“This is fascinating,” Laurel said, smirking with amusement, as I set the knobs on my toaster to the appropriate settings. “What else is God telling you?”
“Not much. Is there something you’d like me to ask him?”
“Does he know whether or not my movie will get sold before I have to move?”
“He says it’s iffy.” I grabbed a fork in preparation to drag the bundle out of the oven. “He’d love to help, but he doesn’t have much pull in Hollywood. If you really wanted to sell your movie, you’d go to dinner with Bailey Pierce. She’s connected.”
Laurel rolled her eyes. “I’d love to go with you, Chuckerman. But I can’t.”
For the sake of moving on with the evening and from further humiliating myself, I told her I understood. I pulled the tinfoil from the toaster and grabbed a couple of spoons.
We enjoyed the snack. But I didn’t know where I stood with Laurel, and the uncertainty wasn’t sitting well with me—which was probably why I was still awake at two in the morning. No girl since my lab partner in medical school had ever turned me down, and I’m pretty sure Annabelle Aston would have gone out with me if I’d told her that Bailey Pierce would also be at our table. So what was Laurel’s deal?
I pushed my chair back, put my feet on my desk, and came up with several theories. The first—and to me the most likely—was that she was dating me and the rabbi simultaneously. Mormons do, after all, have a thing for polygamy. She probably liked us both, though, obviously, for different reasons. And because she’d been spending so much sack time with me, I figured, she was going to balance her relationships out by giving the man of God a getaway.
Also possible: Laurel was looking more for status than for love. Maybe Rachel was right, I thought now as I slumped back into my chair. Laurel was only in this to hook a Jewish husband—or possibly an entire Jewish family—so she could either convert or stay in New York. And she was test driving a couple of different models, no different than she’d done with the coffee pots she’d taken out of the boxes and examined on the floor of Macy’s, to see which of us better suited her needs.
Whatever her driving force, I understood that she was in a sense just trying to save herself, no different than what my grandma had been doing with the driving lessons. And what was wrong with that? Hadn’t the driving lessons been my idea?
I couldn’t blame Laurel for covering her bases. However, that didn’t mean I couldn’t protect myself as well.
Despite what I’d told Laurel, I rarely connected with God in my kitchen or elsewhere. But I did talk to Slip. I looked now at his picture on my desk, a close-up of his face. It had been taken poolside, by Lucille of all people, a few years after the events in my movie took place. I studied his eyes, I heard his laugh. I considered how he would have handled my situation. He didn’t answer; he never does. Ours are always one-sided conversations. Nonetheless, in the silence of the night, in the Bildungsroman that was my life, my next move came to me. I’d do as Slip would have done. I would prove to myself, to Laurel, to my sisters, and even to God, if he was interested, that David Melman was a man who owned his own road. Perhaps that was the reason I’d kept the Caddy all these years: to keep me in control of my destiny.
With my head leaned against the back of my chair, I closed my eyes and did a SMASH CUT in my mind to Monday morning, to my office in Midtown, where first I’d sit in a suit and tie and eat a bagel and have a Coke, and then I’d place a call to Share in Los Angeles. I’d ask her if she’d like to come with me to a dinner. I would take her, I’d tell her, to Cipriani Downtown, the trendiest of the trendy, for a feast with my new client. I’d tell her my new client was Bailey Pierce and that she and Bailey could chat, they could connect. If she was lucky, numbers could be exchanged and doors could be opened.
I felt guilty thinking about it. Talk about making a deal with the devil. Or maybe I was just looking out for myself, just like my father was way back when. I’m sure he felt bad about putting Slip’s interests over Estelle’s, but in the end, wasn’t he really putting his interests over everyone’s—finding a solution in the name of his own peace of mind and self-preservation? That, I reassured myself, was exactly what I was doing here. Besides, I didn’t intend to sleep with Share, just to have some fun. I whispered this aloud, as if Laurel could hear me as she slept. I’d just take Share as my date. No one would get hurt. And if I didn’t tell Marcy or Estie, no one would find out, either.
