Owned: A Mafia Menage Romance(97)
“It’s one of the luxuries of Los Angeles, don’t you think? You can eat every meal outside. No mosquitoes, perfect weather… I’ll bet every other house on the hill is dining al fresco even as we speak.”
I chuckled. “That could very well be,” I sighed, biting into a crimson strawberry and relishing the sweet burst as it slid across my tongue. “This is a lovely garden. The orange blossoms smell so sweet.”
“It’s small, just enough,” she replied modestly. “Raul and I can’t keep up with much more than this anymore. Oh, try the quince jam… Yes there you go. Raul makes it from our own tree, just over there.”
She ladled a lump of jam onto a round of cheese and popped it into her mouth with a happy, satisfied sound. Her eyes took in the garden and the view of downtown LA in the valley below, always moving, always squinting at everything as though assessing it. I suspected she didn’t miss much.
“You’re Winnie’s girl, aren’t you?” she said suddenly, spearing a stack of pear slices onto her plate.
I nodded. “She was my aunt. You knew her?”
“Yes, we went way back. We dated co-stars from the same movie in the seventies, and practically had to be on a perpetual double date for the whole six months the film was shooting. I was bored in three. I think Winnie was bored the whole damn time. But you know: PR. That was the way of it.”
I bobbed my head sagely. Oh yes, PR, I repeated to myself, wondering if dating a movie star involved contracts or what.
“So then you still live just down the hill?”
“Yes,” I replied. Then it occurred to me I could probably see my house from where we were, and I scanned the hillside until I spotted the bright blue water of my swimming pool and pointed to it. “Oh, I’m just there… I’ll try to wave to you next time I’m swimming, haha.”
“That’s a beautiful house,” she mused. “We had such a time there.... such parties! So many memories! Brando cooked dinner in your kitchen, you know.”
My eyes widened. “What? Marlon Brando cooked dinner in… my kitchen?”
She waved her hand in the air. “Oh he was a great cook. I love a man who can cook, don’t you? It’s so delightful to be waited on once in a while. Really treated. And Marlon really knew how to treat a lady. But what a temper! He could be so moody.”
I found myself nodding like a complete dope. This was a woman who had been “treated like a lady” by Marlon Brando. Who knew what other kinds of saucy information lived in her brain? You really should have Googled her before you came over, I scolded myself.
“So you kept the house?” she continued as she sipped at her coffee cup, her small plate empty in front of her.
“Oh I’ve kept it almost the same as she left it to me,” I replied. “Even some of the furniture… it just seemed to go with the decor too much to replace.”
Oh my god did Marlon Brando sit on my couch? I wondered breathlessly, then tried to push the thought aside for later.
“That’s been, what… eight years now?”
“Yes, I was seventeen when she passed.”
“And you’ve been living all alone in that house since then?”
“Well… Yes, I guess so, now that you mention it. I had a boyfriend… fiance really… But that didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, cocking her head sympathetically. She really did look like she cared too.
“Oh, no, that’s all right,” I said breezily. “Being an artist, you spend so much time alone anyway, just wrapped up in your work. It’s just the way of things. I guess I never really thought about it before.”
“You like it that way then? Being alone?”
Her bright green eyes settled on me and I got the impression I was really expected to come up with a good answer. Did I like being alone? I didn’t know, but I ended up that way whether I liked it or not. I painted alone, naturally. And when I was in the intellectual working-out stages of a painting I couldn’t really stand too much human interaction or the whole project got off track, so I did that alone. And now that Kevin was in San Francisco, I was alone even during the times when I might prefer to be otherwise.
But did I actually like it? At that moment, I couldn’t be sure.
“It seems to be the most productive choice for me,” I admitted finally, watching her closely to see if my answer was satisfactory.
“Productive,” she echoed. “I have to admit, I admire your discipline. When I was twenty-five, well… I was anything but productive. There was a lot of Marlon Brando around, if you know what I mean.”