Chapter Three
Lilly
“You didn’t,” Lilly’s mom says later that night, her dark eyes wide over the bowl of her oversized wineglass. They’re gathered around the kitchen island, a giant plastic clamshell of the Meatball King’s signature garlic knots open on the granite. Kit and Olivia are perched on the counter. June leans against the fridge. Marianne lurks in the doorway, nibbling a piece of her hair while she peers down at the glowing screen of her phone. “What did he say to that?”
“I mean, nothing,” Lilly admits, flexing her aching toes against the tile. Even as she’s telling the story she knows she’s making it all sound funnier than it actually was, turning the whole thing into a madcap comedy bit for everyone’s entertainment. She likes to think she’s developed a thick skin—you basically can’t live your life as one of the five socialite daughters of the Meatball King of Southern California without at some point accepting the fact that people are going to say what they’re going to say—but the truth is she was into him for a minute there, Will Darcy, with his smirk and his stubble and his rough, capable mouth. She hadn’t kissed anyone since Joe. “It’s not like I stuck around and put on my best Transatlantic accent so we could do a little Hepburn/Tracy back-and-forth.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” June observes, reaching delicately for a garlic knot. “I for one love your Transatlantic accent.”
“Thank you, darling.” Lilly blows an imaginary ring of cigarette smoke in June’s direction—trying not to notice the way her sister pulls the dough apart rather than actually eating it, or the way her wristbones have once again begun to jut. “You know I’ve always thought you’re just divine.”
“Can you focus, please, girls?” her mother asks irritably. She’s wearing a flowered robe that Lilly knows she bought because she thought it made her look like Sophia Loren inYesterday, Today and Tomorrow, though the total effect is closer to John Travolta inHairspray. “Who even is this person? Will Darcy?I’vecertainly never heard of him.”
“Well, in that case,” Kit tells her, “I’m sure he doesn’t even exist.”
“He’s the lead in that new Johnny Jones movie that’s about to start filming, isn’t he?” Olivia asks. For a person with virtually no interest in the art of filmmaking, Olivia has an encyclopedic knowledge of the industry, mostly on account of being on a first-name basis with every publicist and paparazzo in LA. “The weird fucking Shakespeare thing? He’s a stage actor, I think, but apparently Johnny wanted him so bad that he flew to New York and, like, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“Sex stuff?” Kit asks hopefully. June snorts. Lilly raises an eyebrow, trying to affect disinterest; Johnny Jones is an auteur if ever there was one, an Oscar-winning eccentric known as much for his art house sensibilities and erratic behavior as his blockbuster budgets. By all accounts actors are falling all over themselves to work with him, not the other way around. Still, she refuses to be impressed.
“His father was Fitz Darcy,” Marianne announces, and Lilly glances over at her in surprise. She didn’t even think Marianne was listening, though she knows from experience that that assumption is made at one’s own peril.
“Oh!” Cinta says in a decidedly friendlier tone of voice, just as Kit asks, “Who’s Fitz Darcy?”
“Who’s Fitz Darcy?”Cinta echoes, horrified. “Sometimes I swear it’s like I’ve taught you girls nothing.”
“You taught us how to wax our own bikini lines in case we ever get stranded on a desert island,” Olivia reminds her. “That was very helpful.”
“He was in a bunch of movies back in the late eighties and early nineties,” Marianne reports, holding up her phone to display a Wikipedia entry. “Everyone said he was on track to be the greatest actor of his generation, but then he and his wife died in a car crash trying to escape the paparazzi after an Oscar party at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
Lilly blinks. “When was that?” she hears herself ask.
“Ninety-seven, it looks like?” Marianne frowns down at the screen. “They had two kids, Will and his sister.” She’s quiet for a moment, then keeps reading. “‘There was speculation at the time that Darcy, who’d struggled with his mental health following a string of box-office flops, may have purposely caused the accident by driving into oncoming traffic.’”
