Loving Emily (18 page)

I wonder whether my physics partners are still virgins. I’m not, I think, feeling proud. Not anymore. I have had sex one time. I’ve moved over to the other side, passed into manhood.

I wonder if I look different. Can people tell by looking at me that I Did the Deed last night for the very first time?
There’s one
, someone might say upon seeing me.
A brand new non-virgin. You can spot ‘em by the stunned gratitude on their faces.

Calvin and Jonathan are checking over their data recording sheets. Calvin’s saying. “If we keep the club length and the rotational velocity constant to begin with, we can determine the range at different launching angles.”

“Speak English, Calvin,” I say.

Jonathan jumps in. “It just means if we use the same length club and swing it exactly the same way each time, we can discover how far we can hit the ball using different angled club heads.”

“Right, and I’ll film it all, so we can analyze your swings in slow motion, or even frame by frame.”

“This is gonna be cool, Ryan,” Calvin says.

I should be glad Calvin’s happy with me for once, but instead I’m worried. “We need to find a way to spice it up though, make it interesting.”

What if we called it something like “Physics Nerds Go Golfing”? I look at Jonathan and Calvin. As physics nerds go, these two are the dream team. Calvin could be the show-off golfer, and Jonathan the new guy on the course.

I grab a pad and write out some ideas. This thing will not go to Sundance or Cannes, but it might make a boring high school science project into something you could stay awake through. Then, I pitch the idea to my partners.

“You want us to wear costumes?” Jonathan looks fearful.

“And act?” asks Calvin. To my surprise, he sounds more fascinated than horrified.

“It would be very low-key,” I say. “It could be funny.”

They promise to think about it.

•   •   •

It’s time for Emily to meet the family. I have picked her up from home, driven through our gates, and pulled up our long driveway. I park in front of the house. A few other cars are in a guest parking area off to the side.

“Are they having a party?” Emily asks as she fidgets and checks her hair in the rearview mirror.

“No,” I tell her. “I don’t know who those cars belong to.”

We walk into the entry hall to see my parents talking with Nat and with Dad’s casting director, Mitzi. Dad’s still deep in pre-production for
Mystery Moon,
and it looks like he brought some of his work buddies home from the studio to eat with us.

My parents have forgotten Emily’s coming to dinner.

This massive, weird bronze sculpture stands in one corner, dwarfing the humans, and on the other side a wide staircase goes up to the second floor. I put my hand on the small of Emily’s back and walk her up to them.

“Emily, this is my dad, my mom, Nat Weston, and Mitzi Travenor.” Mitzi, who’s one of my favorite people, has been casting Dad’s films for as long as I can remember. Mitzi’s six feet tall and broad shouldered, with this wedge of frizzy orange hair. She’s from New Jersey but tends to dress from wherever she took her last vacation. There’s this sari-like thing wrapped around her, and a red dot on her forehead, although the Indian effect is undercut by the Nike running shoes.

“Gimme a hug, gorgeous!” Mitzi screams, and I hug her hard. Mitzi turns to Emily and says, “Sorry, honey, but I got to him first. When he was five, he promised to marry me, and I’m holding him to it.” Mitzi’s in her mid-forties and has been with her partner, LeeAnne, for the last twelve years.

Before Emily can answer, the star of
Mystery Moon,
Jared Abernathy, walks in. Blessed with good genes and a good plastic surgeon, Jared’s a guy who is best described by the word “chiseled.” With a superhero jaw line and insanely cut shoulders and arms, he doesn’t so much move as strike poses for those fortunate enough to have him in their line of sight. He has black hair and the kind of blue eyes that leave a streak of blue behind when he turns his head.

“Yo,” he says to me. He knows I’m the son, but I can tell he can’t quite remember my name.

“Hi Jared. I’m Ryan,” I say. “This is my girlfriend, Emily.”

“Well, hello,” he says. He seems to think he’s entitled to give Emily a really obvious appreciative once-over, checking her out from top to toe. Emily would ordinarily wither a guy who acted like that, but here in my parents’ house, meeting a major movie star, she’s a little off her game. She bites her lip and looks down.

“
Jared.”
Mitzi gives him a push.

