Love & Lies: Marisol's Story (8 page)

“Of course you are, sweetheart. I know that. And when you get there, you’ll find yourself a lovely girlfriend.”

“I hope you’re right, Helen,” Birdie said, giving me a sad look. “If anyone will have her.” Fortunately, he was sitting across from me so I could kick him in the shin.

“I’m not paying forty thousand dollars a year for you to find a—a—a girlfriend!” Dad sputtered.

“Oh, Raphael, don’t be silly,” Mom said, shushing him with a finger to her lips.

Birdie, who had always been just a little nervous around my blustery father, fidgeted in his seat. “This is the
best
risotto, isn’t it, Damon? I’m going to have to get this recipe!”

Damon the finicky, who’d basically just moved the risotto around on his plate until half of it spilled over onto the tablecloth, nodded enthusiastically and said, “It’s fantastic!”

Dad did not try to hide the rolling of his eyes.

B
Y
F
RIDAY MORNING
I
STILL HADN’T GOTTEN
very far with my idea for the dialogue exercise. I couldn’t go to class the next morning unprepared, and I was getting frustrated. The boys didn’t have classes on Fridays, so Damon was running lines with Birdie for Birdie’s first college play, which was some goofy thing by Molière. Birdie was practicing tripping over his own feet, and both of them were squealing with laughter like two little pigs. Finally, I packed up my laptop and headed to the Square. Any place was quieter than my apartment.

The Mug wasn’t too crowded in the daytime, but the idea of writing there all afternoon and then waiting tables there all night was not appealing. I pretended not to know where I was headed, but it was just a game.
She probably won’t be here anyway,
I thought as I stepped through the door at Starbucks.

Still, I could barely breathe as I glanced surreptitiously around the room. I was right: no Olivia. But there was an empty table in the back near the window, so I grabbed it before even getting my first cup of coffee. For a few minutes I felt self-conscious sitting there staring at my laptop screen, but the allure of working in public became apparent to me
quickly. Even though I was surrounded by people, no one paid the slightest bit of attention to me. There were so many conversations going on that they became a pleasant buzz of white noise that didn’t interrupt me at all. I liked the fact that people all around me were busy; it helped overcome the blank-page (or blank-screen) phenomenon of writing down those first words. It almost seemed like I was carrying on a conversation with the rest of the world.

I let Carmen and Dorothy run around in my head and just be with each other. Before long they were speaking, speaking so fast that I could barely keep up with them. It was breathtaking to write like that, full speed ahead without even stopping to edit or reread.

By the time Olivia showed up, I’d forgotten why I’d gone there in the first place.

“Well, hey!” she said, coming up to my table. “Do you come here to write too? I thought this table had my name on it.”

I looked up into her wide smile and gasped. Even if you have an active fantasy life, it’s still shocking when your dream walks in the door, shining its perfect teeth at you.

“Hi! You can join me—there’s room here!”

“Oh, I don’t want to interrupt you,” she said.

“No, you wouldn’t be!” I said, taking my shoes off the other chair and moving my bag to make room for her. “I’d like the company.”

“If you’re sure,” she said, settling herself in. “I do love to work in here, don’t you?”

“It’s my first time,” I admitted, “but yeah, I like having all the talking around me.”

She nodded and sat down. “I have to
be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, before the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”

I loved the way she put things; it was what I’d been thinking, but I could never have said it like that.

“So, have you finished the exercise for class?” she asked.

“That’s what I’m working on now. I did some other writing this week, though—just ideas, really, for my novel.”

“Wonderful!”

“Your class last week was inspirational.” I knew I sounded like the worst brownnoser alive, but I actually meant it this time.

“Was it?” she said with a little grin. “Well, I hope I can continue to live up to my own high standards.”

I knew she was tweaking me, and I was embarrassed. Could she tell I had a big old crush on her? I probably wasn’t the first student to find her “inspirational.”

“Well, don’t let me keep you from working,” I said.

“Oh, you won’t,” Olivia said, brushing her luxurious hair out of her eyes. “Nothing stops me. Even when the screen is
blank, I have the miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and waiting for me to make them visible.”

“You do? That’s amazing. I wish that would happen to me.”

“It will someday, when you’ve written as much as I have.” She opened her laptop and her attention immediately disappeared into it, leaving me to search for my own invisible ink.

Fortunately, I’d just about finished the exercise, because having Olivia sitting across the small table from me was torturously
distracting. She contemplated the computer screen and tapped out words on the keyboard without an obvious thought for me, her foolishly smitten student, sitting so close and unable to think about anything but her. Half an hour before I really had to be at the Mug, I closed my laptop and told Olivia I was leaving for work.

She looked up from her writing, dreamily. “I hope you got some work done.”

I nodded.

“Good. See you tomorrow, huh?”

“Absolutely.”

In order to get from the table to the front door I had to think consciously about how to walk. It wasn’t until the fresh air slapped me in the face that I began to clear my head of the aura of Olivia.

*  *  *

When I got to the classroom the next morning, Olivia was already there. She looked up and gave me a quick wink, which discombobulated me so much I could barely manage to find an empty seat. For fear of giving away my feelings I didn’t dare look up at her until she started to talk to the whole class. I gave Gio a little wave—he was at the other end of the table—and wondered if he could tell I’d been whacked in the head with the love stick.

We started right off reading our exercises out loud. I wanted to wait to read my piece until last, if possible, so I could calm down a little bit first. Lots of people volunteered to go ahead of me, either because they wanted to get it over with or because they were so proud of what they’d written.

