The Decent Proposal (5 page)

Mike switched from the ab roller to an exercise ball. She decided to text him instead, knowing he'd write back immediately:

            
y u gotta dis me like that yo?

(They often affected a faux “street” patois in their informal communications, which she found a little exhausting, if not embarrassing. But there was no breaking the pattern now.)

            
chill

he wrote back a few seconds later,

            
was thinking deep thoughts

            
like what

            
like y all asians r such bad drivers oops . . . awkwd

            
r u DRIVING?!

It was almost a lost cause at this point, but she still tried to get him to put away his phone whenever he was driving.

            
. . . maybe . . . dentist appt, woohoo obamcre!! but stopped at light awl good

            
going now dumbass have fun singing your little <3 out

She knew he loved singing along to his horrendously cheesy homemade mix CDs. When he was drunk enough, he even did it in front of her.

She headed to the locker room to shower and change.

EVEN WITH TRAFFIC,
Mike's commute was gloriously brief, and today she flew down Washington Boulevard. Square Peg Pictures had been in Culver City since 2001, before it was a hip neighborhood. The founding partner loved to tell the story of how the Chamber of Commerce brought cookies to their door, thrilled that a legitimate business had set up shop adjacent to a cockfighting and prostitution ring fronting as a bar on one side, and a leather sweatshop on the other. But a year ago the debut of a swanky restaurant across the street had been written up in the
New York Times
, and now the leather sweatshop was the Pilates Sweatshop. Culver City had its own strip now—a restaurant row of fusion eateries with backlit bars where young professionals sampled fancy grub and drank overpriced cocktails with punny names—and though Mike hated being party to the gentrification process, she had to admit the new Culver City was much more her speed than the old one.

She pulled into the gravel lot and broke sharply, crossing herself with lightning speed while descending from her Jeep. Since college, she'd made amends with the Korean Presbyterians, and come back to them on her own terms. Each Sunday she attended a church service in Koreatown, and if she concentrated hard enough while singing the hymns, eyes on the cross, she could still feel the light of Jesus inside her like when she was a little girl. Mike was grateful for her religious upbringing; now more than ever, she prided herself on not having plunged into the first-generation abyss of resenting her immigrant parents' failure to conform to white American standards. A few months ago, her father had been diagnosed with Parkinson's, and the disease was progressing more rapidly than expected.

Something small and hard burned inside her at the thought
of her quiet and dignified father dying, radiating a pain she knew would consume her if she gave it free rein. She slammed her car door much harder than necessary, and turned resolutely to her office building.

Mike wanted desperately to help him, but while she was capable of supporting herself, she had no money to spare. If she hadn't been able to expense all her social activities (dinner, drinks, movies, books, gas, even valet parking), which were all tangentially related to her job in the entertainment industry, she wouldn't have been able to go anywhere or do much of anything. It was outrageous, but while she maintained a swanky L.A. lifestyle wherein blowing several hundred dollars in a single night at some douchey club was no big deal, she had no way of helping her parents pay for the state-of-the-art surgery (terrifyingly called “deep brain stimulation”) that might help keep her father's disease at bay as long as possible. Mike's parents had sacrificed for years to send their only child to Amherst without any student loans, and never once did they press her to become a lawyer, doctor, or engineer as so many other immigrant parents did. She'd reaped all the benefit and now was powerless to share any of the burden—other than the emotional one she placed on herself.

I'm a bad daughter
, she thought, physically shaking away the emotion while entering her office, doing her best to force the poison out of her system. No one at Square Peg knew about her father, just as they had no idea about her religiosity. The breezy small talk that made up the bulk of her day was too trifling for such weighty concerns. Richard was the only one who knew, and he knew everything. Whenever they spoke on Sunday afternoons he asked, “How'd church go?” and she always answered, “Fine,” or, “It was cool,” but they both knew something significant lay beneath the routine exchange. In the last few months he'd taken to adding a follow-up question, “How's your dad?” and she usually answered the same way.

