gripped his shopping bag under his arm and dug three pennies from his pants pocket.
For the third or fourth time this morning he found himself glancing sharply over his left shoulder, but again there was no one within yards of him. The morning sun was bright on the Roosevelt Hotel across the boulevard, and the clouds were breaking up in the blue sky.
He crouched beside Jean Harlow’s square and carefully laid one penny in each of the three round indentations below her incised signature, then wiped his wet fingers on his jacket. The coins wouldn’t stay there long, but Sydney always put three fresh ones down whenever he walked past this block of Hollywood Boulevard.
He straightened up and again caught a whiff of pears and cumin, and when he glanced over his left shoulder there was a girl standing right behind him.
At first glance he thought she was a teenager – she was a head shorter than him, and her tangled red hair framed a narrow, freckled face with squinting eyes and a wide, amused mouth.
“Three pennies?” she asked, and her voice was deeper than he would have expected.
She was standing so close to him that his elbow had brushed her breasts when he’d turned around.
“That’s right,” said Sydney, stepping back from her, awkwardly so as not to scuff the coins loose.
“Why?”
“Uh …” He waved at the cement square and then barely caught his shopping bag. “People pried up the original three,” he said. “For souvenirs. That she put there. Jean Harlow, when she put her handprints and shoe prints in the wet cement, in 1933.”
The girl raised her faint eyebrows and blinked down at the stone. “I never knew that. How did you know that?”
“I looked her up one time. Uh, on Google.”
The girl laughed quietly, and in that moment she seemed to be the only figure in the forecourt, including himself, that had color. He realized dizzily that the scent he’d been catching all morning was hers.
“Google?” she said. “Sounds like a Chinaman trying to say something. Are you always so nice to dead people?”
Her black linen jacket and skirt were visibly damp, as if she had slept outside, and seemed to be incongruously formal. He wondered if somebody had donated the suit to the Salvation Army place down the boulevard by Pep Boys, and if this girl was one of the young people he sometimes saw in sleeping bags under the marquee of a closed theater down there.
“Respectful, at least,” he said, “I suppose.”
She nodded. “‘Lo,’” she said, “‘some we loved, the loveliest and the best …’”
Surprised by the quote, he mentally recited the next two lines of the Rubaiyat quatrain – That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest, / Have drunk their cup a round or two before – and found himself saying the last line out loud: “‘And one by one crept silently to Rest.’”
She was looking at him intently, so he cleared his throat and said, “Are you local? You’ve been here before, I gather.” Probably that odd scent was popular right now, he thought, the way patchouli oil had apparently been in the ‘60s. Probably he had brushed past someone who had been wearing it too, earlier in the day.
“I’m staying at the Heroic,” she said, then went on quickly, “Do you live near here?”
He could see her bra through her damp white blouse, and he looked away – though he had noticed that it seemed to be embroidered with vines.
“I have an apartment up on Franklin,” he said, belatedly.
She had noticed his glance, and arched her back for a moment before pulling her jacket closed and buttoning it. “‘ And in a Windingsheet of Vineleaf wrapped,’” she said merrily, “‘ So bury me by some sweet Gardenside.’”
Embarrassed, he muttered the first line of that quatrain: “‘Ah, with the grape my fading life provide … ”’
“Good idea!” she said – then she frowned, and her face was older. “No, dammit, I’ve got to go – but I’ll see you again, right? I like you.” She leaned forward and tipped her face up – and then she had briefly kissed him on the lips, and he did drop his shopping bag.
When he had crouched to pick it up and brushed the clinging drops of cold water off on his pants, and looked around, she was gone. He took a couple of steps toward the theater entrance, but the dozens of colorfully dressed strangers blocked his view, and he couldn’t tell if she