Shopgirl

by STEVE MARTIN

  Lisa laughs and flirts with him for another half hour then ups the stakes.

  “Can you leave now?” she asks.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “What about Mirabelle?” says Lisa, feigning concern for another person.

  “I do what I want,” replies Jeremy, never thinking to mention that they are not a couple.

  This comment releases a flood of estrogen into Lisa’s bloodstream and has her dreaming of sex, babies, and a home in the valley.

  Jeremy doesn’t understand Lisa’s aggressiveness but he doesn’t need to. And neither does his recently elevated consciousness. There is no way the tranquil waters in which his brain floats so serenely can also calm two testicles of an unattached twenty-seven-year-old male.

  “Let me say good-bye to her.”

  Lisa almost, but not quite, feels embarrassed. “Okay, but I’ll wait outside.”

  At her apartment, which has been cleared of roommates by prearrangement, Jeremy gets the works from Lisa. He is shown the illustrated Kama Sutra of Lisa Cramer, cosmetics girl first class, with additional notes contributed by a dozen How to Fuck books, two radio psychologists, the gossip of two highly sexed girlfriends, articles in Cosmo, and an incredible instinct for arousing a man’s superficial interest. He is slowly stripped and stripped for, he is levitated with oral hijinks, massaged and toyed with, rolled backward and masturbated, and finally finished off with a cosmic ejaculation while Lisa deep-breathes and chants. Afterward, Lisa’s belief that she has just blasted the head off Ray Porter is reinforced when she asks if she is better than Mirabelle, and Jeremy, who has no idea that he is not Ray Porter, has no choice but to nod yes. After a customary but brief period of forced cuddling, Jeremy rolls out of her apartment with Lisa’s last words being, “Call me.”

  While Lisa thinks she is giving him the works, Ray Porter arrives at the art party, scoops up Mirabelle, and takes her to dinner, where their familiar and bottomless lust asserts itself. Driving to his house, he reaches under the strap of her seat belt and glides his hand across her sweater, where he feels the spongy resilience of her breasts. At his house, they are destined to make love but a conversation starts instead. A deadly, hurtful conversation that begins by Ray Porter casually reasserting his independence, talking to her like a friend who is in the know, as if she were his partner in finding someone else.

  “I was thinking of selling the house here, getting an apartment in New York. I love it there. Every time I land I get a rush. There’s a four bedroom I like that a friend is selling, big enough in case I ever meet someone.”

  He says it, and there is a message in it, but its cruelty is not intended.

  Mirabelle tires. The speech, delivered as though it were an aside, drains her of momentum. Her arms dangle to her sides, and she drops into a chair. She knows this, she knows everything already, she has heard this. Why does he have to reiterate? To remind her that this is nothing?

  She looks up at him and asks him a horrible question. “So are you just biding your time with me?”

  The answer is awful, and Ray doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say anything at all, just sits next to her. Mirabelle’s mind blackens. The blackness is not a thought, but if it could be pressed into a thought, if a chemical from a dropper could be dripped onto it causing its color and essence to become visible, it would take the shape of this sentence: Why does no one want me?

  He pulls her into him, her forehead on his shoulder. He knows that he loves her, but he cannot figure out in what way.

  So she sits there, her short fingernails digging into him, trying to hold on to something that will keep her together, that will keep her from flying apart in all directions. As she clutches him, she feels herself sinking into a cold dark sea and there seems no way out of it, ever. The proximity of the man she has identified as her salvation makes it worse. He takes her to the bed and she lies face down on the covers and he rests his hand on the small of her back, occasionally stroking her. He tells her that she is beautiful, but Mirabelle cannot align this thought with his rejection of her.

  The next morning, Lisa picks up the ringing phone.

  “Hi. It’s Jeremy.”

  “Who?” says Lisa.

  “Jeremy.”

  “Do I know you?” says Lisa.

  Jeremy jokes, “When do you really know someone.” Getting no laugh, he continues, “Jeremy from last night.”

  Lisa goes through the list of men she spoke to last night. None is named Jeremy, though sometimes men will find her and call her because they think they’ve made eye contact with her when they really haven’t.

