When It Happens to You

by Molly Ringwald

  He was fifteen into his set when the unmistakable odor of a cigar wafted through the open window. Peter parted the shade and there was Didier reclining in a chair under an umbrella reading Le Monde, puffing on a cigar. The thought of having a conversation with Didier was unappealing, so he backed away from the window to finish his push-ups and shower, hoping Didier would be gone by the time he was finished.

  Under the showerhead, he let the water beat down on his head and shoulders. The pressure was good and went a long way to wash away the flight experience that he imagined as a film covering his body. He was about to get out of the shower when the thought occurred to him to masturbate; briefly he debated whether it would wake him up for the party or lull him further into somnolence. By then his hand had absently begun the task so he attempted to conjure up an image that would get it done. His ex-girlfriend, Sue Ming, flickered in his mind. She was a child-development researcher hired by the network to make sure that the show followed certain guidelines, and she spent a lot of time on the set peering at notes on a yellow legal pad through blue vintage cat-eye glasses. For years he had been wildly attracted to her, but as soon as they slept with each other for the first time, her allure all but evaporated for Peter, and he found himself having to think of other women and situations in order to perform. It was strange now to have Sue and her glasses come to mind almost two years after they had said good-bye. He tried to picture her in the gray tank top and little lacy boy-shorts that she used to wear to bed, but almost simultaneously, he remembered her face after she let herself into his apartment, when she found him asleep next to a woman he had met the night before at a bar in Greenpoint. What was her name? Karen? Kelly? It was a “K” name for sure, but everything else was hazy. He woke up and Sue was standing in the doorway with coffee and croissants from the café down the street, while the mascara-smeared K girl slept naked next to him, drooling on the pillow.

  “I don’t understand,” is all Sue said. “I don’t understand.” And she really did look confused.

  He was confused as well, not really sure how he and the girl had ended up at his place after he had given Sue his key only the week before. He vaguely remembered something about roommates and a college dorm, and after all the tequila shots he had ordered for everyone at the bar, borough hopping had seemed unappealing. So they stumbled to his apartment in Park Slope, drank more tequila, and he remembered little else.

  There was no scene. Sue simply set the bag with the croissants on the bureau along with the coffee and walked out. She mailed his key back to him the following week.

  The thought of Sue Ming, her glasses and her pained, incomprehensive expression did little to advance the situation at hand, so he switched to the memory of a porn film that he had seen when he was thirteen years old. The woman had frizzy hair, enormous natural breasts—or so he assumed, since it pre-dated the proliferation of everything fake—and her face wore a permanently lascivious expression. He saw her open her legs and stare up at the man who, if memory served, was wearing a doctor’s coat and horn-rimmed glasses, and said in a voice that sounded incongruously sweet in comparison to the sexy sneer, “Don’t you want it?”

  Peter closed his eyes and concentrated. He switched places with the doctor and walked toward her. “Yes, I want it,” he said. Putting his hands on her knees he pushed them wider, and then in the shower the water ran scalding hot. “Fuck!” he yelled and jumped to the side. He waited for a moment and then tentatively ran his hand under the shower to see if it had cooled. Stepping back under the shower, he tried to envision the scene once again. “Don’t you want it?” the woman said. But this time something was different. Her hair was in a twist instead of loose. He readjusted to the change and coaxed himself back up. “Yes,” he said as Dr. Peter. He unzipped his pants and watched her eyes grow large in a gratuitous expression of appreciation—and then the water ran cold. He stepped to the side, trying desperately to keep the fantasy in play. Back under the showerhead, he resumed, stepping toward her as she lay back in anticipation, but just as he finally entered her with a moan, the water ran blistering hot again.

  “Fuck, fuck, FUCK!” he screamed. He jumped to the side, and his left foot landed on a bar of soap that had softened. As he fell, his legs landed in some version of a split, and in a panic his arms flailed upward, managing to knock over all of the bottles of shower gel, shampoos, and conditioners lined up on the ledge. One of the bottles shattered and a shard of glass embedded itself in his big toe. He turned off the shower, grabbed a towel, and wrapped it around himself. Hopping across the room on one foot, he sat down on the bed and attempted to remove the shard without tweezers.

