Back After This

Chapter Fifteen The Lesson

Chapter Fifteen

The Lesson

At about noon on Sunday, I headed for the address Will had given me. He lived in a building not too different from mine, about a fifteen-minute walk away. I knocked on the door, and when he opened it, Will was holding on to Buddy by his collar. “Hi.”

“Well, hi,” I said. I reached down to rub the top of Buddy’s fuzzy head. “Nice to see you again, troublemaker.”

“Thank you again for doing this,” Will said as he shut the door and let Buddy go. “I have to go capture this epic love story, and somehow I don’t think the bride-to-be would enjoy a hundred-and-sixty-pound dog trying to get his nose under her petticoats for an hour and a half.”

“You would never do that, would you,” I said, resting my hand on Buddy’s head. I looked at Will. “He would never do that, that’s defamation.”

Buddy trotted off toward the small living room and immediately jumped up on the couch.

“Is he allowed to be up there?” I asked.

“I’ve already given up,” Will said. I turned to look as Buddy flopped down on the sofa, which he occupied almost completely. His head rested on one arm, and his stretched back legs almost reached the other. I nodded and turned back to Will. “He certainly seems to feel at home with you.”

“I have a feeling he can make himself at home just about anywhere.” He dragged a plastic bin out of the hall closet and pulled off the lid. “All right,” he said. He began to remove items from it and lay them on the floor. “I have chicken things. I have cheese things. I have this rubber thing with a hole in it that he might or might not want to chew on. I have this rope that he uses to pull me around the apartment. And I have these.” He held up a bag of long, crusty chews that looked like expired foot-long Slim Jims. “These are bully sticks. Do you know what those are?”

“I don’t,” I said.

“They’re dicks,” he said. “They are bull dicks. They are the literal dicks of bulls.”

I looked at the bag. I looked at him. “ Those are.”

He looked at the bag. He looked back at me. “Believe it or not, that’s like a third of the original size.”

“That is a legit amazing animal fact.”

“Buddy loves them. But I have to warn you, however bad you think a stretched and dried bull penis would smell when a dog slowly rehydrates it with his mouth, it’s much worse in reality, so just…if you go with these, maybe open a window. But anyway, all that is there if you need it.” He put everything back in the bin and put the bin back in the closet. Then he got on his hands and knees and crawled under the dining table, only to emerge with a stuffed elephant. “This is Caesar.” He squeezed the toy. It gave a squeak, and Buddy briefly lifted his head from the sofa before dropping it again and returning to what seemed to be an immediately restorative sleep.

“Is he allowed to watch TV?”

Will grinned in the direction of a large backpack on the floor as he zipped it up, then lifted it up onto his shoulder. “After he finishes his homework. I just walked him, so he should be good for a while, but if you need his leash, it’s hanging on the hook by the door.”

“Got it.”

“Next time you see me, I’ll have food,” he said. “You want Thai, Mexican, Korean, or Indian?”

“Let’s say Mexican,” I said, and he gave a nod and turned and headed for the door. “You didn’t even ask me if I’m a vegan or anything,” I added as he opened it.

He turned back to me and narrowed his eyes. “You had the Bolognese.” He had an exceptionally good mouth. I just had to stop noticing these things.

“Busted,” I said, and we both smiled, and he gave me a wave and walked off down the hall. I shut the door and turned back to Buddy, who just then stretched his endless legs so they were even more fully extended across the entirety of the living room couch. “Please, don’t get up,” I told him. “I’ll just sit somewhere else.”

Human nature comes for all of us in our moments of solitude, so obviously the first thing I did was snoop. I didn’t go into the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet, and I didn’t open anything that was closed, so in fairness to myself, I exercised more restraint than a lot of people would have. It was a small place, but the little hallway that led to the bedroom and bathroom was loaded—naturally—with hanging picture frames. This family, standing together next to a river wearing life jackets, had to be his. I wasn’t sure which of the boys with wide smiles he was, but there was a girl, too, and parents who both looked like the kind of strapping people who go rafting a lot.

There was a teenager I didn’t think was Will, wearing a Dodgers jersey in the stands at a game. On the wall opposite what I figured were family photos, there were bigger prints, more what I would expect to find in a photographer’s house. One showed a bike racer, captured against a blurred background, wearing bright blue. Another was of a guy climbing a mountain, and it occurred to me in passing that if Will took it, he must have climbed up there, too.

