The Rules of Love & Grammar

by Mary Simses

  “This is some party,” Greg says.

  Peter looks around. “I can’t take any of the credit. It was the production company that did it. Although my assistant, Cassie, is the one who got the cake. She said we had to do something to celebrate my birthday.”

  His birthday. How could it be his birthday? He was born in…Oh my God. His birthday is in June. That’s now.

  “It’s your birthday?” I say.

  “Yeah. Guess I’m getting to be an old man.”

  The group laughs. Everybody except Regan, who puts her hand under Peter’s chin and says, “Why, darlin’, you don’t look a day older than sixteen.” She bats her eyes, and I’m surprised she doesn’t knock him over with the sheer force of her lashes.

  Peter’s cheeks turn pink. I can’t believe how obvious she is.

  “I hope you like my gift,” she tells him. Then she leans toward me. “I brought him a little present. A set of Marilyn Monroe movies. Don’t you remember how much he loved Marilyn? Or maybe he just loves blonds.” She laughs and brushes her flaxen hair behind her ear, revealing a large diamond earring in the shape of a cheetah.

  Marilyn Monroe movies? I’m afraid I’m going to cry. How did Regan even know it was his birthday? How did she know he likes Marilyn? I was the one he took to the Fifties Film Festival at the Dorset Playhouse. I was the one who went with him to see Some Like It Hot and How to Marry a Millionaire, not Regan. I can’t believe the two of them are that chummy.

  “You know,” I tell Cluny, grabbing her shoulder to steady myself, “I would have brought him a gift. But nobody told me it was his birthday. Nobody told me.” I’m getting teary.

  “It’s okay, Grace. You didn’t need to bring anything. Who cares about a bunch of old Marilyn Monroe movies, anyway?”

  “Are you sure? I think I should have maybe brought him something.” Regan knew, but I didn’t remember. I really think I need to give him a gift.

  A woman in a black chiffon dress walks over and asks to get a selfie with Peter. As she’s getting ready to take the shot, Regan squeezes in between the two of them.

  “I have to give him something,” I whisper to Cluny, holding on to her arm so I don’t fall. “Can’t not give him something.”

  “Grace, you don’t have a gift. Forget about it.”

  “Well, then I need to think of one. I’ll give him…I’ll give him a gift from my heart.” That’s right. Not some stupid movies anybody can buy on Amazon. “Yeah, something real,” I say, leaning into Cluny.

  “Are you okay? You seem kind of—”

  “Fine. Absolutely fine.”

  I hand my empty glass to her. Then I walk toward Peter, very carefully, in my high heels. I feel as though my legs are replacements that have been brought in to do the job of my real legs, but they don’t quite have the hang of it yet.

  “I have a birthday gift for you,” I tell him.

  “Grace?”

  Cluny is behind me, tapping my shoulder. I ignore her.

  I look at Peter, and all I can see are his eyes. His blue, very blue, eyes.

  “Aw, Grace, you didn’t need to do that,” he says.

  “Oh, I know, I know. But I wanted to.”

  “Um, Grace, I think maybe—”

  It’s Cluny again. I wave her off.

  “I prepared this just for you,” I say, pointing to Peter and rocking back slightly on my heels. “Hope you like it.”

  I clear my throat. Then I begin to sing, in a low, slow, breathy sort of way. I sing “Happy Birthday to You” the way Marilyn Monroe sang it to President Kennedy for his forty-fifth birthday at Madison Square Garden. She wore a very tight, nude-colored dress. It was even tighter than mine. And it had twenty-five hundred rhinestones on it. Twenty-five hundred. I’ve seen pictures. It was so tight, she couldn’t even wear underwear. Just the dress.

  I’m thinking about Marilyn and the twenty-five hundred rhinestones as I sing. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.” I think my voice sounds good. I’m pretty sure I’m on key. I don’t want Peter to think this is a joke or something silly. I want him to know how much I care, how much I really do wish him a happy birthday. And I want him to want me, not Regan. I try to sound just like Marilyn, with that breathy voice. I feel kind of like her in my own clingy dress, although I am wearing underwear, of course. A few people stare into their drinks, but most of them are watching me. “Happy birthday, Mr. Director, happy birthday to you.”

