Proust at the Bottom of a Glass

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

It’s three-fifteen in the morning when she tells me she’s going to go “freshen up.” I know what this means. I’ve been here before.

When she comes out of the bathroom she’s fully dressed, her hair’s perfect and the pocketbook she left sitting on the bedside table has four crisp Benjamin Franklin’s in it that weren’t in there when she arrived. Neither of us will mention this part of the transaction. We’re both far too classy for that.

Or at least she is.

I give her a kiss on the cheek, pretending to be normal, more for my benefit than hers.

“Same time next week?” I whisper, acting like a give half a damn.

“Call me,” is all she says. She doesn’t mean it. She means call the number of the prepaid cell phone she keeps in her West Hollywood apartment and leave a message and maybe, maybe, she’ll call me back. If she doesn’t have a better offer.

“See if you can get us some coke next time,” I say to her back and she heads for the door. Her laugh is like crystal shattering on embarrassingly expensive imported marble tiles.

“Nobody does coke any more,” she says. “What is this, 1989?”

“How old were you in 1989?” I ask.

She smiles at me with teeth so white they practically glow in the dark.

“Two,” she says, and then she’s gone.

I go back to bed to toss and turn until sunrise, then sleep until noon.

Let me tell you exactly how fucked up California is: They put goat cheese on pizza here. That’s exactly how fucked up California is.

Breakfast is a shot of tequila and a hot shower; lunch is a slice of fucked-up California pizza from that little place on La Cienega, then a thirty-minute drive up Laurel Canyon and into Studio City.

God, I hate L.A.

The appointment is at five; I show up at five thirty. Marvin doesn’t care. He stop caring six months ago.

“When am I going to see the script?” These are the first words Marvin says to me. That’s how he opens all of our little chats.

“Oh I’m fine,” I say. “A little sciatica.”

“So go get a fucking colonic. When am I going to see the script?”

“You know we never talk any more.”

Brittany sticks her head in the door, takes one look at Marvin’s face and disappears.

Marvin plays with a pencil for a minute. When he drops it onto the desk it makes a sound like a car backfiring.

“Six weeks,” he says, rubbing his expensive blue L.A. eyes. “Six fucking weeks. I don’t know how much longer I can stall for you.”

“Great art takes time.”

“This isn’t great art. This is the movies. And Warners wanted this script six fucking weeks ago.”

“Give me another month.”

“In another month they’re not going to want the script any more. They’re going to want their two hundred thousand dollars back.”

“Could you ask Brittany to get me a latte?”

“It’s Whitney, and there’s a Starbucks across the street, get it yourself. How many pages have you got?”

“What happened to Brittany?”

“There was never a Brittany. You call her Brittany every time, and it’s always been Whitney.”

“What about the last one?”

“Sienna.”

“You’re sure it’s not Brittany?”

“Charles,” says Marvin like he does when he’s really mad at me, not just pretending to be mad like he usually is. “How many pages?”

I hold up my index finger and thumb, about a screenplay’s width apart.

“I want it on my desk Monday morning.”

“Marvin, you know I’m not going to show you a first draft. You know I don’t work like that.”

“Your first drafts are better than anybody else’s final drafts, and you know it, you arrogant prick. Monday morning.”

“I’m not happy with the third act.” I don’t bother telling him I’m not happy with the first or second acts, either.

“How do you feel about the words ‘breach of contract?’”

I roll them around in my mouth for a minute. “Not that good,” I say.

“Monday morning,” he says. “Not Monday afternoon, not Monday end-of-day. Monday morning, capiche?”

“Marvin, you’re a forty-year-old hebe from the Valley. You’re not from Newark.”

“Get out.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with Newark.”

“Get out of my office.”

“No, I’m lying. Newark’s a shithole.”

“Get the fuck out of my office!”

Brittany tells me to have a great day as I’m walking to the elevator. Brittany? Whitney? Whatever.

Neither of them knows that I haven’t written a goddamn word.

I’m in downtown Pasadena on a Friday night. Why? Because that’s where I was when I got tired of driving.

I roll into the first parking spot I can find, which I locate about twenty minutes after I first started looking for one, then walk into the first bar I can find, which I locate about twenty seconds later.

It’s early, which means the place is packed. Downtown Pasadena is the blue-plate-special capital of the San Gabriel Valley, full of kids too young to know any better and retirees too old to care any more. I should probably find someplace trendier to drink, but I can’t see the point. Booze is booze.

The bartender is an amateur magician; he produces a shot glass by sleight-of-hand, and fills it from a bottle of Patrón he had hidden up his sleeve. Then he does it again, and again, and then I lose count. By the time he makes a well-done burger with extra mustard appear, I’ve forgotten that I asked for one. Then I show him a trick of my own by making the burger disappear while his back is turned. He’s impressed; he rewards me with another shot of tequila.

After a while of this, time starts to pass very quickly.

By nine-thirty the place is starting to empty out. The oldsters have all gone home to their boring lives and their boring beds, and the youngsters are looking for a better party. Soon enough it’s just me, the prestidigitator with the seemingly bottomless bottle of tequila and the red-headed college girl in the corner who’s been staring at me all night.

