“Now, I’m serious, Livi. Say the word, and I’ll call in sick tonight, and we’ll spend the evening waiting for Sexy Irish Guy.”
“Nope. Thanks, but no thanks. As much fun as I’m sure that would be, I choose to live in reality rather than a Nora Ephron film.”
As soon as Fiona walked out the door, I reopened my laptop and read the little bit of plotting drivel I had worked through that day. Landing’s Edge, I think I was calling it at this point.
A small, fictional midwestern New England town called Landing’s Edge is sent into a tailspin when it is revealed that their most prominent citizen mayor is involved in a money laundering and bribery scheme corrupt dealings. Of some sort.
That was about all I had.
I sighed in disgust and closed the laptop, once again convinced I would never get a movie made. How did I have even less of my screenplay on the page than I’d had a year ago? At least I’d upgraded from my notebook of handwritten scribbles to an actual word-processing program. I figured that should count for something. Hopefully things were going better for Sexy Irish Guy. I did wonder what he was up to. I hoped he was getting work, and I wondered if he made a habit of creating joint histories and unrequited love stories with random women or if it had been a one-time thing.
I also wondered, very much in spite of myself, if he might have been good for me if he had stayed in my life. I’d completely meant what I told Fi about there being no romantic feelings there whatsoever. I did admire his confidence, though. I admired the comfort he seemed to have in his own skin—skin, which, admittedly, was probably more comfortable to live in than most. If we’d had each other to lean on, might we have been a good support system for each other? All of that stuff about knowing there was someone out there who believed in our dreams was great, but what if we’d been able to remind each other of that from time to time? Might he have pushed me? Inspired me?
“Might he have met me at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day?” I whispered with a laugh, rolling my eyes at myself. “Oh, shut up, Olivia!”
I stood to go into the bathroom to wipe the banana off of my hands and freshen up—Liam would be here in a few minutes to pick me up for our customary Wednesday-evening dinner-and-a-movie date—but the phone rang before I got there.
“Hello?”
“Hi. It’s Liam.”
We had been dating for eight months and he still identified himself each and every time he called. “Liam? I’m sorry. Liam who?”
“Liam Howard. Your boyfriend.”
I stifled a groan and smiled. “Yes, Liam. I know. I was kidding.”
“Oh, sorry. I guess I thought you might not recognize my voice. I’ve had a bit of a raspy throat today.”
“No need to explain.” You aren’t funny. I get it. “So, what’s up? Shouldn’t you be on your way here by now?”
“Well, I thought I would be done with work for the day, but the best-laid plans . . .” I could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “I can get away for a little while, but then I’ll have to head back. Do you mind if we just grab some coffee?”
Liam was one of the lowest lawyers on the totem pole at the legal firm of Kubrick & Coppola, Attorneys-at-Law. I’d told him that law firm was much too edgy for him, and with a name like Howard he would fit in better across town at Spielberg, Reiner & Marshall.
He didn’t get it.
“Sure, babe. Coffee will be fine.”
“I’m sorry. I owe you.”
“I’m just glad I’ll get to see you at all. Should I meet you at the usual place?”
* * *
Well, the usual place was too far away from his office, so we ended up at a location I used to know well, though I didn’t recognize the address when he gave it to me. I parked about three blocks away, and the setting grew more familiar as I walked from my car. I examined every entrance I passed, but none of the numbers on the glass doors matched up with the address scrawled on the note in my hands.
“Surely not,” I muttered as I slowed my approach in response to the aroma of coffee and the gaggle of patrons clustered on the sidewalk with biodegradable cups in their hands. I looked down at the paper and then held it up against the light of the setting sun and squinted to verify the location one more time, but doubt was replaced by incredulity when I spotted Liam waiting for me at a bistro table just outside the entrance.
“You okay?” he asked as he stood. He greeted me with a quick kiss and then held the door open for me and ushered me inside.