CHAPTER 12:
Spectacle Scenes and Lessons on Perspectives
The following week’s class, class number seven of twelve, was entitled plain old POV. “Cryptic, don’t you think?” I said to Laurel, pointing to the syllabus as we walked toward the classroom.
She walked faster than me, even though my arms were empty and her messenger bag was loaded to the hilt. Her bag reminded me of a clown car. New items continually emerged, like the shoes that currently formed the top of the pile. “You’re joking, right?” she said, flipping her head over her shoulder toward me, several tile squares of floor behind her. “Point of View.”
“Or Privately Owned Vehicle. Point of Value. Power Operated Vehicle,” I offered. “Depending on your POV.”
“Why would POV stand for Power Operated Vehicle in a film writing class?”
“All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t have killed you to have spelled it out.”
“What side of the bed did you wake up on?” she said as we entered the classroom. She dropped the bag onto the desk.
“You know perfectly well what side I was on,” I whispered. I’d spent last night at her apartment, in her bed. It was the first time I’d stayed at her place since the purchase of the Chuckerbuck machine. I didn’t like to spend the night in her walk-up due to the clutter, the cat, and the distance from my office. However, in an effort to compete with the rabbi, I’d decided to step up my efforts. Besides staying with her, I’d also agreed to go to a Barbra Streisand impersonator show the following Thursday night.
Some might call my behavior sucking up. Marcy called it being in love. After she set eyes on the Chuckerbuck, she said I was as whipped as the foam on the lattes Laurel had just made. I told her no, I wasn’t in love, I just didn’t like to lose. Even in a fling.
Who was I kidding? By staying at her place, I was also trying to assuage my guilt, since I had, as planned, gotten on the phone the previous morning and invited Share to my dinner. She could pick her hotel, I’d said, the tab was on me. She’d agreed before I’d finished asking.
Now Laurel rolled her eyes at me. “You know that’s not what I meant.” She began to line the shoes on the edge of the desk and told me to take a seat. “I will spell out POV for you now.” And she did, in what I later told her was one of her best lectures. Probably because it involved props. Namely, a pair of high black heels that would have been perfect for her to wear to my dinner with Bailey, as well as her cowboy boots and a pair of dirty brown Birkenstocks, which, Laurel explained, came from the school’s lost and found.
As I asked Don how much he wanted to bet that Judd would claim the shoes, Laurel began her talk.
“Every writer comes to the table with a unique take on the world based on her experiences and understanding of them,” she said as she set out the shoes. “It’s this interpretation that gives a story its meaning.” She explained that the writer conveys his or her attitudes toward the human condition in many ways. One is by filtering her story through the eyes of a particular character. “Think of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby,” she said. Then she formally presented her footwear.
“So you see, how your story presents itself to an audience will depend on who you pick to tell it.” She paused to kick off her Keds, place them on the desk, and put on the high heels. She strutted back and forth a few times.
Don whistled.
“The woman who walks around in these is going to tell the same story differently than the woman who prefers these”—Laurel paused to lift the Keds from the desk—“who is going to tell the s
tory differently from a person who wears cowboy boots.” Here, she lifted a boot. “And all three of those ladies will tell it differently than the dude who wears these.” She jammed the Keds under her chin so she could lift up the dirty sandals. She rotated slowly from one side of the room to the other, a human art installation. “As the writer, it’s your choice.”
As she set the shoes down, Laurel warned us to choose our POV character carefully. “Your audience will be walking in that character’s shoes. Will they like his shoes? Will they relate to him? Will they want to take his ride?”
Like an idiot, I looked down at my shoes, my new moccasins—soft brown leather, totally dope. The rabbi probably walked around in some form of black comfort wear, or worse, Birkenstocks. So as far as which of us offered the better ride from a footwear perspective, there was no contest, I thought as Helene raised her hand and asked, “Is having your characters speak to the camera a good way to show point of view? We thought each character could speak directly to the camera as the ship goes down.” She chuckled. “I was in foils in the salon at the time.”
