SCOTTY’S CASTLE WAS not a castle, and the Scotty in question did not design, build, or even own it. Scotty was a con man who convinced millionaires to buy land in Death Valley on the promise that it was teeming with gold. Mines were dug at great expense, but no gold appeared; nothing piled up except the years, during which something unexpected happened: Scotty made a friend. Unlike all the other dupes who talked of suing him—or worse—the Chicago insurance millionaire Albert Johnson continued stubbornly to believe in Scotty, and together they continued exploring the land for gold. Over time, their outings became less about searching for a precious metal they would never find, and more about appreciating each other’s company and the natural wonders around them.
Death Valley was much the same then as it is today. A vast valley of flat plains, it lies so low on the surface of the Earth that it constitutes the lowest point in all of North America: almost 300 feet below sea level. Enclosing these plains are gray and purple mountains that trap the sun-warmed air and send it rolling back to the plains to be heated over, and over, and over again. In summer, the temperature routinely hits 115 degrees. No one who visits Death Valley wonders how it acquired its name. And yet it is no wasteland: it has a meandering creek in which pupfish populations leftover from the last ice age have adapted and survived; a crusty white salt basin that occasionally becomes a saltwater lake in rainy winters; golden sand dunes; fields of yellow flowers that bloom in spring; abstract rock formations carved into mountain faces and painted with mineral splotches of color; and many other natural phenomena.
In the 1920s, Johnson built a Spanish Colonial villa so that his wife could join him in comfort and style. It was made to look like a desert castle, with Anglo-Saxon architectural motifs adapted to the American Southwest. Instead of guards in suits of armor, two giant cacti flanked a wooden portcullis painted red, with curling iron flourishes fixed inside each latticed square. The walls and towers were the color of sand, and made of stucco. From a notched battlement flew an American flag in place of a knight’s pennant. Red Mission tiles created specially to withstand the sizzling desert heat capped off this ridiculous yet impressive monstrosity. There was even supposed to be a pool (the Jazz Age equivalent to a moat), but before he could install it, Johnson discovered that the government owned the land the house had been built on. Scotty had either made a mistake or purposely misled him; his tract lay farther north. It took years for Johnson to legally acquire the land in question, and by then the Great Depression had bankrupted his insurance company like all the others. The pool was not to be. Most people dismissed the millionaire as a fool for continuing to associate with a known huckster, but by then the friendship was sealed, and Johnson let Scotty live in the castle for the remainder of his life.
The Chambers family owned a desert estate near Johnson’s. As a girl, Beverly was forced to spend extended weekends there, and while she relished the extreme heat—as she did all extreme things—the desert held few other distractions for her. Even with Charlotte there it took only a few hours for her and her brother Tom to begin fighting. Their father, “Big Stan,” was constantly taking them out on neighborly visits as a way of forcing them to behave (they knew better than to act out in front of strangers), and they spent many an afternoon at Scotty’s Castle this way. Stan grew fond of the place, and at some point in the fifties he got it into his head to build a replica. Beverly, who was a young woman by then, convinced him to at least build this embarrassment where no one could see it from the public road, and never tell anyone about it. She said every great family should have a secret, and Stan was tickled by the idea of a hideaway.
The only difference between Scotty’s Castle and its secret twin, Stan’s Castle, was the tiled swimming pool Beverly Chambers stood staring at now from a window on the second-story landing. It was gorgeous, less a watery oasis than a second sun, as bright and glittering as its skyward companion but with the added attraction of refreshment. Bev had inherited the house from her father, and for decades “that vulgar castle” (as CharBev always referred to it) had lain unused. But in her old age, Bev discovered she had a measure of affection for it, as she did for anything that had managed to survive from long ago, and she spent at least a few weeks there each year, usually between the months of October and April.
The sun’s glare began to overwhelm her. She looked away, puffing on her latest Parlie. A dirt road stretched from the entrance through a series of rolling hills to the public roadway, scores of miles in the shimmering distance. Shimmering, and not even noon yet. The desert heat still fascinated her. As a girl, she loved how the sweat under her arms would evaporate before it even had a chance to settle. Out here, it was as if the Earth’s atmosphere didn’t exist—as if there were nothing between her and the heavens above. If she were religious (as Albert Johnson had been), this might have made her feel closer to God, but instead it always made her think about alien abductions, how easy it would be for a vessel to materialize out of the endless sky and snatch her from this desolate landscape. It was no coincidence, she always thought, that both Roswell and Area 51 were located in the American Southwest. The desert revealed how empty the world really was. In more reasonable climates, nature at least gave the illusion of providing cover, and in towns and cities people could crowd together and pretend they weren’t powerless. But there was no pretense out here, no semblance of comfort, or false impression of safety. There was simply . . . nothing.
A distant noise intruded on her reverie. Bev’s consciousness returned to the world like a swimmer rising to the surface of the pool outside—breaching the liquid coolness of interiority for the dry, blazing heat of shared reality. What was that noise? Of course: it was the faraway whirring of a car engine. She couldn’t see them yet, but they were close. This was always how it was in Death Valley; sound traveled unimpeded over the flat land and through the crystalline air, over distances greater than the eye could see. In the desert, hearing was the more reliable sense.
They were early, which surprised her. What happened to young people being fashionably late? In their day CharBev were never on time for anything. There were a few things she still had to do. Bev turned to Peaches, who was brushing up her latest trail of ashes inches from her feet:
“Stop fussing, Peaches, and help me down the stairs.”
She stuck out her arm and wiggled her fingers impatiently. It was absurd, but at some point in the last week, during the aftermath of her hangover from her binge with Mike Kim, Bev had lost the ability to go up or down the stairs without assistance. Peaches had tried to convince her to use a cane, but she refused. Decrepitude was officially a bore.
