by Siel Ju
Our meeting was more awkward this time. The chairs forced us to sit facing forward, so that when I turned toward him, I was confronted with his distant, aquiline profile, his eyes slightly downturned and preoccupied. He was wearing a shirt I didn’t recognize, with jeans that I did. I asked Jeff how the acting was going and he said it was fine, in what seemed like a slightly testy tone, but then he turned his head and asked about my work. I chattered aimlessly, nervous. The bartender, who seemed new, set down my glass of wine while glancing past me, then moved to the other end of the bar and glanced in the same direction again, at the last table still in the dining area. As I talked I turned and saw a popular singer sitting there, a girl I’d seen on billboards but couldn’t name. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and looked a bit shy, nodding softly while the people around her, all much older than her, jabbered urgently.
The place was otherwise empty. It was a Tuesday, close to midnight. The flat screen next to the bar was on mute, flashing through images of a man’s mouth, eating an apple, licking a stamp, kissing a child. I stopped talking and Jeff and I both watched in silence, until we realized it was an advertisement for mouthwash. Then we looked at each other without comment, our lips sliding over our teeth self-consciously.
He spoke first. “Do you want to get out of here?”
Instantly his voice took me back to my old apartment, its close walls and flat, tatami-like carpet, the alcove of the bedroom area cozy and clandestine. I remembered that first morning after, when he got an audition call and slowly woke up as he answered it, talking in a confused then in a more excited way. I remembered how he looked, sleep in his eyes, fumbling around for his jeans where he kept post-its and a pencil. “Okay, I’ll be there,” he said, his voice groggy with morning. Then he got dressed without showering and after giving me a quick kiss, went straight to the audition. His hair looked good a little greasy, and I think he knew it.
Most of the time he’d just come to my place, but once in a while I met him at Diane’s. I found out quickly he had his share of admirers there, the kind that kept ordering drinks to get his attention, until they got sloppy and shameless and sad to watch. The second time I went by alone, there was this one girl who had come dressed up in a blue-silk, babydoll-ish dress and hipster glasses. She sat at a small table with her friends and kept calling “Je-eff, Je-eff,” and asking him to come over and settle one conjecture after another her friends had come up with about men and what they wanted. When Jeff went, they begged him teasingly for free drinks, and eventually, he obliged them. “They’re regulars,” he told me, shrugging.
He was the kind of person who ate in handfuls on the go, rarely sitting down for a real meal. At my place I’d make him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or, if I was out of bread, feed him wasabi peas or trail mix, in those one-serving pouches from Trader Joe’s. We’d sit in bed and eat with childlike pleasure, and I thought these little meals were more delicious in their simplicity, somehow more real and instinctual than Christian’s elaborate dinner parties, with all their shucking of oysters and entertaining of strangers and cleaning up of messes.
I’ve made things with Jeff sound more idyllic than they really were. In reality it was mostly uncertainty and anxiety and confusion, if with an undercurrent of anticipation, since we never defined anything, never knew if this time might be the last time, that sense of trepidation growing more imminent the longer things went on. There were a few weeks when we saw each other quite a bit, but most weeks we didn’t see each other at all, and we had a tacit agreement that we wouldn’t comment on either of those circumstances. Sometimes, I felt closer to Christian and didn’t return Jeff’s texts, even when I was alone at home. Other times, Jeff ignored mine. Once I showed up at Diane’s as planned and Jeff wasn’t there. I was told he couldn’t make it in that day by a female bartender who studied me appraisingly, after which I felt compelled to order and drink my requisite glass of wine anyway. Jeff texted while I was there to say he was sorry, rehearsal ran late, but later, trudging to my car alone, I found myself half-afraid and half-excited that I might run across him on the sidewalk, holding some other girl’s hand.
We stepped out onto the balmy street. “Where do you want to go?” I said.
He shrugged. “What’s open where we can actually hear each other?” His tone was casual, almost indifferent.
“Nothing,” I said. “Not at this hour.”