  “Ça va?” He heard Didier’s voice calling from outside. “Everything okay?”

  He managed to remove the glass, cutting his fingers in the process, and then opened the door for Didier, who looked up from his paper with bland interest.

  “I heard you crying,” he said.

  Didier often mixed up his verbs in English, usually just choosing the one that sounded closest to the French.

  “Your shower’s got a problem,” Peter said. “I just about killed myself in there.”

  Didier nodded. “Oui. I’ve been telling your sister that she needs to have a plombier come, but she forgets.” He puffed on his cigar and exhaled slowly, admiring the smoke as it dissipated in the air.

  The guests began to arrive at dusk, one by one at first and then all at once. Peter stood alone under an outdoor heater. He noticed how much color everyone had and how healthy and smiling they seemed. He felt very wan and pale in comparison and wished that his sister had waited at least a day to throw the party. But Lindsay had always been overly enthusiastic and impatient. He remembered the year that she talked him into opening all of the Christmas presents in advance that their mother had stashed in the back of their parents’ closet. “Come on, you know you want to,” she baited him. “What difference does it make if we know now, really?” They were eleven years old, and even now he was impressed by the simplicity of her argument. Not, “Why don’t we check, and that way you’ll know if they got you the Atari?” followed up by “How are you going to know what to hint for?” Lindsay’s argument was brutal in its simplicity: What difference does it make? It seemed irrefutable at the time. He was dumbfounded at having experienced his first existential crisis. By stating that it made no difference if they opened the gifts then or on Christmas Day, or any other day, it stood to reason that nothing mattered. If Christmas was like any other day, then what about Halloween? The Fourth of July? What about the day he was born? He looked at his sister’s face, flushed and bright at the prospect of the espionage, and agreed to do it. So they opened every present, and then immediately and painstakingly wrapped them all back up afterward, feeling solemn and depressed. Lindsay had looked on the edge of tears that she had ruined their Christmas, but Peter told her it was okay. He vowed then, the first of many times, never to be controlled by her impatience. And yet here he was again.

  Lindsay smiled, graciously accepting bouquets of flowers and bottles of wine from her guests. She passed the wine on to Didier, who had been born to the parents of a fading haute bourgeois, a generation that while squandering the money of its forebears was nevertheless schooled in the best of everything no longer affordable. He took the wine and set about uncorking each bottle with an almost religious reverence. Peter watched as he opened, sniffed, and then displayed the bottles with precision along the center of the low outdoor dining table.

  Lindsay came over and grabbed Peter by the shoulder, eagerly nudging him toward a bald man wearing shaded glasses. “Quintin, this is my brother, Peter,” Lindsay said.

  The bald man flashed a smile. “How do you do?” he said as his eyes flitted from Peter’s eyes, down his body, and then back to his eyes in less than a second. “Now, where has she been hiding you?”

  “He’s my big brother!” Lindsay said, touching the man lightly on the cheek. “Born a whole three and a half minutes before me!”


  “Nice to meet you,” Peter said.

  A severe-looking woman with a Louise Brooks bob, deep-hooded eyes, and a slash of a red mouth came over. Quintin put his arm around the woman while still looking at Peter.

  “This is my wife, Rita,” he said.

  “Rita is a phenomenal artist,” Lindsay said. “Those sketches you were admiring in the hallway? Hers.”

  “You are too kind,” Rita lowered her lids and smiled. Her pointy canines jutted out, giving her the look of something feral.

  Peter had no idea what sketches Lindsay was referring to, but he nodded and smiled anyway.

  “And Quintin works at Warners,” Lindsay said. “You must cast my brother!”

  “You’re an actor?” It was a question that sounded declarative, and Peter felt that he could already sense the man’s interest wane.

  “He’s incredible.” Lindsay linked her arm in Peter’s and leaned her head affectionately on his shoulder. “I’m trying to get him to move out here.”

  “From where?” Quintin asked. Peter watched the man’s eyes dart around as he surveyed who else was at the party.

