Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
C LEM’S LEFT FOR WORK, SO I MAKE HER BED THE WAY she likes it and clean the spaghetti pot from her dinner last night. To keep my brain from spiraling, I run to the beach and walk home. I manically clean the house, except my closet. It’s still only two p.m., and the perfectly white grout between my kitchen tiles is offering me no solutions. I wash my hair and blow it stick straight.
When I have completely run out of things to do and ways to put it off, I decide to go to the Santa Monica Pier and talk it out with Dan.
I arrive a little before five o’clock. It’s still hot out. I’m on the pier looking down onto the beach, and I’m not sure what I’m looking at. Dan is surrounded by women. He’s in a red bathing suit and a white T-shirt like he’s fresh off the set of Baywatch. The women are leaning in toward him, and there’s something, even from this far away, that tells me he doesn’t like it. It’s the way he is taking tiny steps backward and smiling with his mouth closed. When the crowd breaks open, I see little kids too, grabbing small canvases and backpacks and leaving with their moms. After everyone else has left, I watch as the last little boy, maybe six, reaches into his backpack and gives Dan something. Dan plops onto the sand to examine it, so the boy does too. I’m not sure when I’ve ever been so focused on something in my life. I don’t know what I’m watching, but it’s possible that Dan has a child. The boy says something to make Dan laugh, really laugh, and I want to know what it was.
I text Clem: Breaking—man bun might have a kid
Dan looks up and sees me standing at the railing and points me out to the little boy. Dan says something and the little boy nods. The possibilities swirl around my mind—I decide to grab hold of See that woman? She’s about to make it in Hollywood. I wave at them, and Dan pulls out his phone and texts me: The least you can do is give me a hand?
I make my way onto the beach as he’s collecting towels and watercolor kits. “Grab those,” he says by way of greeting. “This is Louis.”
“Hi, Louis,” I say and feel like I should say another thing. Not having siblings or cousins or friends with kids, I don’t actually have a little-kid repertoire. “What’s all this?”
“Art camp,” Louis says and hands me his backpack. “My dad’s always late.”
“But he always comes,” Dan says over his shoulder.
I pick up a few towels and fold them. “So you do this every week?” I ask.
“Mostly. It’s a pop-up camp, for when I have time.” He collects sandy paintbrushes into a canvas bag. “Which is a lot lately.” It really is preposterous how little care Dan takes with his hair, I mean, comb it once. Just once. But on the beach, and now with Louis riding piggyback, it looks more normal. It’s like if you first saw a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat at the mall, but then later you saw him out on the range and it sort of made sense.
“What?” Dan asks. I’ve been looking at his hair for too long.
“Have you ever come into contact with a hairbrush?”
“Was that a joke?” And over his shoulder to Louis, “Was it?”
“I think she thinks you’re messy.”
“Then maybe she’ll help us clean up.” He puts Louis down and points to three abandoned canvases down the beach. Louis runs to get them, and a man is waving at us from the pier.
“Always freakin’ late,” Dan mutters.
I pick up the stack of towels and follow Louis and Dan back up to the pier.
Louis hugs his dad, who’s in a blue suit and a crisp shirt. I wonder where he’s been today that’s made him late.
He says hello to me, and Dan says, “This is Jane.”
“She’s his stalker,” Louis tells him.
“I am not,” I say just as Dan starts to laugh.
“She is a little. I mean, showing up at my place of business. In a dress,” he says.
“It’s a sundress. This is the beach. You said five.” I can feel myself getting worked up. I turn to the late dad. “I’m his colleague, we have a scheduled meeting.”
Louis’s dad could not care less about me and my meeting. He just waits as Louis hugs Dan goodbye.
“See you, Peanut,” Dan says. The intimacy of the nickname startles me. When I was a kid, I used to imagine that my dad would have had a nickname for me, maybe Doodle, something to do with the squiggly outline of my hair, our hair. Louis smiles a smile that matches one that’s buried in my heart.
We watch them walk away, and the towels are heavy in my arms. “You okay?” he asks.
“Of course.” We start walking. He’s walking rudely faster than I, so I have to double step to keep up. “So can we brainstorm a little?”
