Lies, Love, and Breakfast at Tiffany's

by Julie Wright

  A date. As if I had time for dates. What I said instead was, “You make it sound like I never go out. I go out all the time.”

  “Going out is not the same as dating. Going out is something you can do with people you don’t even like. Dating requires emotional connections. The last time you had an emotional connection—that I can remember—was with that Sam kid.”

  I sighed and pulled her into a hug. “It’s so cute you think that Sam and I could be anything long-term.” I unlinked our arms and patted her head. “Sam and I were a three-date situation.”

  I picked up a box of books and headed for some empty shelves. With all the boxes I’d lugged around, plus all the art I’d hung, I could skip the gym for a month.

  She let out a puff of exasperation as she followed me. “Do you ever have dates that move past the five-date situation?”

  I stopped, rested the box on a shelf, and unpacked with renewed zeal.

  I didn’t answer.

  She shook her little head at me. “And that’s why you need a movie day. Romance movies.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “But not today. I can’t get past the five-date situation if I never make it to the one-date situation. And no one will want to date me if my house smells like garbage that is three weeks past putting out.” I kept to myself the fact that my apartment smelled that way only because the garbage really was three weeks past putting out.

  “Well, I’m watching a movie.” She fished her phone from her pocket, swiped her finger over the screen, and her TV flickered on. A few moments later, the screen was full of flowers and credits, and her surround sound blared music only classic Hollywood knew how to produce.

  “What? No reel-to-reel?”

  She looked aghast. “You don’t play antiques. The film is much too delicate. You of all people should know it’s blasphemy to even suggest it.” She abandoned the TV and went to the kitchen.

  I finished unpacking the books onto her shelf. “I thought you were watching a movie,” I called out to her.

  “You know it’s a long introduction,” she called back.

  I did know. I knew the moment the music started that she’d put on My Fair Lady. The introduction took so long that it was easy to forget you were watching a movie and not just listening to a soundtrack until the movie’s dialogue finally kicked in. By then, I’d unpacked four more boxes, and Grandma had exited the kitchen with a smorgasbord of cheeses and flatbreads and cucumber sandwiches—her favorite.

  I allowed myself to pause and take some of the food off the tray with a stern, “I really have to leave after I’m done with the boxes in this room.”

  She waved me off as she focused on the screen playing out a movie she probably had memorized. “I’m only listening to you if you happen to be telling me you have a date with a prospective new grandson-in-law.”

  Since the conversation had become cyclical, and neither one of us would back down, I opened another box. A date. When was the last time I’d been on an actual date? The closest I had to any such thing was hijacking Ben’s dates over the last two nights. I blinked. “Date?” I blinked again. “Oh, no! Ben!” I jumped to my feet and tugged my phone from my back pocket.

  I’d forgotten all about the fact that we’d left Ben’s car at the club.

  “You can’t celebrate a crime; that’s immoral, eh?”

  —Nicole Bonnet, played by Audrey Hepburn

  in How to Steal a Million

  I told myself I was justified for forgetting the fact that Ben had no vehicle. I’d been pretty out of things last night and even this morning when I’d left Ben’s house. But when I woke up this morning, that responsibility should have been my first priority, especially since Ben had left his car at the club in order to come to the studio to help me. Was his car even still there? Was he stranded at home because I’d gone to pick up my car and then ditched in the middle of the night without thinking he’d need a ride to go get his car?

  “I’m an idiot,” I said out loud as the door to Grandma’s back porch shut behind me. I scrolled through my list of contacts until I found his number and hit the call button. The least I could do was offer him a ride to his car.

  When he answered the phone, however, my mind went blank.

  Thoughts of that picture on his fridge crowded out my words.

  “Hello?” Ben said. “Hello? Silvia?”

  “Ben!” The word exited my mouth like a bark, but I felt proud I’d managed to get that far. “Hi . . . Ben. I was wondering if you had your car yet. I don’t want to leave you stranded any longer than I already have. And sorry it took me so long to get to you about this. You probably already have it taken care of. I crashed pretty hard when I got home.”

  “You crashed pretty hard when you were at my house, too,” he said, though the laughter in his voice indicated he didn’t mean anything negative in the comment. “But actually, I’ve been home all day. Laundry. I’d forgotten my car wasn’t in the garage.”

  “Oh, good!” I said. “I mean, not good that it isn’t taken care of, but good that I can still help, since you helped me, and it’s my fault your car is currently stranded. I thought maybe we could go get it, and then I could make it up to you with dinner.” The words rushed from me like they couldn’t exit my mouth fast enough.

  Yesterday, I was able to talk to him without feeling tongue-­twisted or stomach-knotted. Funny how the discovery of a person’s importance in your life changed the way you communicated with them. Learning I was important enough to him to warrant fridge space changed everything for me.

  “Dinner. Dinner sounds great . . . except . . .”

  He paused long enough to make the hesitation feel like he might have died on the other end of the line. When he finally spoke again, he said, “I kind of have a date tonight.”

