Poseur #2: The Good, the Fab and the Ugly (13 page)

So, rather than waste time fretting, he took a comprehensive aptitude test which determined a list of career choices based on his “natural strengths” and “innate talents.” And low and behold . . .

“I am a natural filmmaker.” He wrapped up his monologue with a little blasé shrug. “So I move to Los Angeles. Why not?”

“Yay!” Charlotte burst into a mini round of applause, to which Jules lifted a modest hand. Indeed, he’d conveniently forgotten “filmmaker” had been nineteenth on his results list.

“Dentist” had been his first.

“But tell me,
Charlotte,
” he continued, pronouncing the “ch” in her name like “children” (Charlotte imagined they’d have four, all girls; the fifth, a boy, would die tragically in childbirth). “I want to know all
abowchoo.
”

Charlotte unhooked her platinum Christian Dior stiletto heel from the horizontal leg of her barstool, and rested it on his. “Well . . . ,” she began with a coy, flirty smile. “I enjoy long, romantic walks on the beach . . . waking up to the sound of the rain . . . and laughing with old friends.”

Jules responded with a solemn nod of his handsome head. “I too enjoy laughing with friends,” he informed her, sounding grave. Charlotte dangled a few absentminded fingers into a dish of salted nuts, and gazed fleetingly at a nearby burbling fountain. She’d intended her clichéd response to be taken as a joke (hadn’t that been obvious?), but somehow Jules had missed it. What to say next? She found herself at a loss.

She crammed a fistful of nuts into her mouth.

“We must laugh at man,”
Jules boomed with unexpected force, causing Charlotte to gag quietly on a cashew,
“to avoid crying for him.”
He bobbed his thick black man-brows, assessing the level of her awe while she nodded, dabbing her watering eyes with the edge of her napkin.

“Do you know who said that?” he ventured at last.

“Um . . .” She bit the corner of her petal-pink bottom lip. “You did?”

He chuckled, touching her softly on the elbow. “It is a quote,” he explained. “Napoleon. You know who he is, yes?”

Charlotte narrowed her pool-green eyes. Did she, Charlotte Sidonie Beverwil, honorary French Citizen of the Hollywood Hills, know who Napoleon was?

“Um . . . he’s dating Mischa Barton, right?”

“No,” Jules answered with a sympathetic smile. “He is . . .”

“I know,” she blurted, holding fast to the seat of her stool, “who he is. I was
joking.
”

“Oh.” Jules blinked, looking stunned. And then, without warning, he burst into a fit of giggles. Seriously.
Giggles.
Charlotte flushed to the roots of her hair and glanced around, queasy with embarrassment. “You are
funny
!” Jules informed her in an exhilarated voice, while a blonde at the end of the bar smirkingly pretended to examine her fingernails.

“I’m really not.” Charlotte cringed, bugged her eyes at the bartender, and mouthed the word “martini.” The bartender, a white-haired man with a nose like a turnip, raised his gray caterpillar eyebrows, judging her age with classic bartenderly suspicion.

“Yes.” Jules pounded his Rolexed fist into his open palm. “Of all human qualities, humor is the most important. More important than
strength,
than money, than beauty, than
strength
. . .”

“More important than repeating yourself?” Charlotte couldn’t help herself.

“Perhaps,” Jules went on, blissfully unaware of her gentle jab. “Even more important than food. Because food only nourishes this.” He pressed his wide hand to his firm abdomen, and for one delicious moment Charlotte’s appreciation for rock-hard man-driff overwhelmed her urge to die. But then he said:

“The tummy.”

Charlotte blanched with numb horror. The
tummy
? Was he a guy, or an unusually overdeveloped
Teletubbie
? She sent the bartender another imploring look.
Please,
her eyes pleaded, and she actually clasped her hands.
Please, take pity.
The bartender sighed, and with a casual
whaddowhycare
shrug of his black suspender-clad shoulders, twisted open a bottle of gin.

“So!” Charlotte blurted, desperate to change the subject. “What’s your favorite movie?”

“Oh.” Jules frowned, baffled as to why they changed topics of conversation. (The laughter thing had been going so well!) “Well, that one is easy for me.
Garden State.
Have you seen this film?”