“Yeah, fine.” I looked around and marveled as we walked in. “It’s just strange. This used to be my regular coffeehouse when Fi and I lived in the apartment on Venice Boulevard. Back when I used to go into the Heartlite offices every day.” I chuckled at the coincidence. “I was actually here last February 4 too.”
Fi and I had moved from Culver City to West Hollywood shortly after she got the job at Grauman’s. The move took me farther away from Heartlite, but by then I’d been promoted from an assistant writer to writer/associate editor. That meant I not only got to write my own cards, I also got to oversee a small group of assistant writers and tell them when their Grandparent’s Day cards were a little too hip and their First Communion cards were a little too peppy. I also had enough clout to be able to work from home most days.
“Do you always remember specific dates on which you went to particular restaurants? That’s an impressive, if somewhat useless, skill to have.”
“No, not usually.”
As Liam placed his coffee order at the counter, I glanced around the wide-open space and felt a flutter in my stomach. I hadn’t been in there since that day—not because the memories were too raw, though I was sure that would be Fiona’s assumption, but because when I needed a coffeehouse, I needed a place to work. Not a place to have conversations with a wide range of men from disgusting to delightful. The Mugs & Shots on Venice Boulevard had failed me spectacularly in that department.
I glanced over at the couch—“our couch,” he had called it—and smiled at the memory.
“Olivia?” Liam’s voice snapped me out of my nostalgia. “Do you know what you’d like?”
I was going to order a hazelnut crème breve for old times’ sake, but they were out of hazelnut. Thank goodness. It was time to snap out of the Sexy Irish Guy daze and focus on the Handsome Uptight Lawyer I wanted to be there with. A caramel macchiato and a cranberry scone it was. No sentimentality, no dreaming of “what if,” and still plenty of sugar.
Liam paid, and we grabbed a small table in the back. As we sat he asked, “So how do you remember that you were here last February 4?”
“Oh, you know. I told you about that actor I met here.” His expression was blank, so I prodded. “You know, the other guy was hitting on me . . . We talked about Sri Lanka . . .”
Still nothing, so while we waited for our coffee, I told him all about Sexy Irish Guy. And as I did, I couldn’t help but look up each time the door opened.
“Are you in love with this guy?” Liam asked minutes later as he sipped his Americano.
“No! Of course not. What I just told you—that is literally the extent of the story. That’s it. In its entirety.”
He smiled. “And yet, here we are, having coffee. Here. Today. Exactly one year later.”
“Yes! And I told you how weird that was. But this was your pick—”
“I know. I wasn’t saying you orchestrated it.” He placed his hand on top of mine. “I’m just saying it’s pretty ironic. Don’t you think so?”
“It’s like—” No. I stifled my inner Alanis Morissette, knowing he wouldn’t get it.
But then he surprised me by continuing. “It’s maybe even a little bit too ironic, Olivia. Yeah, the more I think about it, I really do think . . .”
I looked up at him, and he was smiling a provocative smile. He knew what he was saying. He knew he was treading on sacred Alanis ground. I even suspected Liam Howard knew he was being funny.
I stared at him in wonder
ment, in awe of the way his eyes twinkled when they were full of humor. I’d never seen that before, and I knew that was probably a good thing. I wasn’t accustomed to the strange little flutters and convulsions that were occurring in my chest, and I didn’t know if I liked them or not.
An Olivia Ross romantic relationship tended to fit within some unstated but undisputed guidelines. Fiona led with her heart while I led with my head. That had probably always been the case, but as I got older the desire for sensible and practical was cemented. I’d never drooled over wedding dresses or practiced signing my name as Mrs. Imaginary Husband. It wasn’t that I didn’t want love and not that I didn’t appreciate romance. I did. But I wanted—no, I needed—love and romance to fit into the life I had chosen to live. Like the way a great scarf can make an outfit you love even better. But you can’t go out dressed in just the scarf.
So, though I may not have understood the way I felt as I looked at Liam in that moment, and I absolutely could not understand why my heart was beating faster than it had been a few seconds prior, there was one thing I understood perfectly.
