Up & Out - Ariella Papa [44]
Seamus is always making a case for something. I am getting used to it. His arguments are compelling and organized; in other words I am certain that other people have heard this stuff before he tells me. I wish that he could be a bit more spontaneous…but his good qualities outweigh my minor pet peeves. Although, sometimes I think my attraction to him might blind me a little.
We are constantly drinking wine together, good smooth wine. The only times he doesn’t talk is when he is studying the wine list. When he looks up from it this time, he presents me with three possibilities, which means I have to struggle over making the right decision. I’m not sure if he is testing me or if I am paranoid.
I hesitate and then he eliminates one bottle and decides that we should have our starters with the first bottle and our meal with the second.
Every meal with him is a two-bottle ordeal. (We both vowed not to do the sake anymore.)
“Do you ever drink anything other than wine?”
“If I could I’d drink Kool-Aid,” he says.
“If you could? Why can’t you? At home, at least?”
“I’m not going to make it.”
“All you do is add water.” I can’t believe he’s serious.
“Yeah, but then you have to buy a pitcher. There are people who do those things. I’m not one of them.”
“You mean you don’t have a pitcher in your apartment with all those wineglasses?”
“Wine is premade.”
“Kool-Aid takes two seconds.” This is the first time I’ve argued with him—about Kool-Aid, no less.
“I have enough disposable income to have other people make the things I consume.”
Was I being too picky in wanting a man who could add water to a pitcher? People who do those things? I had just seen another side of him I wasn’t sure I liked.
On Friday I spent the working day in a voice-over session and returned to my desk to find a boatload of e-mail from Delores. I had to cancel my dinner plans with Seamus when Delores decided she wanted to review the sound design at eight-thirty. We were supposed to go to Vong. It hurt to cancel.
Delores was wearing a T-shirt with Esme on it—it was like a dress on her four-foot-eight body. (No one had told me that we had new T-shirts made.)
At nine-thirty I longed for lemongrass coconut soup as she talked in circles about her views on the noise grass should be making in a scene where Esme was teaching her brother Eric to fly a kite.
I realized then that she just didn’t get it; she was under-qualified for this job and scared shitless about it. Instead of working with me, she had decided to pretend that her way was the only way. The minutiae mattered to her, because if she could nitpick the tiniest detail, it would seem like she knew her stuff.
Oprah would call this an “aha moment,” but in spite of my revelation I still worked until 11:30 p.m. on a Friday night.
“Were you out with Seamus?” Lauryn asks when I come home. She is wearing overalls, which swim on her, and a bandanna in her hair. Boxes and papers are strewn everywhere. I have to be out in a week and the sight of this mess traumatizes me.
“No, I had to cancel. I was working with an elf.”
“Jesus. You want a mudslide?”
“How very eleventh grade of you.”
“They’re still good. And I need a little break.”
“Why not?”
We sit on the couch with our mudslides. On Sunday movers are coming to move all the big furniture to Lauryn’s aunt’s house in Framingham. It will stay there until Lauryn finds an apartment in Boston at the end of the summer.
I have been instructed that Jordan will come by sometime next week to pick up the love seat. I wonder how the conversation between the two of them was, but I know from the last eight months of their marriage that if Lauryn wants me to know something she will tell me.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around to help you pack,” I say.
“That’s okay. I know you’ve been working late.”
“I’m going to have to work from home tomorrow, unless that’s going to get in your way. I could go to the library—I just won’t go to the office. I have sworn not to do that after the UpFront. Remember how I lived at work