Lucid (10 page)

“He’s got your eyes,” he observes.

“How kind of you to choose the butt-ugliest animal in the state of Connecticut for that remark.”

He stares at me for a moment. I know I’m blushing, but there’s nowhere to hide in here.

“First of all, I was commenting on the color. Your eyes are green,
and you hardly ever see that in a dog; he must be part Australian shepherd. Second, he’s not ugly in the least. He just doesn’t look like anybody else because he’s a mutt. So he doesn’t meet some conventional standard of what a pretty dog is supposed to look like. And last, because you seem to take it personally, be assured that you meet conventional standards of what a pretty girl is supposed to be.” I feel my face burning, but I can’t tell if it’s because I’m flattered—or pissed off.

“Wow,” I say. “You really know how to compliment a girl. You can be assured that you exceed every standard of how to insult someone.”

He laughs, and for a minute I wonder if he’s laughing
at
me. “Come on. The last thing you need to be defensive about is your appearance. You’re really pretty by any standards.”

I know I should be flattered, I know I should be swooning, but I’m too annoyed. “So what’s the first thing I need to be defensive about?”

“Oh, I’d say the first thirty-seven of the top ten are all your attitude.”

“I should be defensive about my attitude?”

He laughs again. The jerk. “Be defensive. Be very defensive.”

And then…

“Look, I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot. Again. Seeing as how we’re going to be working together.” The cat purrs as James massages her ginger fur and buries his face in her neck.

“Excuse me? We’re going to be what-ing together?” I grab the cat from him and try to put on a collar.

“Didn’t Dr. French tell you that I signed up as a volunteer?”

“What?” The cat squirms, looking for more petting from James.

“Hey, you’re paid staff; you’ll get to boss me around.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” I finally manage to wrangle the cat by scratching her belly with one hand and slipping the collar on with the other.

He smiles a genuinely charming smile and manages without a bit of meanness to say, “You don’t have to be sure. You just have to get used to it.”

He picks up the leash of his unnamed Australian shepherd mutt, scoops up his scrawny ginger cat, and on his way out the door…

“See you Friday night.”

I should be relieved. All my stupid remarks and defensiveness haven’t alienated him. He clearly feels completely comfortable with me, friendly even. So why has my heart collapsed into a black hole?

I want to be special to him.

J
ade clearly has something on her mind as Boris and I escort her to school. We are sharing a blueberry muffin and I’m getting surprisingly full. Usually she scarfs the entire crumble top before I can get my fingers in the bag, but I look down and realize she’s barely taken a bite. I ask her what’s up.

“You wouldn’t really get it.” She sighs. “It’s about a boy.”

The sincerity catches me so off guard that I cough on a bite of muffin.

She shoots me a sideways glance and grabs the bag from my hand. The conversation seems to kick-start her appetite for breakfast, which makes me happy. The girl’s ankles are the size of my wrists. As she plucks the blueberries from the muffin to eat separately, she not-so-delicately reminds me that I have never had a real, actual boyfriend. Nor do I seem to have many friends who are boys who don’t like other boys. I convince her I may still be able to
provide some worthy advice for her dilemma.

Apparently Josh Hinkle, a freckle-faced friend of hers I have met on several occasions, is now “vibe-ing her.” She actually uses those words. She isn’t mutually interested in shifting their status from Just Friends to Boyfriend/Girlfriend (not even sure what that means in second grade, but I know it’s harmless and involves lots of heart stationery and sparkly stickers). She doesn’t want to lose him as a friend or let things get weird.

I tell her just to be honest. To have a direct conversation with him and let him know how she feels.

“Maaagggie!” She giggles, rolling her eyes. “You so don’t get it.”

“What did Nicole say?” I ask.

Jade gets quiet for about half a block and I let her. She doesn’t answer my question. Instead she asks me a different one.

“Why do you think Mom hasn’t found anyone since Daddy?”

“Tough shoes to fill,” is all I can think to say.

By the time we get to school, she has decided she is going to get Josh to see that Tomiko is the girl for him. Problem solved. How very Jane Austen of her. She hugs me tight and ditches me with her mangy mutt.

