L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories

THE GIRL Megan Abbott

The house was famous. A Mayan fortress made of ferroconcrete blocks stacked like teeth. A powerful man lived there. June had heard of it long before this, her first introduction.

The talent agent who brought June called it the Shark House.

It was in Los Feliz and you could drive by a hundred times and miss it. But once you saw it, you couldn’t turn it away. There were no windows. The tiny lawn sloped up, feathered with ivy that looked red in the strange light. It was a house that seemed to hold things inside. You felt you might be walking into a maw. You were.

“Huston will be here,” the agent said. “Key Largo. The part’s perfect for you.”

“Claire Trevor’s got it sewn up between her thighs,” June said softly, looking up at the house from the open door of the agent’s middling car. “Ten years, every bed I land in is still warm from her.”

“She’s not married to Guy,” the agent pointed out.

“You can see how far that’s got me,” June said.

The agent was very young, with a scruff of dandelion hair, a splashy tie, and shiny cheeks. She almost wanted to take a bite out of him. Then spit him out.

There were always young men like this and, for a decade or more, they’d look at the line of June’s bust and her slanting smile and figure maybe they could sell her. But she looked in the mirror and saw everything.

Two years ago, she’d married Guy, who ran sports book on the West Side for Mickey Cohen and liked to trot her up and down the Strip, his “actress wife.”

Now, the talent agents saw different kind of possibilities in June, different ways to lay odds. They knew producers cast actresses for all kinds of reasons, including big vigs they needed to pay off, big secrets they needed to hide. Sure, her carnival days might be over, but she may still have sheen left, they told her.

But June had long given up on sheen. She wanted a job.

“What does it matter?” her friend Gladys asked. “You married the honeypot. Just slip on your silver mink, prop your feet up, and listen to Dick Haymes all day.”

Sometimes she considered it.

But June held onto a few small things from when she first came to the City of Dreams. A button from her baby brother’s shoe, her first pair of silk stockings, and a deeply felt longing to show someone something sometime. Something inside her that no one else had ever seen. All these years of lifted skirts and pearl-mouthed hangovers hadn’t scrubbed that yearning away. It was her favorite part of herself and she would not let it go.

When June was young, before her father left the first time, before he became a forgotten man and ended up in Chicago and married a hotelier’s daughter, a bigamist in three states, by her mother’s count, he would pull her on his lap and read her stories from a big book with crumbling foiled edges she liked to touch while he read.

She would lie against his humming chest and watch the gold dust gather on her fingertips.

The story she always remembered, her favorite, was the one about the miller who had fallen on hard times. One day, the devil approached him in the woods and promised the miller all the riches in the world in return for what stood behind his mill. The miller, knowing all that lay behind the mill was a gnarled old apple tree, eagerly agreed. What he did not realize was that his beloved daughter, at that moment, was standing behind the mill, sweeping the yard. And now she was the devil’s own.

It was a long story, with many turns, and June couldn’t remember all of it, but she did remember this: the devil tries to take the daughter but is unable to because she is pure. He tells the miller that he must chop off her hands. The miller cries and cries and his daughter hears him. The daughter, who loved her father, held out her hands.

“Dear father,” she said, “do with me what you will.”

At this point, June’s father always lifted his hand and dropped it on June’s tiny wrists and laughed. They both laughed, maybe.

“That’s a terrible story,” her mother would say, from the laundry tub.

“It is,” her father would reply. “But she loves it.”

As they walked up the pathway to the house, the fleshy succulents tingling around them, the air itself changed, became wet and thick and scented. The leaves curled against June’s face, cradling her with long fingers.

Slipping her mink from her shoulders, she felt, for the first time in long while—years, maybe—nervous, though she couldn’t say why.

The agent was talking behind her.

“I know Georgie Tusk will be here. He’s running B unit over at Warner Bros. and he’s got big eyes right now.”

But June had met Tusk a dozen times at three different studios, and no soap. Women she knew, starlets, made jokes about him, how he was married to that beautiful actress who was big the decade before and all he cared about was poking his tusk in her and they couldn’t get any flash from him.

