‘I knew you’d get it.’ Ben looks oddly handsome tonight in chinos, a blue checked shirt and cardigan. He’s even wearing socks.
‘Get what?’ asks Jen.
‘The restaurant. It was used in When Harry Met Sally.’
Jen scrutinises her polished fingernails. ‘I haven’t seen that movie.’
‘Excuse me?’ It’s hard to tell if Ben’s more shocked or embarrassed by his girlfriend’s revelation.
‘I haven’t seen it,’ she says, shrugging. ‘It’s an old movie. I wasn’t even born when it was released.’
I resist the urge to point out that I was only three-years-old myself when it came out.
Mike waggles a bread stick. ‘Jen is precisely the reason we need to be writing something that appeals to a new generation, a generation that has neither seen nor gives a shit about the original movie.’
‘I guess. But, really?’ Ben turns back to Jen. ‘You haven’t seen the greatest romcom ever made?’
I’m astonished that he’s referred to it in this way.
‘So, what are we having?’ asks Mike, clapping his hands.
‘I can never decide,’ I say. ‘I’m the complete opposite of Sally. It takes me for ever to decide what to order and when the food arrives I always want what the other person is having.’
‘Cute,’ says Ben. Though my eyes on the menu I can feel him watching me, and I find myself feeling a little self-conscious.
‘That scene, early on, where Sally orders the apple pie and ice cream,’ I say, ‘that’s probably my favourite scene in the whole movie.’
‘You know they wrote that scene based on Nora,’ says Mike. ‘Apparently, she had this crazy way of ordering food, which Rob found hysterical, so they gave the trait to Sally. They used their own experiences a lot in the original – like the scene here, in this cafe: that scene replicates the first date Rob had with his wife.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘I’m serious,’ he says, taking another bread stick. ‘You should add a couple of new scenes with Sally ordering food, bring back that character trait. Audiences would love that.’
‘I like that idea,’ I say, jotting a note in my new notebook.
‘And you could try introducing some stuff from your life. You’d be surprised how the smallest things can change the entire feel of a script.’
‘There’s nothing very remarkable about my life,’ I say, discreetly slipping off one of my new shoes, which are pinching.
‘The unremarkable is the remarkable,’ says Ben. I lift my eyes towards him and smile softly, which he returns. When Jen catches the look between us, I start smoothing my napkin over my lap, and a feeling, oddly like guilt, creeps over me.
While we wait for our food Mike talks through the changes Ben and I have made. He likes the addition of Jim, the plot and character developments we’ve made to George and Jules, and he feels the premise is much stronger.
‘It’s beginning to feel more current, the voice feels sharper but still with the softness of one of Nora’s romcoms. I think we’re on the right track,’ he says, as he’s presented with his raw steak. ‘But I still feel as if we’re playing it a bit safe. I’m wondering if part of the problem lies in Truman and Anna.’
‘How so?’ I pick at my bacon lardons and poached egg.
‘Truman’s great. I love the fact he’s like a young Harry, all testy and neurotic but with a touch of Sally too. But Anna,’ he pauses, eats some meat, gives a small shake of his head. ‘She’s not… big enough.’
‘Uh-huh?’ I say, not exactly sure what he means.
‘I’m thinking Jennifer Lawrence.’
‘O-kay.’ I try to sound excited when I’m actually wondering if Mike has gone utterly mad. I mean, I know she’s a major Hollywood star and all, and I’d have to be completely insane to turn my nose up at the idea, but Jennifer Lawrence, seriously? She’s boisterous and unlike any Ephron actor, and not at all what I had in mind. I was thinking of someone more classical and sophisticated, like Lily Collins, maybe.
‘She needs to be big, funny, outrageous, but current too, you know, someone who can really play it for laughs.’
‘I love Jennifer Lawrence,’ says Jen.
‘Though there may be some other options,’ says Ben, aware of my unease.
