The Decent Proposal (4 page)

“Duke Rifferson,” he said again. “The star of
Bennington Park
?”

She stared, if anything, more blankly.

“The TV show?”

“I don't watch TV,” she said.

Ugh
, thought Richard.
One of those
. It was his turn to stare. Maybe she was super-religious? She was Latina, wasn't she? He knew there were some crazy Catholics out there. (He'd grown up outside of Boston, after all.)
It doesn't matter
, he reminded himself.

“Okay, I'm just gonna say it,” he announced.

Elizabeth put down her cup.

“I think we should do it. I mean, it's crazy, obviously, some stranger wanting us to meet for a year, especially since we're strangers too. But there's probably some random connection we'll figure out eventually. Which reminds me—I looked for you on Facebook to see if we had any friends in common but I couldn't find you. Do you use a nickname or something?”

“I'm not on Facebook,” she said.

No TV, no Facebook. Forget Catholic, was she Amish? He moved on quickly:

“Anyway, who knows? But who cares, kinda, right? I mean . . . why not? It's a crapload of money. And if safety's an issue we can always meet in public places.”

He grinned again, and so did she, even though she didn't
want to. Wasn't he going to ask her about herself? But it was obvious he didn't really care about her, or whatever connected them. He only cared about the money. . . . Elizabeth stroked the rim of her mug, as if it were a wineglass capable of humming. She didn't need to be reminded of the money. She'd already run up the numbers: if she factored in an extra hour each week for travel and another 25 on top of that for incidental time expenditures like traffic and this coffee, that came out to 181 hours total. According to section 35 of the contract she'd picked up from the floor, the anonymous donor would take care of all gift or income taxes; they would each receive their half a million free and clear. This meant she would be making north of $2,750/hour for her time, whereas if she divided her base salary and bonus by the number of hours she spent at the firm (billables plus incidentals), her rate came out to less than $150/hour, and that was
before
taxes. The proposal itself was absurd, but the numbers didn't lie. They never did.

This didn't change the fact that the proposal wasn't to be trusted. She remained convinced it was a trap and she refused to fall for it, no matter how much Richard Baumbach might try to sweet-talk her into acting like a greedy fool. Plus, she didn't
need
the money. Her mortgage was on track. Her investments were diverse and thriving. Elizabeth took great pride in her fiscal fortitude; it felt almost like an imposition to be offered such a fantastic sum, like an unwarranted interference with her best-laid plans. No; it was impossible.

But then why had she come? If she were really so immovable, she should have refused him by e-mail. In part it was because she knew someone who could truly use the money: a friend who was struggling, and who would actually accept her charity if she went about bestowing it the right way, or so she hoped. Could she really pass up an opportunity to be an honest-to-goodness savior? But there was another reason too. When she had told
Richard she didn't have a boyfriend, Elizabeth had neglected to add the word
never
. At eighteen, she went through a period she referred to now as her “rough patch,” because to call it anything else would be to give it more power over her than it already had. She had emerged from this tumult without a hitch in her academic career or the law career to follow. But throughout her twenties, and now into her thirties, the rough patch became a justification for the black hole—there was nothing else to call it—that was her romantic life. She'd grown used to comforting herself that she was doing so well in every other aspect of her existence,
what with that rough patch and all
, that she could afford to do nothing in this one thorny, difficult-to-navigate area. But it was time, she knew, to address the deficiency, to stop making excuses based on the past and to do better. Elizabeth would rather have died than become one of those women who perpetually bemoaned their singlehood, but lately she'd begun asking herself if this was it, if she was okay not only with being alone for the rest of her life (she felt certain she was, if it came to it), but with not even
trying
?

Thus far she'd managed to visit a few online dating sites, but she could never bring herself to subscribe. Dipping a toe in the dating pool was always
just
horrifying enough to paralyze her at its edge; she couldn't imagine diving in headfirst. Every now and then she made a begrudging effort to meet men the old-fashioned way, in person at organized events like alumni reunions and recreational outings. She'd even forced herself to go to a few bars. These episodes were disasters, all of them, and invariably brought on a wave of reinvigorated contentment with her status quo, because she
did
have a good life—a great life. But then a few weeks or months would go by and she'd begin wondering all over again: was there something better even than “great” out there, some higher state within her reach if only she pushed herself a little harder?