I head to the dog park near Washington Square so Boris can take care of business. Okay, I may have an ulterior motive. I choose this particular dog park not because it’s convenient, but it was there—and right around this time of day—that I saw Andrew and Carmen. Not that I’m trying to bump into them again or anything, but I still can’t shake the feeling that Andrew and I could be great friends.

Wondering how Jade’s morning at school is going, I must admit that Emma may be right. I don’t have much of a social life. Especially
in comparison to my seven-year-old sought-after sister. But I am certainly never lonely. I don’t know where Emma gets that from.

It’s usually only in bad movies that this happens. I walk through the chain-link fence and see Andrew sitting on a bench, by himself. The moment feels like what I imagine Jade experiences when we play Go Fish and she picks a card from the pile and screams, “I got my wish!”

He’s reading
Catch-22
, one of my dad’s favorites and thereby part of my home-school curriculum. No canine or Carmen or camera in sight. He just seems to be hanging out in the dog park. I walk toward him and he looks up.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says with a pleasant smile, with that endearing lopsided thing. It makes him seem honest and nice but also conveys a scent that we are already conspirators. This happens to me in some roles. Where you meet someone and there’s an instant mutual feeling that the two of you will have a shorthand and a common view of life. I can always use another friend. This guy would be a good one.

“I was counting on your waiting for me. That’s why I came,” I say. “It sure as hell wasn’t because this is Boris’s favorite place to take a crap.”

“Of course not. From the look of him, Boris’s first choice would always be something you’d have to wash or, better, replace. Perhaps some precious keepsake like the tattered blankie your grandma crocheted for you and FedExed from her shtetl in southeastern Armenia, which has comforted you in your bed ever since, being soaked with the tears from the heartbreak of your second husband’s untimely demise at the hands of a charging water buffalo in Cape Town. Not
that they have hands; it’s simply a figure of speech. If not on your blankie, Boris might prefer to crap in an expensive shoe.”

Boris barks on cue. In that nasty, misanthropic way he has.

“I do that too.”

“Interesting. Why would you pick the expensive ones? Speaking personally, I’d just crap in a sneaker.”

“Food for thought. Actually I mean that I make up stories about everything. Kind of compulsively.” I elbow him. “But they’re better than yours.”

He pretends to frown. “And that was my best one ever. It’s going to be really hard to impress you.”

“Which will make it all the more worthwhile.”

“Do you like me enough yet to do me a favor?”

It turns out that when he showed his short film to the eminent and volatile Professor Duncan, the prof told him that his star’s Spanish accent was too strong to be believable as an Inuit. Andrew made the mistake of responding, “So what?” which prompted Duncan to make the issue grade dependent. The answer was supposedly simple, in a school filled with aspiring actresses: just get one to spend half an hour on a dubbing stage redialoguing every one of Carmen’s lines.

The problem with the answer is that since Andrew is dating Carmen and wants to continue to do so, recruiting any of her classmates could result in her discovering that her boyfriend rolled over and trashed her work. The other problem is that instinct told him Professor Duncan doesn’t give a shit about the first problem.

“Do you have an Inuit accent?” he asks hopefully.

“Depends on whether I get Inuit.” It gets a genuine laugh from him.

The Post Production Center at NYU’s Kanbar Institute of Film and Television provides all of the state-of-the-art hardware, software applications, and operational/technical support necessary for the editing needs of an artistic filmmaking community that produces about eight thousand student projects a year. It isn’t like being on a real campus—NYU is just a bunch of buildings around Washington Square—but being in such an amazing facility, surrounded by young creative types going about their work, rekindles the oft-visited dilemma of whether I’d enjoy four years of college.

The half an hour is closer to three. The entire film is Carmen talking to the camera. Every syllable has to be synched perfectly. An accent as extreme as Penelope Cruz’s not only sounds different, it makes your mouth move differently over different lengths of time. Also, Andrew has a lot of potential as a director, not so much as a sound technician. He apologizes a lot for screwing up in about every way possible. Boris is only to blame for one retake.

I do a super job. Partly from professional pride, and partly because I really want to impress the hell out of him. Not that I’m hoping to star in his class projects or anything.

“You know what?” he says. “This actually plays.”

“Right, Director Boy. You now have a C– ceiling on this project.”

