The Smart One and the Pretty One

  They settled on a movie that was starting in twenty minutes in Century City, which meant they had to hustle to make it. Good, Ava thought as they nabbed the elevator down to the ground floor: they’d have no time to do anything other than buy tickets and go sit in a dark theater.

  They spent the whole drive figuring out the best route to avoid traffic. But even so, their movie was sold out by the time they got up to the cinema, and so were all the other decent films.

  “The fates are against us,” Russell said, frowning at the scroll of movies and times flickering over the ticket counter. “But I’m getting hungry, anyway. Let’s buy tickets for a later show and have dinner first.”

  Ava was still desperately scanning the list of movies. “It’ll get pretty late if we do that.”

  “Or,” he said, and the edge to his voice made her turn and look at him, “I could just take you home and not waste any more of your time. Would you prefer that?”

  “Would you?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips.

  “Not at all. I’ve been looking forward to this evening all week.”

  “Because you thought you’d be with Lauren.” She hated herself for saying it, for her own perverse desire to force him to admit something that would only depress her to hear.

  He wasn’t honest enough to do that, anyway. He raised his hands in a supplicating gesture. “I’m thrilled to be out with you tonight, Ava.”

  “But Lauren’s the one you made the plans with.”

  “So . . . is your point that you never intended to be part of them?”

  “No, of course not,” Ava said, frustrated—she was trying to prove that he didn’t want to be there with her, and he kept twisting it back on her. “Once I knew about it, I was—” She stopped. What was she? “I was fine with the whole thing,” she finished lamely. Then: “I just don’t want you to feel like you have to hang out with me all evening if you really just wanted to be with Lauren.”

  “You know what?” Russell said.

  “What?”

  “I’m hungry. And it’s making me irritable. And it’s not outside the realm of possibility that hunger has the same effect on you. Can we please just go get something to eat? We’ll hold off on the movie for now, see how we’re feeling after dinner.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Ava said.

  He looked around. “Let’s not do the food court thing. I desperately need to sit down and have a drink. It’s been a long week.”

  “There’s a Houston’s downstairs.”

  “Perfect. They have a full bar.”

  There was a wait for a table at Houston’s. The hostess said it would be roughly ten minutes and gave them a big square beeper. It was crowded inside the restaurant, so they went outside to wait. The evening was growing cold and Ava shivered in her thin top. In all the rush of trying to make the movie, she had forgotten to grab a coat.

  “Here.” Russell slipped off his jacket and held it out to her.

  “That’s okay,” Ava said, hugging her elbows and huddling her shoulders. “I’m fine.”

  “Take it,” he said and circled around behind her so he could drape it over her shoulders.

  “Won’t you be cold?” Ava asked.

  “I’m never cold. It’s a guy thing.” He had on a long-sleeved oxford shirt and a T-shirt under that—you could see the outline of its shorter sleeves through the woven cotton of the shirtsleeves. His shirt still held the outlines of a good starchy ironing—the day’s wearing had softened but not eliminated them—and was tucked neatly in at his narrow waist. Ava followed the row of buttons up to where the collar branched into two points and then up to his face. Their eyes met. She felt a weird jolt of familiarity, some sense of having known him when they were kids coming back to her as a brief moment of déjà vu. She didn’t mention it, though.

  Instead she said, “I have this theory that guys get just as cold as women but they think it’s more macho not to admit it.”

  “Now who’s generalizing about the sexes?” Russell asked. Stripped of the jacket, he looked younger and a little more vulnerable.

  “Me,” she admitted, and he nodded with a smile.

  The jacket was blessedly warm and smelled nice. Russell didn’t seem to wear cologne, so it must have been some other mild scent clinging to it—his deodorant, maybe, or his shaving cream, or some combination of various toiletries like those. Ava cuddled into its heavy, silk-lined warmth. “Thank you,” she said. “For the jacket. I was lying when I said I wasn’t cold.”

  He gave a slightly superior smile. “I know.”

  She leaned back against the mall directory, a heavy glass sign set in a concrete base. “So what made this week so long for you?”

  “Work stuff.” He twitched his shoulders, first one, then the other, rapidly. “A lot of people were yelling. At me. All week long.”

  “You’re the managing director. Who’s allowed to yell at you?”

  “Angry members of the board,” he said. “Meaning, primarily, the family who founded Evoque. They used to control every aspect of it. The mother designed the clothing, the daughter modeled it, the father ran the business . . . But a couple of years ago, everyone—even they—agreed it was time for a change.”

  “That’s where you came in.”

  “That’s where I came in.” He absently rubbed his own arms.

  “Why were they yelling at you?”

  “Oh, you know. The usual. Earnings less than we’d predicted. Shares down. And so on.” He made it sound like it was no big deal, but she suspected it took some effort for him to do that.

  It seemed kinder to match his lighthearted tone than to express concern. “I thought Carson Flite was going to magically reinvent the company’s image. I mean, Carson Flite and you.”

  “It takes time to do that,” he said. “I need more time.”

  “There’s no rush, is there?”