Suddenly, there were voices buzzing in front of them and another couple was suddenly there, suspended at the front of the house. A man in a pale seersucker suit and a big-eyed girl with tight curls and a coral gash for a mouth. Her face was the studio mask but behind it was something else, maybe something softer. You could never tell, though. And June had long ago stopped trying.

The stacked blocks of the house were white under the moon. Everything looked wet, gleaming, like teeth. Everything was like teeth.

“It’s a cave,” the girl whispered.

“A lair,” the seersucker man said.

“A tomb,” the agent joked, but his voice went high.

When June first hitched to Hollywood, age fifteen, a man picked her up outside of San Francisco. He drove her to a place called the Moaning Cavern, near Vallecito. He told her that, inside, all the mysteries of life would be revealed to her.

They walked a long way until they reached a space so narrow they called it Pancake Squeeze, and he did in fact show her what life was all about.

He also gave her bus fare for the remainder of her trip. On the way out, a stalactite pierced his hat, and June was glad.

Since then, and a thousand thens thereafter—“Let me show you my private office,” “Won’t you come to my wine cellar, baby girl?” and “I have a little house out in Malibu with a peach of a view”—June had stopped feeling scared of men taking her to dark places. In the end, the dark places were all the same, and you’d better get a mink coat out of it or you were a fool.

The coral-mouthed girl next to her did not have a mink, but she had a leopard swing coat, which she dragged along the ground.

“I heard about something that happened here,” she said. “I know a girl.”

June had heard things, too. About the house’s owner, everyone had. An elegant widow’s peak and a European way. A collector, an importer, a private dealer in things, objects. No one knew. She had seen him once at the Mermaid Room, where girls swam in tanks, their twitching smiles painted red, fingertips tapping on the glass. Eyes hidden behind a green-tinted pince-nez, he did not look up at the girls but seemed always to be whispering in the ear of his date, a tanned woman with a square face and large slanted eyes, a thicket of peacock feathers spiked through her brown hair.

June had heard he was a man acquainted with artists and occultists and intellectuals and all the other people who made June feel, despite her I. Magnin suits and cool voice, like a Woolworth’s counter girl who turned tricks every other Saturday night.

“What’s the big deal? Another rich stiff with a taste for Tinseltown trim,” the agent said.

The seersucker man, whose hair was white-blond, and his eyelashes, too, blinked three times but said nothing.

The entrance was hidden under the slab projecting from the center of the house, its heavy tongue. There, on the copper gate, the chevron pattern repeated itself, slashing wrought arrows pointing up, into the house’s dark interior.

The seersucker man pushed it open and they crept up a stone steps to a front door with a flickering glass lamp at the top, a Cyclops eye.

They turned, and turned again, and June felt something brushing her ankle, and it was the girl behind her, the feathers on her gown quivering.

Finally, they found the door, which opened with a shuuusshh.

The girl gasped.

“Oh,” the girl said, as they found themselves in an outdoor courtyard lined with canted columns, wall torches pluming flames, light blazing hysterically from the rooms that faced it.

Through half-open doors, June could see women with severe hair and pendulous earrings, their arms laced high with Mexican bracelets. Men with pencil mustaches and the slick look of morphine and Chinatown yen-shee, their cuff links dropping to the floor, their heads loose on their necks. Some were dancing, hips pressed close, and others were doing other things, straps slipping from shoulders, bracelets clacking to the tiled floor.

Everyone seemed to be having a marvelous time.

Then June saw, under a darkening banana tree in the center court, two women, ruby-haired both, their bodies lit, swarming each other, their silver-toned faces notched against each other. They were famous, both of them, famous like no one ever would be again, June thought, and to see their bodies swirling into each other, their mouths slipping open, wetly, was unbearably exciting, even to June.

“Let’s see the sights,” the seersucker man said, gesturing inside one of the rooms.

