“I love the way women talk. A delicate place—what does that mean? Are you trying to say that she’s moving to Los Angeles and she’s not thrilled about it?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Marcy said. “But she told you she’s moving?”
I asked her why Laurel’s situation was more complicated.
“All I’m saying is that she’s trying to figure some things out, she’s seeking clarity, and you have a tendency to muddy the waters. So just . . . just stick to Share or whatever teenager you’re currently making up from scratch.”
“Words I never thought I’d hear. You must mean business.” I told her as I turned to go that she had my word, but then I turned back. “Why do you think I couldn’t have any real interest in her?”
“C’mon. Anyone who finds Share appealing is not going to like Laurel. Venn Diagrams, David.” She held up two chocolate donuts. “You’ve got the circle of bright women with dysfunctional families and horrible hair and then you have the circle of starlets with their own perfume lines. The two circles don’t intersect.”
“Is that so?” I said, grabbing the donuts. “We’ll see about that.”
She told me to leave the donuts, which I didn’t, and get out of the bakery, which I did.
The air was hot. It was going to be a doozy of a Manhattan day. A perfect day for a ride. An ideal day to roll down the windows, crank the radio, sprawl across the backseat, like Estie and Ryan did, and head to Brooklyn.
Even under the best conditions, the bridge is not a quick trip. We are usually in for a thirty-minute haul. We go Houston Street, to West, to the Henry Hudson Parkway, through the Battery Tunnel into Brooklyn, and across Brooklyn to the bridge. We cross over the bridge to Staten Island—screaming as we go, because I’m scared to death of bridges, of the water beneath, of the space in between. Then we return, sometimes coming to rest in Brooklyn on the grass near the bridge, just like Tony Manero and Stephanie did in Saturday Night Fever. We get hot dogs, play cards, and toss rocks in the water until a cop asks us to stop.
Laurel did not seem to be as comfortable in the Caddy as were my other passengers. One hand clutched her coffee cup, the other pressed her messenger bag to her side. Her hair blew wild, her words barely escaped her mouth without strands of hair blocking them.
“This is not what I imagined,” she hollered.
“What’s not?” I asked, turning down the radio.
“Your Cadillac,” she said. “The shrine. I thought it would be a little more grand, a little less cluttered.” She pulled an empty Frito bag from the heel of her boot.
I grabbed the bag and tossed it into the backseat. “Based on what?”
From the backseat came Estie’s voice: “From your movie, duh.”
“Right,” I said. The concept that those who read my work would gain insight into my personal life without me telling them a thing had never dawned on me until this moment. I shook my head slowly, like one tends to do when the light bulb goes on.
“Did you like it?” Estie asked. She told Laurel that she’d read the scene that introduces the car in the bakery.
Laurel said she’d heard about the reading that morning. “I wish I could have heard it,” she added, noting that as far as she knew, a public reading was a first for any of her students. “But I did read it and yes, I liked it.” She leaned toward me. “I gave you an F for format but an A for description.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“You painted quite a picture. There is clearly a disconnect between the reality of the car and what lives in your mind.”
“I beg to differ,” I said, quickly brushing onto the floor some crumbs left over from the annual Slip Melman Birthday Ride cake.
“Don’t be offended,” Laurel said. “That’s one of the reasons we write.”
“To misrepresent?”
“To immortalize. To remember a time, a person, an object, maybe all of the above, as we want them to be remembered.”
“Why do we need to remember the Cadillac?” Ryan asked, finally interested enough in the conversation to sit up. “She still runs like a son-of-a-gun. Doesn’t she, David? Even with 200,000 miles on her.”
“I’m sure,” Laurel said. She sipped her coffee through the straw, seemingly eager to drop the topic. But her silence just got her further into the hot seat.
“You want to drive it?” Ryan asked.
She shook her head and said that she was good where she was.
“Go ahead,” I said. We were still in the city. “I’ll pull over, you can take it a block or two. Maybe it will enhance your appreciation of it.”