Thought I wasn’t going to mention her, didn’t you?

She’s been looking at me from over a dog-eared copy of Swann’s Way, and I haven’t seen her turn a page for twenty minutes.

I empty my glass one last time and, just for something to do, slide off my stool and make my way over to her table.

“I never liked Proust,” I say as I ignore the absence of an invitation and sit down.

“Why not?” she asks, taking it all in stride along with a sip of the beer she’s been nursing for an hour.

“Made me feel inadequate,” I say before realizing that probably wasn’t the best way to start a conversation.

She doesn’t say anything, and I’m forced to think of a different approach.

“I’m Charlie,” I say, because it’s true.

“I know exactly who you are,” she says. “I read your book.”

“Which one?”

“You’ve only written one.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve read every word you’ve ever published,” she says.

“Every word?”

“Even that story you wrote for Playboy.”

“I guess somebody really does just buy it for the articles.”

She shrugs. Which of course just leaves me guessing.

“Shouldn’t you be home working on your next book?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “I should be home working on a screenplay.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“I lost my muse.” I don’t know why I say this. I mean, it’s true, but I don’t know why I say it.

At first I think I’ve lost her interest. She goes back to her book, ignores me for thirty seconds. Thirty seconds stretches to a minute. I’m just starting to feel like an asshole when she speaks up.

“Do you know what this book is about?” she asks.

“A failed love affair.”

She purses her lips. I feel like I’ve given the wrong answer. “It’s about a superficial man,” she says, “who idealizes a woman who doesn’t deserve it, and who’s heartbroken when he realizes who she really is.”

She closes her book, slaps it down on the table.

“Why did your muse leave?” she asks.

I know a set-up as well as anybody. “Because she idealized a man who didn’t deserve it, and she got her heart broken when she found out who he really was.”

She finishes her beer. I’m wondering whether I should order us another round when she says, “Are you sure it wasn’t the other way around?”

She’s looking at me now with those big, golden-brown eyes, still wide with promise. Still waiting to see just what the world has to offer. Innocent eyes.

“Maybe it’s both,” I say, unable to meet her gaze for long.

I wave, and a minute later the bartender arrives with a beer for her and a shot for me. She sips while I stare at my glass.

“I’m not going to sleep with you,” she says finally.

“I wasn’t going to ask,” I say, instantly defensive.

“I think you were,” she says. “I just want you to know that I’m not going to.”

I’m barely even listening at this point. Of course she’s right. Of course I was going to try to sleep with her. It’s all I know how to do these days. I don’t even know her name yet, but I knew the minute I saw her that I wanted to sleep with her.

For a while, I sit and ponder through a tequila haze just what this says about me as a human being.

And then, for a while longer, I think about Swann’s Way.

Her beer is half-empty when she declares that she has to go home. As she’s putting her book in her oversized bag, I find myself wondering where she’s really going. Home, like she says? Or off into the arms of some boy she’ll seduce and then discard once she’s tired of him.

I leave some bills on the table, offer to walk her out. She smiles, pretends to think about it, but shakes her head.

And then she’s gone.

When I get home, instead of going to bed, I start to write.

Another year, another bar. A classier place this time, more befitting my newly inflated bank account, still fat from the ludicrous advance check I’d deposited just six hours before.

I should be surprised to see her there, but I’m not.

The past year has been good to her. She’s put on a little weight in all the right places. She’s doing something different with her hair, letting it fall in ringlets instead of just pulling it back into a ponytail. She’s dressing better, too, in a grey satin number that shows off all her curves.

She spies me from across the bar, breaks away from her friends to come talk to me. I’m not sure why she does it.

“I saw your movie,” she says. I’m not surprised. Everyone is seeing it. Only it’s not really my movie any more.

“What did you think?”

“It was terrible,” she says.

“Yeah, I think so too,” I say.

The bartender appears at her elbow, as bartenders always do when a beautiful woman stands at the bar. She orders some exotic and trendy variation on a martini, sliding a twenty toward him and not expecting any change.

“Are you working?” she asks.

“Here and there,” I say.

“A new novel?”

Those golden-brown eyes again. Just like the ones I see in my dreams every night, the ones that seem to hover in front of me whenever I’m writing. Maybe they’re not quite so wide now, not quite so innocent. Maybe they’re a little older, a little narrower, a little more cautious. Or maybe it’s just my imagination.

I answer her question with a nod, always superstitious, not wanting to say anything more for fear of jinxing myself. It’s still too early. If I lose my muse again, the words will slow from a flood to a trickle, and the inch-high stack of pages on my desk won’t grow any taller.

She takes a sip of her drink, gives me a smile that, for just a moment, lights up my world. “Don’t let anyone rewrite it this time,” she says.

“I won’t,” I reply.

I raise my glass and we make a silent toast. I don’t know what she’s drinking to, but I’m drinking to the only thing that will ever matter to me in this life. Not love, not wealth, not family or security or years. Inspiration.

I watch her walk away, unable to ignore the way her dress hugs every curve, sways with every step. I briefly wonder where she’s going, but then I realize that in the end it doesn’t matter.

She’ll always be there, hovering in the back of my mind.

Until my next muse comes along.

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Harrell. All rights reserved.