You in Five Acts(28)

You both laughed.

? ? ?


“You’ve reached the voicemail of Allison Anders, formerly Allison Anders Roth, of AAR Artists. Please leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, or you can reach one of my assistants . . .” I held the phone away from my ear as my mother’s disembodied voice read out a series of names and numbers. I thought about hanging up. I’d decided to call her mostly out of boredom, anyway, since I’d been sitting in the lobby for an hour, unable to face the Molotov cocktail of lust and angst that awaited me back in the theater. I’d played four chess games already and was down to 5 percent battery on my phone, which was an even more compelling argument for hanging up on Mom’s voicemail. But then I realized that she would see the missed call even if I didn’t leave a message and would probably start concern-texting me a series of standalone question marks. So I waited, as instructed, for the beep.

“Hey Mom,” I said, getting up and pacing across the geometric lobby carpet. “It’s your most important client. Haha, just kidding, it’s your son.” Just then, the double doors to the theater opened; the movie was letting out. “I guess I . . . um, just wanted to say hi,” I said, stepping back against the wall by the men’s room, keeping one eye on the stream of people moving toward me. “And that it’s like the Arctic Circle here, and that—” I felt someone watching me and noticed a girl a few feet away, zipping up her coat with a don’t-I-know-you? look. I cleared my throat and lowered my voice.

“I, uh . . . miss you,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “But I’m actually at a movie right now with some friends, so I guess that’s a good sign. Except for the fact that I’m outside calling my mom, so . . .” I laughed gently, shaking my head. I definitely should have hung up when I got her voicemail. I hadn’t wanted to leave her a dumb, rambling message. I hadn’t wanted to leave her any message at all. I’d just wanted to hear her voice.

“Anyway, I know you’re really busy,” I said, “so you don’t have to call me back. I’ll talk to you later.”

I ended the call and slipped my phone into my back pocket just as Ethan came out of the theater and spotted me.

“What the hell, dude?” he cried, tossing me the coat I’d left crumpled on my seat when I made my escape. “You missed half the movie!” You, Diego, and Joy followed a few steps behind him, looking restless, confused, and puffy-eyed, respectively.

“Sorry,” I said. “I had to—”

“Take an epic dump?” Ethan asked, loud enough that a few strangers laughed.

“Um, no. I had to make a phone call.” That was true. “To my agent.” That was not true.

“Oh,” he said begrudgingly, looking annoyed he couldn’t be more annoyed.

“Consider yourself lucky,” Joy said, wiping her eyes. “That was so sad.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Don’t tell him!” Ethan said. “This is the kind of film you have to see from start to—”

“She drives her car off a bridge,” you cut in. “With Jim in it.”

“Babe!” Ethan said sharply, and you shook your head at him like someone training a dog. I felt my shoulders relax.

“And she makes Jules watch,” Joy whimpered. She looked up at Diego, her lower lip quivering. “Did I get snot on your arm at the end?”

“It’s OK,” he said, smiling down at her. “This shirt is so old, it’s basically Kleenex.”

“I mean, who would do that?” Joy asked, her eyes wide and watery.

“A crazy person,” Diego said.

“See, that’s what I take issue with,” you said, pulling on your coat while simultaneously dodging Ethan’s attempts to help. “Why does the woman have to be some unhinged sociopath?” You rooted around in your purse and fished out a container of Tic Tacs. “That’s just straight-up misogyny.”

“Truffaut is not a misogynist,” Ethan said, rolling his eyes. “He’s a genius. Have you seen The 400 Blows?”

“Nah, I think my mom blocks those channels,” Diego joked.

“Anyway,” Ethan continued, ignoring our snickering, “Catherine doesn’t do it because she’s crazy, she just realizes she can never have him, or the kind of life she wants. It’s about the choices you make when you feel desperate and trapped.”

“I felt trapped watching that,” you said, rolling your eyes and jiggling your jaw from side to side. “I’m going to the ladies’ room.”

“You have to see it,” Ethan said, turning to me as you scampered off, clutching your bag. “I think you could really use it for Rodolpho’s motivation at the end.”

“Hold up, does your play end with murder-suicide, too?” Joy asked. “Because I thought ballets were depressing, but damn. This was worse than Swan Lake.”

“It’s . . . more nuanced,” I said, mostly for Ethan’s benefit. Really I wasn’t sure I understood how someone could hurl themselves off a bridge just from wanting someone. I mean, I wanted you, but not that badly. Yet. Maybe Ethan was right, and I needed to study some unstable types, although people watching was more my speed than movie watching. It had always been a habit of mine, since I was little, to pick someone out of a crowd and try to imagine what it would be like to be them, sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure—I’d start with the shoes or the walk or some other detail and then let my imagination spin out from there. There were a dozen people standing around me in the lobby at that moment who I could use: The middle-aged man with the pleated jeans and slight limp, who would go home to Queens to care for his disabled brother; the twentysomething hipster couple with matching asymmetrical pixie cuts who might get into a fight on the train, and then, back on the sidewalk, she’d walk ahead of him, fighting tears, while he silently smoked a hand-rolled cigarette. Most of my made-up stories had depressing trajectories, which was something my therapist in L.A. would have called “worth exploring.”