IT WAS RICHARD, not Elizabeth, who was responsible for the early start. As it turned out he celebrated well into the night of the premiere with a number of friends, but no one more so than Mike. They did a series of shots (he lost count somewhere around six or seven) in honor of “Mikard,” a word that became funnier to them the more they said it, which happened to coincide with the more they drank. They both had to Uber it home, and it wasn’t till well past 2 a.m. when a Lincoln Town Car ambled down Rowena, stopped a moment, and ejected a stumbling Richard onto the curb like a garbage truck emptying itself into a landfill. He was just sober enough to remember Elizabeth was picking him up at seven sharp. His head ached already; he knew he would be massively hungover in the morning and threw himself into bed in the desperate attempt to get a few hours of sleep. This desperation, of course, ensured that he got none. Two hours later he gave up, and on an impulse he texted her:
u up yet
She texted back almost immediately:
Yes. You?
Elizabeth had forced herself to wake up at five on Tuesday for a rare weekday roller skate. This had ensured she would be tired enough to go to sleep immediately upon returning home from the premiere the night before, at eleven. When she woke at five again on Wednesday morning, she was reasonably refreshed and ready to go.
A few texts later, they agreed they might as well get started. It took Elizabeth only thirty minutes to get to Silver Lake so early in the morning. When Richard tumbled into the front passenger seat it was still dark outside, not quite 6 a.m.
He looked across at her. She was back to her normal self: loose clothing, ponytail, face devoid of makeup. He was glad. It was nice to have the old Elizabeth back. But she wasn’t quite back, was she? Somehow she looked different; he couldn’t put his finger on it. But it bothered him, and as she fiddled with what looked to be a picnic basket shoved between their seats (what the hell did she have in there?), he stared at her, trying to figure out what it was.
She caught him staring. Their eyes met, bouncing off each other in opposite directions. Elizabeth made a big show of rearranging the objects inside her basket. She removed a thermos and unscrewed the cap. The car filled with the aroma of fresh coffee.
“Do you want some?”
She had time to make coffee? he thought, declining with a shake of his head. The smell was actually making him sick, and when she opened the basket to put back the thermos, he leaned over to take a peek, the sight of a homemade PB&J smeared against a Ziploc bag nearly making him heave. He swallowed thickly. Nausea and exhaustion were descending on him, fast, and he wasn’t sure which would win out. He hoped it was the latter, though the saliva pooling in the bottom of his mouth portended otherwise. Not again, he begged silently. Richard was angry with himself for being hungover after promising he’d drink less—especially after being so good the last few weeks. But then he thought of Mike, and everything that had happened yesterday. He didn’t regret a thing. He couldn’t tell Elizabeth, though. He’d betrayed his best friend to her once before, and he was determined not to do it again.
Elizabeth pulled into the street. There were no other cars on the road except for a lone Prius behind them. It was 6 a.m., a full hour earlier than they’d planned on leaving.
“So how was the rest of last night?” she asked, once they’d gotten on the 101.
“Eh. You didn’t miss much at the after party, or the after–after party. Nothing to report.”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Not too bad,” he lied. “I’m not really much of a morning person anyway. Unlike you, apparently.”
“It’s true. I am a morning person,” she said, with her uniquely flat intonation, devoid of inflection or innuendo. Richard remembered how he used to rail against her peculiar manner of speaking. He even had a “DP robot voice” he used to do for Mike in the early days, when he and Elizabeth were just getting to know each other. His eyelids began to droop.
“Feel free to lie down in the back if you want to.”
“Really?” he asked gratefully. “You sure you don’t mind?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “Go for it,” she said, swapping out the 101 for the 10. There was still hardly anyone on the road, and even though by the time she got to the 15 there were plenty of vehicles in her rearview mirror, the traffic remained light. Elizabeth did a quick five-count with “Mississippis” in between, while from the backseat Richard snored steadily. Soon, their suspense would be over.
Elizabeth thought about Orpheus, who was so often on her mind these days. He was doing so much better. She realized it was only a matter of time before she told him everything, rough patch included, because how could she not? They’d grown so close, especially over the last month or two. Suddenly she wished she could have conjured him there now, by some magic spell, and talked to him for as long as he would listen. She wouldn’t have held back a thing.
ORPHEUS DID NOT appear magically in Elizabeth’s front seat, but by a more minor miracle he was only fifty yards behind her, in one of the many Priuses dotting the road—the same Prius, in fact, that had been following her all the way from Silver Lake.
Since showing up on Elizabeth’s doorstep in the guise of a new man almost two months earlier, Orpheus had made significant progress up the side of the well. It became easier once Elizabeth knew what he was doing; it was as if she threw him down a rope, beckoning excitedly from the top. He continued his job hawking pizza on the Boardwalk, and each week they went to the supermarket together (he had his own shelf in her kitchen now). He slept over almost every night, and when she wasn’t there, he had permission to loiter on her back porch as much as he wanted. (She made sure her neighbors knew he was her guest.) They’d even done a little “house hunting,” which consisted of trawling through Craigslist and Westside Rentals listings for something dirt cheap yet otherwise dirt-free, which turned out not to be such an easy find. They were in touch with Phoenix House and the St. Joseph Center, two local charities that helped the homeless with housing, both temporary and permanent. Elizabeth had told him finally about her “Orpheus account” and her intention to use the money she received each month from the lawyer to help him however she could, as long as he kept in mind that the ultimate goal was his financial independence. She was so businesslike about it, there was little opportunity for emotion, and he had to settle for a simple “thank you,” which he found himself repeating thereafter almost every day.