But suddenly the coral-mouthed girl didn’t want to and June’s agent had a darting look, and said he’d spotted George Tusk and had a sweet deal he wanted to seal over a pretty girl’s bare back.

The seersucker man drifted away and it was only June and the girl.

A dark-haired man in glasses came up to them. He had in his hand a tall green bottle and a pair of balloon goblets crooked in his finger.

“Please?” he said, lifting the bottle.

“Are you the owner?” June asked.

The man grinned wetly, his face a white streak under a torch flame.

Slowly, he set the glasses on a rosewood table and poured the green liquid from the bottle.

“Are you him?” June asked again, the alcohol—whatever it was—hitting her the second it hit her tongue, tingling through her mouth like cocaine.

“Oh,” the girl said, touching her greening lips. “It’s very fine.”

The man starting talking to them about the Mayans.

“They’d fasten a long cord around the body of each victim. After the smoke stopped rising from the altar, that meant it was time.”

June was not listening because he did not look important. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves and she saw a tattoo of a woman with a long webbed tail on his forearm.

“They’d throw them into the pit,” he was saying. “The tribe would watch from the brink and then pray without stopping for hours. After, they’d bring up the bodies and bury them in a grove.”

June couldn’t really hear, her head starting to feel echoey and strange.

The man was suddenly gone and June couldn’t remember him leaving.

What had they drunk? She felt her dress slipping from her shoulders, her own mouth seeming to go wider, spreading across her face.

She felt the girl’s hands on her, and they were walking on the faintest of feet, their tiny shoes tapping on the courtyard.

They stood under an arching tree hung thickly with long soft blooms like red bells. The bells tickled June’s hair and made her skin rise up.

“I’ve been here before,” the girl said, eyes saucering. “Have you?”

“No,” June said, brushing the blooms from her face, the musked scent from her nose. “I don’t think so. Do you know the owner?”

“I’ve been here before,” the girl whispered. “I know where that hallway goes. I was brought here. I had something done to me here.”

June didn’t say anything, but the way the girl was tingling her arms around her bare shoulders made her skin quill.

It was later, maybe much later, and June was shaking off the drink, which had fallen on her like silk, flooding her mouth and covering her eyes.

Things were starting to turn, and there seemed no life to anything suddenly, not even the bodies pressed close. The girls had hooded eyes, stone faces, lacquered bodies, hard and merciless. The men didn’t seem to have faces at all, only smears of antic pleasure, over as quickly as it began.

Maybe there was more, June thought.

But she and the girl were sunk deep into a low velvet couch and it was very hard for her to get up. Finally, she did, and the girl followed.

It had been years since she’d fallen for slugged booze. When a different man came, this time with a gold-flecked decanter, June refused and the girl did, too, her eyes already like Xs.

“In three weeks, it’ll be 1947,” the girl whispered, then turned and seemed to look at her, blankly. “Did you ever think you’d be so old?”

June, her head a greening fuzz, felt certain the girl meant you, you, you.

She felt something rancid rise up in her and that she might say something very cruel, but then she started to wonder if the girl had meant it that way, or had said anything at all. Had she?

There was music coming from the far end of the courtyard and it drew them, beguiled them.

Trawling, hypnotized, across the courtyard, through the low thicket of agaves, their crimson-tipped leaves a woman’s nails, razored to crimson points, they couldn’t stop.

There was a narrow hall that emptied down into some stone-stepped subterranean keep. From within, they heard laughter, keening.

“I wonder what’s down there?” June asked, the girl’s fingers prickling on her.

“Is that you, Junie?” a voice shouted from below, the talent agent. “Guess who’s down here.”

“Huston?” June whispered into to the black, the drink still telling on her, her fingers seeming to slide down the stone wall, which felt wet and private.

“Come down,” he said, his voice manic and unwholesome.

Before she could do anything, the girl grabbed onto June so fast and hard June felt herself nearly fall.

“I don’t think I can go down there,” the girl said. “I think I’ve been down there before.”

June looked at this frailing girl, a girl like so many she had known. A girl to whom things just happened. June was not that girl and hadn’t been for some time. It had cost her.