“About what? You’re the one who’s got a soundtrack in the works.”
“Well, sort of. I just want to talk the whole thing through. I think we’re the only people who care if this movie gets made.”
We get to his car, an old white BMW sedan. I mean old, with a little rust but pretty leather seats. “Get in,” he says. “I’m starving.”
We toss his stuff in the back seat and get in the car. I have Dateline vibes, and I can hear Keith Morrison telling the audience that I got into a car with the man I despised most in the world. Why? he’d say into the camera just before the commercial break. Why would she get in that car?
“Buckle up,” he says, and it sounds chilling.
“Why?”
“Because we’re in a car, Jane. And it’s the law.” He shakes his head and pulls into traffic. We drive five minutes down to Venice Beach and park in front of a skate-rental store. We get out of the car and Dan still isn’t talking to me. He’s just walking toward the boardwalk as if we’d previously agreed that I would follow him anywhere. There’s a hint of sand on the sidewalk, and I like the way it makes a sound under my sandals, like a crinoline under a big taffeta gown. We pass some artists selling paintings and sculpture and Dan stops to look. One of them, an older man, gets up out of a beach chair and slaps him on the shoulder.
“Is this new?” Dan asks. “It’s great.” They’re standing in front of a small oil painting of a pile of feathers. It’s actually beautiful, but what I’m really noticing is that Dan has his back completely to me, like I’m not here.
“And who’s this?” the man with manners asks.
“Sorry. Pedro, this is Jane. We’re trying to work together.”
I say hello and shake his hand. “It’s not easy,” I say with a smile.
“Because she’s insane,” Dan says.
“Can you see why Dan never has a girlfriend?” Pedro asks me.
“Yes, no mystery there,” I say.
Dan laughs like that’s both true and fine. “We’re going to Maud’s real quick.”
Pedro gives me yikes eyes. “Oh, he really does hate you.”
“Wheatgrass,” I say. “Tell me it’s not wheatgrass.”
“You’ll be begging for wheatgrass,” Pedro says.
I find out what he means when we are seated on opposite sides of a picnic table with an order of potato skins and two lemonades between us.
“They’re delicious,” he says. “Try.”
I pick one up and take a bite, and the grease rolls down my wrist. It is a celebration of starch and cheese and bacon the likes of which my mouth has never known.
My bliss must show on my face because he says, “See?”
“I see.” I take a second napkin and wipe my face. “I had you pegged as a guy who would think cheese is murder.”
“Yep, you’ve really got me all figured out.” He leans toward me, gesturing with a potato skin. “So tell me why you’re stalking me. You want ideas for Quinlan’s song?”
I’m not ready to ask for help, so I take another bite of my greasy potato and use another napkin. “Are you a painter? Like is this the Bruce Wayne to your Batman?”
He laughs a little, a two on the Richter scale. “I paint, or I have painted. My degree is in photography. I sell prints online when I’m between jobs.” I’ve never sat like this, across a table from him, and the navy blue of his eyes is deeper than I remember. His lashes are jet black like his hair—it’s all so dramatic. He takes another potato skin and replaces a fallen piece of bacon on top. “I have a darkroom in my apartment, and the chemicals will probably kill me by the time I’m sixty, so there’s no need to save for retirement. It’s a pretty solid plan.”
I laugh. I don’t mean to. I want to take the laugh back, but it’s gotten me. “Yes, death is a sure path to financial independence. You’re a total catch.”
The view of the ocean is behind him, beyond the boardwalk. People are skating by. The sun is getting lower so his face is in shadow. He’s completely still, and there’s so much motion behind him, it’s mesmerizing, like he’s in time-lapse.
“Jane,” he says, and I come to.
“Yeah, so can we talk about this movie?”
“I don’t have a tiger,” he says.
“I think the tiger thing was a joke,” I say.
“When I said I didn’t think it was commercial, I meant it in a good way.”
“I bet you’re terrible at breaking up with people.”
“I am,” he says. “How would you know that?”
“Just a hunch. How was it in a good way?”
