One To Watch(4)
Ray [10:00am]: I really miss you.
Bea [10:04am]: I miss you too.
Bea insisted she wasn’t nervous to see Ray, but the deep breaths she kept taking (air hissing in through her teeth, then pushed back out past lips pursed in a Lamaze-shaped “ooh”) as she sat in traffic on the 10 told another story. She reassured herself that she was a different person now than the girl who spent all those years obsessed with him, the shy Hollywood agency assistant in love with the most handsome guy in her mailroom class.
How unbearably cliché, Bea thought of her younger self as she pulled off the highway and into the winding, moneyed streets of Westwood, where quaint Tudor houses that looked airlifted from a Grimm story lined every block. She’d rather have stayed in her hodgepodge neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles, but her favorite wine shop was here, nearly an hour away in traffic. For her one night with Ray (pretend though she might that it was no big deal), she knew she had to make the trek.
Les Caves was easy to miss with its unobtrusive sign and rough-hewn wooden door, and still easier to ignore when one peered inside briefly to see scattered tables laden with disorganized clusters of bottles. But Bea loved it here—loved speaking her broken French with the shopkeepers, loved delighting in the quirky wines they put aside for her, mouth-searingly dry Meuniers and sharply honeyed Savennières.
“Bea, bon matin!” Paul, who owned the shop with his wife, was pudgy and ebullient. Bea often joked that Paul had turned her into an insufferable wine snob, but he always laughed heartily and corrected her that she should be proud to be a connoisseur.
“Bonjour, Paul,” Bea said with a grin.
“Et qu’est-ce que tu désires aujourd’hui?” he asked. “Perhaps something very light, dry fruit and mineral? It is so hot!”
“C’est vrai,” Bea agreed—L.A. was experiencing its annual July heat wave, the few days a year when even the desert nights barely dipped below 90, rendering the entire city unlivable. It had been like this, too, the night Ray kissed her. That one perfect, terrible night five years ago, when he was stumbling drunk on the sidewalk in front of Chateau Marmont, his breath stale with cigarettes and whiskey, tears streaming down his face as he told Bea his mom was sick again, maybe terminally this time. He put his arms around Bea’s neck and whispered, “I can’t do this without you.” She replied, “You don’t have to,” not understanding whether he meant as friends or something more.
After all the countless nights of drinking together, sharing hushed secrets and whispered observations, feeling so starved to be physically close to him, clamping down nausea as she watched him flirt and kiss and leave whatever bar they were in with yet another gorgeous aspiring actress/model/singer, finally, finally, he was looking right at Bea.
It was too hot, and everything was damp, and she knew it was wrong when he leaned in to kiss her—he was too upset, too drunk, too distracted. But she didn’t care, because she had wanted this so much for so long, and she felt like she had somehow managed to wrench her life onto the right track by sheer force of will.
After the kiss, she expected him to say something profound—or something earnest, at the very least—but he just mumbled that he needed to call a car, he had an early flight.
“Oh,” Bea had stammered. “Sure. Of course.”
He flew home to Minnesota the next morning. He was only supposed to be gone for a few days, or maybe a few weeks, but he never came back, except to pack up his things and drive east. He spent the next few months at home with his family, watching his mother die; then he moved to Virginia for law school; after that, it was off to a fancy firm job in New York, where he met his girlfriend, Sarah; he followed her to Atlanta when she won a coveted promotion; that was where they got engaged.
And somehow, Bea still couldn’t believe any of it, as if the last eight years of her life had existed in some kind of stasis. Three years of knowing Ray, dreaming of Ray, yearning for Ray, believing with all her heart that he must feel the same. One night of blissful, agonizing confirmation. Five years of wondering whether any of it had been real.
She’d dated other men in the intervening time, of course, but she never found that same spark—no one so movie-star handsome, so quietly funny, so utterly captivating. Of all the app dates and setups, no one else had that thick, dark hair and those smoldering Brando eyes; no one else could run a finger along her arm and make her entire body feel weak.
And anyway, Bea’s primary focus was on other aspects of her life—career, friends, travel, family—she didn’t mind waiting to find another love as passionate and exciting as what she’d felt for Ray. She was sure one would come eventually. And in the meantime … well, in the meantime … was it really so bad to live in her memories? Her fantasies?
But today wasn’t a memory or a fantasy: Ray was on a plane right now, probably somewhere over the Midwest, hurtling toward Los Angeles, where he was spending one night in Bea’s guest room before catching a train to San Diego the next morning for some kind of anniversary weekend for his fiancée’s parents. Bea and Ray hadn’t seen each other for more than a year, not since a stilted meet-up in a crowded bar (with Sarah in tow, no less) during one of Bea’s whirlwind trips for New York Fashion Week. It had been loud, Bea had been exhausted, Ray had been sour. But tonight could be different—just the two of them, no noise. A chance to rekindle the connection Bea so desperately missed.