Authors: Kerry Reichs
“. . . the Science Fair Committee asked to see you, and the American Democracy Initiative meeting has been rescheduled to Tuesday—I already updated your calendar. Don’t forget you have to attend the upcoming School Board meeting, Gwen Eilbert is waiting to see you, and these are your messages.” His administrative assistant, Steff, handed him a sheaf of pink message slips.
“What does the Science Fair Committee want?” Wyatt flipped through his messages.
“To see if you’ll lift some of the restrictions on explosive materials now that Mr. Lang has been fired. They feel it’s a safer environment. There’s a proposal on your policies stack.”
Wyatt snorted. “Not likely. Where is it?”
Steff looked up. “Right on top . . . oh.” She looked confused. “Did you move your stacks around?”
“No. Though things look shifted.”
“Here it is. Amber left some folders for you. Maybe she moved stuff.”
“What does Gwen Eilbert want?”
“To be somewhere else.”
He raised his eyes to Steff.
“I don’t want to spoil it for you.” She grinned. “But Mr. Kelly knows obscenity when he sees it. Here are the ACT testing forms, and you need to sign these.”
Wyatt wished he could ignore the two messages from Katherine Feely Jones. The answer he had to give her was not the one he wanted.
He realized Steff was holding forms out for him.
“Sorry. What?”
“These are for you to read.” She handed him some white sheets. “And you need to sign these.” She handed him some yellow transfer forms.
“What is it?”
“Linny Pope is going to the evening program.”
Wyatt sighed and took the forms. “Leave them with me.”
“And Gwen?”
“She can sit and think profane thoughts a moment longer.”
Wyatt felt heavy as he looked at Linny Pope’s forms. Linny was a pretty, competent sophomore whose bright smile and bouncy bob evoked a grown-up Girl Scout. A Girl Scout who gave her cookies away for free because she was sixteen and pregnant. She was dropping out to attend an evening program for pregnant students.
Wyatt rubbed his tired eyes and wondered if a lime could really cure a headache. His fingers were itching to dial Linny Pope’s house, to ask her what she was going to do with the baby. She might keep it, but she might give it up. The infant was so tantalizingly available he could see her perfectly—clean white socks and shiny white patent-leather Mary Janes, chestnut hair held back by a pink headband, listening seriously at age six as Wyatt explained the importance of birth control before they left for her first co-ed birthday party.
He took a pen and signed away his fantasy child, as he did about two or three times a year. It was torture to have the inside track on a pool of highly desirable future adoptions and not be able to partake. The impropriety, however, was irrefutable. Any School Board in the country would rightly eviscerate him. What next? Buying six-packs for the cheerleaders so they’d get drunk and pregnant? Before you knew it, Wyatt would be a black market child trafficker.
He put the completed forms in his outbox, then called Katherine.
Wyatt hung up with a heavy heart. Deborah Tanner had been perfect—soft spoken, demure, honest face, and an obvious bump. His hand twitched remembering her surprised reaction to a little kick in her belly. You didn’t fake that. But Katherine had quoted him $15,000 he didn’t have. He still had savings, but after the adoption there’d be nannies and bottles and diapers and crib sheets and all manner of brightly colored Made in China plastic things that alarmed Wyatt thinking about them. He made a note to call about getting into the public foster system, banishing Horn Rims’s outrage from his mind.
Wyatt opened his door. “Ms. Eilbert,” he called. “Will you join me?”
Wyatt didn’t know the student well, but he knew her type. She was a hefty, angry girl, prevented by bulk and acne from having the high school experience she wanted. Her anger channeled into rebellion.
“Gwen, you’ve been sent to see me because of your provocative attire. What do you have to say about that?”
The sullen sophomore shifted her heavy frame and adopted a defiant stance. “I have a constitutional right to express myself.”
“While it’s true that public school students possess a range of free-expression rights under the First Amendment, those rights are by no means boundless. Officials, such as myself, can prohibit students from wearing shirts with profane messages such as you are wearing.”
They both looked down at Gwen’s T-shirt, emblazoned with the hot pink script:
I HAVE THE PUSSY SO I MAKE THE RULES.
“None of the words on this shirt are swear words,” Gwen persisted.
“I see your point. However, the collective impression is, by most standards, profane. I must prohibit you from wearing it on school property.”