Charlotte bit the inside of her cheek, hard, hoping to distract herself from an unwelcome memory. She and Jake had rented
Garden State
on their first official second date; Charlotte had thought it was okay, actually, but Jake had
hated
it. He’d staggered around the rest of the day with this glazed, wide-eyed expression on his face. “Look at me,” he’d say. “I’m Zach Braff. I just go around, like,
feeling
stuff.” And when she’d hit him with her pillow, he’d whine. “Sto-o-op! Don’t you realize I’m Zach Braff and I’m
sensitive?!
” And when she’d pressed her lips against his to shut him up, he’d clutch his stomach and say: “Ugh . . . I’m gonna braff. Oh God, I just braffed myself.”

She’d never laughed so hard in her life.

“You see that guy over there?” she blurted, desperate to change the subject once again. Jules stared at her for a prolonged beat, and Charlotte realized he was beginning to think she was schizo. “By the fountain,” she instructed, inexplicably lowering her voice.

“Yes.” Jules frowned, observing the small, candlelit table in question.

“You know that girl Petra?” Charlotte evenly continued. “That’s her father.”

“Oh.” Jules nodded with another blasé shrug. “He is a handsome man, no?”

“Yeah, well . . . see that woman he’s with? Definitely
not
her mother. And they’re still married, so . . . you put it together.”

Jules furrowed his black eyebrows, joining Charlotte in observing the scene. The man who was Petra’s father stabbed a toothpick into a small ceramic dish, offering his mysterious brunette companion a dripping green olive. Smiling, she tilted across the table, sunk her teeth in, and slowly slid the olive from the tiny wood skewer. Her oversized, thin oatmeal cashmere sweater slipped down her shoulder as she leaned back into her seat, rolled her prize inside her still-smiling mouth, spat the pit into her cupped palm, pinched her tapered fingers, tilted across the table a second time, and dropped it — like a coin — into the right breast pocket of his expensive-looking denim cowboy shirt.

“Isn’t that just so . . .
ew
?” Charlotte delicately inquired.

Jules swiveled in his seat, exhaled an expressive burst of air between his pouting French lips, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Nothing disgusts me more than this,” he intoned. “To do such a thing to your wife . . . it is despicable.”

“Really?” Charlotte winked her left eye with suspicion.

“Of course!” Jules pinched his fingers to his temples, springing them apart. “People who go around like loyalty is
nothing
? It makes me sick. When I am with a woman, I am
with
her.”

“So, you mean” — Charlotte swallowed — “you’ve never cheated?”

“Never.” he frowned. “Marguerite, my ex . . . we were together for five years, and she betrayed me with a man like
this.
” He indicated Petra’s father, and spewed. “She is too young! You despicable
pig.
”

At the word “pig” Charlotte could no longer restrain herself. Gripping the edge of the bar, she tilted forward on her high stool, touched his flushed, chiseled cheek with her hand, and kissed him.

“I am
so
sorry,” she gasped moments later, settling into her seat and smoothing her glass-smooth brown hair. She fluttered her eyelashes and smiled. “Are you traumatized?”

“Of course,
no
!” Jules clutched her knee, locking her into a look of grave concern. “Why do you apologize?”

Charlotte took a breath. Okay, so the guy had no sense of humor. You know who had a sense of humor? Jake. And look how well
he
turned out. What if, instead of
judging
Jules, she decided to join him? It could be a relief: to be serious, to be treated seriously, and not (as Jake had treated her) like a joke.

“You’re right,” she observed with a serious nod. “It’s so silly to apologize.” As if to reward her decision, the bartender slid two martinis in her direction and she smiled, lifting her glass by its delicate stem. Clear liquid sloshed about the rim of the glass, spilling a drop to her lap, which bled into her satin dress and transformed the brilliant emerald green into something darker, like the color of mold. With Jake, she would have incorporated the spill into a toast. “To dry-cleaning,” she’d joke. “To wetting my pants.” But she wasn’t here with Jake. She was here with Jules. Good, loyal,
serious
Jules.

