The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

by Abbi Waxman

  “Really?” said Nina, hiding a smile. “Well, if one of us orders the steak frites, a young boy named Harold will catch a bus to the the nearest community garden and dig up the potatoes for the frites himself.”

  “Well,” said Tom, gravely, “it’s getting a little late for Harold to be out alone. Maybe we should choose something else.”

  “I appreciate your consideration for Harold’s welfare,” said Nina. “I’ll have the burger instead. The lettuce and tomato were picked an hour ago by a willing volunteer, so, you know.”

  Tom nodded and closed his menu. “I wish more restaurants had backstories for everything.”

  “We’re doing fine on our own,” replied Nina. She ran an exploratory systems check and was pleasantly surprised to discover she didn’t feel anxious. Maybe she was still a little hyped from the movie.

  “Ripley might be my favorite movie heroine,” she said. “I love the way she’s clearly scared out of her mind and would pretty much give anything not to be there, but she sucks it up and powers through. That’s real heroism.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Tom, “my mom always used to say, ‘If you’re not scared, you’re not brave.’” He took a sip of water. “Mind you, she was usually saying it to get me to try something dangerous.”

  “Isn’t that unusual, for a mother?”

  “She’s unusual,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. The waitress came over and they placed their orders, falling silent for a moment once they’d cleared that hurdle.

  “I’m glad we ran into each other,” Tom said.

  “Me too,” replied Nina. “I’m sorry about the other day.”

  “No big deal,” he said, looking down at the table. Nina noticed a tiny scar by the side of his eye and suddenly wanted to touch it. He continued, “Not everyone has as open a calendar as I do.”

  Nina was interested. “Why is your time so free?”

  He laughed. “Because I don’t schedule anything. I pretty much work, then take the rest of it as it comes. Not a big planner.”

  “I like planning.”

  “I saw that.”

  “It makes me feel better.”

  “Better than what?”

  “Better than chaos. Better than unpredictability.”

  “But doesn’t that mean you also lose out on serendipity? If everything is planned, nothing is surprising.” He regarded her thoughtfully, genuinely interested. While he waited for her answer, he found himself wondering if she was wearing lipstick, wondering what color her cheeks would turn when she was aroused, wondering why he couldn’t stop wanting to go to bed with this woman he barely knew. He wasn’t a teenager, but she made him feel that way.

  Nina sighed. “I still get surprised all the time. You can make whatever plans you want, but life still happens, right?” She looked at his face, the angles and planes growing familiar, his gaze intent but his eyes so, so warm. What was he thinking? “For example, I recently discovered I had a father.” She clarified, “Or rather, I knew I must have a father, but I found out he was dead already.” That didn’t really come out right, but she didn’t think she could make it better, so she left it. Bad things sometimes happen to good sentences. What can you do?

  Tom took another sip of water. “You thought maybe you were an immaculate conception?”

  Nina made a face at him. “Yes. My mother told me I came out of her forehead fully formed.” Tom looked at her, his curly mouth turned up in a smile. He waited, and Nina continued. “No, I just never knew who he was. I asked, of course, when I was little, but my mom shrugged and said she didn’t know.”

  “Party girl, your mom?”

  “I guess. And apparently also a liar.” Nina waited while the waiter poured them both some wine and then raised her glass. “To surprises, hopefully pleasant ones.”

  “Yes,” said Tom, clinking his glass against hers. “And to trying new things.”

  A pause. Then Nina said, “But you do have some scheduled activities, right? The trivia team, for example.”

  Tom grinned. “It’s hardly a full-time occupation. I do it mostly because Lisa needed someone who knew sports.”

  Nina crowed, “I knew it! You’re a jock.”

  “Nope, an armchair quarterback with a good memory.” He raised his eyebrows. “Are you going to tell me more about the whole dad thing, or are you going to move on to something else? That’s kind of a big deal, right?”

  “I guess so,” said Nina. “I’m still not really sure what to think about it. I’m not a little girl anymore, right? And it’s not like he’s even around to get to know.”

  “Brothers and sisters?”

  Nina nodded. “Several. And nieces and nephews, and great-nieces and great-nephews, even.”

  “How is that?” Tom asked, so Nina explained. Archie and Peter had been right; it got easier.

  Tom smiled. “Well, it sounds like you got at least one good brother and a fabulous nephew out of it, and that’s more than most people.”

  Their food arrived, and Nina continued the conversation around a bite of cheeseburger.

  “Do you have a big family?”

  “Not like yours. I have a brother and sister.”

  “Older or younger?”

  “One of each. Older brother, younger sister. My brother’s getting married soon.”

  “Are you going to be a bridesmaid?” Nina looked up at him through her eyelashes. “Will you have a pretty frock?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “if they can find one to fit me. I’m not built like the other girls.” He copied her glance-through-the-eyelashes move, pulling it off surprisingly well.

  “I can see that,” replied Nina, then blushed. She wasn’t anxious around Tom, which was unexpected and pleasant, but she was definitely . . . aware. It was there in the air between them, an unspoken expectation of more to come. A whole other conversation was going on, wordless but clear.

