Eve in Hollywood by Amor Towles

each continent successively into view. And there, below the parting clouds, a destination presented itself:
Istanbul.
And then another. And another. In fact, so quickly the destinations came, the kindly stranger’s pencil could barely keep up.
    3. Istanbul
    4. Cairo
    5. Havana
    6. French Polynesia
    7. The Taj Mahal!
    Lists aren’t so bad, Eve realized. They didn’t have to be a catalogue of matronly constraints. They could just as easily testify to plans and intentions. A celebration of the not yet done. Of what
thou shalt
.
    It really just depended on which side of the pencil you were on.
    On her first night in residence at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Eve asked her waiter if he could spare a pencil and pad. Then under the hotel’s palmy moniker, in honor of her proximity to Hollywood, she itemized a list of her favorite improbable motion picture conclusions. The next night (at the Cocoanut Grove), it was a list of the town’s dullest leading men. In the nights that followed, as she dined across the city alone, her narrow little pad proved a boon companion. And when fellow hotel resident Prentice Symmons expounded on all the sights that Eve should see before she left L.A., she made a list of those.
    That list, originally comprising ten items, was quickly expanded to fifteen; and then to twenty. So in what little space she had left at the bottom of the page, Eve scratched in number twenty-one:
Watch Billy do a Heel-Hooker.
Then she closed her compendium and gave it a satisfied pat, just as Billy was pulling into the visitors’ lot.
    The lot was bordered with palms—those fantastical trees that seemed to be cultivated everywhere in California despite providing so little in the way of shade. Billy scooted around the car to open Eve’s door. As she climbed out, he stood with his posture impressively upright and his gaze fixed on some point in the distance. It must have taken all of his presence of mind not to salute.
    â€”How long will you be, Miss Ross?
    â€”To tell you the truth, Billy, I have no idea. Do you think you can wait?
    â€”You betcha!
    Following a prominent path through the palms, Eve soon came upon a clearing in which grazed a small herd of one-story buildings. Eve had been to the studio a few times before in order to visit Olivia on the set, but she had never been to this particular spot. Since there were no signs and the buildings looked identical, Eve figured she’d have to start knocking on doors. But just as she prepared to eeny-meany-miney-moe, from behind one of the buildings came a barefooted boy in a floppy straw hat with a fishing pole propped on his shoulder . . .

    C
ONSTANCY
.
    That was the whole problem with Aunt Polly’s worldview. An unflinching unwaveriness was the single trait that she presumed the Good Lord valued over everything else. But all you had to do was answer your telephone once in a while to see that constancy had nothing to do with it.
    What God liked most was surprises. He liked up-endings and reversals. Empires that overreached, and fortunes bet on black, and vows of eternal devotion founded on a glance. Maybe it was due to some All-Knowing sense of Fair Play; or maybe, He just got Bored. But when it came to the cautious and considered endeavors of men, the Divine was sure to flummox.
    How else to make sense of the kindly Marcus Benton and his out-of-the-blue invitation to a tête-à-tête? With his mussed up hair, wrinkled shirt, and vaguely familiar demeanor, Eve was inclined to like him from the start—but she couldn’t have guessed in a million years what he wanted.
    And if, as Mr. Benton began to lay his cards on the table, Eve had any remaining doubts as to the importance of Surprise in the workings of Providence, the Good Lord dispelled them in His inimitable style with the throwing open of a door and the barging in of a latter-day Napoléon.
    For despite all the laughs that they had shared over Livvy’s