The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (27 page)

“My mom would kill me if she found out I was sharing the Barrett family secret with you guys, but whatever, she’s not here to find out,” he said when Mom asked what it was that made them so good. “Two words:
grape jelly.
Well, in this case, five: sugar-free grape fruit preserves—because that’s all I could find in your fridge.”

“They’re pretty awesome,” I agreed.

“Yeah? You think so?”

It was kind of sweet the way he sounded like the answer really mattered to him. Then again, he was also an actor. Maybe he was just trying to impress Mom. I nodded. “Almost as good as Father’s Office.” That was my favorite burger place in L.A.

“Omigod.
Dude
. I
love
that place! Well, I did until I stopped eating meat.” He jumped up. “You want me to make you another one? I can make you another one.”

“Oh, that’s—”

“Seriously. It’s no big deal,” he said, already throwing one on the grill.

I shrugged. “Okay, thanks.” I looked over at Mom, who mouthed
Is he not so sweet?
and shrugged. He was sweet. They were all sweet in the beginning. Especially at the beginning of filming, before they caught on to how nuts she was.

After he brought it to me—well-done, but not well- well-done, which was usually how people did it when you said well-done—Mom poured us all some more lemonade. “So, Annabelle. Tell us about your day with Matt.”

“It was fun,” I said, taking a bite of my burger.
Until the part when you showed up and he got all weird and bolted, obviously never to be heard from again
.

She turned to Billy. “For the most part Annabelle is very articulate and communicative—all her old report cards say something to that effect. But when it comes to talking about boys, I get one-word answers.”

“
Mom
.” And she wondered why.

“Annabelle, you want another piece of corn?” Billy asked. “It’s good, right? There’s something about grilling it in the foil that—”

“So when are you seeing him again?” Mom broke in. She sighed. “I remember
my
first boyfriend. . . .”

A triple: interrupting, embarrassing me,
and
making it about her. “Mom. I just met him. He’s not my boyfriend.”

She turned to Billy. “Annabelle hates when I try to talk to her about boys.”

“Well, yeah, I can understand why,” he laughed.

Mom’s smile—the one that seemed permanently etched on her face whenever he was around—flickered. “Excuse me?”

He shrugged. “It’s obvious that you’re embarrassing her. Look at the way her ears are turning pink.”

My ears got even warmer. I wasn’t sure what was worse: being talked about like I wasn’t there, or having Billy Barrett notice my utter and complete mortification.

Mom laughed. “I’m not
embarrassing
her.”

Billy’s eyebrows shot up.

“We’re just
talking
,” she said lightly. “Annabelle and I talk about everything. We’re very close.”

“Yeah, but maybe this is something you want to talk about
later
,” he suggested gently. “Like when I’m not here.”

If there was anything that made Mom go into diva mode, it was when someone tried to give her parenting tips. Billy didn’t sound drama king–ish, like he was stirring it up looking for a fight, but even Ben didn’t dare call her on the way she dealt with me. His response was always to change the subject as quickly as possible and divert her attention to something else, like how when a kid fell, you tried to distract him before he could compute that he had fallen and had a meltdown.

I watched Mom watching Billy, who wasn’t watching either of us but was instead putting mustard on his veggie burger, as if everything was cool and they were just having a conversation instead of standing on the brink of a huge drama. As he brought the burger up to his mouth, Mom did her guppy imitation (mouth open, mouth shut; repeat) before closing her mouth. She stood up. “I’m getting a sweater. Does anyone need anything from inside?”

We shook our heads before I went back to focusing on the grilled red pepper on my plate. I was confused. On the one hand, I was grateful to Billy for cutting Mom off at the pass—he was right, she had been completely embarrassing me. But at the same time I was also annoyed. Billy barely knew Mom. And he certainly didn’t know our relationship. Sure, maybe what she and I had was a bit—okay, more like a lot—dysfunctional, but it was our dysfunction.

“Sorry for butting in like that,” he said as he polished off his burger.