  I think I did a great job.

  But I guess nobody else does. A few people clap, but almost everybody is laughing. Even Cluny and Greg and Buddy. They think it was a joke. They think it was funny. They don’t understand that I was trying to be Marilyn. I swallow hard, my eyes burning. I glance around for the doorway, and then I bolt from the patio, almost knocking a tray of shrimp from a server’s hands.

  “Grace, wait!” I hear Cluny call after me, but I keep going. I dash through the crowd in the living room and head toward the foyer. The man who was serving wine and champagne when we arrived is gone. I see a half-open door to a powder room, and I dart inside, close the door, turn the lock, and stand there, my heart pounding. Peter must think I’m an idiot. I feel like an idiot. I lower the toilet seat lid, sit down, put my head in my hands, and cry.

  I can’t believe everything has gone so wrong. For a little while this afternoon, I was actually happy, and I was looking forward to this party. I wasn’t dwelling on Scott or my job or my stupid ceiling. Maybe I hadn’t totally put them in the back of my mind, but they weren’t hovering in the front of it, either. Now they’re all back again, staring me in the face. I’m alone, jobless, and stuck in Dorset. And I’ve just made a fool of myself in front of the one person I wanted to impress.

  I grab a tissue off the counter and decide I’d better go find Cluny and see if she and Greg will take me home. And I make a promise that if I can get out of here without embarrassing myself further, I’ll give up this ridiculous fantasy of getting back together with Peter, of believing he’d even want to be with me. I’ll stop reaching for the stars and go back to being Grace Hammond, the technical writer, who is returning to Manhattan in a few weeks—alone.

  As I wipe my eyes, I look around. The room is tiny, but it’s quiet, and the muted light is soothing. I study the curved pedestal sink, the cream-colored walls, the sloped ceiling. It’s a peaceful retreat. The tiny mother-of-pearl tiles on the sink’s backsplash glow with a pale iridescence, and I wonder how many pieces it took to fill that space.

  There’s a knock on the door, and I freeze, not wanting to give up my haven just yet. “I’m going to be a while,” I call out. “Lost a contact lens.” A few minutes later there’s another knock. “Trying to find my contact lens,” I say. “Think I’ll be in here for a bit.”

  I look around the bathroom again. Something about the ceiling catches my attention, and then I realize the bathroom seems familiar, and now I know why the house seems familiar. I’m pretty sure my mother was the architect and that she brought me here a few times when the house was being built. If I’m right, there’s a little room upstairs that wasn’t originally supposed to be there—one of her shrines.

  I sit up, feeling more alert, more sober, and more in control. I splash cold water on my face and dab it with a little towel. I need to see if that room is here, find out if this is the house. Opening the bathroom door a crack, I watch as a group walks through the foyer and leaves the house. The room is empty now. I glance at the stairway, which ascends to a landing and then doubles back and continues to the second floor. An antique pewter chandelier hangs from the ceiling, high above me, glimmering like a star sailors would use to find their way home.

  Holding the banister, I start up the stairs. After a few steps I pull off Cluny’s heels and leave them behind. At the top of the staircase, a long hallway lit by sconces and decorated with oil paintings of old sailing ships stretches before me. Music drifts through ceiling speakers—the Beatles, singing “Here Comes the Sun.”

  The ha
llway is lit, but the rooms are dark. I poke my head into each one, zigzagging from one side of the hall to the other, turning lights on and off as I go. A bedroom, another bedroom, a study, a third bedroom, a laundry room, an office, the master bedroom. Finally, I come to the end of the hall, and, even in the near darkness, I can see there’s a room that’s not a bedroom.

  I flip the wall switch, and the space floods with light. Flowers are everywhere, color bursting around me. A little cry escapes my lips. It’s a corner room, with the two outside walls and ceiling made entirely of glass. A greenhouse. This is it. Mom’s shrine. I remember wondering why anyone would want a greenhouse upstairs and later finding out it was because Mom wanted it. For Renny. I take a long, deep breath.

