Spur of the Moment (25 page)

Yo and Kevin burst out laughing. “You are not serious,” Yo said.

“I am serious. He said, ‘Oh, really, that's great. I can see that.' ” Ramiro nodded with comic exaggeration, playing the part of the duped boss. “He bought it. I got Arbor Day off, Earth Day, any random day I made up. I'm serious.”

Yo and Kevin found this hilarious, and Ram joined their laughter. Their merriment was quickly stanched, however, when Ram's father said, with a serious grimace on his face, “You are Catholic. How can you turn your back on God for a day off from work!”

“Dad, I was just being silly, joking around.”
That's what I do. It's who I am. Why can't you understand even a little bit about who I am?

Silence and tension gripped the room until at last Kevin changed the subject to something safe—football, golf, basketball—the harmless conversation of men.

Eventually, dinner was over, and Ram went to his friend's house for after-dinner cocktails. When he saw Nick, he hugged him tight, then took his hand in his own, and gripped it firmly, as if to prove to himself that Nick was real, their love was real. At last, Ramiro was home.

 

 

M
arin spent her day locked in her hotel room. At first, she simply reveled in the fact that she could sleep in and be a lazy slob, watching bad movies on cable.

She snuggled under her covers, smiling to herself. She'd been smiling a lot these days. Since her date with Jay, her life seemed to be a whirlwind of excitement. They both had hectic schedules, but they did their best to see each other whenever they could. Marin was amazed by how busy someone who was unemployed could be, but Jay had the most amazingly eventful social calendar she'd ever heard of, and he often traveled to check on various investments or to go to board meetings of various boards of directors that he served on.

The other night, Jay had taken her to a party at the home of a movie producer. He'd been so casual about it. Just, “Want to come to a party tonight?” Not, “Want to come to a party where a number of Hollywood heavies will be?” She'd seen Ron Howard, Winona Ryder, and Ben Stiller, and there were lots of producers, directors, and behind-the-scenes people who Marin didn't know yet, but knew she would be in awe of when she did. Thank god she'd gotten dressed up for it.

She'd had to buy lots of new clothes since coming to California. For one thing, she'd only packed a week's worth of outfits when she'd come out here. For another thing, most of her clothes in Denver wouldn't fit in here. Denver was a casual town that could never be confused for being a high-fashion hot spot. In L.A., there was a strange fashion code that Marin was still working to crack. Even “casual” outfits seemed expensive and high fashion.

She ordered breakfast from room service at about noon, feeling like a queen, who, with a simple phone call or a snap of the fingers, could summon food and drink and whatever her heart desired.

She took a shower, put on a cute, short white nightie and white silk thong underwear. She did her hair and put on a little makeup, even though she knew it would probably be several hours until she saw him. His dinner was at two, but with dessert and coffee and talking and maybe games, she probably wouldn't see him till seven or eight.

Her boredom started to set in around two o'clock. She kept changing positions on her bed, trying to get comfortable. Her body wasn't used to being so inactive for such a long stretch of time. She should probably go work out, but she'd already showered and the task of changing into sweats and going down to the gym seemed Herculean.

By four o'clock, she was sprawled across the bed, the right side of her face smashed up against the mattress, watching some movie that was so awful she could actually feel it robbing hours off her life—not just the two hours she watched it, but the powerful vacuum of its awfulness was actually sucking months or years away from her time on this planet like cigarettes or chronic heavy drinking.

At six o'clock, she ordered dinner from room service, and this was when depression started setting in. Though at breakfast she'd felt like a queen, now she felt like a loser, all alone on Thanksgiving, holed up in a hotel room, watching terrible movies. She made it a big point to ask for a bottle of wine with
two
glasses, as if it mattered what the receptionist or the waiter thought of her, as if they cared she was waiting for her man to show up and wasn't really a social reject.

She ate her dinner slowly, trying to drag it out to fill the hours until Jay got there. She had a glass of wine with her meal, and though she really had intended to share the bottle with Jay, she had another, then another.