“It’s okay,” I said. I took a breath. Maybe it was okay. In Alateen kids were always talking about how when you first started doing something differently, it sometimes felt wrong, because you were so used to things being done the screwed-up way. I waited for him to say something more about it—
why
he had said it; how he
felt
about having said it; what it
meant
that he had said it—but he didn’t. Instead, the Rolling Stones’ song “Wild Horses” started playing, and he went off on a story about being at some fancy resort in the Caribbean where Keith Richards had a house and this Victoria’s Secret model was being introduced to him and asking what it was like to have been in the same band as John Lennon.

Was it a guy thing, this not analyzing and talking something to death? Or was it just what semi-healthy people did?

Mom came back out with her sweater and an apple pie from Migliorelli’s farm stand. I studied her face, but there were no visible emotional bumps or bruises from his comment. She was back to looking happy and relaxed and all the other things she never used to be unless she had had at least four drinks in her. After dessert, we carried the dishes into the kitchen, and Billy started to wash them.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“It’s cool. You would’ve thought that with two older sisters I would’ve gotten through life without ever having washed a dish, but it was the opposite,” he said. “They made me do
all
of them.”

Billy Barrett doing dishes. If I were a different kind of person, I so would’ve grabbed my camera and snapped a picture and sent it to
Us Weekly
for their “Stars—They’re Just Like US!” feature. Instead, I grabbed a dish towel so I could dry.

“Hey, do you have plans tomorrow?” he asked as he handed me a plate.

Although I hated myself for it, I had snuck a look at my phone more than a few times during dinner to see if Matt had texted. He hadn’t. “Nope.”

“Well, I was supposed to go in for wardrobe stuff, but it got rescheduled,” he said as he scrubbed a bowl, making sure it was actually clean. The few times Mom had done the dishes, you could be assured that when you’d go to get a glass, there’d still be a lipstick stain on it, or flecks of dried food on a fork. “So I was thinking of heading down to the city and hitting some galleries. I thought that if you didn’t have any plans, you might want to come with me,” he said. “There’s some shows in Chelsea that are a little Francesca Woodman–like that you might enjoy.”

Spending the day with Billy?
Alone?
On the one hand, I had been wanting to go into the city to check out some art. Mom wasn’t a good person to go with because her way of looking at art was to walk in a quick circle around the room and then pick and choose which she could see hanging in our house. (“Don’t you think it would be so cute to have this photograph of the woman in the bathtub hanging over a bathtub?” she had once asked when we went to a show at a gallery in Venice. “Very meta.”) But on the other hand, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what the bloggers would write about Janie Jackson’s daughter hanging out with Billy Barrett if they found out.

He scrubbed harder. “But it’s cool if you don’t want to,” he added, not looking at me. “I get it.”

Okay, it was getting more and more difficult to think Billy Barrett was just another dickish star when he went and got all human and nervous like this. “No, I’d like that,” I said. “I mean, I’d have to ask my mom first—”

“I already ran it by her,” he said. “She’s good with it if you are.”

Wow. Mom hadn’t said anything during dinner. She actually let it be between him and me and didn’t insert herself into it. This was huge. I wasn’t quite sure how to react to that. “Oh. Okay then. Sounds like a plan.”

He looked over at me, another big smile on his face. “Really?”

“Sure.”

“Awesome!” he exclaimed. “Dude, we’re gonna have a
blast
.”

So this was what it was like to be optimistic all the time. As for me, I was already worried about what would happen when we ran out of things to talk about ten minutes into the drive.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THINGS MOST PEOPLE PROBABLY DON’T KNOW ABOUT BILLY BARRETT THAT I NOW DO

• Despite the fact that he’s high on the list of the richest movie stars, he likes to save money. We took the train to the city because, according to him, parking is a huge rip-off in Manhattan. And we didn’t even sit in business class, even though it was only ten bucks more.
  
• He hums to himself without knowing he’s doing it, which—next to whistling—is one of my biggest peeves. Also something he does.
  
• He says “Really? You think so?” more than anyone I know, which means the whole Zen “I just try and accept where I’m at and not compare myself to anyone else or look for outside validation, you know what I’m saying?” thing that he pulls out in interviews is more wishful thinking than reality.
  

