The Road to Amazing (12 page)

"Well?" Vernie said.

I smiled stupidly, wishing she'd have
forgotten about the dumb screenplay idea and I could deftly try to
change the subject.

But now I was stuck. I had
to say
something
.
Still, sometimes the most interesting ideas are the ones that come
to you when you're under pressure.

"It's called
The Compound
, and it's a
comedy," I said. "An old man dies, and his two sons inherit his
farm — no, wait, it's a daughter and a son. It's big, but really
isolated, way out in the middle of nowhere. The father spells out
in his will that they can't sell the farm until they both live
there together for a year."

I said that
sometimes
the most
interesting ideas come to you when you're under pressure. This
wasn't one of those times.

"Go on," Vernie said.

"Well," I said, stalling again, "the
man wants to turn the farm into a commune and he invites all his
dippy, free-love friends, but the woman wants to turn it into a
right-wing militia, and she invites all her paranoid, gun-crazy
friends. And somehow they all have to live together."

I thought about the words that had
come out of my mouth. Obviously, it had been inspired by my
experience with Duane and his clothing-optional commune, but I
liked the addition of the right-wing militia sister. It wasn't a
completely terrible idea.

Vernie thought about it
too. "
The Compound
, huh? I like what you did with the genders, making the woman
the conservative and the man liberal — switching up the
stereotypes. It has potential, especially as a comedy. But is that
really a single-location script? It seems like it's a
single-setting, but there are a lot of different locations. How
would that save the producers' any money?"

She was right, of course: it wasn't
really a single-location script. Still, the point had been to
distract Vernie, and it did seem to have been successful at
that.

Vernie looked down at her mug of tea,
blowing into it, cooling it, dissolving the rising steam. But the
second she stopped blowing, the steam reformed.

"How are you doing?" I said.
"Honestly."

She looked up at me.
"What? I'm fine. What do you mean? I'm
great
."

Vernie wasn't fine. Something was
bugging her, but this was my wedding weekend, and she didn't want
to spoil it by bringing up anything heavy.

"How are
you
?" she said. "How are
you doing with the whole wedding business?" Now she was the one
deftly trying to change the subject.

But I thought about this. What if I
told her the truth — that I did have some (very slight!) mixed
emotions about the wedding? Maybe that would give her permission to
be honest with me.

"It was strange earlier," I said,
"when that whale washed up on the beach, and we thought the wedding
might be canceled. I was sad, but mostly because I felt bad for
Kevin."

"Oh?" she said.

I went on to tell her what
I'd told Min: that I wasn't worried about getting married to
Kevin
, but that I was a
little concerned about marriage in general. About how it often
seemed to signal the start of when a person's life got
boring.

"That won't happen," Vernie
said.

"But I've heard you yourself say stuff
like that," I said. "You told me once that when you lived in Los
Angeles, you were always having to choose between going to your
kids' soccer games and spending the weekend with Warren Beatty and
Goldie Hawn."

This was true. Vernie had told me lots
of stories about her life in Hollywood, and how her kids resented
her to this day, because she had sometimes chosen her career over
them.

"My marriage was different," she
said.

"Different how?"

She sipped her tea, and
now I wondered if
she
was stalling for time. "Just different."

It seemed like Vernie didn't want to
talk about it, so I decided to change the subject a bit. "Min says
I'm afraid of growing up," I said.

"Are you?"

"Probably."

"Good! You should be. Too
many people
do
grow up and turn boring. There's absolutely no excuse for
that at all. But part of me thinks those people couldn't have been
all that interesting to begin with. So they got drunk and had a lot
of sex on the weekend. Maybe they even got a tattoo! How
does
that
make a
person interesting?"

"What makes a person interesting?" I
asked.

"When they're passionate about the
things they love," she said without any hesitation at all. "The
more passionate they are, the more interesting they
are."

This answer was so typically Vernie.
But the more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed. It was
definitely true for Gunnar, Min, Otto, and also Vernie
herself.

"It's a choice, you know,"
she said. "Whether or not you become boring? It's not like they
appear one day and put you in handcuffs. They don't
make
you be
boring."

"Really?" I said. "I
thought you turned thirty, and they forced you to stay home
watching
House Hunters
."

"I love
House Hunters
," Vernie
said. "Or at least
House Hunters
International
."

"I know, me too!" I watched her a
second longer. "Come on, tell me what's really going
on."

She sipped her tea again. "Why do you
keep thinking there's something going on?"

"Because I know you. And I
have a feeling you don't want to tell me the truth because you
think it'll put a damper on my wedding weekend. But the whole point
of inviting my friends this weekend was to spend time with them.
With you. The
real
you."

She stared at me, looking both amused
and annoyed.

"So is that why you told me how you're
having misgivings about the wedding?" she said. "To get me to lower
my guard?"

Not misgivings
exactly
, I thought.

"And don't think I don't know you were
stalling for time earlier," she went on, "and that you came up with
that screenplay idea on the fly."

Vernie was smart, I had to give her
that.

"You got me," I said. "But it's not
like you're doing such a bang-up job of hiding your feelings
either. Either you have to tell me what's really going on in your
life, or you need to start doing a much better job of
lying."

Vernie laughed, long and hearty, and I
knew I'd finally broken through the wall.

