Only in the Movies (6 page)

“Address?” I asked, pretending to consult my list.

Alba smirked again. “Nice try.”

“Phone number?”

“No chance, Mr. Jake Blanchard. I hear the school is putting on
R and J
this year,” she said, changing the subject.

“That’s right. Not the whole thing, though. A few scenes.”

“I’m going to try out for the part of Juliet.”

You’d get it without an audition if I was the director, I thought. “Great,” I replied lamely. “I’m doing the set.”

“Really?”

“I’m the school’s official set designer and builder. Next, your post-graduation plans,” I said, my pen poised like Locheed taking attendance.

“Theatre studies at university. Acting courses. You?”

“I want to take screenplay writing.”

“Really?” she said again. “What’s your favourite movie?”

“
Casablanca
.”

“That’s an oldie,” she said, surprised again. “Black and white. And it’s romantic. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.” She smiled warmly. She mimicked Bogey’s voice—not very well: “Play it again, Sham.”

“He didn’t say that,” I corrected. “He said, ‘You played it for her, and you can play it for me.’”

“Hey, you’re pretty good.”

No, I’m not, I thought. Bogey would know what to say now. He’d do that thing with the corners of his mouth, then light a cigarette with a wooden match. He’d come up with
a snappy line or two and have this gorgeous creature staring into his eyes, lost in admiration. He wouldn’t feel like he was walking through a minefield, terrified of tripping over his own dialogue and making a fool of himself.

“‘
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine!
’” I heard him say in my mind’s ear. Then I realized I had said the words out loud.

“You’re not going to quote the whole movie at me, are you?”

“Sorry. Er, there are more questions,” I said, feeling myself blush.

We traded answers to the mostly humdrum questions on the list. I got the feeling she had lost interest in the conversation. Her eyes roamed the classroom. Panofsky had given me three Meaningful Looks already, trying to hurry us up.

“Last one,” I said. “The quality you most admire in the opposite sex.”

Alba didn’t answer right away this time. She glanced into a corner of the room. She seemed to consider her reply. “All right. A poetic soul.”

“Seriously?” I replied, searching her face for signs of mockery.

“I could never love a man who couldn’t express his heart poetically,” she said, shifting her gaze to me. “He’d have to be very articulate and sensitive, and talk to me in beautiful language.”

And not start a conversation by staring at your chest, I thought.

“Which, by the way, leaves out most guys I’ve met.”

We were silent for a moment.

“Your turn.” Alba broke the stillness. “The thing you most admire in the opposite sex. As if I don’t know,” she smirked.

“Um …”

“Yes? Go on.”

“A profound commitment to world peace,” I said.

The left corner of her beautiful mouth twisted a little and an amused look came into her eyes.

“And nice boobs,” I added.

But the joke crash-landed. Alba Magdalena Benedetti
tsked
, rose gracefully from her chair, and walked away.

I
LEFT DRAMA CLASS THAT MORNING
in a daze, as if my senses had been wrapped in cotton and my brain had slipped out of gear. I bumped into Vanni in the hall, knocking her books out of her arms and all over the floor.

“Ach! You great lumbering oaf,” she complained.

“Eh?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

When I began to focus, I found her standing in front of me as kids streamed past us, her hand on my arm and an expectant look on her face.

“You look like you’ve just returned from electroshock therapy,” she said.

“Eh?”

“Let me rephrase the question. How was the lobotomy?”

“The lob—?”

Vanni peered up into my face. Pinched my chin between
thumb and forefinger. Turned my head from side to side.

“Hmm,” she said.

“Hmm what?”

“You can’t even see the scars.”

“Very funny,” I said.

Vanni grabbed me by the arm. “Come on. We need to find a quieter location.”

She led me out of the school and across the road to a joint called the Blue Note. By night it was a jazz and R & B club with a seedy reputation. Instant played there sometimes when one of the bands needed a saxophonist. By day it was a rundown restaurant that specialized in trendy vegetarian concoctions whose descriptions on the dusty menu were more than enough to put me off—salads featuring seeds, sprouts and roots; soups heavy on beans and spices with unpronounceable names; and vaguely Asian treats like oily spring rolls, samosas and flatbreads.

There were only a few customers about, hunched over their tables as if guarding their food. Vanni tugged me toward a table by the window. The server was a skinny, surly-looking guy with a paper chef’s hat that didn’t quite hide his oily black hair.

“Yeah?” he greeted us, flipping pages on his order pad.

Vanni asked for a samosa with tamarind chutney and a cup of chai.

“What about you?” the server demanded, scratching his neck with the butt-end of his pencil.

“Chips with beef gravy and a cherry cola,” I said. “A side order of deep-fried pork rinds.”

“Not on the menu,” the guy replied, looking above my head through the greasy window.

“Okay. Let’s see … a dozen buffalo wings, extra hot. Hold the mayo.”

This time he just shook his head. Vanni gave me a look. I relented.

“Double-shot cappuccino and a piece of chocolate cake. Baked sometime this century.”

He nodded, made a note and wandered off.

“Guess what?” Vanni began, almost gushing.

By now I had returned to the real world after my encounter with the luscious girl with the beautiful name, so I noticed that Vanni’s face glowed with excitement. Her dark eyes danced. Her grin was a mile wide under her overdeveloped nose.

“You really want me to guess?” I asked.

“No. I want to tell you, but first you have to swear to keep this a secret.”

I raised my hand. “Girl Guide’s honour,” I intoned solemnly. “May my head be severed from my body with a rusty axe if I breathe a word. May my teeth fall out the day before Thanksgiving. May—”

“You’re holding up the wrong hand.”