‘Sure,’ says Mike. ‘It’s just an example. It could be Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, Rebel Wilson, you know, someone with a bit more, spirit.’
‘We can work on that.’ I rub my earlobe.
‘Strong female roles really sell at the moment, so see what you can do.’
I allow myself another mini freakout at the mention of Rob Reiner, anything he wants to bring to the script is fine by me, even if it is more gags.
‘And while you’re working on that you might want to think about some of the locations you’re using. That scene with the boys in the bar is great but you’ve got a cut away to Truman in Shakespeare & Co, which doesn’t exist any longer. Find out what the hippest bookshop is, the new place to eat in Central Park, all those things. Figure out ways to root the audience.’
‘Sure,’ says Ben, when I don’t respond. Losing the original locations feels like another blow to my vision of quintessential Ephron. He offers me a reassuring smile.
‘But we can keep some of the original locations, right?’
‘Sure, some of them are essential – the Met, for example – but don’t overdo it. Remember, we’ve only got ninety minutes.’
‘Of course,’ I say, relieved to be clutching on to something of what I’ve written.
We spend the rest of the meal chatting: Mike tells us a Matthew Perry anecdote; Ben shares one about Jennifer Aniston, and Jen tells us how much she adores Matt LeBlanc. I sit quietly, taking it all in.
After the table has been cleared Jen says to me, brightly, ‘You know, Nina, you should like, so go on a night tour of the city.’
‘That’s a great idea,’ says Ben, giving her hand a squeeze. ‘I’ll take you!’
‘I…’ stammers Jen, clearly not having intended for her boyfriend to tag along with me.
‘Such a good idea, babe,’ he says, giving her hand another squeeze, and nodding to the waiter for the bill.
‘Sorry about Jen,’ says Ben, in the back of a yellow cab that we jumped into outside the restaurant, much the way Jess and Marie did after their double date with Harry and Sally. ‘She’s, uh…’
‘Young?’
‘Right,’ he says, cringing a little.
‘What’s she doing with an old man like you anyway?’
‘Harsh!’ he says. ‘You’ve never dated anyone younger?’
‘Nope.’
‘What, you prefer older guys?’
‘I’m not sure I have a preference.’ I say, thinking how not so long ago I would have categorially ruled out hipsters but now… brushing the thought aside I concentrate on my reflection in the cab window whizzing past the park. My thought of Ben is replaced by one of those ‘pinch yourself’ moments when you realise you’re doing exactly what you always dreamt of doing and it feels unbelievable.
‘But you have had boyfriends, right?’
‘Of course I’ve had boyfriends!’ I laugh.
‘So, there must be a type.’
‘Must there?’ I squint. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Redheads.’
‘Right, that much I figured!’ It’s then that our conversation at Timberland pops into my head. ‘Didn’t you say you’d stopped having mindless sex?’
‘That’s the Bethesda Fountain,’ says Ben, deftly changing the subject.
I turn to him, blankly.
‘You know, the huge fountain in Home Alone 2, Mr Deeds…Elf.’
‘Got it!’ I say, Elf being my favourite Christmas movie. ‘This city really is one giant film set.’
‘Pretty much.’
A short distance after the fountain the taxi pulls up, kerbside.
‘Where are we now?’
‘You’ll see.’ He leads me, totter
ing awkwardly in my heels, down a tree-lined path towards the lake in Central Park. ‘Recognise this?’
I pause for a moment, taking in the semi-dark surroundings – wooden boats knock gently together on the still water, huge willow trees tickle the surface of the lake and from a long, low building comes the chink of glasses and the chatter of diners.
‘It’s the restaurant where Marie tried to find a date for Sally,’ I say, sitting on a nearby bench to drink it all in. ‘This is so cool!’
‘I thought you’d like it,’ he says, sitting beside me. I gaze out over the water, soaking up the atmosphere.
‘You know, for someone who claims not to be all that familiar with the film, you certainly seem to know a lot about its locations.’