  “Refresh me,” Lisa says.

  Jeremy is dumbfounded at the possibility that all his exploits, all his catapulting, could be so quickly forgotten by morning. He continues, “Me, Jeremy. I was at your place last night. We did it.”

  Something all wrong dawns on Lisa, “Oh, Ray!”

  When Jeremy hears “Oh, Ray,” he presumes it is slang or pig Latin or some contemporary expression of elation that has gotten by him. So he says it back: “O, ray!”

  “God, you were great last night,” offers Lisa.

  “O ray,” says Jeremy.

  “What?” says Lisa.

  Jeremy, involved in a conversation he can’t follow, finally asks, “Do you know who I am?”

  “Sure, you’re Ray Porter.”

  “Who?” says Jeremy.

  “Ray Porter, from last night.”

  “Who’s Ray Porter?”

  “You are . . . ,” then she adds, “aren’t you?”

  In the morning after the agony of the night, Ray drives Mirabelle to her car, in time for her to get to work by ten. He watches her walking stiffly away from him, overdressed for the morning, bearing her anguish so solitarily. He wonders if it will be the last time he will ever see her.

  She puts on her driving glasses and starts up her new-for-her Explorer. She waves a small-fingered good-bye to Ray, and he notices her diligent concentration on driving as she pulls away.

  She enters Neiman’s, passes the disgraced Lisa, walks up four flights, and slides into her niche behind the counter. She stands there for the rest of the day, again stunned by an inexplicable world, her movements limited to those that her body has memorized.

  Ray and Mirabelle’s relationship does not collapse that day; it subtly dwindles over the next six months. There are fits and starts, but they can all be graphed on a downward slope. He takes her to dinners, drives her home, hugs her goodnight. Sex is over. Sometimes, she tells him he is wonderful and he presses her closer to him. She accepts a date with a sports equipment rep but she cannot offer him even the little bit required to keep him interested. Ray finally grasps that he is giving her nothing and that he has to think for the both of them and separate from her. He pulls back and she reflexively, protectively, does the same. For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, not depressed exactly, but involved in a mourning that at first she thinks is for Ray but soon realizes is for the loss of her old self.

  She is lying on her bed, day having passed into night without her ever getting up to turn on a lamp. She lights a candle in her darkened bedroom and is held in its tender illumination. Outside, sounds from surrounding apartments transition from dinnertime to TV time to quiet time. Her depression has consumed all of its fuel. She is exhausted from doing nothing to heal herself. As the darkness and solitude surround her, she drifts into communication with her smartest self. She admits that her college days are over, that her excursion into Los Angeles was transitional, and that Ray Porter is a lost cause.

  It is morning, and Ray Porter’s phone rings.

  “Hi, it’s me,” says Mirabelle.

  “Hang up, I’ll call you back.”

  “No, that’s okay,” she says. “Guess what. I’m going to move.” There is a lilt in her voice that Ray is not used to hearing.
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  “From your apartment?” says Ray.

  “To San Francisco.”

  There is a short discussion about why she chose San Francisco, which is unrevealing, and there is no discussion about whether it’s a wise move or not, as Mirabelle’s determination is clear and strong. She makes one small request of Ray that he fulfills: she utilizes Ray’s long chain of pull to land an interview with a gallery in San Francisco––not to be an artist with the gallery, but a receptionist. On Del Rey’s ancient computer, she secures an apartment over the Internet and also makes contact with two potential roommates. Within three weeks she leaves Neiman’s, whispers a good-bye to Los Angeles without looking back, and settles into a small flat in the Presidio district near the Golden Gate Bridge. Ray is surprised by her sudden movement, as she had seemed so frozen.

  Mirabelle still faces difficulties, but Ray finances her move and eases a situation that even with his aid reduces her bank account to a long string of zeros, put the decimal anywhere. Her new job as receptionist re-creates the kind of tedium she endured at the glove counter, but at least she gets to be ambulatory. And the mean age of the customers is lower by twenty years.

