Pretty Is (12 page)

When I return to my desk he has vanished. What I mean, of course, is that he has walked away, but it feels as if he has simply disappeared—as if he could rematerialize anywhere, any time.
What does he want
?

I nibble on the end of a pen, letting my eyes go out of focus as I stare out at the rain. My novel’s plot unfolds with startling momentum.

Chloe

The writer’s name is Stephen, and he takes me to RapScallion. This means he wants to be seen with me, which I appreciate. (Unless it means that he wants me to
think
that he wants to be seen with me, which would obviously be a little less gratifying.) He’s nice-looking—just a little shorter than I am, looks like he goes to the gym regularly but not obsessively, good (but not too good) hair. You never know with writers. I fear the paunchy and unwashed. Call me superficial.

On the other hand, he went to Harvard and mentions this within the first ten minutes or so. It’s a potential strike against him.

We decide to start with champagne, for no apparent reason, and I begin to feel festive. I’m wearing a great dress and haven’t been eating much, so I’m happy with my appearance. I see eyes wander my way as people wonder if they should recognize me. Stephen sees this, too, and it’s obvious that he likes it.

He raises his glass and offers a toast to the success of our next projects. We clink glasses overenthusiastically, and both burst out laughing.

The food is great. I order whimsically and am pleased with everything. We get more champagne. Our knees bump under the table. I want to sail out into the starry night on a champagne wave and land in Stephen’s bed, wherever that is. I glow encouragingly at him.

And then, as the waiter clears our last plates and discreetly sweeps crumbs from the tablecloth, Stephen starts quizzing me about the movie. The plot, the cast, the ending. “I can’t really talk too much about it,” I say coyly, which happens to be true. “You’ll have to wait and see it.”

“Oh, you can tell me a little,” he says, with a big winning smile. His eyes crease ever so slightly at the corners when he smiles, making him look just a little older, a little more worldly, a little more devastating, at least if you’ve drunk a bottle of champagne on top of a predate cocktail (or two). I even let myself imagine that I see a hint of Zed in his face. His tanned hand glances against mine. I’m entranced by our picturesquely candlelit fingers resting on the white tablecloth. “Well,” I concede. “There are a few things I can tell you.”

I give him a rough sketch of the plot. I notice after a minute or two that he’s frowning, but I tell myself maybe that’s what he looks like when he’s thinking. When I finish, though, he’s still frowning. Our knees aren’t touching. Through my sparkly champagne happiness I see dimly that I’ve made a mistake.

“I don’t get it,” he says abruptly. “What’s the guy’s motivation? If it isn’t sexual, then what is it? And what about the girls? Why wouldn’t they try to escape earlier? I mean, it sounds like a sort of basic male fantasy, doesn’t it—falling in love with their captor? But if that’s all it is, then why the insistence on chastity? Is it just for the PG-13 rating? And the policewoman is problematic, too. Why does she identify with these girls? Why are we, as the audience, even interested in her story? I mean really, I don’t quite see the point. The plot doesn’t work for me.”

I should brush it off. “You’ll just have to wait and see” is what I should say, lightly, while laughing. I sure as hell shouldn’t be offended—he isn’t attacking me, after all. His attack on the movie is tactless, definitely, but that’s all. I feel attacked, though. Blindsided. “I don’t think too many men would admit to that particular fantasy,” I say nastily, still smiling. “Maybe you have some personal issues I should know about?” I know, this doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, but at the moment it feels both witty and cutting. I no longer want to float into Stephen’s bed; I want to carve him up in little pieces. “Honestly, I like writers who don’t insist on spelling everything out, who leave some room for interpretation. I like movies that make you think. That show you that people are, you know, complicated.”

“Well, I like movies that make sense,” he says, and there’s no handsome eye-crease now. “What I
don’t
like are scripts that disguise laziness as ambiguity. That’s a cop-out, and the worst kind of pretension.” For a long moment we look right at each other. I feel a hell of a lot more sober than I should, and I have a feeling he does, too. I see things in his eyes I hadn’t even noticed before, things that make me wonder why I’m even here. The hint of Zed vanishes. (Or maybe it doesn’t—he disapproved of me, too, after all.)

