Deja vu All Over Again

by Larry Brill

  On the second try, when they reached the end, he paused before that kiss, looking into her eyes in a way that made her feel he really meant it. She melted when, on the fourth run-through, he cupped her face with both hands and kissed her gently, slowly, and it tasted of forever. She knew they’d be going steady before the afternoon was over. Until now, the only boy who tried to kiss her like he wanted more than just lips was Tommy Tucker at a party the year before. He slobbered and groped and that was plain icky.

  They continued to practice all the way from the living room to her bedroom. She offered token resistance when his hands began exploring her body. She offered encouragement to his hands when he mistook that as a definite no. Before long they were naked; he was awkward and she was nervous. Julie had never done it before, she told him. He said it was his first time, too, sounding guilty, as if he was embarrassed to admit it, and Julie believed him even though Nate had a date with Margo Willingham once and Margo was not shy about being that sort of girl. Julie kissed him again and hoped he wouldn’t notice she was trembling. She must be in love with him because she wanted to do it. If he wanted it so much, that must mean he loved her, too. More than Margo and any of the other girls he could have had sex with if he loved them.

  And then, when the moment of truth arrived, when Julie expected she was about to experience trumpets blaring and angels singing, instead she heard: “Julie. I’m home.”

  “It’s Mom.” She pushed Nate; he rolled off the bed and landed on the floor with a thump.

  “Dear, are you in there?”

  He ducked behind the bedroom door. She leapt to the pile of clothes on the floor beside the bed, made it into her panties and was still fastening her bra when her mother opened the door just wide enough to poke her nose into the room.

  “What in the world are you doing, Julie? Why aren’t you dressed?”

  She searched for a plausible excuse, knowing she was flushed from head to toe, caught more than red-handed. If her mother came into the room, they were cooked.

  “Mom, can’t I have some privacy?” She threw an arm across her slack brassiere as much to hold it in place as to show some sense of modesty. That stopped her mother, who asked again what she was up to. Nate, with only the door between him and her mother, pointed to the window behind her, held his nose and made a water motion.

  “I was getting into my swimsuit.”

  And then her mother asked about the bike propped up near the front door. “Is that Nate Evans’ bicycle?”

  “Uh huh. He came by to rehearse for the play and we decided we’d go for a swim.” Lord, please let this work. I’ll be good from now on.

  “Well, he had better not be in there with you,” she said sternly. And then after a pause, she laughed. Of course she laughed. It was a silly notion. A good, respectable boy like Nate Evans, of all people. “I’m just kidding you, dear. Where is he? I want to say hello.”

  “He’s in back already, I think. Mah-ummm,” she whined. “Can I finish getting dressed now?

  Before she closed the door, Julie’s mother tsked, “That Nathan. He’s such a nice boy. Honey, I’m glad you’re seeing more of him these days.”

  She swung her eyes to where Nate was cowering behind the door, hands cupped between his naked thighs, and she laughed. “Me, too, Mom.”

  Julie bounded after her mother while Nate made a beeline for the window that opened to the backyard. She stuck her head out the bedroom door, fumbling with the front of her bra and stalling for time.

  “Nate invited me to a party tonight. One of the other kids in the play. At their house. Can I go?”

  “I don’t think your father would approve. Are their parents going to be there?”

  “Yes, they are. And Daddy’s not here, so he can’t really mind.”

  “That’s not the point, young lady.”

  She heard the window click shut behind her while Mom said she would think about it.

  Julie slipped into her swimsuit as quickly as possible, took two large towels from the linen closet and wrapped one around her as she ran out the door to the patio. She stopped in her tracks. Mother was standing only a few feet from the pool staring down on Nate, who was in the water and holding himself against the wall looking up at her with one hand shading his eyes against the sun’s glare and one arm along the tile lip of the pool to hold him close to its edge. Mom was chuckling about something Nate had said as if it was the most natural conversation to have with your girlfriend’s mother. Not the kind you’d have after she caught you naked in the bedroom. Almost caught. In heaven.

  She tossed the towels onto a deck chair and jumped into the water next to Nate. Her splash forced her mother to retreat a step or two. After getting Nate’s assurance that the party wasn’t going to involve booze or drugs and that chaperones would be on the premises, Mom agreed to let Julie go as long as he had her home at a reasonable hour.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Coop. The last thing I want to do is get Julie in trouble,” he said as the woman went back to the house.

  “I can’t believe you. Talking to my mother like that. You’re naked.”

  “Yeah. Kind of creepy, isn’t it?”

  Nate kept his body turned away from her and apologized. When she asked what for, he said, “For being pushy. For wanting to…well, you know.”

  Julie laid a hand on his shoulder. “Me, too.” She was disappointed and relieved at the same time. It had been stupid, but the way Nate looked at her, the way he touched her, she felt so ready. Now, after this near-miss, she was certain it would happen someday, but she couldn’t tell Nate that. She wasn’t a Margo Willingham kind of girl, no matter how much she wanted to be only a few minutes ago. So they agreed that maybe almost getting caught was a good thing, and taking their time would be better.

