The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (26 page)

I nodded. That’s what I had a black belt in.

“Anyway, you’re really talented, Annabelle,” he went on. “Like . . .
really
.”

I shrugged. “They’re just weird shots.” They were. Super-random things, like a homeless person and a hipster standing on the corner of Abbot Kinney in Venice. Walter’s hand grabbing a fistful of fries at In-N-Out. A collection of Indian goddess statues at Be Here Now.

He shook his head. “I don’t think they’re weird,” he said. “It’s as if . . . they’re puzzle pieces or something. Like you know they’re part of this bigger picture, but you’re not sure how they fit together.” He plucked off a white blossom from a tree and twirled it in his fingers. “It’s, like, although you don’t exactly understand what’s being said, you get the sense that it’s a little bit complicated.” He smiled. “Like you.”

At that, my smile evaporated. Last night I was just different. “
I’m
complicated?” I wasn’t complicated. My mother had used up all the complicated chips.

“Well, yeah. Not in a bad way. In a
good
way.” He held out the blossom to me. “It’s a compliment. I promise.”

I love when someone you don’t know well suggests something to you—a book, a movie, a band—with the line “I think you’ll really like it,” and they turn out to be right. There’s so much potential in that victory—not just because you’ve discovered something you like, but because there’s the opportunity of being understood.

The chance of being gotten.

So when Matt had suggested we go to Overlook because there was something he wanted to show me because he thought “you’ll like it,” I was intrigued. We had spent only a few hours together, but I already felt as if I wanted to be gotten by him. Even if the idea of being known sometimes made me feel like throwing up.

When we rounded the corner and I saw the building in front of us, I smiled, immediately knowing that this was what he wanted to show me. It was an unfinished concrete building. The foundation was there, and arches where the windows would go, and stone steps, but it was more like just the skeleton. Like a Polaroid photograph that, midway through developing, decided to not go any further.

“It’s the Overlook Mountain Hotel,” Matt said. “The third version of it. The other two were made of wood and burned down, and then they ran out of money while building this one and just stopped. It’s cool, huh?”

“It’s
amazing
,” I said as I ran up to it and started snapping away. It looked like something out of a fairy tale—both creepy and comforting at the same time. I doubted I’d be able to capture the feel of it in a photo, but I wanted to try.

“It’s one of my favorite places around here,” he said as he stood in an archway.

The way the light was shining through the trees on him gave him a halo effect, like something out of a religious painting. “Hey, is it cool if I take some shots of you?” I asked. Because I hated having my picture taken, I always asked first. Except with my mom. I never asked her, because I always knew what the answer was.

“Sure,” Matt replied.

I focused in on him. I was glad he didn’t do what most people did when they knew they were having their picture taken, which was immediately change their expression to try to look how they thought they should, which was never natural or real and therefore ended up in the trash folder. After a few shots I pointed to an old clawfoot bathtub. “Go sit in there.”

He gave me a look.

“You’re an artist,” I said. “It’s an artistic idea.”

“Okay, okay,” he laughed, folding himself into the tub.

His legs were so long it looked as if he was going to explode up and out of it. As I clicked away I moved closer and closer until soon I was standing over him. After I was done I put the camera down but didn’t move. As we looked at each other, I felt like I was at the top of a roller coaster before that first drop. So this was what people meant when they talked about a Moment with a capital
M
.

“You do realize that as soon as you let me out of here, I’m taking some of you,” he finally said.

Moment broken. I brought the camera back up to my face. “No way.”

“How come? It’s only fair.”

I shook my head. “I like to be
behind
the camera, not in front of it.”

“Okay, Jackson, you’re off the hook for today, but I promise you at some point
I
will be the one holding the camera and
you
will be in front of it.”

“At some point” implied a future. With him in it.

I smiled.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

After the hike—which included a visit to a fire tower, which Matt admitted he had never been to the top of, despite numerous attempts to climb it, because he had a slight (“Maybe not slight—more like crippling”) fear of heights—we stopped for lunch at this place, Luna 61, in Tivoli, near Bard. After a quick glance at the vegetarian menu (pad thai noodles, stir-fry, sweet potato and goat cheese enchilada), I decided it was my new favorite restaurant in the area. And then, after one bite of the owner Debra’s homemade banana cream pie, I amended my decision: it was my favorite restaurant anywhere.

