1 An Open Relationship #5
“That surprises me,” he said.
Since I couldn’t be cool, I’d have to be sincere. “It was a weird place. It’s not like it had a lot of friends to even choose from. Like, there were a couple of popular kids, a couple of losers, a bunch of invisible people…”
“Wait,” he said, “let me guess. And there was a very bad, but very pretty girl who put down all the girls she thought were inferior.”
“Yeah,” I replied. There was one of those. “She never messed with me, though. I didn’t exist for her.”
“And there was a guy who skipped all his classes and mouthed off to the teachers, and of course all the girls liked him.”
“All of them but me,” I said.
“And a theater club, and a band, and those were for the losers.”
“If so, that makes me a loser, because I did band.”
“No way.” He laughed. “What did you play, flute?”
“Um, not exactly.”
“Guitar? Piano?”
Don’t guess it. Please don’t guess.
“No,” I said.
“Well, what then?”
“I played the, uh, triangle.”
He froze, stared at me, and turned beet-red as he tried to suppress a laugh. “The triangle?” he asked, in case there had been some confusion.
“Listen, it’s harder that it looks! It sets the tune for the whole band!”
“Of course. The triangle is known to be a very complex instrument.”
“Oh, shut up.”
He continued, “With something so trying, I’m guessing you didn’t make it long.”
“No. Two weeks. Then I found another hobby.”
“Choir?” he asked.
“If you heard me sing, you’d throw yourself off this roof.”
“You danced then?”
“Yeah.” I took a sip of my beer.
“Not hip-hop, I presume.”
“You presume right.”
“Please God, don’t tell me it was ballet,” he groaned.
“So what if it was?” I asked, irritated.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yeah, for a while.” I crossed my arms. “And I was good at it, by the way. But I had to quit.”
“Why?”
“My teacher told me I’d need to lose ten pounds if I wanted to keep doing it.” The mere memory made me angry.
“I’m hoping you didn’t do that.”
“I didn’t. That’s not the end of the story, though,” I said.
“OK, I’m all ears.”
“Well, my mom found out and she got so mad she went down to the school to meet with the teacher and ended up throwing coffee in her face.”
He laughed so hard he nearly dropped his beer. I thought it was pretty amusing, too.
“I like your mom,” he said. “If you’d been my daughter, I’d have done the same.”
That reminded me I needed to call her the next day so she wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown.
“You’re actually the kind of person who’d throw coffee in a teacher’s face?”
“Depends. Maybe I’d have invited her up here and tossed her off the roof. I’m kind of itching to try that, now.”
“So you’re a bad guy?” I asked.
“I am. I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”
I asked him if he had finished with his guesses about what my school was like, and he said, “No, not at all,” then inquired whether I had been one of the invisible people.
“You could say so.”
“Did your boyfriend go to the same school?”
“Yeah.”
“He wasn’t invisible, though, right?” Ross pinned me with his eyes.
“Nope.”
“Probably the typical popular guy you’d have never thought would notice you, right?”
“You’re pretty good at this,” I conceded.
“And when you hooked up, the whole school was talking about it for a week.”
“Actually two weeks.”
“I was close,” he said.
“Close but no bull’s-eye.”
“You’re so negative!”
Looking at him askance, I asked whether his guesses were so accurate because his school had been like mine, too.
“No. Mine was boring. Nothing interesting ever happened. But I’ve seen lots of movies where the plot is like this.”
“Stereotypes are often true,” I said.
“I never said they weren’t.” He crushed his cigarette out on the ground. “So your life is basically a modern version of Jane Austen.”
“Who’s that?”
He stared at me as if he couldn’t believe what I’d said. “You’re studying English and you don’t know who Jane Austen is?”
“I don’t like to read,” I murmured.
“Wait, let me get this straight: you’re studying English and you don’t like to read?”
“I have to pick a major, right? But I don’t know what I want to study!”
“You’re telling me you’ve never read Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park ? You never even saw any of the movies?”
“No, but I guess you like her,” I replied, “because you know all the titles.”
“My mother loves her,” he admitted. “She has all her books and DVDs of all the film adaptations. I know them all by heart.”
He shook his head in disbelief and asked, “OK, so you don’t like books, you don’t like movies, apparently, so what do you do with your time? Listen to music? Play dominoes? Stare at the wall?”
“Dominoes, no. Walls, no. Music I do like, but I’m choosy, so I don’t listen to a lot of it.”
He seemed stunned and asked what I did like, and I protested that I liked all kinds of things.
“Such as…?”
“I mean, I used to love ballet before the coffee incident.”
“But what about now?”
Well, there was running. I used to do that before I met Monty. But he had this idea that a girl shouldn’t leave the house alone—especially not in tight clothes—so I kind of forgot that and ended up sticking to things you could do around the house.
“I like reality shows,” I finally admitted. “The more fights on them, the better.”
He smiled, but I think he thought that was ridiculous. He tried to change the subject to movies, saying there was nobody who didn’t like movies and asking me if I’d seen anything recently.
“Sure,” I said. “ Finding Nemo .”
“Well,” he said, arching an eyebrow, “that’s the summit of cinematic culture right there.”
“Yeah, my boyfriend doesn’t like movies.”
“Yeah. I’m not asking questions about your boyfriend. I’m asking about you.”
With a frown, I exploded, “I don’t like movies, OK? They take forever to watch. It’s just a bunch of people talking about whatever, and I hate the way they, like, show a building or a field from a bunch of different angles… Who cares!”
“You’re not watching them right.”
“How do you watch them wrong?”
He shook his head and asked me if I hadn’t watched Disney movies when I was a child, and when I brought back up Finding Nemo , he said he was pretty sure that wasn’t Disney.
