The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(18)
“Please ignore the Budweiser chapel,” he said, practically frog-marching me through it.
The room beyond it said Ellery Finch all over. It was a high-ceilinged study with soft recessed lighting and a wide bank of windows on one side. A beautiful behemoth of a desk sat in the center, covered in books and a laptop and a green-shaded lamp that looked like it came from a pool hall. The room was almost empty otherwise, and it would’ve been monkish if the three windowless walls weren’t entirely given over to books.
“They’re not all mine,” he said. “This room used to be a creepy fake library, with all these random leather-bound reference books bought by the yard, but I’ve been swapping them out for the real stuff for years.”
I wanted to shove him out, lock the doors, and live in the room for a month. “Bought by the yard?” I managed to say. “That’s so weird.”
“I know. It’s a thing they do for rich people who want the effect but don’t actually want to read the things. God forbid my dad crack a fucking book.” He paused and touched his fingertips to his mouth. “Mostly it’s almanacs and old censuses and stuff, but occasionally there’s something good. That’s what I wanted to show you, actually.”
There was a door on the far side of the room that hung open a few inches. I bet it led to his bedroom, and I was almost let down I wasn’t going to see it. It’ll be a vintage My Bloody Valentine poster, an unmade bed, and an Underwood typewriter, I told myself. What’s there to see?
Finch gently tugged a book from its place on the wall. Its green cover made my heart jump. But it was bigger than Tales from the Hinterland, the leather pressed and attractively cracked. He laid it carefully on the desk.
The words My Hollywood Story swooned across the cover in loopy print. “Check out this cheeseball,” Finch said, turning to the title page. A black-and-white headshot of a Valentino type smoldered out at us from beneath a high double peak of glossy hair. He was wearing more eyeliner than Audrey after a cat-eye tutorial binge.
“Vincent Callais,” Finch said. “French actor, did some American movies in the forties. He played Myrna Loy’s bad boyfriend once, so that’s pretty cool. His writing is hilariously terrible, but I’m a sucker for film history so I flipped through it.” He opened the book to the photos at its center. “So here’s poor old Vincent standing kinda near Anita Ekberg at a party … Oh, here you can see the netting of his toupee … But look—check this one out.”
I leaned over the book. An elderly Vincent and his shit-eating grin sat at a restaurant table, looking greasy and overexposed. On one side of him, a blonde bunny smiled for the camera, all eyelashes and chest. On the other was a man with a perm and a boxer’s build, much younger than Vince. His eyes basically had comic-book arrows coming out of them, pointing toward the blonde’s chest. And next to him, looking like she was beamed in from another photo entirely, sat my grandmother.
My eyes flicked down to the caption. L to R: Unknown woman, Callais, Teddy Sharpe, Althea Proserpine. 1972.
My grandmother would’ve been twenty-eight then, her book a year old. I looked back at her face. Hers was the kind of liquid loveliness that held a secret: you look at it again and again, trying to catch it. That quirked brow, the lip with a nick in it, like maybe she’d fallen off her roller skates as a girl. She wore a sleeveless patterned top, and her hair was in a messy bob, dark bangs swept over her forehead. The fingers of her right hand touched her chin, absently. On her first finger, the same onyx ring she wore in her author photo. On her third, a coiled metal snake.
“She looks like you,” Finch said.
Not even close. If I was a house cat, she was a lynx. “My scar’s on my chin, not my lip,” I said, touching the white dent I’d gotten during a particularly ugly run-in with the bad luck.
“You know what I mean. It’s the eyes, I think. You look like you’ve got a million things going through your mind, but you’re not saying them.”
I hated unsolicited compliments, if that’s what that was, so I kept my eyes trained on Althea. “Is there anything about her in the book?”
“Nothing. This is how I discovered her, actually, this photo. I read the entire 1970s section hoping she’d show up.” He rubbed his chin with the flat of his palm, thoughtfully. “It was just … her face, you know? She looked like she was somebody I should know about. And that name. It’s a lot of name. Finally I Googled her, which I should have done first, and found out about the book. I couldn’t find it anywhere, not even reprints of the stories, just old articles and stuff. Not very long, except for the Vanity Fair piece. I became weirdly obsessed with reading the book, mostly because it’s impossible to find.”
“Is it good?”
“Good?” He thought for a moment. “Good isn’t the right word. It puts you in this weird headspace. I’d just gone through some family stuff when I read it. I was all messed up. Getting the book at that exact moment was just what I needed. It gave me a feeling like…” He stopped, narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t laugh. It made me feel the way love songs do when you’re falling in love. Except in a messed-up way, ’cause that’s where my head was at. There’s a lot of darkness in them. I can’t remember now how much of that was in the stories and how much of it was mine. I loved them either way. I’m really sorry I can’t read them again.”