by Julie Wright
I tried once to bring up the topic that filled my thoughts, but all words regarding my face smiling from his fridge or my sudden awareness of him clogged up my throat and suffocated me until I swallowed them back down again.
Instead, I allowed the conversation to remain casual and comfortable.
At least until the distracting behavior of Ben texting someone on his phone began. I might not have even noticed, since his phone was out of my sight line, except for the buzzing vibration every time a message came back in, and the slight tick noise his phone made when he hit send. He was in the middle of a full-on conversation.
A lot of people turned to their phones for entertainment even in social situations where splitting attention would be considered rude, but Ben was not one of those people. Ben groused about people who refused to be present enough to stick it out through a single conversation without turning to a device for something better. Ben even called people our age the “Something Better Generation.” He often shook his head in disgust because no one committed to anything due to the time they spent looking for something better—better outfit, better car, better job, better vacation, better girlfriend or boyfriend, better spouse. “Loyalty,” Ben often said, “doesn’t happen in a world where the new generation of iPhone is never longer than three months away.”
Ben wasn’t wrong in that. In a world where people were used to trading up, how was anything supposed to stick?
Now, here he was on his phone, trading up on our conversation for whatever better conversation existed on the other end of those text messages.
I finally stopped talking, not wanting to compete with the digital relationship he considered more important than the real one, and felt grateful he had a date. He didn’t seem to notice the silence settling between us but continued on his phone like I was a hired driver and not a friend of more than three years.
He looked up after grumbling at his screen and spoke after a six-minute lag in our conversation. “Let’s not get my car just yet.”
“What about your date? Is she meeting you later? Do you want me to drop you off somewhere else?” The words probably sounded snippy. I certainly felt snippy, since he’d obviously been talking to Alison or he wouldn’t have been able to give me new instructions.
At least, I felt snippy until his hand touched my shoulder like a jolt of electricity. I know he was just trying to get my attention because he was on my blind side, but when I had been thinking of him on a date with someone else, his touch wasn’t exactly appreciated.
“My plans just got cancelled. You know how I said our celebration should be soon? Maybe let’s make it really soon, as in tonight soon. How about it? Want to go celebrate our great editing caper—is that what you called it?—tonight?”
I frowned at my windshield and tried to make sense of his offer. “What happened to your date?” I shouldn’t have asked, but I had to know because this new way of thinking about Ben in terms of something more than a friend was driving me to madness. If his date just had the flu, but they were planning on going out tomorrow night or next weekend, then that meant Ben and I were still living in the friend zone. If she cancelled because she’d decided to run away with the owner of a local food truck, then Ben and I had a new set of possibilities in front of us. “Won’t Alison decide to stick the business end of her high-heeled shoe in my heart if I do another hostile takeover of one of your dates?”
“Alison doesn’t actually wear heels very often, so I doubt she’d use them in a homicide situation. Did you already make plans for tonight?” He said all of this instead of answering my question.
“I don’t have plans.” Friend zone it must still be.
“Great! Then let’s get celebrating. Where should we go?”
I shrugged and turned toward Santa Monica, because even though I’d shrugged, I’d already decided I wanted ice cream.
It took me several minutes longer to admit that my desired big celebratory plans consisted of frozen dairy. But I finally fessed up by way of suggesting, “How does Three Twins ice cream sound to you?”
He stopped whatever he’d been about to say as a message buzzed on his phone. He hesitated long enough for me to wonder if Alison had texted again and he was trying to figure out how to tell me to turn my car around because our plans were now cancelled.
“We could get it and then eat on the beach,” he said. “But if you give me any crap over getting a waffle cone instead of a bowl, I will never buy you ice cream again.”
This sounded like the Ben I’d always known: the teasing, silly, funny Ben. Friend Ben.
Right.
I knew how to act with Friend Ben. I had to erase the idea of there being any other kind of Ben in my life right out of my head. Making the mistake of believing there might be some other kind of Ben would basically kill the chances of keeping Friend Ben.
I parked on Main Street in front of the Cameron Building that housed the ice cream parlor. I turned the car off and got out, waiting for Ben to get out so I could hit the lock button.
“I haven’t been to Three Twins in a long time,” he said once we’d both made it to the front. He held the door open for me, and I stepped into the ice cream parlor with Ben right behind me.
I breathed in deep. “I love that smell.”
Ben grinned. “Yep. Nothing better than the scent of sugary, creamy calories to make a day brighter.”
I ordered the lemon cookie. Ben ordered the mint confetti in a waffle cone. We took our orders outside and walked until we came to a through street that would lead us to Venice Beach. The place was crowded, but what else could be expected on a Sunday evening? We had to weave around the street performers and skateboarders to get to the sand teeming with kids gripping bucket handles and shovels or running in and out of waves and parents taking pictures. There were joggers, skimboarders, body surfers, and couples taking leisurely walks.
Like Ben and me.
Only we weren’t a real couple. We were just friends. A lump settled in my stomach at the thought.