What there wasn’t much of was furniture. There was the gray couch Buddy had been sleeping on, with its upholstery worn down to bare in a few places. There were a couple of tables that looked like they might have started their lives as flat-pack items fifteen years ago. It all looked scavenged. Fortunately, however bare the sofa cushions, they were surprisingly comfortable, which I learned when I came back to find Buddy had moved to his giant bed on the floor. “Oh, thank you,” I said, settling onto the warm sofa. “Nice of you to share.”

For about an hour, I read a novel and Buddy napped and periodically snored a loose, cartoonish snore, clearly in a state of floppy-lipped bliss. But when I came to the end of a chapter, I took out my laptop and opened an episode of Dear Wendy I had been working on as a favor to the show’s editor, who was out of town for two weeks. The idea behind the show was that Wendy, an advice columnist, would listen to a question, and then she would interview some experts to get their input, and then she would deliver her verdict.

This episode, like a disproportionate number of advice-column questions, revolved around a wedding. There was an estranged brother, a best friend, a years-old resentment over a disrupted birthday party at which someone was overserved—it was messy and appalling and, in that sense, pretty standard. The producer who had done the first pass at the episode was still new and needed some help nailing the basics, although she had solid instincts for what was good and what was boring, which was more than half the battle.

I got quite absorbed in fiddling with some tape Wendy got from a wedding planner who argued that no one is entitled to be invited to any wedding, and I was still on the couch with my headphones on when I heard the key in the lock. I hopped up and paused to look in the hall mirror to make sure I was at least a little presentable and didn’t have an egregious case of headphone hair. I ran my hands through it just as he opened the door.

When he came inside, I felt it in my knees, something vaguely lovely that I was hesitant to interrogate beyond simply being happy to see him. His camera bag was across his back, and he lifted both hands to show me two big plastic take-out sacks. “I have come to feed you,” he said.

“All right, ” I said, maybe a little too hungrily, so to speak, as I stepped out of his way.

“How did Buddy do?” At just that moment, the dog dragged himself off the bed and came over to greet Will, who wrapped his hand under Buddy’s chin without the slightest bend at the waist.

“Just like you said, he mostly slept. How was the engagement?”

“The pictures should be great. I think the couple is doomed,” he said. “She went off to touch up her makeup at one point, and he told me he’s looking forward to being married because it will force them to fight less.”

“Wow, yikes.”

“Exactly. Okay, let me put all this down.” He went into the very small galley kitchen, where he pulled down some plates and got some mismatched flatware out of a drawer. “I got some tacos, I got some enchiladas, I got some tamales, and I got some sopapillas in case you have a sweet tooth, I didn’t know. I also got some chicharrones, which are my actual favorites.”

“Ooh, I think I want them.”

“They are fried. They are pork. You definitely want them.”

“Sold.”

He fished a dried pig’s ear out of his backpack and gave it to Buddy to gnaw on—I was apparently not the only one given to producing items from the bottom of a bag unexpectedly—and we sat on the couch, with my open laptop nudged out of the way on the coffee table. The food was stupendous and decadent, and we ate a lot. I stuffed my face while he talked about the challenges of new clients; he stuffed his while I talked about radio. “Tell me about Madeline’s,” I said as I scooped rice onto my plate. “I’ve never been a server, I feel like it’s an enormous hole in my understanding of the world.”

“Well,” he said, “I would have to take a lot of pictures to pay for even this tiny apartment in this city by myself.” He downed a piece of pork—they were as good as they sounded—and went on. “None of this is my ultimate plan. I’m between…something. Somethings. I don’t know.” He looked around. “Practically everything in here is thrifted, you know, so I feel okay leaving it? Everything I really need can fit in my Kia just in case.”

“In case what?”

“In case whatever,” he said.

I considered him as I finished a bite. “You told me it was a long story what you were doing before you got here and started doing portraits.”

“Mm,” he said noncommittally.

I sat back and studied him. “Look, I interview people for a living,” I said. “I’m going to get there eventually. We’ll start easy. Where did you grow up?”

“California.”

“Northern or southern?”

“L.A.”

“I assume you were a movie star,” I said. “I think that’s all they have there, right? Just like D.C. only has politicians?”

He made a face I found very hard to interpret. “I mean, I wasn’t,” he said.

I frowned at him. “But?”

“Well, my father was a cinematographer,” he said. “And my mother was a stuntwoman.”

I put down a forkful of tamale. “What?”

“Yep.”

“If I had anything that interesting in reserve, I’d tell everyone constantly. Like…jumping motorcycles over canyons or what?”

“When she was younger, it was mostly fights. But eventually, she did a little bit of everything. She did some driving. She fell out of a lot of windows.”

