“We have a ghost,” the girl said. “Or so they say.”
It was Frieda. The other girls had all warned her about room 707. Guests hardly ever stayed through the night there; they usually checked out and demanded their money back. Supposedly, someone had killed his rival in that room. No one knew the whole story, but it was definitely cold in there when you turned down the bed. Occasionally there'd be a guest who'd specifically request 707, usually a writer looking for inspiration, or a guitarist or drummer who wanted to prove his courage by spending the night in a haunted room while getting good and drunk.
“Not that I believe in ghosts,” Frieda went on to say, “although it's possible that some sort of vibration could emanate from the ether.”
Jamie laughed. “Well that explains everything. Just my luck. I'm fucking haunted.”
“It's the hotel, not you.” Frieda could see behind Jamie when she peered through his door, which had been left ajar. His room was in bad shape. She'd noticed the Do Not Disturb sign on for several days. If Frieda wasn't mistaken she saw a plume of smoke. She hoped he wasn't about to burn the hotel down to the ground. “Did you want your room turned down?”
“My room is turned upside down already. That ghost ruined my concentration, damn it. Come have a drink. I need some company. Alive company.”
Frieda laughed. “Right now?”
“You might work here, but they don't own you, do they? You're not a fucking slave, are you?”
That was the sort of challenge that always got to Frieda. It was weird that this fellow sensed her antiauthoritarian streak. Not many people knew that about her. She looked like a proper Goody Two-shoes; in fact, she was anything but. She had turned in one of her teachers at school for using stray cats for their biology lab, then had gone back, climbed in through the window of the schoolhouse, and set all the cats free. Several of them had followed her home; that was how she'd been caught and given a week's suspension from classes. The headmaster had driven by and spied the cats lounging in the grass outside her house. “We didn't think you were that sort of girl,” the headmaster had told her, but she was then and she still was now.
Frieda followed Jamie inside precisely because she shouldn't. He went to open the window first thing. The room was acrid and smoky.
“I know it stinks in here. Sorry. Whisky all right?” Jamie pulled on a T-shirt. He was extremely handsome, better looking than Mick Jagger. There was a purple suede jacket thrown over the bureau and several pairs of socks littered about. A half-eaten order of fish and chips had leaked grease onto the bureau. Frieda's mother had been a cleanliness fanatic; if she saw this room she'd probably have a stroke. Mrs. Lewis had spent her whole life making their house perfect, cooking lovely dinners, not letting a dish sit in the sink, and what had it gotten her? Absolutely nothing, in Frieda's opinion.
Frieda nodded. “Whisky's fine.” She had been in nasty rooms before, but this really was the worst. Not that she minded. “Did you have a riot in here?” she asked.
“Sorry. I've been working round the clock. I seriously don't know what day it is. Am I saying ‘sorry' a lot?”
Jamie quickly made up the bed. He wasn't very good at it. He threw a blanket over everything.
“Working at what?” Frieda said as he handed her a glass of whisky. The glass wasn't particularly clean but Frieda had read that alcohol killed all germs. You could pour it on a wound, for instance, if you had no other antiseptic. Frieda was a very quick drunk, one drink and kerplunk, she could easily find herself on the floor. So she took a tiny sip. She shivered as the whisky burned her throat. She felt very daring and grown-up.
“I'm a songwriter,” Jamie said. “When I write I make a mess. I forget the outside world.”
Poets were known for such things, and Frieda didn't count any of it as a mark against Jamie. He had more important matters to think about than the details of the corporeal world. She noticed the guitar propped up against the wall. There was sheet music scattered around. She knew famous people stayed at the Lion Park, but unlike Katy and some of the other girls, she'd never actually met one in the flesh. The odd thing about Jamie was that she felt as though she'd known him for a long time. She wasn't uncomfortable with him at all. It was probably the poet inside her that bonded them.
“Sing something,” Frieda said.
