The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (30 page)

As I watched her on set the next morning, dressed in a simple navy shirtdress (she was so committed to the role, she didn’t even balk at the fact that it was cleavage-free) and flat sandals, her hair in a bun, with minimal makeup and black horn-rimmed glasses, I totally bought the fact that she was a tenured professor with a Ph.D. and was an expert on Emily Dickinson. As her students sat there mesmerized while she recited
Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune—without the words/And never stops at all
, I was right there with them. And when they shot a scene back in her office, during which she opens a drawer and finds an airplane-size bottle of vodka stashed away, I held my breath as I watched a host of different emotions play across her face within fifteen seconds—surprise, fear, temptation, longing, resolve—before she throws it into the garbage.

Just like I bought that instead of being a Hollywood heartthrob who hung out at Soho House canoodling, Billy Barrett was just a normal, working-class guy. Now that I had spent some time with him, that wasn’t so far off the mark. From the expressions on the faces of the crew as he shot his first scene—where, dressed in a flannel shirt and faded jeans, his face all scruffy, he pleaded with someone at the bank to give him a loan so he could keep the tavern that had been in his family for three generations—I wasn’t the only one who was surprised to find that his acting abilities reached beyond being able to wrestle a bad guy to the ground or jump out of a burning building right before a bomb went off.

Just like, when they finally did their first scene together, in the bar, when he asks her what he can get her, and she pauses before ordering a cranberry and soda, I totally bought the chemistry between them.

“I’m starting a pool as to when the two of them take the on-screen stuff offscreen,” I heard the prop woman whisper behind me as we watched them banter back and forth.

“If they haven’t already,” one of the makeup guys replied.

I wanted to whip around and tell them they had not, but it was one of those moments where you couldn’t look away. They were too good together.

“And . . . cut,” ordered Alistair.

Even with the immediate surge of movement—lights being dragged away, cameras being moved off to the sides, crew members hustling about like an army of overgrown ants—it took a second for Mom and Billy to break character. Instead, they stood there with goofy looks on their faces until Mom almost got hit in the head with a giant light. After that she dragged him over to where I was sitting.

“I need to make an amends to the two of you,” she announced. Ever since rehab, nothing was just an apology anymore—now, because of the Twelve Step thing, it was always an amends, and it was always very official. “My behavior last night when you guys got home was inappropriate.”

“No worries. Everything’s cool—” Billy said.

She held up her hand. “Please, let me finish. It was not cool. It was inappropriate and rude and—”

“Janie, I get it. I do. Really. But it’s over, okay?” he said. “So just let it go.”

The two of us looked at him, confused. Letting things go was not something we in the Jackson family had a lot of experience with. Holding on to things like a dog with a bone so that we could then throw them into each other’s faces over and over again? That we were good at.

“So you’re not mad?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Really?” she asked doubtfully.

“Yes, really. But if you keep asking me that, I will be soon.” He shifted his weight. “And I have to pee. Bad.” He turned to me. “You hanging around for lunch?”

I shook my head. “No. I’m . . . going to go meet Matt.”

He nodded. “You call him or he call you?”

I felt my cheeks flush. “I called him.”

I guess he could’ve said “I told you so,” but he didn’t. Instead, a small smile came over his face. “Right on. Have fun.”

After he walked away, Mom turned to me. “Did you ask
Billy
for guy advice?”

“No,”
I lied.

She did that thing where she furrowed her brow as much as the Botox would allow it.

“Maybe,” I relented.

She continued to wait.

“Fine. Yes, I did.”

I waited for her lower lip to start quivering, the number one sign that a meltdown was forthcoming. (Other signs included blinking a lot, pacing, and taking deep breaths faster and faster). Regardless of her amends, after what happened last night, I was sure she’d freak out. But the quivering didn’t come. Instead, she did her guppy imitation before nodding. “Well, I think that’s . . . just great,” she said.

“Really?” I asked doubtfully.

“Yes, really.”

I was doing the same exact thing to her that she had done to Billy. Was the drama-queen/making-mountains-out-of-molehills gene hereditary? “Okay then,” I said. “I should go. You know, to meet him.”

“Right. Of course.”

But I didn’t move. Something was happening in that moment. With every word, that cord between us was being stretched more and more, and I knew that if I turned around and left, maybe it wouldn’t snap in half, but it would tear; and that tear would start to fray, until ultimately what we used to have would be gone.