I kept waiting for our conversation to hit a lull. To get to that moment when an awkward silence fell over the table like a cheap itchy blanket that we found ourselves unable to untangle ourselves from, where no matter how many topics we tried, we couldn’t throw it off and get back to easy flow. That’s how it had always been for me with guys I knew in the past. I would play this slow game of verbal strip poker—take off an earring with this story, a ring with that memory—but soon enough the messy truth of my life started peeking through and the guy somehow intuitively knew it was time to start backing away and to find someone who was . . . less complicated.

But that didn’t happen with Matt. The conversation kept flowing through lunch and over the ride home. It was so easy that as we turned onto my road, I was even thinking that maybe I’d be the one who suggested we get together again. Sure, I’d be blackballed by all those magazine advice columnists who were always saying you needed to let the guy do everything or else you’d scare him away (if he was going to be scared away that easily, did you really want him?), but who cared. Especially because off in the distance, whatever happened between us already had an expiration date of forty-seven days and fifteen hours. Not that I had counted.

“So,” he said as he put the car in park and turned off the ignition.

“So,” I repeated. Would it be weird to invite Matt in? Did it just scream,
I’m asking you in because I’m hoping you might kiss me even though I still don’t know for sure that you’re not with someone
? Yeah, asking him in could be weird. “Do you want to see our cow?” I blurted. The minute it left my mouth I cringed. As if
that
wasn’t weird?

He looked confused. “You have a cow?”

“Well, no, it’s not ours,” I corrected. “It’s the neighbor’s, but it likes to hang out at our fence. She’s nice. We named her Mabel. My mom thinks that’s a cow-sounding name. She even answers to it. Kind of.” Who was the babbler now?

“Sure, I’ll come see your cow.” He cringed. “Although that sounds kind of creepy when you say it out loud.”

We were just about to turn the corner into the backyard when we heard Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” come pouring out of the windows of Billy’s pickup truck as he pulled into the driveway. My mom was sitting next to him.

So that’s why I hadn’t gotten any texts from her.

“Omigod, they’re so good!” Mom said as she tumbled out of the truck with a bunch of bags full of produce. “Who is that again? Lynyrd Skynyrd?”

Billy cringed. “I can’t believe you just mixed up Skynyrd and Zeppelin. I’m going to have to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

Mom laughed. And not one of her fake tinkly laughs she used when she was flirting with a guy. This one was simple and genuine. Which alarmed me even more than the alternative.

“Dude, I’m going to have to make you a classic-rock playlist,” he went on. “To educate you. Maybe even track down some concert at, like, the Pomona Fairgrounds, with some band from the seventies to take you to when we’re back in L.A.”

Okay, (a) the guy called my mother
dude
. And (b)—as if (a) wasn’t bad enough and a (b) was even necessary—Billy was talking about hanging out with my mom when the movie was over and we were back in L.A. He wasn’t supposed to say things like that. That was not “Location Doesn’t Count”–ish.

“Hi, Bug. Hi, Matt,” Mom said when she saw us. She held up a bag. “We decided to barbecue and went over to Adams in Kingston. Bug, you wouldn’t
believe
what a great market it is. And you know you’re not in a big city when there’s barely any frozen food in the place! Matt, would you like to stay?”

Really? She was doing this in front of everyone without asking me first? It wasn’t like she had had a lot of experience trying to be the cool mom in front of a boy her daughter liked, but still—we had never missed an episode of
Gilmore Girls
back when it was on. From that alone, she knew the right and wrong things to do. She knew she had to check with me first.

“Oh. I . . . uh . . .” He looked over at me, but I just kept staring at the ground. On the one hand, I didn’t want him to go (see: lamely asking if he wanted to see my cow). But like people were always talking about in Alateen, it was one thing for a parent to stop drinking. It was a whole other to change habits and patterns that had been etched deeply because of the parent’s drinking. Like, say, being afraid to have friends over when you had no idea whether your mom was going to be drunk, or get drunk, and what she was going to do or say in front of your friends. Yes, my mother was sober, and, yes, with every day that went by she was showing me that she was, indeed, changing, but it was hard to trust that it was going to last. I had gotten pretty good at moving through life with my breath held, afraid that if I dared to exhale my life would all come crashing down. You can’t give that up after a week, or a month.

