Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (27 page)

     "Philippa? Miss Roberts!"

     She spun around. "Yes, Mr. Reed?" Reed, the manager of the drugstore, the man who had hired Philippa four years ago, thought she was a good worker, dependable, cheerful, never called in sick. But she tended to be a bit of a daydreamer; he sometimes had to repeat her name before he got her attention.

     Philippa was trying to break herself of that habit; she knew Mr. Reed and others thought she was either deaf or that her mind wandered. They didn't know that Philippa wasn't her real name. Once, when a woman had come into the store with a little girl, saying, "Now behave, Christine," Philippa had turned around, thinking the woman was talking to her.

     "I need you to work the ice cream counter, Philippa," Mr. Reed said. "Dora had to go home, she said she wasn't feeling well."

     Before leaving the cosmetics department, Philippa paused at the Revlon display and checked herself in the mirror. It hadn't bothered her before, but now she suddenly wished her face weren't so pudgy. But at least her hair was nice; thick and auburn, and drawn up into a ponytail that fell past her shoulders. And she wore a little lipstick, and sometimes nail polish, but she didn't allow herself anything extravagant beyond that. She was saving her money.

     On the day she tore up her parents' photographs and tossed them into the bay, Philippa had left San Francisco. She had gone straight from Fisherman's Wharf to the Greyhound bus station, where she had purchased a oneway ticket to Hollywood. Her hopes and dreams had made the long journey
with her, tucked safely away in an invisible trunk. Compartments of that unseen trunk had also transported her determination to make something of herself. "You are never going to amount to anything," Mother Superior had said. But Philippa was going to prove her, and everyone else, wrong.

     When she arrived in Hollywood, she had walked up and down the streets looking for the glamor she had expected to find, the movie stars, the settings of her favorite films. Instead, she found tidy little motor courts and modest storefronts and palm trees—an endless march of palm trees. She came upon a quiet street behind Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where houses were set far back, with big lawns that sloped to the sidewalk. The houses all had deep verandas and steep roofs— Philippa learned later that these were called California bungalows and that they had been built just after the turn of the century. One of them had a Room for Rent sign in the front window.

     The landlady's name was Mrs. Chadwick.

     "There's four other boarders," she had explained as she puffed up the stairs, "two schoolteachers who work over to Hollywood High, a gal who works at a travel agency, and Mr. Romero, who says he's a scriptwriter for the studios, but I ain't never heard his typewriter going. Mr. Romero'll invite you into his room for a drink, but his feelings won't be hurt if you turn him down. He's harmless. You seventeen, you say?"

     "Yes," sixteen-year-old Philippa said. "I have my birth certificate if—"

     "Ain't necessary." At the top of the stairs Mrs. Chadwick looked the girl up and down. "You look like a big eater," she said. "Oh, don't worry; I don't mean it critical. I have an appetite myself, and I must say, I put out a good table. My boarders don't starve, I can tell you that. Well, here's the room. Five dollars a week, a month in advance. Bathroom's down the hall."

     The room was small, but it was sunny and airy, with palm trees right outside the window. Philippa could see the big H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D sign on the distant hills.

     That same afternoon she had gone job hunting. The few restaurants she applied at turned her down flat. "The uniform won't fit," they said. But she was lucky at the Cut-Cost Drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard, because the employees wore large smocks so it didn't matter that she was overweight. Cut-Cost was one of those new modern drugstores that sold other things
besides drugs, like underwear and percolators, and had lunch and ice cream counters. She was hired that day at seventy-five cents an hour to do everything from sweeping up to running the checkout. Or selling ice cream cones, which was where she went to work now while she kept an eye on the tormented man who was chain-smoking at the lunch counter.