Later that morning, she direct-messaged him on Twitter:

            
drks/din later?

His reply came almost simultaneously:

            
pls

            
rush st?

There was no response, so she wrote again:

            
i came to u last time . . .

            
fine

he wrote back a few seconds later.

Mike grinned.

            
8p don't be late like ujzh

She kept the window open. In the afternoon, while a client complained to her about his studio quote not being high enough, she reached out to him:

been sitting on the f'ing fone for half an hour with this whiny SOB.

            
ugh

he responded, and it truly helped. She felt better, felt heard.

But she wanted more.

In the seven years since college, she had certainly sown her wild oats. Mike was glad for all the experiences whipped up inside her whirlwind twenties, and she had stored each of them away like a wise, industrious ant for the lean times to come.
At this point she had more than enough to feast on: one-night stands for the storybooks, pickup lines so bad they deserved a special section in Ripley's, relationships that ran the gamut from short and disastrous to medium and middling to long with epic proportions, including one man who was delectably French and actually
proposed
to her, thereby forcing her to acknowledge she didn't love him at all. She had zero regrets, but she was tired. The oats had grown; it was time to reap them. Though she could barely admit it to herself, it was such a depressing thought, her father's diagnosis had spurred her to settle down in a way her mother's gentle (sometimes not so gentle) prodding never could: as a reminder both that life
in general
was short and that
his
life was short, and that if he was ever going to witness his only child getting married, ever going to meet at least one of his grandchildren, she'd better get a move on. And as much as she had avoided the issue till now, she knew without the aid of any fountains that the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with was the same person who watched old
Friends
episodes with her after every breakup (better than any comfort food, plus fewer calories); the boy who had become a handsome man by the end of college exactly as she had predicted, but who had continued to grow better-looking with the passing of each year so that now, on the verge of thirty, his physical beauty at times downright alarmed her; the ex she had so foolishly, idiotically discarded.

There was no question: she was majorly, totally, butt-crazy in love with Richard Baumbach.

True, this love was mixed up with a separate yet similar flavor: the love between best friends. Maybe this was why it had taken so long to recognize. It was like blending two grape varieties into one fine, delicately flavored wine and being expected to taste them both in a single quaff—not impossible, but requiring a mature, sensitive palate. For the greater part of her
twenties she'd simply been swilling it, getting drunk off it, and it had been fun, but it was also a mess. Now she was ready to
appreciate
what she had, to do the whole glass-swirl/nose-dip/mouth-swish thing without even laughing, to treat it all as solemnly as it deserved.

But was she too late? Suddenly she found herself trapped inside a real-life
My Best Friend's Wedding
, playing  Julia Roberts to his Dermot Mulroney with one key difference. The opening of that movie had always rung false to her—Julia waxing eloquent about some dumb pact she and her best friend had made to marry by a certain age. The audience was supposed to believe that Julia had been determined to marry him
before
she found out he was going to marry somebody else. The real way it would have happened, of course, was that she wouldn't have realized he was the one
until
learning about the other girl. It was an ugly emotion—the same impulse by which a child abandons a toy and wants it back only when her younger sibling shows interest:
you can't have it; it's mine!
Mike could smell the studio note a mile away: “we can't have our heroine be so unlikable.” It was a good note. Because it was exactly how she had reacted when Richard told her about the Decent Proposal. And she had been able to experience firsthand what a cheap and ugly feeling it was.

Richard, feckless and freewheeling, incapable of holding down a relationship in all the years since she'd broken up with him—as if he, too, had been waiting till she simply came to her senses and took him back—was suddenly no longer available to her. It was easy to disregard all his one-night stands with whatever pair of tits he happened to be staring at when the bar lights came up (she teased him constantly about his unrepentantly slutty ways). But the Decent Proposal was not so easily dismissed. It was, after all, a
decent
proposal, and the fact that she didn't quite know what to make of it was the reddest flag of all. Her toy was in danger of being snatched away, and she wanted it.