“What'll you give me in return?” Jamie grinned at her. He couldn't help himself with women; seduction came easily to him. He thought it was from those years in the hospital, flirting with nurses as a boy, needing their kindness so desperately. He was charming, he knew, and he used his charm to his benefit. Otherwise he'd still be at home in Queens. He had one brother who worked as a cook in a diner, another who was in the army serving in Vietnam, and the third lived in his mother's basement and took odd jobs, or so he said. No one had actually seen him work. They all resented Jamie. The called him a lucky bastard and a selfish prick, not that Jamie cared. If someone wanted to fault him for using what he had, they could go right ahead. He wasn't going to sit still and let the world walk over him when all he had to do was smile to get what he wanted. Smile and come up with a song.
“I'll give you a song title,” Frieda said. She had a million ideas. She didn't even have to try; ideas just came to her. She was always thinking up movie plots and stories for books and ads for TV. Her old boyfriend, Bill, had called her a dreamer, but Frieda couldn't stop thinking. Her head was filled with ideas. “Once you have a title, the rest is supposed to flow. Or so I've read.”
Jamie poured himself another drink. He knew what he had been missing. A muse. Someone who could inspire him. That was why he was in a rut and couldn't write a damn thing. Frieda was wearing the white smock all the maids wore while on duty. It made Jamie think of snow and of purity. She looked like a nurse, a hot one. She looked like an angel on his bed. She wasn't his type, but she was very sweet and honest. The opposite of Jamie.
Jamie himself had done some evil things, but not on purpose. He'd been driven to self-interest by his desire for fame, and, of course, by drugs. When he was a boy, he thought about ways he would get out. Not just out of the hospital; he wanted a way out of his life. His mother always said that she had known as soon as he could walk, he'd be through the door. He would lie, steal, cheat, he would put himself above all others, but he would get out.
“All right,” Jamie said to Frieda. He found her fresh and interesting. Most girls were tongue-tied around him. When they did manage to speak, he found they didn't have much to say. “Fine. Let's see if it works that way. What's your title?”
Frieda didn't even have to think. Her ideas came to her fully formed.
“‘The Ghost of Michael Macklin.'”
Jamie laughed. “That's a far-out title.”
“He's the ghost across the hall. The one you think you hear. He died of love. I don't know how exactly, but love was allegedly the cause.”
“‘The Ghost of Michael Macklin.'” Jamie let it roll around in his head.
“‘It's a great title and you know it. Now you owe me! Just one song. You have to sing!'”
Jamie sang to her then, not his own composition, none of those were ready yet—they really weren't very good—but a song he knew most women were suckers for: “Greensleeves.” He didn't know why that song spoke to women so deeply, but it did; several women had fallen in love with him when he sang it. It was something about the desperation of it all; being done wrong was romantic in some weird way that made a woman melt. He could see that it was happening right now in the way that Frieda was looking at him. Her open mouth; her utter concentration. It was so easy to win a woman over, it gave him a charge. Plus she was pretty, and different, and smart. Jamie felt a little awkward because he had a girlfriend. Well, actually a serious girlfriend. That was the other reason he was in London. He sometimes forgot about that. He was getting married.
When he was done, Frieda applauded. “Well, I don't know about your songs, but you have an amazing voice. An absolute ten.”
&nbs
p; “Really?” Jamie was surprised by her no-nonsense ways. He was full of himself, but he was vulnerable and filled with self-hate as well. He often felt like chucking it all and wondered if everything he did was crap. Somehow when this girl said something, he believed it.
“Totally gorgeous. Soulful. Better than Mick Jagger.”
“You don't know Jagger,” Jamie said.
“Let's just say that he couldn't say no to my black dress the other night.”
She felt insane to be saying a thing like that. She'd merely wanted to seem desirable to Jamie. She had no experience with anyone resembling a rock star in any way. Frieda's ex-boyfriend, Bill, was nothing like Mick Jagger, other than the fact that they were both human beings. Bill was at university in Reading studying chemistry. He worked part-time in a lab researching cancer cells. But Frieda didn't feel anything she was saying to Jamie was a lie. She felt different being with him here in his room drinking whisky and sitting on his bed, like the wild girl her parents thought she was. Someone Mick Jagger might have made a pass at.