Gwen smirked. “You can’t stop me from thinking it.”
Wyatt was immensely irritated by this stupid girl and her pussy power.
“I’m also going to require that you attend three detention periods and write me a term paper on the Supreme Court case
Bethel School District v. Fraser
’s impact on free speech.”
Gwen’s jaw dropped, and Wyatt felt slightly ashamed. His eyes fell to her heaving T-shirt and he didn’t anymore. If she wanted to be a rebel, she should learn something about meaningful expression, not inflammatory garbage.
“That will be all,” he dismissed. He followed as she trudged out of his reception area.
“Don’t you think that was a little harsh?” Steff asked. Wyatt reminded himself to close his office door when disciplining students.
He didn’t answer. His anger was not directed at the girl, but she was the vehicle that had flung the sentiment in his face. If Gwen wanted to flaunt her pussy power, fine. He had power too.
Wyatt felt eyes boring into the back of his head and turned to see Amber Paley staring at him. It was unsettling to see something like hate on her face.
He retreated to his office before he could call Gwen back and apologize. He aimlessly moved papers, desperate for the day’s end. He wanted to be away from students and to be drinking. Steff shot him a sympathetic glance when she entered, laying the mail on his desk and exiting without a word. He pulled the stack to him, starting with the slim white envelope on top.
Two minutes later he was still staring at the contents he’d pulled from the envelope. One was a note of beautiful script that read:
The DiGuardi family wishes to thank you for your services in assisting Farasha in the delivery of her champion foal Biscuit.
The other, more official-looking instrument, read:
Pay to the Order of Wyatt Ozols $15,000.00.
Without allowing himself time to think, Wyatt picked up the phone and dialed Katherine Feely Jones.
H
ave you ever heard of someone afraid of a pedicure?” I’d been mulling over our lunch for days.
“Every time the local news does a special on fungal infections. Why are you answering my question with a question?” Freya steepled her fingers, framed by the black leather wing of her chair.
“Did I?”
“Twice.”
I didn’t know how to describe my lunch with Julian. It felt like a betrayal to share. “He’s nice.”
Freya did her signature controlled exhale.
“Dimple. Your attitude is . . .
bewildering
. Do you want this role?”
I was startled. “Of course I do.”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“It’s not up to me!” I protested.
“The measure of achievement isn’t whether you have a challenging problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.”
“What would you like me to do?” I didn’t see how I could sway Julian’s decision.
“Care,” Freya ordered. “Show me, show Julian, that you want this. Put some life into it, for god’s sake.”
Eyes on the floor, I said, “I don’t want to be disappointed.”
She waited for me to look up, and held my eyes. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
I didn’t answer.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “it too shall pass. Probably sooner than it should.”
Freya’s words stayed with me out of her office, past the effervescent receptionist in tangerine hoop earrings, down the elevator, and across the parking lot. I got to my car so preoccupied, I forgot to tug down my Pucci mini and seared a dermal layer of thigh on the hot leather seat.
“It’s out of my hands,” I explained to yesterday’s Starbucks cup. “Julian makes the decisions,” I protested to my Regina Spektor CD. “What can I do?” I asked my lip balm. “Honestly!” I complained to my water bottle.
“Fine,” I said to them all, turning the key. “But you’re going overboard.”
Twenty minutes and a pair of jeans later I walked into my favorite shop in the Marina.
“Hey, Larry!” I called to the proprietor.
“Dimple! My god, it’s been, what, a year? More?”
“Too long.” I kissed his cheek, avoiding the grease stain.
His face lit up. “Are you a customer today?”
“You betcha,” I said. He clapped with glee.
“You want the Fat Boy?” He named my usual.
“Not this time. I need something special, for two.”
By the time I got to Wales Productions, I was less sure of myself. I smoothed my hair, but it was an unwinnable battle. I looked as frazzled as I felt. Could this even work?
“Can’t fail unless you try.” I gave myself a pep talk and opened the door.
Production offices aren’t as formal as people think. The entrance of Wales Productions opened right onto a large room filled with several desks. The closest was empty, and occupants of the other two were on the phone. I walked past, toward where the great director was likely to sit. Eyes followed me, but no one objected. Confidence goes a long way in casual L.A.
I caught Julian’s voice, and steered my steps that way. He was in a large office, door open, on the phone. His personal assistant, seated at a desk outside, was also on the phone. I wondered if they were all on the phone with each other.
