“You mean have I changed my mind since I asked you again this morning?” Jimmy said. “No. I know I have a reputation for being easily distractable, but I usually am much better than that. Even about breakfast food. Never mind getting married.”
“Fine,” Liz said, ignoring all the rest of it. She ignored Mark and Geoff, too, who looked like they’d frozen in place. “Do me a favor. I want to get married three weeks from Sunday, in Paris. I want a suite for the four of us at the Georges V. It’s the start of the high season. Is that possible?”
“It is if I spend enough money.”
“Do you mind spending a lot of money?”
“Hell, Liz. I’d take grocery bags full of cash and throw the contents on the street if that’s what it took. Are you serious?”
“I’m very serious. I want to have the reception at that place you took me to last year, the one with the mirrors—”
“Voltaire’s.”
“That’s the one. Make your side of the guest list good. Make it very good. Do you think you could get Paul McCartney to come?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. I always wanted to meet a Beatle. And yes, I know I shouldn’t say that to his face. I want that wedding on the cover of every tabloid from New York to Hong Kong and back around again. Can we manage that?”
“We can try,” Jimmy said. “Liz, for God’s sake, I’m delighted, but what’s gotten into you? Are you all right?”
“Shut up,” Mark said. “You go make reservations. I’ll pack.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up,” Jimmy said.
“You know what she’s like,” Mark said. “She’ll change her mind. Make reservations. Go now.”
“Does this mean Jimmy’s going to be our stepdad for real now instead of for pretend?” Geoff said.
Liz thought she ought to pursue that one—how long had they been playing that Jimmy was their stepdad for pretend? —but she didn’t have the heart, and she didn’t mind anyway. She ran her hands through her hair. It was wet.
“I’ve got to call Debra,” she said. “I just fired Maris in rather dramatic terms and she needs to know about it as soon as possible. Can we leave here now? If an arrest has been made, that means we’re not under suspicion anymore, right? I want to pack up and get out as soon as possible. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night. Can we do that, too?”
“Sure. We’ll send one of the drivers to pack up at your mother’s house,” Jimmy said.
“You fired the ultimate bitch goddess?” Mark said.
Liz ignored him and started to hike down the hallway to her room, or the room with her suitcase in it, anyway. None of the rooms here had ever really been her room, any more than the bedroom at her mother’s house had ever been her room. Brian Wilson sang about the joys of being in the safe haven of his room, but Liz’s room at home had not been a safe haven. It had been a place where her mother could get to her, just as school had been a place where the girls could get to her, so that her entire childhood and adolescence had been one long resistance to a siege. Now she felt as if it had never happened—no, that wasn’t right. It had happened, but it hadn’t meant what she’d thought it meant at the time. It had never been of any importance, even while it was going on. If she had been able to understand that, it would not have been so terrible. Most of it might never have happened. It was one thing to live your life to somebody else’s music. It was something else to live it by somebody else’s screenplay, especially when it was such a terrible screenplay, so badly written, and so trite.
She sat down on the bed, picked up the phone, and dialed the number of the office in New York. It wasn’t quite five. Debra would still be in. The phone rang and rang, and on impulse Liz got up and went over to her suitcase to rummage around in the bottom of it. There was one thing she always had with her. Even in the wake of Jay’s dying, when there had been no money, when she had had no career, when they had had nothing at all, she had this, the way somebody else might have had a talisman. That was her problem in a nutshell. Other people carried lucky charms. She carried the evil totem for a voodoo curse.
She found it just as the receptionist picked up in New York, the Hollman High School Wildcat for 1969. She flipped open to the first page with its picture of the yearbook staff under the outsized numbers for 1969: Nancy Quayde, Chris Inglerod, Emma Kenyon, Maris Coleman, some boys she didn’t recognize. She tore out the page and then tore the page itself into quarters. She flipped to the next page and the page after that and did the same thing, methodically, page after page.