Shopgirl

by STEVE MARTIN

  All points of view are duly expressed, with nothing new forthcoming, but with nods and asides and overlaps. This rapid exchange gives the appearance of an interesting conversation but one whose actual content is flat, dull, and drunken. That is, until Mirabelle speaks. Mirabelle, sober as an angel, fearlessly breaks into the chatter midstream:

  “I think for a lie to be effective, it must have three essential qualities.”

  The booming voices of the men fade and the trebles of the women trail off. Ray Porter quietly worries inside.

  “And what are those?” says a voice.

  “First, it must be partially true. Second, it must make the hearer feel sorry for you, and third, it must be embarrassing to tell,” says Mirabelle.

  “Go on,” the room implies.

  “It must be partially true to be believable. If you arouse sympathy you’re much more likely to get what you want, and if it’s embarrassing to tell, you’re less likely to be questioned.”

  As an example, Mirabelle breaks down her lie to Mr. Agasa. She explains that the partially true part is that she did sometimes need to go to the doctor. She then made him feel sorry for her because she was in pain, then she embarrassed herself by having to explain it was a gynecological problem.

  The agile minds in the room click open the brain files and store this analysis away for future use. Ray Porter, meanwhile, is tilted momentarily one centimeter off axis and for the first time in almost a year wonders if it is not he, but Mirabelle, who is determining the exact nature and character of their relationship.

  They don’t make love that night, or for a while, but within a month everything resumes, and the letter and its dark information is mentioned only one more time, ever: Mirabelle tells Ray that if something similar happens again, it is better left unsaid. But the sandy foundation of their relationship has been eroded. It has been eroded by the unmentionable being mentioned; their silent agreement not to discuss Ray’s devotion or dedication has been broken.

  Mirabelle no longer knows what she believes about her relationship with Mr. Ray Porter. She no longer asks herself questions about it; she simply resides in it. Ray continues to see her and make love to her, with their erotic interest never waning, not even one pheromone. He pays off her credit card debt, which had whopped up to over twelve thousand dollars. Months later, he pays off her slowly accruing student loan, which has recently crossed the forty-thousand-dollar mark. He replaces her collapsing truck with a newer one. These gifts, though he doesn’t know it, are given so that she will be all right after he leaves her.

  He continues his quest elsewhere for a single appropriate love with occasional dates, road trips, and flirtations, but he continues to care about Mirabelle in a way he cannot explain. His love for her is not the crazy love he expects to feel, the swinging delirious rhapsody that he has promised himself. This love is of a different kind, and he searches his mind for its definition. Meanwhile, he maintains a belief that their relationship can go on undisturbed until the absolute right woman comes along, and then he will calmly explain the circumstance to Mirabelle and she will see clearly how well he has handled everything, and wish him well, and congratulate him on his reasonable thinking.

  L.A.

  “I’LL HAVE A HOT DOG,” says Mirabelle. It must be noted that this is not an ordinary hot dog but a Beverly Hills hot dog with none of the unspeakable ingredients of a carnival hot dog. So Mirabelle is not violating the purity of the tender blood flowing under her dewy skin. Lisa, on the other hand, orders a salad that fulfills her personal view of the two main qualities of diet food: it looks ugly and tastes bad. She has not allowed that some foods, perfectly low in fat, can actually taste good. She saves ordering normal food, food that might not be so dietary, for those times when a man is watching, hoping to come off as a vixen who never gains an ounce. This is the importance of dating for Lisa; without it, she would wither away, barely able to lift a spoonload of sliced carrots.

  Lisa and Mirabelle sit outside as usual, under the California sun on a perfect eighty-degree July day.

  “How’s your love life?” Lisa knows that her real inquiry is twenty questions away on her list, and she’d better start circling the topic early.

  “It’s fine.”

  “He doesn’t live here, right?”

  “He lives in Seattle.”

  “That must be hard.”