  Another plus: the San Francisco arts scene is livelier than the intermittent one in L.A. Every third night there’s something going on somewhere, which she can either attend or pass on and curl up in her own bed. The gallery action puts her in the center of a glut of testosterone. Mirabelle is a ripe, relative virgin, and her romantic life starts badly. At an art opening, she meets an artist named Carlo who courts her for a month, fucks her several times, and leaves her cruelly: she calls him on the phone, he says he is on the other line and that he will call her back, but he never does. Ever. She summarizes and explains this event to herself not by saying that she is yet again unwanted, but that she has learned something about her own decisions. She has learned that her body is precious and it mustn’t be offered carelessly ever again, as it holds a direct connection to her heart. She sheathes herself in a protective envelope of caution and learns never to give away more than is being given to her. The mini-disaster of this brief romance accomplishes something else, too: Mirabelle is able to shift her anger from Ray to Carlo, and Ray is then able to become a friend.

  While she adjusts to San Francisco Mirabelle’s spirits rise and fall, but she is determined to stay positive. Ray keeps in touch by phone and sends small checks her way when he reads the need in her voice. Mirabelle has long given up her instinct to refuse the aid, as she has no choice but to accept it, which she does with sincere humility and graciousness. She also pursues her art with a steady diligence, and her drawings are accepted in several group shows. The small drawing, not even eight inches square, of her lying nude floating in space is shown as being from the collection of Mr. Ray Porter.

  In Mirabelle’s new job, she meets artists and collectors. She is always careful not to promote herself through gallery contacts––her sense of correctness prevents it––but she now enjoys being a relevant person at the openings. She often calls Ray, who immediately calls her back according to plan. One afternoon she announces, “I’m going to an opening tonight and my goal is not to be a wallflower.” Toward the end of each week, she has collected a few stories to report to him: her nights on the scene, who flirted with her, who slighted her. She also monitors the sporadic comings and goings of the vilified Carlo, who popped into one opening with a pregnant girlfriend on his arm, sending the fragile Mirabelle into an angry snit. She tried to get even with him through psychological warfare but couldn’t, because he didn’t care.

  Mirabelle’s stay in San Francisco stretches into several seasons. The frequency of her calls to Ray Porter diminish. She has a few flirtations, conversations really, that never amount to much. But one night, she takes the walk up the stairs of her new flat and notices on the doormat a small, oblong, clumsily wrapped box with an overly large Hallmark card taped to it. Once inside the apartment, she sets the box down on the kitchen table. She feeds the cats, then untapes the ends of the wrapping and inside finds a plain white box, and inside that, a rather cute Swatch watch. She opens the note and reads, “I would like to have dinner with you, Jeremy.” And quickly scribbled below is the usually tacit implication, “my treat!”

  Jeremy has been working around the West Coast for the last six months, during which time he’s made an out-of-proportion six-year psychic leap by funneling the entire contents of the Bodhi Tree bookstore into his brain. He has been commuting to San Francisco ever since he hit the road and now, ready to settle down in L.A. and become a minor lord of amplifiers, he finds himself having to go to Oakland every week on business. Occasionally, Mirabelle’s image floats into his consciousness and hangs there. The image he sees is not from his early pathetic dates with her but from his encounter with her in the parking lot on the night of the art party. Because not until then had he matured enough to recognize her as something beautiful and something worth holding as an object of real desire. He’s found her by calling her old number, then looking up the new number in a reverse-directory on the Internet to find her address.

  Mirabelle calls him at the number scrawled on Jeremy’s note, her memories of the awkward night in her apartment also having been diluted by their short walk to the Reynaldo Gallery, now almost a year ago. A date is set several weeks in the future. When the day arrives, he shows up in a taxi, and from her window, Mirabelle sees him tip the driver several generous bucks. They walk to a local restaurant where, upon approaching the hostess, Jeremy announces, “Table for two, Mr. Kraft.” Mirabelle has forgotten his name is Kraft but is aware that this is only the second man in her life who has taken her to a restaurant where a table has been reserved for them.