She couldn't believe when nine o'clock rolled around and she still hadn't heard from him. She figured he would have called her as soon as he'd left and was about to drive back to L.A.

When he called, it was almost eleven, and Marin had finished off the wine and was nodding off into a drunken slumber.

“Babe?”

“Jay, where are you?”

“I'm so sorry. We waited a couple of hours after dinner to have dessert, then there was coffee and brandy and dessert wine, and I drank too much to be able to drive home tonight.”

“Oh, you're kidding,” she whined. “I was really looking forward to seeing you.”

“I know, I'll make it up to you. When's your next day off?”

“I'm not sure.”

“How about Saturday night after you get off the set?”

“Sure. That sounds great.” Even though, in truth, most nights she worked on the set she just wanted to crawl into bed the second she got home and crash. They'd only gone out a few nights when she worked, but twice she'd fallen asleep right after sex, something he loved to tease her about.

“Great. See you Saturday night.”

Oh well, every relationship had challenges to overcome. All in all, though, she counted herself the luckiest woman alive.

41

Porno Pop-Up Hell

A
na had finished her sessions with Chelsey. She'd lost four pounds in the last six weeks. Hardly enough weight to star in a weight loss commercial, but she was feeling better. She'd loved working out with Chelsey—Chelsey kicked her ass. Ana wished she could afford a trainer all the time.

Ana would have lost more, but Thanksgiving weekend with Scott's family had blunted progress significantly. She felt like she was at least on the right track now, eating better and working out more. Her pants weren't quite so tight anymore, and that was really the main thing.

She ate her lunch slowly, trying to actually enjoy her entire hour-long lunch break. She liked to surf the 'Net while she ate, but she usually scarfed down her food in about four minutes flat, and then she didn't want to keep reading online publications lest some higher-up walk past her and think she was goofing off, rather than taking a much deserved lunch break. So she was determined to keep her lunch in front of her for an entire hour, even with her stomach grumbling angrily. Eating slowly was supposed to be good for you anyway.

Ana nibbled miserably on her carrot stick. She felt like she'd been starving herself for months and was not yet skinny. She knew that it had taken her several months to become the porker who busted out of her pants, but still, she wanted speedier results.

She went to the
New York Times
and read the news and book reviews. Then she quickly looked at
Denver Post
online. She checked the celebrity gossip at
People
and
Us.
Then she decided to swing by
Bitch
magazine, a hilarious mag that critiqued the bullshit of the pop culture she'd so recently been at pains to study in
People
and
Us.
She typed in
www.bitch.com
, which, as it turned out, was not the correct URL to the feminist
Bitch
magazine. Quite the opposite, it was a porn site of some sort, which spewed out pop-up ads for other lascivious porn sites like fireworks going off in rapid fire succession.

“Shit! Ahh!” Ana knew,
knew,
that this would be the exact moment The Weasel, Deb, or the president of the company would choose to stroll by her cube. Getting caught surfing porn sites was, at best, humiliating, and, at worst, a fireable offense.

She used every skill she'd developed playing video games, using her mouse to click the windows shut like she was zapping down enemy airships. Bam bam bam!

Shit, shit, they just kept coming, multiplying like weeds, rabbits, talentless boy bands, and reality TV shows.

Bam bam bam! Fire! Attack!

At long last, she'd successfully killed off all job-losing porn ads. She quickly changed the address to
www.bitchmagazine.com
, which turned out to be the correct URL. But Ana was too tired to read cogent arguments about the lack of people of color in television or the use of strip clubs and strippers in guy-guy buddy movies. She was breathless from attacking the equivalent of a fleet of hostile war planes.

42

Surprises

I
t was a lazy Sunday morning. Ana woke up first and watched Scott as he slept. She knew she should let him sleep, but she couldn't resist the urge to kiss him. Mostly still asleep, he kissed her back. As he woke up, his kisses got stronger and stronger, his groping more fervent. She loved that he could be practically asleep and yet have some instinct so powerful he could grope her with a frenzy.

“We're out of condoms,” Ana whispered.

“No!”

“Wait here, I'll be right back.”