And, maybe because my champagne brain has been reckless enough to allow Zed-thoughts to enter the equation, I make my biggest, stupidest mistake yet. What I should be doing is escaping to the ladies’ and raising an eyebrow at the waiter so that the check will arrive in my absence. Instead I open my mouth.

“But sometimes things don’t make sense, do they?” I sound a little belligerent in my own ears. “Because, actually, it’s based on a true story. So whether you think it makes sense isn’t the point. The point is that it
happened
. The point is that life
is
fucked-up.”

“I thought you said it was based on a novel.”

“Well, yeah. But the novel is partly based on a true story, I happen to know.” Why the hell am I doing this?

He rolls his eyes and gestures—pretty rudely, it seems to me—for the check. “Actually, that doesn’t surprise me in the least,” he says. A snooty note has definitely entered his voice. Harvard counts against him.
Bastard
. “People working with nonfictional material can be the laziest of all. They think it’s enough to say, ‘this incredible thing happened,’ without bothering to offer motives, reasons, basic explanations. They count on the material to be so shocking that you won’t notice what’s missing. That actually explains a lot about my problems with your movie. No offense.” Now he flashes the smile again, but it doesn’t work on me anymore. “I’m not saying it won’t still be a really good comeback vehicle for you.”
Comeback? Vehicle?
Obviously there are crazily deep insecurities at work here. It occurs to me that he hasn’t said anything very specific about his own recent work. I’ll never know, because I’m certainly not going to ask.

We’re standing now, and he actually places his hand on the small of my back as we move toward the door. I sidestep (gracefully, I think) just enough that his arm doesn’t reach, and his hand falls back to his side. Outside, he hands his ticket to the valet. “Where to?” he asks, as if our conversation isn’t still hanging over us like a funnel cloud. “Do you want to go out? I have some friends at Plafond. Or … do you want to go to my place for a drink?” He has moved close again, and I realize suddenly that he is about to bite my ear.

We sure as hell aren’t on ear-biting terms. “You go ahead,” I say. “I’ll just get a cab.” I raise my arm, and immediately, thank God, for once in my LA life, a cab appears. One of the valets seems to have wrangled it and it’s probably someone else’s and God knows what it will cost me, but there it is. The universe is cooperating with my drama. I leave him standing there looking confused. “Thanks for dinner,” I say breezily. “Hope you’ll enjoy the movie!” I actually blow him a kiss, overdoing it a bit.

In the cab, though, I cry. I cry and cry, and laugh, and realize that I’m fucking lonely. The driver ignores me. It’s nothing he hasn’t seen before.

Lois

Sean settles into the chair across from my desk. A cloud of smoke and dampness accompanies him, as usual, although it isn’t raining for once. Dressed in his customary musty black layers, he seems to have his own private climate.

I ask him to remove his iPod headphones. “I’m not listening to anything,” he objects.

“It’s my rule. I can’t talk to people who are wired.”

He yanks the buds from his ears.

Sean was disruptive in class today—sighing theatrically, slumping back in his chair as if in pain, loudly crinkling the bag of some vile snack he was ingesting. I got the distinct impression that he hadn’t done his reading. I get the distinct impression that he has not come to my office to discuss
Tristram Shandy
.

Before break, week after week I kept resolving to kick Sean out of class if he continued to make my life unpleasant. I considered reporting him. I debated whether I had more to gain or lose by exposing my past to get rid of Sean. The answer should have been obvious, but I clung to the secret that was my story. New developments have inspired me to change tack.

As always, I battle physical revulsion in his presence. His hair badly needs washing. Acne blossoms behind the greasy veil of his bangs. I make a conscious effort to sit up straight, aware of my desire to conceal as much of myself as possible behind my wood-grain-finished fortress of a desk. At the same time, knowing what I think I now know, I also feel an unaccustomed flutter of excitement: Sean represents new possibilities. There are things I can learn from him. Under the desk my left foot taps wildly to some frantic beat of its own.

“Well?” I finally say. He has come to see me, after all; I didn’t ask him to stop by. I must not reveal that I am, for once, glad to see him.

“I want to know what it was like,” he says. He seems to be picking intently at a hole in his jeans.
Solemn, dark, lanky?
Well, yes. Among other things.