“I should never have discovered him,” she says to Emily, sounding apologetic. Five years ago, Jared served Mitzi a latte at a West Hollywood coffee bar. He’s now recognized in thirty eight countries.

Emily looks around her, glassy-eyed. Our front entry hall is the size of her family’s combined living and dining rooms. Through an archway you can see into a room with a grand piano and, behind it, a long wall of glass and mirror cabinets full of Oscars, Emmys, SAG awards, Golden Globes, and every other prize on the planet. Every week, one of the maids cleans all the glass and mirrors and hand polishes each award.

Dad jumps into the conversation. He knows he messed up, but there’s no problem my dad can’t fix.

“Emily!” He takes her arm, giving her the Doug Mills twinkle-eyed smile. Waving a hand at the others, he announces, “You derelicts know where the bar is. Go make yourselves drinks. Emily, may I give you a tour of the garden? It’s nice this time of day.” He takes her off.

Mom walks up. “Emily seems very sweet.”

“Yeah, she’s cool.”

“Would you ask Ro to get some bottles from the wine cellar?” Our wine cellar’s bigger than a normal-sized bedroom and is outfitted with all this high-tech stuff to keep wine bottles happy and comfortable. “And also ask when dinner’s going to be ready?”

I go to the kitchen, where Ro’s working and Maddy and Molly are, as usual, sitting at the counter in the center island. After a while, Dad brings Emily in to us. The two of them are talking and smiling, although Emily still has this glazed over expression. Dad says to me, “You two sit next to me and Nadine at dinner, OK? It’ll give us some more time to get acquainted with Emily.” He disappears.

“I saw your fountains,” Emily says. She has that look of a deer suddenly caught in the high beams of a car. It’s a natural reaction for a first timer to our house.

“But did you see the waterfall and the sculpture garden?” I ask.

Emily gets a big laugh out of that one until she realizes I’m not joking.

I introduce her to Ro and my sisters.

Ro takes both of Emily’s hands in hers and kisses her on the cheek. “Such a lovely young girl,” she says. The twins smile at her. I know they are mentally gearing up to tease me later.

Mom comes into the kitchen and walks up to me and Emily. “I get to have her now, for a few minutes,” she says to me, taking her arm. I look at them standing together, my mother and my girl. Mom’s jewelry weight looks approximately equal to her body weight. She’s pretty, or she was before the Botox and the starvation. Her eyes have that scary I-shouldn’t-have-had-that-last-facelift look to them. But she is smiling at Emily and trying to be nice to her.

Emily smiles back. She looks like a rose from our garden, fresh and pretty. Her shiny hair swings as she talks, and she’s big compared to Mom, but in an awesome, sexy kind of way.

They both look a little shy around the other. Finally, Mom says she wants to show Emily something and hauls her off to another room. I wonder what the two of them could possibly say to one another, but a few minutes later I see them with their heads together.

When Emily gets back, I pull her into the library, where we can be alone for a minute. “What did she show you? What did you talk about?”

“You,” she says. Mom had taken her to what I call the Wall of Woe, that is, the wall with all the family photos, including those that document my dorky developmental stages.

“So you saw the buck teeth and the braces?”

“Yep.”

We hear a knock, and Ro’s face peeks in. “It’s time to eat!”

“Did you check your email?” Emily asks me as we walk out to the dining room. “They sent a bunch of information about the England program. I’m so excited!”

I try to feel excited, too. I wonder if Oxford has a tennis court somewhere that I could use.

At dinner, the conversation turns to work, as always. We are sitting at the huge dining table, which Ro has loaded up with platters of roast beef, mashed potatoes, green veggies, and salad. I’m grateful to Dad for being so nice to Emily. He has her seated next to him and is explaining what went down at the studio today.

“We’re auditioning for the role of Roxanne,” he tells us. “It’s a small role, but it’s an important one. All her scenes are with Jared, and they’ve gotta be red hot together to make it work. So Jared’s been coming to the callback auditions to read with the actresses.”

“How’s it going?” I ask.

Mitzi makes a face. “We called back ten girls,” she tells me and Emily,” and not one of them really did it for us. I saw five hundred to get down to the ten.”

Dad passes Emily the salad. “We don’t need her until September. Mitzi’ll find her. She always does.”

“Darn tootin,’ Mitzi says, reaching for her glass.”That’s why he keeps me around.”

