Chapter 24
Our eyes connect and for a half-second I feel the room stop. A smile spreads across my face but I quickly shut it down. I don’t know what to say. He’s the very last person I expected to see here. I’m shocked, confused and, although I don’t want to admit it, excited.
‘Hello, Finn,’ I say, my voice cracking a bit.
‘Hey, Sam.’ He grins and his hazel eyes are so twinkly I have to look away. He shouldn’t be so charming and handsome.
‘What are you doing here?’ I hope my tone isn’t too aggressive. The last time we were alone I was walking away from him in the East Village after the movie. I was so angry that night, and so embarrassed of my reaction, that I wasn’t sure what to say to him. I’ve relentlessly focused any communication with him on work and shut down any attempt to move beyond that. I even had the person at Brands who books travel work with him directly to arrange the trip to Miami. When I see him at Plant Daddy I’ll make up any excuse to keep him at arm’s length, from volunteering for a dog walking shift for Damola to emptying the container of grounds.
‘I’m here for the same reason as you,’ Finn says simply.
‘I doubt it,’ I say, thinking about the latest negotiation with my mother.
‘Everyone’s here to make a connection. I’m not always great with things outside my art. Correction – I mean with people, of course.’ He looks down, breaking eye contact like he’s suddenly nervous. I can tell it’s something he doesn’t love to reveal. At the school in Coney Island, he confessed he was kind of a loner as a kid, but I assumed that was a stage he passed through. He looks up at me again. ‘That nice woman at Plant Daddy who is always telling me I should cut my hair shorter suggested I check this out. She even printed out a newspaper article about it.’
‘The one with the jokey gay T-shirts and high tops who sometimes has multiple reading glasses attached to different parts of her body?’ I ask, although I don’t have to. I’ve purposely avoided being there when my mom and Finn are both around. I’m afraid she’ll sniff out something between us that isn’t there.
‘Yeah, do you know her?’
‘A little bit,’ I say without elaborating.
Finn leans forward, placing his forearms on the table. ‘Sam, I wanted to…’ He begins quickly and then pulls the brakes. His voice is more shallow and less playful than when I turned around. He wipes some sweat off his forehead and tries to reboot. ‘Sam, I’ve been wanting to talk to you. Not about work or whatever. I wanted to apologize for what happened after Sunset Boulevard. ’
His eyes are soft and almost pleading. He doesn’t look anything like the know-it-all who steamrolled me after the movie. Maybe this is a new language for him. ‘I get too worked up about stuff like that.’ He rubs his hands together in a slow, calming way. ‘My emotions take over. I’m sorry I pushed you. Not everyone I meet is a subject for a documentary. I’m trying to learn that.’ He’s not being aggressive or demanding like he was after the movie and it makes me want to explain.
‘It’s my fault,’ I say before I can even process how kind he’s being. ‘I shouldn’t have been so defensive. I get in this funk after a screening. My feelings are all on the surface. Especially at that theater with a movie I love.’ The film had an impact on me but it was his probing that put my stomach in knots. But sitting here with him after his apology my stomach feels more like happy butterflies fluttering.
‘I thought more about Sunset Boulevard ,’ Finn says. ‘I even watched it again on my own. A few times in fact. I think you’re right. It has the core elements of good filmmaking and it’s camp as hell. I should have gone into it with more of an open mind.’
‘Wow. Thank you.’ It was generous of him to do that for me. Not that he did it for me per se. He really did it for the kids, but the generosity is there, nonetheless. ‘That was very kind.’ I lean a bit closer to him. ‘I have a confession. I stayed up the other night to watch Moonlight .’ I don’t tell him that I also watched it before our screening in the East Village. ‘You’re right. It’s complex and important. It really speaks to this moment. The kids in the program should see it. I guess we have both been doing some secret movie watching.’
We laugh and the tension from the other night fades. We quickly move to a conversation about both of the films and how much we admire and appreciate them.
‘What do you think about showing a black-and-white film to kids? Are you worried they’ll get bored?’ he asks. It’s a fair question.
