Everything Leads to You

What a stupid thing to wish for. A handful of thrilling days. A good story to tell later. Like what Clyde wrote in his letter to Caroline when he was talking about her mother: a few minutes in the spotlight on the arm of someone famous.

Ava is doing exactly what I once hoped she would do, but now, when I picture us together, we’re lying in a cherry orchard or I’m watching her bake a cake or we’re hunting for treasures in thrift shops. The memory of her curled up on the backseat of her beat-up car in the desert, entirely unaware of me, is enough to make my chest ache. But I don’t recognize the Ava I’ve gotten to know in the girl next to me now. I search her face, but her sunglasses are still on and I can’t find her.

There is only one chance to get a first kiss right. I can’t shake the feeling that if I kiss her now, it won’t be the right version of her I’ll be kissing.

So I say, “I brought my laptop. What neighborhoods are you thinking? West Hollywood? Beverly Hills?”

She straightens up, moves a tiny bit away from me, but barely misses a beat.

“Actually,” she says. “I was thinking Venice. Somewhere with a view of the ocean.”

I rise from the bed, wondering if I’m making a mistake to let this moment go. My laptop is cold and heavy when I sit back down. I open to the browser and hand it to her.

“Oh,” Ava says, looking at the screen. “The Internet is locked or something.”

“You just need a password. The front desk will give it to us.”

Ava stands up and grabs the key.

“You can call them.”

I cross to the desk, pick up the phone, and dial zero.

“Hey,” I say. “What’s the Internet password?”

I read it out to Ava and she enters it. She smiles.

“Success,” I tell the man on the other end. “Thanks.”

She does a search for Venice apartments and barely ten minutes into looking, she says, “Found it.”

“That fast?”

“It has an ocean view. I think it’s exactly what Caroline would have chosen. Want to see?”

I’m sitting at the desk now, and I don’t know if I trust myself to get back onto that bed with her.

I shake my head.

“I’d rather wait to see it,” I say. “Surprise me.”

She slips her phone out of her pocket and calls the broker, sets up an appointment for just a couple hours from now.

“I have to look the part, right?” she says when she hangs up. “Where should we shop?”

“I have to go over to Rebecca and Theo’s for a meeting,” I say. “But you should go to the Beverly Center.”

“The Beverly Center. Okay.”

“It’s just a couple miles from here. Take Sunset to La Cienega, and then stay on La Cienega until you hit Beverly.”

She nods. “I can do that,” she says.

“Venice apartments are hard to come by. It’ll be competitive. If the clothes don’t work on their own, you could always play the Clyde card.”

She’s up now, grabbing her keys, slinging her purse over her shoulder.

She grins at me.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

~

Charlotte and I get to Brooks Avenue at a little after nine, park near the beach, and stroll by the skaters and punks and tourists who look a little afraid of what they’ve gotten themselves into. I pull out my phone and double-check the address she gave us.

This is a nice building. I mean, really nice: white-painted brick with art-deco-style ornamentation. The door to the building is locked so we press a button, and soon Ava’s voice comes through the small gold speaker.

“Is it you?”

“Yeah, it’s us.”

“Take the elevator! Penthouse! Three-twenty-three!”

“Penthouse?” Charlotte says.

I widen my eyes like I know.

Then there’s a buzzing, which lets us into the lobby. In the elevator, we select P for you-know-what, and a screen asks us to enter a code, so we press 3-2-3 and the doors shut and we glide upward. When the elevator opens, we find ourselves on the roof, facing the ocean right in front of us, the Santa Monica pier to our right, its Ferris wheel lit up, silhouettes of palm trees against the dark sky.

We turn around to an apartment made of glass.

Ava stands in the doorway, dressed in high-waisted white jeans and a blue-and-white polka-dotted blouse. She has on bright red lipstick and a pair of shiny, bright red heels, a long string of pearls around her neck.

“Are those real?” I ask her.

“Of course they are. I had to look like a girl who belongs in a penthouse.”

Charlotte and I laugh, and Ava takes a seat on an outdoor sofa that must have come with the place. She rests her feet on an ottoman, crosses her ankles. I would hardly have recognized her.

“I went to Bloomingdale’s and told the woman to make me look rich.”

“It worked,” I tell her.

A moment later, Jamal appears next to her, in sagging khaki shorts and a gray ribbed tank top that shows off his muscular body. They couldn’t look more incongruous: She’s dressed for a lunch meeting at an upscale restaurant and he’s dressed for a day at the beach.

“Finally,” he says, holding a bottle of champagne by its neck. “We can pop this open.”

“We felt like celebrating,” Ava says.