The Half Life and Swim (4 page)

“It’s very competent,” I began. “Very smoothly written.” She took a slurp of her smoothie. “So that’s good?” She slipped off her cropped denim jacket, revealing an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt. Had the Flashdance look come back again? Had I missed it? I made a mental note to see if she was wearing leg warmers.

“Competent’s okay, but okay’s not going to get you into Berkeley.” I tapped the first page with my pen. “Now, I can tell you had a great time in Paris.”

Her brown eyes sparkled, and her hands danced in the air. “The flea markets were awesome! I found this cameo? On a silk ribbon?” Her fingers traced a line along her neck.

“That sounds beautiful. Really. But there’s none of that passion on the page,” I said. Her essay hadn’t even mentioned the flea market. Instead, she’d written about the Louvre, and the Seine, and various and sundry cathedrals. The whole thing could have been lifted from a
Let’s Go
guide.

Caitlyn gave me a blank look, pulled one knee up against her chest, and poked her straw deeper into her smoothie. “Passion?”

“If you loved the flea markets, you should write about the flea markets.”

“But that’s, like, shopping! No college is going to admit me because I like to shop!”

“They might if you can write persuasively and with passion. If you use this essay to tell them who you really are, what you really care about. If you . . .” I rubbed my cheek. Suddenly I had a headache. What if I was wrong? What if she wrote her essay about the flea markets and the admissions people decided she was an overprivileged brat?

I took a deep breath.
“Okay. Maybe not shopping. But passion. Something else you’re passionate about.”

She shrugged, rolling her straw wrapper between two fingers. Her nails looked worse than they had the week before. “The thing about this . . .” I tapped my pen on top of her essay, remembering the word Lonelyguy had used:
generic.
“A hundred kids could have written this.”

She shrugged. “There were only twenty kids on the trip.”

“Well, twenty kids, then.”

“Fine.” She gathered her pages and began to refold them.

“Well, wait. We can talk about it, if you want. Try out some different...”

“That’s okay. I know what I’m going to write about.” The zipper on the purse was so loud I could hear it over the blenders, and over the two twentysomething screenwriters at the next table who were talking intently into the single cell phone that lay open on the table between them.

“Well, should we talk about the interviews? You’ve got one coming up in . . .” I clicked open her file. She shook her head.

“I’m okay. I’ll just work on this for a while. See you next week.”

“Caitlyn . . .” Too late. She was up, and she was gone.

I sat there for four more hours, for three more clients. I drank iced espresso and endured the glares of my seatmates until 2:45, when I packed up my laptop and eased out the door. Lonelyguy never came back.

“Nu?”
asked Grandma. “Well?” It was October, seventy-two degrees under a cloudless blue sky. The breeze blowing through the opened windows carried the scent of lemons and jacaranda, and dinner: roasted turkey, with gravy, and stuffing, creamed onions, and cranberry sauce. Most Americans reserved these items for Thanksgiving. My grandmother cooked them at
least once a month, and served them in her gold-rimmed good china.

I dropped my keys into the blue-and-white-painted bowl by the door and followed her onto the terrace, where she’d draped our tiny metal-legged table for two in a festive orange tablecloth. She’d lit candles, too, and set the food out on platters on the little rolling drinks cart the previous tenants had left behind. I helped myself to a plate. “I think I’ve found a new line of work.”

I expected my grandmother’s eyes to light up when I told her about Lonelyguy, thinking of the money all that desperation could bring. Instead, she set down her fork and fixed me with a stern gaze that would have been more effective if she’d been wearing something other than a hot-pink kimono.

“Ruthie, you’re spinning your wheels.”

I patted my lips and looked at her calmly. “What do you mean?”

“This classified stuff, it’s nice, you know. A mitzvah.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be doing it for free. I bet I could get people to pay five hundred bucks for a rewrite. Or maybe I could come up with some kind of contingency scale. Like, if ten people e-mail you when the new profile goes up, you pay...”

“What about your screenplay?” Grandma asked innocently, her pale eyes guileless under their false eyelashes as she spooned creamed onions onto her plate. She’d only blended her rouge on one side of her face. The other side was a clownish circle of pink. “The movie you were writing?”

I sighed. “I think I lost my inspiration.”

“I think you lost your boyfriend,” she said.

I set my knife down on a pile of green beans. “He wasn’t really my boyfriend.”

“If you fall off the horse...”