“Now it makes sense,” I said.

“What does?”

“The fact that you wanted to lasso the dog.”

He laughed. “She did ride horses a few times.”

“What would I have seen her in?”

“Many, many things, honestly. Most recently Real Estate Men. You’ve probably seen that.”

“Does that even have stunts?” Real Estate Men was a very beloved but very dopey comedy about a couple of agents who accidentally get tangled up with some mob guys.

“Remember when the guy is showing the house, and he’s trying to explain to the buyers how safe the neighborhood is, and then the lady out in the street gets hit by a car, and she flies up in the air?”

“That’s your mother?”

“That’s my mother. Gwynnie Cabot. Thirty-two films, ninety-four television shows, seven back surgeries, and one ear she can’t really hear out of anymore. She’s the happiest person I know.” Hegot up and went over to take a photo album off the shelf. He flipped through it and then handed it to me, pointing at a picture of a woman wearing a pair of padded coveralls and a helmet, standing in front of a muscle car.

“And your dad’s in that business too.”

“Yes. But he’s not famous. He’s a working DP, a director of photography. He did a lot of police procedurals and TV movies and stuff. They’re kind of opposites, honestly. He doesn’t ever want any attention, and she will walk around on fire if you put a camera on her. If you talk to movie people, they don’t necessarily know him, but they all know her.”

I reached over and touched his elbow without really entirely meaning to do it but probably not exactly not meaning to do it. “I can’t believe this. You are officially much more interesting than I am.”

“I doubt it,” he said.

“I don’t have a lot of secrets,” I said. “I think you pretty much know everything weird about me at this point.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m not sure. I’ve been meaning to ask you: I said something wrong when we were talking about the shows you work on, right? At your photo shoot? We were having a good time, it was good, and then it was weird.”

“Oh,” I said. “After we talked about Scanner Stories. ”

“Yeah, actually,” he said. “I think that’s right.”

I took a big breath and let it out slowly. “So,” I said, “Justin Dash is my ex. We were together for a few years, and we made the first two seasons of that show together. He hosted it, but we made it. And when we broke up—or when he broke up with me—he kind of…kept the show.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. And I…I just walked away from it, because I didn’t want to fight about it. Or think about it, or whatever. And now, it’s just, you know, his thing, like you said.”

I watched him replay it in his head. I saw it hit. “Oh no, because I said—”

“It’s not your fault—that’s what everybody thinks, and now it’s true. I’m not part of it anymore. I haven’t been part of it for years. I got very drunk the night I realized he’d made as many episodes without me as we made together.”

“I feel like…garbage.”

I laughed and reached out and touched the couch between us, like I was putting my hand on his leg when I wasn’t. “You don’t have to feel like garbage. It just makes me flinch, which is frustrating, believe me, because I would love to just not think about it anymore.”

He tilted his head and looked at me. “All right, but I still feel a little bit like garbage. Just a small can. For what it’s worth, I still can’t walk past the place where my ex works without wanting to kick myself in the shins.”

“Where does she work?”

“She’s a lobbyist.”

“For who?”

“Dentists.”

I would love to be a person with a heart so expansive that I’d take no pleasure in the fact that his ex lobbied for dentists and not the environment or human rights. But I am what I am, and I was sort of witheringly gratified that it was regular lobbying.

“Wow, so you could have ended up in the pocket of Big Teeth.”

“Big paying for your teeth, honestly. I couldn’t get over how boring it was, but boy, was she getting ready to make money.” His eyes fell on my laptop. “Is that for work?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m editing.”

“Show me.”

“You don’t want me to show you this.”

“Yes, I do.” I squinted at him, but he just pointed at the screen.

I couldn’t eat another bite anyway, so I set the plates aside and pulled the laptop over so we could sit side by side and he could lean over to look. “Okay, this is a podcast episode, let’s say. What does this look like?”

“Waveforms. I assume that’s all sound.”

“Yes.”

“What are all the rows?”

“This one is the narrator’s voice,” I said, pointing at the top row. “So it’s, you know, ‘In a town in Wyoming, there’s a cage in a basement, and in that basement, there’s a dragon.’?” I moved my finger down. “Then this one is the actualities.”

He closed one eye. “I don’t know what that is.”

“They’re like sound bites. They’re people talking. ‘Well, I’ll tell ya, the first time I saw the dragon, I was pretty surprised.’ Or maybe, ‘I’m Professor Oldcreatures from the University of Arizona, and there are only about twenty dragons left in the American west.’?” Moved it down again. “This one is music, because this piece is scored.”