“To new beginnings,” she offered, clinking his glass. He smiled.

If only everyone spent Tuesday night dining at Campanile, but they didn’t. Janie Farrish, in particular, dined at an establishment so exclusive, only four people (and, occasionally, a disobedient cat) ever ate there.

Her kitchen.

“Mom.” Janie swept the pink and gray eraser boogers from her open sketchbook, and glared — for maybe the umpteenth time — at the kitchen wall. “When are we going to get that fixed?”

“Get what fixed, honey?” Mrs. Farrish murmured, removing the lid from a large pot of boiling pasta, and tilting her tired face toward the steam.

“That.”
Janie pointed to the kitchen wall by the fridge, or, more accurately, the utter
lack
of wall by the fridge, a vestige of Tyler Brock’s new puppy, a French bulldog named Beluga, whom they’d babysat last year. At night, they’d made a bed of towels and confined her to the kitchen, blocking the door with a baby gate. She’d whimpered the whole night, and come morning Janie discovered her passed out in the corner — a saucer-sized hole in the wall, incriminating flecks of plaster still clinging to her rubbery, black lips.

“Janie.” Her mother lifted the heavy pot from the stove and furrowed her damp brow. “Your father plastered it over months ago.”

“Yeah, but haven’t you noticed? It’s a completely different color than the rest of the wall.”

“You want to repaint the whole kitchen?” her mother scoffed, dumping the pot’s steaming contents into a large dented strainer. “Be my guest.”

A sour bubble surfaced inside Janie’s stomach and threatened to burst. Weird, but certain words, which before Charlotte’s friendship had meant nothing, now meant
everything
— to the point where they made her physically ill. Take her mother’s word, “guest,” for instance. What if Charlotte came over? Janie looked around, seeing her whole house with a brand-new set of eyes —
her
eyes — and all the details she’d never noticed before — the tear in the screen door; the old, matted carpet; the boxy smallness of the kitchen; the sagging, pet-haired arms of the living room couch — pulsed outward in vivid Technicolor. It wasn’t merely that the furniture was
falling apart,
but that it had never been that great to
begin
with. What would Charlotte, whose bedroom was lit by not one but
three
antique chandeliers, think of Janie’s square ceiling light fixture, complete with tiny, fried moth corpses by the bulb? What would Charlotte, who spent her nights sweetly tucked into a four-poster mahogany bed, think of Janie’s standard IKEA fiberboard single?

What would Charlotte think of
fiberboard
?

And then, on top of all of that, there was
the weirdness factor.
Like the potted cactus her mom decorated with red chili-pepper lights. Or the collection of dried wishbones on the kitchen windowsill. Or the eighteen
PROPERTY OF JAKE
stickers stuck at random on the front door, a vestige of his Dymo label maker days in the fourth grade.

How had she not noticed this before? How had she not
cared?

Jake knowingly chortled as she explained her issue, his eyes bolted to their boxy black TV. He was deeply entrenched in a crucial game of
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,
his sole respite from thoughts of Charlotte, and therefore his current addiction.

“You’re wearing Winston goggles,” he explained, blasting a parked white car with his machine gun.

“Winston goggles?” Janie winced as her brother rattled another vicious round of bullets into a hapless palm tree. “You mean, like, beer goggles?”

“Yeah.” He paused to wrestle with his controls, punching buttons like a lab rat on crack. On the screen, a shrieking blonde ran down the street. “Except instead of everything looking better, everything looks worse.”

“But Jake” — Janie ripped a cuticle from her thumb — “things look, like,
way
worse.”

“Yeah, but whatever.” He lowered his controls to his lap while his character, C.J., bench-pressed at the gym. “I mean, imagine you grew up in a shantytown.” He raised his eyebrows for effect. “In, like,
Honduras.
You’d probably think our house was some kind of paradise.”

“Very nice!” Mrs. Farrish clattered in the kitchen, and Jake and Janie shared a glance, bracing themselves. “Honduras” — she stomped into the living room, wiping her hands on her green checked dishcloth — “is one of the most
destitute
and
impoverished
regions in the world. Is picturing yourself there
really
necessary for you two to appreciate life in this house?”