Beautiful Stranger (6 page)

Hesitantly, she took the velvet box with two shaking hands and opened it. Inside was a ring with a single immaculately cut diamond. It wasn’t the largest Sam had ever seen. Her father had given Poppy a stone the size of Rhode Island. But this stone was startling in its whiteness.
Star
tling was the right word for it. It looked like a miniature gleaming evening star.

“My beautiful Samantha. There is no graceful way to ask this question. My fear that you will reject me knows no bounds. It took all my courage to find the nerve to ask, and now I fear I cannot. Yet I shall ask anyway, because of how much I love you. Will you be my beautiful Samantha forever?”

“Umm, Eduardo?”

“Yes?”

“Can you boil that down to one simple sentence?”

Eduardo smiled and took Sam’s hand in both of his. She realized that her hands were still trembling. “Will you marry me?”

Suddenly people all around them, some of the same people who’d been listening to the musicians, were applauding and cheering. Sam looked around and realized they’d drawn a crowd. An elderly Asian couple was snapping photos. A bald girl on Rollerblades was taking video.

Without waiting for her answer, Eduardo leaped out of the doorway back to where the band and the crowd could see him. “I asked!” he shouted. “Now help her answer.
Sí, sí, sí, sí! Sí, sí, sí, sí!
”

The band struck up a new song, and the crowd took up the chant. Six, a dozen, fifty, a hundred people, all shouting, “
Sí!
”

“So what do you say?” Sam felt Eduardo’s arms wrap around her. “
Sí?
”

In a town where storytelling turned on reversals—where the expectations of the viewer were flipped by the screenwriter and the director—this particular reversal was too much. The dissonance between he’s-going-to-dump-me and he-asked-me-to-marry-him was just too great. Sam felt dizzy and kind of nauseated. Her mouth was dry. She thought it was a miracle that she could even form the words. Fortunately, she could form one.

Samantha Sharpe, who had recently turned eighteen, who never, ever,
ever
thought she’d get married young—if at all—found herself saying, “
Sí.”

“Eduardo, I’m only eighteen.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know.”

It was thirty minutes later, the diamond was still in its box—though on the table between them—and they were sitting outside at a café called Pauletta’s by the Sea, right there on the promenade. Eduardo had ordered a Dos Equis, Sam a lemonade. She wanted to have this particular discussion fully sober. It was one thing to say
sí
in front of a crowd just begging for a happy end to the movie moment they’d just witnessed, and quite another to move on to the actual holy-fuck-I-just-said-I’d-marry-him moment. That’s why the diamond wasn’t on her hand. A movie moment was one thing. Reality was quite another.

Fuck that.
The voice inside her was insistent.
You said yes. You mean yes. Just put on the ring.

“Eighteen is too young to get married,” Sam pointed out. “Hell, look at my father. Forty-five is too young to be married. No
one
stays married.”

He reached across the table to caress her hand. “You think this because you are swimming in the tiny fishbowl of American movie stars. My parents have been married to each other for thirty years, and they adore each other.”

Sam had to admit, when she’d met his parents, they had seemed to adore each other. But they had to be what was known in Hollywood as a nonrecurring phenomenon. Also known as: a freak of nature. She did not hesitate to share this point of view with her sort-of fiancé.

He was unfazed by her hesitation. “I’m not surprised that you would say this. And please understand: I am not proposing that we start a family for a long time. But when I look at you, and I look at the last months since I’ve met you, this has been the most wonderful time of my life. When you find true love, you do not throw it away because of age, or distance, or a fishbowl.”

“And what are we supposed to do now?” Sam remonstrated. She knew she was looking for every possible reason not to do what her heart was screaming for her to do.

“You’re going back to Paris. I’m going to USC. That’s not a marriage. That’s a separation.”

He smiled tenderly. “We can work all of that out. I’m sure we can.”

“Such as?”

“There are always options. I can transfer. You can transfer. Maybe I’ll defer a year and stay at the consulate here.” He reached across the table. She thought he was going to take her hands again, but instead he opened the box. The diamond ring gleamed. “Look at it. It is beautiful, but not so beautiful as you, Samantha. If we want to make it happen, we will make it happen.”