“You should give it a try,” Ryan told her. “Uncle Davy doesn’t let many people behind the wheel.” He paused to throw his torso into the front seat. “I’ve been behind the wheel,” he said, and he explained how he and Estie sit on my lap in empty lots and steer while I press the pedals. “But my mom’s never driven it. Neither has Aunt Rachel. No one has. Not even Share.”
“Share can’t drive anything,” Estie offered. “Mom says she’s not old enough to have her license.”
“Of course she is old enough,” I said, more in defense of myself than Share.
“Well I’m old enough,” Laurel said. “But I don’t have my license.”
The three of us stared at her.
“You don’t have your license?” Ryan asked.
Laurel shook her head, oblivious to the outrage of her fellow passengers.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I don’t drive,” Laurel said.
I almost ran off the road, right into the Hudson River.
“What do you mean, you don’t drive?” Estie took the words out of my mouth. My niece and nephew were as shocked as I was. The Melman family learned the importance of driving during the Christmas season of 1977, and I’ve made sure that all subsequent Melmans have understood that lesson as well.
Laurel explained without embarrassment that she only possessed an expired Utah driver’s license, and she hadn’t driven since she moved to New York. “New York has everything I could ever want, and I don’t have to get behind the wheel of a car to get it,” she said. “Last summer, over the Fourth of July holiday, I had the corner grocer deliver of a bag of marshmallows—a single bag—because I had writer’s block and a sweet tooth, and it was raining.”
“What’s the point of living in New York City if you’re not going to go outside?” I asked.
“That’s the whole point,” she said.
“If that’s so, then you have no business moving to Los Angeles,” I said. “You’re going to have to take three highways to get that same bag of marshmallows.”
Laurel shrugged and sipped her coffee.
“You’re moving to Los Angeles?” Estie asked.
“I’m planning on it,” Laurel said. She explained to Estie, as she had to me, that if she could sell her movie, she could stay in New York. She also explained, in more detail than I’d heard before, that in the movie she was writing, the father of a wealthy Utah family loses his fortune and then commits suicide in order to free up insurance money for his family. “Before he commits suicide, he comes to New York to say goodbye to his estranged son. He kills himself by throwing himself off a bridge. I was thinking of using the Brooklyn Bridge in my film, but I suppose the Verrazano will do.”
“The Verrazano Bridge is actually better than the Brooklyn Bridge for your movie,” Estie said. “It gets way more suicides. There’s even a sign at the bottom that says ‘Life is Worth Living.’ But it doesn’t work.”
“I don’t think the issue is which bridge, I think the debate should be about whether jumping off a bridge is a realistic method of suicide,” I said. “No one in their right mind would throw themselves over the side of a bridge.”
“Plenty of people kill themselves with bridges,” Laurel said.
“That’s why there’s a sign,” Estie added.
“Well, they’re all nuts,” I said.
“Exactl
y,” Laurel said. “They are committing suicide.”
“If I were to commit suicide, jumping off a bridge is the last thing I’d do,” I offered.
“You don’t strike me as the suicide type,” she said.
“Why not?”
“You’re wearing a Cubs shirt and Air Jordans. You’re way too young at heart.” I didn’t offer, because I didn’t want to ruin my image, that I’m way too faint of heart as well. I like to play it safe. I couldn’t fathom stepping onto and looking over the side of the Verrazano, which was what Laurel planned to do once we reached the bridge. Research, she called it, getting in touch with her father-character’s mindset before he takes the plunge. She wanted to touch the edges of the bridge, observe the water “roil” beneath, feel the rush of the cars as they passed, hang over the side.
“You’re crazy,” I told her.
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is a two-story structure. It has six lanes on the bottom, six on top, all for cars, none for pedestrians. So on our return trip out of Brooklyn, I pulled into the far right-hand lane, put on my hazards, and prayed as Estie and Ryan hopped out with Laurel, who took them where no Melman—except for one—whose exploits were about to be a major motion picture—had gone before: to the edge.
