She was using a cooing, lulling voice that Scarlett felt was probably copied from one of her yoga instructors. Scarlett reached over and slid open the panel.
“Pull over,” she said to the driver.
“Oh, come on, Scarlett. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Adventure is white-water rafting. This…” She held up the can. “…is tuna.”
“That was very well phrased. You have a touch of the actress about you, too, you know.”
The cab stopped, and Scarlett opened the door and got out.
“You did very well!” Mrs. Amberson called to her as she walked off. “You pass! I think this is going to work out splendidly!”
Scarlett had no idea what that meant, and she didn’t care.
DEAL OF A LIFETIME
It took Scarlett the entire walk home to calm down—and it was a long, hot walk. When she arrived at the Hopewell, she pushed right on through the empty lobby, through the dining room, into the kitchen.
The Hopewell kitchen was embarrassingly large for a family that couldn’t cook and had no guests to feed. Most of the appliances were from the sixties and seventies, and there were way too many of them. Only about half of the stuff worked. Belinda could make the place behave somehow, but no one else could.
There was something else in the kitchen that refused to behave. Namely, her parents, who quickly moved away from each other and did some quick hair and clothes adjusting. Scarlett knew what that meant. She had walked in on them canoodling. Again. It was kind of nice to have parents who liked each other—she was one of the only people she knew who did. Still, every one of the Martin siblings had caught them making out. There was, after all, a good reason why there were four of them.
“Guys,” Scarlett said, wincing, “can’t you put up a sign or something?”
Her dad was pretending to be very interested in something behind one of the three refrigerators.
“Is it you or Marlene who freaks out about mice?” he asked casually. “I can never remember. I know one of you is spiders and one of you is mice.”
Scarlett responded by backing up against the worktable and pulling herself up to sit on it.
“Oh, right,” he said. “It’s you. You should ignore what we’re doing then.”
For once, the sucking face may have been preferable.
“Mrs. Amberson spoke to us this morning,” her mom said, opening a box of no-kill traps. “Has she told you her idea?”
“Oh, she told me,” Scarlett said, warily watching the floor.
“You don’t seem happy about it. I thought you’d be excited about working on a book.”
“Wait…what?”
“She wants you to be her assistant!” her mother said happily. “You really seem to have impressed her.”
“I thought you said I couldn’t get a job,” Scarlett said quickly.
Her parents gave each other googely-eyes for a moment.
“Look,” her dad said, “we had a long talk in bed this morning about all of you. And we’ve come to some decisions. We’ve realized just how much you all try.”
“Lola works hard and has voluntarily taken a year off from going to school or moving,” her mother said, reaching out for her dad’s hand. “Spencer has tried his best at auditioning, and he’s really straightened up in the last year—getting up at five every morning to work a breakfast shift. And you…you’ve never gotten much of a chance at all. And here comes something that is what you love, writing, that would pay a really generous amount.”
“It would?” Scarlett said.
“She’s offering to pay you five hundred dollars a week,” she said. “Cash. We need the help around here, but she is your guest, and that’s a lot of money. And a good opportunity.”
Five hundred dollars a week was an actual, literal fortune. Some of her friends got almost that much for their cab, clothing, and going out allowances.
“So,” he said, “are you happy with that?”
This would have been the right time to tell them about the tuna, and the lying to the security guard. But…five hundred dollars.
There was something else lingering here, though.
“What did you decide about Spencer?” she asked.
“Spencer told us that this show is connected to NYU and Juilliard, and that doing it might give him a very good chance to go there, maybe even get another scholarship, this time for something he really wants to do,” her dad said.
“We called the culinary school,” her mother said. “They said they’d have to let his scholarship go today, but there’s no reason he can’t reapply, and they’ll make a note on his file. There is a strong chance that if he reapplies in the next few weeks, they’ll be able to give him the same package. It’s not guaranteed, but it sounds like he has a good shot.”
“We decided to let him do this show,” he finished. “If it doesn’t work, we may still be able to get him in. And combined with you getting this opportunity…”
“The two things came at the same time,” her mother finished. “With this little bit of extra security for you, we felt better about taking a chance with him.”
Of course. Of course, her taking this job was tied into Spencer’s chance.
“So…” her dad said, all smiles, “happy?”
“Thrilled,” Scarlett said.
Okay. So her summer was about to be a minefield. But she would be rich by the end of it. She could buy a whole new wardrobe. A new computer. There would be iced coffees at lunch and cabs when she needed them…
“As for the money,” her dad said, “it’s way too much to play with. So she’ll be paying us directly, and we’ll put it away for you. But you can have fifty a week. Now, we just need you to take the dirty table linens to Mrs. Foo’s and pick up Marlene’s prescriptions at Duane Reade. The linens are behind the front desk.”
Scarlett slunk out of the dining room.
The dirty tablecloths and napkins had been bundled into a large plastic bag. Obviously, they had been allowed to collect, because the bag was heavy and a bit hard to carry. She hoisted it up and it partially blocked her view. She used it as cushioning as she slammed her way back out the door.