As we walked slowly along the sand, Ben lifted his spoon. “A toast!” he said. “To the worst fraudsters in all America.”
I tapped my spoon to his, and we both ate a bite of our ice cream.
“What makes us the worst fraudsters?” I asked around a mouthful of lemony happiness. “We got away with the crime. Doesn’t that make us the best?”
“It’s not about getting away with it. It’s the absurdity of our crime,” Ben confirmed.
“And we’re absurd why?”
He gestured with his spoon as if he were a conductor at an orchestra. “The lack of actual criminal intent. Calling what we did criminal would be like calling a girl who delivered freshly baked cookies to her neighbor a criminal. Unless those cookies are laced with cyanide, the criminal intent just isn’t there.” He leveled his ice-blue eyes at me and gave me his best infuriating smirk.
“If we’d been caught, the studios—both of them—would definitely see criminal intent. We’d both be in a lot of trouble.”
“Trouble.” He said this with kind of an accent, in a way that let me know he was quoting a movie, only I couldn’t place which one. The gesture seemed familiar, but the one word was so vague, it was hard to place.
“All right. I give up. What is that from?”
He put his hand to his chest as if mortally wounded. “You don’t know? You? The girl who prides herself on knowing lines from movies even if she’s only seen them once?”
“You gave me a single word. It’s not much to go on.” I pointed my spoon at him.
“I gave you a sentence. It’s just that there’s only one word in that sentence.”
I rolled my eye at him. “Your snide-ways look is really annoying.” But then I stopped in my tracks, inadvertently kicking sand into my shoes. I definitely should have taken them off once we left the front walk. “Wait Until Dark!” I
said triumphantly, the movie finally coming to me.
Ben stopped walking, too. “Correct! And honestly, I’m surprised you got that one.”
“Only because Wait Until Dark was one of the most controversial movies for me from film school, no matter how much everyone else loved it.”
“You’re going to harp about the first and last five minutes of the show, aren’t you? They don’t even really count.” He leaned against one of the graffitied walls to get out of the way of a lady walking her dog, even though dogs weren’t allowed on the actual beach.
“As an editor, how can you say that? The first and last five minutes count the most. The first five minutes dictate how you’ll feel about the movie while you’re watching it. The last five minutes dictate how you’ll feel about it after the lights come up.” I took a big bite of my lemon cookie ice cream, hoping to chase away how disgruntled that particular film left me feeling.
“Lots of husbands were less than ideal back then. So, at the time, the audience likely didn’t think anything of it, and they went home feeling fine.”
“Are you kidding? That ending killed my soul.”
Ben lounged against the wall with his back against a painting of a woman’s hair flowing in the wind. He casually nibbled at his waffle cone and watched me as if I was about to put on a performance.
“Sam in that movie had to be the world’s worst husband ever,” I said. “He’s a creep to Susy in the beginning, and he’s a creep to her in the end.” I started walking again so my rant had extra energy. Ben pushed off the wall to follow me.
“How does him refusing to enable her make him a creep?”
I whirled on Ben so fast he had to take a step back to avoid getting slapped with my ice cream bowl. “Seriously? Are you seriously asking me that?” I shook my head. “Do I even know you? It makes him a creep because his wife is blind! At the beginning, fine, he’s trying to help her understand that she can do things even though she’s blind. As a half-blind woman, I can appreciate that. But at the end? Ben! He had to break down the door and step over two dead bodies to get to his blind wife. When he sees her, she’s covered in blood and there’s glass and all kinds of stuff all over the floor—stuff she wouldn’t be able to see because she’s blind—and instead of being a good husband and checking to see if any of that blood was hers, he stops the little girl from running to her and says the stupidest thing ever.” I lowered my voice to mimic the gruff voice of Efrem Zimbalist Jr. “No. Let her come to us. You can do it, Susy. You can walk over the debris you can’t see to reach me to prove your independence and self-sufficiency. You need to prove to me that you’re a strong woman, even though you’re blind and single-handedly stopped a drug deal from going down and managed to outsmart three criminals, one of whom was trying to murder you. No, Susy, you walk to me to prove you’re strong, because what you’ve done already isn’t enough.” I growled in irritation. “She should’ve walked to him and punched him.”
Ben busted up laughing. “Tell me how you really feel. Seriously, Silvia, I think you’re holding back.”
I bumped him with my shoulder and allowed myself to smile over getting so worked up. “Shut up.”
“Terence Young was a good director. Audiences were terrified by that movie. It was totally before its time. The scenes done all in the dark were brilliant. The audience was invested because they had to fill in the darkness with their own imaginations. I liked that movie.”
“I’m not saying I didn’t like the middle,” I said defensively.
He gave me his snide-ways look.
“I’m not. I did like it. Everything but the beginning and end. It’s an easy fix. Just cut the film where the scenes were stupid and tape them together without her husband’s callous cruelty in them. Or you could keep them in and have her husband be stabbed by Alan Arkin’s character, and then have Mike survive his stab wound, and then Mike and Susy could run off together and live happily ever after, because even though Mike had a criminal past, he was still the only one who appreciated Susy for the strength she displayed under pressure. Metaphorically speaking, Mike and Susy were the ones who could see in that film. It was the rest of the characters who were blind.”
