“See for yourself,” he said, pushing a couple of buttons and holding the handset out to me. I grabbed it from him.
“Johnny, it’s ’Naya,” said the first message, dated a week earlier. It did sound like her. “Call me back when you get this, gorgeous.”
The next one had yesterday’s date. Same voice, completely different tone.
“Inaya again. I know something’s up, Johnny, and I know this isn’t your cell number. And now all of a sudden David won’t return my calls either? I don’t get it. Whatever’s going on, I’m reasonable; you don’t have to hide from me. Just talk to me. Please.” And this time she left a number.
I tried to commit it to memory, since Teo had already torn off the paper he’d scribbled it on and stuffed it into his pocket. You never know when the phone number of an A-list actress might come in handy.
“What do you think that’s about?” I said to Teo.
“No clue. Maybe Rivenholt was having a fling with Inaya and broke it off. Still doesn’t explain why he extended his hotel stay and then left the room. It’s like he’s running from something. I didn’t want to bother Berenbaum with this, but it looks like we’re going to have to.”
My stomach dropped to my knees. “Berenbaum? David Berenbaum?”
“No. Oprah Berenbaum.”
“I went to school for directing,” I said numbly. “He—I—my dad took me to see Blue Yonder when I was ten. David Beren-baum.” The name tore open some hermetically sealed pocket of na?veté I had forgotten I had.
“Oh Jesus. You’re not going to piddle on the floor of his office, are you? If so, I’ll just crack a window and leave you in the car.”
“David Berenbaum. We’re going to see David Berenbaum.” I couldn’t stop saying it.
“He funds, like, half the Project. Rivenholt’s his Echo. Uh, partner, you might say. Not in a gay way, that I know of; Rivenholt’s like his muse. That’s what the Project’s for, to regulate travel between here and there. So we can get inspiration from fey and vice versa. Anybody who’s anybody has an Echo.”
“All of them? You’re saying Martin Scorsese hangs out with fairies?”
“Yup. Not all fey are sunshine and rainbows.”
“Kubrick, Eastwood, Coppola?”
“Kubrick’s before my time, but probably. Eastwood and Coppola, yeah.”
“Spielberg?”
“He doesn’t need one; he’s a wizard.”
The wave of vertigo that swept over me suggested that this was a good time to stop asking questions.
“Let’s get you back to the house and feed you some lunch before we go see Berenbaum,” Teo said. “Half the reason we get to hang out with these people is that we stay cool about it, and you are not looking cool right now.”
When we got back to the car, which was badly parallel parked under a palm tree, Teo reached into his jacket for the drawing and studied it again in the sunlight. I peered around his arm at it curiously; it gave me the same icy-bright rush of exhilaration as before. No matter how many times I looked away and back, the feeling was the same, like traveling eight years into the past.
But the drawing was showing me what Rivenholt had felt when he looked out his window, a fact both intimate and puzzling.
“Do you remember when Los Angeles made you feel like that?” I said to Teo.
“Nope,” he said, folding the paper and tucking it away. “Unlike ninety percent of this town, I was born here.”
? ? ?
We arrived back at the house to find a crisis in the living room. We heard it as soon as we opened the car doors, actually, but had to see it to believe it. When we walked in, a very tall black man was kneeling behind Gloria, holding her by the arms. Gloria was shrieking, red faced, at the bearded white guy I’d met briefly the day before. The bearded man—whose name I’d already forgotten—was slumped at one end of the couch, face buried in the crook of his elbow, sobbing.
“Look at me, you coward!” Gloria shrieked at him. “Have the decency to say it to my face!”
“Quit it,” said the man holding her, barely audible over her screams. “Settle down.”
When it comes to drama, I am both amplifier and sponge. You want to keep drama as far away from me as possible. Faced with this spectacle, I planted my sneaker-clad carbon feet on the hardwood floor as though I were staring down head-lights.
“Where is Song?” Teo asked briskly of the only other calm person in the room.
“She went to the store,” said the man holding Gloria. For just a moment I saw the strain on his high-cheekboned face, the coiled control. When he spoke again, he sounded almost bored. “Gloria, you know they need you back on set in twenty. You need to stop it now.”