The Rom-Commers

Chapter Thirteen

BACK AT CHARLIE’Shouse, I felt strangely elated.

I didn’t have to do this. I could quit and go home.

Charlie wanted to get started at the table—but one, Logan had said not to do any writing until we had a written contract, and two, I was quitting.

I hadn’t told Charlie that yet, of course.

Charlie sat down at his heavy, faux-farmhouse, designer dining room table, clearly thinking I would follow his lead.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I walked around his living room, examining knickknacks and bookends and decorative ceramic bowls like I had all the time in the world. Which I did.

“Hey,” Charlie said. “Can we focus?”

“This is a really nice house,” I said. “You have great taste.”

“It’s not me. It’s my wife. My ex-wife.” Then a pause. “It wasn’t even her, actually. It was her decorator.”

“Well, then,” I said. “My compliments to your ex-wife’s decorator.”

“Could you…?” Charlie started.

But now I was opening a drawer under his TV console. Empty.

“What are you doing?” Charlie asked.

“I’m exploring my new workplace.” I slid open a second one. Empty.

“Can we just get started over here?” Charlie asked.

But that’s when I opened a third drawer. And this one…

This one…

Was full of Oscars.

I froze. Stared.

So… when Charlie had declared he had a “whole drawer of Oscars”… that wasn’t a figure of speech.

This was a literal whole drawer of Oscars.

And not just Oscars, actually—all kinds of statuettes, jumbled willy-nilly like booty in a pirate’s chest. Like they hadn’t been placed in there, but maybe dumped. Or dropped. Or chucked.

“What’s this?” I asked, in a tone like he was a naughty child and I’d found his box of stolen candy.

“Just… stuff,” Charlie answered—also like he was a naughty child and I’d found his box of stolen candy.

I stared down at the contents of the drawer. Yes, there were actual Oscars—those unmistakable gold figurines. But also: the very recognizable Golden Globe awards that were literally miniature golden globes. Then, after that, a whole mishmash of silver and brass and crystal figurines engraved with words like HOLLYWOOD FOREIGN PRESS, NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE, WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, HOLLYWOOD FILM FESTIVAL—that was just the top layer. Those were just the ones I could count.

I looked up. Charlie was watching me. “Are these your awards?” I asked.

Charlie nodded.

“Like, from the actual events? These are the awards you walked up onstage in a tuxedo and received from some world-famous actor?”

Charlie nodded again.

“What are they doing in here?”

Charlie shrugged.

“Charlie,” I said, becoming more aghast by the second. “Why are the awards that most screenwriters would sell their organs for just piled in here like it’s a junk drawer?”

“Just…” Charlie said, like he was trying to come up with an answer. “To keep them in one place?”

I shook my head. “In one place? This is the best you could come up with? How about a mantel? Or a bookshelf? Or an antique glass-fronted cabinet? Or a safe? How about anywhere other than shoved like trash into a forgotten credenza drawer?”

Charlie didn’t answer, so I looked back down. Then I pointed. “This Women’s Film Critics Association award has lost her little wing!”

Charlie had the good sense to look cowed. But then he said, “Look—none of this stuff means anything.”

All I could do was blink.

“It’s all just theater,” Charlie said.

“Are you telling me,” I said, “that you don’t care that you got all these awards?”

“I do care,” he said. “I just don’t care enough to display them in a trophy case like a douchebag.”

“So you’re just going to shove them out of sight and break off their wings?”

“You seem to be taking this kind of personally—” Charlie started.

“I do! I do take it personally! Do you have any idea what I would give for even one of these awards? And you’re just treating them all like they’re garbage? Look!” I picked up an Oscar and held it out toward him. It was surprisingly heavy. “Look how scratched this is!”

“It doesn’t matter!” Charlie said.

“It doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter that you’ve scratched up the statuette of the highest honor in your industry? These things are made of solid brass and plated in twenty-four-carat gold! I watched a whole documentary about it! You don’t even have the tiniest inkling of how lucky you are. I will spend my whole life writing and striving and obsessing over movies and I’ll never even get close to one of these, and you…” I looked back down at the drawer, and words failed me.

“You want it?” Charlie said then. “Just take it! It’s yours, okay? Now we’re even!”

“But we’re not even. Because I didn’t really win it!”

“Nobody really wins anything!”

“Tell that to your thousand-dollar coffee maker!”

Charlie frowned, like he’d never made that connection.

Which just made me madder.