She hurried down the hall to Ramiro's room.

“Hey Ram, can we borrow some more condoms? I'll buy more when I go to the store today or tomorrow.”

He pulled open the drawer of his nightstand and as he tore off a strip of three, Ana noticed a large stack of loose paper on his desk. The top page had the words
“Staring at the Sun
by Ramiro Martinez” typed on it.

“What's this?”

“It's nothing.”

“Is it a story? A novel?”

“No, it's not finished. It's nothing.”

“But if it were finished, what would it be?”

“A novel, I guess.”

“Oh my god, Ram, I had no idea you were working on a novel. All this time we thought you were a lazy slob and really you've been secretly toiling away on a great American novel. Your first novel. It's so exciting!”

“It's my fourth, actually.”

“Fourth! You're kidding! What did you do with the other ones?”

“They're in the bottom drawer of my desk.”

“Did you try to get them published? Did you try to get an agent?”

“Nah. They're not any good.”

“How do you know they're no good?”

He shrugged. “They just aren't.”

“Have you ever let anyone read them?”

“My first . . . I finished it in high school . . .”

“High school!”

“I'd just come out, and I gave the manuscript to my dad. I thought of it as a sort of peace offering. Like yeah, I'm a fag, but I'm also this prodigy.”

“Yeah? So what did he say about the book?”

“He said he was impressed that I could type three hundred pages but I had no talent and never would.”

“You're kidding. He wouldn't say that.”

“He said it like he was really sorry he had to tell me. Like he was just a doctor who had to tell a patient he had terminal cancer. I think if he'd said it in anger, I might have thought he was just trying to be cruel, but the way he said it, I knew he really meant it.”

“Ram, you're a great sketch writer. I'm sure you're a good novelist. Maybe, you know, I mean your first novel, you were still in high school. It takes years for authors to develop their talent. Let me read it, okay?”

He shrugged. “It's your time.”

Ana hauled the weighty manuscript back to her room.

“Ram's written a novel. Four of them,” Ana said to Scott.

“Ramiro? A whole novel? He didn't get bored with it after a paragraph?”

“I guess not. I want to start reading it right away.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you mind?”

“Are you saying I'm not going to get any?”

“You will. Just not right now.”

“Four minutes ago I was going to get nookie. And now, no nookie?”

She nodded, happy he understood this turn of events in their entirety.

“Life is so cruel and unfair.”

“It's a lesson best learned when you're young. Now off to visit one of the million Internet porn sites if you must, but leave me to the manuscript.”

Ana sprawled across her bed and tore into the story. It was immediately apparent that the story was autobiographical. In the story, a Mexican-American twenty-two-year-old guy has just graduated from college and travels through Mexico one summer, just as Ramiro had when he graduated from college.

What struck Ana was that the book was so serious—not a joke cracked or fashion faux pas mocked. It was filled with breathtaking descriptions of everything from a peasant woman sitting on a blanket selling beaded jewelry to a pack of dogs devouring a kitten (she wouldn't have minded if that last one had a wee bit less detail).

The guy in the story, Tonoch, does a lot of reflecting about his past and his future. Time and again he brings up his father's disappointment in him. He feels alternately angry and guilty about this.

Tonoch is a theater major, and his father, a construction worker who didn't have access to a college education, just like Ram's real-life dad, is furious with Tonoch for pursuing the impractical dream of being an actor. He'd stopped paying for Tonoch's education when Tonoch refused to major in business. (Ramiro's dad had stopped helping him through college his freshman year when Ramiro declared he was going to major in philosophy.)

Tonoch's father had fantasies of his son getting paid handsomely and going to work in spotless white shirts with smart-looking ties. He wanted a son whose face didn't get weathered from working outside his whole life. A son who never had dirt under his fingernails. But just as much as his father wanted him to be a businessman, Tonoch knew he'd be miserable with such a life.

Tonoch was at the Temple of the Jaguar at the ancient Mayan ruin of Chichen Itza listening to the tour guide talk about the ancient Mayan people and thinking about how he didn't understand how he could have gone through his whole life without having heard even a word about what his ancestors achieved.

