The Deep Whatsis

by Peter Mattei

  “Come on, you! It’s not that cold!”

  I do a kind of fake shiver again and jump up as a wave comes toward me, turning around so that it hits me in the ass. Then I move quickly out, pulled in part by the backwash, and when the next wave comes I go for it, dropping down and to my side and just letting it slam into me. Now I’m completely wet and freezing.

  “That’s more like it!” she says. She comes up to me and puts her arms around me and with the next wave we are floating together in the water and being pushed back toward shore.

  “Let’s go farther out!” she says.

  “This is fine,” I say.

  Then she kisses me, and holds me, sort of as if we are lovers now, as if our night together in the same bed, her arm over my side from time to time, my arm on top of her, has changed things between us. Maybe it has. She looks up at me and smiles and I relax a bit. Perhaps I’ve been overreacting to her advances, I think, perhaps this is nothing more than a frisky party girl who likes to get fucked up and have sex with guys who don’t even know her name because she’s young and none of it matters, none of it de-perfumes the soul for more than an hour, or a night. Perhaps that’s all this is, here’s a girl who likes making guys happy, likes the few moments of feigned intimacy that it provides, likes hanging out at Glasslands and Death By Audio and maybe giving head to some cool guy from the band she just saw, in the john just before closing time; it’s not a totally wasted night even if he doesn’t call you, which he won’t, although he might send a booty text at some point in the coming week or two. Perhaps she’s got these awful rich asshole parents, the angry alcoholic type-A Wall Street dad and the OxyContinaddled Botoxified mom with the bogus not-for-profit foundation that gives laptops to endangered birds. She grew up on the Upper East Side enduring her parents’ horrible, asinine friends, she had to put up with the idiocies of one of those tony Daltony schools, and in silent revenge against them she became loose, she became lost, revenge is sweet and bitter, Mommy, look at me now—but no, stop, stop for once, that’s not it. She’s not what thinking made her, not at all. She’s a girl, she’s here, she’s lovely.

  “This is kind of embarrassing,” I say, “but I’m not really even sure what your name is.”

  “No way!”

  “Suri or Sari or something but I don’t remember. I’m really sorry about that. I feel like a jerk.”

  “It’s Sabi!” she says. “Short for Sabine. My mom was very like hippie slash Euro, she was into German movies and shit. I think there was like this character in this Fassbinder film, I can’t remember which one, I’ve blocked it out. I saw it once and I was literally like ‘Oh My God this is not his best work why did you name me after her!’”

  I peer down at her face and for a moment I feel something, something akin I suppose to what happiness feels like, or maybe it’s only compassion or tenderness, they’re all interrelated in some way. Is it an emotional-slash-psychological question or are we merely talking etymology, and then I stop thinking and I kiss her. I stop kissing her and look at her—I may be smiling at this point?—and kiss her again. We kiss in the waves for a bit and then we stop.

  “Sabi,” I go. “I think I, um, I think I’m …”

  And then I say it.

  “In love with you.”

  She freezes for a moment and then looks at me and then looks away. Did I just ruin everything? That was not my intent.

  “I’m sorry, did I …? Should I have not …?”

  “No, no,” she says, “it’s cool.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, no, it’s cool,” she says again. “I think I kind of, um, you know, like, with you, too.”

  And now I look at her, as if for the first time, but she is not looking at me, she’s looking out to the ocean, as if she sees something happening there on the dark horizon, the apocalypse forming, warships approaching, and so I look out there too, into the darkness, but there’s nothing, even the tankers and their tiny lights have left the scene. What are we looking at? What are we looking for? And when I turn and look back at her she isn’t there, she’s running—no, running up to the shore, kicking up her knees, bounding over waves, and sprinting up onto the sand.

  “Sabi! Hey!” I cry out. “Wait, stop, what are you doing?”

  “Leave me alone!” she seems to shout back at me and then I start running after her, she’s scooping up the hotel towel and her clothes in it and she’s running south toward Venice, running as fast as she can. By the time I emerge from the waves to give chase, she’s pretty far ahead of me, I run as hard as I can on the sand but I’m not really gaining much ground on her. Coming up the path I see the jogger standing there, the woman with the blue-and-white sweatsuit and the visor, she’s holding her iPhone up at me like she’s just Instagrammed a weird shot of a naked man chasing a naked girl on the beach. Then she starts jogging again, back up toward the PCH, and I have no choice but to watch Sabi disappear, thinking, pondering, why did I say what I said to her? Could I have worded it differently? If I had dropped the “um, I think” before the “I love you” would that have made a difference? If I had said it in another way, “I have strong feelings for you” perhaps, or “you know, I really like you a lot,” would that have garnered a different result?

  When I get back to the beach outside Shutters my clothes are gone and the sun is coming up. I see a trash truck emptying trash bins and realize they must have tossed my Adriano Goldschmieds and Hugo shirt; perhaps I can persuade our finance department to reimburse me if I can find the original receipts. I look around for something to hide behind, a newspaper, a plastic bag, but the beach has been swept clean. I hike up naked to the hotel and just walk into the lobby and up to the desk and for some reason speak in a half-British accent.

