“Would you sing me a song?”
“Of course. Any requests?”
“‘Deep Dark Woods.’”
The opening refrain of the classic rock anthem, her generation’s “Stairway to Heaven,” prompted a divine series of chills, a rush of stirrings in her soul. Her eyelids fell as he treated her to the private serenade in his distinctive, tenor-baritone croon, a voice made to crush it in arena rock while remaining true to English blues-rock roots. Stuff of beauty, legends. Music touched sacred emotional places.
Brian sang, melodies rising and falling in weightless crests.
Scar tissue healed. Time dissolved. There was only his magical voice, the medicine of his song.
When she returned to consciousness, the car crawled up an incline. They twisted through narrow roads, past an assortment of Georgian mansions, futurist experimental structures, and ranch homes with orange trees out front.
“Welcome to the Hollywood Hills. You’re beautiful when you sleep. Want to visit the sign?” Brian pointed out the window. Past his vector, legendary white letters in an uneven alphabet soup welcomed visitors to LaLa Land.
“Nah, I’m good. I just want to get home. To your home, I mean.” Home. After all of these years, the word was tough to think, let alone say. She shook her head, the pinball re-activating in another round of frenzied banging. Stupid anxiety.
The mishmash variety of houses gave way to pervasive opulence, sprawling mansions and golden gates emblazoned with cursive initials. Bereft in the face of wealth on display, she gaped like a goldfish who’d leapt from its bowl and landed on the floor.
“Me, too.” He hummed, steering the car into a driveway barricaded by a fortress of an iron gate fit to protect a medieval castle. Brian leaned out of his driver’s side and punched a code into a box.
Double doors parted with an electronic groan, and he resumed the drive. A black ribbon of private road unspooled beyond the windshield.
Their path ended at a roundabout with a glittering fountain in the center. Cobblestones abutted the most elegant home Helen had ever seen in person. Three stories of blocky, geometric architecture, lots of glass and metal, piled upon each other in a haphazardly artsy arrangement.
A smattering of interior lights made the palace gleam like an alien king’s castle. Mahogany double doors complete with gargoyle knockers offset the modernist design with a funky, vintage-goth feel.
A car was parked out front. A guard dog of a massive SUV sat in Brian’s roundabout, golden hubcap rims shouting “behold my bling.”
Brian mumbled a string of British curses, his hands tightening on the wheel like he wanted to strangle it.
Sixteen
“Not expecting company?” Helen had zero idea how the rich operated, if Brian could anticipate members of an entourage hanging around his property whenever.
“It appears my daughter has manipulated her bodyguard into ringing her stepmother. Looks like you’ll be meeting the ex-wife this evening.”
“Ah.” With any luck, the encounter would end quickly, and former supermodel Kris King would be on her way.
The forty-five-year-old stunner had traded appearances in top fashion magazines and sashaying down Paris runways for managing acts and making guest appearances on talent audition shows and other reality TV fare.
Yes, Helen had Google-stalked the woman to whom Brian had been married for two years. And she didn’t measure up to Kris in looks, status, wealth, or anything else. Not a huge source of distress, given the magnitude of all of the other shit she had to deal with, but not pleasant, either.
Brian parked his car in front of Kris’s. He looked over at Helen, features drawn in a blotto sort of resolution.
She got it. He didn’t want to leave the cocoon they’d created in his car during their slow roll through Los Angeles. She didn’t want to pop the bubble either.
“Sorry in advance,” he said.
“She’s that bad?”
“No, she knows how to act and be polite, but if I had my druthers she’d bugger off and I’d never see or speak to her again.” The iciness with which Brian spoke, combined with the absolute, unwavering certainty undergirding the words, exposed a hidden side of his personality.
When he cut people off, she bet goodbye was forever. Respectable and intimidating.
“What did she do?”
Brian broke eye contact. A subtle bow of his spine and caving of his chest, like he wanted to protect his underbelly from attack, pinged her radar. “I caught her shagging someone else, walked right in on it. The worst part was her cynical justification, this line about how it meant nothing and she was only doing it to advance her career. To her credit, she was right. I served her the divorce papers the morning after I found her and the other man in our bed, but the following week, she’s on the cover of the Vogue collector’s edition. So she got what she wanted.”
Twinned tendrils of embarrassment and petty vindication curled through Helen. On a lark, she’d purchased the fat anniversary commemorative, a glossy doorstop paying homage to one of her mythical namesakes.
The cover featured Kris, decked out in gossamer robes of virginal white silk and a golden tiara emphasizing rivulets of hay-colored curls, standing on a beach flanked by azure ocean.
The retreating ships were shown only by shadows, for even the thousand-vessel fleet launched on behalf of the planet’s greatest beauty mustn’t compete with the camera’s close-up on her perfect face. Inside the pages, while the battle of the Iliad raged in a background diorama of toy soldiers, the camera made love to Kris’s classic Scandinavian elegance, looks exceptional even by elite modeling standards.
The inwardly directed joke had been self-deprecating, yet another tired instance of trite and pathetic witnessing to Helen’s low self-esteem. Helen of Troy, ha ha ha. Obvious who really deserved such a lofty comparison.
But now, it wasn’t so obvious. Human ugliness skulked behind every unobtainable façade.
“I’m sorry, Brian. I’ve been cheated on, too. It sucks.”
“Royally.”
“Did you love her?”
He moved his head side-to-side.