She staggered her way down half the block, the sun beating down on her.
“Whoa!” a familiar voice said. “That looks heavy.”
A pair of hands lifted away her burden, revealing Eric. She laughed, a keening, nervous laugh—sort of like the sound made by little purse dogs when people accidentally catch their fur in the zipper. Not an alluring sound. Combine that with the fact that she was sweating and carrying twenty pounds of dirty linen…it was a pretty, pretty picture.
“Where are you going with this?” he asked.
“Down the block,” she managed to say.
“You lead the way. Can’t have you carrying this.”
She was too astonished to do or say anything when he took the bag from her.
“I’m here working with Spencer,” he said. “I just came down to get a sandwich from the place on the corner. So this works out. What’s going on today? Any more TV appearances?”
“No,” she managed, “but my new boss just tried to get me arrested for shoplifting tuna.”
He stopped and set the bag down on the sidewalk to redistribute the weight.
“Is that just a joke I don’t get, or did that happen?”
“It happened,” Scarlett said. “It definitely happened.”
“I’ve only known you for a day or two, and you’ve managed to do more weird stuff than anyone I can think of.”
He picked up the bag again, but frequently peered at her over it.
“Does crime pay well?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But I don’t get to keep any of it. It’s going to a school fund.”
“Ah, the joys of college tuition,” he said. “Thank God for my commercial. Two days of work paid for a whole year at NYU. I’d better get another one or I don’t know how I’m coming back.”
It wa
s impossible for Scarlett to ignore that Eric needing to earn money fit nicely into the promise she had made to Spencer about rich guys.
They had reached the laundry. Eric carried the bag in and set it on the counter.
“I look forward to hearing the stories,” he said. “Promise me you’ll tell me when I see you. And I will see you. I’ll make a point of it.”
He gave her one final, devastating, and unlikely smile, then went off in search of his sandwich.
It was at that moment that Scarlett fully accepted her new employment.
ACT II
The very last room completed in the Hopewell refurbishment of 1929 was the Empire Suite. J. Allen Raumenberg worked for weeks on its composition. It was perhaps here, in this hotel room, that he developed his concept of “bringing down the moon”—the principle that would guide the hundreds of Broadway and film sets he would design over the next twenty years.
Raumenberg felt that the most magical time of day was twilight, when the moon hung low and the sky split with color. He had his glassworks create a spectacular moonlike mirror, and he carefully manipulated shades of light and dark in all aspects of the design so that the room would “constantly appear to be suspended in that magical hour when the night is about to bloom and the curtains on every stage rise.”
Fittingly, the room’s first inhabitant was Clara Hooper, a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, and the mistress of a wealthy Wall Street banker. She was sitting at the dressing table in the Empire Suite looking into the moon mirror when she got a call saying that the stock market had just crashed. Hours later, her boyfriend vanished, never to return. She realized that the six dollars and forty-seven cents she had in front of her could now be the only money she had in the world. She certainly couldn’t pay the twelve dollars a night the room cost. She tossed her things out of the fourth-story window to a friend who waited in the street below, and then slipped out quietly during the night.
So from the start, the Empire Suite had a strong (if somewhat dubious) connection to the theater world…
—J. ALLEN RAUMENBERG: DESIGNER FOR AN AGE
THE INHABITANT
“How do you write a life?” Mrs. Amberson asked from the window of the Empire Suite. “The tangled web. So many stories…”
She blew some smoke up. It floated back down and settled around her head, like a halo of smog.
“I feel like we’re missing something,” she said.
Words, Scarlett thought. Words, on a page, written by you. That’s what we’re missing.
But she sighed to herself and said nothing. She just absently read her e-mails from her friends. It looked like work—not that there was any work to do.
There were lots of updates, as usual.
Dakota’s French was good enough now that she got through an entire day in Paris speaking no English at all. Chloe had accidentally backhanded one of her ten-year-olds in the head with a tennis racket…but otherwise she was good. She had stopped dating the first guy and moved on to another, and already had eyes on a third. Hunter had gone to LA for the day and had gotten to go on the Paramount lot. Josh had about twenty new English friends, and they tended to spend their weekends partying in London or going off to the country to push each other off small boats called “punts” into shallow water.
Two weeks. That’s how long it had been. Two weeks, and they all had new lives and impressive achievements. And she’d been here with Mrs. Amberson, waiting for her to get one cohesive thought together for this book.
There had been plenty of writing preparation. They’d gone shopping at the Montblanc store on Madison Avenue, where Mrs. Amberson spent several hundred dollars on two pens—one fountain, one ballpoint—and a pot of ink. They’d gone and spent a few hundred more on notebooks from some imported Parisian papermaker. There was the ergonomic yoga support pillow that was supposed to induce creativity. The multiple trips to various health food and Asian grocery stores for teas, herbs, dried plums, some seaweed in a bag, organic coffee, special water…
In fact, Scarlett had never been so busy doing so much nothing. Between the shopping, the endless walks Mrs. Amberson needed to “feel out the city again,” the days spent in bookstores picking up books on how to write, the lunches, locating all of the services Mrs. Amberson required…Scarlett had had almost no time to herself.