  “Shall I get the check?” asked Tom, his voice quiet.

  “Yes,” said Nina. She swallowed. “I should head home.”

  “Still time for a chapter before bed?” He smiled.

  “Maybe,” she replied.

  * * *

  It turned out they’d both taken ride share to get to the movies, so they started walking south toward Larchmont.

  Tom took a deep breath. “So, I guess your busy schedule doesn’t allow for much dating?”

  Nina took a similarly deep breath. “Not really.” She paused. “And I’m pretty happy being single, honestly. I have plenty of . . .”

  “Friends?” finished Tom, and Nina nodded. “Me too. You never wanted anything more?”

  Nina didn’t reply for a moment, as they crossed Santa Monica Boulevard. “I’m not against it. I’m just not looking for it. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” Tom replied, easily. He effected a Garbo-esque accent. “You want to be alone.”

  “You know, she never actually said that. She said she wanted to be left alone, totally different.” Nina shook her head. “I get it. I want to be left alone, too.” She looked at him quickly. “Not by everyone. Just by most people. I like a quiet life.”

  He snorted. “Have you thought about leaving LA? It’s not exactly a Trappist monastery.” A chorus of horns underscored his point.

  “I noticed that,” she replied. “But I grew up here; traffic is the rumble of the ocean to me.” They crossed Melrose. “What about you? Do you date a lot?”

  He shrugged. “On and off. I had a girlfriend for a while. We broke up a few months ago.”

  “Oh yeah?” Why did that make her frown, wondered Nina. Maybe because a few months didn’t seem very long.

  “Yeah. It ended badly, so I’ve been enjoying my own company.” He sounded fine, but she wondered if he was still getting over it.

  “You’re not friends?”

  He shoo
k his head. “No.” He was silent for a moment, navigating a busy cross street. “My brother says I’m a sucker for difficult women. He says I like a challenge.”

  “You disagree?”

  Another shrug. “I don’t think it’s conscious. I’m a fairly boring person, I think.”

  “Not to me. Not yet, at least.” Nina was glad she wasn’t looking at him, because she felt herself blushing yet again. Her cheeks were such traitors.

  “Well, thanks. Maybe ‘boring’ is the wrong word. I’m calm. I kind of take things as they come. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I guess,” said Nina, laughing. “I’m not like that, but I’ve heard people like you exist. Like unicorns.”

  “I’m pretty sure we’re more common than that.” He stepped around a crowd of teenagers and found himself more closely at her side once they were reunited. Their sleeves brushed, and neither of them moved apart. “Maybe that’s why I’m attracted to people who have some kind of spark, you know? Sometimes that ends up being not such a good thing, but it’s true of my friends, too. Lisa, for example. We’ve been friends since high school, and she was always the brightest star in our group. Interesting. Different.”

  “She seems very nice.”

  He laughed. “Well, I don’t know if ‘nice’ is the right word, but she’s definitely her own person, and I like that.” They walked in silence for a while, and Tom was thinking about reaching out to take Nina’s hand when suddenly she said, “This is me,” and stopped.

  He looked up at the guesthouse. “So it is,” he said. “Do you know that cat?”

  Phil was perched on top of the gate, watching them.

  Nina nodded. “I do. He’s mine.”

  “What’s his name? He’s judging me.”

  “His name is Phil, and actually,” said Nina, “he’s judging me.” She looked up at Tom. “I’m really glad we ran into each other. I feel pretty good we didn’t send Harold out for potatoes.”

  “Me too,” said Tom, and stepped closer to her. She looked at him, then stepped closer still, tugging at his coat and pulling him into a kiss. After a few moments they stepped apart, and Nina opened her mouth to invite him in.

  “Well, good night, Nina,” said Tom. “Maybe we can do this again soon?” He leaned down and kissed her again, then smiled against her lips and turned away to leave. “I’ll text you, OK?”

  “OK,” she replied, watching him go with a little crease between her eyebrows. Crap, she thought. What went wrong there?

  But when she went inside her phone buzzed.

  “I wanted to come in,” he texted, “very, very much. But you were planning to be Garbo tonight, and I decided not to push my luck. Besides, as another actress said, tomorrow is another day.”

  She smiled and picked up a surprised Phil and hugged him.

  “Watch the whiskers, lady,” he said. “They don’t stay gorgeous on their own.”

  Eighteen

  In which Nina fulfills her first family obligation.

  Sunday was usually Nina’s extravaganza of planning. She would sort out clothes for the week, plan her meals, make sure she’d read whatever she needed to for work and for the book club, make a proper shopping list and shop for groceries . . . It was her reset and recommit day, and she always felt like she’d crushed it by the time the evening rolled around.

  However, on this day, things were already out of whack by 10 A.M., and it was all Peter Reynolds’s fault. For the first time in her life Nina had a family obligation, and she wasn’t entirely sure she liked it.

  Peter had texted her at nine, an hour he said was the earliest acceptable time to contact someone on a Sunday.

  Nina had still been asleep. Somewhat acerbically, she suggested he recalibrate and set her earliest acceptable time to eleven.

