How to Be a Grown-up (2 page)

“Sure!”

“I’m so stoked to see you guys. They were both super talented in school,” he explained to Chester, who didn’t seem to care, while I got jostled by people trying to find space where there was none, and searched for the perfect pithy anecdote to sum up my life. “Hey.” He smiled at Jessica. “Still writing?”

Drum roll to the: “Yes, but” . . .

“Yes,” she answered, bracing her smile, “but not creatively.” The nauseating “yes, but” had become the refrain when running into anyone from school where we’d been dancers and painters and poets. Now we were Pilates instructors and makeup artists and tutors. “I work at a website,” Jessica added. “It’s a news aggregate. I’m editing.”

“Cool.” He nodded. “What about you, Rory? Still wielding that nail gun?”

I couldn’t believe he remembered that. Me crawling around the set during tech for
Private Lives
, him with his shirt off making out with Condra (moon in Sanskrit). And I got so distracted by the way he held her face that I nearly nailed him to a flat. “I am now fully licensed. I also have a black belt in power sanding, and in several states I’m allowed to carry a concealed awl.”

He laughed. In my mind, I threw my fists up overhead like a triumphant boxer. “So you’re still doing set design?”

“Actually Jessica rescued me.” I put my arm around her waist. While waiting for her Big Idea for the next Great American Something, Jessica had started writing for women’s magazines. When she burned out on reporting “20 Ways to Make Him Wild” and “I Was a Child Bride,” she eventually got a job at Domino magazine, reasoning, “We all need something to sit on. You can masturbate on your couch, you can menstruate on your couch, I don’t care. It’s no longer my problem. I’m just telling you about the couch.” When her editors needed someone to make a $500 coffee table look like a $5,000 table, she called me. When I realized it paid better than trying to build an entire set out of toilet paper rolls for some shithole black box on Twelfth Avenue, I stayed.

Then the editor from
Domino
moved to
Elle Décor
, where I met a photographer who recommended me to an art director at
Architectural Digest,
and eventually I was freelance styling for photo shoots all over the city and able to move down from Morningside Heights and rent my own tiny studio in a brownstone on West Eightieth Street. I had made it.

You know, except for the my-cross-eyed-assistant-is-engaged-so-what’s-wrong-with-me thing.

“I’m a stylist for shelter magazines,” I told him.

“That sounds like fun.” He smiled kindly.

“Oh, who cares. You’re in
True West!
” I gushed. “And we saw you on
Desperate Housewives
.”

“And
CSI
,” Jessica chimed in.

“And that movie with Vincent Gallo about the hustler.”

“It’s a living,” he demurred.

“No, you’re
famous
,” I rebutted him. I mean, not famous how we’d thought he’d be famous. Maybe famous only to us, but the real kind was clearly only minutes away. All you had to do was look at him.

He leaned down, the tips of his fingers in the small of my back, his lips grazing my ear. “Want to find a table in the back?”

“Let’s get another drink,” Jessica prompted us.

One drink turned into three. A natural raconteur, Blake regaled us with behind-the-scenes stories from the sets he’d been on, until Jessica and I were holding our stomachs from laughing so hard.

Chester looked peevish. “You want to get out of here?” He abruptly stood and addressed Jessica.

“Okay.”

I knew she was being the Pan Am stewardess of wingwomen, but I let her go, feeling instantly nervous to be alone with Blake. “I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing that he’d inadvertently gotten stuck on a date with me.

“You like crepes?” he asked.

We walked across Tompkins Square Park to the all-night stand on Avenue A while he told me how rehearsals were going, how Chester was holding back. We shared a Nutella banana, and I couldn’t feel the cold anymore.

“You have whipped cream on your lip,” he said.

“What?”
Kill me.

“No,” he said, when I failed to get it. And he leaned in and swept it away with the tip of his tongue before pulling back.

It’s hard to believe that fairy tales weren’t written by single women, that it wasn’t really Hannah Christian Andersen. Because there are hours, nights, when we are suspended in such exquisite perfection that we are aware, even as they are happening, that only clogs and soot can await us in the morning.

I took his hand and pulled him toward the curb, my other arm hailing a taxi. “Eightieth and Amsterdam, please.”

I rested my head back on the seat next to his and he looked in my eyes. He placed his hand on my thigh (thankfully skipping my prickly calves) and slowly moved it up. Not speaking. Until his fingers grazed the lace trim of my thong. Which he edged aside and slipped a finger inside me.

He hadn’t even kissed me yet.

As the sun rose, I girded myself for him to be on the sidewalk with the morning edition, but he held me until my alarm. And we had sex again while I should have been at spin class with Claire. I called the calorie expenditure even.

I had never felt anything like what it was with Blake. And it wasn’t just that I’d had eighteen years to build it up in my mind. Blake knew how to touch me—my insteps, the soft skin on the underside of my forearms, behind my ears. And what he didn’t know, he asked, and in a way that dissipated any shyness. Then he wanted to know where I liked to have brunch. We walked through the park, and that night he cooked me dinner. He was just . . . there. Blake Turner, in my butterfly net, in my studio apartment—in me.