Elizabeth looked directly at the sun. This time she courted it, allowing it to burn a hole in her field of vision. It was a trick of hers acquired during college. Whenever she was on the brink of a momentous decision she forced herself to look at the sun (or a lightbulb if it was nighttime), and wait until the spot faded from view before deciding one way or the other. The idea was that this would prevent her from acting rashly, but the ritual itself was mildly masochistic and she tried not to indulge it too often.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she announced, getting up to stall for time while the spot faded from view.

Richard watched her disappear, his stomach twisting in dismay. For the first time he considered the possibility that this coffee might not go his way. Was she actually going to
refuse
? Why would she do that? His mind began racing, his leg thumping harder to keep up with the thoughts roiling inside him.

ELIZABETH ADJUSTED HER
ponytail in the mirror, pulling it a little tighter. She ignored the pulsating sunspot, focusing for a moment on her face instead: nothing to cut herself on in
there
. She looked away quickly, down at the sink, wiggling her fingers beneath the hands-free faucet. She avoided dwelling on her looks, not because she had any particular problem with them, but because such thoughts were restricted and repetitive and ultimately beneath her. She gave up on the faucet, sidestepping to the one beside it. There was nothing wrong with dwelling on
his
looks, though. Would it be so bad, having to look at his face every week for a year?

A thin stream of water trickled from the faucet. The proposal was a risk, it was true, but some risks were worth taking; she was perfectly aware that some rewards couldn't be seen—let alone calculated—in advance. If she refused, would she be throwing away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? Wasn't this proposal, ri
diculous and idiotic as it was, a better alternative to yet another abortive cycle of dating? She wouldn't actually be
dating
him, but that was exactly the point: it would be like inching into that freezing pool a little more each week, a sort of intensive tutorial—a
paid
intensive tutorial—on relations with the opposite sex. She still believed the proposal was a trap, but wasn't every trap also a sort of
challenge
?

Elizabeth cupped her hands beneath the dryer stuck against the wall. The machine clicked on, the harsh rush of hot air assaulting her ears. It wasn't like her to be indecisive. She consoled herself with the thought that either way, her ordeal today would soon be over. Elizabeth pictured herself leaving Urth Caffe—exiting this floodlit stage and returning to her tiny house three blocks from the vast, unchanging ocean, where no one other than George Gissing awaited her. It would be such a
relief
.

Wouldn't it?

She grew impatient with the dryer, wiping her hands on her pants. The sunspot was gone.

FROM ACROSS THE TERRACE
, Elizabeth caught sight of him staring at her. She knew she had to act now, or else lose her nerve. She walked toward him, watching as he averted his eyes guiltily, taking refuge in a long, crackly pull on his straw. She almost laughed. He was harmless, wasn't he? She could easily throw herself into his life for a two-hour lesson each week and then climb back out again, couldn't she?

Elizabeth dropped into her seat, waiting till he finished slurping like a five-year-old.

“Okay, here's the thing,” she said.

He nodded eagerly. Now he was a puppy. All he needed were the floppy ears.

“I'm willing,
in theory
, to take some crazy person's money if they want to throw it away.”

“Hear, hear.” He proffered his iced coffee for a toast.

She stared at him till he lowered it.

“But let's agree right now,” she said, “that we're only doing this for the money.”

“Of course,” he said, cheeks ablaze once again, because
of course
he'd thought about the possibility that the Decent Proposal was some sort of matchmaking scheme. How could he not? Even Mike had been quick to point out that this was exactly the sort of situation in which love was supposed to spring up unexpectedly, a weed between a crack in the cement, a miracle of life where none existed before. But Richard had pointed out that this analogy was both
gay
and
lame
, and then Mike had pointed out that those were both
offensive
and
outdated
words to use, and the conversation had derailed from there.

“Why?” Richard couldn't help himself from adding now, another grin spreading across his face. “Are you worried we're going to fall in love?”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes so quickly, it was more of a flicker. “I'm really not,” she said. “I just want to make sure we're on the same page.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “We are one hundred percent doing it for the money. Roger that. Confirmed.”

“Good. Now from what I can see, it's a valid contract. I'm a lawyer,” she added by way of explanation.

“Oh, cool!” he exclaimed. “Who do you rep, anyone I might know?”

