A mystery kid she was raising on her own? Not a one had volunteered that.
I bought a notebook at the airport bookstore, too. There wasn’t much of a selection there, so I’d been stuck with a pink one with a unicorn on its cover and a pack of crayons Velcroed to its side. I left the crayons on the seat beside me in the airport departure lounge for some kid to find. “Who is Frank?” I inked across the top of its first page while I waited for my plane.
For that matter, who was M. M. Banning? Her name was as much a fiction as her book, Mr. Vargas told me. The publisher had decided the name she came equipped with, Mimi Gillespie, lacked gravitas. So she invented “M. M. Banning,” a name of indeterminate gender better suited to a bank president than a college dropout. Once the book was published and became a hit, Mimi Gillespie was as good as dead. Except to Mr. Vargas, who remembered how she was before she was famous.
M. M. BANNING lived in Bel Air, in the kind of place I’d only seen before in magazines—stone facade framed by palm trees to the street, all glass everywhere else. It wasn’t the kind of house I’d think of buying if I happened to be a celebrity obsessed with privacy. I wondered if M. M. Banning woke up some mornings wondering how on earth she’d ended up there.
According to Mr. Vargas, ending up in Los Angeles had never been part of the plan. When she was twenty-two, he told me, Mimi had left New York to oversee her book’s adaptation into a movie. “I’ll just be gone a few months,” she said.
Everything had gone well at first. The film version of Pitched won an armload of Academy Awards, one of them for the screenplay she’d worked on as a consultant. Mimi attended the ceremony on the arm of the up-and-coming actor who played The Pitcher, an exquisite cipher named Hanes Fuller, who appeared on-screen shirtless more often than not. The press called them “today’s alternate-universe Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe” because she wore glasses and cardigans and was stunningly average-looking, while he always seemed to have his chest hanging out.
At twenty-three, she’d married the movie star. By twenty-five, they’d divorced. Instead of coming back to New York, she’d moved to the glass house and disappeared inside. Or tried to. Before she’d unpacked her boxes, M. M. Banning’s more fanatical devotees had tracked her down and pressed their faces against the glass to peer inside. I’ve read your book. I feel your pain. Come out and play.
M. M. Banning put up a stucco wall iced with razor wire to keep her public at bay. Fans and the occasional photographer still lurked outside its perimeter hoping—what? That the reclusive novelist would come out to pose for the literary equivalent of a photograph of a yeti? That one day she’d be lonely enough to invite a lurker inside and they’d become best friends forever?
When the airport cab dropped me at the gate I was relieved nobody was around watching with binoculars as I punched in the entry code in the keypad. 21 22 00 0. The gate swung open and I scuttled through, then huffed up the steep driveway with my bags. I stood at the door for a minute enjoying the irony of the word “welcome” worked into the rush doormat at my feet. My mother would have died from the excitement of knowing I was there if it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that she was already dead.
“Los Angeles is paradise on earth, Alice,” Mr. Vargas had said as he’d scrawled the keypad’s code on a Post-it for me back in New York. “You can’t blame people for being seduced by it. Have you ever been?”
“Never,” I said.
“Everybody should go once.”
“How many times have you been?” I asked.
“Once,” he said. “Listen, I know Mimi has a reputation for being difficult, but if I weren’t fond of her I wouldn’t send you. She’ll love you if she’ll let herself. In the meantime, don’t let her scare you off.”
I wiped my feet on the mat and squared my shoulders. Don’t let her scare you off. I practiced my smile. Businesslike, but with enough warmth to keep me from coming off as too Nurse Ratched. I mumbled lines I’d worked on during my flight. Nobody knows single motherhood better than I do. It was just me and my mom growing up. . . . No, I’m good, I ate on the plane, thanks. Just a glass of water, I’ll get it myself, tell me where. . . . So this must be Frank! Only nine years old? You seem much older.
Little did I know.