Two. Silver and Guilt
Two
SILVER AND GUILT
The first thing to do after you’ve been fired from your job at a high-end arcade and you fear your agent may dump you is to use every bit of your last remaining strength to get out of going to a Christmas-drinks thing with a gale of other mostly unproduced screenwriters, blown in by the promise of cheap booze.
But my best friend is standing in my kitchen and the venue tonight is where, two weeks ago, he met a cute bartender named Felix and failed to secure a phone number. So, easier said than done.
“We don’t have to go,” Zav says as he opens my fridge and winces. He peers around the door at me. “What do you eat ?”
“There’s stuff in there,” I say, keeping my eyes on my nails.
I’m terrible at painting them—they always end up looking like I sought out a manicure from a troll who lives under a bridge and had all its gnarled fingers recently re-smashed—but getting a professional manicure isn’t in the cards when I have no job and sixty-five bougie stuffed animals to pay Li’l Ballerz for.
“I see a pizza Lunchable and a… Capri-Sun? Did you kill a child actor and steal their apartment?”
“Child actors have nicer apartments than this,” I remind him. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to stop by the Erewhon for one of your juices.”
Zav comes from money—or at least enough money that his mom drops grocery funds into his bank account. And not just grocery funds but LA grocery funds, meaning he can justify paying twenty-four dollars for a personal chickpea pizza that tastes like dirt.
“It’s not just juices. There are essences, too. But now I think you really need to go to the writer thing because they have free food,” Zav says, shutting the fridge and backing away from it.
“Is it free if it costs me my dignity?”
“You know that the only way to get in is if you’re a screenwriter and don’t have any dignity to begin with.
” He gives me a look that I know is a pitying one.
“Tell you what. I’m going to go to this because Bar Cutie will be there.
I love his name. Felix. But to ensure my karma is good, I’m going to pay for your takeout. ”
“You don’t have to do that,” I say. “Just getting out of going is more than enough.” The last time I went to one of these, this guy I’d actually been on a Hinge date with came up to me.
I thought he wanted to apologize for never texting me back, but he’d only thought I was Gary Busey’s daughter and maybe I could slip Daddy Gar his script.
“I want to. Thinking of you sitting here eating all those nitrates will make my face look saggy.”
“I wouldn’t want that,” I say.
“I know,” Zav says. “And once I’m firmly in a tenuous situationship with the bartender, I’m going to come over here and help you clean up.
” He peers around my place and purses his lips at the flocked tabletop Christmas tree I picked from the trash when my downstairs neighbor moved out.
(It was on top of some other stuff, not deep in the dumpster.) I’ve been shoving the take-out menus from my mail in between its branches.
Zav extracts one from the shawarma place on Yucca and puts it on a different branch.
“Christmas dirtbag was probably cute in the late aughts, but you’re not Seth Rogen. ”
“He’s Jewish,” I remind Zav.
“Whatever,” he says, waving as he heads to the door. “Wish me…”
“Fuck?” I finish Zav’s statement.
“Not until we’re in the aforementioned tenuous situationship! I have standards, Lunchable lady!”
Zav comes through in a big way when, an hour after he leaves, a massive quantity of chow fun noodles and kung pao shows up along with two big cans of Sapporo.
I’d ask him to let me borrow his streaming service passwords, but I feel like he’s done enough.
So instead, I’m flipping through channels on the basic cable box that is supposedly included with my rent even though my rent seems about four figures higher than it should be.
Sports. News. News. Cartoons. The finale of a dating reality show that I need to catch up on.
Home-shopping holiday deals extravaganza.
I stare at a porcelain Santa whose sack is encrusted with Swarovski crystals, and when the presenter knocks the price down by half, I’m almost wondering if it’s a good deal.
But I also realize I’m a bit drunk, and I definitely don’t want to order something I’ll have forgotten buying by the time it shows up.
I like my regrets to appear immediately instead of taking three to five shipping days.
Click. The next channel is Heartfelt. And of course it’s playing a Christmas movie.
It’s one of the older ones that still re-airs every year—a classic, if you will—called A Christmas by Any Other Name , about a movie star named Rose who gets dumped the week before Christmas and attempts to hide out in a small town under an alias, only to find that the down-to-earth boyfriend she bailed on for Holly wood is the owner of the inn where she’s staying.