Ben grinned at me. “An astute observation on vision from a half-blind woman.”
I smiled, too. “I guess it’s a bit of a sensitive subject for me.”
“Clearly.”
I felt pretty certain there was a pun hidden in that word.
“Anyway, I’m not saying I hate the movie. Audrey’s performance in that film was really great, and you’re right, the scenes in the dark allow the audience to use their imaginations and was a really brave direction for the director to take. The treatment of Susy just seemed pretty caveman to me—she was a wife and a woman and a person with a disability.”
Ben listened with a half-smile on his face. “That was the mind-set back then. I like movies like that because they show us how far we’ve come. But we’ve only come so far because of people like Audrey Hepburn. But you already know that.”
“Why should I know that?”
He gave me a long look of disbelief. “Because she was a huge advocate for growth and change. Because you work in Hollywood. Because everyone knows that.”
I shrugged. “Audrey and I have an interesting relationship. I don’t pry into her life, and I hope she doesn’t pry into mine.”
Ben had finished his ice cream during my rant. My half-eaten ice cream melting in the bottom of my bowl showed I’d been doing a lot of the talking. “Sorry for the rant,” I said.
“Don’t be. Feisty you is my favorite you.”
“I don’t think Dean likes feisty me.”
“Dean doesn’t even like himself right now, or he would show up to the things that matter in his own life.”
“Yeah, well, I think he’s the sort of guy who could have played the Sam character in Wait Until Dark. I don’t think he’s used to women standing up to him.” When Ben gave me a questioning look, I explained how it had become necessary for me to confront Dean outside the reviewing theater.
Ben listened with rapt attention, almost tripping on the uneven sand as I unfolded the story right to the end. “So I’m probably fired,” I finished.
“For what? For not letting him steal all the credit for your intellectual property?” Ben shook his head. “Nah. If he tried that, the lawsuit would be all yours. It would be easy to prove the edit is your work. Every person has a style, a brand that they put on their own work. I’ve seen Dean’s work, and his style is so far removed from yours that no one would ever be convinced that it belongs to him. Even the bits I added aren’t enough to mark the work as mine. This one was all you. If he tries to fire you, you would have evidence that the action was wrongful.”
“I don’t think he’ll try,” I said after a moment. “Not really. I mean, yeah, I joke about it, but he’s not always a jerk. I’ve seen him be decent to people.”
“Decent to you?” Ben asked.
“Not yet, but maybe in the future. We’ll see what happens.”
Ben let out a low chuckle. “There you go. Giving people the benefit of the doubt.”
The sky faded from blue to pink as the sun sank into the sea. I finally finished my ice cream and threw away the cup and spoon.
Ben threw away his napkin as well and wiped his hands together with a dramatic flair. “That was a lot of sugar. And since we both know our chances are one in one thousand, two hundred and eighty-two of dying of diabetes, we should probably get real food for dinner.”
“We both know that statistic?”
“Don’t disappoint me by telling me you didn’t know.”
We ended up getting gyros at Malaka Brothers, and neither of us commented either way on whether or not it was healthy for us. The food was good, and the company was better. Sometimes that was all that mattered.
And I laughed a lot.
I’d forgotten the silliness that came with Ben, the light and easy way we had when we were together. And worse, while I was with him, I forgot we were hanging out in the friend zone. I forgot he was with me only because his previous date had fallen through.
I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to imagine anything but Friend Ben for myself.
Which is why, when we reached my car and his phone buzzed with a call coming in and he frowned and said, “Hang on a second. I’ve gotta get this,” and he walked a short ways away to give himself privacy, but I still heard the words, “Hey Alison,” I suddenly remembered, and the remembering slit a tiny hole in my heart.
“There can’t be any feeling between the likes of me and the likes of you.”
—Eliza Doolittle, played by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady
I tried not to eavesdrop with an intensity I’d never known before because I was afraid I’d hear a salutation like “I love you” or something similar. It felt wrong to not like Alison. After all, she obviously cared about Ben, which was great for him, and she hadn’t been mean to me or done anything that was in any way offensive that I had seen. Okay, so she did dismiss me at the dance club, but she could hardly be blamed for that, since I’d looked like a walking hazmat threat.
“Sorry about that.” Ben’s voice from behind me startled me out of my wandering thoughts.
I worked at a smile. “No problem. You ready to get your car?”
He frowned. “You okay?”
Dang it! I really wished my face wasn’t a window into my thoughts. “Totally okay.”
“Totally?”
“Exactly.” I nodded my head and said this with a finality that pretty well closed the conversation on my well-being.
We got into the car, and I pulled out onto the road, abandoning Santa Monica for West Hollywood, where Ben’s car still sat at Burnout. At least we hoped it still sat there. For all we knew, it had been ransacked or hot-wired and was now sitting at the bottom of a ravine somewhere.