We looked around the streets as if willing something to open. Cars went by slowly, watchful at the crosswalks. A group of girls cycled by on their cruisers, laughing loudly, their skirts flapping against their thighs.
“I thought about you last week,” I said.
“Yeah?” He turned and looked at me, his expression a friendly challenge. His hair moved probingly in the beach breeze, slowly, like it was floating in water.
“There was this actor that looked like you.”
“A doppelgänger,” he said, then smiled, though there was a tension in it, like this news spelled bad luck and pained him to hear. I wondered if this was one of those things you weren’t supposed to say to actors, some sort of faux pas I didn’t know about.
I looked down, feeling slightly dejected. I flashed through Jeff’s different expressions, serious, sleepy, excited, indifferent, and now, this unhappy smile. At the end of those images I realized that my memories ran like an infomercial for something, though I didn’t know for what, one of those ads that evoked only a mood, so at the end you were left with a vague sense of longing, though you didn’t know if it fit, how long it would last, how long you’d be amused by the novelty of it.
“What about Mao’s Kitchen?” I said. “They’re open until three.”
I went to Jeff’s place only once. It was the night Christian and I had our first big fight. Christian’s drunk expression had taken on a teeth-baring, aggressive cruelty, which was such a turnaround from his usual slack, garrulous state of inebriation that I didn’t know how to react. In the end he’d apologized and we’d made up somewhat, but I also told him I needed time alone to think. Walking to my car, I felt a small thrill just from having had the gumption to leave Christian when he’d wanted me to stay, that I’d proved to him and myself that I was capable of a little agency. I wanted to extend the high. Driving, I called Jeff and asked him if I could come over. “Sure,” Jeff said, in a bewildered tone, and gave me directions in a careful, halting manner. On the freeway, I felt an almost giddy state of freedom, tinged with fear. I tried not to dissect whether or not Jeff really wanted to see me. I sped, but as a precaution stayed behind a woman who was also speeding, in a blue Lexus convertible. She looked regal, her graceful arms extending benevolently toward the wheel, like a monarch performing a stately ritual. I mimicked her. I popped my sunroof. The night was cool and slippery and glittery with headlights, the 405 still busy after ten, the cars slowing to an enthusiastic cluster at the 101 then speeding up again in joyful little blurs. Once I got off the freeway at Van Nuys, I squinted for street signs, coasting past the brightly lit fast-food chains and the more dour-looking strip malls until I was plunged into a dark residential area and found the complex where Jeff lived—a boxy, functional multifamily housing unit painted a dirty shade of beige, its buzz-through gate staring toward the street with a mute, impassive expression. Walking up to it, I felt myself tense up, hesitant and vaguely regretful about having made myself an imposition. I took a slow elevator up to the third floor and when the doors opened, Jeff was there. I followed his taut shoulders through a complex maze of narrow hallways, until he held his door open and ushered me in.
Once we were inside Jeff seemed to relax somewhat. His apartment was a one-bedroom, small but so sparsely furnished it looked roomy with possibility. I moved toward him and we had sex on the cheap carpet in his living room, made enough noise that his neighbors in the apartment below him pounded against the ceiling. The sound was oddly wet, like a soggy mop, or damp socks. Afterwards we laughed, talking about movies with sex scenes we liked, playfully pushing
and pulling at each other, our limbs lax and giving. Later, in bed, I said “We should do this more often.” He squeezed my hand in response, cautiously.
In the morning at his coffee table, we ate kiddie cereal. The sugary crisps sang against my teeth. I apologized obliquely for inviting myself over, and he shook his head. “I had fun,” he said, then added, “Now you know how we do it in the Valley.” He looked up from his bowl, smiling impishly. He reached over me to get the remote, grazing my right breast, then for the next half hour we watched cartoons, him running his hands under my shirt in a lazy, intimate manner. Then I told him I had to go, I had a writing deadline.
He stayed on the couch with the cartoons on low volume while I combed out my hair in the bathroom. I yelled out to him that I’d read Antony and Cleopatra, and there was a short silence. “I admire her resilience,” I said. “She’s a really strong character, I think. Beyond owning Egypt and being a ruler and all that, she’s powerful on a personal level. Like she just goes for what she wants, even full-on into suicide.”