Well la-di-da, didn’t he make it sound simple. She squinted, doing everything in her power not to look at the ring. If she looked at it, she would put it on. If she put it on, she would never take it off.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

She cocked her chin back toward the Peruvian musicians, who were still holding forth up the promenade, their music still spirited but much fainter now that she and Eduardo were sitting on the patio. “All that stuff you said, about it being traditional in the village for a man to ask a woman an important question. When your father asked your mother to marry him, did he do that?”

Eduardo threw his head back and laughed.

“I’m serious!” Sam told him.

“To tell you the truth, I wanted it to be memorable. So I had to—how do they say it?—punk you.”

Damn. Well, he sure as hell had done that.

She looked at the ring. He saw where her gaze was focused.

“Don’t put it on until you are sure. We will talk and talk and talk. There is no hurry.”

And they talked for hours, until day turned into evening. She raised every logical argument about why they shouldn’t get married. He knocked them all down like bowling pins with a bazooka and painted a portrait of a future worthy of Monet. They would travel the world. He would be a diplomat, she would be a filmmaker. They would speak two languages at home as easily as others spoke one. They would make love every day and twice on Saturdays. They’d have wrinkled sex when they got old and die in each other’s arms when they were both a hundred, because they’d love each other too much to keep on living.

Finally, they were the only customers left. Their original waitress stood by, clearing her throat discreetly.

“We’d better give her a hell of a tip,” Sam decided. She couldn’t believe how long they’d been out there. Or what had brought them there, to see day turn into evening into night. He’d asked her to marry him. That was a ring on the table. That ring was for her.

Charlie Kaufman couldn’t write anything this weird.

“I agree.” But he made no move to do it.

“I have cash.”

Sam went to open her Coach hobo bag, but Eduardo caught her hand. “Do you know what’s in your heart?”

“Yes. A little voice telling me that you’re insane.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much. Look what you have to look forward to. A lifetime of insanity.”

“It sounds …”

How did it sound? It sounded absolutely insane. Absolutely and completely insane. Which is why, finally, Sam took out the ring. Eduardo took the gleaming diamond and slipped it delicately on the ring finger of her left hand.

She adored it. She adored
him
. The ring sparkled on her tanned finger. She loved it and it made her nervous, both at the same time. She wondered if this was how every bride-to-be felt at the moment when the dream of her childhood turned into the reality of her life.

Who was she going to tell first? Her father? Cammie? Or Anna?

This was Hollywood. There was only one answer: conference call.

The Bank of Birnbaum

“I
f you hadn’t spotted this place, there’s no way we’d be here,” Ben exulted as he looked around the dilapidated, neglected interior of Superior Body and Repair. “How incredible would this place be for a nightclub?”

“The question is, how did you arrange for us to get inside?” Anna asked. She peered around the place as well. It had clearly seen better days.

He shrugged. “Money talks, bullshit walks. In my case, I expressed keen interest in the property to the owner and even hinted that I’d fork over the back taxes. It’s amazing how fast they got a set of keys in my hands. It’s been a long time since this place was open. Half the keys were bent.” He grinned as he ran a finger through the thick dust on a dented beige filing cabinet. “Not that there’s anything to steal in here, anyway.”

It was late in the afternoon, two days after they had walked past this abandoned building the night of the
Ben-Hur
party. Now they were inside. Ben had advised that she wear her most beat-up and expendable clothing, because the place was bound to be dusty. He was right—the interior was so sullied with a mixture of dust, filth, and accumulated mouse and pigeon droppings that Anna had immediately donned the mouth-and-nose guard that Ben proffered. She wore an old pair of faded Earl jeans and a black Hanes T-shirt she’d swiped from her father’s drawer.

Ben was similarly attired, but it was hard to tell, because the exterior windows were so caked over with grime that little natural light came through. Yet Anna could see his eyes, and judging from the faraway look in them, what he saw was pure possibility. Anna squinted and tried to imagine the same thing. She
wanted
to see it, for his sake. But it was hard. All she saw were the grungy remnants of all things automotive. She hoped that being here would bring Ben back to reality.