“Probably not. I do corporate M-and-A.”

He was pretty sure that meant mergers and acquisitions, but instead of asking he just nodded.

“I did a little research on Jonathan Hertzfeld and his firm. And I consulted with a colleague who specializes in trusts—redacting our names, of course. It all seems legit.”

Richard nodded again. He hadn't checked on anything other
than the payment schedule. And while it sounded like she hadn't told anyone about the proposal, he'd told upwards of a dozen friends and begun adding
#DecentProposal
to as many of his tweets as possible. But she didn't need to know this. He approximated his best businesslike manner:

“So do we have a deal?”

She extended her hand across the table.

“We do.”

They parted a few minutes later, Richard eager to leave before she changed her mind, and Elizabeth figuring there would be more than enough time in the year to come to run out of things to say.

EARLY ON THE MONDAY
after Richard and Elizabeth's coffee, Mike Kim burst out of her Santa Monica apartment building in exercise shorts and a sports bra, pausing at the blue recycling bin on the curb to toss away a letter she'd stopped reading after “Dear Mr. Kim.” Like many Asian immigrants, her parents had given her a name—Michaela—that sounded fussy and old-fashioned to cornfed American ears, and from the time she was ten she instructed everyone to shorten it to “Mike.” Among those who grasped she was a female, there was
still
some confusion, as there were always a few who assumed her first name was Kim, a sure sign they hadn't grown up around Koreans, since Kim was basically the Korean version of Smith or Jones. Mike's name became a way to differentiate between her inner circle and the rest of the world—her true friends versus all the substitute teachers who called on “Michaela,” the work acquaintances who didn't know any better, the spammers who
routinely sent “Mr. Kim” e-mails for Viagra and Cialis, to her unflagging amusement.

She slammed the bin shut and darted across the street. A pair of earbuds spilled down the side of her courier-style workbag, slapping against the full length of her naked leg, lean thigh to dainty ankle. She let them hang there, swaying jauntily, while gliding along the sidewalk toward her car. If Mike's name was full of pitfalls, her appearance was straightforward enough. All her life she'd been extremely thin; during puberty she had acquired the slightest curvature to her hips and a decent bust (B-cup easily upgraded to a C if need be): a natural size zero, which—in L.A., especially—made her a perfect ten. Smooth and flawless, her face required no adornment. Her light complexion was the pride of her mother, who despite her daughter's best efforts held fiercely to the antiquated Asian belief that the whiter the skin the better. Mike's natural beauty extended to her hair as well: pin-straight, it was thick and textured enough to hold a natural glow, a burnish that was almost metallic. Even this morning's slapdash ponytail tapering a few inches past her shoulders looked like something out of a shampoo commercial.

She reached her car—a Jeep Wrangler with no windows or roof—pawing blindly for her keys while checking Facebook with her other hand. Richard had already updated his status:

            
Monday, Bloody Monday

and she dumped her bag on the sidewalk to devote her attention to double-thumbing a reply:

            
Everyday is Like Monday.

She knew he'd get it, because she'd forced him to listen to Morrissey a few weeks earlier, and this had been one of his fa
vorites. It was an established fact that Richard was hopelessly plebeian when it came to music, and would have been lost without her guidance.

Mike knelt on the ground, unearthing her keys at last. Before starting the ignition she placed two fingers over her lips and transferred them to a plastic St. Christopher statue taped to her dashboard. She did this every time she entered her car, except when her parents were in town. For them, the statue came down. They were evangelical Protestants, and wouldn't have understood why their daughter indulged the Catholic notion of worshipping the saints. But Mike found the saints fascinating, and occasionally inspiring.

She shot eastward on Olympic.

As far as her parents knew, she was still the dutiful daughter whose first move after being dropped off at Amherst was to join the College Community Group affiliated with the nearest Korean Presbyterian Church. At eighteen, Mike had been as picturesque and poised as she was now, at twenty-nine, and she rose to the top of the church's hierarchy with the same queenly insouciance she'd perfected in her old church in New Jersey. Each night she held court in the dining hall among her fellow churchgoers, and for all that her day-to-day existence had changed upon entering college (the communal bathroom was perhaps the biggest hurdle), life felt very much the same. It was only looking back on that first year, now, while turning into the LA Fitness on Bundy, that she could see how unhappy she'd been, how
bored
.