Rose, whose brilliant disguise is a pair of glasses and a green turtleneck, successfully checks in at the quaint inn she’s booked under a pseudonym, only to slide on the ice outside the building and be caught by her square-jawed ex, who suggests she’ll need sturdier shoes if she’s going to stay upright in Christmas Village, New Hampshire.
I think one out of every four Heartfelt movies involves a strapping man telling the heroine to wear more sensible shoes, and I wonder if contemplating arch support is a turn-on for their audience.
“Once you end up sticking around with the flannel-shirted one who got away, you’re never getting out!
Your Oscar dreams are going to wind up as mauled as the shitty continental breakfast he probably puts out every month of the year that’s not December!
” I’m yelling at the TV. I should have just watched a basketball game.
At the same time, though, I remember watching this exact movie with my mom on the first day of winter break when I was fifteen and found out my high school crush was dating someone else.
My mom has always been a sucker for any kind of romance.
She showed me the classics— It Happened One Night , Bringing Up Baby , Love with the Proper Stranger , everything Ephron—but she couldn’t resist the guaranteed happy endings of a Heartfelt movie.
Back then, I couldn’t, either. They weren’t only balms to my teenage heartbreak.
I loved sinking into one of those movies and knowing from the first second that the main characters would fall in love.
I’d never yet been in love, at least the reciprocated kind, and the movies helped me imagine that once I found my person, I’d be happy, that every day would feel like a Christmas gift.
But my love affair with Heartfelt ended as I got older and I realized that love was not the solution to every problem and, in fact, could be its own problem.
Watching Heartfelt now just makes me think about all the parts of relationships they don’t show, the hard parts of loving someone.
I’m about to change the channel when my phone alerts me to an incoming FaceTime.
My parents.
When I initially told them I wasn’t coming home for Christmas this year—as has been the case for the last several years—they could not understand why I’d want to be in Los Angeles and not in Powell Park, Illinois.
“It would make sense if you had a family of your own, but won’t you be lonely?
You can’t honor traditions all by yourself! ” Mom said.
I told them that it’s really hard to make the trip if I can only spend a few days there at a time, and it’s impossible to be away from work that long when I’m on a deadline.
Which would be somewhat true if I’d held on to my job at Li’l Ballerz—working over the holiday break means bigger crowds.
I’m sure they’re suspicious about my employment, since I’ve claimed to be getting real screenwriting work but I can’t send them links to Variety stories about me or so much as point to a single movie I’ve worked on, even uncredited.
Still, I think they’d rather not know the truth.
That truth is I try to avoid visits to my hometown as much as possible.
Especially around Christmas. I’m not estranged from my family—I’ve hosted my parents and my brother’s family here and even met up with them at a Jacobs family reunion in Michigan—but I am estranged from Powell Park for one specific reason. One specific person , really.
When I went back to Powell Park after college, Grant Heath was the one person there—besides me—who felt like he didn’t belong.
In a good way. He’d grown up near Milwaukee, but after his mom died, his father moved back to his hometown of Powell Park and opened a bar.
Grant followed him to work there, which was a big factor in why I went there so often, always with my laptop, always with the line that I was job hunting.
It was Grant who caught me writing pages of a screenplay in one of the bar’s back booths.
“Fade in on…” he’d said as he sat down across from me that first time.
“Bartender, twentysomething, good-looking but clearly a rake, sits across from a woman who would have eaten a sandwich if she’d known two glasses of white wine were going to do her in so quickly,” I’d responded.
“But she’s holding it well, even if she’s wrong about the guy being a rake. To prove he’s not, he’s going to make her a sandwich.”
It was like that from the start. Easy but electric.
He’d actually gone and made me a sandwich—a great sandwich.
Nothing fancy—Grant loved to elevate a classic.
It was a tuna melt. Not a sexy thing to eat in front of someone you were attracted to, but something about the way it came together made it hard not to close my eyes in ecstasy. “Why is this so good?”
“Dill,” Grant had said. “And my self-interest in impressing you.”