🌁 chapter nine: everybody loves kira [let me be your ghost]

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.” -Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”

-Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight

Kira interviewed the way rich men golfed—as a game she intended to enjoy whether or not she let you win.

We set up on the cliff terrace off the west wing of the property. The sun deck was a slab of warm stone hanging over the Pacific with two loungers, a bottle of something sparkling in a sweating bucket, and a wheel of cheese Tini had sent out like a dowry. The afternoon smelled of salt and cut grass and the cold mineral breath that came off the water when the wind turned.

Kira was wearing a flowing emerald sun dress with a black cardigan to ward against the cool afternoon breeze, her blond hair whisked up into a properly messy chignon with strands of hair kissing her face. Her effortless grace contrasted against my grey cable knit sweater and Blundstone boots. It was as if she was the sun and I was a dark stormcloud.

I set my recorder on the low table where Kira could watch it work, and clicked it on.

Kira looked at it like it was a cute dog. “You use tape. That’s either very charming or very sinister.”

“It can’t be both?”

“Everything I love is both.” She poured two glasses of the sparkling liquid into waiting glasses without asking and folded herself on her side onto the lounger, sunglasses up in her blonde hair, and aimed her whole attention at me. It was a physical thing, her attention, a warmth like standing in a window. I understood in the first thirty seconds why crisis-struck famous people paid her fortunes—being looked at by Kira felt like being forgiven.

“So,” she said. “Ask me things.”

I started easy, the way I always did—the on-ramp questions, the ones that let a subject hear their own voice being interesting. How she met Eze (a Berkeley party neither of them was invited to, both of them hiding from it in the same stairwell). What he was like at twenty (“a haunted house with good manners”). The early Crane Industries years, Magnus in his terrible prime, the parties, the boats, the paranoia growing up around the family like ivy that eventually held the wall together.

She was a great interview. Publicists always are—they know where the story’s joints are, how to hand you a quote with the handle facing out. For an hour I filled tape with usable, glittering material and waited, patient as a fisherman, for the water under all that charm.

The wine helped. The second glass helped more.

“Can I ask the impolite version now?” I said.

Kira’s smile shifted—didn’t drop, shifted—like a boat’s motor kicking into gear. “Finally. Yes.”

“You and Eze.” I kept my voice at professional cadence. “Every photo I found, you’re on his arm. The tabloids ran you as the girlfriend at least twice. For the book—what are you to each other?”

She laughed, a real one, head back, loud enough that the nearby gulls eyeing our cheese wheel took off.

“God. Girlfriend.” She wiped an eye with the heel of her hand. “Lola. I have been on that man’s arm at a hundred parties because a beautiful woman on his arm answers questions before they’re asked, and answering questions before they’re asked is literally my profession.” She sipped from her glass, her French manicured fingertips making gentle tapping noises. “Also because his exes were mostly actresses, and actresses—” she made a gesture like a chef’s kiss with her whole hand, wistful and unrepentant. “I was significantly more interested in the starlets than in Eze. Significantly. Two of them I still see whenever we end up in the same city, and one keeps a drawer open for me in Paris.” Kira winked at me.

The relief that went through me was so fast and so total that it embarrassed me before it finished arriving. It must have crossed my face at speed, because Kira’s eyes—big, blue, professionally trained to read rooms for a living—caught it, held it, and understood it in one second flat.

She lowered her glass.

“Oh,” she said softly. Delighted. “Oh no. You should have seen what your face just did.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said ‘oh no.’”

“Those are barely words.” She leaned in over the cheese, conspiratorial, sunglasses sliding down into place like she was giving me privacy. “One question, off all the records, woman to woman. Does he know you feel like that?”