  “Only if they’re planning to fire me.” He gave a little laugh.

  “Is that likely?” and then she said, “Jesus!” as she gave a sudden jump.

  “What’s wrong?” Russell said, putting his hand out to her arm. “Are you okay?”

  Sheepishly, she reached into the hip pocket of his jacket and pulled out the restaurant beeper, which was vibrating and lighting up. “Scared me,” she said. “I thought something was attacking my leg.”

  “And I thought you were having a seizure,” he said. “I was desperately trying to remember if I was supposed to put something in your mouth to keep you from biting your tongue or whether that’s just a myth.”

  “I don’t know,” Ava said. “Does food count as putting something in my mouth?”

  Russell took the beeper from her. “Let’s go.”

  Once the hostess had seated them, Ava slipped her arms out of Russell’s jacket, carefully folded it, and handed it back across the table to him. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m okay now.”

  He put it on the booth bench next to him. “If you need it again, let me know.”

  “I will.” They studied their menus. Ava looked up after a moment and said, “Oh, and I never got to say I’m sorry about all the work stuff.”

  He waved his hand dismissively. “It is what it is.”

  “I like that phrase,” Ava said. “Or maybe I hate it. Either way, I admire its applicability. There isn’t a situation in the world that can’t be summed up by ‘It is what it is.’ But it doesn’t actually mean anything, does it?”

  “You think I should stop saying it?”

  “Not at all. I just think it’s important to acknowledge it’s fundamentally meaningless.”

  “In other words,” he said, “it is what it is.” They grinned over the tops of their menus at each other.

  The waitress stopped by the table to ask if they wanted to order drinks. Russell gratefully requested a martini made with Bombay gin, straight up, with a twist—but “not Sapphire,” he instructed her. “That’s important.”

  “I’ll have one of those too.” Ava leaned her hea
d back to look up at the waitress. “But feel free to use Sapphire or any other precious gem. I’d never know the difference.”

  “Me neither,” the waitress said and left the table.

  Russell raised his eyebrows. “You normally drink martinis?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Can’t you tell?”

  “The precious gem thing was a tip-off.”

  “I don’t ‘normally’ drink any hard liquor. Just wine. But I’ve been thinking I’d like to have a signature drink. Something I always get so when I walk into my favorite restaurant where everyone knows my name—that place doesn’t exist by the way, but in a perfect universe it would—they’d immediately start making it and bring it over before I even sat down.”

  “I have a couple of restaurants where they bring me my martini without asking,” Russell said. “Ones I go to for business dinners.”

  “So do you always order that drink?” Ava said. “The martini with the this and not the that?”

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  “It’s very James Bond of you.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m like him in other ways too.”

  Ava settled back against the booth. “How’s that?”

  “Devilishly good looks aside?” he said, and she laughed and nodded. “Well, I’m constantly doing battle with the forces of evil. And I have a bad habit of falling in love with beautiful women whose only goal is to betray and destroy me.”

  “I’m not sure you have the healthiest attitude about these things.”

  “Oh well,” he said. “It is what it is.”

  “I can’t stay out too long,” Daniel called through the open car window when he finally pulled up, twenty minutes late. Lauren had expected him to be five minutes late, not twenty, and had therefore spent fifteen minutes waiting on the curb for him. She had received four offers in that time to jump into the cars of strange men and had declined them all, although she had briefly considered saying yes to one guy who was cute and clean-cut and driving a high-end Lexus, especially since Daniel was already twelve minutes late at that point. But in the end she had waved him on with a regretful smile.

  “Why not?” she said, pulling the door open.

  “My mother’s not doing well tonight. I would have canceled, but she said I should get out of the house and do something on my own for once.”

  “It’s nice to see you too,” Lauren said as she swung herself into the car and flopped down in the passenger seat. “And I accept your apology for keeping me waiting.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” he said. “So what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Get a drink?”

  He pulled the car back into the traffic, cutting off a driver who honked at him, which he ignored. “Sounds good to me. Tell me where to go—I’m new to these parts.”

  “You prefer funky and older, or hip and new?”

  “I don’t care. Like I said—just tell me where to go.”

  She directed him to a decent restaurant that had a large bar and was rarely so crowded you couldn’t get a table at the last minute: she was hungry and hoped he’d be able and willing to squeeze in a quick dinner.

  When they got there, the bar was standing room only, but just as Daniel was handing the bartender the money for their drinks, Lauren spotted a couple standing up to leave and ordered him to grab their table. A young woman approached just as Daniel did. She hesitated, tilting her head to give him a sweet “May I have this one?” kind of look. Daniel’s response was to immediately slide into a chair, claiming the table for himself. The girl looked momentarily stunned, standing there with her drink in her hand, but then she shrugged and rejoined her friends.

  “You did that really well,” Lauren said as she joined Daniel at the table with their drinks. “I’m impressed. Oh, and here’s your change.” She dropped it on the table as she sat down. “I gave the bartender a big tip.”

  “Did what well?” He didn’t even glance at the money, just stuck it in his pocket.

  “Grabbed the table before that girl did.”