Her discontent came to a head a few weeks before the end of freshman year. It was a simple matter of being late to dinner one night and seeing her usual table from afar. There they all were: her crew, her posse—heads bowed, hands clasped, willfully oblivious to the gawks and stares of everyone around them. Mike didn't want to be one of the ignorant people gawking, but
she suddenly didn't want to be one of the earnest people praying, either. She wanted to be free of it, if just for a night; they hadn't seen her yet, so she turned—sharply, on her heel—and carried her tray as far away as she could, to an empty table upon which a discarded textbook lay, making the space feel even emptier, somehow.
Perfect.
She sat down and began leafing mindlessly through the thick pages. It was an introduction to art history, and she was ogling the David when someone cleared his throat above her:

“Uh . . . 'scuse me?”

She looked up. He was holding his tray so uncertainly it looked as though he might drop it. She took in his pocket tee, braided belt, and baggy yet tapered jeans.
Ugh.
When were guys going to learn how to dress?
When?

“Can I help you?” she asked, not caring that she sounded like a bitch. She wanted to be left alone.

“That's my textbook,” he said, casting his eyes downward.

She noticed how long his eyelashes were.

“Oh! Sorry,” she said, slamming the book shut and shoving it toward him.

“S'okay,” he mumbled, placing his tray beside the book and taking a seat just one chair away from her.

Crap
. The last thing she needed was an awkward conversation, but she could hardly ask him to leave, or leave herself. She made a mental determination to eat as quickly as possible.

“So . . . what's wrong with your usual table?” he asked her, busying himself with pouring a glass of milk over a bowl of Lucky Charms.

“My
usual
table?” she demanded.

He took a quick breath, as if steeling himself: “The Asian Christians. Aren't you like their queen bee?”

Mike's jaw dropped in an expression that was half-real, half-mocking, while she watched the boy's face explode in a bloom
of red. Later she would learn that Richard had said this because he was desperate to keep the conversation going, but it happened to be the perfect thing to say because it proved he was an
observer
, which made him to some extent an
outsider
, and on this evening, an outsider was precisely what she wanted to be.

“Actually, that's the
Korean Presbyterian
table,” she said, tossing her shiny head. “Not to be confused with the Catholic Filipinos, over
there
, or the fake Buddhists—
there
—who still totally celebrate Christmas.”

He nodded, grinning widely, a dimple in each cheek.

“Good to know.”

“How about you?” she asked. “What's your deal?” And while he fumbled for an answer, she couldn't help adding, “Why the sad solo dinner?”

“Wow, way harsh, Tai,” he said, and as Mike approached the cardio machines inside the here and now of the gym (why were half of them always out of order?
why?
), she marked this as the first instance of a special clairvoyance between them, because in the
same exact
moment she'd been thinking about
Clueless
, too.

The Richard of a decade ago was average-looking, maybe even a little on the doughy side, but he was on the cusp of that second stage of male development wherein baby fat melts, chests broaden, necks thicken, and teenage guys hatch from their boy-cocoons as fully fledged, handsome young
men
. The lucky ones, anyway. And despite his eating habits (he followed up the Lucky Charms with a bowl of soft-serve ice cream), she predicted Richard Baumbach was going to be very lucky. He could use a little help getting there, however, and the word had simply popped into her brain:
Project!
Like the hapless Tai, he was itching for a makeover, and she wanted nothing more than to help him.

As it happened, they made each other over, though the process took years and was more of an evolution than a transforma
tion. Mike took a step back from the Korean Presbyterians, and Richard, who confessed soon after their first dinner together that he hadn't made a real connection with anyone at Amherst until meeting her, emerged from the shadows, acquiring by osmosis her natural ability to join, and even somewhat to lead. He became a beloved resident counselor, providing support and guidance to those as lonely and overwhelmed as he had once been. It seemed only natural that he should acquire some of Mike's beauty too, and with the passing of the years he grew into his face and body exactly as she had predicted. Richard and Mike grew together, in both senses of the word: side by side and toward each other, until they became two halves of the same enviable person. Both had an innate fondness for movies (
Clueless
was only the beginning), and with mutual encouragement their predilection became their defining passion. By junior year they were joint presidents of the Film Society, and spent all their time together.

