“Their car was hit by a train,” Juliette said suddenly, stung by the word “common” and the casual way Mercy had used it, the casual way she was talking about the most guarded part of Juliette’s life. “They were coming home from a party and there was a fog and they took a side road that ran over train tracks where there was no crossing and they got hit by a train.”
Mercy nodded, as if she had known all along, but she said nothing.
“The radio was on,” Juliette continued, uncertain why she was doing so. “The police said the radio was on. And they were driving very fast. There was snow on the ground but it was getting warmer and there was a mist, a thick blue mist . . .” Her voice trailed away, and around her the sun and forest vanished and she saw the road as it had been, narrow and winding through the uneven farmland, the mist rising from the snow, the car’s headlights hitting it as if it were a wall, the world reduced to a small muffled frightening space. “Anyway, after that,” she continued, already wishing she had not spoken, had made up some other reason for her various life decisions, “I didn’t think about this place so much. When Gabe decided to move over here, I was happy, because that meant I didn’t have to worry about it for a while.”
Mercy nodded again. “Sometimes,” she said, “running away works. A lot of people say it doesn’t, but they’re wrong.”
Juliette fought the urge to argue with her; she was not running away. How could she be running away when she was here? The place she had run away from?
“There’s supposed to be a Giotto here, you know,” she said instead, quickly, drawing Mercy into the dark interior of the ruined castle and away from any further discussion. “According to family legend, he spent summers up at the villa and as a thank-you to the contessa—she was like my twenty-greats great-grandmother—he painted a fresco on the property. ‘In the place only God knows.’ Or at least that’s what she wrote in a letter to her sister. This castle is the Castiglion Che Dio Sol Sa, which means the Castle That Only God Knows, so we always figured it was here somewhere. Gabe and I searched and searched for years, but we never found it. My dad found out later that the castle was not around in Giotto’s time.”
“Cool,” Mercy said, and the conversation moved seamlessly to other, less disturbing things.
Mercy quickly fell in love with Cerreta, from the damp fragrant wine cellar, its ceiling strung with curing meats and drying herbs, to the family library with its six-foot-high shelves of journals and Bibles and books of local history. Juliette led her through the family chapel, its linen altar cloth and silver chalice still in place. Here mass had been said each week for all the inhabitants of Cerreta when it was still an estate worked by dozens of families, and confession was heard once a month in a small, carved-wood confessional. Juliette could remember hiding there as a child, crouched on the worn velvet kneeler, while Gabriel counted to fifty in the courtyard below.
Together the two women climbed the stone steps of the campanile, through the storerooms, some still stocked with grain and firewood, some filled with Gabriel’s pottery rejects and a few old watercolors done over the years by Juliette’s mother and her aunt. From the top you could see, far in the distance, the fortress walls of Siena and the hill town of Montalcino. In between was a swaying sea of forest, broken only by fields, vineyards, and the crumbled remains of various centuries-old houses and holy buildings.
“We should shoot the movie here,” Mercy said as they sat between the battlements, absorbing the impossible shimmering silence of the countryside. “I think the love story part is supposed to take place in the country, and it’s even more beautiful here than in A Room with a View. We could even add in the bit about your missing Giotto. And,” she added practically, “there’s plenty of room for the trailers.”
“God, don’t let Gabriel hear you,” Juliette said with a horrified laugh. “That is his worst nightmare. Cortona barely survived that Diane Lane movie—tour buses still block the roads every summer with people on the Tuscan movie tour. Gabriel won’t even let me put pictures on the website—Bon Appetit did a story on a bed-and-breakfast two towns over and now you can’t even walk through the market for the tourists, he says.”
“Still, I bet you and Devlin could do wonders with a place like this,” Mercy murmured dreamily, watching the swallows. “Make it expensive enough and you won’t have to worry about tour buses. And Gabe can keep his organic olive grove—sell the bottles for a hundred bucks a pop.” She gave Juliette a look of such keen-eyed mischief that she had to laugh. It was a conversation Juliette and Gabe had had more than once, and fairly recently.