“She definitely creates her own drama,” he said.
In the corner of his bathroom floor, I saw a pink elastic hair tie, dusty with disuse. I picked it up and shook it off, then pulled my hair back. If Jeff noticed, he didn’t comment on it, just gave me that usual indulgent kiss when I said goodbye. But the rest of the day, whenever I felt my ponytail bob, I sensed a gnawing sort of anger grow in me, petulant and itchy to see things to their conclusion.
Mao’s Kitchen was still doing a brisk business, the scrabble of late-night diners somehow looking glamorous and almost subversive in the dank, dimly lit atmosphere. We sat in the corner against the red brick wall. Chinese propaganda posters stared down at us with gaudy, self-sufficient pride. Next to us sat two blond European-looking girls with big teeth, sharing a gigantic plate of chow mein and talking in a guttural language I didn’t recognize. A short busboy silently brought us a small bamboo bowl of wonton crisps, then came back with a red unguent for dipping. Jeff bit into a crisp, then chewed studiously, like he didn’t exactly like the flavor but was still interested and accepting of it on an anthropological level. “I’m not that hungry,” he said. “Do you want to split something?”
After the Valley visit, I didn’t see Jeff for a while. Perhaps due to the chagrin from our fight, or fear that I’d call it quits, Christian grew more tender, obliging, and five months to the day after we’d started dating, asked me to move in with him. We sent out an invite to the housewarming to all our Facebook friends, which by this time included Jeff. “Congratulations,” Jeff wrote on the event wall, “but I have dress rehearsal that night.” To that Christian replied that we’d be there to see him in the play as promised, that we had even read the play, by we meaning me.
And go to see him we did. We drove up to Topanga opening night. Amy organized it—to “support” her friend Jeff—buying a dozen tickets and rounding up her acting buddies, plus Christian and me. But the outing was a bust. It was an unusually windy night, and the attendance at the outdoor amphitheater was sparse. The tickets Amy got were in the cheaper, upper tier, and sitting there, we could hardly hear a thing. At intermission Christian argued with the usher to let us move down closer to the stage, without success. So for three hours we watched the actors bluster about the stage pointlessly, their floppy, Shakespearian costumes billowing comically. I paid special attention to Cleopatra’s death, but the actress’ portrayal of suicide was anything but swift. She died painfully slowly, writhing a little, in a manner that seemed realistic enough for a poisoning by little snakes. Afterwards we all clustered around Jeff, as if for warmth. Amy handed Jeff a bouquet. “Wow, flowers—Thanks,” Jeff said, cradling the tulips in his arm awkwardly, like he’d been handed an unruly infant. Christian slapped Jeff’s back. “That was a unique interpretation of Antony. So militaristic,” he said. “Really fantastic.” I agreed. When Jeff’s eyes met mine we smiled at each other plastically, then looked away.
That first month living with Christian was a strange time. I remember some happy moments as we rearranged ourselves to accommodate each other’s routines. I also remember things went bad quickly. That said, even in the badness there was a part of me that felt lucky. Christian’s drinking got worse, but I was nursing my own imposter syndrome, and I think I believed to some extent that Christian’s own self-loathing was what kept him from noticing my defects. I was proving to myself that I could eke out a relationship, could get someone to care about me enough to stay in it. And this gave me a sense of accomplishment high enough to blunt the lows. No one really seemed happy that spring anyway, not anyone I knew, not anyone who circulated through our little dinner parties, to toast endless nothings and fool ourselves into believing we were grabbing life by the handful. It’s obvious, looking back now, that it couldn’t last, but at the time I thought I was making things work, taking the butt-ends of life and molding something messy but tangible out of them.