The kids, like the Mormon Rodeo, viewed the outing as an adventure instead of an accident waiting to happen. I watched them disappear from my side mirror. The second hand ticked away on the dashboard clock as I waved traffic around me and waited. Cars passed; my car trembled. So did my hands. The wind blew, steamy and strong—which was, apparently, why Laurel’s immediate takeaway from her near-death experience was that her hair totally frizzed.
“Look at me,” she said, hopping back into her seat and pulling down on the sun visor to get to the vanity mirror.
I couldn’t tell the difference between her hair before and after, but I knew enough to keep that to myself.
“I should have wrapped my hair in a towel first,” she said. “Like your mother.” She rummaged through her bag and cursed the fact that she didn’t have anything with her for her hair.
Looking at me through the rearview mirror, Estie again reminded me, “From the first scene of your movie.” Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a thick, hot pink ponytail holder with blue and purple sequins around it. She handed it over the seat to Laurel, who thanked her, gathered her hair onto the top of her head, and secured it there, like a pompom.
As she wrapped her hair, and I attempted to merge us back into moving traffic, I said, “You know, you know more about me than most people, including most of the people I’ve dated, and I’ve hardly had to speak a word to you.” I had to yell to be heard, so I paused while I rolled up my window, hoping the glass would keep the noise of the expressway from interfering with my profound statement. “I think we’re onto something. Everybody ought to show up on dates with scripts. They’d save a lot of time and talking.”
“Most people’s scripts aren’t as autobiographical as yours,” Laurel said.
“It isn’t even really a script,” Estie said. “It’s more like a story that he is calling a script.”
“Estie, my dear, let’s not waste our time trying to pigeonhole,” I said, elbowing Laurel. “The teacher says we’re not supposed to get bogged down in semantics.”
Laurel laughed. “I can’t stop thinking about your mother in that towel. My father would never have allowed my mother to walk around in public with her hair wrapped like that.”
“Why not?” Estie asked.
“He’s an asshole.” Laurel offered the information no differently from how she answered questions in class. Straightforward. Matter-of-fact. She apologized to my niece and nephew for her language and added, “A real spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child type of guy.” She busied herself with a few seconds of scenery watching before adding, “He’d have been better off, we all would have been better off, had he done like Bobby C and thrown himself off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.”
This information was more than I’d bargained for on a Sunday outing, especially a family one, but Laurel did not seem to feel sorry for herself, so I decided to not feel sorry for her either, although that was my instinct.
“Bobby C didn’t throw himself off; he was drunk and he fell,” Ryan said. “It was an accident.”
“No, he killed himself,” Estie said. “He got the girl pregnant, he didn’t want to marry her, the priest wouldn’t help, so he had no choice. He was Catholic.”
As they went back and forth as to whether Bobby C committed suicide or not, Laurel said, “Aren’t they too young to be studying Saturday Night Fever?”
“No such thing as too young. Not when you’re studying under Uncle David.”
“Well, if I ever need a sub to teach my class, I know who to ask.”
“Sure,” I told her. “I can step in this week if you’re covering Saturday Night Fever, The Big Lebowski, or Caddyshack.”
“How about Schindler’s List?” Laurel asked. She explained that she was using a clip from Schindler’s List in our next class to demonstrate sequences. “The Ghetto Liquidation scene,” she said. “The part where—”
“Sorry, can’t help you there,” I interjected.
“You never saw Schindler’s List?”
I shook my head.
“Oy.”
Objectively speaking, Laurel—a six-feet-tall (with the pompom) Mormon in cowboy boots with an abusive dad and no ability to drive—was as foreign as foreign could be. Yet if I closed my eyes and changed Laurel’s rasp to a slightly higher pitch, I would have sworn I was sitting next to my mother.
“Is that something else they teach you in conversion class? How to make your fellow Jews feel guilty about not seeing Schindler’s List?”