Susan, who had kept her old seat but had revamped her look—a little lipstick, a little blond—since last week’s class, mumbled, “I got out of the group in the nick of time.”
Candy, too, gave a snotty sigh, but Laurel told Helene, “I actually don’t mind your idea.” She pulled off one of the black heels and tapped it on Helene’s desk. “But be careful.”
She explained that the voice-over technique is like the Smash Cut, to be used sparingly. “It can be used to enrich a film, but not to tell the story. Movies,” she said yet again, “are a visual medium.” She went on to say that many beginning film writers rely too much on voice-over to tell their stories.
“Your good buddy David is a prime example,” she said. “He’s got a great story but he tells it instead of shows it.”
“What do you mean? I thought you liked my story,” I said, sounding far more insecure than I’d intended.
She put the high heel back on her foot. “I didn’t say I didn’t like your story. My point is just that movies are told via action, gesture, image, and expression rather than words.”
Candy threw in her two cents. “I would say that dialogue and camera position are more refined ways to convey point-of-view than voice-over.”
Laurel agreed. “Never underestimate the intelligence of the audience. They will pick up a character’s entire mindset from the smallest gesture.”
The next thing I knew, the Mormon Rodeo was demonstrating her point using a real-life scene from her boyfriend’s apartment in which her boyfriend (she shot no glance in my direction) made her a snack, a banana boat, out of the only food he had in his kitchen. “Not only because he realized I was hungry but because he realized he’d been giving me a hard time for not being able to go with him to a work event.”
There was a delay, a pregnant pause, between the time she spoke and the moment I realized she was speaking about me, at which point I wanted to die or at least fling myself out of one of the windows, all of which were wide open due to the brutally warm weather. I imagined Laurel’s story drifting down with the windowsill soot to everyone who stood on the corner of Broadway and 8th.
Clearly I was the banana boat maker, but I did not immediately identify as the boyfriend. Maybe she only used the term for simplicity’s sake, as “one of the guys I’m sleeping with” was too clunky and might have detracted from her point—which, by the way, couldn’t have been farther off the mark. I did not make her the banana boat because I felt bad. I made her the boat because I wanted her to feel bad. I might have raised my hand and offered my own point of view if I hadn’t committed to keeping our relationship a secret.
On and on she went. “He was so sweet,” she said. “You should have seen the way he scrounged around his kitchen, looking for any food he had.” Her eyes communicated primarily with the women in the class, but the men looked equally as interested. “It was really just a mess of chocolate and banana, but he was so proud that he made me close my eyes to taste it.” She sighed. “The cutest part of all, he pulled an extra fork from his back pocket, his own fork, so we could eat it together on the couch.” At this point, Laurel pretended to pull something from her own back pocket to really bring me to life. “He told me that the way to a woman’s heart is through her sweet tooth.” She put her hands on her hips and shook her head, recalling the moment I’d long since forgotten.
The women in class oohed and aahed. The guys stared at Laurel, wishing they were the boyfriend, while I cringed, wishing I were not. For one thing, I didn’t enjoy my private actions being subject to public analysis. Second, had I known I held the status of “the boyfriend,” I wouldn’t have gotten myself another date for Saturday night.
“How much really happened here? If you asked my boyfriend, he’d probably tell you, ‘Nothing. I got some chocolate, melted it, and ate it.’” She used a fake male voice, a voice she’s used to imitate me when I say something she thinks is boorish. “When you look at it that way, it was just an ordinary evening. But if you look at it my way, you see a magical, defining moment between two people.” She walked up and down the rows of chairs as she spoke, playing with her necklace, making her way toward the back corner of the room—toward me. “A banana boat to some”—she knocked on my desk—“an expression of love to others.” As she made her way back toward front and center, she added, “You know, the banana boat scene might find its way into one of my movies one day because it was so perfect.”
