Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (24 page)

I shake the writer's hand. “I'm not Jewish,” I mutter to Harvey. I don't think I'm even 5 percent Jewish.

“Harvey tells me you're a screenwriter.” I want to die. He's telling screenwriters I'm a screenwriter? Instead of dying, I pass Harvey his food and cutlery.

“Oh. Well, no. I mean, I write, but I haven't written a script yet.” Please stop asking me questions about me. I don't know what I'm doing yet! I'm the arrow shooter's assistant.

Bryan furrows his red brow, and I spot little dandruff flakes there. “Are you going to film school?” he asks.

Oh God. I involuntarily roll forward onto my toes, clasping my hands together. I realize I'm trying to appear larger, like some sort of animal tactic, to stop myself from feeling so small and unsuccessful. This instant realization only makes my subsequent facial expressions and movements more awkward to complete.

“No.” I pull my mouth to the side and slam my heels back into the soft ground. “I'm not going to film school.”

Bryan nods, then sweeps his arm dramatically in the air. “It was raining when I left Los Angeles this morning. It isn't raining here. Odd, since it's usually the other way around.”

I look over at Harvey to make sure he has everything he needs for lunch, hoping I've forgotten something so I can leave. Bryan continues the dramatics in a gray suit that's straight out of 1986. Of all the three hundred or more people here, he's the only one wearing a suit. It's like he's forgotten he's writing for a show set in the 1800s and shot in the middle of nowhere on a small western boomtown set. Instead he's dressed like a rich guy from
Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

“The rain was so beautiful in the Pacific Palisades. Have you been to the Pacific Palisades, Kelly?” The sound of my name forces me to look away from the flakes on his shoulders and back to his face. Bryan gently bats a fly away from his head.

“No, I haven't. I've been to LA. But I haven't been . . .”

“
Oh!
” He clutches his chest and puts on his Ray-Bans, leaning onto Harvey's makeshift desk. I look down at Harvey; he has an entire meatball in his mouth. “OH, IT'S DIVINE!” Bryan continues. “The mist, the smell, driving my car through the winding hills with the green, slick, lush forests passing me by . . . Heavenly.”

An indifferent-looking PA comes over the ridge of the hill. “Bryan, I'm ready to take you down to the set.”

“WONDERFUL!” Bryan shouts, stepping away from the desk and leaning so close to me I fear I may inhale his shoulder flakes. “I hope to see you both later at the Sutton,” he whispers. “And you must see the Palisades in the rain, Kelly. You must.” He wags a finger at me and walks backward toward the PA, who is mouthing, “
Kill me,
” at me over Bryan's shoulder. I watch them walk across the field and then look down at the bow and arrow at my fingertips, wondering if I could.

As they disappear beneath the ridge, I turn back to Harvey. “Harvey, that guy was so LA.”

Harvey grabs a napkin and wipes a lather of grease and sauce from his meatball-filled face. A crumble of ground beef drops from his mouth. “Hey, I'm LA too!” he says.

It's raining again. It's five in the afternoon. Every day at five o'clock, Harvey plays life-sized chess in a West Vancouver mall with the Persians
.
He's never late for this. The Persians are all at least fifty. They do not make eye contact with me. They offer me their seats. They are polite and soft-spoken, wearing modest robes and headdresses that are the antithesis of Harvey's black uniform. I was embarrassed at first to loiter around a large group of men in the middle of a mall, straddling chess pieces as they moved them around a painted floor. But now I just pretend they're all handicapped people and I'm the charge nurse keeping them safe. I wait for calls on Harvey's cell phone. I stare at mall people. I kill time.

“Hey, Kel,” he shouts to get my attention. The sound echoes through the marble mall as he stands between a giant bishop and an eighty-year-old Iranian in a light-blue robe. “There's no way we're the only Jews in here, right?”

“I'm not Jewish,” I mutter. “Harvey, we have to leave now if we want to get over the bridge and to the Sutton Place for drinks.”

Harvey claps his smallish hands together and points at the old Iranian. “I'll get your queen tomorrow!”

“Harvey, why do you like hunting so much?” I ask as we hit traffic on the bridge. “I mean, do you eat the meat?”