How dare he take his life for granted? How dare he stand here in a mansion full of awards and act like nothing mattered! “You want me to take it?” I said. “I’ll take it! And I’ll spray-paint it bubblegum pink and write my name on it in red Sharpie with little hearts! And then I’ll tell everybody I won an Academy Award for a rom-com so rom-commy it was called The Rom-Commers!”

I wanted so badly to finish with “I quit!” right then—to charge out, Oscar and all, and never come back.

But I guess I wanted a chance to write with Charlie more. Because, instead, I just dropped that Oscar back in with the others. And then I walked myself out Charlie’s back door without saying another word.

CHARLIE GAVE MEa minute—several, actually—to cool off. And then he quietly came outside, too, and stood beside me as I stared at his pool.

Finally, I said, “You’ve got a pool with a high diving board?” My tone was calmer now but still had insult-to-injury undertones.

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “It came with the house.”

“A high dive came with the house? Do they even make those anymore?”

“It’s vintage,” Charlie said. “This house used to belong to Esther Williams.”

I turned to face him. “America’s mermaid, Esther Williams?”

Charlie looked surprised that I knew who she was. “Yes. She lived here. In the fifties. And she put in that pool. You know who she is?”

“You could say that. I’ve seen every single one of her movies.”

“For your mermaid rom-com?”

Ugh. Now I remembered: He’d read it. He’d read it and called it aerosol cheese. He didn’t deserve to live in Esther Williams’s house.

But stepping outside was restorative. It was a warm day—and sunny.

Maybe we needed a change of activity.

“We should go for a swim,” I said next.

But Charlie shook his head. “I don’t swim.”

I turned. “Never?”

He shrugged, like he was about to tell me something fundamentally boring. “I had a near-drowning accident as a kid.”

“Why do you own a house with a pool if you don’t swim?”

“My wife wanted it. Ex-wife.”

“Did she swim?”

“She didn’t swim, either, to be honest.”

“Why did she want a pool, then?”

“She liked the idea of swimming,” Charlie said. “But she didn’t like to mess up her hair.”

I thought about my own hair—the fact that it was pre–messed up. Maybe that was a type of blessing.

I could feel Charlie looking at my curls, pulled back, as ever, in their little pom-pom ponytail. “I bet you don’t have that problem,” he said.

Was he complimenting me or insulting me?

“Swimming is my sport,” I said, moving on. “I swim every day at home. It’s the one thing I do for myself. Every morning at five A.M.—”

“Ouch,” Charlie said.

“—I swim sixty laps.”

“Every morning?” Charlie challenged, like I had to be exaggerating.

“Yep.”

“Even on weekends?”

“Yep.”

“Isn’t it tiring?”

I shrugged. “Life is tiring. Swimming is just swimming.”

Then I turned to head back inside.

“Where are you going?” Charlie asked.

I turned back. “To get my suit.”

“You brought a swimsuit?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“To swim.”

“How did you know I’d have a pool?”

“I didn’t even know I’d be staying here! But I knew I’d find a pool somewhere.”

“You can’t swim here,” Charlie said.

“Why not?”

“This pool’s off-limits.”

“Off-limits?” I asked.

“It’s not for swimming,” Charlie said.

“Your pool is not for swimming?”

“It hasn’t been cleaned in a while.”

I looked down at the water, sparkling like a mountain spring.

Charlie added, “And it’s not safe. You know? It’s not built to code. That diving board’s a death trap.”

“I think Esther Williams knew how to build a high dive,” I said.

“She was a professional.”

I sighed and put my hand on my hip. “Are you telling me I can’t ever swim in your pool?”

“Pretty much.”

“But why?”

“Because.”

Nothing about this conversation made sense. But the idea of me in that pool clearly made Charlie unhappy. And maybe I was still mad about his whole Velveeta-themed comedy routine back in the bathroom, but the more unhappy I made him, the happier I felt.

I started walking toward the diving board at the far end.

“What are you doing?” Charlie called after me.

“I’m checking out the high dive.”

“I already told you—no swimming.”

“I’m not going to swim,” I said. “I’m just going to bounce a little.”

“You’re going to bounce a little?” Charlie demanded, breaking into a jog to come after me.

But by the time he got close, I was halfway up the ladder to the platform. He grabbed at my ankles—but I kicked his hands away, and he stayed on the ground.

Once I’d passed his grasp, he said, “Come down from there. That’s off-limits, too.”

“I was a competitive swimmer in high school. I’m practically amphibious. Chill out.”

Charlie watched as I reached the top and then walked out to the end, fully clothed, sneakers on. “Come down,” he ordered.