He’s quiet for a second, and the white noise of the boardwalk—rollerbladers, voices, gulls—intensifies. “The loud movies with the explosions and superheroes, they sell tickets because they’re an escape. We don’t have to think about our own lives when we watch them. We can hide in the noise. But it’s the quiet movies that make room for us to look at ourselves. People cooking, teaching, gardening. They’re quiet things, but they’re the things that move us. And people, mostly, are afraid of the quiet.”
“Yes.” It just comes out.
“Wait, did you just agree with me?”
“Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, Dan.”
“Wow, did you borrow my dad’s joke book?” He smiles and sits up straighter. He has the posture of someone who’s just won. “So, the movie.”
“Yes, that. What you said about the quiet. I agree. And I wonder, if the thing with Jack Quinlan for some reason didn’t work out, how else could it be commercial?”
“I don’t think it needs to be. I feel like this movie could be made really cheaply. It’s so personal, it doesn’t need to be big and sweeping. Like it could be one camera.”
“I’m not letting you turn my movie into The Blair Witch Project .”
He laughs. “That’s big budget compared to what I’m thinking. The film I made with Wallflower Pictures—”
I interrupt him. “The one that won all the awards and sold exactly no tickets? That one?”
Dan leans in. “Yes, that one. We made it so cheap.”
“That’s impressive, but you’re thinking of how to make this smaller, when Nathan wants to make it bigger. Clearwater doesn’t make small films. We need to increase the wow factor without sacrificing the quiet of it all.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Did you just agree with me?” I smile at him behind my napkin.
“Which is why a pop star with a big song for the soundtrack is the right fix,” he says. “It doesn’t mess up the story.” And just then, Jack Quinlan’s “Purple” comes on the radio. I want to say this was a coincidence or a sign, but that song comes on the radio three times an hour.
“What?” Dan asks.
“What, what?”
“I think you think you have a poker face, when I can seriously see every thought as it crosses your mind. You just had a sarcastic thought.”
“Did not.” My hand moves up to my face to hide whatever my next thought is going to be.
“Did too.”
“Just, this song. It’s on constantly.”
“And?”
“It’s just so weird that he’s such a huge star. Like he’s on TMZ every day and I’m still trying to get my first movie made.”
He widens his eyes like he knows I’ve just overshared. I think he’s going to pounce with some snarky comment about what a loser I am, but he says, “Well, I’m thirty-two and slowly dying of chemical inhalation in my apartment, so.”
I don’t say anything. I cannot fathom why I shared that with this man. It was an inside-the-house, under-a-blanket thought. The kind I’d only share with Clem.
“Your buddy Jack is actually performing next weekend at a music festival in Long Island. In my hometown. My brother’s the electrician at the venue. It’s supposed to be a big secret that he’s showing up, but it seems like everyone knows. What kind of timeline is he on to write the song?”
“We’ve been pretty loose about the whole thing. Which is why I was sort of hoping you could help me with a backup plan?”
He gives me a long look, and I don’t blink. “Nope. I think your plan’s all we’ve got.”
My plan is entirely made up, I don’t say. I am sweating. It’s hot and the sun is bright behind Dan’s head. I am drunk on bacon grease and cheese. “I think we should go.”
We don’t talk on the way back to the car. I am not accustomed to not talking. I should be asking him what his plans are for the weekend; he should be asking where I live, if I have siblings or pets. But he’s just walking next to me, taking in the sun on the water, stopping quietly to look at what people are selling. And I feel sort of ignored, like there’s an arrogance to this quiet, like he’s above the awkward silence. I also wonder if I’m one of those people who is afraid of the quiet.
“What?” he asks. He’s caught me looking at him.
“What’s with the string bracelets?” I ask.
He grabs his wrist. “Louis makes them. They’re not very good.”
“No,” I say. “They’re just pieces of string. Shouldn’t there be some braiding or something?”
He stops walking and turns to me. “He’s just trying to tell me something he doesn’t know how to say. He’s not trying to win design awards. Also, he’s six.”
“Of course,” I say, and we walk toward his car. “And why ‘Peanut’?”
“Just came to me one day and I said it. Won me these bracelets, so I guess it was a fit.” He’s casual about it, as if he doesn’t understand the enormity of having given a well- received nickname to a kid who needs it.