 

 

“Tonoch” a.k.a. Ramiro was always doing that. Teaching you simultaneously about things like Mayan history and why the sky was blue while struggling to come to terms with his tumultuous relationship with his father. But Ana thought he pulled it off. She couldn't put the book down, and not just because it gave an insight to Ramiro's quiet pain that he'd always kept hidden from his friends. She genuinely liked the stories of Tonoch's conversations with migrant farmers and shopkeepers and other Americans he met along his journey through Mexico.

She spent the entire afternoon reading, using tissue after tissue crying through the sad parts. “It's your father's own issues! He's just jealous that you are so smart and got the college education he never had! Stop being so sad and drinking too much and sleeping with guys that don't treat you well!” she silently told the character in the book.

In the end, Tonoch did what she advised. He found a wonderful man, a professor from the States who did research on Mayan history. The professor was in Mexico for the summer, but had to return to California where he taught in August. He asked Tonoch to come with him and Tonoch agreed. He decided that when he moved in with Manuel he would look for acting jobs and maybe find a job teaching English to people whose native language was Spanish. Tonoch thought that maybe he could get started with a happy life if he was hundreds of miles from his father's disapproving gaze.

Ana shut the book. It was nine o'clock at night. She was starving. She wiped the tears from her eyes. She felt drained. She wondered if Ramiro fantasized about moving away from his father like Tonoch did. But Ramiro was so close to his family, particularly his mother and sister, she couldn't imagine him moving across the country.

She walked to Ramiro's room and knocked on the closed door.

“Come in,” Ramiro called.

“Oh, sorry Nick, I didn't know you were here. Can I talk to Ram for a second?”

Nick was sprawled across the bed. Ramiro sat in his ratty brown recliner. They had been laughing at something when she'd opened the door.

“We've been meaning to get off our asses and go over to Sean's place anyway. Ram, I'll wait for you downstairs.”

Nick left, and Ana took his place on the bed.

“Hey, are you okay? Have you been crying?” Ramiro asked.

She nodded. “At your book. It was really good.”

“You read the whole thing?”

“I couldn't put it down. I haven't eaten all day. I've just been reading.”

“The book made you cry?”

“Parts of it are really sad. The ending was happy, but I cried with sad happiness, you know? You should definitely try to get it published.”

“No way.”

“What do you mean no way? Why would you want to write a novel if you didn't want to try to get it published?”

“I have all these thoughts in my head. I need to get them down on paper, that's all.”

“But don't you want other guys who have gone through this to read this? Don't you want to see if you can get money and awards and stuff? Maybe you could start writing full time. I know you don't want to work at the bookstore for the rest of your life.”

“No. It's not any good.”

“Ramiro, I think it's good. Why don't you try and see if an agent thinks it's any good or if a publisher thinks it's any good?”

He shrugged. “It's not even finished.”

“It felt finished to me. That's just an excuse. You're just afraid of rejection.” As she said it, she realized what a dead-on statement it was. It was why Ramiro was so hard on himself, why he never thought anything was good enough to be declared finished. “That's why you never finish anything. Nobody can tell you you have no talent if you never finish anything and let anyone see it.” He didn't respond. “I'm going to see if it can be published.”

“Ana, whatever. Nick is waiting for me. I'm glad you enjoyed the book, but really, don't waste your time.”

 

 

T
he next day after work, Ana stopped at the Tattered Cover bookstore and went to the section on writing. She spent half an hour flipping through books and finally selected one that discussed how to get a novel published and another that had a listing of literary agents.

She went home and promptly started reading the book on how to get a novel published. It had a section on deciding whether or not to get an agent and another section on how to get an agent. The book said that you might not need an agent for a nonfiction book, but that most publishing houses wouldn't look at a manuscript if it wasn't represented by an agent.

The way to get an agent, it said, was to type a one-page query letter talking about the book and a little about yourself and what else you'd published. It suggested putting down any literary magazines you'd had short stories published in, if any. Since Ramiro hadn't been published, she focused on his experience writing comedy.