“Really? Mick, huh?” Jamie didn't believe her for a second. She wasn't the sort of girl who would have slept with one of the Rolling Stones. She was the type to fall into everlasting love. Jamie knew she was hoping to impress him. He tried not to laugh. He had an uncanny way of knowing the truth about someone, even though he often didn't know the truth about himself.
“Well, I wasn't the one wearing the dress,” Frieda admitted. “But I've worn it since.”
“Sex by association.” Jamie grinned. She certainly wasn't the typical maid. She seemed more like a college student. “If I want to catch up to Mick, I've got to start writing songs—otherwise my deal with the record company means crap. I've got to at least give them an A side and a B side for a single, pronto.”
“All you need is a little help, and your songs will pour out of you. You've got a great title already. That's half of it, isn't it?”
Frieda finished her drink and got ready to leave. She had gulped her whisky a little more quickly than she'd planned; now she was tipsy. She still had a dozen or more rooms to turn down.
“Wait a minute,” Jamie said. “What about my song? I thought you were going to help me?”
“I dare you to finish it by the morning,” Frieda said. She knew that some people responded to ultimatums and challenges. She did, after all. Tell her she couldn't do something, and she'd have it accomplished in no time. Just like those cats she'd set free from the biology classroom; because of that there were now dozens of cats wandering around the house where she grew up. They lived out in the fields and were decimating the rabbit population. Sometimes she forgot about consequences.
“Okay. Fine.” Jamie saluted her. He seemed lit up by the challenge; it was as though no one had ever dared him to work hard at something before. Frieda saw what people meant by charisma, it was almost as if he had no control over it. He was the sort of person who drew you in; she felt sure that as soon as she walked away from him everything would be much darker and less interesting.
“You really think I can do it?” Jamie said.
It was the real him for an instant, and Frieda felt more drawn in, more bonded, poet to poet.
“How about if I come back tomorrow night and if you haven't finished, I get that purple jacket. Then you'll have something at stake.”
“Fine,” Jamie agreed. “You're on. But what do I get if I win?”
“A song,” Frieda said. “A brilliant side A or B.”
Jamie turned on the look that had always gotten him what he wanted from the nurses. “More,” he said.
“Not enough?” Frieda was flustered. “A kiss,” she threw in. “Maybe,” she added, even though she realized she was dying to kiss him.
Jamie might have written the song he'd promised her, but at eleven o'clock Stella phoned him, and he could never say no to a woman, especially one he was set to marry. He grabbed his jacket and pulled on his boots and went down to the lobby. The porter called him a taxi. He'd written two lines before Stella had called. When I'm with you, I'm always yours. I belong to you. It sounded like a lie to him.
“Don't do anything I wouldn't do,” the porter, Jack Henry, said as Jamie got into the cab. Jamie thought he must look suspicious.
The taxi took him to Kensington, where Stella's parents lived. They were off somewhere on a holiday, so Stella and her sister, Marianne, had the place to themselves. How anyone could trust them, Jamie had no idea. Even he was more trustworthy than those two girls. They were the wildest of the wild, always together, always in trouble. Jamie could have been staying in Kensington right along with the sisters, living in luxury instead of in a third-rate hotel with no room service, but he and Stella fought so often he knew he wouldn't be able to write in the Kensington house. He probably should have stayed at the Lion Park that night as well and gotten to work on his song and won his kiss from Frieda, but instead he knocked on Stella's parents' door. The Ridge family was rich, extremely so, and Stella was beautiful. She was everything a man could want, particularly if a man was looking to self-destruct. She was all wrong for Jamie. They were too much alike. Fire and fire. Not a good mix. The kind of thing that led to immolation and disaster. Stella was definitely no one's muse. She was too self-centered, and needy, and gorgeous. And there was one other thing about Stella that was an utter negative: She was addicted to heroin.