“Oh, sure. Do you pick the music?”

“No. They have somebody good at that. If I did it, you’d just get a lot of sad piano, because that’s my safety zone.” I moved my finger once more. “This row is ambiance. And you put them all together.” I pressed the space bar, and a vertical line swept from left to right across the screen. “It’s just multiple tracks, just like with music.”

He leaned closer. “What are all the little dots?”

“Those are all cuts.”

He turned to me and seemed to suddenly notice that we were about six inches apart. I certainly did. “There are like a hundred of them,” he finally said.

“Yes.”

“I had no idea,” he said.

“Well, no, you’re not supposed to.” I clicked to stretch out the tape so he could see the adjustments all throughout the voice tracks.

“What are you cutting?”

“Could be a lot of things. Could just be mouth noises. Mouths are a menace.”

He turned to me, and I felt him looking at my lips. “Mouths?” he asked.

I reminded myself to breathe. “They’re a curse to human beings,” I said. And then I said, “Admittedly, not always.”

He laughed. “No.”

“Anyway, it’s mostly things that nobody is ever going to notice. Here, hang on.” I got up and fetched two pairs of headphones and a splitter from my bag. I put on a pair and handed one to him.

He goggled at the big, sturdy Sonys. “Old-school listening, huh?”

“I hate earbuds,” I said. “They’re never clean, I hate the sound, and I can’t stand looking at anything that was just inside my ear. Anyway.” I hit the space bar again, and we heard a woman’s voice say: Honestly um I think the truth is that um you don’t invite people to a wedding because they deserve it um you invite them because you want to spend that day with them. “Okay, what did you notice?”

“Lots of ‘ums,’?” he said. “You’d cut them out?”

“Judgment call,” I said. I replayed the beginning of the clip over and over in our ears: Honestly I think um I think um I think um think um think um. “This first one can go. But I’d leave the other ones. You want people to still sound like themselves. But you don’t want the people listening to be thinking about how much she’s saying ‘um’ instead of hearing what she says.”

“I could never notice all this in the first place.”

“Well, maybe, but on the other hand, I don’t know how to use a camera more complicated than my iPhone. And truthfully, I think you could. I’ll tell you what,” I said, grabbing a file and popping it into an email. “I’m going to send you a file I use for training. It’s me talking. You have to see if you can figure out what I use it to train people on.”

“Oh, no. I am going to fall on my face so hard.”

“I bet you can do it. Just listen carefully, and I bet you’ll hear it. And if you don’t, I’ll tell you next time I see you.” He smiled and I shrugged.

He pointed at the bottom row. “You said this is ambiance. Is that like street noise?”

“Sometimes. Not usually.” I played him the ambi track. It was just quiet, with a soft whoosh in the background, which I raised the volume to emphasize.

“I don’t get it.”

“Nothing happening, right?” I moved a few things around and hit play again. “You can hear that, right? When it cuts between two pieces of tape?” He nodded. “That’s the sound of nothing happening in two different rooms.” He nodded again. We both leaned forward even more. And we stayed that way until I could smell his soap. I played it for him again. Fuzzy silence, then silent silence. Noise, then much less noise.

“What makes them sound different?” he asked.

I tried not to turn toward him to stare at the side of his face, at the hollow of his throat, at those dark eyes. “Lots of things,” I said. “The equipment. Big room versus small room. Sitting next to a window versus next to a pile of laundry. Those quiets will all sound different. So that’s why we make people record maybe thirty seconds of what the silence in the room sounds like. It’s useful. We call it room tone.”

“I’ve shot a couple of weddings where the videographer got room tone, and I had no idea what it was for.”

“Now you know.” I closed the laptop. “And that is probably as much as you want to hear about that.” We took the headphones off.

“So you do all this for other shows on top of the show you’re actually making,” he said.

“Yeah. I sort of fit everything in around the edges. When I’m not going out on twenty blind dates.”

“You really went out on twenty blind dates.”

“I really did.”

“And? Did you like them?”

“Some I liked. Some I didn’t. Some didn’t like me. One left the country, although I don’t think it was because of me. One was still married.”

“Married?”

“Separated. Separated and angry. But anyway, I have a second date with a family doctor very soon.”

“Doctor sounds good,” he said. “I guess that’s something.”

“It is. He seems fine. Who knows?” I found myself eager to stop telling Will about Michael #2, and I wasn’t sure who that was for. I grabbed for the first change of subject I could think of. “Hey, you pulled me way off track. You were telling me your life story. We were up to your mother falling out of windows.”