‘Uh-oh,’ says Ben, in an ‘I’ve been rumbled’ way. A cheeky smile breaks over his face.
I hit him playfully on the arm. ‘I knew it! I knew at the fair when you quoted Harry to me! And then tonight when you were so surprised that Jen didn’t know “the greatest romcom ever made”…I see through you, Scriber.’
‘What can I say?’ He shrugs playfully. ‘My guilty pleasure is out.’
‘Unbelievable,’ I say, cheered by this disclosure and allowing a comfortable silence to fall between us. We sit for a while watching the ducks gliding by, hearing their bodies breaking the water as they pass.
‘We should probably have a think about the next set of changes,’ says Ben, when a couple walks past us, hand in hand, breaking our reverie.
I hesitate.
‘You’re not keen on the changes Mike suggested, right?’
I give a short, weary laugh. ‘I thought I’d hidden it better than that!’
‘Mike won’t have noticed, or if he did, he wouldn’t care. He’s a pretty seasoned mule.’
‘Everything just feels so far removed from what I envisioned it to be – the big physical comedy, the contemporary locations – it all feels, well, not what I intended. There’s hardly a trace of Ephron left.’
‘In the industry they call it “the process”.’
‘Which means?’
‘I think Ephron described it as the period in which “the writer generally gets screwed”! She likened it to a pizza – it starts off plain and simple and then the director says, “I think it needs mushrooms” and the writer agrees and then someone else chips in, another topping, and before long you have a pizza with everything, and sometimes it’s great and sometimes it blows. That’s “the process”.’
‘Right. I can see that.’
‘It’s hard, but you have to believe me when I tell you that Mike knows what he’s doing.’
‘It’s just so difficult to spend all that time crafting something to then have other people turn it into something entirely different.’
‘But what you had was a middle-of-the-road, plain pizza and what you might get is something really spectacular. That’s the gamble.’
‘I’m not great at gambling.’
‘Then I guess you have to decide whether you want to be a writer who earns a living or a writer who doesn’t.’ He stretches out along the length of the bench, one arm reaching past me. Little goosebumps form on my arms.
‘Is it really that black and white?’
‘’Fraid so.’
‘You don’t think it’s possible to have artistic integrity and an income?’
‘Rarely, if ever!’
‘Jeez, that’s depressing.’ I stare at the gentle movement of the water, enjoying the feeling of Ben’s arm behind me.
‘But what’s more depressing is the idea of not writing at all.’
I nod, taking a moment to consider this and then thinking about Mike’s suggestions. ‘It’s not quite how I imagined being a writer would be when I started out.’
‘How did you start?’
‘A degree, little radio plays, bit and bobs. What about you?’
‘Luck,’ he says, a slightly distant look in his eye. ‘My dad knew someone who knew someone and I got a job as a script reader at an independent production company. It’s not exactly what I set out to do but…anyway, one thing led to another and well, here we are.’
‘Yeah, one thing led to another and you got an Oscar nomination and I wound up in a bookshop.’
‘It’s a good bookshop.’
I furrow my brow. ‘How do you know?’
He pauses. ‘I have a confession.’
‘Go on.’
‘It may not have been a coincidence that I bumped into you at the street fair.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning,’ he clears his throat. ‘I heard you tell that guy at the theatre that you worked in a bookshop in Brixton. I wanted to see you again, so I checked out all the bookshops, and, just in case you don’t know this already, there aren’t that many bookshops in Brixton!’
‘Right. Competition isn’t our greatest threat!’
‘When I saw the note in the door saying the shop was closed but the stall was open, signed by you and Astrid, I knew exactly where to find you.’
‘But you had Jen with you.’
‘That wasn’t my plan but Jen doesn’t take no for an answer; she was hell-bent on coming along.’
‘Sounds like you’ve met your match.’
‘I may well have done.’ He holds my gaze, and I know he’s not referring to Jen.
‘What did Mike mean by rooting the audience?’ I ask, trying to steer his attention away from me, though my heart rate has quickened.