We settled on Sichuan eggplant. A middle-aged Chinese woman wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt took our order. “White rice or brown rice? Brown rice is fifty cents more,” she said. We went with brown. When she left I asked Jeff what he did now that he was no longer at Diane’s. He looked up sharply, then said he’d started a new job, as a broker at a small investment company. His expression as he said this was challenging, but also a bit run down, like he was returning to a battle he’d fought before. I expressed surprise and said congratulations. At this he softened a bit. His shoulders still had that self-protective edginess, but his brow relaxed and he suddenly looked older, more adult, like someone aware of his mortality. I saw he’d grown thinner, his cheeks hollowed out under the reddish lighting. I asked if brokers had a flexible schedule, like freelancers, and he shook his head a little impatiently.
“It just gets old, the struggling actor thing,” he said. “I’m discovering there are things I want in life, maybe even more than acting.”
I took this in. I tried to think of something encouraging to say that wouldn’t come across as patronizing. “You always seem to land on your feet,” I managed. For a second I thought he might turn contemptuous, but then he just smiled and said, “I hope you’re right.”
Every play has its metaphorical gun, each actor fiddling with it, hiding it, loading it with need and suspense and Eros, before inevitably, someone pulls the trigger. And fooled by Chekhov, I think that’s how I thought life should be too, though I made a poor actor, and I wasn’t in a play.
That’s why I showed up on the closing night of Antony and Cleopatra. I was the one person sitting alone in the packed amphitheater, filled this time with older couples that looked like do-gooder types, committed to supporting their local community theater in retirement. I sat in the second row. That close up, Jeff looked like a parody of himself, his stage makeup garish and fierce. I remember the moment he spotted me, when he wasn’t part of the main action and a little off to the side, scanning the crowd. He gave a very slight start when he saw me staring at him, before he resumed the scanning. After the play I waited around and went up to him. He was with a few of his fellow actors, who seemed to make him skittish. “You came back,” he said in a loud, cheery tone, then gave me a jumpy hug. “You were great,” I said, my hands still on his arms, then quickly let go and turned to his friends. “You were all great,” I said. They murmured thank yous. For a moment, we were all silent, then Jeff said, “Come on, let me walk you to your car.”
We moved away from the crowd, not touching. Once we were in the lot I turned to him and said, “I missed you.” I leaned into him. He gently turned his head away and put his hands on my shoulders to hold me at arm’s length. “Hey,” he said. “I’m seeing Allison now.” When I didn’t respond he added, “Cleopatra,” for clarification. I realized I must have already known this at some level, because while his words wounded me, the feeling they produced was one that I’d been expecting for some time, that I almost recognized. I welcomed it, embraced that small tingly sorrow. He was pushing me away, but
there was a new tenderness in his voice and hands that made me think we were still connected. I shrugged like it didn’t matter. “And?” I said.
He took his hands off my shoulders. “Come on,” he said, his tone suddenly exasperated. “The show’s over.” He looked at me for a moment. “Look, thanks for coming. It was good to see you,” he said. Then he gave me a little firm wave. He turned around and went back to the crowd, to his girlfriend. Watching him go, I thought for a second about making a scene, my own version of celerity in dying, wrecking whatever we had in one quick go. But I didn’t. I didn’t see the point. I thought about how tomorrow, the costumes would be returned and the stage drops dismantled, the performance turning into a nondescript line on the actors’ résumés before, in a few years, disappearing altogether. I thought about how this little act between Jeff and me too, like any bad behavior, would now disappear into the anonymity of the city, the world going on like nothing ever happened.
Our food arrived. We unsheathed our chopsticks and started grappling with the slippery eggplant. “I’ve wanted to apologize,” he said. “I feel like I wasn’t very up front with you, when we were seeing each other, about what I wanted.” As if on cue the European girls next to us started shifting about. One of them slipped a clean pair of chopsticks into her pink backpack. Then the girls wriggled through between the tables and were gone. Jeff started again. “I was sort of just trying to figure things out for myself, and I think you became the victim of that.”
“Victim?” I said. I laughed testily. “I wouldn’t say I was victimized.”
“Maybe victim was the wrong word,” he said quickly. “Anyway, I’m sorry.”