“What are you?” he asks, digging away at his teeth with a toothpick. “Some animal activist?”

“Well, no. But if I weren't so selfish and lazy, I would be an activist for something.”

“Oh,
something
.” He chuckles.

“Yeah, probably hungry or homeless kids or the elderly. Something, though. Not animals. Maslow's hierarchy stuff. I'd start at the bottom.”

Harvey tucks the toothpick behind his ear. “Huh?”

“Never mind. Do you think I should act or write?”

“Act. Hands down. More money. Get on the screen.”

“But I want to write.”

“Then why the shit are you asking?”

Harvey knows big people. He takes me for drinks with a couple of directors, Michael and Christopher, and of course dandered Bryan. I take fake notes for Harvey. They talk about actors: Milla Jovovich (very easily directed), Benicio Del Toro (a genius).

Michael asks if I'm an actor.

“Yes. Well, I
can
act. I've been trained. At the Citadel Theatre school when I was a child.” Dear God, shut up.
Trained?
Please stop asking me questions about myself.

“Any film?”

“No.”

“Did Harvey find you in film school?”

“She's not in film school,” Bryan says, pinching his eyes closed for effect and putting his drink back on the table. His hand twirls out, palm up. His fingers flitter as he speaks, like he's typing in the air. Bryan is my favorite.

“So you're an enigma! You're cute, you can act, but you don't?” Christopher says, grinning to himself.

“She should be in movies. She's got the big head,” Harvey says, sipping his Coke.

“Big head. Yeah, I've heard that. Big head, short body.”
Shut up.

Michael shoos Harvey off with his hand. “Forget Harvey, he's fucking with you. You should get Harvey to put you in his show. You'd be great! Hey look, David is here! DAVID!”

“Yeah, maybe.” Shut up, Kelly.

I excuse myself and go to the ladies' room. I walk by a table of beautiful girls.

“Look at her sweater,” the one wearing a fur-and-denim jacket says loudly enough for me to hear while she points at my rayon sweater. It's a bit of a weird thing, being me—the girl in a rayon sweater who lives at a Travelodge and spends her nights on GeoCities writing short stories—in a place like this. A place where a grubby-looking Benicio Del Toro is sitting at a table I'm about to pass, surrounded by beautiful, young, leggy girls. Still, he looks at me longer than he should, causing one of his leggy girls to sneer at my rayon sweater, again.

When I return, I'm pretty sure David is talking about his new sci-fi where gooey people get plugged into walls or something. It sounds retarded.

I tell Harvey I'm leaving.

“What? Truly? Is it because I keep teasing you about being Jewish? I was just doing it while you were gone.”

“I'm tired. It's eleven
P.M.
”

“Okay. Everyone, Kelly is leaving. Say good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Kelly.”

Bryan leans over, takes my hand and kisses it.

“You are a great writer, Kelly. You will be great. I'll see you next time.”

Full of shit, all of them. Bryan hasn't even read my thoughts on Britney Spears.

As I walk away, I hear Harvey. “Hey! My show came in second last week! Some show called
The Sopranos
came in first. You guys ever hear of that?”

I wince.

Lovable dumb fuck.

Tonight, leaving the Sutton Place for the Travelodge feels more dramatic than it has any other time I've made this trip, which is a lot of times. Tonight, it feels symbolic. It feels like I'm in a 1990s indie film, some role Parker Posey took that no one ever noticed. I finally realize what I want to be: the guy with the twirly hand. I don't want to be the anxiety-ridden actress or the producer's assistant. I really do want to be Bryan, dandruff and all. To swoop into another country, wearing the wrong outfit, just to watch my writing come alive. To be dramatic about everything for a living and not even care about my flaky scalp.

I drive through the rain, opening the window and feeling the mist. I pass the wet green trees and pretend I'm fabulous Bryan in the Pacific Palisades, all the way back to my sandwich grill in the Travelodge.

THE BACKUP
PLAN

Weeks after having my first kid, I had a realization.

Everything had been smooth sailing: I was twenty-three and was in a great three-and-a-half-year relationship with James. That is, until I watched Oprah. There's a good reason a lot of men don't like Oprah: she's an instigator of change. Change is rarely something people greet with a hearty “Oh, this will be great! Can't wait!”

