In my head, my friend Linda’s voice rose in pitch: Let the famous actor flirt, dummy!
“I wasn’t planning on buying anything,” I said when we reached the register. “I was just killing time before I met a friend.”
“What kind of friend?”
“What kinds are there?”
“Boyfriend?”
“No, a girlfriend. We were going to get a drink, maybe see a movie. Do you have anything out? I need at least a sixty percent on Rotten Tomatoes before I commit.”
I stood awkwardly beside him as he produced an AmEx. My face flushed as I felt other people in line watching us, and I still wanted to snatch the book before he could buy it for me. He thanked the clerk, her bored eyebrow ring never rising in recognition, and glanced back at me. I was supposed to follow him now, and I did, slipping The Road into my bag.
Outside, early-evening pale had settled in. He took off his sunglasses, a full reveal. The high cheekbones and irresolute brown eyes. I remembered them as blue in his films and now took that as the work of contacts. It made me wonder how much of that fresh, taut look was surgery or Botox.
“I’ll tell my mom you said hi.”
“What if…” He looked off into the headlights and taillights of traffic. “You canceled on your friend and we grab a drink instead?”
The truth was I wasn’t meeting a friend. It had been a spur-of-the-moment lie, the kind you tell when you want someone to think you have plans. A single twenty-seven-year-old wandering the shelves of a bookstore on a Friday evening with nothing better to do? Though I hated that it made me feel anxious, it did. The drink offer wasn’t shocking—his flirting was hardly subtle—but now my mind jammed with thoughts of how I looked. What did he see? Chestnut hair, I’d recently had drastically shortened and highlighted for the coming summer. The small bulb of my father’s nose mixing with my mother’s darker Mediterranean eyes. I attempted to not let my insecurities wash over me and thought of all the yoga and treadmill miles I’d logged during the city’s hibernating months.
“Aren’t you dating Scarlett Johansson or someone?”
Again, the laugh was surprised and genuine. “I’m between destructive relationships with coworkers at the moment. Here’s my perspective: I’ll either go drink at the hotel bar by myself until someone recognizes me and I get annoyed… or I can buy you dinner.”
“Now it’s dinner?”
“If you’re hungry.”
Of course I was going to say yes. But I told myself I was saying yes only because the initial shock at his fame had worn away. He was just another guy trying his hand at a pickup line.
We took a cab, sitting a comfortable distance apart in the back. The butterflies that flapped and spun kamikaze in my stomach when he first spoke to me now lay dormant, reverse-aging back into their chrysalises. The cab rounded the corner of Wacker, passing the river on our left and the gleaming silver phallus of Trump Tower. The setting sun reflected off its miles of mirrored glass and cast light over the city, lighting from a painting or a dream. After a bit of awkward silence, he said:
“You got into this cab and still haven’t told me your name.”
“Jackie.” I shook his palm, and the grip lingered. That smile, how he flashed it like a knife, knowing it was dangerous. No wonder his dumb movies made so much money.
In the restaurant, we were led up the stairs to the second floor and a series of private tables. He was ordering a bottle of wine before I’d sat all the way down.
“Did we just screw everyone on the waiting list?”
“They don’t give us half-famous folk a choice.”
As the wine arrived, he went with the standard barrage of first-date questions, not all that different from a Tinder date: What do you do? Where are you from? (Consumer advertising, creative director; Iowa originally.)
“Do you like advertising?”
“It’s a job,” I said, only because I did not feel like talking about it. I was obsessed with my work in the way one is obsessed with a cruel lover, but I was saving my rant and fury about Grinspoon and the general chauvinism of advertising for my therapist.
“That’s too bad. People should have passion for what they do.”
I gave him my meanest laugh. “That’s a pretty asinine thing for someone like you to say.”
He’d taken off the Cubs cap and hung it on the back of his chair. His oak-colored hair, matted from the hat, swept back from his forehead.
“I don’t see how I’m asinine because I love what I do.”
“I said what you said was asinine. Because it was. You know, most people take whatever job they’re offered. That’s how you pay a student loan or buy a burrito for lunch.”
“All I meant is that I love what I do, and I love it aside from the money. Aside from all that bullshit of being known.”
“How can you separate the two?” Suddenly this guy was Darren Grinspoon and every other mediocre man I’d ever dealt with professionally. Linda Holiday had once called this “the conundrum of contemporary straight women”: We understand better than ever that men are selfish, arrogant, awful, and entitled, and yet we nevertheless spend most of our energy and intellect trying to find one who seems okay enough and will love us. Leftover emotional energy is then wasted on not wanting to want that.
“I think you know how you sound,” I told him. “It’s easy to love what you do in your circumstances.”
He didn’t quite look like I’d taken the air out of him, but his gaze was puzzled, maybe put off. Then he smiled. “Hope you don’t dissect every chunk of blather that comes out of your dates’ mouths like this.”
“If you’d like, I could sit across from you all night googly-eyed, asking what it’s like to work with De Niro.”
He laughed uncomfortably, and his eyes wandered, unable to settle.
“Yeah, okay, but you realize that I didn’t get to that point for almost a decade after I dropped out of college. Until then I was a broke stage actor living in a shitty apartment, doing odd jobs for spare cash. I’m just saying I never cared. I’ve loved this since I was seven years old and my second-grade teacher suggested I try out for Oliver Twist. I just meant I’ve always loved performing, and I’d still do it even if it was community theater back in my hometown, which by the way, is Omaha, not Orange County or something.”
“Fair enough.” I looked back at the menu, face turning hot, feeling as though this whole thing had been a bad idea. I opened my mouth to say as much, but he cut me off.
“I’m hearing how defensive that sounded. Sorry, I don’t have a lot of conversations anymore with people who aren’t in the business. It’s a bad bubble. Please do feel free to call me out as an asshole.”
I closed my mouth, felt the flush recede. “I think I just began by assuming you’d sound like an asshole.”
“Want to start over?” he suggested. “Maybe about how great Omaha and Iowa are? Real salt of the fucking earth, right?”
The waitress interrupted us. He ordered the grilled corn tamales and the fettuccini with artichoke, and she took the menu and said, “Yeah dude, whatever—like you’re not a figment of my imagination right now,” which made all of us laugh.
I ordered the pearled barley risotto and handed over my menu. In that moment, the trailing tail of a memory came to me like a song lyric I could remember but not place with a musician: Jefferey on a similar early date. We’d gone to dinner, and when the bored, ill-tempered waiter took our menus and stalked off, Jefferey whispered to me, “So that’s your ex, and this is some psychosexual mind game? ’Cause I’m in. I’ll bring the ice pick and boil my own rabbit.” Every last word was so weird I couldn’t help but crack up.
The actor and I talked about our salt-of-the-earth childhoods, his as familiar and mundane as mine. In turn, I told him about Iowa. My dad the farmer, Friday night football games, country bonfires, the town square where we all gathered on weekend nights and cupped cigarettes in our palms when the police cruisers passed. Most of our fathers wore the same Carhartt jackets and bitched about bailers and planters, fertilizers and Monsanto seed prices. Most of us went to one of two state schools when we graduated. I left off the story just before my dad was forced to sell the farm following my parents’ bankruptcy. A decade later, he still wasn’t over it, and I worried he was depressed or about to divorce my mom. My siblings and I couldn’t be in the same room without arguing about it.