“That’s perfect,” Alison said. “She can be your new girlfriend.”
“She’s just a person,” Sharon said, and she took my arm. “Come on. Let’s go say hi.”
I hesitated, but eventually I finished my drink, and with Alison watching, I followed Sharon to where Scarlett was standing, flanked by a group of admirers. They were mainly men, actors and producers and writers wearing glasses. Scarlett was smiling at them, and as we waited in a kind of line, I worried that Scarlett might actually know Steve Martin and would think I was doing a clumsy, second-rate imitation of someone I wasn’t. And then Scarlett looked up, saw Sharon, and her smile, if possible, got even bigger. She obviously liked Sharon, and so we approached.
“I’d like you to meet my exceptionally cool friend,” Sharon said, and Scarlett turned to me, and she must have been a very good actor because I actually believed she was happy to meet me. We shook hands and then someone named Mandy came over, a friend of Sharon’s from South Africa, and because Scarlett had been shooting a movie in Cape Town, they started talking about Nelson Mandela. They all said, “How, are, you,” in what I guessed was a Nelson Mandela imitation.
While they talked, I looked back and saw that Alison had gone. She’d stayed out as late as she had for me, and I was thinking I should thank her for the invitation, and that’s when I realized Scarlett was speaking to me. Because I was thinking about Alison, I didn’t hear what she said, but I looked at her. I noticed her teeth, which were perfect, and her chest, which was pushed up and perfectly visible. Her hair was done up in a perfect chignon, and I looked at her long green dress with its shimmering sequins, and when I looked up from the dress she smiled.
“So you’re friends with Sharon?” she said.
I nodded.
Sharon had started talking with Mandy, and Scarlett had turned her attention to me, and was facing me. “Sharon’s great,” she said.
And I continued nodding, not because I was agreeing with her — although Sharon did seem like a nice person — but because my mouth didn’t seem to be working. An actual movie star was talking to me and I was frightened, partly because I didn’t know what she wanted me to do. I had my desire, and here was a person with her own desire, and instead of basking in the paradise of that mutual desire, I let her desire dominate. And I imagined that her desire was sexual. Because of the way she presented herself I could feel a sexual component to our conversation, and although I knew it was probably my own sexual component, what I did in reaction to that, or in reaction to my fear of that, was imagine myself as Steve. If necessity is the mother of invention, then desire is the mother of necessity, and Scarlett was there and I was there, and because there was nothing between me and the perfection in front of me, I said something.
“I’m sorry we missed your movie.”
There’d been a showing of the movie before the party, and I told her I’d heard the movie was excellent. It seemed, as I said this, that I was stepping outside myself, that who I was was standing in one place, and as I took a step forward, not only was I talking like Steve Martin, I was thinking like Steve and seeing with Steve’s eyes, and it felt pretty good. I wasn’t obviously impersonating Steve, but with the white hair I imagined she might have been thinking, This man reminds me of someone.
Steve was certainly all-American, and wearing the mask of Steve, I felt safe enough to see behind the façade of “movie star” to an all-American, or at least a Danish-American, girl, an intelligent young woman with lovely eyes and soft skin. Although she wore a lot of makeup, I could see through the makeup, and when I did, it wasn’t her desire or my desire, it was Steve’s desire, and I was ready to act on that desire when she turned. She turned away from me to someone else. I was still standing there, but she turned to the next person waiting in line and she started talking with that person. It was clear our conversation was over, and so I said goodbye to Sharon, and then I left.
It was a beautiful afternoon. Jane and I were walking around an outdoor sculpture park near UCLA. It was the opening of an art show and we found her friend’s exhibit, a platform with telescopes and measuring devices, and as we looked through the telescopes, her friend, whose name was Bob Braine, said I reminded him of someone. Since I was more interested in thinking like Steve than looking like Steve, I didn’t say anything, and we continued walking around the various installations. The art we saw, although it was both visually and even philosophically pleasing, wasn’t very emotional, and since we were both feeling the need for some emotion, we were happy when we came upon the movable wall. An artist named Dave Wave had built a thick steel wall in the middle of the lot, and the wall was movable. If you pushed on it, it moved like a gate. Various people were pushing on the wall, but because they were on opposite sides, the wall wasn’t moving. We watched them, and when they left we started to do what they’d been doing. We stood behind the wall, on opposite sides, and when we pushed, because we were pushing against each other, of course the wall didn’t move.
“Let’s try something,” I said, and I walked over to Jane’s side of the wall. We both stood on that side, and when we pushed, suddenly the wall, which had seemed so intractable, very easily swung open. I mention it because, metaphorically, that’s what we were doing. That’s why we drove, in our separate cars, back to her house.
Once inside we moved, by habit, into the kitchen, where the light was. She said she wanted to make me a meal, and I said that sounded excellent, and then she started cooking, risotto and mushrooms. While she was chopping, I wandered out to the patio, where Rex was sleeping on his rug. I was standing near her sliding glass door when she said, “There’s more backyard around the side. I thought we would eat inside, but. .”
“No, inside’s great.”
She let me stir the risotto, and the beauty of risotto is that, over time, because of the constant stirring, you can actually witness the beads of rice opening and expanding, taking in the liquid and becoming something else. I demarcate my relationship with Jane from the moment of the risotto. There was the dinner, and then after dinner we moved to her beanbag chair where she showed me her collection of postcards. We were sitting there, just the two of us, and we’d been talking about the postcards and she was about to get up. As she leaned forward, shifting her weight to the front of her body, I held out my hand and she took it and held it as she rose to a standing position. She held it a little longer than she had to. Quite a bit longer, so that I was able to use my hand as a sensing device to feel the warmth of her hand, and the softness of her hand, and the blood that was flowing between our two hands.
Chet Baker was singing his songs about love, and the music was nothing if not romantic. He was singing his songs as if for us, and without ever officially beginning, we just started dancing. I should say I started trying to dance, trying to do a good job, but the secret of dancing is enjoyment.
“I’m not normally a very good dancer,” I said.
“We don’t have to dance.”
“No,” I said, “I want to.”
It seemed like the necessary thing to do, to keep going in the direction we were going. If this was a habit, I wanted it, and so I moved the coffee table out of the way and we began moving together on the orange rug in her living room.