“Emily,” Mom says, “would you like to come to Doug’s birthday celebration?”

Emily turns to me with a question on her face, but I love Mom’s idea.

“You’ve gotta come to Dad’s party.”

My dad will turn fifty at the end of this month, and Mom’s planning a blow-out. We’re talking two hundred people—Dad’s friends and people he works with. Because of who he is, most of them will be Hollywood A-listers. I give Emily the date, and she says, “But that’s the day of the Madrigal competition in San Francisco.” She’ll be performing up there with the Songbirds for the state championship.

“I’m so sorry.” She gives me and my parents a regretful look. “I would have liked to come.”

I think she and I both feel kind of bad that we won’t be there for each other that weekend, what with me missing Emily’s performance and her missing my dad’s party.

The talk continues, and someone asks me and Emily about college applications.

“We apply next year,” I tell the group, “but this year, the junior class is traveling to New York and Boston in May, to check out schools there.” I’ve been signed up since October, mainly because it’ll be fun to go traveling with my class.

“Are you going on the trip, Emily?” my mom asks.

She nods. “I’ve always wanted to go east for college. And then study in Europe after that—history and international relations.”

“Europe is so charming!” Mom says. She stops, as if she’s not sure what to say next.

Emily continues. “Yes, but I think I’d like to end up in D.C. in a foreign policy job.”

Everyone nods their heads and makes murmuring noises.

“What about you, Ryan?” someone says. I’m not so sure I want to move to the East Coast, even for a few years. I’ve been to New York a lot. It’s okay, but I’ll take the beach, sun, and ocean any day over some dark concrete canyon.

“I guess I have to think about it,” I say. Once again, I feel like a wash-out, an aimless rich boy just floating along. Everyone I know has dreams, plans, accomplishments. Except for Michael, and look where that got him. I think suddenly, what am I good at? What have I done with my life up to now? Diddly squat, that’s what.

“W
ay to go, Ryan!”

I’m at the tennis club. I lean over, my hands on my knees, gasping for breath. Sweat drips from my hair and forehead onto the surface of the tennis court. A hand pounds my back.

“Awesome match!”

I stand up, taking a towel someone hands me and wiping off my neck and face. I’ve just almost beaten Mason Ronson, the number twelve seeded player in my age group in California.

He beat me by one point in the last game. It was a fluke that I played him at all; his partner for the practice match called to say he had car trouble, and no one else was available.

A couple of dozen people are standing around, part of the crowd that began to gather at our court when people caught on to the fact that an unknown player was running neck and neck with Mason Ronson in a practice match.

He’s approaching me now, hand outstretched. I shake it, feeling the hard calluses on his palm and fingers, even worse than mine.

“
Who
are you?” he asks, as if he can’t quite believe such a nobody almost took the match away from him.

“Ryan Mills.”

“Who do you train with?”

“No one.”

His mouth shuts in a thin line. “Good match,” he says in a clipped voice, turns on his heel, and stalks off.

My old tennis coach, Ben Swanson, walks up. “Don’t get a swelled head,” he says. “You just played the match of your life, and Ronson’s coming off a torn hamstring.”

“No chance of my getting a swelled head with you around,” I tell Ben, grinning.

“You should come by the club more often. I can throw you some more practice matches, if you want.”

“Sounds good,” I tell him. “I will.”

•   •   •

I’m at Sal’s with Chrissie. Her eyes are red, and her curly hair looks dry and limp.

“You look beat,” I say.

“It’s just havin’ to take the bus everywhere—to work and for all my errands,” she says. She pulls out two quarters and puts them in the jukebox. “I shouldn’t be spendin’ money on this, but I can’t resist.”

“Here.” I pull out my wallet.

“Thanks, but I’m not your charity case.”

“This isn’t charity. It’s helping.”

“Whatever. I mean, thanks, Ryan, but I don’t need handouts. I need more money.”

“Explain the difference.”

“I need a better job,” she says. “One that pays more.”

“Like what?”

She shrugs. “Maybe there’s a role out there for a Great White Whale.”

“Have you had any auditions lately?”

She shakes her head. “Are you kiddin’? I look like Wife of Moby Dick.”

An idea pops into my head and out of my mouth, without any intervention from my brain.