  “But I will tell you this,” Nate said. His eyes were dancing and Julie knew a joke was coming. “There isn’t anyone that I would rather almost do it with than you. Almost.”

  He laughed and splashed her face. Julie sputtered with water running off her cheeks and chlorine in her nose. She splashed water back at him and kicked herself into the deeper end of the pool. Nate chased, reaching for her ankle. He reeled her in and, with both hands on her shoulders, gave her enough time to draw a deep breath before he dunked her.

  Underwater and free of his hands Julie opened her eyes, immediately struck by one curious observation: Gosh, it seemed so much bigger in her bedroom.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Gremlin

  It was somewhere near Salinas, cruising up the highway that split acres of lettuce stretching to the horizon on either side of him in perfect rows like a green picket fence lying on the ground, that Nate felt the nervous energy from what he was about to do. He had the next scene for his life in his head now.

  By late November the boy was convinced it wasn’t just the memory of the girl he was in love with. He was in love with the woman she had become.

  And he was desperate.

  Sabotage.

  The boy was about to become a Man of Action.

  And Nate hoped to hell he could pull it off without Julie wanting to kill him.

  He was driving home in a 1972 Gremlin he found on craigslist and bought from a guy in Flagstaff, Arizona, as one more step in recreating his life. It was a two-door hatchback just like the one he drove his senior year. Like Nate, the little Gremlin was rusty around the edges, didn’t do hills very well, had trouble starting in the morning and an occasional exhaust problem. It was prettier and more reliable than the one he bought back in school with money saved up from summers spent cutting, boxing and hauling apricots along with the rest of the teenage labor at the orchards that covered the east foothills of the valley. He loved that first car. It wasn’t much, but it was worth every nick from his paring knife, every splinter from the wooden trays he had to carry to the drying sheds and every sweaty hour under the summer sun running buckets full of apricots from the pickers to the pickups parked on the dirt road just beyond the
trees.

  Julie was on his mind on the Southwest flight down to Arizona. She had recovered from whatever it was that kept her from work on the Friday after he bombed using Eppie’s direct approach and let her know exactly how he felt about her. He was convinced it was Nate flu because she refused to talk to him for nearly a week, and even then, not until the campus was deserted and they could meet in the open quad near the library, giving them privacy to talk in the protection of a public space. He sat on the waist high ledge that formed the base of the library building. She stood, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, close enough for intimate talk but maintaining an arm’s length between them.

  “I really like you, Nate, you know that,” she said. “But let’s not let things get out of hand.” He nodded and parsed every word. She spoke softly, haltingly, and maybe it was just his imagination that she spoke without conviction. How much did she care for the fiancé? She never said, which left him to speculate that it could be a lot, maybe just enough that she didn’t want to second-guess her decision to marry him, or somewhere in between. As much as he wanted to, he definitely could rule out “not at all.”

  As she talked, Nate decided “Friends” was not an option. He’d slink back to L.A. and love her from more than just an emotional distance before he would sit and watch her every day with that guy.

  “Things will look different, you’ll see.” She was certain he’d find somebody else. “That’s what you need. You’ll find the right woman for you.”

  A replacement? A diversion? Someone who would make him forget Jules? Seriously?

  That was the first tickle to his imagination on how to fix his Julie issue. After closing the deal on the Gremlin in Flagstaff, he spent the night in a Motel 6 munching on take-out pizza, sipping bottled water, and noodling over various scenarios ranging from logical but likely ineffective, to absurd and likely to lay waste to any chance he had of winning her back.

  Sabotage. That theme nagged him worse than if his mother caught him with the mouthful of double meat pizza he was chewing. He wasn’t the one who needed to find an alternative to love. Festerhaven was the one who needed an alternative to Julie, a distraction that would take him out of the picture. He thought about Seth Naylor’s problem. The poor guy was still paralyzed by the thought of meeting Angel Strings in person. Nate had continued to woo her in Seth’s name, and it was obvious that he had her falling in love with the guy—the version of Seth that Nate created. If he could work that kind of magic for one, could he possibly do it again? Staring at the ceiling, boxed in by the pea green walls of a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere, Nate decided that moment that he was going to try.

  “You clearly haven’t thought this through.” Jack Hewitt said. He watched his barking rat-like terrier straining at the leash raise his leg and take a leak on a small cactus. Nate was exhausted and his agent’s comment had him feeling pissed upon just like that plant the pooch watered. Jack had the dog’s leash in one hand and a cigar the size of sub sandwich in the other.

  They stood on the sidewalk outside Jack’s condo on Van Ness Avenue under a palm tree that sprouted in a tiny rock garden between two concrete and stone staircases in front of the building. Nate spent seven hours and fifty-five minutes of the eight-hour drive from Flagstaff to L.A. thinking about his plot to win Julie back. He pulled in to a truck stop in Barstow for chicken fried steak at the five-hour mark and spent two more hours jotting a list of pros and cons, developing a plan of action before he called his agent and hit the road to Los Angeles. Even though it was Saturday, Jack said he could give him some time before he headed out to a “Grip and Grin” session at the opening of an artsy-fartsy movie. It was the kind that would draw some big players from the industry who liked to be seen in public supporting highbrow flicks they wouldn’t waste a nickel on producing.