“It’s okay? That I don’t stay?” I asked quietly, hating myself for giving her the opportunity to guilt me into it.

She smiled. “Yes, you don’t need to stay, Bug. I’m okay. I promise.”

For the first time in I don’t know how long—maybe forever—I believed that was actually the case.

As Matt and I waited for the bushy beard–clad, David Foster Wallace–reading, Benjamin Franklin spectacles–wearing guy behind the counter at Swallow to get us our coffees (though not without a pained look, as if our request was seriously interfering with his reading time), he turned to me. “So did you have any ideas as to where you might want to go?” Matt asked. “Because I was thinking, if you didn’t have anything special in mind,” he continued, “I’ve mapped out a barn tour.”

“A barn tour,” I repeated. That wasn’t something you heard a lot in Lost Angeles.

“Yeah. I was thinking about how the day, when we were driving over to Woodstock and we passed that red barn on 9G, you mentioned how you had always thought barns were cool and how, when you were little, you had wanted to live in one, so I was thinking, if you brought your camera . . . Did you bring your camera?” he asked as he leaned over and peeked into my bag. “Yup, you did.” He smiled. “I was hoping you did. . . . Anyway, I was thinking that maybe we could, I don’t know, go on a barn tour so you could take some photos. We don’t have to . . . just, I was thinking . . . if you felt like it.”

Growing up with my mother, anything I said—my likes, my dislikes, my fears—were immediately run through her what-does-this-have-to-do-with-me? filter. So when I mentioned something in passing like “I’ve always thought barns were really cool,” it’s not as if I expected anyone to hear me, let alone use up disk space in his brain to remember it. And then do something about it.

Just then, I flashed on a line in the script from the movie. Billy’s character tells Mom’s character that people think it’s things like flowers on Valentine’s Day, or a necklace on an anniversary, or dinner at a fancy restaurant for a birthday that symbolize love, but it’s not. It’s the day-to-day things, like letting them control the remote when you’re watching TV in bed together before you go to sleep, holding their hair back when they have the stomach flu and they’re throwing up, or giving them a free pass to be pissy and make a really big deal about the fact that you didn’t replace the empty toilet paper roll when you know they had a bad day.

I knew I barely knew Matt, and that after the next few weeks, I’d probably never see him again, so it wasn’t like it was
love
or anything, but having someone organize a barn tour for you was a sign of
something
. If just someone who would be a really good friend.

I watched as he turned red. “Forget it. I knew it was a stupid idea. I mean, you’re from L.A. Why would you want to drive around looking at
barns
—”

I grabbed his arm. “I would like nothing more than to go on barn tour,” I said.

“Okay, go-to comfort food?” he asked as we stood in front of a gray barn on 9G in Germantown.

I fiddled with my lens so I could get the willow tree in the shot. “Rice pudding,” I replied. I loved the Trader Joe’s brand. When Mom was in rehab, I had bought so many they filled up an entire brown paper bag at the checkout. I fired off a few shots. Usually I got self-conscious about shooting when I was with people and tried to hurry up, but with Matt I didn’t feel that way. “You?”

The way he did with all the questions we had thrown out to each other over the course of the afternoon (because it was somewhat like making a list, I very much enjoyed it), he didn’t answer right away. Instead, he took his time to think about it, sometimes cocking his head from side to side as if weighing the different possibilities.

Snap
. Without looking at it, I knew it was a good shot.

“Sunflower seeds,” he finally said.

“That’s your
comfort
food?”

“Yes. Mixed with peanut butter. And Hershey’s chocolate syrup.”

I focused in on his face again. Tighter this time. God, he was cute. “And do you make this concoction a lot?”

He stared into the camera, his gaze steady and strong. “Yes.”

I gently pushed the button, listening to the click before lowering the camera. “Well, I eat a lot of rice pudding.”

“Most embarrassing moment,” he yelled down from the roof of a red weathered barn in Chatham. With the promise of some Momofuku Compost Cookies, I had convinced him to climb up and had gotten some cool shoots of him lying on it spread-eagled so he looked like a starfish.

I laughed. “With
my
mother? Too many to count,” I called out. “But I think having her mug shot come up as the first image when you Google her name is probably the winner.”

