So then: A mentor. And answers.
I arrived at Dave’s exhausted. Strange dreams involving Arthur and a shotgun. The gun would go off, and I’d wake up. This happened several times. Finally, I gave up and turned on the light. It was three in the morning.
Suriyaarachchi was on the phone with his father, a one-sided conversation in which he stared down at his feet and plucked at his eyebrows, grunting occasionally. After he got off, he was in a foul temper. Dave, too, was in a mood, which had to do with losing a big contract he’d been counting on. We sat around the suite barely speaking. Interestingly, neither of them seemed upset at each other.
At this point, we had a rough cut that was too long — two hours and twenty minutes — and were looking for places to trim. Dave suggested we watch it from the beginning and, after a few clicks of the mouse, shut off the desk lamp and sat down between us.
Halfway through, Suriyaarachchi said, “What else do you have to watch around here. This movie sucks!” He leaned forward and used the remote on the coffee table to mute the sound and turn up the lights. He put his head in his hands and groaned. “God! What am I going to do?”
Dave got up. “I think I have just the thing for today. I’ll be right back.”
After he left I said, “So what did your father say?”
“That it would have been better if I’d spent four years in an insane asylum, rather than film school. At least, he said, they teach you practical skills like basket weaving. He’d be half a million dollars richer by now and have some place to put his dirty laundry.”
Dave came back with a VHS and popped it into one of the decks. He said, “How do you feel about baseball?” As it happened, Suriyaarachchi loved baseball. “World Series, game three,” Dave said. He had set it to record before going to sleep and made a concerted effort to avoid learning the outcome this morning. Suriyaarachchi had learned the final score but hadn’t seen the game; he promised not to tell.
I left the two of them to their mutual interest while I went downstairs for another coffee and a copy of the Village Voice. When I returned, I spread the rental listings out on the kitchen counter. It was time for a change. I needed a place of my own — spending time at Dave’s and Arthur’s helped me realize that it was more than just a thousand-dollar-a-month hole in your pocket. It was where you could, if you so desired on a Saturday afternoon, pop the cap off a cold beer to be savored with a smoke in the wide-open comfort of your own living room. Where you could entertain a certain lovely tall girl with alien amber eyes and appealingly crooked teeth.
I made some calls with the wall-mounted phone, sipping my scalding coffee through the sharp snapped-off hole in the cup’s lid. On the face of it, hundreds of landlords around the city were vying to rent their cozy studios to me; however, all calls led to the same three brokerages, none of whom would get specific until I had filled out an application. Today was one of my two days off at the theater. I had been hoping to explore a lead or two during the late afternoon, but it wasn’t looking good. I popped my head into the editing suite and caught the roar of the crowd.
“You don’t have a fax machine, do you?”
The editor came out in his bare feet to microwave some popcorn and revealed it hiding in plain sight under a stack of books. I sat cross-legged on the floor, using the receiver to communicate with the realtors. The application was a joke. It asked for my occupation and income but for no other information that might tie me to these answers. I could have put down anything, and did, and by three thirty I was lined up to see half-a-dozen places. The broker asked me how soon I could get downtown. I told him to give me an hour.
I pulled out my wallet and removed the slip of paper that Viktoria had given me that day, the words call me in her loopy schoolgirl hand. I dialed the number. When she answered, I said, “How would you like to go apartment hunting with me?”
“Who’s this?”
“The guy who hasn’t called you back in a week.”
“Hey! I was wondering about you. I almost didn’t pick up because I didn’t recognize the number. It’s been a very upside-down world I’ve been living in. Usually, I’m the one who doesn’t call you back. Interesting feeling, being blown off. And by interesting, I mean it sucks. Apartment hunting, why not? Where should we meet?”
I put my head into the editing suite again to announce I would be leaving early. Suriyaarachchi, engrossed in the game — it was apparently a nineteen-inning nail-biter — said, “Why don’t you just take the rest of the day off?” I was about to tell him that he was paraphrasing what I had just told him, then thought better of it.
I thanked him and left.
I met Viktoria on the corner of Third Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. I was struck anew by her beauty. She was stunning. Tall and thin, with long blond hair that today she had divided into twin pigtails. She wore a skirt, high-heeled Mary Janes, and a cardigan over a button-down oxford. I felt both sheepish and overjoyed to be walking down the street with this sexy jailbait. Every man we passed without exception was dumbstruck, even the two holding hands. She was, to say the least, out of my league. She seemed at ease with the attention, absorbing it and deflecting it in equal measure, returning a smile or lowering her gaze or staring straight ahead. There was something electrifying about being the guy she was with, like riding a motorcycle for the first time — power, danger, lack of control.
We met the broker outside a tenement on Fifth Street and Avenue A. He had to correct himself when telling us his own name. “Hector, I mean. Viktor is my brother. Hector Villanova.” He handed us his business card with trembling fingers.
“Villanova,” Viktoria said. “That can’t be your real last name?”
“What do you mean?”
“Villanova means ‘new house.’ ”
“Yes, it does,” Hector said, not catching her drift.
Viktoria looked at me poker faced.
Hector fumbled with the keys before letting us into the lobby. It was a five-floor walk-up, past dimly lit hallways and the smells of cat pee and frying onions. Hector described the apartment as “newly restored,” but all that seemed to mean was the stove had been cleaned. A sponge and a can of Ajax stood on the counter. One of the walls had been given a recent touch-up; the smell was intense.
One couldn’t really be given “the tour” because there wasn’t anything, properly speaking, to tour. The place was a kitchen. Nevertheless, Hector tried his best. “These are the original linoleum floors,” he said, and tapped a buckling tile by the refrigerator with his tassled dress shoe. I went to the windows and looked down at the street corner. Hector came over to narrate the view for me, as if to revise what I was seeing. “What we have here are two exposures, unusual for the building, but this is a corner apartment. North facing and east facing. You will get very nice light here in the morning, and it should maintain an even brightness throughout the day. You can see the features of the neighborhood from here. Restaurants, nightlife, shopping. It’s very safe at night. There are people around all hours. Eyes on the street, we call it in the business. Keeps the criminal elements at bay.”
Viktoria said, looking out, “Oh my God, that place!” She pointed to the bar directly across the street. “We used to cab it down there once the clubs closed. Nice thing about it — only thing about it, really — is that there’s no last call. They’d just let us hang out until we had to go to school in the morning. I don’t know how many times I barfed in that garbage can on the corner.” She took me by the hand. “Come look,” she said, and brought me to the bathroom.