Laurel said her disapproval had nothing to do with religion. “Schindler’s List is a classic. As a film writer, you should see it. I don’t care what you do as a Jew.”
“My grandmother does,” Estie offered. She hung her torso over the front seat and explained how happy my mother would be if Laurel showed the movie in class because she’s been trying for years to get me to see it. “She even sent him a copy of it in the mail.”
“You can borrow it for your class,” I told Laurel as I shoved Estie back onto her seat.
Laurel laughed. Then she sighed and sat back against her own seat. For a while we traveled in silence, everyone content to look out their respective windows. Laurel still had her cup of coffee tucked in between her legs. Every so often she’d take a sip, and I wondered how she could bear to drink cold coffee. Mostly, she rode with the side of her head pressed against the window. I couldn’t tell if she was thinking about something—her movie, maybe—or just watching the scenery.
I thought about asking her what was on her mind, but I stayed silent and kept my eyes on the road, which was congested. The Cadillac was nothing if not hard to maneuver, so focusing on driving was probably not a bad way to go. Besides, I figured, maybe she wasn’t thinking about anything. Maybe she was just enjoying the ride—something I’ve never been able to do. My wheels are always spinning. I’ve clocked more miles in my head than my Caddy will ever see on the road. In this moment, for instance, I was thinking about how Laurel could move to Los Angeles without a license, a car, or the desire to drive.
So, after we dropped Estie and Ryan back at my sister’s Union Square apartment, I shoved my car into a spot on 14th and offered to buy the Mormon Rodeo a pretzel in Union Square Park. I also offered to give her driving lessons.
She said yes to the pretzel but no to the driving lessons. Later on, Marcy would say that in her opinion, getting experience with women who eat carbs was more important for me than spending time with women who drive. I, however, found Laurel’s decision disturbing. What kind of woman doesn’t want to drive?
We walked into the park and talked. Laurel learned about my day job, my business, and my latest project—the big deal I was about to land—branding perfume for a pop star whose identity I could not reveal t
o Laurel due to a confidentiality agreement. She shrugged and said she’d probably never heard of her, anyway. I told her, as I pointed us in the direction of the statue of George Washington and his horse, that she may not have heard of her, but she may soon smell her. “She wants me to create a signature scent,” I explained. “Its distinguishing aspect, what will set it apart from the pack, is that it will mark everything. Her CDs, concert tickets, the T-shirts she sells at the concerts. We’re going to call it Omnipotence.” I shouldn’t have divulged the name of the campaign, but Laurel didn’t strike me as the gossipy kind.
She didn’t strike me as that interested, either. She laughed and called the concept cheesy.
I told her I didn’t disagree. “It is cheesy.”
“Then why is this mystery pop star going through with such a campaign, aside from the fact that her ego is obviously out of control? Doesn’t she care that her handler, or whatever you are, thinks her idea is lousy?”
I shrugged, took a sip of my Coke, and sat on the stone wall across from George. “I don’t know, I didn’t tell her.” As Laurel sat down next to me, I added, “Sometimes you have to make room at the table for the little white lie.”
“Not in my business,” she said. “Writers need to tell it like it is.”
“I thought writers weren’t supposed to tell it like it is. I thought we were supposed to live somewhere in between writing what we know and what we don’t.”
“Factually, yes. But you have to come from a place of honesty. Your characters don’t have to be honest, but you need to be honest about them.”
“Is that so?”
Laurel pulled her knees to her chest and her boots onto the edge of the wall. My eyes went to her boots. They were beat up, I could see now, and faded to the color of the stone base on which George Washington and his horse were resting. This was, I realized, the closest I’d been to the boots, probably to Laurel herself, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel like touching her. On her arm, her leg—which was only an inch or two away—it didn’t matter. Not because of any feeling of affection towards her, I told myself, but just because I was a guy, she was a girl, and there she was. But she was moving to LA, and Marcy had told me not to start with her, and so I didn’t. Instead, as a hacky sack flew over Laurel’s head and into the bushes, I touched her boots.
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