They were young; they were beautiful; they were devoted to each other. It would have been absurd for them not to date or sleep together. They were each other's first, and by senior year they were speaking casually about settling down together after graduation in their own place in L.A.

Mike kicked it up a few notches on the StairMaster to deaden the impact of what came next:
she
was the one who broke it off. Before Richard, her world had been small and confining, and she knew it was thanks partly to him that there was so much now she wanted to do, but this didn't change the fact that he was her first boyfriend,
ever
. As senior year wore on she began to panic. Was this it? Was she really going to move in with him and marry him, eventually have his children? He may as well have been a Korean Presbyterian. She took him out to dinner a few weeks before graduation and got as far as “sow our wild oats” before he cut her off:

“I totally get it,” he insisted, draining the bottle of red wine he'd ordered for the two of them. “It's totally cool.”

Mike descended from the StairMaster and made her way to the mats for a grueling regimen of abdominal exercises. It was
not
totally cool. He didn't speak to her for two months, and they moved separately to L.A. The first few weeks were torture, alone in the concrete wasteland of a crappy Mar Vista apartment she shouldn't have rented online without seeing in person, and she waited as long as she could before reaching out to him:

“Wanna find the fountain that lights up when Cher realizes she's in love with Josh?”

This was the olive branch she extended to him, delivered over the phone one day with zero preamble, and when he paused she thought he was going to reject it, but he was as alone as she was, and
of course
he wanted to go find the fountain. Afterward they went to Hollywood in search of Angelyne, a living legend who became “famous for being famous” before anyone else. As a struggling actress/singer in the eighties and nineties, Angelyne paid for hundreds of billboards featuring her blond-bombshell, sex-kitten-from-Mars image to be plastered all over the city. Her traditional career never quite took off, and nowadays the billboards were gone, but she still drove around in her custom-made pink Corvette, and seeing her was just as big and L.A.-specific a thrill as spotting one of those mountain lions that occasionally roamed the same area. Even though they didn't find her (and still hadn't, seven years later), by the end of their first day together in L.A. their platonic friendship was sealed, the dynamic duo reunited. And side by side like old times, they rose together through the ranks of the entertainment industry.

Mike became a literary manager—a more interesting, less hated version of an agent—who focused on her screenwriter clients' creative process rather than the business side of things.
A year ago, when she was named one of the
Hollywood Reporter
's top “35 Under 35” up-and-comers, Richard had framed the article and actually marched into her office with a hammer and nail to hang it behind her desk, much to her coworkers' amusement.
He
had taken the plunge as an independent producer, leaping off the traditional path like some crazed adrenaline junkie. But Mike respected his audacity, and whenever he needed encouragement (which was more often lately), she told him it was only a matter of time before the risk paid off, even if she didn't feel quite as confident as she sounded. The problem wasn't Richard; she believed in him wholeheartedly; but everyone knew it had never been harder to make movies than it was today. Still, they knew all the same people and went to all the same parties. They were in this thing together, and on the rare occasion Mike ventured out alone, everyone's first question was, “Where's Richard?” When they were together, third parties became superfluous—an automatic fifth wheel—and they loved to have an audience precisely because they didn't need one. Newcomers to their circle always assumed they were a couple, and they delighted in trotting out their origin story, complete with an ongoing debate about who had been better in bed (the greater the alcohol, the greater the detail). Lately, Richard had been indulging in an ongoing riff about how Mike was leaving him in the proverbial dust, and joked about moonlighting as a handyman in her office (this coming out of the wall-hanging incident).

She checked her Facebook page, supine on an ab roller. In yet another instance of clairvoyance, Richard had replied to her wall posting a few minutes earlier with a YouTube link to Morrissey's “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.” She responded with a link to the Verve's “Bitter Sweet Symphony” and tried him on his cell. He didn't pick up. It wasn't even nine yet; there was no way he was working, so he was
obviously screening her.
Bastard.
She wondered if he was still hungover from the weekend. Saturday had turned into an epic bender to celebrate the commencement of the Decent Proposal. At some point Mike had asked half-seriously if she could sit next to him and his mystery woman on their first date, to watch the farce play out firsthand. There had been an awkward pause and she had been forced to say, “I'm joking!” Afterward, she'd sucked down more shots than usual, and he'd matched her for every one.