  “No,” said her nephew, “if I make an exception for you, I’ll need to customize my entire system, and that won’t work at all.”

  “You have a system?”

  “Of course. There is a standard weekday wake-up time, and a different weekend time. There is a time in the evening after which one cannot call anyone except good friends or lovers, and a time after which one can only call if there is an emergency.”

  Nina’s phone was lying on her pillow, on speaker. “I assume there’s a booty call exception to that rule.”

  “You assume correctly. See? It’s a good system. If I have individual wake-up times attached to everyone I’ll mess it up. I like to keep it simple.”

  “Well, I guess we all better bend to your will then.” Nina might have been a little cranky, still, and she was definitely under-caffeinated.

  “It would be best. Besides, you had to wake up in order to answer your phone, so no harm, no foul.” Nina could tell from his tone of voice that her new nephew was a morning person, that despicable breed. She said nothing, but turned her head and pressed it into the pillow so her phone slid down and rested in her little ear divot.

  Peter was still chirping at her. “So, I was wondering if you wanted to come with me today to visit my mom? She lives in Culver City, and I need to get my dog’s claws trimmed.”

  Nina opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. Nope, she had to ask: “What do those two things have in common?”

  “My mom’s a vet. She taught me a lot, but not how to cut dog claws without messing it up and making them bleed. The last time I tried, the house looked like a Quentin Tarantino movie for days.”

  So, here she was, at ten on a Sunday morning, sitting in the front seat of Peter’s car, with the world’s smallest greyhound resting on her lap. Neither she nor the dog were entirely sure this was a good idea.

  “So,” said Peter. “Something about your face tells me you had a good night last night.”

  She turned and looked at him incredulously. “How on earth can you tell that?”

  “I have mad skills.” He grinned at her. “I learned that phrase from one of my students, and I’m afraid it’s become a habit.”

  “I’m not sure anyone even says that anymore.”

  Peter shrugged. “And yet I still do. You might conclude I don’t care what other people think of my vernacular, and you would be correct.”

  Nina and the greyhound rolled their eyes at each other. Then Nina said, “Well, I did, as it happens. I met this guy and at first I didn’t like him and then I did and we kissed and then I messed up and then I got another chance and this time went better.”

  Peter laughed. “Well, that sounds good, I think. Can I ask a round of rapid-fire questions?”

  “Sure.”

  The greyhound swallowed nervously.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Tom.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I think he’s a carpenter, but it’s unconfirmed. He smells of sawdust, but for all I know he’s homeless and sleeps in a sawmill.”

  “Is he cute?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he sexy?”

  “Very.”

  “Is he funny?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, I’m sorry, did you sleep with him already?”

  Nina shook her head. “I would have, to be honest, but the first time I invited him in he said no, and last night he left before I had a chance to invite him again.”

  “Hmm.”

  Nina looked over at him. “Do you think that’s a problem?”

  “No.” Peter slowed the car to let someone cross. “Just interesting. My observation of young men in Los Angeles—admittedly, I have a different cross section than you do, probably—is that they’re all ‘sex first, talk later.’ Maybe he’s from out of town.”

  “Not really. Pasadena.”

  Peter made a left and started looking for a parking space. “Ah well. Pasadenans are weird.”

  “They are?”

  “Yeah. Caltech i
s there. And the Jet Propulsion Lab. And CalArts, where all the great animators study. It’s a strange intersection of pocket protectors and Miyazaki movies.” He found a space and parked deftly. “Let’s go.”

  Peter’s mom, Becky, lived in a part of Culver City that Nina hadn’t visited in a while, and she was surprised to find it had become totally gentrified, with the requisite chain coffee place named for a whale hunter, a juice place, a frozen gluten-free yogurt store, and an organic grocery store where the carrots were priced individually. Peter rang the doorbell and apparently his mother released a pack of hellhounds, who dashed themselves against the wood with the fury of a thousand wolves who hadn’t eaten in some time. Once the door opened, they were revealed to be three small mutts with enthusiastic tails and hanging tongues, whose only goal appeared to be declaring their undying love for Peter’s dog, whom they’d clearly met before.

  Becky was the woman who’d waved a peace sign at Nina back in the lawyer’s office, and she greeted her now with a lazy smile. “Hey, you brought my newest sister,” she said, kissing her son. “Ignore the mess.”

  Most of the time this is something people say when their houses are immaculate, and the idea is you say, ‘Oh, you should see mine,’ or something similar. In this case it really was a mess, and Nina found it enormously relaxing. She counted two more dogs, older and less enthusiastic, who nonetheless waved their tails at her from their sleeping stations on the sofa and floor. Several cats were watching her cautiously, or sarcastically—it’s always hard to tell with cats—and the whole place was covered with a fine patina of fur. There was a vague smell of woodsmoke and the inside of dogs’ ears.

  Nina and Peter followed Becky through the living room into what turned out to be the kitchen, which was marginally cleaner, at least in places. An older man was sitting at the table, deseeding an acorn squash.

  “Hi there,” he said. “I’m John. I’m Peter’s stepdad.” He waved his sticky hands at her. “Welcome to chaos central.”