Some of the character dialogues were pretty bad, I thought. A couple of people—Steve Briefcase for one—didn’t even get the rhythm of how you wrote dialogue. It was as if they’d never read a novel before, or even listened to people speaking. Mary Lou wrote a pretty interesting piece about a young couple who were discussing whether or not to get married, and I wondered how true to life it might be. Hamilton Hairdo read this ridiculous thing about two Labrador retrievers discussing their idiotic owners—I was completely thrilled by his incompetence (and a tad annoyed that Olivia smiled at him, as if she found something about the piece amusing). Gio had written a conversation between a boy and his mother. I knew it was pretty close to home from the things he’d told me about his mother last spring. As always with Gio the writing was good, but he shied away from the emotional part of it.

Olivia said something nice to everybody, then gave some gentle critiques, focusing mainly on style and how to make dialogue sound realistic. She recommended we read our work out loud to see if the dialogue sounded like real speech—which I did anyway—and she explained that after this week she expected us to critique each other’s work too.

I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying because I was distracted by the way she looked. If I’d thought she was beautiful before, it was because I hadn’t realized how truly amazing she
could
look. It was a very warm day, and Olivia had prepared for it by wearing a white sundress that fell just below her knees. It was a simple dress that showed off her tan, well-muscled arms and legs; she wore nothing else except white sandals and the large silver earrings. Her black hair was
piled on top of her head with a few wisps falling down against her cheekbones. Talk about dramatic looks. I could tell I wasn’t the only gobsmacked fan; when Steve Briefcase tried to form a sentence, he made the mistake of looking up at her, and his words slipped and stumbled all over each other. Olivia Frost was the definition of stunning.

And then it was my turn to read, which I attempted to do with confidence.

The first time Dorothy saw Carmen was in the waiting room of the San Juan hospital. A social worker introduced them.


“
Mucho gusto, señora,”
Dorothy said.


“I can speak English,” Carmen said. “I’m not stupid.”


“I’m sorry!” Dorothy said, putting her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t think you were stupid. I just thought . . .”


“I’ll leave you two alone to get to know each other,” the social worker said before she disappeared into the crowded hallway.


Dorothy sat down next to the very pregnant teenager whose child she hoped to be able to adopt after it was born. Dorothy was a therapist; she spoke to people in all sorts of difficult situations all day long, but now she couldn’t seem to think of a thing to say to this girl, Carmen. And Carmen obviously wasn’t going to speak to her first.


“So,” Dorothy finally said. “How far along are you?”


“Thirty-six weeks. You won’t have to wait long.” Carmen sounded angry.


“Oh, I wasn’t asking for that reason! I just wondered.” Dorothy wished the social worker hadn’t left so quickly. “I’m very grateful to you for this, Carmen. My husband and I have tried for a long time to have a child of our own, but we haven’t been successful. I promise you I will be the best mother I can be to your baby.” Dorothy laid a hand on Carmen’s arm, but the young woman pulled herself away from the touch.


“How old are you?” Carmen wanted to know.


“I’m almost forty-two,” Dorothy said.


“That’s old,” Carmen replied.


“Well, some women my age do get pregnant, but the doctor says I won’t be one of them.”


“I am eighteen,” Carmen said, lifting her head proudly.


“I know.”


“Why do you so much want a baby?” Carmen asked. “They are a lot of trouble. I have two younger brothers. They cry and whine and are always hungry.”


“Oh, but they also laugh and hug you. And you can teach them things—how to walk and talk and read. I think it would be the most
exciting thing I’ve ever done!”


Carmen made a face. “Your life must not be very exciting then.”


“Well, I guess it isn’t.” Dorothy said, laughing.


“Are you laughing at me?” Carmen wanted to know. “I cannot stand for people to laugh at me.”


“At you? Of course not! I’m laughing at myself,” Dorothy said.


Carmen was quiet a minute and then said, “Well, that’s okay then. If you laugh at yourself before other people can do it, it surprises them.”


“I think you’re right,” Dorothy said.


“Will you make sure that nobody ever laughs at my baby?” Carmen asked.


“Carmen, I promise you that.”


After I’d read my dialogue aloud, I looked at Gio first, without even thinking about it. He gave me a thumbs-up and a smile. I smiled back, and then Olivia spoke and the rest of the world disappeared.

“Marisol, that is a wonderful piece of work,” she said, her black eyes sparkling into mine. “I am
so
impressed that a writer your age can get to the heart of her characters like this. I could feel the anger in Carmen, the resentment against this older woman who plans to take her baby away. Her mixed emotions. And Dorothy also elicits our sympathy. She doesn’t know what to say; she doesn’t want to offend. Their emotions are so clear—great job!”

She went on for a few minutes about the difficulties of writing dialogue that reflects the characters’ emotions, saying she hoped everyone could see how expertly I’d managed to do this. She finished with, “You’ve really taken this assignment to heart. I can’t wait to see what you do next!” The rest of the class was staring at me with bald emotions ranging from awe to envy to downright resentment. But who cared?

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t drag my eyes away from her face. Olivia’s response to my work had been completely positive. To no one else had she given such enormous praise, and I believed I deserved every word of it.

Once our dialogues had all been read and commented upon, Olivia gave her lecture for the day. I took out my notebook and, like the week before, made notes on all she said. How I did this, I’m not sure, because I could barely hear the words. There was a kind of buzzing in my ears, or maybe around my whole head, and I felt as if I were watching the class proceeding from someplace far outside of it. I had been elevated from these mortal surroundings to some more exalted sphere by the admiration of Olivia Frost, and I hoped to remain in that bubble for a long time.

Eventually I managed to come to my senses enough to get down the assignment for the following week: to describe a place we knew well. Olivia begged us to give not merely the kind of description a tourist brochure might—no warm, sunny beaches or quaint little cottages or majestic mountains. She hoped we would search more deeply for our sense of place and find the way in which the setting gave additional meaning to the story. She left us with this thought:
“It is the
function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.”