“Well?” Val prompted him again as we stood on her dusty driveway under the blazing sun. “Did you get the Netflix thing?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, Blake,” I said, an ache rippling out from my breastbone, “I’m so sorry.”

He picked up his phone from the passenger seat of the convertible. “My agent left the message while I was in the air. Fucking coward.” Blake had started swearing again, having decided that Wynn was ten and had heard it all by now and that Maya was still small enough not to be paying attention. I did not agree, but this didn’t feel like the moment to bring it up.

“Oh, honey, you’ll get the next one,” Val said, her gaze already off him as she pointlessly started moving the luggage around the porch. “You want a frozen banana?”

Ignoring her, he picked up his smile, got out of the car, threw his arm around Wynn’s neck, and pulled him to his side. “You guys have fun?”

“We caught a frog,” Wynn said. “I looked it up. It’s a Northern Leopard.” They told him all about our short-lived adventures in amphibious pet ownership while Blake scooped up Maya and tickled her tummy with his nose, making her squeal.

“Last bathroom visit, guys,” I announced. They ran into the house, and I expected Blake to take me in his arms and squeeze me as he always did after being away. But he just walked past me to open the trunk.

Okay . . .

“So, we’ll talk tonight?” I couldn’t help but seek confirmation.

“Let’s just pack up.”

I nodded, unsure what to do. Step back and let him realize this exercise defied the law of physics? Or try to manage it.

“Wow, we sure have a lot of shit,” he said angrily as he struggled to close the trunk with half our luggage and Wynn’s bike still on the ground.

“Well, we thought we’d have an SUV like we rented to drive up,” I said, stuffing what I could in all the floor spaces. Wynn and I would have to ride with our legs crisscrossed.

“Yeah, it was all they had left.”

“When you made the reservation?” I prompted him.

“I forgot, okay. Look, some of this crap will just have to stay here until next time.”

“No!” Maya burst into tears as she returned to find him unloading one of her Hello Kitty bags filled with stuffed animals. “Not my fwiends!”

“Not that one, Blake. It’s okay, Maya, we won’t leave your friends.”

He scowled and I reopened the trunk. “Let’s just go through everything and figure out what we can leave here.”

“You’re leaving stuff here?” Val asked, coming outside again as if she’d been listening for her cue.

“Yes, is that okay?” I asked, because her son had absented himself from the conversation as he always did when we needed anything of her. Even staying for two weeks to cover the gap between camp and school and not one, as would have been her first choice, had been completely negotiated between Val and myself.

“Well.” She pursed her lips. “I’m having friends up to stay when the leaves change.”

When Blake’s grandparents died, Val had come into a little money; she bought a farmhouse and moved up to Woodstock. Gone were her shoulder pads, her broker’s license, her struggles as a single mother. Instead she studied Reiki, wrote iffy poetry, and threw pots. Everything she’d wished she’d embraced as a teen in the sixties and a big f-you to what Scarsdale had raised her to want: the dentist she landed at Boston College, whom she dutifully supported through his DDS, until he left them for—wait for it—his big-breasted dental hygienist
and
screwed her out of alimony.

Hence the wind chimes. The Don’t Frack with Me bumper stickers. And a deep unwillingness to do anything asked of her.

“That’s not until late October, Val. We’ll get it before then,” I assured her.

“Well, sure.” She looked away, trying to be casual. Subtle. “If you have to.”

I was ready to get in that clown car, hold my husband’s hand over the gearshift, and put a hundred miles between me and Woodstock. “Okay, guys, let’s get going!”

It’s hard to pinpoint on a long, hot family ride in creeping holiday traffic that someone is actively not talking to you, as opposed to just trying to survive, but I started to suspect, sometime around the George Washington Bridge, that Blake was not talking to me.

And we needed to talk. Had needed to talk for months. To keep our Screen Actors Guild health insurance, Blake needed to book $30,000 worth of union jobs each calendar year. His theater work didn’t count toward it, and neither did all the nonunion film stuff he did for friends, but between residuals and Something Always Coming Through, we had squeaked by. I should clarify that none of this would have been possible without The Apartment.

Blake had inherited the rent-controlled lease to the classic six on West Fifty-Sixth Street where Val had decamped with him after the divorce. It was supposed to be transitional, but after Rudy Giuliani came into office and the city went from being a place families fled to to a place you donated sperm, blood, organs,
anything!
to stay—a rent-controlled apartment just blocks from gentrifying Columbus Circle was something no one would give up.

So with our low rent, our union health coverage, our ability to jointly cover child care until our kids started public pre-K, we had just made it, without any financial cushion, from month to month. For ten years. One hundred and twenty months. With any injury, strike, or root canal threatening to submerge us.

So when this year started and he failed to book a single pilot, I began suggesting that we might want to have The Talk. What was the plan? Would we keep doing this until the kids left for the college we couldn’t help pay for? Zeroing out our bank account every month? Waiting for the euphoria when he got a job? The euphoria that was feeling more and more like we were just junkies living from fix to fix.