“It’s hard to know where to begin,” Mrs. Amberson mused.
Scarlett could take it no more.
“What did you do?” she finally snapped.
“Do? What? For money?”
Scarlett nodded. That was a good start. This direct questioning was effective.
“My very first job was at the Round the Clock Diner,” Mrs. Amberson said. “I got that by lying and saying I had been a waitress for three years in Cleveland. I suppose that you could call that my first role. I played a New York waitress. I definitely didn’t know how to do the job when I started. I copied the walk, the way of speaking. After a few weeks, I was the toughest waitress they had. In fact, I was a little too good at being a New York waitress. I scared some people. So I refined it a bit and took the act uptown, to the All Hours Diner. And while I was there, I started picking up shifts at the Ticktock.”
Scarlett wasn’t sure if she was supposed to write down the names of all of these diners, but she had been sitting here for a long time, waiting for something to come out of Mrs. Amberson’s mouth. She typed a few of them out.
“Where did you live?” she asked.
“On the floor of an apartment on Thirteenth Street and Sixth Avenue with a ballerina named Suzie. She was a freak. A good dancer, but she lived entirely on milk and hard pretzels. I never saw her eat anything else, even when I brought home food from the diner. She had this loser drug-dealer boyfriend. Drug dealers had some glamour then, but not this guy. Used to come over and sit in the corner, put on a wizard’s hat, and meditate loudly. He made a sound like this.”
Mrs. Amberson made a loud, grating mmmmmmmmm noise. Scarlett considered making a note of this, then opted against it.
“I only stayed there because it was cheap. Then they both went off to form a macrobiotic commune upstate, and I got kicked out. Then I moved to Second Avenue…”
She leaned backward a bit and stared at something below her.
“Your sister is here with her boy,” she said. “What’s his name?”
“Chip,” Scarlett said, without enthusiasm. Why was Lola home? She was supposed to be doing a long shift at the store today.
“Of course. Chip. Nice enough looking, but he’s never going to split an atom, is he?”
“I doubt it.”
“You look unimpressed. Not your type of boy? I’ll bet you like them a little more swift on the uptake, don’t you, O’Hara?”
Scarlett decided to let the question drop in the hopes that she would forget it. But that didn’t happen.
“What is your type?” Mrs. Amberson asked, leaning in from her perch. “You’ve never told me about your love life, Scarlett. You’re a very pretty girl. You must have a boy shacked up somewhere for your personal delights. I’d bet it’s a booky one, with overtones of Harry Potter and a lot of black T-shirts. Come on. What’s he like?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Scarlett said. “I’ve just…some guys at my school, a few times.”
“You left out the verb in that,” Mrs. Amberson said. “I love verbs.”
Scarlett glared over the laptop, but Mrs. Amberson did not look even slightly deterred.
“I have great hopes for you this summer, O’Hara,” she said. “I don’t buy this stern, determined exterior of yours. There’s a romantic underneath. I’m sure of it.”
Scarlett had no idea she had a stern, determined exterior.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“You almost never smile,” Mrs. Amberson said. “Not a real smile. I know smiles. I was in several toothpaste commercials. I know all the varieties of smile.”
She turned back and tried to squeeze her he
ad between the rails to get a better look at what was going on in the street below.
“Well,” she said, “it looks like your sister isn’t making out too badly. If they don’t bulge in the brain or anywhere else of interest, the wallet is a good alternate location. And I should know.”
Something in Mrs. Amberson had detached and floated away. This effort that Scarlett had put her through had exhausted her.
“I think,” she said absently, “that I need a little trip down to the Turkish bath this afternoon. I always used to go there to sweat out the small stuff. Maybe just give the room a light freshening and then take a few hours off. You look a little peaky. Do something frivolous.”
Lola jumped about four feet when Scarlett opened the door to the Orchid Suite.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” Scarlett asked.
“Aren’t you? Where’s Mrs. Amberson?”
“She’s gone to sweat at the Turkish bath. What’s your excuse?”
Lola looked a bit furtive and guilty.
“It’s Chip’s mom’s fiftieth birthday,” Lola said. “They’re having a weekend event in the Hamptons and a dinner in town.”
“It’s not the weekend,” Scarlett said. “And it’s not dinnertime.”
“There’s a lot to do. There’s the jitney to charter, the caterers to speak to, the party planners, the flowers, the band…”
“You know, Chip is a big boy with a high school diploma and a phone and everything,” Scarlett said. “Why do you have to take off work for that? It’s his mom.”
“He needs help,” she said. “He’s no good with that stuff.”
“Isn’t that what the party planners do? Plan parties?”
“You don’t understand,” Lola said, digging furiously around her bureau. “Have you seen my pink ear…oh, here they are.”
She put the pink studs in her ears with a rapid, stabbing motion.
“What was it last week?” Scarlett said. “Or the weekend before?”
Suite Scarlett Page 9