Everyone murmured in agreement.
I rolled my eyes, although secretly, I couldn’t help but think that Laurel had made me sound pretty good. One day, I’d simply made a solid snack; the next, I was a knight in shining armor. I felt proud. I sat up a little taller at my desk. I tried to not let the reality that the knight was slated to step out with another woman that Saturday ruin the moment.
Don whispered, “You’re the boyfriend, ain’t ya?”
“I’m actually not sure,” I whispered back.
“I saw the way she knocked on your desk.” He imitated the knock. “You’re the guy.” He announced to the rest of the couples club that I was the boyfriend.
Susan leaned toward me. “That’s good, because you missed the boat on my daughter. She’s dating a rabbi.” She turned toward Helene and added, “They’re going on some kind of outing this weekend. I couldn’t be happier.”
“Stop talking,” Don told her. “No one’s interested.”
I didn’t want to admit how interested I was.
Helene was interested, too. She told Susan, “Mazel tov,” and asked the name of the rabbi’s congregation.
Before Susan could open her mouth, Laurel, in her black high heels, took a few steps toward us and waved a hand in the air. “Enough,” she said. “Let’s move on.”
Without another word, we did.
At least, most of us did. My mind remained stuck. Was I the boyfriend? What was the rabbi’s status? Was the making of the banana boat really a sign of love? My conversation with Broc had taken place only weeks ago, yet my plan to take the road less traveled, a path that had seemed so clear and simple at the time, was already muddled. Not that Laurel and I shared any more common ground now than we did at the outset. The problem was that now I cared. I was not okay with caring. I hated caring. I had enough people to care about. History has made clear that caring only leads to concern and concern only leads to coronaries. Not to mention, how much could Laurel care about me given that she wasn’t coming to my dinner and was possibly still sleeping with the rabbi?
As I took Laurel for egg rolls after class, my head was awash in worst-case scenarios, most of which involved me as an old man, a stone’s throw from a cadaver, alone and broke after having been a faithful husband to a dysfunctional Jewish convert who over the years devolved into a hussy and finally upped and left when the fragrance business went bad.
Even after we arrived at the 3 Woos, I could only semi-participate in the conversatio
n with Janet about whether her parents should expand their menu in order to expand their customer base. Given that we were, again, the only customers, I told Janet that menu expansion seemed like a decent idea. “So does a little re-branding.”
Laurel said, “David’s in marketing, he might be able to help.” Janet clapped her hands. “Can I pick your brain in exchange for free egg roll and a dish of our new offering, pad thai?”
“My brain is your brain,” I told her, though I didn’t mention that it was functioning at half-throttle since I was now wondering how I’d gotten involved with a woman who was also sleeping with a rabbi who was also, apparently, sleeping with Susan’s daughter. Instead, I told Janet that she was welcome to come to my office any afternoon for a consult. “Maybe we could play with a logo,” I told her. I added, as I entertained the possibility of Laurel, the rabbi, and Susan’s daughter all sleeping together on the downward dog retreat, “I’ll answer your questions free of charge.”
“My parents are too proud to accept freebies, Chuckerman,” Janet informed me. And so, while I considered sleeping with Share and maybe even Bailey on Saturday night to even the score against Laurel and the rabbi, we compromised. I gave Janet my business card and cash for the egg rolls, but I took a container of pad thai home with me, on the house.
I ate the pad thai four nights later, after my dinner with Bailey and Share. After I returned to my apartment around midnight, earlier than I’d expected. Hungrier than I’d expected. More anxious for Laurel’s return than expected.
Once again, unable to sleep, I padded in my pajamas to my almost-empty fridge. I grabbed the pad thai. I took it to my window chair and took a load off while my mind processed the events of the evening. An evening that had singlehandedly shifted my POV on Share, banana boats, Laurel, and possibly my life.
Chuckerman Makes a Movie Page 19