“Suit yourself,” June said, louder than she meant, trying to talk herself into something. “I need a job.”

She said it hard, but it was an act. The look on the girl, her mouth open and pink, scared her. It reminded her of girls she knew back in Missouri, that family down the street. The Huffs. The girls were never allowed outside. The father hung a razor strop in their bedroom window so boys would stay away. One day, Sally Huff came to school with a red line down her face. In calisthenics, June saw it, the way the red line went all the way down to the top of Sally’s bloomers, and below. At the time, June wondered if any man would ever care about her so much.

Leaving the girl, who kept calling after her (I don’t think you know, if only I could tell you), June weavingly made her way down the stairs.

Which only led her to another narrow hallway of curving stone, waxing candles strutted along the walls.

There were strange crooning chants coming from somewhere, a drumbeat like one of those jungle movies June always found herself in, except nothing like that.

Because there were smells she couldn’t name, sounds, the sense that the house changed as you moved through it, that you could keep walking and end up in places you never guessed, the house like one of those puzzle boxes, only you’re in it. And it’s in you.

Slowly, in the near-dark, she moved down the first long hallway.

It was a honeycomb, the wetness on everything seeming to cling to its cold walls like nectar.

Her arms quilling, she slid her mink back on, fingers clasped over the frog closure. It made her think of Guy and the things he was good for.

“June, is that you?” she heard the agent say, from somewhere, and soon enough he was at her side, his face a red flame under the torchères. “I’ve got to… I’ve got to…”

His lips were doing funny things and June couldn’t understand him.

“Is it John Huston? Can I talk to him about the part?”

“He ain’t here,” the agent said, shaking his head, his shirt open and wetly red. “I don’t know what kind of man the owner of this house is, but there’s things I don’t care to see. I have a sister. And a wife.”

“You also have a blonde stashed in a duplex on Sunset,” June said, telling herself he was just high, guilty. “How about George Tusk?”

“He ain’t for you,” the agent said, shaking his head harder, like an animal in a cartoon. “And you ain’t for him.”

“Some rainmaker, you,” June started, but the agent started leaning against her, rested his head in her hair and started whispering strange words, like a chant. She couldn’t understand them and she’d never seen him like this. She’d never seen one hair slip from its Vitalis pomp.

“I think we should go,” he said. “I think we should.”

But something made June pull from him.

“I don’t want to go yet,” June said. “I want to see what you’ve seen.”

When she had first landed in Hollywood, young June had twenty-seven dollars papering her powdered breasts under her swiss-dot blouse. She was an orphan, her mother lost five years before to spots on her lungs and her father knifed in the neck shooting dice behind the Southern Pacific roundhouse two months back. Three days after he died, she found he had left her a shoe tip full of small marked bills in her closet, in her white T-straps.

Written on one was a note to her: “Daddy loves you and your big gold dream.”

The first few years in Hollywood, times were hard and she shared apartments, rooms, even, with a hundred girls, their shared pillowcases flossy with their peroxided hair.

Working counter girl, working as an extra, working as a department-store model, a girl to look pretty at parties, she got by, barely. She even filled her teeth with white candle wax when they turned brown and died.

She said she would do things, and she wouldn’t suffer for them. She’d seen where suffering could get you, and it wasn’t her bag.

So she hustled and hustled and finally found the ways to get all those small roles at Republic, B-unit jobs at Fox. She never could be sure, though, if she was making headway or running on her last bit of garter-flashing luck.

Until she met Guy. He wasn’t very smart, or very nice, but he was crazy about her in the way men could be. The hard way she fronted her shoulders, her stupendous breasts, the way she could make him milk pudding and then tug down his pinstripes and show him what her mouth was for. It was all he needed to want to marry her. She was sad to learn what a relief it was. To find a man like this, who, before her, had lived with his mother his whole life, God rest her soul.

And, for the first year or so, she’d stopped the auditions, standing or lying down, kneeling. She didn’t even go to pictures anymore. She was content.