“. . . you get back on the horse,” I recited. “But guys aren’t horses. I don’t want to meet anyone right now. I’m very happy. Just because I’m single right now doesn’t mean I’m not happy. I don’t need a man to be happy!”

She pushed herself off her chair and drew herself up to her full height, giving the dragon embroidered across her chest a fond pat before she started talking. “When your mother, my daughter, was on her deathbed, I made her a promise,” she began, her Boston accent turning “daughter” into “dodder” and “promise” into “prahmise.”

Oh, God,
I thought. Not the deathbed promise. That was Grandma’s big gun, brought out once every few years, maximum. “You’ve taken wonderful care of me.”

“I promised that I could always make sure that you were well taken care of and happy . . .” she continued as if I hadn’t said a word, jabbing the air with her fork.

“I am happy.” “But you’re not!” she said, dropping her fork onto her plate and glaring at me. “You’re afraid! You think everyone’s staring at you, judging you...”

“I am not afraid!”

“. . . and spending your whole life underwater isn’t natural, Ruth Anne!”

I raised my eyebrows and made a face, as if this was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. “It’s not natural to swim?”

“It’s not natural to hide,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed underneath the rouge, and a vein in her neck was fluttering. “Or to pretend you don’t want love.”

“I’m not hiding,” I said, and shoved my hair behind my ear, off my scarred cheek, to emphasize the point. “And I do want love. Just not right now.”

“So when, then?” she asked. “Next year? The year after that? Five years? I’m not going to live forever, Ruthie, and”—she reached across the table to grab my chin in her pincer grip— “nobody else is, either. You should know that. You, of all people.”

I nodded, pulling my head away. “Okay,” I muttered, sounding like a chastened teenager. “Fine.”

She pretended she didn’t hear me. “Decaf,” she said, lifting her empty cup. “Please.”

Later that night, I turned on my computer. There was one e-mail in my in-box, one lonely e-mail from Lonelyguy. “Sorry I stood you up,” Gary said. “Something suddenly came up. I could meet you after work any night this week, or if you’re free we could hook up tomorrow.”

I stared at the message for a while. Maybe Lonelyguy was all there was for girls like me. Girls like Taryn, the gorgeous, confident ones, got the pick of the litter; girls like me got to choose among the also-rans and wannabes, the humor-impaired pistachio-eaters who’d think they were doing us a big favor by dating us and expect a lifetime of gratitude, not to mention oral sex, as recompense.

I thought of Gary in the coffee shop, all shaving cuts and eagerness, without any of Robert’s edge, his black, cutting humor, and I wrote, “What occurs to me after a careful reading of your profile is that you were right. Sorry to be blunt, but there’s very little here to distinguish you from any other guy your age. Do you have any hobbies? Pets? Passions? Talents? Anything?”

I sent it before I could reconsider. It was mean, I knew, but I was feeling like my heart had been shredded after my grand-mother had accused me of hiding, of burying myself underwater and failing to make her happy before she died. If inflicting some of my misery onto Lonelyguy meant I’d be able to sleep, I wouldn’t hesitate.

His reply arrived in my in-box five minutes later. “Can juggle a little. Can bake cookies. Have read every book Raymond Carver and Russell Banks have ever written. No pets, though. Should I get one?”

Christ.
I typed, “I think getting a pet so you can pick up girls online is tantamount to animal abuse. PS: Please add reading stuff to profile. Chicks dig books.”

“Will do,” he wrote back almost instantly. “Re: pickup pet. I’d give it a good home and feed it that organic stuff they sell at Whole Foods. What do chicks dig? Cats? Dogs? Ferrets?”

“No idea,” I typed back. I was wondering how much I could pour from Grandma’s dusty bottle of Baileys without her noticing and thinking that, at my age, it was probably time for me to start buying my own nightcaps.

“Meet me at the valet parking stand at the Beverly Center at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon to discuss,” he wrote. “It can be a consult. I will pay.”

“Fair enough,” I murmured, clicking on the X in the corner of his message and sending it to electronic oblivion.

“No. I won’t do it,” I said, and shook my head, refusing to move another inch closer to the pet-shop windows that overlooked the fourth floor of the Beverly Center shopping mall. “No, no, no. I’m not going in there, and you are not buying a pickup pet from a puppy mill.”

“Lot of
p’
s in that sentence,” said Gary, pulling a bag of nuts from a plastic bag looped over his wrist. “Pistachio?”

I looked in the bag. “Those are cashews.”