  There have to be at least two hundred orchids in here, most in baskets made of wooden slats. The baskets are suspended from the ceiling by wires, and the long, green roots of the orchids are growing through the slats, hanging down like Rapunzel’s hair. More orchids are in pots, arranged on a large glass table in the middle of the room.

  I spot phalaenopsis with blossoms of white and pink and purple; cattleyas, the traditional “corsage” orchid, with flowers of pink and white and yellow; cymbidiums of gold, red, and cranberry; dendrobiums with pale yellow petals; and vandas with blossoms of blue and pink and purple, so big the flowers barely seem real.

  The scent is so sweet, I want to swoon, and the colors are almost blinding, from the softest pink to the brightest orange. I wish I could put my arms around the whole room. It’s like something from a fairy tale. My heart is drumming, happiness rushing through me.

  There’s a wicker chair in the corner where the two glass walls meet. I walk over to sit down, to take it all in, to steady myself. That’s when I see him, standing in the doorway, wearing a pale-gray shirt open at the neck, jeans, and a black jacket. I jump. It’s Sean Leeds.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. “Are you all right?”

  “Me? Oh, sure, I’m fine.” I can feel my face turn pink, my heart race, and a prickling sensation go up and down my arms. Cluny’s never going to believe this. Oh God, I hope he wasn’t there to witness my singing debut downstairs.

  He steps into the room and glances around. “Just checking. When you locked yourself in the bathroom for twenty minutes, I thought—”

  “How did you know I was in the bathroom?” I try to steady my breath.

  “I saw you go in. I came by a couple of times and knocked.” He pauses and raises an eyebrow. “Did you find your contact lens?”

  “My contact…Oh, yes. Yes, I did.” I point to my eye. “Thanks.”

  Sean leans over the table and picks up a pot holding a cattleya. The orchid’s yellow-and-pink blossoms look like bells attached to five-pointed stars. “I figured if I didn’t follow you up here, I’d never get to talk to you. I’ve been trying to get your attention all night.” He turns the pot around, viewing the blossoms from all angles, and then sets it back on the table.

  My head suddenly reconnects with my body. “Really?” I manage to utter, a dry little croak.

  “Sure. From the second I saw you in that dress.”

  I freeze. Oh, no. It’s not what I thought at all. He’s going to give me some brotherly advice on what is and isn’t appropriate to wear to a New England version of a Hollywood party.

  “Yeah, I know I made a bad choice.” I look away at the spidery blossoms of an arachnis. The plant is teeming with flowers, bright yellow spotted with orange.

  Sean walks toward me and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Are you kidding? You look dynamite in that dress.”

  I can’t believe he’s saying this. I can’t believe Sean Leeds is touching my shoulder. I’m sure he’s just being nice. Or looking for a little attention. I don’t blame him, his breakup with Sydney Parker having been splashed all over the tabloids.

  “Oh, you’re just being nice,” I say.

  “You don’t think you look dynamite?”

  “Uh, no. Just the opposite. Someone like Regan Moxley could pull this off with no problem, but not me.”

  “Whoa, whoa.” His hand slides down my arm. “Who is this Regan Moxley?”

  I feel every part of his warm hand on my cool skin, as though each of his fingers is breathing new life into me. “She’s been hanging around Peter all night. Tall, thin, blond.” I pause. “Southern.” I pronounce it the way Regan does, with her Texas drawl.

  He looks at me, head tilted. “With the toothpick legs and the lion’s mane? Are you kidding? You rock that dress. It wouldn’t do a thing for her. Besides, she could never pull off that Marilyn Monroe act you did.”

  Oh, no, he did see it. My stomach plummets, and for a second I don’t know what to say. “I should never have—”

  “Oh, yes, you should,” he says, giving my arm a little squeeze before taking his hand away. “That was the most fun I’ve had at a party in ages.”

  I can’t believe he really means this, but his expression is sincere. I finally muster up the courage to thank him.

  “So, what are you doing up here?” he asks.

  I could tell him the long version, but I opt for the short one. “I thought I recognized the house from when I was young. I knew I’d be right if I found this room.”

  “It’s a pretty cool room.” He gently touches a cobalt-blue blossom on an orchid next to me. “Look at this thing. Beautiful, huh?”