Elizabeth had told him about the lawyer’s e-mail the night she received it. He didn’t say a word; the “do not pry” strategy had been working well for him. But he wanted desperately to go with her. Partly, he wanted to protect her, but mainly he was curious: his ability to keep inching up the well and eventually over its lip and onto solid ground was now tied directly to this anonymous benefactor. There was, however, another reason. The idea of getting back inside a car and hurtling down the highways of greater Southern California scared him—deeply—but he was drawn to this fear the same way a child insists on seeing the goriest horror movie in the theater or riding the biggest roller coaster in the park. Wouldn’t this prove how far he’d come? That he had acquired more than the trappings of progress and secured real, lasting change for himself? In a flash of inspiration he realized it would be even better if he weren’t just a passenger, but actually driving the vehicle in question.
He became determined to follow them.
But how was he going to acquire a car? Renting one was impossible; he hadn’t had a driver’s license or credit card for twenty-two years. (He’d consulted a calendar recently, more baffled than shocked by the hemorrhaging of time.) For days he wasted his energy on wishful thinking. If Elizabeth had an anonymous benefactor, why couldn’t he? Someone who dropped a pair of keys in his lap and pointed to a shiny, waxed car waiting on the curb just for him. (This did not happen.) He knew a few people who lived out of their cars, and even though most of these vehicles were ancient RVs or oversize vans—dubiously mobile shanties that hadn’t gone east of Lincoln in years—he asked each of these homeless car owners if he could borrow their car for a day. They all told him some version of “fuck off.” And then suddenly it was Tuesday morning, and he and Elizabeth were sitting at the kitchen counter eating omelets (his new specialty). She reminded him about the premiere that night and the trip the next day. She said she’d be getting home late and waking up early, so he might as well take her spare key to let himself in and out.
She placed it gently in the palm of his hand: the same hand he’d used only a few months earlier to break into the house he more or less lived in now.
“Orpheus, I’m so proud of you,” she said, before making a hasty exit, leaving him staring in her wake. He hadn’t even been able to say his usual “thank you.”
How could he possibly not follow her? He had to restrain himself from running out to her in the driveway and proclaiming his intention never to let her out of his sight from this moment on, not even for work. There was no way she was going to the desert without him.
But how?
He left his rolling suitcase in the house that morning. Walking without it felt strange, like he was missing both a load and a limb, his step lighter but also less steady. He headed toward the Boardwalk, sidestepping a young family whose paraphernalia cascaded from their car onto the sidewalk: T-shirts, caps, sunglasses, bottles of water, sunscreen, a half-empty box of donuts, the trappings of a stroller. The harried father glanced up at him from a pile of toys, shrugging his shoulders apologetically. In the last few weeks, Orpheus had bought some more outfits, and he now regularly availed himself of Elizabeth’s washer and dryer. He’d taken to wearing a baseball cap to keep out of the sun, and to hide the worst of his ravaged face from view. Pleased to have been mistaken for a regular functioning human being, he saluted the man, “huh,” without breaking his stride.
It was busy on the Boardwalk for a Tuesday in October. Orpheus watched a performer jump in his bare feet from a chair onto a pile of broken glass. (He managed, as always, not to cut himself.) A Jimi Hendrix look-alike on roller skates nearly crashed into him while playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A bald, red-faced woman in a sundress banged her fists on an upright piano, failing to make much noise since the instrument was missing most of its keys. Orpheus yearned suddenly to be back inside Elizabeth’s house and away from the madness of the world. He turned to walk back, and saw the tourist family from a few minutes earlier taking in the Boardwalk for the first time—overwhelmed, mesmerized. Something dropped from the father’s back pocket, traveling the short distance to a nest of palm husks lying on the ground. The husks, which had been blown off the tops of the surrounding palm trees by coastal winds, must have broken the object’s fall. The father didn’t hear a thing, and was already running after his young son, who was eagerly inspecting the glass walker’s pile of broken bottles. Orpheus walked over—all it took was a few steps—and reached down among the hairy brown husks, plucking out the object easily. A large plastic holder said “Enterprise Rental.” It was as he had suspected, but hadn’t dared to hope: they were the keys to the car a few short blocks away, a fully functioning car guaranteed to be empty and unattended for hours to come.
Orpheus pocketed the keys, striding off at a brisk-but-not-too-brisk pace.
It was only when he was inside the car that Orpheus realized how odd these supposed keys were. They weren’t keys at all. Where was the slender, notched, metallic protrusion to be inserted into a matching hole? This was nothing other than a black rectangular cube. The hell? His eyes darted around the dashboard for the ignition. How the fuck was the car supposed to start without a key? What had happened to cars in the last two decades? Was he so out of touch he couldn’t even start a car anymore?
He heard a police siren, his heart rate spiking, hands sweating as he surveyed the dash more urgently. The siren couldn’t be for him. Could it? No; he’d be long gone by the time anyone knew. If he could figure out how to start the damn thing.
He saw a START button, which looked promising. He pressed it: nothing. He punched it with his fist: still nothing. What was happening? What was he doing? The old, proud Orpheus would never have stooped so low. No, for that man, the means always justified the end, which was how he’d ended up marrying a woman he didn’t love and betraying his family for another woman who wasn’t worth his spit. Fuck it. For once, the end would have to justify the means.
He took a deep breath and pressed the START button again: nothing.
He tried again: still nothing.
He began pressing the button over and over, without hope, pressing harder each time, until he was practically punching it with an index finger he was in grave danger of breaking.
Orpheus kicked at the floor in anger, letting loose a furious, animal yell.
Later, he realized his foot must have hit the brake pad just as he was pressing down the button. The headlights and all the interior controls flickered to life, and a little screen in the middle of the dashboard showed him the view from the back of the car. This thing had cameras too? It didn’t sound like the engine was running, however, and without hoping for much, he put the car in drive and stepped on the gas.
