Page 162 - In Five Years

We’re staying at Casa del Mar, in Santa Monica right on the beach. My room
is on the ground level, with a terrace that extends onto the boardwalk. The hotel
is shabby chic Hamptons meets European opulence. I like it.
We have a dinner meeting with Jordi and Anya tonight, but when I reach my

room, it’s only 11 a.m. We picked up half a day on our way across the country.
I change into shorts and a T-shirt and a sun hat—my Russian Jew skin has

never met a sun it particularly got on with—and decide to take a walk on the
beach. The temperature is warm and getting hotter—in the mid-eighties by
lunchtime—but there’s a cool breeze off the ocean. For the first time in weeks, I
feel as if I am not simply surviving.

We go to dinner at Ivy at the Shore, a restaurant practically across the street
from Casa del Mar, but Aldridge still calls a car. Kelly is in town to see another

client, so it’s just Aldridge and me. I’m wearing a navy shift dress with lilac
flowers and navy espadrilles, the most casual I’ve ever been in a work
environment. But it’s California, these women are young, and we’re by the

ocean. I want to wear flowers.
We get to the restaurant first. Rattan chairs with floral backs and pillows
pepper the restaurant as diners in jeans and dinner jackets clink glasses,

laughing.
We sit. “I’m going to insist on the calamari,” Aldridge says. “It’s delectable.”
He’s wearing a light asuit with a purple paisley shirt. If you photographed us

together, you might think it had been planned.
“Is there anything we should go over?” I ask him. “I have the company stats
memorized, but—”

“This is just a get-to-know-you meeting, so they feel comfortable. You know
the ropes.”
“No meeting is just anything,” I say.

“That is true. But if you try for an agenda, you often get an undesired
outcome.”
Jordi and Anya arrive in tandem. Jordi is tall, in high-waisted pants and a

cowl-neck sweater. Her hair is down and wet at the ends. She looks like a
bohemian dream, and I am reminded, for not the first time, of Bella. Anya wears
jeans, a T-shirt and a blazer. Her hair is short and slicked back. She talks with her

eyes.