The Chateau on Sunset

Chapter 1

1957

It takes an hour of waiting for someone to claim her before Aria starts to believe. If you didn’t believe in wishing stars, then your wishes wouldn’t come true. If she didn’t believe that her parents were dead, then they couldn’t have been burned up by fire. She’d step off the airplane and there they’d be and she’d hold them and hold them and hold them—­and she’d know to never let them visit a gas station.

But in the small dark cave of the lobby, as disregarded as the fringed gold lamp beside her, Aria finally understands that nobody will kiss her good night again. That to be motherless—­parentless—­is like being dropped into a void and no matter how much she scrabbles at the air, she’ll never stop falling.

What should I do? she wants to cry out. Just tell me what to do.

But she has nobody to advise her, not anymore. She tries to stop the snotty little sobs that soak her handkerchief and both her sleeves. But she can’t. In the end, she has to wipe her nose on her skirt and for the first time in two weeks she’s glad of something: that her mother can’t see how disgusting she is.

“Holy cow. A kid.”

A young woman, or perhaps an old girl, appears suddenly in front of Aria. She’s chasing beautiful, hasn’t quite caught it yet. Then another girl-­woman glides over. She isn’t beautiful either—­but this time it’s because that word is wholly inadequate.

“What are you doing here, honeybee?” she says to Aria.

The endearment makes more tears leak from Aria’s eyes. She points to the luggage tag on her suitcase: c/o Miss Devine Rey.

“You’re here for The-­Legendary-­Miss-­Devine-­Rey?” The not-­quite-­beautiful woman runs the words together. “Holy cow,” she repeats.

“You’d better come with us,” her excessively beautiful friend says, leading the way out of the lobby, which contains one witchy-­looking chandelier, a baby grand piano, and a scattering of ancient chairs, as if only spells, musicians, and ghosts ordinarily occupy it. “I’m Calliope Burns,” she says. “And this is Flitter Reeve.”

Aria’s tears pause. Maybe, for the first time ever, her name will help rather than hinder her.

I wanted to add some sparkle to your surname, her mother used to say. Imagine if you were plain old Jane Jones.

Aria loved her mother so much she never said that, in a classroom full of Bettys and Marys, she’d much rather have been plain Jane.

Now, desperate to keep talking to anyone kind, but especially to these two, she whispers the name that finally fits in. “People think my name is weird. But yours . . .”

“They’re our stage names.” Calliope smiles, and Aria has the most peculiar urge to become one of her insignificant possessions, like a pocket perhaps, so she could travel always in the circle of her radiance.

Calliope is blue-­eyed and blonde-­haired, and her skin looks like soft apricot clouds. She somehow occupies both the space of her body and the space outside herself. Flitter also has a vibration of some kind, juvenile perhaps, but discernible if you pay attention. But she’s too precisely put together—­her hair is more white than blonde, her brows are arrowheads, and her nails the startlingly red color of danger signs. Whereas Calliope—­her nose is crooked or off-­center, and it’s that imperfection that makes Aria keep staring, trying to figure out how nine-­tenths extraordinary plus one-­tenth flaw equals lightning plus auroras to the power of heaven.

“If I can’t have a face like hers,” Flitter says, indicating Calliope, “then I can at least have a beautiful name.”

“Is my aunt beautiful?” Aria blurts. They’ve stepped outside and into such a parade of gorgeousness that Aria needs to know if her aunt is lovely enough to pay what seems to be the entry price around here for short, brown-­haired Aria too.

Calliope says, “Aria, next to your aunt, you are Marian Monti.”

Aria beams. Her father thought Marian Monti was a real looker; he took Aria and her mother downtown to the Rialto Theater last year to watch The Girl Who Married a Millionaire, and Aria’s mother had joked, Perhaps I’ll get a few tips.

Aria’s father replied, There’s more than a million bucks of love for you in my heart, and her mother had kissed him like he was a river and she the desert.

Her tears are back. She’s afraid that Flitter and Calliope will flee, but instead they take her hands. “We’ll give you a tour,” Calliope says. “You can’t disturb your aunt between one and five.”

“Why?”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Flitter says, words Aria doesn’t pay attention to because the gardens are full of trees with white star-­shaped flowers and, lower down, there are star-­shaped jasmine flowers too, like she’s surrounded by so many potential wishes.

“Here’s the pool,” Calliope says and look!

Sunshine pours down with abandon, spotlighting cabana chairs. Bikinis color triangles onto the bodies of platinum blondes who look so much like Marian Monti from the back that Aria’s whole body starts to quiver with excitement. But then they turn and their charisma is dull, like silver tarnish. Still, that over there is definitely Judith Crown!

It’s like nothing Aria has ever seen—­famous actresses worshipped by everyone in America are now standing right in front of her.

In the center of it all sits a blond man. He’s talking on a telephone whose long cord stretches like gum over the brick paving. His skin is slick and tan and he’s smiling graciously at all the people trying to catch his eye. He beckons them over, shakes hands if they’re a man, drops a charming kiss onto the knuckles if they’re a woman. He juggles the telephone, the hands, his own finger crooking to catch the attention of a delivery boy with an armful of drinks, as well as the conversation he’s having on the phone and the drinks orders he’s eliciting from the people pulling their cabana chairs around him. In between all that, he makes jokes that have the crowd laughing and raising their glasses, chinking them against his.

He’s part cowboy, part gladiator, part man in a suit riding a Vespa through Rome.

“Welcome to Hollywood.” Flitter grins.

The man hangs up the phone, shakes hands with everyone again, blows a kiss or two, then strolls over to the path. “Hello, ladies,” he says to the three of them in a movie-­star voice, low and articulated, and Aria feels her posture correct itself like it does when she’s in the presence of a teacher or doctor or other higher being.

Flitter and Calliope chorus, “Hi, Bob.”

The woman at his side smirks and says to Calliope and Flitter, “Sorry I stole the part, girls. You need more practice.”

“There’ll be other parts, ladies. I know it,” Bob tells them.

Then he and the woman walk toward a narrow path leading uphill, leaving the scent of riches and Coppertone in their wake.

“Did you hear what he said!” Calliope whispers to Flitter. “Maybe he thought our auditions weren’t half bad.” To Aria, she says, “That’s Bob Ashenhurst. King of Hollywood.”

The king of this castle. It’s the first thing anyone has said that makes sense to Aria. Bob walks as if there’s an invisible crown, heavy with gold and rubies, on his head, and he alone has the strength to hold it aloft.

“That’s Lacey Magee with him,” Flitter goes on, not bothering to whisper. “Who hides daggers in her beehive just so she can actually stab you in the back. We went to a casting call yesterday for a part in one of Bob’s movies. She got it.”

“There’ll be other parts for us,” Calliope reiterates with conviction. “But now,” she looks at her watch and says to Aria, “it’s time to meet your aunt.”