  “Pardon me but someone has just nicked my jeans,” I say. “Might I trouble you for a key?”

  3.22

  Wearing a robe they provided at the desk, I cross the empty pool deck and go down the hallway to my room; I gather my things, put them into my suitcase, pack away my laptop, and consider taking lots of pharmaceuticals but decide against it. I throw on some pants and a shirt and my J. Lindeberg suit jacket and grab my phone off the desk, and just as I am about to put it in one of the pockets I decide to look at it; there are a few messages but no e-mails from work, possibly the server is down? I stare at the phone’s clock feature and watch the minute change a few times; it does so about every sixty seconds. I text and call Tom Bridge and leave him a message inquiring as to the whereabouts of the shoot. I call my assistant back in New York and she doesn’t pick up either. I try her cell and her home phone, nothing, weird. Then I find Sabi’s text, the one I didn’t delete, and I hit “reply” and the 347 number appears. I hesitate and then I call; her phone rings, she doesn’t answer, which I suspected would happen, the voice mail tells me that her voice mailbox is full. I go back to the front desk and ask for a cab. One comes almost immediately. I give the cabdriver the address of the Gangrape offices, which I got from the little card on the fruit basket that finally did arrive. The card had said “Eric, Here’s to a hoppin’ fine time in LA! Lots of love, Your friends at Gangrape.”

  As we head down Ocean Boulevard into Venice I listen to the messages; one is from Tom Bridge wondering why I’m not meeting them for dinner, one is from Seth Krallman wondering if I still want to pick up his car or not, one is from Lynette my headhunter singsong asking how things are going and wondering if I have any interest in an ECD job at Grey, and one is from Barry, who is not wondering anything at all, I doubt he’s ever experienced wonder in his life. But that’s the one I pay attention to: “Eric, this is Barry. Please call me at your earliest convenience.”

  The Gangrape offices are housed in an old warehouse on the railroad tracks in Culver City. When I get there I pay the driver and go inside. It’s a big open space with a skylight and a plywood halfpipe in the center; the Gangrape directors are all known for their amazing skate videos. The Gangrape director that we hired, Brian
Sisto, is twenty-seven and goes by the moniker Psyk, as in “sick” or “ill.” Brian’s bio claims that he was homeless for a time, living with the skate kids on Venice Beach, which is when he began documenting the skater thing, and photography and video saved his life, but I happen to know that his father is Vito Sisto, the reputed mobster-turned-producer, head of production at a porn studio in the ’90s.

  Just inside the Gangrape headquarters, sitting at a big long desk made of traffic pylons are two scorching-hot girls, one blonde and one redhead. I approach the blonde and tell her I’m with Tate, I’m the creative director, I just got into town and need to know where the shoot is, I lost my call sheet. She seems confused for a moment and runs back to talk to someone and then returns.

  “Here’s a copy,” she says as she hands the call sheet to me. “It has the address of the location, it’s a house in Mar Vista not far from here, those are the GPS coordinates.”

  “You think I could walk there?” I ask her.

  “Um.” She pauses and thinks. Then she turns to the redhead. “Can you walk to Mar Vista from here?”

  “What’s Mar Vista?” Ginger asks.

  “It’s this little neighborhood with these like really cool midcentury modern houses?”

  “Where is it?”

  “I think it’s like just past Cloverfield?”

  “Cloverfield? I thought that was a movie?”

  “It’s a street?”

  “It is?”

  “I think so?”

  At this point I’m walking out. It takes me a few minutes to walk to Venice Boulevard and find a cab but I do; the cabdriver has no idea where Mar Vista is, he doesn’t know where Cloverfield is, but he does have GPS and so we punch the numbers in and he takes me there. It’s nowhere near Cloverfield. At one point the GPS gets the direction of a one-way street wrong and we have to go around the block but this is a minor inconvenience; I don’t mind taking more time than needed because I’m looking in every direction, hoping to see a naked girl carrying a Shutters towel.

  When I get to the location the shoot is in full swing. I can hear classic hip-hop (50 Cent’s “Gunz Come Out”) coming from inside the house, which is a modest early ’60s job with a slab for parking and a jaunty roof, the kind of house you’d buy back then if you couldn’t afford a real house, and now they go for two-point-five. I pass some crew guys carrying a couch out the door, stepping over cables, another guy carrying C-stands to the cube truck, and when I get to set I see an actress, midthirties, brown straight hair, bangs, attractive without being pretty—or is it pretty without being hot—and instantly I know that this is our Abby. If I had been involved in the casting she might not have been so perky, so ingratiatingly “mom-ish” but what difference does it make now? As the camera rolls Abby is gyrating ridiculously to the Fiddy track, with her head high in the air, and I suss out immediately that this is Psyk’s take on the commercial, that instead of the quick little sniff and a smile that the creatives had spent the past six months discussing endlessly with the clients (is it a smile of Enjoyment? is it a smile of Satisfaction? is it a smile of Homemaker Pride?) he’s decided that Abby is to celebrate the lovely new scent provided by FreshIt World of Scents. It’s genius. The scent is like her orgasm, the orgasm she has never experienced with her unemployed husband, or with the neighbor she fucks occasionally in his car, only not anymore, she feels too guilty about it, and she would never buy a vibrator, what if Eddy found it? etc. And so FreshIt World of Scents becomes therefore so much more than the sign of being a good mom, it’s something she does for herself, in private, the scent transports her to a virtual world of her own making, a world nobody knows about, her own velvety world of self-gratification.