“Over there, by the hydraulic lifts?” Ben’s finger stabbed the air. “That’s where we’ll put the dance floor. But when we get the lifts working, we can have dancers up on the risers. Where the customer waiting area was? How about a mini-theater? Tiny stage, seats for five or ten people to watch the actors, poets, rappers, performing artists, up close and personal.”

“And how about where the gas pumps are now?” Anna prompted. She couldn’t help but be charmed by his enthusiasm, even if she didn’t share it.

Ben thought a moment. “I’m not sure. Maybe we’d take them down altogether and put in an outdoor café.” Then he smacked his palm against the clipboard he was holding. “I know! What if we do car washes for people as part of our valet service? No, wait, we have gorgeous girls in bikinis do the car wash. Clubgoers drop their cars there, see them washed—it’s definite added value.”

“Not to mention eye candy,” Anna teased, though she realized it was actually a very creative idea. She wandered around the interior. Ben was seeing the club. She was seeing work. Lots of it. And money. Even more. “Do you have any idea what this will cost?”

He nodded vigorously. “I talked to my boss at Trieste. He doesn’t see this as competition—too far away—so he ran some numbers for me. He figures two and a half million for renovations and licenses, plus another one point five mil for advertising, staffing, et cetera. I really need four mil to get this place open and make a splash while I’m doing it. I’ve been working on the proposal nonstop for two days.”

Anna smiled sweetly. She’d never see Ben this excited about anything. It was invigorating, in a way. “Well, I must be a club kid at heart, since I found the place, huh?”

“Under the pearls and the pedigree, you mean. Maybe I should add a reading corner. Chekhov, Proust, Balzac, and Dickens. Just for you.”

“Very funny.” She beamed at him, in all his kid-on-Christmas-morning giddy excitement. It was the strangest thing—she hadn’t thought once about Caine or their parting of ways since their conversation at the W Hotel bar. It was as though it had been her and Ben all along, and the Caine thing had never even happened. With Caine out of the picture, it suddenly seemed clear that he’d only been there in the first place to tell Anna what she really needed: a step back from her relationship with Ben. And now that she’d had it, she felt more ready to throw herself into it headlong than she ever had before. True, she wasn’t a thousand percent behind his club idea. The upshot was clear, if it ever came to fruition: It would mean his dropping out of Princeton after only one year. The idea appalled Anna—not that she’d said as much to Ben. Oh sure, he could always go back and finish his degree later. But Anna felt certain that though people said such things, in reality, “later” never came.

Then there was the painful long-distance-romance piece of the equation. It would be one thing for them to travel a few hours every other weekend between his school in Princeton, New Jersey, and her school in New Haven, Connecticut. It would be quite another to keep their relationship going with her in college on the East Coast, and him in L.A. running his nightclub. How was
that
going to work? She’d seen plenty of kids at her high school with so-called long-distance relationships. There were girls with boyfriends at Choate, or Exeter, or St. Paul’s. These relationships inevitably faltered.

She didn’t say any of this to him though. For one thing, she was the one who had pulled back on their relationship, so she really didn’t have the right to question how they’d handle … whatever. For another thing, she definitely didn’t want to dampen his enthusiasm.

“How long do you think it’ll take you to get the place open?” Anna asked. There was a roll of blue paper work towels in the middle of the floor. She tore off three squares and wiped her hands, though she’d been careful not to touch anything.

Before Ben could reply, his cell rang.

“Yeah?” he answered. “Be right there,” he said gruffly, then hung up. “We’ve got a visitor.”

“Who?”

“My dad. Also known as the Bank of Birnbaum. Come on, let’s let him in.”

As they moved to the front door—avoiding several piles of debris along the way—Anna marveled that Dr. Birnbaum was buying into his only son’s plans so easily. Ben had explained that he’d need a hefty loan—or even an outright gift—from his father to make the club happen. And if it was going to cost four mil, well … Anna couldn’t imagine asking her own father for that sum to get a risky new venture off the ground. It simply was not Jonathan Percy’s style to do such a thing, though he habitually bet millions of dollars on hedge funds, stock options, and initial public offerings. And should she ask her mother, Anna knew she’d be greeted by a look that said,
Did the dog just soil the carpet?