“Oh.” Lilly busies herself with a garlic knot, ignoring the sudden drop in her chest.Losing your parents young doesn’t make you a good person, she reminds herself.It just makes you unlucky.And in Will’s case, apparently, an enormous douche. “Well. That explains his East Coast hate boner for the entire state of California, I guess.”
“From what I heard, that’s not all he had an East Coast hate boner for,” Olivia murmurs.
“What’s a hate boner?” their mother wants to know.
“I don’t want to talk about Will Darcy anymore,” Lilly declares instead of answering, stuffing the garlic knot into her mouth and swallowing it in one pungent, slightly stale bite. “He sucks. I want to talk about Junie and Charlie Bingley.” She turns to her mom, smiling wolfishly. “Not gay! Took her number.”
Cinta is immediately and thoroughly distracted, just like Lilly knew she would be, and they debrief the rest of the party in relative peace before Kit and Olivia head out to meet some friends at a club in West Hollywood and Marianne wanders upstairs. Lilly follows not long after that—flinging open the window above her desk so that the warm breeze ruffles the curtains, the smell of bougainvillea and star jasmine drifting through the air. She watches idly through the open bathroom door as June does her going-to-bed routine: her dutiful flossing, the fourteen-step antiwrinkle regimen Lilly is always a little bit too tired to remember to do herself.
She tucks her feet under the covers and plucks her phone off the nightstand, typing Will Darcy’s name into the search bar of her browser before she can talk herself out of it. She hits go and suddenly there he is: all dark, close-cropped hair and the faintest scruff of beard along his jawbone, the plush, sulky line of his frown. For fuck’s sake, that frown! In every single picture! It’s like someone has always and perpetually just shat in his sneakers. She wants to call him up and tell him to be careful or it will freeze that way, like their aunt Veronica used to say to her when Lilly was young and in a snit about the last of her Bomb Pop falling into the sand at Zuma Beach.
She clicks through the search results, allowing herself a quick, guilty romp through the last ten years of Will Darcy’s career. He landed the role of Mercutio in Shakespeare in the Park when he was still at Juilliard, she reads with grudging interest; he won his first Drama Desk Award for a turn inLong Day’s Journey into Nightwhen he was twenty-five. “Ten Reasons Why Will Darcy Is the Thinking Girl’s Newest Obsession,” offers a New York gossip blog. Further down on the page are photos of him with the cast ofUncle Vanya, which premiered at the Public two years ago, alongside a shot of him ducking out of a Brooklyn bookstore in glasses and a leather jacket. There’s also one of him eating lunch on an Upper West Side patio with a curly-haired brunette (unidentified, according to the caption), his face broken open into a smile so relaxed and surprising that Lilly gasps.
It’s—well. It’s a good smile.
He landed the title role in a star-studded production ofHamletat the Hayes last spring, she reads on, though it doesn’t seem to have run for very long. Lilly is just about to click on theNew York Timesreview—it looks bad, which is promising—when Junie turns off the faucet and pads into the room, her hair freshly braided and her complexion as creamy and unblemished as an ingenue in an Icelandic yogurt commercial. “What are you doing?” she asks, nudging Lilly over and climbing into bed beside her.
“Nothing,” Lilly says too quickly, closing out the app and feeling vaguely like she’s gotten caught reading Treehouse Brothers erotica. “Just messing around.”
June lifts an eyebrow, but she doesn’t say anything as she makes herself comfortable, the two of them scrolling in silence for a long, quiet moment. Lilly has spent so much of her life in thesame room as June that being with her is basically the same as just being with herself—the two of them breathing in tandem, the light from June’s phone flickering out of the corner of Lilly’s eye.
“So,” Lilly says finally, rolling over and propping herself up on one elbow. “Charlie Bingley.”
June snorts, scrunching herself down into the pillows. “You sound like Mom.” Then, a little shyly: “He asked me to lunch tomorrow.”