To his amazement, it moved.
Over the course of the previous week, Orpheus had asked Elizabeth a series of nonchalantly phrased, cunningly disconnected questions to confirm the logistics of the desert trip. (So much for not prying, but at least he did it artfully.) This was how he knew she would be picking up the boy at 7 a.m. from his apartment in Silver Lake. One day, he asked her to show him how her phone worked. (He didn’t have to pretend to be mystified by this device.) Since the Internet meant very little to him, he focused his wonderment on the fact that it was both a phone and a Rolodex.
“So everyone you know, all their numbers and addresses are right there? Stored in the phone?”
“It’d be more impressive if I knew more people, but yes, that’s right,” said Elizabeth.
“So if you wanted to look up, say, Richard, huh—”
She gave him the tiniest flicker of side-eye.
“—say if you forgot his address. What would you do?”
Elizabeth clicked on her contacts, pulling up Richard’s card. “Here, look.” She handed him the phone.
“Outstanding,” he crowed, committing the address to memory.
He wished he had a Thomas Guide to help him find his way to Silver Lake, but he was surprised how much he remembered once he was back on the streets as a driver instead of a vagrant. Too vast from the pedestrian point of view, L.A. came alive inside a moving vehicle. As he turned onto Washington—his namesake—Orpheus felt himself become a part of the hatched pattern of boulevards and avenues stretching eastward. Not even twenty-two years of deprivation and neglect could induce him, as a native Angeleno, to forget that after Lincoln came Sepulveda, and then La Cienega, followed by La Brea, Crenshaw, and Western. They were all still here, exactly as he’d left them (except for what looked to be an elevated rail—the hell?—just west of La Cienega). He’d forgotten how many billboards there were in L.A., adorning the space where the streets met the sky. Many of them were digital now and changed every ten seconds or so, reminding him of futuristic cityscapes in movies like Blade Runner.
“The future is now,” he whispered, gazing out his window. “Huh.”
Orpheus made a left onto Vermont, heading north: Venice, Pico, Olympic, Wilshire, all the numbered streets in between. It was like visiting old friends. If anything, the city looked better than he remembered it, though maybe that was because he looked so much worse.
He went east again on Beverly Boulevard, knowing it would turn into Silver Lake Boulevard eventually. From there he got a little lost; the grid went wavy, like straight layers of sedimentary rock turned groovily metamorphic, the parallel lines melting into curves, the perpendicular intersections swirling into spirals. It wasn’t until close to sunset that he found a suitably inconspicuous spot on Richard’s block from which to keep watch.
His plan was to stay up all night. He spent the first two hours reading the manual he found covered in crumbs in the glove compartment, learning about hybrid energy and (most important) how to turn the damn car on and off. Close to 3 a.m. he saw Richard stumble into his building. Somewhere around 4 a.m. he fell asleep, despite his best intentions, succumbing to the inevitable crash that followed the adrenaline rush of his day.
Orpheus had no idea why he woke up two hours later, but he suspected it was the noise of Elizabeth’s ignition turning over (at least her car still operated the old-fashioned way), because almost immediately he saw the familiar Honda Accord begin to move. He was still wiping sleep from his eyes when he started the Prius like a pro and took off behind her. If he had woken up even thirty seconds later, he would have waited another hour before realizing they were gone. He would have missed them entirely.
It was still dark when he followed Elizabeth onto the 101 and the 10. Orpheus had thought that driving—especially on the highway at night—would bring back the memory of his calamity like never before, but he was so intent on negotiating the delicate balance between not letting Elizabeth’s car get too far away and not getting too close to it that the eastern sky went from black to navy to cerulean to bright Dodger blue before he realized the night was over. It was only when the sun’s rays began poking him in the eye that he recognized the beginning of a new day.
Orpheus pulled down his visor. A photo fluttered to his lap. It was a studio portrait of the tourist family: father, mother, son, and even their baby daughter in matching khakis and Christmas sweaters. He squirmed, casting it off him as if it were an insect he couldn’t bear to touch. He looked around him. In the light of this supposedly glorious new day all he could see was the flat suburban sprawl of the Inland Empire extending endlessly on either side of him. Orpheus released a long sigh. He was tired, so tired. Every bone ached; every joint creaked.
There would be no ghostly visions of his lost family, no painful yet revelatory resurrection of the past, no real demarcation between that past and however many days were yet to come. He had no idea what he’d say to Elizabeth if she saw him following her, no way of justifying his actions. What the hell was he doing out here? He’d already ruined one family’s vacation; what more could he accomplish?
He had no answer, but he continued following the spotless Honda Accord, maintaining a carefully calibrated distance several car lengths behind.
BY THE TIME Richard woke up, Elizabeth had moved on from the 15 to CA 127, also known as “Death Valley Road.” They were getting close. His head popped up in the rearview mirror.
“How long was I out?”
She looked away from the road for a split second to glance at him. He was rubbing his eyes with his fists, and even though he had only a half inch or so of hair, somehow it was still sticking up in the back of his head. It was a rare moment in which he had no idea how adorable he looked, which enhanced his adorableness by about a thousand.
“A little over three hours,” she said, training her eyes on the road again.
“Yikes, really?” he yawned. The sleep hadn’t been refreshing, but it had helped. He at least didn’t feel like vomiting anymore. He climbed into the front seat, his denim backside brushing against her shoulder. “Sorry,” he muttered.
She caught a whiff of his unique scent: Right Guard deodorant, Head & Shoulders shampoo, and the tiniest tang underneath it—an earthy, animal something that refused to be contained by artificial fragrances.
“You still okay to drive?” he asked. “Not too tired?”
“I’m good.”