Something had shifted.
I leaned over and kissed him a little more passionately than I normally would in public, simply because I couldn’t stand not to.
“What was that for?” he asked, not at all displeased.
“Oh, don’t you know? A well-timed, properly used Alanis Morissette reference is the equivalent of a love potion for all Gen X-ers.”
He blushed. “Is that right?”
“Absolutely.” I nodded in earnest.
“Well, in that case . . .” He set down his coffee and jumped up. Then, in the middle of a coffeehouse in Culver City, California, dressed in his pinstripe suit, Liam Howard, Esq., began belting out the ironies of it raining on your wedding day, paying and then being offered something for free, and refusing to take good advice.
I giggled uncontrollably as he made his way through the entire chorus of “Ironic.” I was also tempted to bury my head as we—well, he—drew the attention of every single customer and employee, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. When he was finally done, ending with a very Alanis-like “It fig-gers,” everyone in the coffeehouse applauded. Liam took a bow before sitting back down and calmly taking another sip of his coffee as if none of it had happened. As if he hadn’t just changed the rules. As if he hadn’t just changed . . . everything.
“That,” I gasped, still trying to regain my breath as delighted laughter coursed through my body, “was fantastic.”
He smiled at me, but even more notably, he watched me. He didn’t superficially look at me or glance my way as he continued ingesting his caffeine. No, he watched me. Studied me, even. I don’t know what he saw, but there seemed to have been a shift in him like there’d been in me. An invisible border had been breached, and we’d somehow stepped into undiscovered territory.
With that delicious twinkle in his eyes still having its effect, rendering me defenseless, he whispered—regretfully, I think—“I need to get back to work.”
I stood from my chair and moved over to sit on his lap. I kissed him again, but this time the passion took a different form. It was no longer an impetuous impulse finding its life. This time our lips chose to be united in a soft, intimate partnership.
“Must you?” I asked as I rested my head on his shoulder and inhaled his scent, needing rations to help me survive this new, unfamiliar emotional domain.
“Unfortunately.” He sighed as he wrapped his arms around my waist. “But thanks for meeting me. Sorry I can’t make it to see Schindler’s List. I was looking forward to this third viewing with you.”
“Hey! It was my turn to pick!”
“I know. But exactly how long is that awful retro theater you love so much going to be showing that one? I don’t know if I can take much more, Olivia. Can’t we please move on to something more upbeat, like Sophie’s Choice or Kramer vs. Kramer?”
I sat up straight so that I could once again get a glimpse of the twinkle I instinctively knew was going to be brightening his eyes again. “I didn’t complain last week about going to that awful thing you wanted to see—”
“Oh, you mean The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King?” He laughed. “That awful thing that has made a gazillion dollars and that you and I were actually the last two people in North America to see? That one?”
“That’s the one.” I grinned. “It was so long!”
“Oh, yes. And it’s clear from your film choice that you have no interest in long films . . .”
“That’s different. Schindler’s List is important, Liam.”
“Middle Earth is important, Olivia.”
The teasing was new as well. How had everything shifted so dramatically, so quickly? Who was this amazing, perfect man, and where had he come from? And how was I ever going to bring myself to rise from his lap so that he could go back to his stupid job, away from me?
“There was just so much manufactured suspense,” I continued with a groan, determined to prolong the conversation as long as I possibly could. “So much sweeping background music telling us exactly how we should feel, as if we weren’t capable of figuring it out on our own. So much running. So much—”
“Color,” he deadpanned.
“Exactly.” I nodded. “Far too much color.”
I made the mistake of pausing, which allowed him the opportunity to continue on with his mature, adult life where careers were something that mattered. “Thanks for meeting me. Even if just for a little while. See you tomorrow?”
“See you tomorrow.”