  “It’s okay, we get to see each other once, sometimes twice a week, sometimes more or less.” Then Mirabelle, oblivious to undercurrents and thinking that Lisa might have an interest outside Rodeo Drive, says, “Have you ever read Idols of Perversity?”

  This question passes through Lisa like a cosmic ray: no effect. Mirabelle then does a neat and tricky little analysis of her favorite book while Lisa handles her disinterest by staring in Mirabelle’s face and dreaming of makeup. As Mirabelle winds down, and as her break recedes into the land of lost lunch hours, Lisa pushes hard.

  “When do you get to see him next . . . ?”

  Mirabelle never, ever would betray any personal information about Ray Porter, even his name, though in this case the fully briefed Lisa already knows it. But in her excitement she does tell Lisa that she will see him next week: “we’re going to the Ruscha opening at Reynaldo gallery.” Mirabelle assumes Lisa will be there already, as no one who attends anything ever at the Reynaldo gallery would miss the next event. In a clear instant, Lisa sees herself wrangle Ray away from Mirabelle and, with a simple toss of her lasso, utterly make him hers.

  Collapse

  RAY PORTER’S QUEST FOR THE right woman is not going well because he is living in the wrong eternal city. He is still in the city of his youth, where women in their twenties frolic like bunnies, and speak in high tones, and cajole him and panic him. He still believes that here he will find a china-skinned intellectual who will dazzle him with a wild laugh and a sense of life.

  A bridge is being built in his subconscious. The bridge is to span from this eternal city to a very different eternal city. This new city is where his true heart will live, a heart that bears the marks of his experience, that knows how and whom to love. But the bridge is several powerful and painful experiences away from being finished, and right now he sits in his Seattle house with a woman he has no idea he isn’t interested in.

  Christie Richards is thirty-five and a fashion designer of some local note. She has a saucy body that given the right astrological moment and an exactly measured dose of Cabernet can arouse Ray’s memory of adolescent backseat conquests. And as Christie sits across from him at his dinner for two, which has been prepared and delivered to the candlelit table by a nearly invisible chef, all the essential ingredients of lust converge on him. As he rotates her body in his mind so he can see it from all sides, Christie drones on about Seattle fashion.

  “ . . . but I want windows, because without windows you’re a rack designer. I have an overweight design that sells well, but no store is going to put an overweight design in their window, they want to bury them in the basement. . . . ” And she talks on and on, sometimes mentioning a recognizable fashion name as she continues to drink and pour, drink and pour, finally coming to the dregs of the Cabernet, with Ray, hiding his enthusiasm for getting her steaming drunk, casually opening another bottle and filling her glass.

  But by the end of dinner, Christie starts talking with a slur, a big slur, and Ray begins to wonder if he has perhaps shoveled a few too many drinks her way. He takes her outside for some refrigerated Seattle air, which he thinks will do her good. It does her good, but not him, as now she is energized with oxygen and ready to forgo the foreplay, which at this point Ray Porter needs desperately if he is going to do what a man’s gotta do.

  She then drags him to his bedroom, which she has been in before, but only on a polite-host guided tour. The lights are already at dim and she kneels down before him and tugs at his belt buckle with the words, “I’m gonna suck your dick.”

  “Well, all right,” thinks Ray. Christie fumbles unsuccessfu
lly with the incredibly simple pants hook, then falls flat on her face with a kerplunk. On his wheat-colored carpet, she looks like a drunken Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, except instead of the longing look toward the homestead, she is trying to focus her eyes on anything that will stay still. She brings her face to within one foot of the bed leg and gamely crosses and uncrosses her eyes, hoping to bring the swirling images into one.

  Ray knows he is in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if it is his own house. He knows he shouldn’t be doing this, he knows that the days of these parenthetical women appearing in his life sentence are coming to a close. He helps her up and walks her down the hallway to the living room, where he props her on the sofa, shoveling pillows under both her arms so she won’t fall over. He looks into her eyes and says dumbly, “Can you drive?” He doesn’t really say this to find out if she can drive, but to let her know it is time to go home. She, knowing her limits, shakes her head “no,” although Ray isn’t sure if she means no, or if she can no longer hold up her head.