But that feeling had gone away, too, like everything did, always.

It felt like the basement was larger than the house, deeper than a tomb. She walked endlessly, until she seemed to wind up where she started again.

Finally, she saw two producers she’d auditioned for many times. They each had one leg of a limp girl, carrying her, her claw-tooth anklet clattering against the stone wall. They were laughing and the girl was, too, but her body was so limp and her dress had fallen open, her breasts skittering with each swinging move they made. Her laughter reminded June of her mother’s when her mother would go for days not eating, dancing around the living room, raving about her dead babies lost to pennyroyal tea and curling irons.

And that drink would still not go away. Her face felt hot and fluid, like if she touched it it would scald her.

Resting her hand against the wall, June felt it slide and there was a whole new passageway that, she realized, must be underneath the courtyard, because it had the same arcade of rooms, but different things happening in them. Or the same things, only very different.

June felt suddenly like a hard-rock miner who had at last struck gold.

These rooms had no doors, only beaded curtains, and June had to look in all of them.

White arms like spokes from under tangles of green satin—these were things June had seen many times, except it all felt different. Maybe it was the blank faces of the strange stone statues, the lacquered masks cusping from the walls, eyes of blue jade. Everything gleaming and lifeless.

The aura of lush jungle ruins, sweet and rotten.

There were strong smells and noises that started as pitchy squeals and thuds, but when you listened longer turned into odd scrapings and the keening of a sad cat.

She had been to many Hollywood parties since she first stepped off that Greyhound in downtown Los Angeles with those twenty-seven dollars. She had seen many things, sometimes across a party, sometimes across a room, a bathroom stall, sometimes right in her own hands, once shaking, now still, cold, professional.

But she had not seen this, not like this, not here.

There was something in these rooms June knew and was sorry she knew. She had not been in rooms like these but she felt she had. She felt suddenly like the rooms were inside of her.

And in the last room on the left she saw Georgie Tusk, naked, stomach billowing as he rested on a lacquered chaise. Eyes fogged, lashes wet, he was touching himself and some other body on the bed, some long limb—all while watching something happening at the foot of the chaise.

There, against a wide settee of spiky banana bark, kneeled a beautiful woman. Georgie Tusk’s wife.

June recognized her from when she was a girl, this shivery platinum star who tinkled through a series of Paramount society pictures, her skin ice-white, satin creaming across her hips, jewels dripping stalactites from her ear lobes, her neck. She was always the Wealthy Wife, the Long-Throated Mistress, the Rich Divorcée on a tear, her voice warbling like a mouth full of cold marbles but her face, glorious.

June always remembered her famous close-up in Our Stolen Hours.

Robert Taylor leaning over her, eyes lit with passion, mouth craning to reach her stemlike neck.

And her face, the eternal Ice Bitch’s face, finally releases itself. Her eyes blurring, expression going soft with desire. The most beautiful woman the world had ever seen.

Until you spot the mirror glinting behind Taylor. Until you see she is gazing at her reflection. The deepest longing ever, for one’s own miraculous visage.

Watching through the beads now, June could not see the actress’s face clearly because it had been buried under the stiff gingham skirt of a very young girl folded in that banana-bark settee.

A girl in a jumper, her face stitched with terror and elation. And the movie actress doing things, her hands hard on her, and everyone watching. And June felt herself tilt, reaching for the shuddering bead curtains, but they were too far, everything was.

The sound of the shimmying curtains drawing everyone’s eyes, the actress’s face untufting from the girl’s skirt and turning to face June.

That face, marble, calcite, ivory tusk.

And the actress smiled, cooingly.

And June knew the night had only begun for them.

Join us, Mr. Tusk was shouting, his face frenzied, his hand tugging on the bare leg beside him. A leg June now saw belonged to a young boy, a stripling with a chipped tooth and a face flush with opioids. He was not moving but was sleeping deeply, like the schoolboy he was.

June stumbled backward.

Join us, lulled the movie actress, mouth gleaming, wet.