     The day she got the job at Cut-Cost, Philippa had gone down the street to Hollywood High School and registered for evening adult classes. Within a year she received the high school diploma she should have received from St. Bridget's. Now she was attending evening classes at a local junior college, with the hopes of eventually obtaining a bachelor's degree. When the other employees at Cut-Cost looked at Philippa, or when Mrs. Chadwick's boarders engaged her in conversation, they saw a determined young woman who was quiet, kept to herself, and worked hard. Sometimes Mrs. Chadwick would sit on the front porch of her California bungalow and hear the girl's typewriter clacking away upstairs as Philippa did homework assignments, and she would wonder what drove the child so.

     A woman came up to the ice cream counter then and ordered a double scoop of vanilla, and when Philippa saw her wine red hair, she thought of Frizz and wondered if her old friend was still getting along in New York City. The two had exchanged letters frequently at first, and it had been strange to address an envelope to Christine Singleton and to open mail addressed to Philippa Roberts. Frizz had told her all about her life in Manhattan, how she shared an apartment with three other aspiring actresses while working at a deli to support herself, closing her letters with "I miss you more than I can say, Choppie. I hope we can be together again someday." But after a while the letters had started to get shorter and further apart until, to Philippa's dismay, Frizz stopped writing altogether. Her last letter, which came a year ago, had been little more than a brief note saying, "Don't know if I can make a go of it here. Maybe Mother was right." Philippa had written back, asking Frizz to come to Hollywood, but she had received no answer.

     Rinsing off the ice cream scoop, she turned around and was startled to see him standing there, the stranger with the haunted face, reading the list of flavors behind her. He carried a spiral notebook, and a cigarette dangled from his lips. Philippa's heart jumped; she had never been this close to him
before. He was so very handsome, in the dark, square-jawed way she liked.

     She was just about to say, "May I help you?" when two teenage boys who were loitering at the magazine rack looked at Philippa. One of them said, "Look at the porker they've got serving the ice cream," and his friend said, "That's like having the mouse watch the cheese!"

     Their laughter was cut off by a sudden word from the man, who turned to them and snapped, "That's bloody rude of you, don't you think?"

     The boys gave him a startled look and began to say something when he cut them off with, "Why don't you go somewhere and immolate yourselves?"

     They went away, saying "fuck you" over their shoulders. He turned back to Philippa and said, "Stupid kids." When he gazed at her she saw very dark eyes that looked right at her and, she felt, straight down into her soul.

     She tried to think of something to say, a way to thank him, when he said with a half smile, "What the hell, one scoop of vanilla."

     Philippa served it up neatly, giving him an extra-large scoop, and he took the cone and slapped a nickel on the glass counter. She thought she saw sparkles in the black eyes when he said, "Keep this up and you'll bankrupt the company."

     She watched him go, confused by her sudden feelings. It was some minutes before she realized he had left his spiral notebook on the counter. She hurried outside, but when she looked up and down Hollywood Boulevard, he was nowhere in sight. She decided to keep it and return it to him the next time he came in. A name was written on the cover: Rhys.

     Philippa stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. "That's bloody rude," he had said. He had defended her. When the boys had insulted her, he had defended her. But there was more to it than that. It was the way his eyes had not only looked
at
her, but
into
her.

     He was so tall, so good looking, so self-assured, it seemed. And yet. And yet...

     
Something is troubling him.

     As Philippa went back into her room and tried to settle down to her studies—tonight, Psych 101—she had a hard time concentrating. She couldn't get him out of her mind. She looked at the spiral notebook he had
left on the ice cream counter. She hadn't opened it, but now, overcome with curiosity, she finally did and read the first page. It appeared to be a poem of some sort:

     
Lavender shoe polish.

     
Midgets on the moon.

     
Singing peas.

     
End the Resurrection just when you need it...

     She turned the pages. "Existence comes before essence," he had written. "We create ourselves after we are born. God was invented as an excuse, as a place to lay blame. Without God,
we
are responsible. And
we
have the Bomb."

     Philippa suddenly felt sad. She pictured his handsome face, with its melancholy shadows, the neglected clothes, the black tousled hair and soulful black eyes. What pain did he carry inside? When had he lost hope?

     She went to the window and looked out at the lights of Hollywood twinkling through the evening smog. She could hear the constant traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, where the sleepless, the cruisers, the sightseers thronged steadily up and down the street.