  “Oh.” That was not at all what I had expected to hear. After seeing the picture on his fridge, I had expected our next conversation to be something like planning for our future. I must have been really delirious when I left his house if I’d allowed my imagination to get so carried away. I plopped down on one of my grandma’s patio chairs and stared at the koi pond that fringed her back patio. This was definitely a time where feeling stupid was an accurate response. The good news was that Ben had no idea what had been running through my mind and therefore spared me from feeling stupid publicly. It was bad enough I had to feel it privately.

  “Right. I bet Alison wouldn’t like it if I crashed yet another evening,” I said, keeping my voice light and unconcerned.

  He didn’t deny the date was with Alison. I hadn’t realized how much I hoped he would deny it until he didn’t.

  “But I still need a ride to get my car, if you don’t mind,” he said after the awkward pause became almost too unbearable. “I really did forget I didn’t have it, which would have been less than ideal when it came time for me to leave tonight.”

  “Of course!” I said. I might not have wanted to facilitate his date with Alison, but I did owe him a solid five-star favor. “I’ll be right over.”

  Discussing my dating life with my grandma had made me realize how much I missed having a dating life. I missed having a significant other who was obligated to go to social events with me, and who would be there when I needed a cuddle, and who would reassure me about all the things going on in my life.

  Maybe that was what Grandma meant when she’d said her house felt lonely. Grandpa had died a long time ago. Maybe here, she was hoping to find the sort of companionship that came from living in close proximity to someone else.

  I sighed with the ache of realizing I was missing that same thing in my own life. Maybe it was because Ben smelled good, or because he had a picture of us on his fridge that made us look like a couple, or because he’d bailed me out in a way that earned him definite white-knight-on-a-valiant-steed points, but when I thought about missing that special someone in my life, the onl
y face that came to mind to fill the emptiness was Ben’s.

  And he had a date with his old college girlfriend.

  Grandma must have sneaked out onto her back patio, because when I turned to go back into her retirement villa, she stood sentry at the door. “Who were you talking to that could possibly make you sigh like that?” She crossed her arms over her chest, the many bracelets on her wrists clicking together as they settled into place.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” If she didn’t have to talk to me about being lonely, I didn’t have to talk to her about it either.

  “That was the sigh of your mother telling you that film school was a waste of your life, the sigh of your father telling you he would not buy you a pony, the sigh of the time Emma went to New York with her dad and your parents said you couldn’t go with her. In fact, that might be the biggest sigh I’ve ever heard you give.”

  My resolution to not talk to her lacked resolve, because I slumped back in her outdoor armchair and covered my eyes with my phone. “You know that moment when you finally see potential in a relationship, where you think that it could really go places, and that all those places were places you actually wanted to go? I had that moment today.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” she said.

  “Unfortunately, I also had the moment when the other part of the relationship equation is taking someone else to all those places. Gah! I’m stupid.”

  I felt her come closer and knew that if I let her, she’d be sitting next to me, settling her arms over me, and offering to hire a hitman for my competition.

  Every girl needed a grandma like mine.

  Instead of giving in to my self-pity, I stood and gave her a quick hug, stealing some of her energy to fortify myself against the upcoming task. After all, I had told Ben to expect me right away. Making him late for his evening with Alison would be more petty than hiring a hitman. Stepping into Grandma’s premade embrace and squeezing her tight was all I had available to me for comfort. “Anyway, I gotta go. Really. I owe someone a favor, and the time to pay the piper has come. Don’t worry about me or my sighing habits. I’m fine.”

  She pulled back so I could see her raised eyebrows of doubt. “Are you?” she asked.

  No. “Yes,” I said, because really, no was the wrong answer, too. It’s not like I could feel any keen sense of loss over Ben when it only just barely occurred to me to care about him in a romantic way.

  The right to feel badly did not belong to me.

  I told myself that the whole way to Ben’s house. When he answered the door before I even knocked, and smiled at me like I was the best thing to happen to his day, I realized I was a liar. I had every right to feel as bad as I wanted, because that smile was valuable.

  “Look what I can do,” Ben said before pulling me in by the shoulders and wrapping his arms around me.

  Astonished, it took me long enough to react that Ben had to say, “It’s called a hug, Silvia. It works best when you hug back. I thought you’d be proud of me remembering how without any practicing.”

  I laughed because it made the entire thing so much less uncomfortable. “I’m sorry about your car,” I said, since all other comments and questions came with too much real conversation. I didn’t have it in me for real conversation.

  He shrugged. “As long as the tires weren’t stolen while it sat in the parking lot, we’re good, right?”

  “Right.”

  I let him into the passenger side before getting in, starting the car, and pulling away from the curb.

  “So, tell me more about the screening,” he said when it became apparent I’d become a mute.

  Of course! We did have things to talk about. Glorious, wonderful things! We had what we’d always had.

  Movies.

