Heart's Tempo

by C. L. Ryder

  “Why’d you give it up, Winny?”

  Winny was sipping from her mug and looked up at me, her ocean blue eyes flashing like light on rippling water.

  “Your plans,” I continued, “the way you talk about it. Your designs.” I motioned with my hand at the loft. “I mean, I’ve heard your music. You’re an amazing singer, but somehow it just doesn’t add up. From what I can gather, you’re someone who values authentic self-expression. That’s what I feel by looking at your place. You designed it. But your music…I’m having a hard time believing the same person wrote a song called ‘It’s Lit With U Bae’.”

  She smiled, though it was a small, knowing smile and not the typical glowing grin that she had. “Singing is a passion of mine too,” she said. “I’ve played the guitar since I was a little kid, and my mom is a singer too. You might've read that one on my Wikipedia,” she added with a chuckle.

  I waited for her to expand on her reasons for giving up architecture for her singing career, to tell me a passionate story about how she had dreamed of being on stage since she was young—something with the same enthusiasm she had when she told me about her architecture and interior design goals, but she didn't. Instead I saw a slight change on her face, the same one I had seen on the night of the wedding. It was…sadness? I really couldn’t tell, but it made me even more curious about her reasons. She didn’t seem like she wanted to answer, and I felt like I already was getting a bit too personal by having asked her that question, so I kept my mouth shut.

  The thing was, even though I barely knew her, Winny didn’t put off any kind of air of enjoying fame or wealth. She seemed to want simple things in life, and getting rich wasn’t really a factor because I was pretty sure her family was already well off. I had looked up her dad’s Wikipedia too, and he had been in quite a number of big movies back in the seventies and eighties before he died.

  “So what about you?” she asked, “I looked at the work on your website. I’m surprised you’re not working for some place like…like Homeowners Mag or LivingStyle.”

  It was my turn to give the knowing smile with a tinge of sadness. “I interviewed with Homeowners Mag. They rejected me yesterday.”

  “Ouch. Sorry. Your work is awesome though. What happened?”

  “They said I didn’t have enough professional experience,” I said.

  “Seriously? But your work is already at a professional level.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. Well. I gotta keep working the wedding gigs while trying to find some way to fit in some freelancing jobs or an internship or something.”

  Winny lit up suddenly, thunking her mug onto the table so hard that a bit of tea jumped out. She pointed at me. “You can shoot my apartment. I’ll pay you for the prints, and you can put that on your resume.”

  “What? No. Are you serious?”

  “Totally serious. I mean, it’s just one gig but it’s a start.”

  I thought about it for a moment. It wouldn't get me a job, but she was right—it was a start, and having a gig under a big name like hers would be a pretty damn good one. “Okay,” I said gratefully, “I’ll do it.”

  “Alright.” She grinned that sparkling grin that made me feel all funny inside, like I had just been dropped from one of those carnival rides. She stuck out her hand, and I gripped it. Her touch was warm and soft, and her handshake was firm. “Pleasure doing business with you, Ms. Golden.”

  I laughed. “Thank you, Winny. I honestly don’t know what to say. I mean really, you don’t need to do this for me. I’m just some girl.”

  Her grin turned down to a smile, and she looked at me in a way that lit up my heart like I had never felt before. “Well, because I like you, Lily,” she said.

  If her grin and the way she looked at me made me feel like I was on a roller coaster, those words made me feel like I was free falling from an airplane.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been able to share my love of this stuff with anyone,” she went on. “And plus, I just like talking with you.”

  We made plans to meet again the following Monday for the photo shoot, and after we finished another round of tea, Winny drove me back to my car at Mr. Nice. I spent the drive home in a kind of daze. She and I were going to see each other again.

  I was doing my best not to let what I felt for Winny get out of hand, but it was difficult. Not only was she beautiful and charming, I liked talking with her too, and found myself wishing we could talk even more. I could’ve just chalked up the experience to being the whim of an eccentric celebrity, that maybe come Monday she will have already forgotten about our meeting and agreement, but I had thought the same thing about today and was proven wrong. Plus, Winny had given me her personal cell phone number. That might’ve been the most mind-boggling thing about it all. She could’ve given me the number of her manager or someone like that, but she gave me her direct personal phone number. For someone in her position, that was huge.

  Why did she have to be straight? Why did she have to have a boyfriend?

  And, as I pulled onto the evening bumper to bumper traffic on the 101 North, a thought occurred to me. It was something that had nagged at me while I was at her place, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. The Internet said she was in a relationship with the actor Frank White, but I hadn’t seen a single photo of him, or the two of them together in her entire apartment.

  There was the possibility it was a design choice, given how meticulously she had done the renovation and interior design of the loft, but I did see other photos around—old snapshots of her as a kid with her parents, a black and white photo of her father, a recent photo of her and her mother. I wasn’t too familiar with actors, but I had looked up Frank White’s Wikipedia too, and recognized him immediately as having been in the latest Judd Apatow comedy that I had watched with Alex a couple weeks ago. I definitely had not seen his photo around the place, let alone any photos of the two of them.