He nodded. “Yeah. That would be tough to beat.”

As he shimmied down from the roof, I tried not to think too much about what it would feel like to have his arms around me instead of the drainpipe.

“Why are you shaking your head?” he asked as he landed in front of me with a thud. Close.

“Huh?”

“You’re shaking your head like you have water in your ears or something.”

Busted. “Oh. No, I just . . .” I waited for him to step back, but he didn’t. It was like the moment at Overlook. Now was the time to ask him if he had a girlfriend. I cleared my throat. “There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

“What?”

“I . . . wanted to ask you . . . what . . . your most embarrassing moment was.”

He leaned down to tie his sneaker and then plopped down on the ground. “Probably the first time I kissed a girl.”

I joined him on the ground. “What happened?”

“Nerd asthma attack.”

I laughed. “What is nerd asthma?”

He plucked a dandelion from the ground and started twirling it. “Nerd asthma is what happens when a nerd—i.e., me—has to go in a closet with a girl during Seven Minutes in Heaven.”

“You’re not a nerd.”

“Ah, but I am,” he said. “I just have you
fooled
.”

“So what happens during a nerd asthma attack?”

“Exactly that,” he said. “You get in a situation where your inner nerd gets activated, and you get nervous, and your asthma gets triggered, which makes it very difficult to continue kissing.”

I tried to cough away my laughter.

“It’s okay. You can laugh,” he said.

“I’m not laughing,” I replied, trying to keep a straight face.

“Well, you should. You have a great laugh.”

I felt myself blush. “So does it still happen?”

“The nerd asthma?”

I nodded. And scooched over toward him the teeniest, tiniest bit. Like so teeny that if he called me on whether I was throwing myself at him, a jury would find me not guilty.

He shook his head. “No. Not so much. Well, except for that time when I was in the bakery in Tivoli at the same time as Brice Marden. He’s a painter,” he explained.

I waited for him to say something else. Or do something. Like, say, kiss me. But he didn’t. I waited, and then I waited some more.

Just like I had waited for Mom to get better. And for her to realize she loved Ben. And for Olivia and Sarah to apologize after they dumped me. And for the nine hundred other things on the running list I kept in my head of what I needed to happen so that I could finally be happy and start living my life.

I was so sick of waiting.

“I have to tell you something,” I blurted out.

He paled. “You have a boyfriend, huh?”

“What?”

“I figured.” He shook his head. “Man, am I glad I didn’t try to kiss you right now. I mean, having this conversation isn’t fun, but that? Would’ve been
awkward
—”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I interrupted.

“You don’t?”

I shook my head. “Do you?”

“Do I have a
boyfriend
?”

“No! A girlfriend.”

“No,” he replied.

“Oh.”

“Did you think I did?”

“I don’t know. Did you think I did?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because. Because you’re beautiful, and smart, and funny, and cool.”

Wow. Billy really did know about this stuff.

“Well, I don’t,” I said firmly.

“Well, that’s good,” he said just as firmly.

I nodded. “I’m glad we had this conversation then.”

“Me, too.”

We sat there in silence. “So . . . what do we do now?” I asked.

He handed me the dandelion and then put his hands on my cheeks. “I think we do this,” he said, as he leaned in to kiss me.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PROS OF HANGING OUT WITH A GUY, WHERE KISSING IS ONE OF THE ACTIVITIES YOU PARTAKE IN TOGETHER (AKA A GUY YOU’RE SEEING BUT YOU ARE AFRAID TO SAY YOU’RE SEEING, EVEN TO YOURSELF, BECAUSE YOU’RE SURE THAT WILL SOMEHOW JINX IT)

• Kissing
  
• You don’t have to wonder if he’s going to try and kiss you.
  
• The good mood you’re in from all the kissing makes it easier to tolerate your mother.
  
• The good mood thing helps when you get home to find your mother’s co-star has taken a slice of the triple-berry buttermilk bundt cake that you made for the guy you’re kissing.
  
• You no longer feel like a freak because, for the first time ever, there’s a guy in your life whom you’re kissing on a consistent basis.
  
• You want to keep revealing more and more of yourself to him because every time you take the risk to let him in on who you really are—the good, the bad, the crazy—he doesn’t come up with a lame excuse as to why he has to get going. Instead he looks . . . honored.