‘I think he meant enabling them to be in the present but also to recall the imaginary past. You can do it by adding historical details to the dialogue, like political references. It can also help fill in back story.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like Harry working triple time when Clinton was elected, maybe that’s the first tricky patch in their marriage. If you think about Clinton’s election, it takes you straight back to nineteen ninety-two: the news, the style; the general vibe. It could really work.’
‘How would we marry it with the scenes we already have?’ I produce a half-eaten packet of Rolos from my coat pocket.
‘Well, we’d need to think about major political events since 1989 and take it from there.’
‘My knowledge of American politics extends from knowing that Ronald Reagan was an actor to George Bush being a clown,’ I say, offering him a toffee.
‘That’s okay.’ He takes a sweet. ‘My knowledge of British politics extends from Meryl Streep being your prime minister to Spitting Image.’
‘Meryl was a great prime minister!’
‘Probably better than the current one, right?’
‘Right!’
We both chew on our toffees quietly, relaxed in each other’s company.
‘The start of the Clinton era might be a good place to begin,’ he says.
‘When was that?’
‘Nineteen ninety-two.’
‘Truman would have been two,’ I say, after a quick calculation. ‘So all Sally’s energy would have been tied up with him, leaving little time for Harry.’
‘And you’ve already touched on the fact that Harry was jealous of all the attention Sally gave Truman. Harry throwing himself into work to deal with that makes perfect sense.’
‘Which is all well and good, but where does it belong in the story?’
‘It might work in the Italian restaurant scene, when they’re reminiscing about Truman.’
I begin to think about how I could piece it all together. ‘Let me play around with it and send you something.’
‘Come on,’ he says, offering his hand to help me up. ‘Next stop coming up!’
‘Where are you taking me now?’ I allow him to help me up, surprised at how familiar it feels to hold his hand and the warm glow that it gives me.
‘North!’
We exit the park, walking up a wide road flanked on one side by the park and the other by the imposing apartment blocks with their coloured canopies and windows lit up like advent calendars.
‘I don’t do that!’ I protest, kind of charmed that he’s picked up on this trait.
‘Sure you do! But okay, how about we make one of the characters really hopeless at making decisions about food instead, or an appalling crab-walker…’ He redirects me so as to avoid a lamppost.
‘Are you implying I’m a crab-walker?’ I playfully nudge him towards the nearest building.
‘No, I’m calling you an indecisive crab-walker!’ He bumps his hip against mine in a gesture that cannot go unnoticed as flirtatious
‘My ex hated my indecisiveness.’ I figure this is probably the first time I’ve referred to Will as my ex; it feels kind of liberating.
‘Your ex must be a schmendrik.’
‘A what?’
‘A fool. I’ll bet you’ve lots of little ticks that drove him crazy but would drive another man crazy.’
‘That, I doubt!’ I say, blushing at the remark, which Ben sweetly pretends not to notice. ‘Is that the Met?’
‘Sure is,’ he says, taking my hand in his and leading me up the steps.
It’s cooler by the time we leave the museum, the sun has fully set and my feet are aching from my new shoes. I sit on the front steps and take them off; Ben offers me his cardigan, which I accept, and he slips it over my shoulders. The wool, heavy with his scent, is warm and snug and I shoo away an unhelpful image of being beside him in bed.
‘One last stop,’ he says, skipping down the steps and hailing a rickshaw.
‘No way am I going in that!’
‘You’ve never taken a rickshaw?’
‘Never, and I’m not about to start now.’ I’m convinced that rickshaws exist for one reason only: death.
‘Go on, live a little.’
‘That’s exactly the opposite of what these things are designed for,’ I say, rooted to the steps of the Met. ‘I have a family, you know, and friends, some of whom might actually miss me.’
He looks at my feet. ‘It might spare you some blisters.’
‘I’d rather endure the pain than risk my life in that.’
If Harry Met Sally Again Page 14