  FWS IS A GIFT YOU GIVE YOURSELF!

  I look around the room, at every member of the crew, the agency producers, the creatives, the clients from Unabrand, the homeowners who are making fifteen grand renting their house out for the day. None of them are her.

  Where the fuck did she go?

  The music stops and some chubby hairy white guy in an Asics running suit and a flat-billed MOBBING hat on sideways jumps up and starts clapping and screaming at the top of his lungs. This is Pysk himself and he’s super happy with the take. Abby, for her part, looks exhausted and humiliated; you can always tell the real actresses, they’re the ones who smile constantly during the process because if they ever stopped they’d fly into a rage, the hacks are the ones actually enjoying themselves. I head over to video village where the creatives and Tom Bridge are sitting in director’s chairs.

  “Hey, guys,” I say. Tom looks at me and then back at the monitors.

  “You made it,” he says. I tell him I had to work from the hotel on something, a crisis on the Allstate account, sorry I haven’t been in touch. He doesn’t seem to care, and then one of the PAs jumps up and offers me a chair. I say, no, no, thanks, I’ll stand.

  The rest of the shoot goes as planned, although I can’t really concentrate on what’s happening. I do my share of fake bonding with the clients, two guys in identical khaki pants and blue shirts and Bluetooth headsets, and I send a couple of texts to Sabi, no reply, and a couple of times I feel phantom vibrations in my pocket, pulling out my phone to realize there’s nothing there. I feel compelled, as long as I’m here, to make a show of adding value and so I offer up the suggestion that when Abby’s husband comes home, in the shot where we see him notice the fresh new scent, he should take his hands and actually widen out his nostrils to get a better hit of fragrant air. Elbows akimbo, how funny! This is of course the stupidest idea that I could have conjured up, and I know it, but as creative director I also know that everyone will agree with me, wholeheartedly, despite thinking how dumb I am. Even Psyk, the radical rebel white gangsta skatepunk rocker agrees with me, he says SUHWEET! like five times, and that’s how I know he is a tool; no doubt in a couple of years he will be a major feature guy. Sitting there watching Abby’s “husband” Eddy on the monitor as he tries to widen his nostrils out like a jackass, I have to remind myself I’m only doing this so that Barry can’t claim I’m not doing my job; when I get back to New York I’ll need him on my team to make everything right.

  That night we all go out to dinner at Koi. After the edamame steamed in Finnish lake ice slow-melted over smoking Brazilian rosewood, I step out and call Sabi’s number again but I still can’t leave a message. Psyk doesn’t drink so Tom and I order the double flight of sake for ourselves and then an hour later another one. By the time we leave, around ten, we are staggering. We get the line producer to take us to Chez Jay’s near the hotel. By 2 AM it’s just Tom and I at the bar and I ask him if he knew where Intern was.

  “She was at pre-pro,” he said. “But I didn’t see her today.”

  “Maybe she got sick of advertising and went back to New York,” I say.

  “The whole dancing-slash-inner-joy thing was her idea.”

  “You mean that Fiddy Cent shit?”

  “Well, we won’t use that track in the spot, we’ll create something more amenable to the target demo, but yeah. The dancing. The inner joy. Psyk will take credit for it but it was her idea.”

  Tom gives me a look and I can’t tell if he knows more than he’s saying or if he’s just so shitfaced that his expression is mutant.

  “Are you serious?” I say.

  “Maybe,” he says and looks away.

  “No, really,” I say. “How did that work? You let an intern ideate at the pre-pro?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Is she good? What do you know about her?”

  “Less than you,” he says.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Look, Eric, I don’t know anything about the slut,” he says. “OK?”

  “Don’t call her a slut, it’s not nice.”

  “Copy that,” he says and I stare at him, try to get what he’s getting at, if anything, and then he laughs and sticks his fist toward me and holds it there for a while and so we fist bump. I s
tare at him some more; something’s eating at the guy and no matter how long I sit here looking at him I’m not able to divine what it might be. Down the bar there’s a sexy burnt-out woman who’s been looking up from her phone at us from time to time, Tom had bought her a drink about an hour ago but she barely acknowledged it. Now as he gets up and slurs his way toward the bathroom she turns to him and smiles. He stops and tries to say something funny to her about her shoes and I realize this is my window and I leave. It’s a short walk to Shutters and I get there without incident. Back at the hotel I notice there’s a new guy working the desk. I ask him if he’s seen the girl who’s got one of the beach-facing rooms that they said weren’t available but clearly were.

  “Suite three twelve,” I say.

  He looks at his screen and then back at me. “The occupant of that room checked out earlier.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he says.