"Oh, I wish it was something
interesting," she said. "I wish I could say I had cancer or
something. Would that make a great plot-reveal? I spend the whole
weekend acting like everything's great, how happy I am for you, and
then after I leave, you find out I only have six weeks left to
live. Or is that a terrible cliché?"

"A terrible cliché," I
said. "And also a terrible
joke
. I don't want you to have
cancer!"

"Well, I don't. I'm healthy as a
horse. No, it's far less interesting. I just feel old and
irrelevant. I always feel this way in the fall, but for some
reason, it's worse this year than usual."

"You're not
old
," I said, really
trying to sell it.

"Are you kidding? I'm ancient. Plus,
my kids hate me, I'm sleeping like shit, the studio is still
screwing me on royalties, and the latest update on my operating
system screwed up all the programs on my computer, including the
drivers for my printer. Boy, if this isn't cheerful wedding weekend
talk. Are you happy yet that you dragged it out of me?"

"Vernie, I'm sorry."

She shook her head, almost spilling
her tea. "No. I'm just throwing a pity party. Can I get you a party
hat?"

"Please! But would you hate me if I
said it isn't that bad? You just finished saying the thing that
makes a person interesting is that they're passionate about the
things they love. You're the most passionate person I
know."

Vernie smiled, but it was a weak one,
especially for her.

"I know the answer to your problem," I
said.

"Oh?" she said, lifting an eyebrow.
"Well, please enlighten."

"We need to get you laid."

I sort of said this without thinking,
but I immediately regretted it. I mean, Vernie was seventy-four
years old.

But of course she howled. "Oh, you
have no idea how right you are!"

I heard voices out on the porch — Otto
and Gunnar back from the beach.

I pointed at Vernie. "We'll continue
this conversation later," I said.

"No, I think I'll take option number
two," she said. "I'm going to start doing a much better job of
lying about my true feelings."

* * *

Later, after Nate and the others were
back from the beach too, we all had lunch — deli salads and cold
cuts — and I was starting to think that maybe the weekend had
turned a corner. I still didn't know what was going on with Otto,
but Vernie had perked up a bit (she probably would have said she
was faking it better, but I had a feeling our little conversation
had cheered her up).

Kevin seemed a lot more relaxed too,
and I couldn't help feeling a little proud. I had officially
cheered up two different people — Kevin and Vernie — in the space
of thirty minutes.

Then Nate looked over at Kevin, took a
big bite of his turkey sandwich wrap, and, talking with his mouth
full, said, "So how long before you and Russel have kids? You used
to yabber about that all the time back in school."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Everyone fell quiet, even
as we kept eating — so quiet you could hear actual
swallowing
. All of my
friends knew exactly how I felt about kids, and now they knew how
Kevin felt too, so they could easily deduce that it had to be some
kind of issue between us. Min already knew for a fact that it
was.

Kevin reached for the cranberry quinoa
salad. "Oh, that was a long time ago," he said to Nate. Then he
immediately changed the subject. "My skin is still stinging in the
places where the wetsuit didn't cover."

"I know!" Ruby said. "Me
too."

"Rack off, mate, it
wasn't
that
long
ago," Nate said to Kevin. "Just a coupla years. Is it the whole gay
thing? You used to tell me that didn't matter."

I couldn't help but wonder: Are all
straight guys this clueless? Even Gunnar wasn't like
this.

"
Dude
," Ruby said to Nate, "catch a
clue."

Which just goes to show that while
lesbians and straight guys might have similar brains, there are
still some pretty big differences.

Nate's eyes danced from Kevin to me,
then lingered, like he was finally putting two and two
together.

"More potato salad?" Min said to the
table. "It's made with pesto, right?"

I nodded yes even as everyone shook
their heads no to the salad.

"Don't drink coffee," Nate said at
last.

"What?" Ruby said.

"Before using a wetsuit. Or anything
with caffeine. It shuts down the blood vessels, so it makes you
feel colder."

After that, the conversation finally
did move on — to the world's sixty zillionth conversation about
whether Apple still deserves their reputation for innovation, I
think. I wasn't really listening.

Later, when we were cleaning up, Kevin
leaned in close to me and said, "That really was a long time ago
when I told Nate those things. Seriously. I don't think that way
now. It's not just you. I don't want kids anymore
either."

I smiled and nodded. "I know. It's
fine, really."

But a few minutes later, Min stepped
up to me and said, "Hey, you want to go for a walk?"

And I hope it doesn't make me sound
like a jerk that I said, "Yeah, let's go."

* * *

Inevitably, we found ourselves walking
down the road to Amazing.

Min didn't say anything like, "Wow,
that was rough back there, how are you doing?" And she didn't look
at me all concerned either. Which was great, because it really
wasn't a big deal. On the other hand, I knew that if I wanted to
talk about it, she was more than willing to listen.

Instead, I said, "Are you mad at
Gunnar?"

"For moving that orca?" she
asked.

I nodded.

"Well," she said, "he committed a
felony. But this is your wedding, and I believe him when he said he
moved it farther down the beach. So I guess this is one of those
times where you sort of turn the other way and pretend it didn't
happen. Like when a friend tells you no one understands her like
Taylor Swift."