“D’you have any water?” He yawned again.
Elizabeth cocked her head in the direction of the basket. Richard opened it and saw a veritable cornucopia of edibles: the aforementioned PB&Js, which looked slightly less revolting now; two baggies stuffed with baby carrots, celery sticks, cherry tomatoes, and cucumber slices; two Balance Bars (mocha chip and yogurt honey peanut); two apples; two pears; a netted bag of clementines; and two individual-sized bottles of water. He grabbed one, draining it in three long gulps.
“Wow, you really went all out, huh?” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I like to be prepared. Could you actually hand me one of those sandwiches?”
They were already in the desert. Growing up in Massachusetts, Richard had pictured bumpy sand dunes as far as the eye could see, like in Star Wars, whenever he imagined “the desert.” But on his way through the American Southwest seven years earlier, and on countless road trips to Las Vegas since, the real thing consistently failed to live up to the fantasy. For one, there was no sand. It was all brown, crumbly dirt and dusty, low-lying plants. This desert scrub spread out in all directions over gently rolling hills. Every time he saw it, he couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.
“Where’re the cacti?” he asked suddenly.
Elizabeth took a moment to swallow the last of her PB&J, which she had scarfed as quickly as if she were on one of her lunch breaks. “What do you mean? There are tons of them out here.”
“Yeah, but, you know, the big ones, with the arms?” He stuck both hands in the air, as if he were making two solemn oaths at once, dragging one shoulder down as far as it would go. “Like in the cartoons? With a sombrero hanging off one arm?”
“Oh, that’s the saguaro cactus. They’re in the Sonoran Desert, which is farther south and east, mainly in Arizona. We’re in the Mojave Desert now.”
“God, how do you know all this stuff?”
“Well, we had these regional geography quizzes in fifth grade—”
“Yeah, that’s what you always say—‘oh, I learned it when I was twelve, or eight, or four,’ but I don’t know anyone else who actually remembers everything like you do.”
“I guess I don’t forget things easily.”
“It’s impressive. And kind of scary.”
She smiled.
Richard began shaking his leg against the floorboard. “Are we there yet?”
She smiled again.
Two in a row, he congratulated himself.
“I think we still have a little over an hour.”
He retrieved his iPod from the floor, where he’d dropped it when he first entered the car. This had been his sole preparatory measure for the trip.
“Do you have a USB port in here?”
She jerked her head toward the basket again. He lifted it, spotting the port with a white connector sticking out of it.
Richard started with a playlist labeled “Cool/Not Embarrassing Music,” which he had crafted for a party at his apartment a year ago. By the end of the party, a wasted Mike had hijacked his iPod from its stereo cradle while he was in the bathroom and switched over to his “Top 25 Most Played” list, which included such humiliating gems as Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” and “Slide” by the Goo Goo Dolls. He smiled at the memory, realizing there was no need to play “cool” music for Elizabeth. He already knew what she liked. Currently the topmost track on his “Top 25 Most Played” list was Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby”—his favorite song, though he didn’t advertise it. He began playing it now.
Elizabeth made a noise. He turned to her.
“This is my favorite song,” she explained.
Come on. “Mine too,” he said, a little reluctantly. But how could he not tell her?
She took her eyes off the road again.
“Really?”
“Really.”
They lapsed into silence, accompanied by Mariah’s silky crooning. Richard was reminded of their dinner at Factor’s, when he vowed never to be a part of those couples who sat in silence, the ones who had nothing to say to each other. But he saw now that he’d gotten it wrong, that sometimes there was nothing better than sitting next to another person and thinking your own thoughts alongside them—nothing more intimate than being alone together. Maybe this was, in fact, the very definition of intimacy: acting with another person the way you did when you were alone.
The song ended. Neither of them spoke. Richard couldn’t imagine sitting in perfect silence like this with anyone else in the world. He and Mike, certainly, were incapable of shutting up for more than a few seconds at a time, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. But he wouldn’t change this, either. Wasn’t it funny, he thought, that the one person he was being paid to talk to was also the one person he could not talk to? Maybe this was why he’d been withdrawing incrementally from his old social scene (though it had been a mistake to lump Mike together with all his other friends; Mike was special, and after last night he would never forget it). When you had someone you could calm down with in this way, didn’t it feel a little pointless to keep expending all that energy?
“D’you have any Selena in there?” Elizabeth asked him, breaking the silence at last.
“Selena Gomez? Nah, she’s too Disney, even for me.”
“No, Selena Selena.”
“What other Selena?”
He was scanning his iPod for his next selection, and for this reason he failed to see her exaggerated double take.
“Do you seriously not know who Selena is?!”
Richard looked up. This was the most animated he’d ever heard her.
“Selena was like the Mexican Madonna,” she told him breathlessly. “She was Tejana, actually, meaning she was a Latina from Texas, and had hit songs in Spanish and then later in English too, pretty much every year from ’85 to ’95, which was when she was shot to death by this crazy woman who used to be the president of her fan club and was caught embezzling money from her. She wasn’t even twenty-four yet.”
It hit him without warning, like a slap in the face: he wanted nothing more than to kiss her. But lunging for the face of a driver currently operating a motor vehicle hurtling over sixty miles an hour was not the most prudent course of action, and also: what?? Richard scanned his iPod blindly. What was happening? He didn’t even want to have sex with her (he couldn’t bring himself to say “fuck her,” even though this was the phrase he had always used up till now, for both its pithiness and bite). He just really, really, really wanted to kiss her.
“That’s terrible,” he mumbled, refusing to look up.
“It really was. Whenever people talk about remembering where they were when JFK was shot, I think about the day Selena died. I remember I was in math class, and I was bored, and then there was all this commotion in the hallway and people started turning on radios and televisions and . . . I know it sounds melodramatic, but it was like the world ended.”