He brushed his lips against mine one final time, then he held my hand as he stood. When he let go, I watched him and his dashing pinstripe suit make their way to the door, and I took in every single detail of him. His masculine walk and his perfectly pressed slacks. The way he smiled at every person who walked past him—and the way each of them smiled at him in return, no matter what their countenance had been prior to the brief interaction. I watched women turn to look at him as he walked past and then turn back to their friends with flushed faces or self-conscious giggles. I watched him step out of the way so an elderly man could exit before him, and I saw him get caught holding the door for a mother with three children under the age of five, though nothing in his demeanor communicated that he was inconvenienced in the least.
They were all things I hadn’t noticed before, though I couldn’t imagine why. Each of those things had always been there. Each of them was unmistakably Liam Howard.
As he finally moved to exit, I called out to him, across the coffeehouse, “Hey, Liam!”
When he turned around, his smile was quizzical. Bewilderment, which I suspected had been caused by the evening’s strange chain of events, was as evident on his face as I guessed it was on mine.
“That whole ‘Ironic’ thing? That was funny, you know.”
He winked. “I know.” And then he walked through the door and went to work.
I sighed and picked up my things to go, trying to reconcile the happiness Liam had made me feel with the sadness that had sprung up from nowhere. Somehow, right before my eyes, Clark Kent had transformed into Superman without so much as the necessity of a phone booth. Faster than a speeding bullet, everything had changed.
February 4, 2005
I went to see Magnum Opus Phantasm, the movie version, on February 3, 2005. Fi made me go. I hated musicals, but she loved them. I mean, I suppose I didn’t hate all musicals, but the ones I liked were a little more obscure, and usually off-Broadway. They usually didn’t get big-screen adaptations. Fi, on the other hand, was a mainstream Broadway purist. Everything from West Side Story to Miss Saigon to Wicked . . . the bigger, the better. Magnum Opus Phantasm was right up her alley.
I just could never get into the randomness of the singing and dancing. I didn’t mind A Chorus Line. Yes, there was a ton of singing and dancing, but they were singers and dancers auditioning for a musical. The singing and dancing made sense. Les Misérables? No
t so much. “It’s the eve of our first battle in the French Revolution! Sing and dance with me, won’t you?” Huh? No, thanks.
When Fi was a little girl, her family would fly from Boston to New York to see Broadway shows all the time. Just for the day, or the weekend. They took me with them on a few occasions, and usually I was miserable the entire time. At least while the show was going. I did, however, love New York. I loved the food, the skyscrapers, the people. I had a fascination with the subway, despite the fact that the Mitchells were not subway people. I would stare longingly each time we passed a station entrance, and I would watch the people going down the steps and coming up. I loved watching the people. You saw every type of person when you spent a weekend in New York. And there were a few places—probably lots of places, but I only knew of a few—where you could hear the subway beneath you as you walked. There, near Central Park, people could hear, if only they would listen. I thought that was magical.
But the shows? Not my thing. I thought Cats was the worst. I’d thought the title was a metaphor—for what, I didn’t know—so when I saw the show was actually made up of a bunch of cats singing, dancing, and playing in garbage, I was disappointed beyond measure. Fiona’s mother thought I was an ingrate for liking the prostitute cat, Grizabella, while Mr. Mitchell insisted I was mistaken. She couldn’t have been a prostitute, he believed. They wouldn’t have put that in a family-friendly musical. Fi and I giggled about it when they weren’t around and wondered what show they had been watching. For years after that, whenever Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell were oblivious to whatever scheme or machinations Fiona and I were concocting right under their noses, we would call it Grizabellaing.
Anyway, all of that is to say Fi dragged me to Magnum Opus Phantasm kicking and screaming. I knew I would hate it. Yes, it was based on a classic piece of French literature, and yes, in some ways the singing made sense, seeing as it took place in the context of an opera house and all. Still, I remained convinced that whatever virtue it possessed would be beaten out of it in its Hollywood adaptation, brought to you by the same team who produced Coyote Ugly.
Plot Twist Page 3