Maybe because the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan is filled with an absurd number of hot guys (which, seeing that it was ground zero for gays and galleries, made sense), but with his San Diego Chargers baseball cap and Ray-Bans, Billy blended in and wasn’t mobbed. And probably also because it was Chelsea, when he
was
recognized—in a few galleries, when he took his sunglasses off—there wasn’t any screaming or wailing or cell phones whipped out to snap photos. There were a lot of double takes with a moment of recognition before the New York I-don’t-care-who-you-are-I’m-cool-too-especially-because-I-work-in-an-art-gallery blank-faced expression returned.

“Is it me, or is being snotty a skill you need to have to work at these places?” Billy whispered to me as we looked at some stuff by William Eggleston. While I’d seen some of his stuff before, Billy knew all about him and educated me not just about him, but where he stood within the context of modern photography. It was like when you went to a museum and used those headset guides, except Billy was funnier and used the phrase “’It’s, like, you know . . .” a lot. (He also owned some of his work, which, seeing that it could be found in many museums, obviously cost a lot.)

But it wasn’t all blending in. When we were done in Chelsea, we decided to walk around the Village, and that’s when I got to witness just how insane people were about Billy. Sure, there were tons of people asking for autographs (not only did he sign them all, but he posed for pictures—including one with the owner of a Korean deli, which he said he’d add to their Wall of Fame right under Snooki from
Jersey Shore
). That I expected. But the girls bursting into tears at the sight of him in Starbucks? That was creepy. (“Oh man—I
hate
when they cry,” he said nervously as a girl who looked to be about my age began to wail.) And when we were browsing at the Strand, a bookstore that Matt had mentioned the first night we hung out, a woman who looked to be in her early thirties ran into the bathroom, came out a second later, and thrust her bra toward him.

“Does that happen . . . a lot?” I asked as he yanked me into the Philosophy section. (“I’ve learned that this is one section where I’ll be left alone,” he explained.)

“Not tons, thank God. But enough. Once there was a lady in, like, her sixties who did it.” He shuddered. “That’s the sense memory I use whenever I’m doing a scene that calls for me to be all creeped out.”

He looked at the books I had collected as we browsed.
How to Be a Woman
by Caitlin Moran. Tina Fey’s
Bossypants
.
Looking at Photographs
by John Szarkowski (Billy said it was like the New Testament for people who were into photography).
Portnoy’s Complaint
by Philip Roth.

“
You’re
reading Philip Roth?” he asked. “Wow. I haven’t even read him yet.”

“I didn’t mean to pick that one up,” I said, trying to grab it back from him.

He opened the book jacket and started reading the flap. “This one’s the one that’s supposed to be pretty outrageous, right?”

I grabbed for it again. “I just . . . I’m not going to read it. . . .” I sighed. “Matt was talking about it the other night. It’s his favorite book, so I thought I would . . .” I shook my head as I took it out of his hands and threw it on a table. “Whatever. It was a stupid idea.”

“What’s a stupid idea?” Billy asked. “The book, or Matt in general?”

I paused. I had been thinking it could be helpful to get a guy’s take on this stuff. And other than Matt, and the cashier at Stewart’s with whom I now had a close personal relationship because of my newfound addiction to their iced coffee, Billy was the only guy around here I knew. I guess I could’ve e-mailed Ben, but he and Alice were in Europe (a few days in London with her parents, and then a week on the Amalfi Coast in Italy to recover from the experience of being with her parents, Alice had written me in an e-mail), and I didn’t want to bother him. It used to be that I went to Ben for everything, from what to do about Mom to which was a Phillips screwdriver—the flat-head one or the pointy one?

However, since the
tu
-to-
vous
change, while we still e-mailed and texted a bunch, he was no longer my go-to person for every little thing. Google was. Our e-mails felt more official—like letters from camp filled with descriptions about what I had done, where I had gone, what I had seen. But how I
felt
about what I did and where I went and what I saw—that I now left out. As for Walter, we texted or FaceTimed every day, and if it had been a question about Spider-Man or Batman or any other action figure-turned-blockbuster-movie, he was the guy, but stuff about relationships with people of the opposite sex whom you weren’t related to? Not happening. And Maya—I had spoken to her once since I left L.A. To say she was my best friend felt like a lie now. Even to say we were friends felt like a stretch.