They were silent for a few moments.
“Look in my glove compartment,” she instructed him.
In among a pile of Balance Bars, he found a CD labeled S and handed it to her. She slid it in.
They listened to “Dreaming of You” first. Richard loved it. Even though it was a wistful song, he could hear Selena’s smile in every note; it was as though she could barely contain her joy in singing. After that, Elizabeth played him “I Could Fall in Love,” which he liked too, and then “Como La Flor” and some of her other Spanish-language hits, which he liked less, but pretended to love just as much as the others.
A road sign came into view.
“Look!” he pointed. “That’s Big Stan Way coming up, isn’t it?”
Jonathan Hertzfeld’s directions had been simple: they were to ignore the no-trespassing signs posted at the turnoff for “Big Stan Way” and take the road all the way to what he simply called “the estate.” They were due at noon, but they hadn’t hit a bit of traffic, and they’d never had to take a bathroom break. Elizabeth drank only a single cup of coffee, and even with his bottle of water, Richard was still dehydrated from his hangover. It was a little past eleven.
They turned onto the one-lane road, which went from well paved to badly paved to not paved at all. They passed a range of low-lying hills. “The estate” came into view.
Elizabeth jammed on her brakes. Richard bolted upright, inadvertently ripping the iPod from its socket, cutting off Selena in the middle of “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.”
It was like a limited-edition “Hacienda” version of the Lego castle he’d been obsessed with when he was nine. Richard clicked the camera app on his iPod. He had to get a picture of this.
“Holy shit,” he said. “It’s a fucking castle.”
Elizabeth nodded. “It’s a fucking castle.”
The portcullis split in two with an electric hum, opening like a regular gate instead of rising upward as Richard had been hoping it would. Even so, he imagined two little Lego knights in Zorro masks and gaucho hats on either side of it, pulling on a rope, their pencil-thin mustaches quivering with the effort. He was about to share this flight of fancy with Elizabeth when he wondered if she would find it racist.
They passed through the gate into the bright light of the courtyard.
BEVERLY HAD CONSIDERED wearing an elaborate getup for the “Summit of Love,” as she’d been calling it to herself for a week. She toyed with the idea of impersonating a character halfway between Katharine Hepburn and Norma Desmond—brash yet grandiose, the eccentric old bat with a fortune to spare on her kooky whims—and as recently as that morning the plan had been to greet them in the middle of the courtyard in a turban, brandishing a cigarette holder, arms raised to the heavens. In the end, she decided a simpler approach would do. Stan’s Castle was impressive enough on its own.
It was Peaches, therefore, who greeted them in the middle of the courtyard, staring glumly through her silver-flecked bangs. Above her was a miniature footbridge connecting the two wings of the castle. Below her Crocs-clad feet were red ceramic tiles, miniature cacti, and succulents arranged in garden beds against the two long walls of the rectangular space. There were at least six iron-studded doors leading inside, and three times as many thick-paned windows. A hill overlooking them provided the promise if not the guarantee of shade at some point in the day. The effect produced was contradictory: snugly grand; kitschily enchanting; as if the architect hadn’t been able to decide whether the building was meant to be a joke or not and had settled for somewhere in between.
Richard got out first, turning in a circle to take in the view. Peaches got a full, 360-degree look at him, a rare smile lighting up her sullen visage. But the smile collapsed on itself when she saw Elizabeth staring at her.
“In here,” she said, gesturing to one of the doors.
They entered a cathedral-like space soaring two stories in the air, an upper gallery running the perimeter. A dual-tiered chandelier hung from the wooden-raftered ceiling, two great rings of iron with electric candles sticking out of them. If they had been real candles, it would have been easy to believe this massive fixture had been lifted straight from a medieval banquet hall. Tapestries hung on the white plaster walls and over the balcony of the upper gallery. A great stone fireplace at one end of the room descended from the ceiling all the way to the ornately tiled floor. Across from it stood another fireplace, this one merely a story high, hiding the staircase leading to the gallery above.
It took some time for Richard and Elizabeth to observe these details, since despite the numerous windows, the space was dark and gloomy. Thick, leathery drapes had been drawn against every pane of glass, blocking out the sun, and their eyes needed a minute to adjust. The air smelled smoky, and what with this, the gloom, and the churchlike proportions, Elizabeth looked instinctively for the font of holy water and tiers of votive candles beside the door. (They weren’t there.)
Placed in the center of the room, directly beneath the chandelier, was a high-backed, circular couch made of dark, button-tufted leather. It seated up to fifteen people, and was the sort of thing that belonged in a posh train station or glittering hotel lobby rather than a private home. And yet it fit the grandiose space perfectly.
Upon it sat an old woman, like a lone traveler, an unlit cigarette hanging off her bottom lip.
Richard saw raw, red scalp and sagging, papery skin; he still retained a vestige of that knee-jerk abhorrence of old age that belongs to children—an aversion to infirmity by the young and healthy who cling instinctually to each other. He glanced away, choosing to survey the furniture instead. It was all dark leather and even darker wood; it struck him as a little creepy. The only object that looked out of place was a glass plaque propped up on a slim, marble pedestal. He squinted, reading: To CharBev, in grateful recognition of years and years of love and devotion, from the California State Prison, Los Angeles County, Lancaster, CA. He guessed the old woman was the “CharBev” in question, but what the hell kind of a name was that?
Beverly had wanted to light her cigarette in front of them as a means of drawing out the moment—to observe them, to put them off their guard—but she was having a hard time igniting the lighter. She flicked it helplessly. Inside her ear, Char’s voice taunted her: Serves you right.
Elizabeth stepped forward:
“Can I help you with that?”