  Ray can drive her home but there is the car problem. Her car is parked outside, and if he drives her home there will be the morning headache of taxicabs and meeting times.

  “You can stay here in the guest bedroom.”

  One of Christie’s eyelids droops lazily. “I want to stay with you.”

  Ray is not amused with her. He firmly says no and takes her to the spare bedroom. She, stunned, sees the door close on her. Then she turns, sees the bed and falls on it face first.

  Ray Porter sinks into his thousand-dollar sheets as if he were sliding into heaven. He is alone and happy about it, but he does worry that Christie will feel her way along the hallway and find him. His usual speedy calculations slow to molasses, and big thick questions blob their way down his thought tunnel: How long does this go on? Why am I alone?

  Ray is asleep, and dreaming of knocking. Knocking? He wakes at the moment of deepest third-stage slumber, so groggy that only one of his senses—his hearing—is functioning. He lies there, wondering if there is a burglar in the house. He pulls himself out of bed and walks down the hall, brave only because he quickly computes that the odds of there actually being a burglar are slim. He can hear the noise in the distance . . . is it down the street? There is construction down the street; would they be working at 3 a.m.? He hears it again, but this time realizes it is someone knocking on his front door.

  He pulls open the door and there is Christie, standing fully dressed, except she has no shoes.

  “My shoes are in your backyard.”

  The only logical scenario is so illogical that he does not ask her what happened. She must have gone to the backyard, slipped off her shoes, decided to leave, left the house forgetting her car keys and been forced to knock on the door rather than sleep outside, or something like that. He gets the shoes, bundles up Christie, who is underdressed for the chilly night, puts her in his car, and drives her the eleven miles to her home.

  The next day, he sends her flowers.

  Mirabelle puts on her pink argyle sweater and her pastel plaid short skirt to wear to the 5 p.m. Ruscha opening, and when she exits her car in the sheltered Beverly Hills parking lot, she looks like a rainbow refracted in the spray of a lawn sprinkler. At the far end of the lot, a car is being locked and a man steps away from it. In silhouette, he files a paper in his billfold. His suit tapers at the waist and his hair falls over his forehead. He starts to walk away, but Mirabelle is illuminated by the last remaining rays of yellow sunlight that stray into the garage, and she catches his eye.

  Then he says, “Mirabelle?”

  Mirabelle stops. “Yes?”

  “It’s me, Jeremy.”

  He approaches her at an angle, the light now raking across his face, and she can finally see him. Although he is the same person, this new Jeremy has nothing to do with the old Jeremy. It would take three Old Jeremys to trade in for one New Jeremy, as the New Jeremy is the sleeker, better model, with many desirable features.

  “It’s so nice to see you again,” he says.

  So nice to see you again? Mirabelle thinks, “What is he talking about?” This is not Jeremy lingo. Is she supposed to say “so nice to see you again” back? It isn’t particularly nice to see him again, but it isn’t unpleasant either, and she is curious about him. But before she decides what to do, Jeremy casually unbuttons his one-button suit, leans forward, and kisses a continental hello on one of her cheeks.

  “Are you going to the opening?”

  “Yes, I am,” says Mirabelle.

  “I didn’t know if I’d make it back to town before it closes, so I wanted to see it tonight. Can I walk with you?”

  Mirabelle nods, surveying Jeremy’s sumptuous leather shoes and the precise fall of his pant legs draping over them. She wonders what happened.