But what could I say? That familiar bounce of the springboard always felt so good. Also, I really didn’t like being ordered around.

Instead, I positioned myself backward at the edge, just my toes, heels hovering over the water, and got a nice rhythm going.

Charlie was halfway up the ladder, craning around the rungs in horror. “Please don’t do that!”

“Why is this stressing you out? This doesn’t concern you.”

“Yes it does. Because if you fall in… I can’t save you.”

“I’m not going to fall in.”

“You don’t know that. That board hasn’t been touched in a decade. It could snap like a toothpick.”

“It’s not going to snap,” I said. “And even if it did, I wouldn’t need you to save me.”

“Not if you hit the water wrong. I’ve researched this. If you hit from high enough at the wrong angle you can pop your internal organs.”

I kept bouncing. “Is that the technical term? ‘Popped organs’?”

“And I don’t swim,” Charlie went on. “So if that happens, I’ll just have to stand here and watch you drown. And I really don’t feel like doing that today.”

“If I pop my internal organs,” I said, “then I’ve got bigger problems than you not knowing how to swim.”

“I know how to swim,” Charlie corrected. “I just don’t swim.”

“Same difference.”

“Come down,” Charlie commanded.

“No.”

“It’s my pool.”

“They’re my internal organs.”

And that’s when I saw Charlie’s face adjust itself a little. “Fine,” he said with a shrug, like he’d made a sudden decision not to care anymore.

“Fine?” I asked.

“Whatever,” Charlie said now, almost like he’d shifted into a new character, and he started to walk back toward the house.

I didn’t know if it was because I’d read everything this man had ever written, or watched every YouTube interview in existence multiple times, or studied the structure of all his scripts like a Shakespearean scholar might obsess over iambic pentameter… but bouncing there on Charlie’s high dive in all my clothes, looking down at his suddenly totally disinterested face… an unbidden insight about Charlie Yates started rapping at my consciousness:

When Charlie Yates is scared of something, he pretends it doesn’t matter.

I flipped back: He did it in his writing. His heroes were always unflappable, always totally unfazed by life’s horrors—guys who’d show up for the battle, encounter the beleaguered company they were there to reinforce, be ordered by the captain to retreat, and say, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.”

His heroes were guys who got cooler in the face of fear.

He wrote guys like that, but he also was a guy like that. With reporters, for example, in interviews. If they got too close to a topic he didn’t want to touch—his mother, for instance, asking for details about his parents splitting up when he was eight—he’d tilt his head with a half smile and say something totally blasé, like, “I must have been a pretty big pain in the ass.”

He’d done it with his shrug just now when he’d talked about almost drowning, too, and he’d done it at brunch by looking at his sock when he casually mentioned soft tissue sarcoma.

Nonchalance as a weapon. Disinterest as a weapon. Aerosol cheese as a weapon.

Was I right? Had I just figured out something vital about Charlie Yates?

“Hey, Charlie!” I called.

He turned back, squinting up at me.

Right there, at the edge of the high dive, I sat down. Then I dangled my legs off the edge.

Charlie stared up, horrified. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sitting down.”

“I can see that.”

“I just want to ask you a question.”

Charlie sighed. “What?”

I gave it a beat, and then I asked, “Why did your wife leave you?”

It was a hell of a question. The second I asked it, though, I knew I was right. His face shifted to extra indifferent. Then came the shrug. Then he said, “I guess she just got sick of my shit.” Then he added, “And I don’t blame her, either.”

There it was.

Charlie Yates had a tell.

The things that he acted like mattered the least? Those were the things that mattered the most.

What would happen if I pushed past the nonchalance?

“Tell me about the day she left,” I said.

“No,” Charlie said. Then, “Why?”

“Because I’m not coming down until you do.”

“Maybe I should just walk away and leave you there.”

“Maybe you should. But then I will definitely do a swan dive off this thing. And maybe pop an organ or two.”

Charlie squinted up to study me. Then he finally asked, “It has to be that? I have to tell you about that? There’s no other way you’ll come down?”

It felt so mean, but I had to know if I was right. Slowly, like there was no room for negotiation, I nodded.

Charlie sighed.

Then he looked around like he was checking for escape routes.

Then he frowned, and looked up at this crazy woman swinging her feet from his diving board… and then his face went extra nonchalant. He glanced off to the side like he was waiting for a bus or something, and then, in a tone like no one on earth had ever uttered a more boring statement, he said, “My wife left me on the day I found out I had cancer.”