  I thought about this while I was stuck in traffic, but eventually it shifted to the back of my mind as I began to plan out what I was going to do to shoot Winny’s apartment, and if we would see each other again once the gig was completed.

  “Giiiiirl,” Alex said. I sat in my computer chair eating an In-N-Out cheeseburger while Alex sat on the floor, munching on fries. Once I got home I called him and told him what had happened, and he insisted on coming over to talk about it. “I’m telling you, Lily. Winny Heart is into you.” He seemed to be completely convinced, though he could get that way even about things he was obviously wrong about.

  “Okay, but even if she wasn’t dating someone, that doesn’t mean that she’s into me. I think there’s a bigger chance of her being straight and just genuinely liking me as a friend.” The thought of a world famous pop star liking me as a friend was still a strange idea to me, no matter how resistant I was to being star struck.

  “You have her number, right? Why don’t you text her?”

  “Text? I’m not going to text her, Alex. I’m not going to bother the girl. She’s a busy person.”

  “She gave you her personal cell phone number, Lily. Personal. Number. Want some fries? I can’t finish these.” He held them out to me.

  I took some and put them on my plate. “So you’re saying she gave me her number because she wants me to text her.”

  “I’d say so. I mean, otherwise she could’ve just gotten your number and said, ‘I’ll be in contact,’ or something like that.”

  “I did give her my number too,” I said absently.

  Alex stood up threw away the empty In-N-Out bag in the trash can. “Anyway, I think you should text her. Or call her. Something, anything. You’ll see. In fact, you know what? I bet you she’s going to ask you to meet up with her again before your little photo shoot. And I bet you it’ll be something romantic.” He stretched the word out like he was dangling it over my head.

  “I doubt that. She’s got a recording session this whole weekend anyway,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I bet you,
Lily. I bet you. I’m gonna go get some drinks. You want to go?”

  I shook my head. “I need some time to digest all of what’s happened,” I said.

  “Alright. Don’t give in to temptation and touch yourself to her swimsuit photos. Because she has them, I Googled it.”

  I laughed. “Go get drunk.”

  I have to admit, after Alex had mentioned the swimsuit photos I did have a moment of temptation to check them out myself, but I resisted. Instead, I took a shower and went to stand out on my tiny patio and enjoy the warm summer night air. The start of season always brought on waves of nostalgia for me, probably because it was steeped in memories of finishing classes at Art Center and the crazy all-night workloads that came with them. Resting my arms on the patio fence, I drew in a deep breath of warm air that carried the aroma of grilled onions, carne asada, and air pollution as a police siren wailed in the distance.

  I took my cell phone out of my pocket and stared at it, thinking about what Alex had said about texting Winny. Honestly, I really wanted to talk to her, but I was afraid. Afraid that the girl was just a nice, trusting person, and that she had given me her number so we could be in contact about the photo shoot and not so that I could text her at ten at night.

  I opened up my address book and then navigated to “Winny Heart”, still shocked that I even had her name in my cell phone. I opened up the text message box and hovered my fingers over the keypad, wondering what I’d even say if I were to text her. Just then, my phone vibrated and chimed, and a message flashed on the screen. I only got a flash of the sender’s name, because the phone flew out of my hands as I jumped in surprise.

  “Shit,” I hissed, looking over the edge of the patio and down into the bushes a story below. My heart was beating fast, but not because I had just ejected my phone, but because of who I could’ve sworn the text was from. No way, I thought, as I ran through the apartment, pulled on my shoes and went outside. I ran down the stairs and out the gate to the street, and then fumbled around in the bushes below my apartment window as a guy walking his dog stared at me. I found the phone, the edges scuffed but nothing broken, and turned on the screen.

  My heart jumped, hard. My eyes weren’t playing tricks on me—the text was from Winny.

  I laughed when I read it. We hadn’t made an official bet, but I felt like I owed Alex dinner.

  “Hey Lily. You busy tomorrow night?”

  Five

  The next evening, I drove out to Winny’s house where we had arranged to meet and carpool together to a restaurant that she said she really wanted to show me. We drove in her Prius and went west from her place towards Beverly Hills and into LA territory that I was completely unfamiliar with.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea,” she said when she noticed me staring wide eyed at the Ferrari dealerships and luxury fashion stores we drove past, “I don’t really come to areas like this if I don’t have to. This restaurant, I’ve always admired for their interior design. And the building was done by Phillip James Dickson, one of my idols.”