     Philippa had not allowed herself to think of boys in the past four years—or men, now that she had turned twenty. From the minute she had run away from St. Bridget's, her path had been set, her goal clear and beckoning. To make something,
somebody
, of herself. She wasn't sure yet just who she was going to be, or what her exact purpose was, but she knew it would come to her and she would recognize it when it was there. And along the way, she was going to prepare herself. She had made the commitment to work hard and sacrifice; she filled her time with her job and school, leaving few idle hours. When she did have a free moment and her mind wandered into daydreams, she disciplined herself back to reality. There were to be no lovers in her life, no men; they would only let her down.

     Once in a while she thought of Johnny. Although she knew that the day would come when she would no longer be angry with him, when the feeling of betrayal would eventually subside, for now she could not forgive him for his deceits and for abandoning her.

     When she heard the theme from
The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour
come faintly up through the floor, she realized that Mrs. Chadwick had finished her kitchen chores and had settled down to watch TV. Philippa went back to her desk, where she had been trying to study. She pushed her homework to one side and brought out a small book that was bound in floral cloth. She had bought it at the Hallmark store on the boulevard, and with it a small fake-gold pen. The first thing she had written in it was "Believe in yourself and you can achieve anything."

     Philippa thought of the little book as her spiritual guide, her own self-written bible. In the many months since that first entry, she had written "Attitudes are more important than facts." "Think defeat and you will be defeated; think success and you will be successful." "They conquer who believe they can."

     And she thought how different her own private notes were from those Rhys had written.

     She was unpacking Easter baskets and chocolate bunnies wrapped in gold foil. Mr. Reed knew Philippa was the only one he could trust for the job, because everyone else on his staff would eat the stock before it made it to the shelves. Philippa, although overweight, never touched candy.

     It was Friday, and she kept her eye on the lunch counter as she arranged the baskets, taking care that no two colors stood side by side, making it a prettier display and giving the impression that the store had more of a variety than it really did.

     And then she saw him.

     She hurried down the aisle, her heart pounding. He had just sat down on his usual stool at the lunch counter when she came up, pulling the notebook out of the large pocket of her pink smock and saying, "Excuse me? Mr. Rice?"

     When he didn't turn around, she put the notebook on the counter by his arm and said, "You left this here last week, Mr. Rice."

     He turned and looked at her, black eyes once again shooting through her. "It's Reese," he said quietly.

     "I beg your pardon?"

     "The name, it's pronounced Reese."

     "Oh—" She felt her face burn. "Mr. Rhys—"

     "Not Mister," he said with a lifting of one corner of his mouth that might have indicated a smile. "Just Rhys."

     "Yes, well, you left it here and I thought it might be important..."

     "Important?" he said, looking at the notebook as though he had no idea what it was. "Words. Just words." He turned his dark eyes on her again; they lingered on her face for a moment, as if he were trying to read something there, and then again, that hint of a smile, and he turned back to his coffee.

     It was one of those perfumed, balmy May evenings when Los Angeles seemed wrapped in warm velvet. Philippa had worked late because two girls had called in sick, and as she hurried home, her thoughts were on the assignment that was due tomorrow night in her art history class. When someone came out of the apartment building just up ahead, she wasn't really paying attention. But when he stepped beneath the glow of the porch light and she saw who it was, she stopped.

     Rhys.

     He walked down to the sidewalk at a casual pace, the notebook in his hand, a cigarette in his mouth. Philippa suddenly found herself following him, hanging back far enough so that he wouldn't see her. When he reached Hollywood Boulevard, he went to a well-lit bus stop and slouched there, squinting through his smoke at the garish neon signs along the street. Philippa stayed back in the protection of the Bank of America entrance, wondering where he was going at this late hour. There was traffic in the street, but there weren't many pedestrians, just a few tourists haunting the deserted forecourt of Grauman's Chinese. A bus came along a few minutes later, bound for Sunset Boulevard, and Rhys got on board and rode away.