“Ah, right,” he said. “Okay. Well, until I was in college, I wanted to do stunts. I was taking martial arts, playing a lot of sports, I trained with her a little.”

“Your mom taught you stunts?”

“Yeah. Remember the backflips? She taught me a lot, after she wrapped me up in so much padding I could barely move my arms. I would just hit the ground and roll. I wanted to be exactly like her. That was the plan when I was younger.”

“But…” I prodded.

“But my brother was better at it than I was, and when I was in college, he was already working, and he was really good. But there was an accident with a motorcycle he was on, and he was in the hospital for a long time. It took him months and months to get better, and he’s okay now, but he scared the hell out of everybody. Especially my parents.”

The other kid in the family photo. The kid at the Dodgers game. “Oh wow, that must have been horrible.”

“Pretty bad, yeah,” he said. “After that, I think my parents lost their taste for having me jump off buildings. It was like one kid who might end up in the hospital all the time was all they could stand. They wouldn’t have told me not to do it, but about a year after that accident, my mom told me that she had a dream I was on fire. And she didn’t tell me to try to get me to quit or anything, she was just telling me. And I felt like maybe the time had passed to get into that. Like I said, he was a lot better than I was anyway. He still is. He’s doing a Netflix thing right now where he’s jumping off some giant bridge, I think onto a speedboat? I can’t remember what it’s called.”

“I admit I saw the family photos—your sister, too.”

“That’s Maggie. She’s a normal person, she’s a teacher. She’s married, she has kids. And she lives just up in Baltimore.” He took a breath. “Anyway, I went to college, and then I just bounced around. I worked in construction for a while, a little retail, some summer camps and parks and outside stuff. Took pictures in my free time. Then maybe five years ago, I started dating Meredith, and eventually she moved here for work. And that’s how I got toD.C.”

“Do you miss California?”

“I miss the weather.”

“That’s very reasonable.”

“Got here, tried a couple things. I thought I might want to be a sports doctor, I think just because I knew people my whole life whose joints were all torn up, where all they wanted was to feel better. So I went back to school for that, but it didn’t pan out. Honestly, I couldn’t pass the first couple of premed classes. So that was it for that. And all I really liked was going out and taking pictures. I did a lot of sports stuff at first, but I wasn’t making money. So I started working with a buddy of mine who did portraits. I apprenticed with him for a while, and then I started this little business, which I can’t live on. And that’s why I wait tables.”

“You’re good at both.”

“Thank you,” he said, briefly smiling down at the floor. “Anyway, I’m here until the lease is up, and then, no idea. Somewhere. Something. I’m trying to figure out my life. That’s kind of what broke me and Meredith up in the first place.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. She felt like the photography was never going to get off the ground, and she’d been telling people I was going to be a doctor, and she didn’t like telling them I wasn’t going to be. She felt like her friends were baffled that she was with this loser, and she finally said, ‘I did not move across the country to live with a waiter in a one-bedroom apartment, and I am not going to pay anybody else’s way.’ That’s a direct quote.”

“Yikes.”

“It was probably for the best. That’s what you’re supposed to say, right? The funny thing is that I’m probably happier than I’ve been anywhere else, even though I haven’t really settled down here. I spend a lot of my time on something I like. I work the shifts that make the most sense, and it all seems to be fitting together. I didn’t even mean to come here, exactly, but I’ve been here three years, and it’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere except at home.”

“It sounds like you stay busy.”

He looked over at me. “I mean, I have some free time for friends.”

I nodded. “That’s good,” I said. “I could probably use some friends who don’t already know what mix-minus is.” He frowned. “Maybe I’ll tell you next time,” I said.

Just then, Buddy noisily rose from the floor and came over to sniff Will’s fingers, then mine. “I think this nut is ready for a walk,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I should probably get home.” I gathered up my stuff, and he walked me to the door.

“Thank you again for doing this,” he said as he swung it open.

“You’re welcome. Thanks for dinner.”

“I’ll see you soon?”

“Next time Buddy gets lost,” I said. “If not before. Meanwhile, wish me luck with my second date with a guy who is, I will say, a better prospect than the supplement guy.”

“Good luck,” he said. “I hope it works out. I’ll be listening for sure.”

Walking back toward my apartment with the sound of his voice in my ears and the smell of him quickly cementing itself into a memory that, true or false, made my chest hurt, I have no idea how I could have possibly believed the thing I told myself, which was: I guess that’s that.