But as unworthy as the impulse was, the emotion behind it was pure; it was true. She loved him with a grown-up, romantic love she could finally taste on its own. There was no other man for her. She was sure of it.

Now she just had to figure out how to tell him all this, how to make him see—no easy matter for two people who knew each other as well as they did. They actually joked sometimes about getting back together someday; she was fairly sure
My Best Friend's Wedding
had even come up, albeit facetiously. Resorting to trickery or an over-the-top gesture was unthinkable, so Mike was, uncharacteristically, at a loss as to how to proceed. For now she would bide her time, and trust herself to recognize when the moment was right—and when it was, to act with the pinpoint precision that moment required.

RUSH STREET WAS
a staple of the gentrified Culver City strip, a Chicago-themed restaurant with a bar on one side and a bank of TVs behind it that played whatever Bulls, Bears, Cubs, or White Sox game happened to be on. The vibe was upscale, with high ceilings and muted lighting, but the Chicago expats got rowdy sometimes, and once, Mike actually saw a man pee drunkenly in front of the bar—much to the horror of an elderly patron, who spat out her kielbasa sausage perfectly on cue, as if they were starring in a bawdy sitcom together. At 8 p.m. on the dot Mike stalked past the leggy blonde manning the hostess station and climbed a wide staircase in the back leading to a more intimate bar with twin stripper poles. It was too early for strippers. In fact, there was no one there except a bartender, and in less than a minute she was towing her vodka-soda to a balcony behind the bar where patrons could lounge and perhaps sneak a cigarette or two if they were regulars. Twenty minutes later, a waiter passed by and she ordered a second vodka-soda while her phone buzzed:

            
walking up

            
upstairs outsde ur in trub

she wrote back, trying to arrange her mouth into a frown, except that whenever she knew Richard was close she couldn't help grinning like an idiot. Any number of in jokes or funny stories they shared bubbled to the surface. He admitted once that the same thing happened to him, and here he was now, bounding over to her, the same dimpled smile plastered on his face as on that first fateful night in the dining hall.

God, how she loved him.

He sat down.

“Yo.” He managed to make the single syllable sound apologetic.

She raised an eyebrow. “You get lost?”

“I know, I know. Sorry! Traffic.”

Mike audibly drew in her breath, placing one shapely hand over her chest: “
In L.A.?
”

“Yeah, yeah, suck it. Plus, I was stuck on the phone with the 'rents. Couldn't get them off. They've been calling me literally every fucking day,
begging
me not to go through with the Decent Proposal. But I think they finally get that it's a lost cause.”

“First, I'm going to need you to promise me you'll never say ‘the 'rents' again. Second, I cannot
wait
to hear more about Dave and Judy's thoughts on the DP.”

“DP, ha. Makes me think of director of photography. Are we abbreviating it now?”

“Oh, I think we have to. From this day forth,” she lifted her empty glass, “we henceforth refer to this crazy shit of yours as the DP.”

He lifted his hand and mimed a glass. “So shall it be.”

It had been a while since they'd made up a code word. They used to do it all the time. Some of their favorites arose via autotype
gone awry. When Mike said, “Cute hit, 9 o'clock,” she was referring to a guy on her left, since “guy” often came out as “hit” while texting. On a budget trip to the Greek islands a few years back when Richard was still gainfully employed, they'd had a lot of fun with the difference between Greek and English letters and came to refer to “crepes” by their Greek alphabet spelling, which looked something like “kpenes.” Whenever Mike felt like dessert after a big meal, she asked Richard if he fancied a “kah-pen-es,” and they'd break into laughter. (All the better if there were others present to be bewildered.) The double entendre potential of the word did not go unrecognized by them either, and many a Saturday or Sunday morning he asked her if she'd “eaten any kpenes” the night before.