  I was admittedly unfamiliar with the names of architects or even interior designers, and I told her that I had no clue who that was but I trusted her. She only smiled. On the radio, which she had tuned to a satellite station playing songs from the seventies, a song by Van Morrison started to play—“Moon Dance”, I think it was—and Winny sang along. I was surprised by how her voice sounded. She had that smooth quality I heard in her pop music, but there was a distinct difference. It was looser now, freer sounding, and I realized that this was probably her normal singing voice, not the one that her producers told her to use because it was what would be popular with the fans and critics. I found my pulse picking up as it seemed to do so often around her, and a little thrill of excitement pulsed through my body and out to my fingertips.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off of her as she sang that song, and I wondered if Winny had her own music—not the music made for her but music she made for herself. When the song ended, I asked her, and she laughed.

  “Hey, I never said that I wasn’t the one who wrote ‘Lit With U Bae’,” she said.

  I grinned. “There’s no way I’m believing you were the one who wrote that. I refuse.”

  “Okay, you got me. Though it’s not a big secret or anything, anyone who looks can find out who produced all my tracks.”

  She told me that she did have her own songs, and that before she became a pop singer she used to write them often for her guitar. They were more folk songs, she told me, like the Van Morrison one we had just heard.

  “Do you still write them?” I asked.

  “Not so much anymore,” she said, in a voice that sounded a bit distant.

  I was curious. Every time I had brought up her music, I always seemed to detect some hint of sadness, or maybe it was regret, in her voice. I was going to drop the topic but she continued. “I used to write them for my mom. She’s a singer too, I think I told you that.”

  “She was the one who inspired you to become a singer, right?”

  Winny’s crinkled up her face like she had just smelled something offensive. “Inspired isn’t the word I would choose,” she said. It was the first time I had seen her react that way. She had always given off warmth, a smile hardly ever far from her lips. “But she definitely was a huge factor in me becoming a singer.” I could hear tension in her voice.

  I wished I hadn’t said anything, internally kicking myself and swearing to forget the Wikipedia article’s half-truths. I dropped the subject and Winny seemed to be lost in thought for a little while before apologizing. When the tension on her face faded to a smile, I immediately relaxed again. That damn smile of hers, it melted me completely and I wondered how long I would be able to contain my feelings before they got out of control.

  I had dropped the topic, but my curiosity was even stronger now, and it seemed to me now that Winny’s career as a pop singer might not have been entirely of her own choosing. I wanted to ask her about it, but it seemed that there was pain there, and that she would need to bring it up herself when she wanted to talk about it.

  The restaurant was up in the hills, and we drove up a steep road that was surrounded on both sides by thick trees. She turned off this road onto a street that was lined with bamboo forest, and as we continued up I could just make out the warm glow of the restaurant in the fading light of the evening. When we emerged from the forest, driving up to the restaurant’s valet attendant, I again was wowed by the incredible design of the place. It was like a glowing glass box sitting in the middle of nature. Not real nature, of course— everything around us was carefully manicured and designed—but it had that feeling. The building was constructed almost entirely of glass, and in the inside I could see patrons dining, and what looked like a small garden.

  We left the car with the valet attendant, and Winny and I walked up the wooden walkway leading up to the place, lined with low hanging garden lamps. There was a faint chuckle of water in a stream nearby, and the low murmur and clinking of dining from the inside. We were side by side as we walked, and I had the overwhelming urge to take her hand, but of course I didn’t. This whole thing just felt so damn…romantic.

  “What do you think?” she asked, jerking me out of my thoughts.

  I shook my head. “Amazing. Seriously. Up until now, I’ve only ever been able to see places like this in magazines. God, I’d love to shoot places like this someday.”

  When we reached the front of the restaurant, a man in a grey suit that looked more expensive than everything in my apartment combined opened the glass door for us. “Ms. Heart, Ms. Golden, welcome. Your table is prepared, if you’d please follow me.”

  I was surprised to hear my name. The inside’s design reminded me of Winny’s apartment—the center was open and had a stream of water running through, with bamboo and other greenery arranged in a sort of garden. All around this center garden were the dining tables, and the host led us to our table, which was in a private section inside the garden itself. I was surpr
ised at how quiet this area was, despite still being inside the restaurant, and I could hardly hear the bustle. We sat down at our table, and the suited host was replaced by another suited waiter, who placed leather-bound menus on the table in front of us. To be honest, I was feeling a little overwhelmed. When she had asked if I was doing anything for dinner I was expecting we’d check out another place in the city—a fancy place for my standards sure, but nothing this fancy.

  “She’s into you!” Alex’s voice shouted in my head. “I told you she’d take you somewhere romantic!” If he were here I knew he would be kicking my foot under the table and nudging me in the ribs.

  “Do you like wine?” Winny asked.

  “Uh, yeah. I guess,” I said. I didn’t know anything about wine.

  “They’ve got a really awesome beer selection here too,” she offered.

  “Beer sounds good.”

  The waiter showed the beer menu filled with a selection of craft beers that were all foreign to me. I selected an IPA, and Winny ordered the same. The beers came, and we both sipped at them quietly as we looked at the menu. I decided to keep it simple and order the veal shanks in red wine reduction, and Winny ordered fresh caught swordfish with garlic truffle mashed potatoes.