  “New York,” Lindsay said.

  “Oh, where in New York?” Rita asked. “We still keep a place in SoHo.”

  “Brooklyn,” Peter said. “Would you excuse me? I was just going to get a drink. Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thank you,” Rita said. “I’m going to see what Didier is pouring.”

  “Have your agent set something up,” Quintin said to Peter as he backed away.

  “Will do,” Peter said. “Thanks.”

  He walked across the gravel, over the stepping-stones that had been artfully arranged so as to suggest a skyscraper, and into the kitchen to grab a beer. A woman in a fuchsia sari was leaning into the open refrigerator. She turned around and jumped when she saw Peter.

  “Oh! Hi there. I was just grabbing some Badoit,” she said, holding up the water bottle as if proof.

  “You didn’t happen to see any beer in there, did you?” Peter asked.

  The woman stepped to the side. “Have a look,” she said. “You’re Lindsay’s brother, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” Peter said.

  “I’m Vela,” the woman said. “Lindsay practices yoga in my studio.”

  “Oh, yoga. Great,” Peter said.

  “Do you practice?” Vela set about opening cupboards, looking for a glass.

  “No. Can’t say I do,” Peter said.

  “Well, we have a fantastic beginners’ class on Tuesday,” Vela told him. She located a glass and poured herself some of the French mineral water. “You want some? Oh, right. You were looking for a beer, weren’t you?” She laughed, an attractive husky laugh, and put the extra glass back in the cupboard. “Our website is called Chit Yoga.”

  “Excuse me?” Peter said.

  “Philosophically, pure awareness, transcendent consciousness, as in Sat-chit-ananda,” she explained.

  “Oh. Chit,” Peter said, nodding. “I’ll be sure to check you out. I mean it. Not you.”

  Vela laughed again. “You can check me out, too.” She winked at him and headed outside. Peter felt the tips of his ears turn red. Vela was garden-variety beautiful, but curiously he was not attracted to her at all. He had always found women with arms more muscular than his intimidating. He located a beer in the refrigerator and went on the hunt for a bottle opener. Lindsay rushed into the kitchen and grabbed him by the shirt.

  “No hiding in here!” she scolded.

  “Where do you keep your bottle openers?”

  She went to a drawer on the opposite side of the kitchen and found one. Grabbing his beer, she opened it for him and threw the cap away. Then she took hold of his arm and pulled him out of the kitchen, back into the throng.

  “Isn’t Vela great?” Lindsay said. “She said she met you.”

  “Yeah, she seems nice. Yoga, huh?”

  Lindsay leaned in and whispered conspiratorially in his ear. “You should definitely have your agent call Quintin. He just got promoted and if he likes you . . .”

  “Okay, Linds. Don’t worry about me. Go be a hostess.”

  He didn’t have the heart to tell her that his agent had let him go after the New York Post debacle, and he hadn’t gotten around to finding another one.

  They weaved their way through the crowd of people while Lindsay embraced, kissed, and laughed with her carefully selected mélange of writers, artists, designers, and financiers. She continually tried, and failed, to draw him into the various conversations.

  “Sean!” Lindsay threw her arms around a tall man wearing a fitted T-shirt clearly intended to show off his physique. He looked familiar to Peter. “Where’s Stella?” Lindsay demanded. “She’s coming, isn’t she?”

  “Parking,” the man said. “She won’t let me drive her Volt until she gets a dent in it herself.”

  “Oh, you are too funny,” Lindsay said. “Not only does she direct you, but she chauffeurs you around as well. What a lucky boy.”

  “Lucky and emasculated,” Sean said. He smiled at Peter with the look of someone who is used to charming a room with his false modesty. Peter laughed a little too enthusiastically and took the opportunity to retreat before Lindsay had a chance to introduce him. He recognized now that Sean was an actor, primarily known for action movies, but who had recently broken into more serious films with a couple of parts in some carefully chosen independent films. He had married the director of one of them, Stella, a woman fifteen years his senior, and his career had just now reached the watershed moment when an actor has a chance at the best of everything. He was on the list that could get movies made just by agreeing to be in them, regardless of suitability or skill.

