girl in the hat

(photo by lucyshena on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucy-locket/)

On her way down the hallway toward her apartment she knocks on Wayne’s door. He pokes his head out as she is turning her key.

“Hey! How’d it go?”

“You’ll never look at me the same after I tell you.”

“Give me a minute. I’ll be right over.”

The air inside her apartment is stale. She pulls the windows open to free the exhalations from the furniture’s previous owners. Almost everything she owns was handed down, bought at a dollar store, or rescued from a dumpster. The floral lamps are tacky and the Persian rug is piebald and stained, but she finds origin of those stains intriguing: Doesn’t that one look like a dinosaur footprint? Could that spot be anything but blood? The mammoth sofa and velvet brocade curtains were left behind by the previous tenant who was an assistant set designer with access to a warehouse full of theatrical detritus. In the kitchen, no plate or fork or glass matches another. Drew likes to think the décor of her apartment is eclectic; full of creative impulses and souvenirs and odd bits that add up to hard evidence of an interesting, complicated character.

Her mother always used to say a woman ought to be complicated. She said it with a Mae West accent. From her, Drew inherited the archaic Mac Plus with two internal megabytes that sits on the desk in front of the mirror. It’s probably a collector’s item. She can’t play games or go online but it works just fine for writing if she saves to a floppy disc. If she turns it on, then goes off to take a shower or cook a meal and it’s usually warmed up and ready by the time she’s done.

The enormous maple bookcase is the only thing of which Drew feels truly proud. She found it at an antique store in Iowa City and paid a lot of money to have it shipped to L.A. It separates living from sleeping in her studio and holds every book she’s read since starting college, a grand display of her intellectual journey: all canonical, mostly fiction, favoring the Classic, Gothic, Romantic, and 19^th century. There’s a section of poetry, one shelf for biography, and a small cluster of theory. She hasn’t read a book since graduation, unless you count the stack of how-to-write-a-screenplay paperbacks which also works as a bedside table.

Drew is tweezing her eyebrows when Wayne comes in. Without turning around she tells him, “Mae Beacon gave me two hundred dollars cash. No, wait-two eighty. Let’s go shopping.”

“Two eighty?” Wayne bleats. “For what? Did you do the dishes? Did you rub her feet? “

“For my invaluable insight. Guess the education’s finally paying off.”

“Hell, I’d lick her feet for $200.” He throws himself down on the sofa; a wheeze of dust wafts up. “I’d do it for fifty! Tell her I have a Ph.D. in Postmodern Lit. “

“You should’ve seen her. She was naked by the pool.”

“What am I saying? I’d pay her. Naked?”

“Stark, raving naked.”

“Tell me every detail.“ They both know Wayne has little interest in seeing a naked woman, but he plays along. Wayne wears a perpetually amused expression, even when he’s angry or bored—or when Drew is angry or bored, that is, because she has never even heard Wayne use the word “bored.” Wayne acts like she’s fascinating. She talks just to watch him listen and, when his eyebrows rise, she talks even more.

Now, he stretches his legs out on the coffee table. He hates her furniture and believes that if he broke something he’d be doing her a favor. He asks, “Did she say who instead of whom? When you asked her how she was, did she say she was doin’ good? Did she have a little lapdog named Princess? Did all her sentences end in question marks? How many times did she say ‘like’? What color was her carpet?”

“Blonde.”

“Wow.”

“I’m in the mood for a celebration. Let me take you to a nice restaurant and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Wayne looks pleased; he loves it when she feeds him. He gingerly selects one paperweight from the coffee table, a dandelion entombed in glass, and tosses it from hand to hand. She thinks if he picked up two more, say the carved marble apple or the scorpion in plastic, he could probably juggle. She remembers the first time she saw him, at a Halloween party during their freshman year in the dorms. He was dressed as Tony Curtis’s Junior in Some Like It Hot and he had been the only one to recognize her as Jane, Bette Davis’s character in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But he was much prettier than Tony Curtis and she was immediately smitten by everything about him—the way he talked, so clever and cynical, how he held his monocle with such verisimilitude and how he remained in character all night, even after swilling half the bottle of cheap whisky she had meant to use just as a prop until they found each other and had something to celebrate. She loved the delicate shape of his face and his snooty diction, his irreverence, his raunchy sense of humor, and the way his wide, bony shoulders tapered down to his tight little ass.

Before they both knew he was gay, they exchanged mixed tapes and sort of smooched once or twice. Their first date had been to see The Misfits downtown and afterward they sat in a coffee house talking about famous prose writers who later wrote for the screen. She told him about growing up in Port Huron, her mother, her gothic fixation, and her lousy luck with men. His eyes, framed so beautifully by tortoiseshell frames, were alternately attentive (while she spoke) and teary while he told her about his parents, who had both worked in the film industry before they died when he was twelve, her of breast cancer and he of lung cancer. Months later, when they were walking home from the library late at night and she tried to kiss him under a maple tree, he had gripped her shoulders and shook her just a little, insisting that he really, really wasn’t ever going to want to kiss her that way but it had nothing to do with her whatsoever and she had to recognize that if they were going to be friends.