‘I think they see so much high-tech HD. Super-rich color. Special effects. Black-and-white can open the door to their creativity without some high-end slick production. It invites imagination.’ I remember my fascination with these films when I was a kid. I close my eyes for just a second, and a memory of sitting on our beat-up couch mouthing the lines through my hundredth viewing of All About Eve while my mom made dinner comes to mind.
‘Sounds like you’ve done that,’ he says.
‘I have. The library down the street from our house had a whole stack of classic Hollywood movies on VHS tape. Do you even know what that is?’ I ask seriously. I just made the cutoff for analog technology; I’m pretty sure Finn was born into the digital age.
‘Of course. I wasn’t raised into the simulation,’ Finn says, putting his hands behind his head. He’s comfortable with me and that makes me feel good.
‘I grew up without cable, and we only had an ancient VCR to play worn-out tapes from the library,’ I say. ‘We didn’t have a ton of extra money. My mom was a schoolteacher and a single parent.’
‘That’s rough,’ he says.
‘She made sure I had a great childhood,’ I say, ignoring the fact that my mother has forced me to be at this speed dating event and is currently ruining my life. ‘She’d do anything for me. I don’t think I appreciated it enough. School was a nightmare. Being overly involved wasn’t enough. Kids teased me mercilessly so my mom would drive me over an hour each way to the LGBTQ youth center just to make sure I had a safe place to be.’ Maybe that’s why I’m going along with her plan. To say thank you? Which is incredibly twisted but suits our dynamic.
‘I can sort of tell that you had a great mom from talking to you.’
‘You can?’
‘Yeah. You’re used to being around people, and you’re easy to talk to. Both my parents are lawyers. Everything is by the book with them. No coloring out of the lines.’ He makes a scowl and wags his finger. ‘They don’t know how to talk to each other let alone talk to me. Lots of polite conversation. No real connection. It’s easier for me to get to know someone through the lens of my camera. Just talking like this is hard for me. My parents never really taught me that. It sounds like your mom did.’
‘I have another confession,’ I say, fidgeting in my chair. ‘That woman who keeps telling you to get a haircut and suggested you come here is not just some rando; she’s my mother.’
His eyes widen and he leans in. ‘No way. I bet there’s a story there.’ His documentarian instinct kicks in.
‘I’ll tell you, but you won’t believe it.’ I explain the whole thing, from the contract I signed to the meeting with Rajesh to the dating profile for my feet. I don’t tell him I’m doing it to be with my ex, Paul. Maybe I should but it’s complicated enough. I don’t want to overwhelm him. Or maybe it’s something else.
‘Wow,’ he says because I’m sure he doesn’t know what to say.
‘I hope it doesn’t make you think my mother is nuts. She’s really very nice, in her own way.’
‘I think it’s amazing. She must love you a lot.’
‘Yes, she does,’ I say. Sometimes too much, but seeing it through Finn’s reaction doesn’t feel like too much – in fact, it feels pretty good. Is there even such a thing as too much love?
Clams ring the bell. Ten minutes could not have already gone by. It feels like ten seconds. ‘That’s your one-minute warning,’ Clams calls. ‘Now make sure you have at least one number on your sheet. Come on, dolls. Give love a chance.’
I look down at my card and see nothing but blank spaces. ‘My mom is not going to be pleased when she finds out I didn’t write down any matches. She’ll insist on making another profile for me on some horrible app.’ I look across the room and see 72, who seemed like such a nice guy. ‘What do you think of that guy over there? Do you think if I wrote down his number and explained to him that my mother is obsessed, he might understand? I have to write down someone.’
‘Write down 24,’ he says and I look around the room for the number but don’t see it.
‘Which one is…’ I start to ask and then realize he has a great big twenty-four on his name tag.
‘Write my number down. I already know the story, and you can tell her you had at least one match because I’ll write you down too.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, caught up in the moment. We write down each other’s number and smile as Clams rings the final bell. Sometimes the only thing that solves a problem is creating a bigger problem.