At first, Gabe had kept his distance. He seemed to think Juliette was using Mercy as some sort of focus group—to see how the rich and famous would take to Cerreta. He checked in now and then with Juliette but gave Mercy no more than a stiff nod and a wave, and he certainly never addressed her by name. At his request, Juliette did not bring Mercy to the villa for meals, but if the small population of students and staff recognized her when she sidled over to politely bum a cigarette or hover at the edge of a group gathered around Gabe as he played guitar, they gave no sign. Although many of the interns were American, most of the guests at the villa were German or Australian, hikers more accustomed to hostels than luxury hotels, and they, too, only smiled and nodded on their way to meals or daytime excursions. For them, Gabe and his tours of the property and occasional narrated hikes through the nearby hill towns remained the only star of Cerreta.
“It’s so nice how everyone acts so normal around me here,” Mercy said after she had chatted with a group of students on their way to repair a wall on the property. “I get so tired of all the fuss and the pictures and the autographs.”
“Oh, they probably don’t know who you are,” Juliette said. “And if they do, they don’t care.”
Catching sight of Mercy’s face, Juliette burst out laughing.
“Don’t worry, Mercy,” she said. “You won’t shrivel up and die. It doesn’t mean they don’t find you interesting. It’s just not everyone worships at the altar of celebrity. There are still some parts of the world where people live in quiet ignorance of your splendor.”
“Now I know you’re just teasing,” Mercy said with a quiet smile, “because that’s not possible.”
Eventually, when she tired of exploring and watching others work, Mercy announced that she wanted to “do something.” So Juliette introduced her to the pigs and the sheep, to the endless weeds in the organic garden, the joys of composting and fence repair, the villa’s laundry room, and finally its kitchen. She kept waiting for Mercy to object, to ask to use the phone, or to borrow the car, to complain about the lack of a clothes dryer or about Juliette’s refusal to let her try any of the vineyard’s wine. “You can drink all you want, you just can’t do it and stay here,” she said firmly. But Mercy never complained. Occasionally she joked that other stars would only weed gardens if they got their own television show, but for the most part she seemed perfectly happy to shadow Juliette like a little sister, and Juliette was surprised at what an easy companion she was. Once she was not strung out, Mercy rarely spoke of Hollywood or herself; she was far more interested in hearing about Juliette’s life or her visions for Cerreta than in discussing Lloyd Watson or the film she was going to make. Sometimes Juliette would catch Mercy watching her with a knowing look, as if she understood more of what Juliette thought than Juliette did herself.
“She’s playing you,” Gabriel said dismissively. He and Juliette were standing over the huge oak table in the study of the villa, going over the renovation plans for one of the half dozen houses on the property. Ancient maps and dim portraits of Delfinos long dead hung on the walls, three dusty wild boar heads glared down from above the fireplace; one wore a party hat. The stone floor was cool even through Juliette’s sandals, but the fire was cheerful and a cluster of lamps threw a cozy circle of light. “She wants to stay and so she’s playing the role she thinks will please you. No one ever said she wasn’t a very good actress.�
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“Well, I don’t see what fabulous benefits she is reaping from being here. It’s not like I can advance her career, or even get her a good seat by the pool.”
“You’re not her mother,” Gabe said, making notes in the margin of the plans. “Which seems to be a fairly valuable asset.”
Gabriel officially softened his position on Mercy during the second week, when he watched her spend the better part of a day digging trenches around the roots of the olive trees. The only way to prevent the boars from eating the roots, Gabe had found, was to bury fences around them. It was backbreaking, mind-numbing work, but Mercy kept at it long after Juliette had abandoned her spade for her laptop. At the sound of Gabe’s wide-open laugh, Juliette smiled, and looked up from her work. From the small garden behind her house, she could see Mercy’s white-blond head shining amid the silver-green of the olive leaves. Her hands were moving gracefully in front of her as she struck a pose and gestured, illustrating whatever story she was telling, while Gabe threw back his head and laughed again. Then their two heads drew close together as they knelt in the dirt and stretched the wire fence between them, lowering it bit by bit into the circular trench. Mercy wiped the sweat off her face with the back of her hand but did not pause. The two worked together until the sun had dipped far below the forest line and the light bled from crimson to a dim hazy peach.