“What what was like?” I think I know, but I want to be sure. Could this be what he wants? Is he finally playing his hand? My heart feels skittish, uneven. I breathe slowly. I give nothing away.

“Being kidnapped. Like, held prisoner. It was a pretty long time, wasn’t it? Everyone wondered why you two didn’t escape, or at least try. My theory is you didn’t want to. That’s what I want to hear about.”

“Your interest in my past is inappropriate, to say the least,” I retort primly. Is there something familiar in the curve of his nostrils? I try to picture his face cleared of acne, enlivened by charm, touched by sun and time. “I don’t understand why you want to know.”

“You’re always telling us we should be intellectually curious. Maybe this is just me being curious.”

“You forgot the ‘intellectual’ part.” I study him while waiting for him to stop posturing and say something interesting. His clothes are secondhand, I decide. He’s affecting a sort of slacker style as a way of disguising poverty, but you can tell that this is a kid who has no money for extras. I know he lives in a ramshackle apartment complex off campus; cheaper than the dorms but seedier, too. Site of drug busts and late-night fire alarms and probably not much sleep. It occurs to me that his life has not been easy.

He shifts in his chair, and that slight motion releases another wave of stale ashtray and musty closet. “Whatever,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of research. I guess I pretty much have what I really need already. I can always just make up the stuff I don’t know for sure, right? But it would definitely be better if I could get your side of the story.”

I have been waiting for months for a reference to his motives; this is as close as he’s come. I am gripping my pen tightly; before I allow myself to speak, I deliberately relax each finger. “Why? What do you need it for? I am mystified, I confess.”

“Material.” He paws at his backpack in the way he always does when he is preparing to leave. “For this book I’m writing.”

Sean? A book? I don’t know what would have surprised me more. I rearrange my face into blankness. “A
book
? You’re writing a book? Okay, but what does that have to do with me?”
A book about his father? Which would be, in part, a book about Carly May and me?
It would explain a lot.

“You figure it out,” he says, beginning to slouch out of the room. “If you won’t answer my questions, I don’t really see why I should answer yours.”

Because I’m the teacher
, I want to say, but I don’t. I simply let him go. I have seldom felt less teacherly, and Sean has become something other than a student.

Chloe

I keep having conversations in my head with that writer bastard. Thanks to him I’m now hung up on the question of motivation: why
did
he do it, anyway? Lois and I never knew. That summer, we talked about it whenever we had a chance. We had theories, but we never knew for sure, and the cops never figured it out. The ending didn’t really seem to give us a clear answer. In a way—and believe me, I seriously hate to say this—Stephen-the-asshole-writer was at least partly right: it’s not a question the movie tackles. Or the book, either, to tell you the truth. I mean they give an explanation, but it’s sort of the obvious one. I avoid his word,
cop-out,
but now I have a damned voice in my head saying:
But isn’t it kind of lame to say he’s just crazy? Just your regular old garden-variety movie psycho?
It occurs to me suddenly that movie logic is usually backward: they make the villain a maniac because he has to be a maniac in order to commit whatever the crime is, because without the crime there wouldn’t be any fucking story. The crime
is
the story, and what we really care about isn’t
why
he does it but what he does, and how. Maybe we get a cheap little psychological hint—he’s not just randomly crazy, say, he’s crazy because he was poor and his mother was mean to him. It’s always something like that. Or maybe he was rich and his father was mean to him. Whatever. Either way, though, the same logic applies: the bad guy was poor and his mother was mean to him
so
he would be crazy
so
he would commit the crime, which gets us back to the story, which is where we needed to end up. The crime comes first; the motive is an afterthought.

But in real life, obviously, the motive has to come first. The default story is no story at all, right? Most people don’t go crazy, or not that kind of crazy, and therefore don’t commit some sort of horrible crime—so there is no story, and we never hear of them. They just work and maybe have a family and play golf or something, and then they die.
Most people’s lives aren’t stories
. This should have been obvious to me before now, but in my current state of mind it hits me pretty hard. My life became a story not because I did anything very interesting but because a crime was committed against me. Anything I do—everything I will ever do—refers back to that event, somehow. It’s my story. I can’t get away from it. I think I’ve always known this, though I’ve never really spelled it out for myself this way.