The reappearance of our friendly server interrupted her. He put his tray on the table next to ours and set Vanni’s order before her. In front of me he banged down a small plate with a tiny wedge of chocolate cake looking lost in the middle. He delivered my cappuccino as if he had palsy—a third of the coffee slopped over into the saucer.

“Enjoy,” he sneered as he left with his tray.

The cappuccino was tasty. “So, your news,” I said.

“I’m going to be published in a poetry anthology!” Vanni declared. “Five of my poems. Hardcover. Clothbound!”

“That’s amazing,” I said. I had known she wrote poetry, but I’d had no idea she was this serious. “That’s really hard, isn’t it, to get published?”

“’Tis. And it’s not a vanity press, either, where you pay for the printing and all that yourself. It’s the real thing. This is Pentameter Press. They’re an old, well-known company. I’ve had poems in magazines before—quite a few of them—but this is the big time.”

“And you want to keep this a secret?”

“I don’t need the ridicule I’ll get if people around the school find out.”

She was right. The worst crime was to look conceited.

I’m not very perceptive most of the time, but I realized as I watched Vanni’s dark eyes sparkle that she was offering me a kind of gift. Not just her trust that I would keep her secret—she was sharing her happiness in her achievement.

“What’s it called, and where can I buy a copy?”

“It doesn’t come out for a few months. It’s called
Water Beads
, from the title of one of my poems. And you can’t buy a copy. I’m going to give you one.”

“
Water Beads
, eh?” I tapped the tines of my fork against the side of my plate. “Well, I guess a book of poems doesn’t
have
to have a snappy title.”

Vanni laughed and took a sip of her chai. She looked at me playfully over the rim of her cup. “There’s a story there.”

“Gee, I wonder if I could possibly persuade you to tell it.”

“My favourite poet is—”

“Seamus Heaney. You told me.”

“Right. You knew that. But what you didn’t know is that he’s the reason I decided to be a poet. One of his poems is called ‘The Railway Children,’ and it’s about these kids lying
on a high embankment beside the train tracks, looking at the telegraph wires after a shower. There are raindrops suspended all along the wires, like beads, full of light, and the kids think that the words in the telegrams people send are carried along the wires inside the raindrops. Isn’t that a beautiful image? The speaker says, ‘We were small and thought we knew nothing worth knowing.’ That’s
exactly
how little kids think, isn’t it? The poem’s lovely, but it also tells us something
true
. And it’s only thirteen lines long.”

While Vanni talked, I ate my cake and drank my coffee. She had let her samosa and chai get cold, carried away as she was with her exciting news, and I recognized not for the first time that one of the reasons we were friends was that in at least one respect we were similar. She loved poetry and I loved movies. The difference was that where I was unfocused, full of plans and aspirations but short on production, she had done something about her dreams.

I thought about Vanni’s words and the stumbling attempt I had made with Alba to explain why I wanted to create movies, not just watch them. Okay, I had been trying to impress her—especially after she caught me scoping out her physical charms—but I had meant what I said. Only I was no good at expressing myself in words—especially compared to Vanni. Alba had said she would only be attracted to a man who could convey his thoughts and feelings poetically. What chance, I thought morosely, did an inarticulate clod like me have?

Bing!

“Hey,” I said. “I have an idea.”

“Really? Should I alert the media?”

“It’s brilliant!” I smiled.

“What? You look like the wolf after he swallowed Grandma.”

“I have to think about this. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, let’s celebrate your good news. How about another cup of chai?”

“Well, aren’t you the big spender.”

L
IKE MOST BULLIES
, the Vulture held a grudging respect for anyone who stood up to him. Within a week or so of Vanni’s noisy arrival into our English class, Vanni and he had called an unspoken ceasefire, and had coexisted ever since. So I wasn’t surprised when, a couple of days after Vanni’s big announcement in the Blue Note, he directed his raptor gaze at her from behind his lectern.

“Turn to page 89,” he told us as soon as he had snapped the cap onto his fountain pen and closed the attendance book. “Today you meet James Joyce, Ireland’s greatest writer.”

I glanced at Vanni, saw her brows clench. Here we go, I thought. She’s going to defend her precious Seamus Heaney.

But Locheed beat her to the punch. “Vanni, perhaps you’d read ‘Araby’ to us. Your Irish accent will enhance the experience for the class.” It was as close to a compliment as Locheed would ever get.

So Vanni began to read, and her lyrical voice, far from crashing through the lines like most of us did when the Vulture called on us to take our turn, seemed to lift the words off the page. I settled back. Outside, the sun was bright on the coloured leaves of the maples, a light breeze glided over the window sill into the room, and Vanni took us to the winter-dark dead-end Dublin street where the boy in the story talked about Mangan’s sister. As he described himself watching her across the road on her porch, I thought about Alba, her graceful form, her unblemished skin, the curve of her lips. That morning I had caught sight of her in the clamorous sea of bodies as she moved down the crowded hall away from me. She had been wearing a long rose-coloured dress and had plaited her hair into a single gold braid. “‘
Her dress swung as she moved her body
,’” Vanni read, as if she was inside my head, “‘
and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side
.’” The vision of Alba brought an ache—a deep, hollowed-out sense of longing. “‘
And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood
.’”

The kid in the story liked to watch Mangan’s sister secretly from his window. His love for her was like a chalice that he carried with great care through the dirty, thronging streets of Dublin. It was of a higher quality, brighter and purer, than the world he lived in. “‘My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.’”

I had never heard love described the way he talked about it, as something refined and spotless. On TV, in commercials and in movies, love was sex—panting, sweat, sloppy wet kisses, the mindless tearing off of clothing. I was no puritan, but I had always secretly believed that there had to be more
to love than clanking, preprogrammed biological urges and actions. The love we saw in the media was selfish and egotistical, a kind of mutual exploitation. Wasn’t love supposed to be the opposite—generous and liberating?