  “Seriously, Ben, you’ve never seen people so pleased with a first cut in your life. And I can’t take all the credit for how great it was. The director did everything right. The actors delivered their lines like they were born for them, and the score was sublime. With your help to give it a polish, it was a perfect storm. I was just lucky enough to be the one to report the weather.”

  “Perfect storms are pretty great,” he agreed. “But they lose some of their power if the weather reporter has pictures of Egypt on-screen when the storms are happening in the Bahamas.”

  He was right, of course. I had done my job well. I needed to enjoy that fact. I’d never felt insecure about myself until Dean came into my life. That man would have been the ruin of me if I hadn’t finally stood up for myself.

  “We should celebrate the great edit caper sometime.” I took my eye off the road long enough to flash a wicked grin in his direction. “Have a toast to a perfect crime.”

  He went quiet, and I realized he must have been thinking about the fact that I’d sort of asked him out earlier. Since I was now chauffeuring him to his car so he could pick up his college girlfriend for their date, hinting at any kind of get-together probably made him uncomfortable. “As friends and partners in crime,” I added. Ben had been my friend first, and if he was unavailable any other way, I was still glad to have the friendship part. Me getting carried away in romantic notions was absolutely not his fault. Really, what did a picture on a fridge actually mean?

  It meant we were friends and that we’d had fun in Disney­land together once. No big deal.

  His voice took on a much lighter tone than it had before. “A celebration sounds like a great idea. Sometime soon. Let’s get together soon, okay?”

  I agreed and wished I could see his expression. It had been more convenient when he’d been in the back seat of my car and I could see him in the rearview mirror. With him sitting in the passenger seat, and my right eye being nonexistent, it was difficult to turn my head far enough to get more than a glance at him without taking my attention away from the road. If I looked at him fully, we might end up as one of Ben’s mortality statistics.

  We discussed the movie, a few of the changes I was thinking of making, Dean’s work habits, and even some of the possibilities that might have driven Dean to become the man he was.

  “It’s probably the classic case of social drinking getting out of control,” Ben suggested. “A lot of people in our line of work end up with issues. It happens all the time when you work a job that practically requires that form of social networking.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I said. “I think he’s hiding out in the bottle to escape personal stuff. Every time he talks about his family or home life, his left cheek twitches and he can never make eye contact. And he never talks about his personal life on purpose. He only does it when someone asks a direct question, or if he’s talking to himself about something and has forgotten you’re there.”

  “You’re the expert,” Ben said.

  But I wasn’t the expert at all. It was just a guess. Whatever was going on in his personal life that would spiral him to a place where he had no control over himself no matter how high the stakes, no matter how much he needed his sobriety to stay on top of his game, had to be pretty bad.

  I sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I almost feel sorry for him, drinking himself stupid and mean all the time. Top ten reasons why I don’t drink—too easy to lose your head. I get why someone would want to numb themselves from reality when life gets too horrible, but better to feel every­thing than to feel nothing and end up with nothing.”

  “I know I’ve told you this before, and I will likely tell you again, but I love that you can hold a person accountable for the things they do and yet still feel compassion for them.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t always. It’s easier to see all sides when it’s other people. When I’m in the middle of it, my side feels like the only side.”

  “Like when you refused to believe that Koya was trying to get me fired because she said you and I were too good of friends to not have so
mething going on in the background.”

  I tsked. “That’s different. Everyone knew she was lying. You weren’t going to get fired just because one crazy person started making up rumors.” I added a laugh, but it sputtered in my throat. She’d mentioned how Ben and I always sat together at meetings, how every project we worked on was a full collaboration between us, but that we left out other members of the staff . . . like her. Suddenly, Koya’s stupid assumptions seemed less stupid. Had she seen what I hadn’t? Had she ascertained my feelings before I processed them myself?

  “Rumors . . .” Ben tapped his fingers on his knee. Even without being able to see, I recognized the low thump from years of working with Ben. He always tapped a pattern of five beats, the first three beats fast and the second two after a brief hesitation. “I heard something interesting about rumors once,” he said, as if starting another conversation entirely.

  Good. Another conversation would keep me from wondering about how little I knew my own self. If someone as vapid as Koya could see through me enough to know that some part of me preferred Ben to any other person, what did that mean about my own self-awareness? “Oh, yeah?” I said.

  “Yeah. Someone once said that every rumor hints at truth.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face fast enough to leave me light-headed. Did Ben know what had been running through my mind? Was I that transparent to everyone but me?

  When I didn’t respond, Ben kept talking. “Well, Mid-Scene is definitely less interesting without you. Or Koya for that matter. She was fired just after you quit.”

  “Really?” Better. It was better for us to talk about something else, something that didn’t make me feel so exposed.

  “Yeah. Turns out she was dating Jason.” Ben laughed.

  “Jason? The squirrely guy from effects?”

  “The very same.”

  I laughed, too. “Well, there’s your hint of truth.”

  We talked about other ways life at Mid-Scene Films had changed since I left the company. The conversation wasn’t anything special or amazing, but it was comfortable.