Here, in this exclusive excerpt, we follow Hadley Baxter as she meets with one of the filmmakers.
Maybe I wanted him to kiss me just so I could confirm he wanted to.
You get used to people falling in love with the idea of being with you.
You think you should always have their feelings in hand like a down payment.
“How are things with Oliver?”
he asked from behind his sunglasses.
“I haven’t heard from him.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“I guess I’m surprised he could walk away without needing to yell at me.
Most people want you to witness how much you’ve hurt them, but not him, apparently.
I made my face a study in neutrality.
“No one at all.”
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
“It’s the truth.”
I said, “I have a question.”
“Why do you have a grand piano?”
“It came with the house, but I do play.
The piano is part of the reason I picked this place.”
“Will you play for me?”
“Most people at least pretend to be reluctant.”
“I like to show off.
But stay out here.”
I don’t know what he played.
It was slow and sad.
The notes drifted out the open mouth of his bunker house, settled on my skin.
I looked over the valley through the sound as though through mist.
Then he stopped, and I was myself again.
“Could have been worse,” I told him, but he heard what I was really saying.
In the evening, pink light submerged the city.
I didn’t ask whose it was.
The cool water felt sharp and shivery on my sunburned skin.
He went inside and came out with a foil-wrapped bar of chocolate.
“Sir Hugo’s boyfriend gave this to me.
I have no idea how strong it is.”
“If it’s from Rudy, probably really strong.”
We each ate a square.
Redwood got to his feet.
“I’m going to turn off those lights.”
The lights in the pool went off, and then the indoor lights.
Piano music emanated from the house again, something dissonant and tattered-sounding, full of holes and gaps.
The mauve light of the city pulsed in the sky and on the pool’s surface.
Marian had written:The world unfurls and unfurls, and there is always more.
A line, a circle, is insufficient.
I look forward, and there is the horizon.
What’s past is lost.
I am already lost to my future.
“I can see your aura,” I said.
“What does it look like?”
“Like smoke.”
The city sparkled and revolved like a galaxy.
They call it the City of Angels, he said, but the name actually just means The Angels.
And, like,whatangels?
All of them, I said.
It’s really exciting, he said.
We’re making something out of nothing.
I thought he was talking about us.
Marian was real, obviously, but people’s lives don’t get preserved like fossils.
Or he said something like that, and I realized he was talking about the movie, not us.
You’re better off just deciding what kind of story you want to tell and telling it.
I think that’s sort of what he said.
I said, But where do we begin?
Where’s the beginning?
It’s The Angels, I told him.
I know, he said, but whatisit?
A helicopter went blinking by.
It’s wind chimes and helicopters, I said.
It’s dance music pounding in a dark room full of people pedaling bicycles going nowhere.
It’s gongs and oms and whale songs soothing in the dim inner sancta of spas.
It’s pit bulls barking through chain-link and Chihuahuas yapping behind screen doors and poodles snoozing on terra-cotta
tiles.
At least that’s what I tried to tell him.
I don’t know what I actually said.
Don’t buy a star map.
Don’t go driving around gawking because you’re already there, man.
You’re in it.
It’sallone big map of the stars.
At least that’s what I heard him saying.
And I was like, you know what?
It’s mostly just houses.
And when you think about houses, really think, aren’t theyso weird?
It’s trash blowing around in the hot, dry wind, nesting in ice plant by the freeway.
It’s the teasing, skipping, arcing fan dance of lawn sprinklers.
I want Redwood to know all this.
(Seriously, though, he said again, likeallthe angels?)
I want him to know that L.A. is a desert wind blowing through the garden of paradise.
I told him, and he said yes.
Excerpted from GREAT CIRCLE by Maggie Shipstead.
Copyright 2021 by Maggie Shipstead.