Weaving down another long hall, breathless and eyes stinging, June could still hear them calling.

After a long time of walking in circles that seemed to knot tighter and tighter, she stopped and leaned against a wall.

Listening to her stertorous breaths, she knew that she had reached some kind of dropping-off point. That she had entered the maw of this great terrible house and now had sunk down its tawny gullet into something she could not name.

She had—one foot still hitched on the steps of that Greyhound—thought she wanted something, thought she’d do anything for that thing. Until now that the thing was here. And it surrounded her. Maybe it was her, had become her.

At that moment came the milky whisper on her shuddering neck.

Her heart clutching, June turned and saw nothing but the dark wall, its surface thick and shiny, like the shell of a beetle.

But then she realized something was hiding behind the wall. Like a scurrying rat.

The wall itself then moved, like a carapace clicking loose, and out came a young girl, long-limbed and sylphlike. A slipper of a girl in a pale-blue nightgown threaded with ribbon. With furring braids and eyes winsome as Margaret O’Brien’s.

“I’m Tinka,” she whispered, smiling. She had tiny front teeth, like a baby’s. “Who are you?”

“What are you doing here?” June said, surprised at the raggedness in her voice. “Honey, can you tell me what you’re doing here?”

“Where else would I be?” The girl grinned, twirling the string on her nightgown. “I live here.”

“You live here?” June said, not quite believing it. “How?”

“With my uncle,” she chirped. “He’s practically like a father.”

“I’ll bet he is,” June said.

Tinka nodded and smiled and some of the spritely glint dimmed. Just the faintest bit. Like she was touching some awareness she couldn’t quite reckon with yet.

“I guess everyone has an uncle,” the girl said, softly.

“Yeah,” said June. “Sometimes more than one.”

“Were you in one of the rooms?” Tinka asked, and June felt she could still hear the beaded curtains hissing, feel them pressed against her.

“No,” June said. “Not yet.”

She wanted to leave, but the girl reached out and curled her baby fingers around her wrist.

“Would you like to meet my friend?” she asked.

Tucking her tiny arms behind her, Tinka seemed to, as if by magic spell, pull another girl from a niche in the beetle-curled panel behind her. It was like a story, one in a dark house with secret chambers and bodies buried behind catacomb walls.

The girl was very pretty and had a red rash flushing up her face.

“I’m Edna,” the girl said, “but I’m changing my name.”

She had the clear blue eyes of a church girl and a spray of rosy pox scars by her braid-tight temple.

“What do you think of Rebecca?” she asked, her tongue lisping. “Or Jessica? I think I could be Jessica.”

June was sure the girl was not yet fourteen.

The three of them sat on a stone bench, Edna with one leg propped up, plucking her toes. Tinka got up and starting spinning.

“I’m just like Sonja Henie,” she said. “Aren’t I?”

June wondered what she was doing here, but she could not leave.

“You’re so pretty,” Edna said to June, her fingers reaching out and touching the silver pelts on June’s coat. “Are you in the pictures?”

“No,” June said. “Yes.” Both answers seemed true.

“My mother was a famous model,” Tinka said. “Before she got the Bright’s, she had jet-black hair and alabaster skin.”

“Now Tinka lives with her uncle.” Edna smiled, those jaws churning over her gum.

“He’s is very handsome,” Tinka said. “You should really meet him. When he picked me up this afternoon at the Chili Bowl, all the girls said he looked like Cornel Wilde. He always says I should invite my friends over whenever I like.”

Tinka reached out and touched Edna’s downy cheek. “But I could tell he liked her best.”

Watching her, June knew suddenly that Tinka, in her smocked nightgown and with ribbons in her hair, wasn’t a girl at all anymore but something else. She felt she could see sharp teeth poking from the corners of her mouth.

“There’s a man here,” Tinka said. “With white hair and spectacles.”

“He makes jungle pictures,” Edna chirped, lifting herself up, her palm pressing down on Tinka’s shoulder. “He saw us by the pool in our suits.”