She looks at him in the mirror. “Do you remember our first date?”
“Of course I do. “ He gazes at the paperweight with a dreamy expression. “What makes you so sad? You’re the saddest girl I ever met.”

That was a line from the movie they had seen. She says the next: “That’s funny. Boys usually tell me how happy I am.”

“That’s because you make a man feel happy.” Wayne loves Clark Gable: there’s a man who could wear a moustache or an ascot or play a guy named “Gay” without a shred of irony. That film was Gable’s last film appearance, Monroe’s, too, and for a moment Wayne feels sad thinking how they exist only in the movies, now; fantastic, extraordinary creatures encased in celluloid like the dandelion in his hand. Monroe was the saddest girl Wayne ever saw, with her breathy little girl voice and her soft curves, you knew she was doomed. Not like Drew. He glances over to the mirror where she stands with her bare feet planted sturdily on the floor, one fist propped on her solid hip.

Drew meets his gaze in the mirror: “You never wanted to sleep with me, you just wanted to think that you could if you wanted to, huh?”

“Well…” there’s no use arguing with her. Besides, he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. He restrains the urge to toss the tacky papwerweight out the window; it arcs halfway up to the ceiling before it drops neatly into his palm. “Maybe I would have if you’d dyed your hair blonde.”

“Oh, is that all I had to do?” Drew finishes with one eyebrow and turns her attention to the other. She’s plucking them thinner and archer than usual; she wants to look supercilious. “You should have seen her there by the pool, naked as a newborn. I swear she looked airbrushed. I kept expecting someone to jump out of a bush to touch her up with a little spray gun.”

“I’d definitely have sex with you if you looked like Montgomery Clift.”

Around the edge of the mirror, Drew has taped up pictures of people she admires: Truman Capote, Arthur Miller, Zora Neale Hurston, Meryl Streep as Clarissa Dalloway, Bette Davis from Of Human Bondage, Dorothy Parker, Garbo as Karenina, and Madonna as Eva Peron, among others. There’s one shot of she and Wayne walking arm-in-arm down a tree-lined lane looking like a happy couple and one taken on her tenth birthday party with her mother offering the cake toward the camera. Drew glances at Kate Chopin’s portrait in silhouette; an abundance of dark ringlets sweep up to reveal a plump lobe dripping with earring and a fold of flesh at the nape. She’s so soft, so womanly, and for a moment Drew wonders, what did Kate Chopin, weeping widow, dedicated mother of six, think about the ambivalent and self-absorbed woman she created in her protagonist? More importantly, what would she think about Mae Beacon?

“So what did you talk about?” Asks Wayne.

Drew turns to face him. “Can you believe she bought that plastic cameo right off my neck for $80 bucks?”

“Why?”

“I guess she liked it. Or maybe she was just trying to be nice.”

Drew raises her eyebrows, examining her work. Mae Beacon’s eyebrows were thin and wide set, overstating her sincerity. In Drew’s experience, girls who act that nice must want something—they’re fishing for a compliment or want you to write their essay or need an alibi so they can cheat on their boyfriend or maybe they’re looking to borrow some cash. Except Shannon, her best friend from childhood who was diagnosed with ALS and dead by fifth grade. Shannon was funny and kind and brave, even when she couldn’t breathe or walk, right up to the end. In high school, Drew had had two brief friendships: one with Sally, the new kid from Boston who owned a skateboard, loved The Beatles, and moved away sophomore year after her parents divorced, and the other with Crystal who was nice until she learned how to use a toothbrush to make herself barf, had her braces removed, and then just slowly wandered off without explanation and with whom, by graduation, Drew was no longer on speaking terms. To Drew, the customs between females are as puzzling as the mating rituals of the praying mantis and as satisfying as trying to quench your thirst by standing in the rain with your mouth open.

Wayne says, “Everyone deserves a chance,” as though he knows exactly what she’s thinking. In the room behind Drew’s reflection, an amber shaft of late afternoon sun tilts in and touches the jewel-toned rug, the glowing paperweights, the particles of dust floating and whirling like pixie dust, and the side of Wayne’s fine face. She is miles away from all that old history, years away, surrounded by lovely objects and the pictures of the people she loves most. She lives among all this, embraced by this. Anything can happen.

She goes to sit on the sofa beside him. “The thing that surprised me the most was her realism. In person, I mean. She’s the realest person I’ve ever seen. You just want to reach out and grab her and see what would happen.”

“You and a million others. That’s what they call sexual harassment.” He’s about to tell her she plucked her eyebrows too thin but they have reached that point in the conversation where the banter has run thin and they both feel the need to dip under the surface to remind themselves of the other dimension.

She takes the dandelion from his hand, places it on the table, and settles back on the cushion beside him, with his hand still in hers. He lets his hand be held.

Drew says, “I just mean I want to touch her. Just to see what she’s made of.”

“Sometimes people are exactly what they seem to be.” He reaches out a finger and touches the furrowed place on her forehead. “So what are you worried about?”

“I sort of liked her. That’s the scariest thing.”

“Of course you did!” Wayne grins and squeezes her hand. “No crime in that. I’m sure I’d like her, too.”