Elizabeth hated cigarettes; she thought smoking was idiotic, but she couldn’t just stand there watching the old woman fumble. Besides, the damage was already done. That much was obvious.
“I’ll manage,” Bev replied coolly, her eagle eyes blazing a warning. Elizabeth stumbled backward, as if singed. It was this infinitesimal victory that gave Bev the burst of confidence she needed to light the damn Parlie at last. She drew in a deep breath, which of course brought on a coughing fit. Peaches, who had been hovering in the back of the room, stepped forward, but Beverly waved her away.
When she could speak again, there was a flush on Bev’s cheeks that made her appear livelier than before. “Thank you for coming. My name is Beverly Chambers, and it’s such a pleasure to meet you both in person.”
Elizabeth just stared at her.
“You too,” muttered Richard.
The stupidity of the “Summit of Love” broke upon Bev like an icy wave socking her in the gut. What the hell was she doing? She’d been like a crazy person for the last six months. Suddenly she wanted to stamp out her cigarette, throw the two of them out, and take to her bed like a normal octogenarian. But she merely paused.
“Peaches, let’s have some refreshment,” she said finally. “Some tea and sandwiches, maybe? Something lunchy.” She looked at Richard, a half smile curling one side of her mouth. “And, Mr. Baumbach—may I call you Richard?”
Richard nodded his head uneasily.
“Richard, then. Please help Peaches with the dishes and things.”
Richard’s eyes widened with surprise, and Peaches turned her head for what would have been the mother of all head shakes if Beverly hadn’t dismissed them both with an imperious wave of her Parlie-free hand. Richard followed Peaches to the door, glancing backward in hopes of catching Elizabeth’s eye. But Elizabeth only had eyes for Beverly Chambers, who was offering her a seat with a birdlike bob of the head.
Elizabeth sat, never breaking eye contact with her host. The footfalls of their companions faded away on the hard ceramic tile. They were alone.
“RICHARD AND ELIZABETH,” Bev singsonged. “Tell me, did you ever acknowledge the happy coincidence of your names?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Elizabeth.
Beverly tsked. “Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Richard and Elizabeth? Surely you’ve heard of the famous pair . . . ?”
“I haven’t.”
Bev sighed dramatically. “Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor? Only the most popular love story of the twentieth century.” She took another drag of her cigarette, careful not to breathe in too much. “Although I suppose it’s been fifty years since the world was incapable of gossiping about anyone else. The twentieth century was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
Elizabeth decided this was a rhetorical question and did not respond.
“It’s what first gave me the idea,” Bev continued, “though there were other, more substantial considerations, of course.”
“Such as?”
Bev sighed again. She couldn’t help comparing Elizabeth Santiago to Mike Kim, and there was no question whom she would have preferred. But then, her tête-à-tête with the latter had begun in exactly the same sort of no-frills, antagonistic manner. (If these two were any indication, women had certainly mastered the art of candid and plainspoken communication: an improvement from her day.) Perhaps she wasn’t giving Miss Santiago enough of an opportunity. On a perverse impulse, she held out her pack of cigarettes, waving them temptingly.
“No thank you,” said Elizabeth firmly. “I’ve never smoked.”
“How wonderful for you,” said Bev, ashing on the floor even though there was an ashtray beside her. “I hate to disappoint you—”
No you don’t, thought Elizabeth.
“—but I didn’t bring you here to tell you why I chose you for my little, ahem, experiment.”
“So then why did you? Bring us here.”
“For the pleasure of your conversation,” Bev said tartly. “And to see how you two were getting on. So tell me,” she smirked, “what do you think of him?”
“Why ask, since you obviously think you already know the answer?”
Tiresome. And insolent. “Has anyone ever told you it’s rude, my dear, to answer a question with a question?”
“Is it?”
Bev smirked again, nodding, as if they’d been fencing and she was bound by honor to acknowledge a hit.
“It doesn’t matter what I think anyway,” said Elizabeth, breaking eye contact for the first time, and glancing backward to confirm they were still alone.
Bev raised what was left of her eyebrows, in what was meant to come across as a question.
“It’s not going to work,” said Elizabeth, a slight tremor to her voice.
Interesting. “No?” asked Bev softly.
“No. But I’ll keep putting in my time like I’ve been doing. I’ll get to the end of the year and I’ll get my money. All of it. You owe me that, for—for—”
“For what, my dear?”
Elizabeth couldn’t finish the sentence, so Beverly did it for her:
“For making you hope?”
Elizabeth stared at the tiles on the floor. They were big—about the size of the plates on a baseball diamond—and every so often there was a glass mosaic inside one of them depicting a mythological creature: a hydra, a basilisk, a mermaid. Elizabeth was staring at a centaur when she heard Beverly’s voice again, so soft it was almost a whisper:
“You have to tell him.”
The hairs rose on the back of Elizabeth’s neck; the centaur took on a new association of horror she knew it would retain for the rest of her life. She looked up at Beverly Chambers. There was no way this harpy could know about that. What she meant, what she had to have meant, was that Elizabeth needed to tell Richard how she felt about him. She looked down again at the centaur, forcing herself to think about this other secret—the blameless one, the one of much more recent vintage.
It wasn’t love at first sight; Elizabeth didn’t believe such a thing existed. Love at first sight always sounded like revisionist history to her, more like love in hindsight, a good story at the expense of the truth. The problem was that love didn’t creep up on a person the way it did in so many books and movies. It didn’t advance in fixed increments; it wasn’t an accumulation of tiny affections and kindnesses; there was no internal scale to be tipped in the eleventh hour by some shared quirk, unlikely remembrance, or grandiose gesture. Like every other miracle, it came all at once, fully formed, and once seen, it was impossible to unsee. It was only natural, yet erroneous, to assume it had always been there, even in the very beginning.
