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Chapter One

Gregory

The bartender at the Hale Nui Yacht Club, a handsome older man named Kimo, knew my drink, which was either a comfort or a diagnosis, depending on how generous I was feeling about the state of my life. That afternoon I wasn't feeling generous at all, so I decided it was a diagnosis and let him pour it anyway.

"The usual, Mr. Normand?"

"If you have to ask, we've both failed."

He smiled the way people smile at a man they've decided is charming, because the alternative — that he is simply always here — is too sad to sit with. My usual is a Martini with three olives, because two is a snack and one is a tragedy. He set it down on a napkin embossed with the club's little gold anchor, and I turned the glass a quarter-turn so the olives faced me, the way my ancestor, silent film legend Mabel Normand, supposedly turned every mirror in every room she entered so she could catch herself being brilliant.

That's a lie, by the way. Nobody knows if Mabel did that. But it's the kind of thing that should be true about her, and in my family we've never let the absence of evidence get between us and a good story. It's practically the family crest. A star, a camera, and a caption that isn't quite accurate.

I turned the ring, too, without meaning to — the pearl-and-opal thing that had been on the fourth finger of my right hand since I was nineteen, when my grandmother pressed it there and said, you're the last one who'll know what to do with it. She had never once asked me about girls. At nineteen I took that for tact. Around thirty I understood it had been permission.

Opal catches the light in colors it has no business containing. Green, then a sudden bruised violet, then a fire that looks like it's coming from somewhere under the stone rather than off the surface of it. Opals are thought to bring bad luck, the superstitious say. I've never been superstitious. But I have been unlucky, which is a different thing and requires no belief system whatsoever.

The marina spread out past the veranda in that obscene Pacific blue, a hundred million dollars of other people's boats bobbing in the kind of sunlight they put on postcards to make the mainland feel bad about itself. Somewhere out there among them was mine — the Second Take, forty-two feet of teak and white sails, the only major purchase I'd made in two years and the only one that made sense. A boat is a house you can flee in. I'd been fleeing in it since the divorce. Slowly. In circles, mostly. You'd be amazed how far you can run without arriving anywhere.

"You're Gregory Normand."

I didn't turn right away. In my experience, the correct response to being identified is to make the identifier work a little for it. Let the sentence hang, and they'll wonder if they've made a mistake.

Then I turned, and — oh. He was worth turning for.

Young. That specific kind of young that hasn't yet been disappointed by anything. Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, in a shirt the color of the inside of a shell, open one button past what the club would have preferred. He had the sort of jaw that gets a boy flown to exotic places, and he had eyes he'd clearly been told were his best feature often enough to believe it. He'd taken the stool beside mine without asking, which I respected. And he was looking at me the way people used to look at me all the time and had, lately, stopped.

Here is the part I want on the record, because it matters later. I catalogued all of it — the shirt, the shoulders, the good faithless smile — the way you'd note a piece of set dressing that photographs well.

And I felt absolutely nothing.

"I might be," I said. "Depends on who's asking and whether they're litigious."

He laughed — too easily, the laugh of a person auditioning. "I'm Dashiell."

"Of course you are."

Nobody is born Dashiell. Somebody becomes Dashiell, on a train platform, at seventeen, when they decide the name they were issued won't carry them where they're going. I knew the maneuver intimately. My own mother had done it, and her father, and somewhere back at the headwaters of all of us a girl named Mabel Fortescott had done it too. She filed the sharp corners off herself until she was smooth enough to slide into a nickelodeon and out the other side a legend. We are a family of self-inventions. It's the family business, really, more than the movies. The movies were just where we kept the receipts.

"People call me Dash."

"People would."

"I know who you are," Dash said, leaning in, conspiratorial, delighted with himself. "You produced The Darkest Hour."

And there it was — the little internal lurch, the phantom limb. Made. Past tense. Eight years past, to be exact. Somewhere in a house in the hills there was a gold statuette I'd put into Lance Hayworth's enormous hands on a stage in front of forty million people, and somewhere in a different house there was a man I'd handed considerably more to and gotten considerably less back. Both of those handings had happened in the same golden, ruinous year.

"I did," I said. "In a previous life."

"I cried." He said it like it was a gift. "At the end. When he stands in the doorway and he doesn't go in."

"Everyone cries at that. That's why we shot it eleven times." I sipped the Martini. "The trick is you make them wait for the door. You make them so sure he's going to walk through it that when he doesn't, the not-walking does all the work. Withhold the thing they want and they'll build the whole cathedral themselves, out of wanting."

I heard myself say it and thought, distantly, the way you notice a draft: you used to believe that about people, not just about audiences. But the thought didn't land anywhere. Nothing had landed anywhere in a while. That was the point of the boat.

Dash was still talking. He was a model — I'd have bet the Second Take on it before he said it — and he was here shooting something involving, as far as I could follow, three watches and a volcano. Then he reached into a canvas tote the size of a life raft and produced, with the flourish of a boy who has learned that objects can be personality-adjacent, a magazine.

"This is me," he said. "It's in Town and Country, which my agent says is a big deal. Is it a big deal?" Dash actually batted his eyelashes at me.