Oprah's guest that day was this fifty-year-old widow who didn't know how to manage money, or write a résumé, or
anything
, because her husband had managed everything while he was alive. Her only job until his death was the kids.

I panicked. “James!” I cried. “If you died, I'd be single. I'd be a single mom. What the hell would I do for a living? Become a waitress? I can't be a single mom waitress! I'm not Rosie Perez.” I paced around the room, then went over to the couch, where I began frantically folding tiny baby Onesies. But they were all so tiny and easy to fold that I finished immediately, and that left me with nothing else to focus on, and I started in on James again. “I can't work any kind of job that involves a schedule. And my high school diploma is only good for entry into two professions—waitress or janitor. How good is your life insurance?”

“I don't know,” he said nonchalantly. “I think you'd get, like, fifty thousand bucks or something.” Then he turned on the blender to make a goddamn smoothie, as if this wasn't the worst news I'd ever heard in my life.

I walked over to baby Salinger in her swing and started cranking it maniacally, like some methed-out baggage handler.

“That isn't Space Mountain, Kelly. Stop cranking,” James said.

I had a high school education and I had just had my first child. I'd watched enough Lifetime to know this put me in a shit position. I was one dead husband away from landing flat on my back turning tricks, or dead in a bathtub in Detroit.

I grabbed my keys, headed for the door, and shouted:

“I NEED A BACKUP PLAN!”

I drove over to the grocery store and picked up every information booklet from all the post-secondary education and vocational schools in the city.

I had to get myself a profession. But not just any profession. Here's what I needed:

1.   Something that didn't take very long to train for. James could die anytime.

2.   Something cool. I just don't think I could ever do a secretary/admin job. Sorry, all you struggling admins, but I've done it, and I'd rather shovel horseshit. I mean, I'm just no good at it. Nowhere near as good as you are.

The local technical school had the fastest programs (less than eighteen months) and promised the highest-paying jobs for its graduates (because they got to do, you know, technical stuff). I sat down in the grocery store café with the senior citizens and flipped through the pages, looking for something that seemed right for me.

DENTAL ASSISTANCE

Let me be clear about something. There's nothing more important to me than dental health. I'm a clean girl. I've had talk-too-close-gross-people near me and I've smelled decay. I would never, as an alive person, allow someone to smell decay on my breath.

But there was no way I was doing teeth. I dry heave when I floss my
own
teeth. Don't get me wrong, I won't judge you for your bad teeth. Rather, I blame your parents for not providing you with the structure any child needs to learn about oral hygiene and follow through on all that. I just can't touch teeth myself. I can't inspect them, I can't pick or scrape at them. I mean, if you ever want me to run away screaming, drag your nails across a chalkboard or scrape at my dry teeth with something metal. If I were a dental assistant, the first time I peered into a mouth full of decay, or leftover food, I'd barf right into it.

MEDICAL LAB TECHNOLOGY

Working in a lab, on the other hand, didn't seem so terrible. I loved my microscope kit when I was six. How would it feel to be the first person to find out someone had brain cancer? Awesome or horrifying? I might want to find out how it feels to see the cancer first, to sit back in my chair and think,
By GOD, I'm the only one who knows!

I know, I'm a terrible person. But I'm sure there are lots of terrible people like me in labs thinking the exact same thing. Labs, after all, are for doctor rejects. For people who like to work alone. Who really grows up and wants to dip little slips of paper into test tubes full of pee? Who wants to cut into slabs of old ladies' shit looking for parasites? Freaks, that's who.

I couldn't spend my early days as a widow hanging out with freaks and old-lady shit.

REHABILITATION ASSISTANCE

Now this? This looked good. Maybe I wouldn't even have to go to school. I'd watched plenty of rehab shows. I was drunk for two years once. But then I read the description of the program:

Medical advances permit a growing number of children and adults to live successfully with disabilities. Under the supervision of an occupational therapist or physical therapist, the therapy assistant helps clients with injuries and disabilities regain their physical, mental, and social abilities, allowing them to be active participants in society. Assistants also support the clinic's administration by managing therapeutic supplies and maintaining equipment.