“Gabriel says we should come to dinner tonight at the villa,” Mercy announced as she walked in the door and headed toward the shower, stripping off her dusty clothes. “I like him. I like how he talks about you, like he’s your brother. I wish I had a brother or sister. I’m glad he didn’t kick me out that night.”
“He can’t kick you out,” Juliette said, not looking up but still amused to discover that Mercy had apparently not been completely passed out that first night. “No matter what he says. Ask him at dinner why he can’t kick you out. I’m sure he’ll be happy to tell you.”
“I can’t kick you out because Juliette owns the controlling share of Cerreta,” Gabriel answered when Mercy dutifully asked the question later, in between bites of stuffed zucchini and white beans.
“That’s not what I meant,” Juliette protested. “I meant you wouldn’t kick her out because you understand what she’s going through. I thought you’d give her your primary-purpose talk.”
“And the reason Juliette owns the controlling share of Cerreta,” he said, ignoring her entirely, “the extra one percent that makes it impossible for me to tell her to take her washed-up movie star friends back to Los Angeles? Because on an October evening about—what, Jules, eleven years ago? twelve?—I was in great need of much cocaine. But I had no money. So I turned to my lovely cousin Juliette, who was still in the cocaine business. Alas, she was not as generous as she is today. And at this point I had nothing, no car, no guitar, no stereo, no watch, nothing but a bottomless need for cocaine. So I had to trade the one thing I had left in the world, my equal footing in our inheritance—one percent for half a gram. I thought it was quite a deal at the time.” He took a long drink of water and another bite of zucchini.
“Wow,” said Mercy, looking at Juliette. “Only half a gram? That was harsh.”
“Very harsh,” Juliette said. “Especially since my plan was to sell the whole thing out from under him. But he was a mess. You should have seen him.”
“And you were a picture of health? You weighed about seventy-five pounds and you smelled like a nightclub floor.”
They were sitting at one end of a long trestle table out in the courtyard of the villa. Around them, the B-and-B guests and what staff were not serving the meal chatted in Italian and German and English, sun-flushed faces moving in and out of the soft circles of light thrown by candles on the tables and hung in nearby trees. The spicy fragrance of jasmine and rosemary, sun-warmed stone and yellow dust, stirred in the dark, retreating when a new platter of food came out sizzling from the kitchen, or a new bottle of wine was opened. Mercy watched Gabriel closely, her face bright and expectant, her whole body canted toward him.
“Fortunately, Juliette sobered up before she was able to sell our birthright,” Gabriel said, now too focused on his own story to notice the look on Mercy’s face. “A year or two later, I sobered up, too. And over the years, she has offered me my one percent back. But I’d rather leave things the way they are. Because I need to be reminded just how stupid I am when I’m left to my own devices. So stupid I would have traded this place,” he said, motioning around him, to the high stone walls and the flowering hedges, the acres that rolled away into the dark, “all of it, for a day’s worth of drugs.”
Juliette watched him, too. He was a compelling speaker; even though she knew the story and the punch line, it still left her a bit choked up. She remembered that night vividly, how triumphant she had felt, thinking what a junkie Gabe was, how she would never let herself get that bad. She remembered, too, the years that surrounded it, the clubs and the men and the twitching nights, those horrible hours just before dawn when sleep seemed a myth and the darkness threatened to suffocate her. She remembered lying on the fetid couch in her dealer-boyfriend’s apartment while he met with his “clients,” feeling her heart pound almost out of her chest, her skin crawling as if it would detach itself from her body and slide out the door. Those nights she drank vodka from the bottle like it was medicine, a vain attempt to placate the hyped-up wrath of the cocaine, and wondered if a person could die from shame and the mocking dark of four a.m.