“I can’t,” Matt finished. “In fact, I need to get going.” He turned to me and flashed me a generic smile, the kind you wear when being introduced to a friend’s somewhat-senile grandparent. “Fun hanging out with you today.”

“Yeah, totally,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as bummed as I felt.

I waited for him to say something about getting together again, but instead he patted me on the arm (could that be any more of a kiss of death?). “See you around.”

See you around?
There was a bigger kiss of death—and it was that.

“Sure,” I replied.

As he walked to his car, I made a beeline into the kitchen so I could head off the disappointment that was starting to churn inside me by stuffing my face. Luckily, I knew there was one last slice of the banana bread I had made. (Now that Mom was back in full Weight Watchers/ Jenny Craig/Eat for Your Blood Type mode, I was well aware that every time I wondered how something I baked disappeared so fast, I had only myself to blame.)

“Hey, Annabelle,” Billy said as he sat at the kitchen table. “Your mom told me you made this banana bread?” he asked as he held up the last sliver of it.

And now this was happening? “Yeah,” I sighed.

I watched longingly as he popped the last piece in his mouth. “It’s
awesome
,” he said as I went to the freezer to get out some of the frozen Momofuku Compost Cookies that I had made the day before (when your cable is out, other than read, there’s not much to do when you’re stuck at home in the country but bake). But they weren’t in there. “Where are the Compost Cookies?” I asked as Mom sailed into the room in a silky rose-colored boho caftan thing (any fewer than three wardrobe changes a day signaled depression). It was more Morocco than country, but the color made her blue eyes even bluer, not to mention made her boobs look perkier, which might have explained why she chose it.

“The cookies with the potato chips and pretzels and toffee pieces?” Billy asked. “Those were killer.” He patted his zero-percent-body-fat eight-pack. “Although I had no business eating all those when we’re four days away from camera.”

I looked at Mom.

“I put them out with the tea last night,” she explained. “I wanted to show him what a great baker you are.”

“Dude, you totally are,” he said. “Hey, you know what you could do? Find a cookbook by whoever is considered, like, the most popular baker in history and then start a blog and make all the recipes and then turn the whole thing into a movie, like they did with that Meryl Streep one.”

“
Julie and Julia
,” Mom said. “We loved that, Bug—remember? We watched it that time I had that awful stomach flu?” She meant the stomach flu that was really low-grade alcohol poisoning. “It was so cute.”

“Maybe it could even be something for my production company,” Billy went on. “I know everyone’s going to expect me to do these action things, or raunchy
Hangover
comedy things, but I want to mix it up a bit, you know? Appeal to that female demo as well.”

“I think that’s very smart,” Mom agreed. “It just makes me so mad how Hollywood tries to pigeonhole us. In fact, I was thinking of writing something for the
Huffington Post
about it—”

As they continued talking, I looked at the two of them, sitting at the table together with a vase of wildflowers and a pitcher of lemonade between them, like something out of a magazine ad. I had to admit they did look good together. But I wanted it to be just
on
-screen, not off.

Billy ate all my homemade baked goods, thus forcing me to go down to the basement and wade through spiderwebs, rusted garden tools, and a pile of what were probably mouse droppings to get to the box with the Ken doll so that I could try to deal with my anxiety that way. (It didn’t work. My highly developed olfactory senses revealed that Mattel must use a different kind of plastic for their male dolls, which lacked the same sort of soothing effects.) And when he got excited about something—like the fact that he, too, enjoyed the occasional episode of
Too Cute
on Animal Planet—he called females
dude
when demonstrating said excitement. (“Dude! I love that show! That one with the Jack Russell puppies? Seriously too cute.”) And he took a long time to tell a story because he was a stickler for getting the facts right. (“Once, when I was in sixth grade . . . no, wait . . . it may have been fifth. . . . yup, it was fifth because I remember Whitney Barbano sat in front of me ‘cause of the alphabetical thing, and I had such a crush on her because she had this jet-black braid . . .”) But even with all that, I had to give him props for putting aside his strong feelings about vegetarianism to grill Mom and me the most amazing burgers I had ever had in my life.