  “That’s a vanda.”

  “A what?”

  “A vanda. A type of orchid.” I can’t believe I’m upstairs at Peter’s party, talking about an orchid with Sean Leeds.

  “I’ve seen lots of these before,” he says. “But I never knew what they were called.”

  “You’ve probably seen those as well.” I point to a plant with white blossoms speckled with hundreds of tiny purple-pink dots. It looks as though a painter sat there for hours decorating them with a single hair of a brush. “That’s a phalaenopsis.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” he says as he bends down to smell the blossoms.

  “Oh, those don’t smell like anything,” I tell him. “Try the one at the end of the table, in that big pot.” I point. “The one with the yellow-and-cranberry-colored blossoms.”

  He leans toward the pot. “Umm. That one smells great.”

  “It ought to. It’s a cattleya.”

  “A what?” He looks up.

  “A cattleya.” Then I add, “Two t’s.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s spelled with two t’s. C-a-t-t…” I stop because I can’t remember what comes next. Is it ly or le? Neither seems right. My mind is too fuzzy to figure it out. “Yeah, well, two t’s. The main thing is that it’s beautiful and it smells great.”

  “Beauty and fragrance,” Sean says, glancing at me before inhaling the flower’s scent for a second time.

  “That one over there.” I point to one of the large hanging pots. Long, narrow leaves and clusters of blooms cascade over the side. “That’s a cymbidium. C-i…No, c-y…Oh, never mind.”

  Sean gives me a puzzled look. “How do you know so much about orchids?”

  I step toward the cymbidium, conscious of putting one foot in front of the other, making sure I don’t trip or do some other stupid thing. The orchid’s peach-colored petals, gently striated with darker peach, are almost hypnotic. “My mother and my sister used to grow them. They had a little greenhouse. When the orchids bloomed, they used to bring them into the house and make arrangements.”

  “You never got into it?” Sean says, coming over to stand beside me.

  “I learned enough by osmosis.”

  “I guess you did.”

  I’m staring at the orange blossoms, and I can feel him staring at me. Finally, he says, “So, what was it like growing up here?”

  I look at him. “In Dorset?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, well, you know. It was like growing up in any small town, I guess. When I was a kid, we skated on the pond behind the firehouse in the winter, rode bikes in the
summer, went to concerts on the beach. You kind of knew everybody, and everybody knew you. It hasn’t really changed much, especially in that way. That part can also be a real drawback, though.”

  “I think it sounds pretty nice, people really knowing one another. I’ll bet they look out for each other.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

  “Your friend Cluny still lives here. That says something.”

  “I suppose so. It’s a good place to raise kids.” I step away from the cymbidium.

  “You know, you’re lucky,” Sean says. “Being from a place like this, knowing this kind of life. L.A. is a completely different story. There’s never any privacy. Too many tabloids and blogs to fill. And there’s so much pressure to be part of the scene—to go to parties with people you’d rather not even be around, to live a lifestyle that becomes so second nature, you don’t even blink when someone down the road puts a vineyard on their estate or surrounds their house with a six-pool moat.” He picks up a yellow and pink cattleya blossom that’s fallen onto the table. “I grew up in L.A., and I can tell you, Hollywood is like quicksand. By the time you realize you’ve been sucked in, it’s too late.” He gazes at the blossom between his fingers. “It’s too late for me, anyway.”

  I don’t tell him I’d trade the life I have in a second for a chance to go to L.A. and start something new. “That sounds a little dramatic,” I say.

  He laughs. “Sorry. But I am an actor.”

  “I’m sure there are a lot of great things about L.A. you’re overlooking because you’re just too close to it.”

  “Maybe,” he says, but he looks unconvinced. He’s silent for a moment, and then he says, “Does your family still have the greenhouse?”

  I run my finger down the skinny leaf of a dendrobium. “Oh, no. That was a long time ago.”

  “No more orchids?” He looks disappointed.

  “No. Mom doesn’t grow them anymore. She stopped after…” I take my hand away. “She just lost interest.” I close my eyes for a moment, and when I open them Sean is standing before me, very close. Neither one of us speaks.