Up & Out - Ariella Papa [38]
“Well, it doesn’t seem like Beth is going to ask you. Unfortunately, everyone else is pretty much paired off. Unless you want someone’s couch. I think it should be a very transitional thing with Tommy. You can’t stay there for more than a few months. It just won’t be good.” It’s nice to have a person who has no trouble making your big decisions for you. She’s right. I can’t afford this rent, not with my credit card debt.
“I don’t know why you’re cleaning, we’re moving out, anyway.”
“It puts my mind at ease.” She pauses. “So I can tell the landlord we won’t need to resign.”
“Yes, and while you’re at it tell him to fuck himself for rent like this.”
“Okay.” She pulls out some pasta boxes and smiles. Cleaning makes her strangely giddy; I will never understand it. “What are you up to today?”
“Well, I think I’ll go to Madison Square Park and work on the final scripts and some notes for the animators. Then I told Seamus I would take him out for dinner since he’s treated me the past couple of times.”
“Nice. I’m going to clean out my closets and take stuff to Goodwill.”
“Do you want to go to Johnnie’s first?” Johnnie’s is a small restaurant with a lunch counter and a couple of tables. They make the best BLTs.
“Do you ever think of anything other than food?”
“Is there anything else?” She shakes her head, but closes the cabinet. I begin to salivate.
A mere hour later, I am happily full of bacon and trying not to be distracted by all the cute dogs at the dog run when I look over some final scripts. Some day I want to have a dog in the city. If things don’t work out with Seamus, I will get a dog. But things seem like they’re working out—it’s starting to feel like a relationship. Although, he seems busier than I am.
I am not calling Tommy yet. I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m going to magically move into Seamus’s fabulous apartment in the West Village. Still, it would be nice to have a fireplace (even if it’s fake) and a boyfriend with the inside track on New York’s restaurants. Okay, I have to stop this food obsession. I am getting out of control.
I think I’m starting to believe in all the work mumbo jumbo. We are in “transition” there—and I feel transitional. My apartment, my job, boyfriends, friends—everything. It’s like melancholy, but less clear. I just want to feel normal again. I don’t want to keep referring to focus groups where we pump kids full of pizza and soda and try to elicit answers we can use in Power-Point presentations to get more money. I want to feel like myself again.
I can’t focus on the scripts. I don’t want to think about Esme. When I first started working on her, I got so into it. It was like rewriting history, creating the type of person I wished I could have been.
My friends were all behind me. Tommy totally got it and knew her just as well as I did. Everyone who saw the interstitials said they were totally inspired by those little films. I even brought them home to show my parents over Christmas two years ago, and for once I thought they finally kind of understood what I did. Okay, they still didn’t get how I could be paid for doing it, but it was a start.
Now Esme belongs to everyone else. Funny how a promotion can be the fastest way to lose control. Sure, it was hard for me to let Janice and John animate her after I made executive producer, but I believed they got it. I don’t think someone in Korea who doesn’t get what it’s like to be a kid in this country would be able to figure it out. I hate that all these decisions are being made based on money, either, or that they are being made by people who don’t know jack about kids.
When I was putting the pilot together, I caved to Hackett’s suggestion about changing Esme’s sister to a brother. It was easy enough to change Ellie to Eric, but once I made the first change I essentially made it okay for all the changes. This was all a part of the job. I wasn’t doing a solo stand-up act, I was making TV. I couldn’t work in a vacuum. People had say. Fuck.
A young black retriever comes up to me and sniffs my leg. “Hey, buddy,” I say. I let him put