  “Angelenos are such amateurs—any New Yorker can score a table around here. We’re tougher and we think faster on our feet.”

  “Clearly you haven’t been to the half-price sale at Fred Segal.”

  He grimaced. “Nor am I likely to go in the future.”

  “You might want to rethink that,” she said. “You could use a little more style. You dress very 1980s Master of the Universe, you know.”

  He looked down at the khakis and V-neck sweater he wore. “What do you mean? This is what everyone wears.”

  “Exactly. Don’t you want to stand out in a crowd?”

  “Sure.” He raised his drink—scotch on the rocks—to his lips. “But not because of my clothing.” He took a sip and winced, the way people do when the liquor’s strong.

  “Why, then?”

  “You care a lot about clothing, don’t you?” he said, deliberately eyeing the fancy top she was wearing. She had pushed her jacket off and onto her chair back, the better to display the black silk camisole she was wearing and the pretty, strong shoulders it revealed.

  “I have to,” she said. “I buy clothing for retail stores—that’s my job.”

  “Figures. And if you quit tomorrow, would you stop caring?”

  “I quit weeks ago,” she said, “and I haven’t stopped caring yet.”

  “You quit your job?”

  “It was in New York,” she said, “and I wanted to come here and help with Mom, so I quit and moved out.” It was basically the truth—the order in which those things happened may have been a little different, but none of it was a lie, except for the quitting part. “Eventually I’ll need to find a new job here, once things get back to normal with my mom.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “I don’t know. Something in the same field, I guess.”

  “Does clothing count as a ‘field’?”

  “Fashion does. I like being a buyer. And I’m really good at it—I have an amazing eye for future trends.”

  “And you’re modest, too.”

  Lauren flicked the side of her wineglass with her forefinger to make a slight pinging sound. “Just being honest. If you prefer, I could spend the evening telling you what I’m bad at.”

  “Which is what?” His lips curved a little, like he was anticipating a joke.

  “Self-restraint, for one thing.”

  “Wow,” he said and shifted abruptly in his seat. “That’s a good flaw to have—or at least to claim to have. Guys like girls with no self-restraint.”

  “Don’t get too excited,” Lauren said. “I meant when it comes to spending money, not . . . anything else. Although . . .” She didn’t bother to finish the thought.

  Daniel narrowed his eyes. “You spend too much money?”

  “More than I have.”

  “That’s too much.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Then stop.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Not really. Just don’t do it.”

  “I’m trying,” she said.

  He flung his arm out almost violently. “I don’t get it. I don’t get why someone like you cares that much about what she puts on her body. You’d be a pretty girl if you dressed in a burlap sack.”

  “That’s very Rei Kawakubo,” she said with a snicker.

  He ignored that. “If you were ugly, I could see how you might think that maybe clothing would add some style to the package, draw the eye away from the flaws. But you’re not ugly. You could buy your clothes at Sears and still look better than most girls. Why waste your money chasing after fads?”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “That wasn’t meant as a compliment,” he said. “I was criticizing you.”

  “That made the compliment all the more sincere,” Lauren said. “You weren’t trying to make one.”

  “Whatever.” He looked around the bar. “Everyone in this whole city is so goddamned pret
ty, always dressed up like they have to impress someone. I don’t know how people can stand to live here.”

  “I grew up here,” Lauren said. “It’s not that bad.”

  “You fit in,” he said. “You like to be pretty.”

  “First of all, that’s not a sin. Second of all, there are plenty of good-looking people in New York too.”

  “It’s not the same. They’re not all soft and lovely and unthreatening.”

  “I loved New York for a while,” she said. “But it’s a harsh place. The people are harsh, the weather’s harsh, the bartenders are harsh. L.A.’s easier.”

  “Yeah,” he said with disgust. “It’s all sunshine and puppies. Everyone gives you a big smile as he stabs you in the back.”

  “You definitely belong in New York.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m harsh.” He shifted again—he seemed to have a habit of sitting quietly for a few minutes and then suddenly and abruptly moving his whole body like he was going to explode if he didn’t. Or like he was exploding. Then he’d be quiescent again. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not all bad being here. It almost feels like a vacation. I get my work done early in the morning, then spend the day with my mother doing stuff I haven’t done in years, like just watching TV or reading books. The weather’s always beautiful. Sometimes we just sit on the deck and enjoy the sun. I could never be this—” He searched for the word. “This lazy, I guess, back home. In New York, there’s an energy in the air—you feel like you have to keep moving. Here, you can just do nothing for days on end.”

  “Isn’t that kind of nice? Can’t you enjoy that on some level?”

  “If I weren’t watching my mother die, yeah, maybe.” He picked up his glass and drank deeply. When he put it down, there was no more liquor left.

  Lauren studied him quietly for a moment. Then she said, “Is she really dying?”

  “I don’t know.” His tone ended the discussion. He put his glass down and did one of his explosive fidgets. “You hungry? Want to get some dinner?”

  “Eventually,” Lauren said. “No rush.”

  “Yeah, there is. I can’t stay out too long, remember?”