Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money Read Free Page B

Not all of it had been good, but I’d been
living in New York City for over 10 years: adversity didn’t daunt
me. Especially not at a steady 70 degrees.
    “Where to?” the driver asked, still smiling,
when my stuff was stored in the trunk and I was settled in the
cab.
    Where to, indeed? Sal had given me a lead on
an apartment in a friend’s house out in Malibu, but I felt the need
to touch the Earth and regroup a little bit.
    “The Beverly Hills Hotel, please.” It was
cliché and would probably be expensive, but I was here and I
needed somewhere to land while I scouted a course of action. What
better place than that famous landmark? More, from what I knew
about it, like a museum than a hotel.
    I didn’t have a reservation, but it was
midweek in March, I knew they’d find something for me. And when
they did, it was all about airy lightness and so exactly as I’d
imagined — right down to the pool and the palm trees I could see
out my window — that I pulled off my clothes, flung myself onto the
pillow-top bed and slept off my six hour flight. Welcome to
L.A.
    Giving Los Angeles six months had felt like
a good idea. If I hated it, there were other places: my life was
portable now. Before I’d left New York I’d sold practically all my
stuff. Everything that wouldn’t fit easily into a box or suitcase.
I hadn’t had that much to begin with, but it felt good and right when it was mostly all gone and my life was very
light. And when Jack’s face would pop into my mind I’d push it away
and move on to the next aspect of my big, new project: my newly
revamped life. A work in progress.
    I needed a place to live. The hotel was
wonderful, the perfect respite, but staying there for more than a
week or so wouldn’t be a good idea. I had enough money, but I
wouldn’t for long at four hundred a night. And I needed to think
more about what I was going to do for gainful employment. But this
was L.A. For the first time in my adult life, I needed a car.
    My second day in Los Angeles I asked another
cab driver to take me to where “a lot of car lots” could be
found.
    “What kind of car?” he asked.
    I shrugged. I knew I didn’t want an old car,
and I wanted it silver and not terribly expensive. Beyond that, I
didn’t feel fussy.
    I bought the first new, silver,
domestically-priced automobile I plunked my eyes on, quietly
delighted at the power that buying a new car without a lot of fuss
made me feel. My own magic carpet. And it was easy to rationalize
the purchase: I kept thinking that part of my Chagall had paid for
the whole vehicle. Viewed in that light, it was a good swap.
    Driving myself back to the hotel wrapped in
the scent of new car, I felt positively Californian. Even
when I took a wrong turn off the freeway and ended up lost, I still
felt exhilarated. When you’re not in a hurry to get anywhere, even
being lost can feel like sightseeing. It’s all in the way your mind
frames a situation, that was the first thing I discovered in
L.A.
    A few days later, this new, brighter frame
of mind carried me out to Malibu to meet Sal’s friend and look at
the apartment he had for rent. He’d actually called it a “guest
house” on the telephone, which I took to be localese for “really,
really cramped and small.” But he also said it had a view and
privacy and both of those things sounded good to me — as did the
price — so we set a time and I headed out to see it.
    I fell in love with Malibu before I got
there. The Santa Monica Freeway very abruptly turns into Pacific
Coast Highway and, as you head north, the city falls away. The
closer I got to my destination, the more peaceful things became
until, when I started driving up Las Flores Canyon as directed, I
found myself on twisty mountain-style roads. After crowded Beverly
Hills, it was like a beautiful moonscape.
    I saw the address I’d been given, but
couldn’t see a house: just sort of a widening in the road and a
post with the street address on it. I