She thinks of disagreeing, but something in Clark’s voice stops her. Does everyone already know? “What do you mean?” she asks, but her voice is shaky.
He glances at her and turns his back on the tableau, and after a moment she does the same. There’s nothing to be gained by watching the shipwreck.
“I’m sorry for being rude to your guest in there.”
“Tesch? Please, don’t be polite to her on my account. She’s the most pretentious woman I’ve ever met in my life.”
“I’ve met worse.”
She hasn’t smoked in a while, managed to convince herself that smoking is disgusting, but it’s a pleasure, actually, more of a pleasure than she remembered. The lit end flares in the darkness when she inhales. She likes Hollywood best at night, in the quiet, when it’s all dark leaves and shadows and night-blooming flowers, the edges softened, gently lit streets curving up into the hills. Luli wanders near them, snuffling in the grass. There are stars tonight, a few, although most are blanked out by the haze of the city.
“Good luck, darling,” Clark says quietly. He’s finished his cigarette. When she turns he’s already reentering the party, reclaiming his place at the table. “Oh, she’s just searching for the dog,” she hears him say in response to a question, “I expect she’ll be in any moment now.”
Dr. Eleven has a Pomeranian. She hadn’t realized this before, but it makes perfect sense. He has few friends, and without a dog he’d be too lonely. That night in her study she sketches a scene: Dr. Eleven stands on an outcropping of rock, a thin silhouette with a fedora pulled low, scanning the choppy sea, and a small white dog stands windswept beside him. She doesn’t realize, until halfway through drawing the dog, that she’s given Dr. Eleven a clone of Luli. Wind turbines spin on the horizon. Dr. Eleven’s Luli gazes at the sea. Miranda’s Luli sleeps on a pillow at her feet, twitching in a dog dream.
Miranda’s study window looks out over the side yard, where the lawn terraces down to a pool. Beside the pool stands a lamp from the 1950s, a crescent moon atop a tall dark pole, placed in such a way that there’s always a moon reflected in the water. The lamp is her favorite thing about this house, although she wonders sometimes about the reason for its existence. A diva who insisted on permanent moonlight? A bachelor who hoped to impress young starlets? There’s a brief period most nights when the two moons float side by side on the surface. The fake moon, which has the advantage of being closer and not obscured by smog, is almost always brighter than the real one.
At three in the morning Miranda leaves her drafting table and goes down to the kitchen for a second cup of tea. All of the guests except one have departed. At the end of the night everyone was drunk but climbed into expensive cars anyway, all except Elizabeth Colton, who drank quietly, determinedly, without taking any apparent pleasure in it, until she passed out on a sofa in the living room. Clark plucked the wineglass from her hand, Arthur removed Elizabeth’s car keys from her handbag and dropped them into an opaque vase on the mantelpiece, Miranda covered her with a blanket and left a glass of water nearby.
“I think we should talk,” Miranda said to Arthur, when the last guest except Elizabeth was gone, but he waved her off and stumbled in the direction of the bedroom, said something about talking in the morning on his way up the stairs.
The house is silent now and she feels like a stranger here. “This life was never ours,” she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. “We were only ever borrowing it.”
In the living room, Elizabeth Colton is still unconscious. Even passed out drunk she’s a vision in the lamplight. In the kitchen, four head shots are lying on the countertop. Miranda studies these while the water’s boiling and recognizes somewhat younger and more brooding versions of four of the night’s caterers. She puts on a pair of flip-flops in the sunroom and lets herself out into the cool night air. She sits for a while at the poolside with her tea, Luli beside her, and splashes her feet in the water to watch the moon reflection ripple and break.
There’s a sound from the street, a car door closing. “Stay,” she tells Luli, who sits by the pool and watches as Miranda opens the gate to the front driveway, where Elizabeth’s convertible is parked dark and gleaming. Miranda runs her fingertips along the side of the car as she passes, and they come away coated with a fine layer of dust. The streetlight at the end of the driveway is a frenzy of moths. Two cars are parked on the street. A man leans on one of them, smoking a cigarette. In the other car, a man is asleep in the driver’s seat. She recognizes both men, because they follow her and Arthur much more frequently than anyone else does.
“Hey,” the man with the cigarette says, and reaches for his camera. He’s about her age, with sideburns and dark hair that falls in his eyes.
“Don’t,” she says sharply, and he hesitates.
“What are you doing out so late?”
“Are you going to take my picture?”
He lowers the camera.
“Thank you,” she says. “In answer to your question, I just came out here to see if you might have an extra cigarette.”
“How’d you know I’d have one?”
“Because you’re in front of my house smoking every night.”
“Six nights a week,” he says. “I take Mondays off.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jeevan Chaudhary.”
“So do you have a cigarette for me, Jeevan?”
“Sure. Here. I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I just started again. Light?”
“So,” he says, once her cigarette’s lit, “this is a first.”
She ignores this, looking up at the house. “It’s pretty from here, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he says. “You have a beautiful home.” Was that sarcasm? She isn’t sure. She doesn’t care. She’s always found the house beautiful, but it’s even more so now that she knows she’s leaving. It’s modest by the standards of people whose names appear above the titles of their movies, but extravagant beyond anything she would have imagined for herself. In all my life, there will never be another house like this.
“You know what time it is?” he asks.
“I don’t know, about three a.m.? Maybe more like three thirty?”
“Why’s Elizabeth Colton’s car still in the driveway?”
“Because she’s a raging alcoholic,” Miranda says.
His eyes widen. “Really?”
“She’s too wasted to drive. You didn’t hear that from me.”
“Sure. No. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You people live for that kind of gossip, don’t you?”
“No,” he says, “I live on that kind of gossip, actually. As in, it pays my rent. What I live for is something different.”
“What do you live for?”
“Truth and beauty,” he says, deadpan.
“You like your job?”
“I don’t hate it.”
She is dangerously close to tears. “So you enjoy stalking people?”
He laughs. “Let’s just say the job fits with my basic understanding of what work is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. You don’t have to work for a living.”
“Please,” Miranda says, “I’ve worked all my life. I worked all through school. These past few years are an anomaly.” Although as she says this she can’t help but think of Pablo. She lived off him for ten months, until it became clear that they were going to run out of money before he sold another painting. In the next version of her life, she decides, she will be entirely independent.
“Forget it.”
“No really, I’m curious. What’s your understanding of work?”
“Work is combat.”
“So you’ve hated every job you’ve had, is that what you’re saying?”
Jeevan shrugs. He’s looking at something on his phone, distracted, his face lit blue by the screen. Miranda returns her attention to the house. The sensation of being in a dream that will end at any moment, only she isn’t sure if she’s fighting to wake up or to stay asleep. Elizabeth’s car is all long curves and streaks of reflected light. Miranda thinks of the places she might go now that Los Angeles is over, and what surprises her is that the first place that comes to mind is Neptune Logistics. She misses the order of the place, the utter manageability of her job there, the cool air of Leon Prevant’s office suite, the calm of the lake.
“Hey!” Jeevan says suddenly, and as Miranda turns, the cigarette halfway to her mouth, the flash of his camera catches her unaware.