  Just by looking at him, Peter knew that Sean wasn’t a good actor. He would bet money that he had never studied Chekhov, Ibsen, or even Shakespeare, but Peter would also be willing to bet that it would be Sean, this latter-day matinee idol, who would be called by the Public Theater to perform Shakespeare in the Park. He felt the nauseating and all-too-familiar sensations of failure and envy, and he fled the house, looking for a place far enough away from everyone to inhibit conversation but close enough so that he couldn’t be accused by his sister of leaving the party.

  Outside, the last of the early evening light was evanescing. Someone switched on the outdoor lights, and little bulbs illuminated the garden, giving it the look of a provincial town square in France. Peter wandered through the raised beds of vegetables and herbs. He stopped at a large tomato vine and picked a tomato.

  “Isn’t it the best scent ever?”

  He turned and saw a slender woman with a short blond pixie cut standing next to him.

  “The best,” Peter said.

  “My mother used to grow tomatoes in her garden, and I always thought if I made a perfume, I would make tomato vine one of the notes.”

  Peter nodded.

  “The vines actually smell even better than the tomatoes,” she said.

  “You make perfume?” Peter asked.

  “No, I said if.”

  “Oh, you sounded all professional, with the whole ‘notes,’ and all.”

  She laughed. “Maybe that’s what I should do. Make perfume,” she said. “But don’t you have to be famous now to make a perfume?”

  “You’re not famous?” Peter said. “Forget it, I’m not talking to you. Don’t you know there are famous people here at this party!” He turned around and walked a few steps away, then turned back. She was smiling. He noticed her two front teeth overlapping slightly. It was a really nice smile.

  “I’m Peter,” he said.

  “Greta.” She gave him her hand and he took it in his. It was small and delicate and for some reason made him think of a little bird.

  “Who do you know here?” he asked her.

  “No one,” she said. “Except Lindsay.” She turned and looked at the people milling around the yard, chatting. “You?”

  “She’s my sister,” he said.


  “I was wondering,” Greta said. “You have the same nose.”

  Peter self-consciously reached his hand up to touch his nose. He rubbed the bridge of it and then drank the rest of his beer and looked around for somewhere to throw the bottle.

  “Here I’ll take that,” Greta said. She reached out her hand to him and he stared at her, confused.

  “What? You’ll take my empty beer bottle?”

  She withdrew her hand, and he could see the flush of embarrassment on her face.

  “Do you often solicit the trash of strangers?” he asked

  “It’s a habit,” she said. “I have a daughter and I always have my hand out. Gum, candy wrappers, food she’s chewed up and spit out . . .”

  At the mention of her daughter, Peter glanced down at her hand to see if she was wearing a ring. Her hand was bare.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s go try some of that food over there, and whatever I don’t like, I’ll just spit in your hand.”

  Greta threw her head back and laughed, and Peter was surprised at how pleasant it was to hear her laugh.

  “You’re funny,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to stay very long though.”

  “Don’t go,” he said.

  She looked at him questioningly, and it was his turn to be embarrassed.

  “I mean . . . why are you going to go?” he stammered. “Do you have to get home to your kid or something?”

  “I don’t have to . . .” she said. “She’s with her father right now. At his place,” she added quickly.

  “Do me a favor then, and don’t go,” he said. Standing next to this woman, a stranger, he felt as though he was a man at sea drowning and she a buoy thrown to him as he gulped his last mouthful of saltwater. The intensity of the feeling was so strong that it eclipsed any anxiety or fear of rejection that he should have been feeling. All that mattered to him at that moment was that she not leave him there alone.

  She looked slightly rattled, her eyebrows knitting together in consternation. Suddenly, he grew mortified by his outburst and raced through his mind thinking of graceful ways that he could recant. Too many drinks, he could say—though truthfully he’d had only one beer. Jet-lag. Maybe he could pass it off as a joke? He looked down at his shoes as he felt his discomfort creeping through him in the awkward silence. Then he looked up and found her staring back at him with an inscrutable smile on her face.