“Yes, but pistachios sounded funnier.” He bent down
and peered through the glass. A skinny Chihuahua looked out at us with wet brown eyes and wagged its thin tail hopefully.

I’d showed up at the Beverly Center parking stand at the appointed hour and found Lonelyguy waiting. I’d allowed him to steer me toward the escalators, then up to the fourth floor, where, on the way to the pet shop, he’d asked whether I’d ever done any online dating myself.

“No,” I said. “Maybe some day. But I just got out of this long-term thing...”

He nodded sympathetically. “Prison?”

“A long-term relationship,” I clarified. Okay, not technically true, but how was he going to know that? “Long-term relationship” definitely sounded better than “one misguided drunken blow job, given to a guy who eloped to Puerto Vallarta with Taryn Montaine two days later.” The Chihuahua yawned and curled up on its side in a nest of shredded newspaper with its back to me. Fabulous. My pathetic excuse for a love life wasn’t even interesting to lesser species.

“I’ve got a date tonight,” he said.

“Well, that was fast,” I replied, feeling an unpleasant twinge of emotion I couldn’t name.

“Yep. I put a new picture up and added the stuff about the writers, and the cookies, and I got five responses by noon, and tonight I am seeing”—he stared at the shopping-mall ceiling, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth—“a d-girl named Dana.”

“Well, good,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “That’s great!”

“I could use some wardrobe advice. What do you think?”

I studied his outfit. From its glass enclosure, the dog appeared to be checking him out, too. Blue ring-neck long-sleeved T-shirt, khakis, orange Pumas. Official uniform of the Los Angeles man-boy. The khakis were supposed to signal
I have a job,
while the funky shirt and sneakers said
but I haven’t sold out.
Robert had worn the plaid shirts and concert T-shirts he’d had since high school. Nobody would ever mistake him for the Man. Once, he’d told me, he’d been sitting outside World of Pies and someone tried to put a dollar bill in his coffee cup. Which, he’d said, looking pained, was full at the time.

“Are you pro or anti cologne?” Gary asked.

“I’m indifferent.”

His Adam’s apple jerked and bobbed when he swallowed. “Help a brother out,” he said. “It can’t be any worse than listening to the hopes and dreams of seventeen-year-olds.” He led me toward Macy’s and got me to sniff half a dozen eye-watering potions that he sprayed into the air. “What do you think?” he asked after each one. “Is it doing anything for you?”

I rolled my eyes, and finally started laughing when he waggled his eyebrows and asked, in an atrocious Austin Powers accent, whether something that smelled aggressively of limes was making me horny. “Are you newlyweds?” the bespectacled, gray-haired saleswoman asked as she wrapped up Gary’s Chanel por Homme.

He gave her a sweet smile and took my hand. “Brother and sister.”

Back at the valet stand, I wished him good luck with his date.

“It’s not too late,” he said. He pumped my hand up and down once, and then he just held it.

“Too late for what?” “We could go back in there. Buy that puppy. I’ll ditch the d-girl. You’ll forget about your unfortunate time behind bars. We could go to the beach and let the little guy run around.”

I shook my head. “You need practice, and I’ve got plans.” I retrieved my hand and put it in my pocket. “You might want to take a shower first, though. You smell kind of confusing.”

“Can’t have that,” he said cheerfully, and handed the valet his parking stub. “See ya.”

“Good luck,” I said, leaving him to his date as I headed for the pool.

“Phone for you, Ruthie,” my grandmother announced, clutching the cordless as if it were a wild animal she’d managed to subdue with her bare hands. “It’s a man,” she emphasized in a loud whisper, as if I’d missed the manic glee in her eyes. It was Saturday, six days after I’d left Lonelyguy at the mall. We’d been e-mailing. His date, he told me, had been a disaster. Dana the d-girl had ordered a salad and spent the entire dinner shifting the leaves around her plate and complaining about, in order, her producer bosses, her most recent ex-boyfriend, her father, and her allergies. “By coffee, I was feeling like I was responsible not only for my entire gender, but the atmosphere, too,” he’d said. But it hadn’t stopped him from lining up somebody else. Actually, two somebody elses—a pediatric resident on Friday, for drinks, and a public relations executive for Saturday-afternoon coffee. I’d advised him on clothing, scents, and topics of conversation.
Make eye contact,
I said.
Look at them like they matter, like they’re the only one in the room.
He’d thanked me and mailed me a check. No matter what my grandmother wanted to believe, it was a business relationship, nothing more.