  Mirabelle does most of the talking, and Jeremy listens intently without saying much. Later, Mirabelle will remember the dinner as the time she first found him to be very interesting.

  On the walk home, as they warm up to each other and the night, Mirabelle recites the litany of reasons for her move, leaving out the most important one, and gets down to a final summation:

  “I’m fixing myself.”

  “I’m fixing myself, too,” says Jeremy.

  And they know they will forever have something to talk about.

  While Jeremy dates Mirabelle and makes tiny inroads into her, Ray continues to occasionally see her. In an act of self-preservation, she no longer makes love to him, and because he finally cares about her fully, he doesn’t try.

  Mirabelle takes months to accept Jeremy, and Jeremy patiently waits. And as he stands by, his feelings for Mirabelle grow. One night, she cries in his arms when a recollection of Ray flirts with her memory, and he holds her and doesn’t say a word. Where his insight comes from as he courts her, even he doesn’t know. It might have been that he was ready to grow up, and the knowledge was already in him, like a dormant gene. Whatever it is, she is the perfect recipient of his attention, and he is the perfect recipient of her tenderness. Unlike Ray Porter, his love is fearless and without reservation. As Jeremy offers her more of his heart, she offers equal parts of herself in return. One night, sooner than she would have liked, which made it irresistible, they make love for the second time in two years. But this time, Jeremy holds her for a long while, and they connect in a deep and profound way. At this point, Jeremy surpasses Mr. Ray Porter as a lover of Mirabelle, because as clumsy as he is, what he offers her is tender and true. That night, coming up for air from the unexpected love he is falling in, he gives some opinions on tweeter wholesaling that Mirabelle secretly calls “the second oration.” After he nods off, she pokes her forefinger into his closed fist and falls asleep.

  Their union is the kind of perfect mismatch that makes for long relationships. She is smarter than he is, but Jeremy is in love with his own bright ideas, and the enthusiasm he shows for them infects Mirabelle and pushes her forward into the world of drawing for money. She begins to enjoy tolerating his enthusiastic outbursts; this is her gift to him. Sometimes they lie in bed and Mirabell
e relates the entire plot of a Victorian novel, and Jeremy is so captivated and engrossed that he believes the events in the story are happening right now, to him.

  Mirabelle informs Ray that though she is cautious, perhaps she has met somebody. “I tell him about my medication and he doesn’t care,” she says. This is the moment Ray has always known is coming, when she succumbs to the unrestricted, unbounded, and free-flowing passion of someone who is her peer. In spite of its predictability, he still feels this moment as a loss, and a curious one: how is it possible to miss a woman whom you kept at a distance, so that when she was gone you would not miss her?

  Ray also wonders why it is she and not he who has met someone accidentally in a Laundromat, someone who stumbles into your life and forever alters it. But just three months later, it happens to Ray––it isn’t a Laundromat since he hasn’t seen one in thirty years, but rather a dinner party ––a forty-five-year-old woman, divorced with two children, touches his heart and then breaks it flat. It is then Ray’s turn to experience Mirabelle’s despair, to see its walls and colors. Only then does he realize what he has done to Mirabelle, how wanting a square inch of her and not all of her has damaged them both, and how he cannot justify his actions except that, well, it was life.

  Jeremy and Mirabelle, who are not living together but are close to it, have shorter and shorter separations as he commutes south and north. Mirabelle and Ray continue to talk weekly or more, and they begin to be able to discuss the details of each other’s romantic lives. On the phone, Mirabelle mentions that she wants to fly home to Vermont for a three-day weekend. She does not ask him for money––she never does––but Ray is always forthcoming when he senses her need. This time, however, he does not volunteer the dough and they chat on and hang up. He needs to sort something out.

  As he stands on his balcony overlooking Los Angeles in the dusky orange sunset, Ray ponders his continuing concern for Mirabelle. If she is no longer seeing him, if she is now with someone new, wouldn’t it be the new man’s responsibility to pay for the odd necessity? Ray always had paid; he saw it as his gift to her, but now it is over. Yet he is still compelled to help her. Why?