This assistant did try to stop me, waving while not breaking his parade of “uh-huhs” into the mouthpiece, but I didn’t pause until I stood on Julian’s office threshold.
Arriving unexpected allowed me to study Julian in a different way. He was extremely attractive, especially if you liked bald, which I did. He had sharp cheekbones and clear, lively eyes. He was ruddy with health and everything masculine. I couldn’t define the thing that made the difference between one man and another, but Julian was very, very male.
“Excuse me?” The assistant covered his receiver now, and raised an eyebrow.
I ignored him, focused on the man at his desk. He looked up. His face registered and his body shifted toward me, though his conversation didn’t miss a beat.
“. . . I’d rather use local light guys. It’s snobbery to think only L.A. people can do it well, and locals know their own sunshine best.”
“You can’t just . . .” The assistant was in my ear, but Julian waved him off. I didn’t move.
“Okay . . . Okay . . . No, I want Ted for that . . . Fine . . . Let me know.” He hung up, and gave me his full attention. I waited.
“Well,” he said. “You’re a vision. You look . . . like you arrived in a hurry.”
I smoothed my hair. “I wanted to see a great director at work. But I came here instead.”
He waited.
“The thing about Cora,” I said, “is that she didn’t wait for Jonas to do the asking.”
“She didn’t,” he agreed, eyes alight.
“So I’ve decided to audition you.”
“When she told me I was average, she was just being mean,” he said.
“It won’t be a hot air balloon or zip-lining,” I cautioned. “Just an ordinary lunch at one of my favorite places.”
“Let me find my keys.” He stood, lean in his blue jeans.
“That won’t be necessary.” I smiled. I spotted a leather jacket, and pointed. “Bring that.”
Outside, Julian scanned the small lot for an unfamiliar car, but there wasn’t one. Only the gleaming black beast of the Ducati Multistrada 1200 motorcyle. I normally rented a basic Harley for my motorcycle fix, but today I’d splashed out.
He appraised me. “That would explain the hair.”
“You have an unfair advantage.” I tossed him a helmet.
I had no idea if he’d ridden a bike before, and I didn’t ask. I climbed on and waited for him to settle in behind me.
“All set?” I asked.
I sensed rather than saw him nod. The bike throttled to life, and we roared off toward the Pacific Coast Highway going north.
Bent low over the bike, pavement blurring beneath us, my bravado faded. Did it seem stuntlike and juvenile? Would he see this as a come-hither from a casting couch ’ho? What was I going to say when we got there? Doubt was taking root when Julian shifted his body to fit perfectly against mine, and other thoughts crowded in. His arms and chest were taut. Even through my leather jacket, I felt heat. As if he could sense my thoughts, his arms tightened around my waist.
Shit
, I thought. I can’t have the hots for the director.
LaMimi said,
Shut the hell up for once and enjoy the ride
.
If my hair was bad when I got to Julian’s, it was unrecoverable when I pulled off my helmet at Neptune’s Net.
“How was it?” I was sizzling with energy.
“One minute I wanted to buy a motorbike, the next I didn’t. It’s a vicious cycle,” he replied.
We threaded our way through a clump of bikers straight from Casting 101, leather chaps and all. Neptune’s Net was my favorite dive spot in L.A. It was chaotic and crazy, you fought for parking and a picnic table, but the fresh seafood and stunning ocean view couldn’t be beat.
“Fried or not fried?” I asked Julian.
“Not.”
I steered us toward the nonfried counter.
“You know your biker bar,” Julian observed.
“I love dive bars. I dated this guy who didn’t have any money, but he was a gentleman and always paid the bill. We went to places he could afford. I’ve shot pool and butchered karaoke in the seediest places in town, and loved it. I detest stinginess, so I loved his attitude. And dive bars pour a mean drink.”
“What happened?”
“I drank ’em.”
“To the guy,” he persisted.
It was too personal to share “He didn’t want kids” with Julian. “He moved to the Valley,” I said.
It was our turn at the counter, and we ordered a bunch of crabs, clams, and shrimp, with corn on the cob and cold beer. I squeaked when I saw the basket of Saran-wrapped oatmeal cookies, and grabbed one. “This looks homemade.”
Julian was laughing. “You’re like a kid.”
