“I’m asking you, Max,” she said, quiet but no less desperate, her heart a knotted collision. “You.”
Max tented his hands over his nose and mouth. “He didn’t want to,” he finally said. “It was just an idea.” He was staring beyond her. “He needed money. I told him no, I said it was crazy, but your father—he could be persuasive.”
“Persuasive?” Lizzie said with incredulity. That was his explanation? She had lived her entire life with her father’s persuasions, his appetites; she had been cowed by them, shaken them off, been defined by them. But she had been a child. Persuasive was all it took to convince Max?
“Lizzie—” He reached for her arm, but she wheeled around, bumped against the coffee table; the glass figurine teetered and fell, its delicate beak cracked.
Max bent to pick it up. “You okay?” He tried to touch her, but again she shook him off. What was she doing here? She would drown in the warm sea of Max’s explanations.
“You were there that night, weren’t you?” she said in an anguished rush.
“No, no, Lizzie, you don’t know—”
“No, I don’t,” and she was crying openly now. “I have no fucking idea. But he let me take the blame. You both did. You let me think it was my fault, all these years.”
“Lizzie, please, you don’t understand. He never meant for it to be permanent. I’ve wanted to tell you, I’ve wanted to say something for so long. It never should have happened; I should have stopped it from happening. It was a mistake, a huge, monumental mistake, and all I’ve ever wanted to do was make it up to you.”
“My God. That’s what this was about?”
“No, no; I love you, I do. You know that, don’t you? I love you, and I’ll do anything not to lose you—”
“No,” she said. She backed against the bookshelf and slid down, making herself as small as possible. “You have to stop. No more talk.” She said this into her knees. “Please.”
“Oh, Lizzie.” He spoke in a raspy, choked voice. “Oh God.” He was sobbing. Making awful sounds, his body shuddering. “You have no idea how sorry I am. If I could take it all back, if there was some way I could go back in time, I would; you don’t know what I would give to make this right for you, for all of us.”
“You helped him, didn’t you?” she heard herself ask.
“I only told him, I only gave him a name. No one was supposed to be there that night, you girls were supposed to be staying with friends—”
“Jesus, I know that. Do not tell me that. This had nothing to do with me or that fucking party.” She had scrambled to her feet and hurtled the words at him. She had blamed herself for so long. “What happened to the paintings? Tell me. You have to. Where are they now?”
Max shook his head. “Gone,” he said softly.
“What do you mean, ‘gone’? Did you—get rid of them?” Lizzie saw The Bellhop in her mind’s eye: his hardened mouth, the glossy dark eyes, the oversized ears, the tilt of his head that seemed like posturing. That first night at her father’s after her mother died, she had laid eyes on The Bellhop and she had thought that he would keep her safe. But no, she had been foolish, so unbelievably wrong; that was never The Bellhop’s job. Lizzie was crying, sobbing, as terribly as Max had been. Her father.
“Lizzie, please stop,” Max was saying. “Oh God, please.” He kissed the side of her neck. No, no, she wanted to say. But she was drowning and his lips felt soft and she was desperate to hold on to something. Soon she was doing the only thing she knew to do with Max; she was tugging at his clothes. Soon she was matching his greediness with her own.
Later, they lay on his Turkish rug, limbs entwined. Lizzie’s unhooked bra hanging limply at her chest. Her thighs were cold. Max’s pants and boxers were pooled at his ankles.
“He let me take the blame,” Lizzie said quietly.
“He never meant to. You have to believe me; that was his biggest regret.” Max smoothed back her hair with the palm of his hand, kissed her brow with what struck Lizzie as an unmistakably paternal gesture. “Come,” he said, shifting his legs, pulling up his boxers. “Let’s go to bed.”
Lizzie shook her head. It was like that first night out in California when she was thirteen, when her motherless world was not one she could bear to inhabit. She didn’t want anything to do with a reality that insisted, All this is true. She couldn’t stay. But how could she leave?
14
Los Angeles, 1968
Nearly noon and Harry was still sleeping. It was the fourth day after his arrival in Los Angeles. “Maybe he is ill,” Rose said to Thomas. Her own stomach had been bothering her of late. “This can’t still be jet lag, can it?”
“He isn’t sick. He’s lazy,” Thomas said.
Where had this handsome, dark-eyed man come from? The last time Rose had seen her nephew he was a slightly built fifteen-year old with wispy facial hair and a head that seemed too large for his body. Now Isobel and Gerhard’s eldest stood more than six feet tall, with dark curls, a strong jaw, and an olive complexion all his own, confident as only a twenty-year-old could be.
Harry had recently dropped out of the University of London (“I am not pleased,” Gerhard had said on the phone, and Rose could hear his disapproval surging through the transatlantic crackle). He was here to try his hand at acting, a plan eventually approved by his mother, grudgingly tolerated by his father. But as far as Harry was concerned, there was no trying: “I’m an actor,” he’d maintained when Thomas asked him what he’d be doing for money. “I’m going to act.” Rose and Thomas had agreed to put him up in their small study for the month. “Then you must promise me you’ll kick him out,” Gerhard said to Rose. “He needs to learn to take care of himself.”
“Oh, we will,” Rose said into the phone, and rolled her eyes at her husband. Gerhard and Isobel paid for everything.
Saturday morning, edging past ten. Thomas had to work for a few hours. No sound from Harry. Finally Rose opened the door to the study. Harry’s suitcase still lay open and unpacked on the floor. Was that a dirty sock draped on their Smith Corona on the desk? “It is long past time to get up,” she said to the figure under the sheets. “What are you going to do when you have auditions?”
“Oh, Auntie.” Harry sat up, rubbed his eyes. “I’m acclimating. My body’s adjusting—just like the astronauts. You can’t rush these things.”
“In fact, you can,” Rose said. “And you will.”
Within the hour, they were on the road. First stop: the Griffith Observatory. They took her Impala, Harry slumped down in the passenger seat, sunglasses on. “You know the ’68 model comes in a convertible,” he said. “Simply gorgeous. And it’s not all that much more money.”
She laughed. “How in the world would you know how much money it is?”