  “The way I see it, you’ve got us to the mid-point in the second act, and…so what? We’ve stalled out. Something’s going to happen now, right?”

  “Sure.” If his life really was a movie he now had a plot twist. He liked the irony of that. Nate shaded his eyes. The sun was going down behind the drab, milk chocolate stucco condominium Jack lived in. It was only two stories, but it was the largest building tucked between rows of narrow adobe duplexes with their front doors facing each other, a side wall facing the street, and separated only by concrete walkways as they stretched to the back of the lot. Jack’s building was kept up well, but looked every bit its fifty years and not the glamorous kind of place people imagine when they think of Hollywood. It was in a pedestrian, low rent neighborhood that backed up to Paramount Studios.

  “The story has some workable parts but I’m not sold on it.”

  “What do you like so far?”

  Jack looked off and sucked on his cigar for what seemed like an eternity. “Well, act one, for instance. The hero going back to high school to win over the girl he lost forever ago will tap a few nostalgic hot buttons. Not original but who the hell wants anything really original these days? Too much risk. Then in act two we find out she’s getting married, ala My Best Friend’s Wedding. That’s the crisis, not unexpected, but a comfortable turn of events that has us rooting for them as a couple. Mostly, though, I love the way you wrote the gal, Julie, is it? She’s conflicted about the hero and in self-denial about the cheating asshole. She’s a great character the way you’ve written her. I can see the audience relating to her, though I never pegged you for a guy who’d write a chick-flick like this.”

  That stopped Nate, wounded and badly misunderstood. “It’s not a chick-flick.” He thought for a moment. “Yeah, it’s got rom-com appeal, but it’s about the guy. It’s his redemption I’m getting at.”

  “Uhm, I’m not seeing that. Feels like a chick flick. Where’s my Man of Action you wrote on page twelve that stands up to the goon and getting beat up for it in the bar scene? Fifty pages in and all we got is this Nat guy, a pussy in love who doesn’t do anything after the Julie character shuts him down.”

  There was that word again. Eppie’s word. Pussy, she called him, and accused Nate of lacking a certain part of the male anatomy for not putting up much of a fight. “Normally, I’m on board with when a woman says no it means no,” she told Nate after Julie sent him to “Friends” detention. “But in this case? I’m not convinced. You’re giving up too easily,” she said.

  “I like the way you’ve built the parallel stories with the guy—wasting his life away because he’s a passive slacker just taking whatever shit life hands him,” Jack was telling him now.

  “Parallel to the girl’s backstory,” Nate said. “The single mom who is so devoted to her kids that she sacrifices her individuality to the point she’s lost sight of the person she thought she would be.”

  “Right. And now their worlds collide after all these years. I’ll buy that because the audience will buy it. But the way I see it, fifty minutes in you’ve got a serviceable setup and conflict, so do something that’s gonna make this all worth the price of admission.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “No? Then why are you wasting my time?” Jack jerked the dog leash, pulling the mutt to a sitting position at his feet.

  “Never mind.”

  Sure, Nate would kill to turn this escapade into something that would knock Hollywood on its collective ass, but how could he explain to Jack that was secondary to using the script to get his shit together? Nobody’s going to buy the story—they never do—so sending pages to Jack was like working on a deadline. It forced him to keep moving his life forward.

  “The way I see it, this guy either mans up and does something spectacularly risky or you’re just wasting everybody’s time. So what have you got for me? You got to have something, some cool twist in mind, right?” Jack stared at him, expecting an answer.

  “You ever hear of Cyrano de Bergerac?”

  The agent squinted, and it made the heavy bags under his eyes more pronounced. “Uh, the schmuck with the big nose? Something about pretending
to be his best friend who was having trouble getting laid. I think Bill Murray did a rip off of it years ago.”

  “It was Steve Martin. But imagine: Cyrano de Bergerac meets The Sting.”

  “The Sting? Bob Redford and Paul Newman The Sting? Love that old movie.”

  Then Nate laid out how he was going to win Julie over or go down in flames trying. “I’ve already written it out,” he lied.

  Jack said, “The Sting. A bit intriguing. Who knows these days? Send me something clean. No promises. And, seriously, think chick-flick. I can sell that.”

  He tugged on the terrier’s leash and turned toward the stone stairs leading to a second floor entrance over the condo’s gated parking garage. He paused next to Nate’s car in front of the gate so the dog could mark its territory on the Gremlin’s front tire.

  “Nice ride,” Jack said. “Classic. Maybe you should think about putting it in the story too.”

  Nate spent that night at Woody’s. By the third and final shot of tequila sitting across from each other in the living room, Woody started to accept that Nate had come up with the best possible solution to a rotten situation, even if he still thought it was too passive-aggressive.

  “I can’t sabotage them by ratting the fink out,” Nate said while he sucked on a lime wedge. “Even if that works, nobody, especially Julie, is going to love the rat who does the finking even when he is finking out a rat.”