  What happened was this. Jeremy’s three months on the road, which expanded into a year of multiple trips eastward, not only were a financial success, relatively, but were a success of another kind: Jeremy evolved from ape to man. After touring with Age for only a couple of weeks, Jeremy was invited to stay with them on their bus. After a gig, the bus would leave at around 1 a.m. and be driven three hundred miles or so to the next stop. Usually everyone on the bus would stay up a couple of hours, then retire to individual sleeping bunks with draw curtains that recalled a 1940s train, minus Ingrid Bergman. Inside the bunks were headphone jacks that plugged into a central sound system. One of Age’s members was a Buddhist, new enough to the discipline that he went to sleep every night listening to audiotapes of books on Buddhism and meditation. Jeremy would plug in because he was bored. At first, he was sickened that he was listening to spoken-word tapes and wind chimes, but soon, after one particular meditation provoked a surreal vision in which he toured his bedroom at age four, the nightly routine became the high point of his evening and he began to listen, and listen intently. But more important, as the Buddhism tapes dwindled, new tapes from shopping mall bookstores were purchased from the same shelves that stocked the now exhausted supply of Buddhist recordings, and Jeremy was suddenly plugged into the entire current canon of self-help.

  These books, listened to in the hypnotic rolling darkness of his Greyhound bunk, taught Jeremy about the Self, inner and outer, Jungian archetypes, the male journey and rites of passage, the female journey and rites of passage, the care of the soul, and Tantric sex. He got a heavy dose of relationship books, beginning with Men Are from Mars . . . and ending with a parody book called Loving Someone Dumber Than You (Jeremy identifying with the “you” and not the “dumber”). As the bus rolled on through Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Nevada, under a million stars undimmed by city lights, Jeremy had his consciousness raised and therefore his life altered, by accident.

  They walk across Santa Monica Boulevard and Jeremy explains the success of his business and how he is back in L.A. looking for a place to set up larger manufacturing quarters for Doggone Amplifiers. As he walks with her, he picks up her hand and says, “You look great; you really do look great.”

  This is what Lisa sees as she zeros in on them from fifty yards the other side of the Reynaldo Gallery: a man in a well-cut new suit holding Mirabelle’s hand as they walk up Bedford Drive. And she assumes Jeremy is Mr. Ray Porter.

  “Are you here alone?” Jeremy asks Mirabelle.

  “I’m meeting a friend.”

  “Travel has left me friendless in L.A.,” says Jeremy as he opens the door for her and escorts her in. Lisa slips in behind them and statistically becomes, at the already crowded party, the only woman there with a lavender perfumed cunt.

  Five o’clock is early for a party, but not in L.A. where the average wake-up call is 7 a.m. Dinners are normally at 7:30 on the dot, which is perfect for a jet-lagged New Yorker who arrives and is eating at 10:30 his time. So this party is just starting to fill up, and many of the familiar faces are there. Artist/hero is there, with a date this time, but he remembers Mirabelle and calls her over. Jeremy separates from her and goes to t
he bar for a newly discovered favorite, soda water, cranberry juice, and vodka. Lisa views this as Primetime and sidles next to him, overhears his order, and asks for the same thing. She waits till the drinks are delivered, then moves her aromatic twat within striking distance.

  “Oh my God, I’ve never seen anyone else order one of these,” says Lisa.

  And she is off and running. She laughs at everything Jeremy says, which is difficult because Jeremy is not by nature a funny person. But Lisa knows that finding him funny is essential to her conquest of him, and she therefore finds herself chuckling even at his most innocuous utterances, including several observations about the current political scene. When she realizes these comments are serious, Lisa has to abort a grin midway and quickly twist her face into her version of profound concentration. Her assault continues, cajoling, poking him a couple of times, coyly dipping her tongue in her drink. Then she looks over at Mirabelle and says how insulting it must be for Jeremy to have her chatting up some other guy when the one she came in with is so attractive. “I have a secret,” she says. “I know who you are. I’m Lisa by the way.”

  Since we all live in our own worlds, Jeremy assumes that word of his exploits and success with amplifiers has reached the coast. He loves that an attractive redhead has been informed of his savvy entrepreneurship, so when she says do you wanna meet later for a drink, he glances over at Mirabelle––which reinforces Lisa’s erroneous belief––feeling unexpected regret that it was not she who had done the asking. But he gives Lisa a fact-finding once-over, and says yes.