Juliette looked at Mercy and wondered if she had ever felt that sort of fear, and the mortification that inevitably followed day after day after day. But Mercy only had eyes for Gabe.
“This would be a lot to lose,” Mercy said now, softly. “And I know why you told that story,” she added. “You want me to realize I have a lot to lose, too. And I do. But it’s not like what people think. I’m not like what people think. It’s not my fault that things happen the way they do. I just want to do my work and have fun. It’s everyone else, all the people who want something more. They push and they push and then things just go crazy.”
“We’ve both been through what you’re going through, Mercy,” Gabe said. “That’s all I’m trying to tell you. You’re not different. You’re not alone.”
“But I am,” she said earnestly. “I am different. I am alone. You don’t know. You have this, and you have her, and you have what you can do, and all these people. All I have is me, and people are fighting over who has the controlling share of me.” Her voice was low and clear, and in the candlelight her skin was so pale it seemed transparent. She kept her eyes on Gabriel.
“But you can’t let them do that,” he said firmly. “You need to take care of yourself, make a commitment to yourself. Even if it means you don’t make a movie for a while. Even if it means you ditch Hollywood forever. You can’t give what you haven’t got.”
“That’s what they said at Resurrection,” Mercy said, shaking her head. “But they didn’t mean it. They just meant they wanted me to commit to them, to letting them have control. The staff was always slipping scripts under my door, or inviting people like Bill Becker to these bogus ‘interventions,’ just so they can make contacts, or get you attached to their projects. Which is why my mother put me there in the first place. How do you think I finally got on the picture I was doing in Rome? They had these tea dances, which were basically pitch meetings, and half the people there were stoned out of their minds. Lloyd said—”
“You can’t expect to find real sobriety in a celebrity recovery spa,” Gabriel interrupted. “Those places are worse than useless. They’re part of the problem.”
“I know,” Mercy said excitedly. “They are. That’s what Lloyd said, though I don’t think it was the same for me as it was for him.”
“Some of those places aren’t so bad,” Juliette said, not liking Gabe’s tone, how it gave Mercy an excuse she was only too ready to use. “You get out of them what you take into them.”
“Please,” Gabe said dismissive
ly. “Those places are just extensions of the Pinnacle. The people who run them treat sobriety like it’s just another sort of pampering, something you can order up off the menu. I had a guy last year who wanted to buy Cerreta because he thought it would be the perfect place for a ‘spirituality-based resort.’ I swear to God, those were his exact words. Yoga and wine-tasting is what I believe he had in mind. Like he’d never heard of Napa.” Gabriel drenched another piece of bread in olive oil and shoved it in his mouth.
“You never told me that,” Juliette said accusingly.
“What? Like that’s something we would seriously consider? Please.”
“Yeah, but still, you might have mentioned it. Any other offers you’ve turned down lately?”
“Oh, come on, Juliette,” Mercy said quickly. “You wouldn’t ever sell Cerreta. Not really.”
“No,” said Juliette, still looking sideways at Gabriel, who was nonchalantly digging into his pasta. “Not now, at any rate—we’re finally almost on top of the taxes. Now we just need to figure out a way to pay for all the things to be fixed. There are ten lovely houses on the property; if we could rent them out during the spring and the summer you could expand the vineyard and the olive grove and actually sell some wine and oil. Then you could have all those classes and projects you keep talking about.”
“We’ll get there, we’ll get there,” Gabriel said, winking at Mercy. “Jules never had much patience, even as a little girl. As soon as she thought of something, she wanted it done. You have to learn to appreciate the process. It’s all about the journey; isn’t that what all your L.A. gurus tell you?”
“I would if I understood which process exactly was going to pay the bills. If you’re going to turn this place into an educational retreat, you need a place for people to stay and food for them to eat and staff—”
The Starlet Page 5