He insists on buying me lunch, which I feel weird about because he’s a student and I’m a working girl who can almost certainly afford it more than he can. And as much as I really like the guy without knowing him, the fact is I don’t usually accept favors from people I don’t know. Or from people I do know. Which I tell him, and he points out that I’d just done a favor for him, so don’t give me no freaking guilt trip, woman.

He winds up taking me to a nice place by his apartment in SoHo for moules frites (mussels and fries in this yummy buttery sauce). It is Boris friendly and we sit outside watching busy shoppers bustle along the street. Boris yaps at some heels and Andrew and I trade approximately 400,000 imaginary stories about everyone eating, serving, walking by our table or through our imaginations. He shows potential.

He remarks that an old woman in a fedora dragging a purple roller bag behind her not only sells hallucinogenic mushrooms out of cookie tins but is Aaron Jerome’s grandmother and goes to all his shows. I have no idea who Aaron Jerome is. Andrew’s eyes get wide in mock disbelief. Aaron Jerome is SBTRKT, he tells me. Still not computing. He explains that Aaron, or SBwhatever, is some great DJ from London. Andrew reveals he has a show on WNYU (from midnight to 3 a.m. on Tuesdays, not primetime broadcast, but nonetheless…) and is a music junkie. Which in some cases can translate to too hip to be actually cool. But on Andrew it works because he’s a total dork about it, so it’s like reverse cool.

However, no one’s perfect, particularly in the cool department. Just as my frites disappear and I’m reaching onto his plate, in walks Carmen. Turns out she’s been desperately looking for him in his favorite lunch spots because she lost her key to his place and needs to retrieve her sides to rehearse. Apparently, his iPhone died a surprising and secret death this morning. I shoot him a look, but he pretends not to notice.

At first, she doesn’t acknowledge me at all. Then, without looking at me, “Thanks for babysitting my boyfriend. I like that top.” She turns to me. And with the most comfortable smile, “Did you wear it just for him?”

“Actually, just for you.” The words fly out of my mouth before I have a chance to think twice. “Imagine my heartbreak when you weren’t around.”

She scrutinizes me. “Being a fellow actress, I can imagine even more than that.”

“Should I be scared of you? Because if you’re going to cut me, please not the face.” At which point she laughs long and hard and phony. Andrew clocks it all, and his face is oddly neutral. Which is interesting.

As she pockets his keys, “So what’s up with you guys?”

“Up?” Andrew says in only a slightly squeaky voice. “We bumped into each other at the park and…”

“I’m buying him lunch to pay him back for a favor.”

“I hope he was worth it,” Carmen says straight back.

“I’ll find out tonight, right, Andy?” Yes, it is a test. I’m hoping he has the guts to tease her a little.

“Looking forward to it,” he says brightly. I breathe an inward sigh of relief that he came through. I really don’t want to be disappointed in this guy. Now the actress is worried. So I say, “Tonight’s the audition he’s been helping me rehearse for.”

Her relief is pathetically transparent. No, this skinny kid isn’t stealing her boyfriend. Like she really should’ve been worried. The thing you learn rather young is that a spicy bombshell always holds a trump card where men are concerned.

She gives Andrew the forty-five-minute kiss I expect her to. I’ve seen shorter weddings. Classier, too. When she is sure she’s staked her claim, she shocks me by grabbing my face and kissing me goodbye. On the mouth. I’m still blinking by the time she disappears through the door.

He is smiling, we are getting along, so why am I getting this unpleasant feeling in my stomach?

“She’s quite a character”—he grins—“more than a handful.”

And then…

“Why do we love who we love? It’s just so inexplicable, huh?”

“My very thought.”

And with that I know what the feeling is in my stomach. I want Andrew to want to be with me. I don’t know what I’d do if he did, but I sure don’t like hearing about how much he loves Carmen. I’m a girl. And I want the guy across the table to want me with every beat of his heart.

The Apple store is just down the street, so I tag along as we wait this obscene length of time for a Genius to tell us the phone is broken. Once we officially establish the obvious, we have to wait for an iPhone Specialist to set up his new one. So we get on computers, watch a selection of cats farting on YouTube, one of whom can actually hiccup at the same time. He (or she, I didn’t get a good look) is my favorite.