“He said she had ants in her pants,” Tinka said, her eyes glittering as she surveyed the girl, the girl’s feather-softness. “He said he could tell by looking at her.”

Watching Tinka, June remembered a hundred introductions she herself had made, more and more of them as she was no longer the one being introduced. Everyone already knew her, the softest pair of very fine shoes. Now, at nightclubs, at parties, coming out of powder rooms at private homes, June was the one who made the introductions, facilitated the transaction, occasionally procured the goods. The girls.

These girls, all of them, always looked just like Edna might in five years.

At Edna’s age, these girls were still back in Omaha, Cleveland, Poughkeepsie. Were still yawning through algebra class at PS 12, sitting on midwestern front porches with firmly belted suitors. In church with their fathers.

Edna smiled at June, her face flushing, her body shifting, like it itched. Like she had ants in her pants.

“Do you think I could try your coat on sometime?” the girl asked her.

They both looked down at June’s smoky gray pelts.

Before June could answer, Tinka leaped to her feet.

“It’s time,” she said. “I’m going to check on the pink room.”

They watched as Tinka prowled down the hallway, her nightgown billowing like a polluted angel.

“Just you wait,” Tinka was saying as she skittered away.

Edna kept talking, but June was remembering something. The girl in the story her father used to tell, the girl with no hands. And how a king heard what had happened to her and because she was so beautiful and pure, he fell in love and had silver hands made for her, and took her as his wife.

“Do you think he’ll put me in a picture?” Edna was saying. “Like Dorothy Lamour?”

June looked at the girl, gum slipping in and out of her unkissed lips, but said nothing. She was working something out. About these girls and what was happening.

“All the important movie people all come here,” Edna said, flipping her braids with her fingers. “They put you in a big pink room with a big pink bed. Like Lana Turner might have. There’s even a lamp with a pink bulb in it.”

June knew all about pink rooms. For ten years her whole life had been pink rooms. But she knew pink rooms here might be even worse than the beaded-curtain ones.

“And they ask you to perform scenes,” Edna said. “I think I will do Jennifer Jones from Song of Bernadette. Tinka says it’s a magical room and I will never forget it.”

“Take your gum out first,” June said, hard as she could. Hard so her voice would not shake.

But Edna just giggled.

As June watched her, something was happening inside.

She was seeing a girl age seventeen, plaited hair and middy blouse, slipping off a bus at Sixth and Los Angeles Street a dozen years ago.

The whole ride down, nearly two days, this girl could think of nothing but what she had done with the man in the cave. But that it was okay because the man smelled of Pinaud’s Lilac and was a talent agent and had an office on Hollywood Boulevard, or so his creasy card said. The girl was sure there would be many more cards.

The girl—all those years still ahead of her, her teeth turning soft and the rest of her hard—who believed in everything with a pure, pure heart.

The girl who just knew that the world would give her things because life had been hard already and she was very pretty and was made to be a star.

The girl who had written, in grease pencil, on the inside of her cardboard suitcase, “Daddy loves you and your big gold dream.”

The girl who held her hands out, wrists up, for every man with a casting sheet and a promise.

June slipped the pearl-gray pelts around the young girl’s shoulders.

“I didn’t think you’d really let me,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t sure,” June said.

“Are you taking me to the pink room?” the girl asked as they rose.

“Yes,” June said. “That’s where I’m taking you.”

The walls were cold and even wetter and June held the girl’s hand behind her the whole way up.

The girl tried to stop under the heavy hanging red bell tree. The coat tangling beneath her, she tried to fix her shoe.

“You can’t stop here,” June said. “You can’t stop.” And she grabbed the girl’s hand tighter, which was cold as silver.

“Don’t stop,” June said. “And never let go of my hand.”

In the courtyard, with all the stone faces turning, all the ivory heads lifted, tusks raised, June pulled the mink over the girl’s head.

No longer lost, June guided the girl through the flaming center of the house, which she knew better than her own. Better than anyone.

She didn’t let anyone see the girl.