She hadn’t loved Richard that first moment in the lawyer’s office—not even close. But she’d been attracted to him; she’d been intrigued by him; and from that first encounter she’d been launched down a path that led irrefutably to love. She supposed that for others the path was meandering, a maze with false turns and dead ends, any number of riddles and obstacles to be overcome before the end came suddenly into view. But for her it had been a straight path; it was so obvious, so inevitable, now that it was there, try as hard as she might to ignore it or look elsewhere. It was love from first sight and it couldn’t be denied, as much as she wished it could.
“My best friend and I used to play a game sometimes,” Bev said, after a long break in the conversation—occupied on her end by the arduous business of lighting another cigarette. “We’d divide everyone we knew into two categories based on the way they related to a single qualifying factor. It was a way to make sweeping generalizations that were wildly inaccurate, but invariably amusing to pronounce. For instance, people fall into two categories, those who listen to music to put them in a certain mood, and those who listen to music because they’re already in a certain mood. Do you see what I mean?”
Elizabeth nodded dumbly.
“And when I learned about you two—even though I won’t tell you why it was I sought you out—I thought of a new one, maybe the best one ever. Can you guess what it was?”
Make her stop, Elizabeth pleaded silently, even while shaking her head in the negative.
“People fall into two categories!” Bev trumpeted. “Those who need to be loved by someone, and those who need to love someone. Here, I said to myself, are two people who belong in opposite categories, what a perfect pair! And you see,” she stamped out her half-smoked cigarette with a flourish as the sound of footfalls returned to them, “I was right.”
Richard and Peaches were carrying two heavy, overburdened trays. Back in the kitchen, Peaches had insisted on displaying every variety of fruit, vegetable, cold cut, cheese, and condiment available and asking Richard which ones he liked, and he had been too polite to say he didn’t like any of them. It had helped that by this point he was truly ravenous; the last thing he’d eaten were a few hors d’oeuvres at the premiere after party the evening before. Apparently a well-behaved, handsome young man with a healthy appetite was on the extremely short list of things Peaches approved of, and she had been happy to transport nearly every foodstuff out of the kitchen. Bev was astonished to see what appeared to be the first smile on that sallow, sour face in ages:
“Well, well, Peaches is in love!” she cried. “Wonders never cease.”
Peaches shook her head, but for once there was no violence in the gesture, and when Richard leaned down to deposit his tray on the table she actually patted him on the head. Beverly laughed to see his cheeks burn, but the sound was nothing like the pretty jangle Mike had remarked on a week earlier. Her smoker’s cough had worsened, warping her girlish laughter into a throaty cackle.
“There’s no question which category she belongs to,” Bev said, winking at Elizabeth.
Elizabeth resented the wink. She felt no intimacy with this horrible crone, but did her best to keep up with the conversation while Peaches began serving them lunch.
“Have either of you been to Death Valley before?” Bev asked.
“No,” said Elizabeth, accepting a cup from Peaches and lifting it to her lips.
“But I’ve been meaning to go for a while,” added Richard.
“Oh, well then, you’ll have to look around! There’s so much to see here: Artist’s Palette, Badwater Basin, Devil’s Golf Course, the Red Cathedral, Scotty’s Castle—but then, you’ll hardly need to go there.”
Bev explained about the replica. “And of course there are the Mesquite Sand Dunes—”
“Sand dunes?” echoed Richard.
“Oh, yes. They were the ones used in the filming of Star Wars.”
Richard almost choked on his sandwich. He turned to Elizabeth.
“We have to go there,” he garbled through a mouth half full of ham-on-rye.
Elizabeth nodded at him vaguely.
Beverly beamed at them both. “Of course you do. I’ll give you directions.”
She made Peaches print out directions. The sand dunes were only an hour away.
“Pardon my rudeness,” said Bev as they were finishing their meal, “but I’m an old woman and I tire easily these days.” She wiped her shriveled mouth daintily with a napkin. “Take your time exploring the desert, but please know that your obligation to me is over. I’ll be resting for the rest of the day. You’re free to return to Los Angeles whenever you like.”
Her implication was clear enough: their time at the castle was up. We drove five hours for this? thought Richard. What the hell? He glanced at Elizabeth, who nodded at him ever so slightly, and somehow he understood her immediately: don’t say anything, let’s just go. Had Beverly Chambers already told her everything when they were alone? Did she know what it was that connected them?
“You won’t be disappointed!” were Bev’s final words as she waved them out the door. She was overcompensating. The problem wasn’t the boy; she had noticed immediately how he deferred to the girl; it was subtle (as most meaningful relations between two people were) but wonderfully clear that he’d already grown to depend on her. Even so, Bev worried that disappointment was exactly what lay in store for them both, if that unpleasant girl didn’t learn to speak up.
“WHAT DID SHE SAY to you when I was gone?” Richard asked the second they got back in the car.
Elizabeth paused to crank up the air conditioner. It was boiling inside the Honda—the kind of trapped, greenhouse heat that imperiled unattended pets and children.
“She told me she wasn’t going to say why she picked us,” said Elizabeth, passing through the gate and starting down Big Stan Way. “She said she just wanted to get a look at us. Together.” Her eyes flicked toward him before returning to the road. “I’m sorry. It was a total waste of time.”
“Unbelievable!” Richard threw his back against the seat in a tantrumlike gesture. “Well, we are absolutely seeing those dunes. Maybe we should see some of that other stuff she mentioned too. We’ve got to make this trip worth something, right?”
“Sure,” replied Elizabeth, turning from Big Stan Way onto Death Valley Road again, too preoccupied to take more than passing note of the silver Prius parked by the side of the road. “Might as well.”