“You're always at that crappy hotel,” Stella said when she opened the door for him. “Maybe you're having an affair. Maybe that's why you're spending so much time there. We're getting married. We should be together.”
“Shut up. I'm over there trying to write. It's not any fun.”
“Shouldn't it be?” Stella asked. “I thought you were supposed to enjoy the creative act. And you shut up.”
“Since you know so much about creative acts, why don't you do something?”
“I am a creative act in and of myself.” Stella smiled beautifully.
They went into the parlor together. Marianne and her boyfriend Nick were in there, snorting heroin. They were all rich except for Jamie. Jamie was the odd man out, and that's why they adored him. They thought he was real and they thought he was funny and when he was famous he'd get them invited to parties in Hollywood. They probably wouldn't have cared if they knew he took money from their wallets and purses, which he did on a regular basis. Money meant nothing to them and quite a lot to him.
Jamie often thought about his mother, who always worried about him and was probably sitting in her apartment in Astoria, Queens, worrying about him right now. She used to make him wear a hat and gloves to school even though everyone already made fun of him because of the brace on his leg. He looked like a monster; he actually scared some of the little kids as he clumped down the halls of the school. He thought about the way his mom had sat by his bedside during his recoveries. She loved him and he'd been a thankless child, except for one thing: His mom's dream was for him to be ambitious, and that he was. She dreamed he would succeed, and he sure as hell wasn't going to fail.
Stella and Marianne's mother, on the other hand, had never changed a diaper. Stella had told him that one night; she'd actually had tears in her eyes, and Stella was most certainly not a crier. Their mother had been depressed and she'd traveled most of the time. That early neglect was probably the reason the girls now felt they were entitled to anything they wanted. Jamie felt sorry for Stella even though she had everything; he understood why she tried her best to be a bitch.
The first time Jamie had come to the house it was to be introduced to the parents, Daisy and Hamlin Ridge. He hadn't understood he'd been invited in order to torment them, but he realized that soon enough, as soon as Mrs. Ridge looked at him. She was a tall, elegant woman and she instantly despised him.
“This is your boyfriend?” she said. “He doesn't look famous to me.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” Jamie countered. He liked to disarm people, come up from behind and win them over, but that didn't seem to be happening
with Daisy Ridge. She was made of stern stuff.
The father, Hamlin, had wandered off to read the paper.
“She's only with you because she knows I won't approve,” Mrs. Ridge told Jamie. “You realize that.”
“I appreciate your honesty,” Jamie said.
“How rude can you be?” Stella said to her mother.
Daisy shrugged. “At least he appreciates my honesty. Whisky?” she asked Jamie.
“Definitely.” He nodded.
“You are not taking anything she offers you,” Stella told Jamie.
“Let's go,” Marianne had called from the hall. The sisters always protected each other and Marianne especially hated scenes. She knew how upset Stella could get. “Nick's expecting us.”
“Nick's fine because he has money and he isn't a Jew,” Stella said to her mother. “Isn't that true?”
Hamlin looked up from his paper, mildly interested.
“Good for you. You managed to snag your father's attention with the Jew comment,” Daisy said to her daughter. She handed Jamie his whisky. “Do you think you'll be good for my daughter?”
“Let's just get out of here,” Stella had said to Jamie, who would have preferred to finish his drink. “She doesn't give a damn about Marianne or me. Never has, never will.”
“Let's go, let's go,” Marianne called. She had the driver waiting for them. She was wearing a pale lemon-colored fur coat.
Mrs. Ridge grabbed Jamie's arm as he went to leave. Surprised, he turned to her.
“Don't hurt her,” she said, for his ears alone. “I mean it.”
In the back of the car, Stella had snorted some heroin that was laid out in a line on a magazine balanced on her knees. “I don't think our mother ever even touched us. She had better things to do. More important things.”
“She was damaged,” Marianne put in. “Very fucked-up history. Love and death. That kind of thing.”
“Everyone's damaged. That's no excuse,” Stella countered. “Look at Jamie,” she teased. “How much more fucked-up can you get?”