He regretted that I’d missed out on my childhood and I said he was exaggerating, but that my brothers had always hogged the TV to watch sports.
He started rattling off a list of movies I supposedly had to have seen: The Lion King. Life Is Beautiful. Forrest Gump. Gladiator. The Pianist. Back to the Future. Some of the titles rang a bell, but I had never seen them and had never felt the temptation.
“I thought I had a sad life,” he said, and I objected that I was very happy.
“You’re not, though, but you will be a couple hours from now, when we finish watching The Lion King .”
He was already standing up to get ready.
I set down my blanket and hurried over to the stairs with him, asking why it mattered whether or not I’d seen some dumb movie.
“It’s not dumb,” he said, and when I apologized for offending the honor of his favorite movie, he went off.
“It’s a classic, for the love of God! You not even knowing the first thing about it is like…
Well, it’s like I’m talking to a person from another planet! ”
When we were back in his apartment, he froze so quickly I almost ran into him and ordered Naya and Will, who were still on the couch making out, to cut the lovemaking because there were people coming through.
“What are you two doing?” Naya asked, looking up.
“Jenna’s never seen The Lion King ,” Ross said in the same scandalized tone as before. “I’m about to fix that.”
“You’re kidding!” Will exclaimed.
“See,” Ross said, “she’s weird.”
“And you’re a little annoying,” I told him.
But at least he wasn’t stuck up. And he was funny.
He guided me to the last door on the left and invited me into his room.
The first thing I noticed was a giant poster for what I guessed was a famous movie.
Then another. Then another. I had never heard of any of them.
There was a sliding glass door that led out onto a balcony and a small window, an orderly little desk with a laptop covered in stickers, and a big bed with a notebook on it that he tossed to the other side of the room brusquely.
Grabbing his laptop and sitting on the bed, he said, “Go ahead and take off your boots. And get ready to have your life changed.”
I did as he said and walked around, looking at things while he tried to find the movie. That first poster that had caught my eye showed a girl with blond hair and a long sword in her hand. “What’s with the sword?” I asked.
Disappointed, he replied, “It’s called a katana, it’s Japanese, and the film, as you can see from the poster, is called Kill Bill. It’s a classic, one of my favorites, directed by Quentin Tarantino. I’m assuming you haven’t seen it, either.”
“No. I would, though. I’m curious now.”
“I would recommend you begin your movie journey with something by Disney, which is a bit softer,” he responded. “I don’t think you’re ready, psychologically, for Tarantino.”
On his dresser, I saw photos of his family.
His mother looked young, and he and his father shared the same features, except that his father had shorter hair and glasses.
There was one picture of a younger Ross standing next to a basketball trophy smiling from ear to ear, and that same trophy, along with a few others, stood behind the photo frames.
Passing a finger over it and thinking how much Monty had always yearned for his team to win a title, I asked, “Do you like basketball?”
“I used to. I think it’s boring now.”
“You were good, though?”
“I’m still good.”
“And humble, too, I see.”
“Humility’s never been one of my faults,” he said. “Now come here. I’ve got the movie.”
Less than two hours later, I was watching Simba climbing up Pride Rock with swelling music in the background. As soon as the movie finished, Ross turned to me, awaiting a reaction, his expression like that of a child waiting on a piece of candy.
“It’s good, right?” he said.
“It was…fine.”
“What do you mean, ‘fine’?”
His indignation made me chuckle, and I admitted, “Look, I liked it, OK? The music’s fun. The characters were amusing. It was good.”
He relaxed and said, “I knew you couldn’t resist Simba’s charms.”
“Actually, I liked Pumba better.”
He seemed unable to believe that, but I explained that Pumba seemed more tender to me.
He made a dumb joke about how wild boar meat was tender and I slapped his shoulder and said, “How dare you talk about eating Pumba,” and he offered me two options: going to see whether Naya and Will were still getting it on or staying there and watching another movie.
I wanted to know what time it was, and he said it didn’t matter, I could definitely stick around to watch something else.
So after thinking it over for a second, I said, “Sure, put on another of those Disney movies.”
And so there I was, at three in the morning, watching the end of Beauty and the Beast. We’d actually started with Snow White , but I thought it was corny. Ross wanted to know my opinion, and I said I gave it an eight out of ten.
“You like Beauty and the Beast better than Cinderella ?”
“Sorry, but Cinderella goes against all my feminist principles.”
“Yeah, that story’s hundreds of years old. There was no feminism back then. You have to look at it from the perspective of the culture of the time,” he said.
“It sounds like you should be the one studying literature.”
“Maybe in another lifetime,” he said. “I’m very happy with my major. Bet you can’t guess what it is?”
“I just met you at dinnertime.”
“OK, you got me. I’m studying film.”
“Naturally. I guess I understand now why you got so offended by what I said earlier. That car outside with all the stickers on it must be yours, then?” I asked.
“Yep, that’s my baby. You like it?”
“It’s original. And I like original stuff. I feel kind of bland around you. I don’t have a single poster in my room.”
“Now you can put up one of Pumba,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m sure Naya would love a giant picture of a red pig on the wall.”
Speak of the devil… Naya knocked on the door just then and peeked inside. “Y’all aren’t doing anything indecent are you?” she asked, pretending to cover her eyes but peeking through a gap in her fingers. “Ah, good, Ross, I see you’re behaving.”
“Gee, thanks for sounding surprised,” he responded.
She asked if I was ready to go, and Ross smiled maliciously and said, “Wow, you guys finally finished!” She told him to shut up and for me to walk down with her to catch our Uber. I slid on my boots as Ross yawned.
“Good night, Ross,” I said.
“Good night.”
“Thanks for the film class.”
“Next time we’ll watch something weird and gory,” he joked.
I shook my head and followed Naya outside.