“Oatmeal cookies are a measure of quality,” I said. “The Oatmeal Cookie Mean standard. I compare oatmeal cookies worldwide.”
“And the best?”
“My
vecamama’s
, of course. My grandmother’s cookies would cure amputation. But in a pinch any oatmeal cookie with milk will turn your day around.”
I couldn’t read his expression. “What?”
He grinned. “You’re . . . enjoyable.”
“Anything’s enjoyable with cold beer on a sunny day at Neptune’s Net.”
I saw a picnic table open up and elbowed in there. It was prime real estate, ocean view. Julian brought the food.
“How about you? Got a food barometer?”
“Onion soup. The best I ever had was in a little Czech Republic town called Český Krumlov.”
“I love Český Krumlov! I went after college and it’s one of my best travel memories. I could’ve spent weeks wandering the cobblestones, sipping
pivo
in the old-town square, and floating on the river.”
“Me too!” Julian lit up.
“Egon Schiele’s my favorite artist, so I loved that piece of it, walking where he’d walked and painted.”
“He was driven out of town after two years because the townsfolk were angry about the nude portraits of their teenage daughters in compromising poses.”
“They certainly aren’t short on anatomical detail.” I remembered the drawings. “I liked his self-portraits best.”
“Good art has to have a certain narcissism to it.”
“I don’t know.” I considered. “I agree that to be confident, you have to have a degree of selfishness. But I don’t like it when the artist interrupts my experience with his stamp. Like when you see a movie and every scene shouts, ‘Look at my insights into these neurotic characters, aren’t I prescient?’ It takes me out of the experience.”
“Isn’t that a way of presenting unique suffering?”
“Is suffering unique? I don’t care about you caring about you. To have value, it has to have selflessness.”
“Does something have to be universal to be art?”
“No. But selflessness makes me like it more.”
“Teenage girls in compromising poses makes me like it more,” Julian said. I threw a clam shell at him.
We sat companionably peeling shrimp and looking across the Pacific Coast Highway at the ocean. At least I thought we were sitting companionably until Julian said, “We can’t ignore the dodo in the bathtub forever. We have to talk.”
His tone was sober, and my heart plummeted. He’d chosen Daisy. I kicked myself for waiting so long to show him any spunk, and for being so dense I didn’t accept the reality of his recent silence.
“The demure Ms. Bledsoe-I-need-to-formally-shake-your-hand tore a new lane in the PCH with a two-wheeled monster of a motorbike, me clinging to her back like a baby lemur. Care to explain, lanesplitter?”
A laugh of relief burst from me. “Oh, the bike?”
“Oh, this old thing?” he mimicked, falsetto, to an imaginary companion.
“It takes a lot of wind to move this hair.” I shrugged. “I’m not completely predictable.”
“No.” His gaze was intent. “You’re not.”
“How’s
Cora
coming along?” I changed the subject to the real elephant in the room.
“Some days good, some days not so good. It’s a truth that your creation will never match the vision in your mind. It’s hard to accept falling short, but you’ll go crazy if you don’t.”
“It’s a wonderful project.”
“I’m close to this one.”
I hesitated. “I did wonder . . .”
He looked interested.
“When Cora reconciles with Jonas, the arc of her relationship with her sister fades away. It’s almost as if by embracing her lover at sunset she’s completely fulfilled as a person.”
Julian studied me. “You find that troubling.”
“Yes. I mean, resolving her emotional relationship with Jonas is important, but she had so much more going on, and it disappears unresolved. Like all she needed was the man. What happened to the rest of her life?”
“It’s hard to encompass a life in two hours onscreen,” Julian said, but his eyes had a faraway look. They came back to me. “It really came across that Jonas was all that she needed to be happy?”
“Sort of.”
“What would you do?”
I hesitated. This was Julian’s baby. “I’m an actress, not a director.”
“You’re a woman.”
He waited.
“Maybe you don’t end with the sunset clutch. You leave it anticipated. Like, instead, Cora exposes her sister and frees herself from that relationship, and when she walks out the door you know she’s
going
to Jonas, but the focus is on her.”
“People like romantic resolution onscreen,” Julian pointed out.
“See, that’s why you’re the director.”
He had the faraway look in his eyes again. I watched the gulls swoop in for discarded French fries and the occasional clam strip. Bikers left, surfers came. Time passed. People eyed our empty beers and the table.