She smiled, leaning back against the counter and popping the avocado into her mouth. She seemed lighter now, almost playful, rubbing her feet against each other as she sipped the iced tea. Maybe the sadness had been left upstairs, absorbed into the vast blue of her bedroom wall.
“Great. What are you thinking?”
“Well …”
The front door banged open and Jill’s voice filled the house. “It’s me! I forgot sunscreen!”
Amy speared another avocado chunk. “My daughter, the revolutionary. Didn’t Che Guevara have the same problem? Not enough SPF?”
Jill swung into the kitchen. “We’ve already got twenty people. Beth says if we …”
She saw her mother half-dressed, eating an avocado; saw me standing by the fridge with a handful of baby pretzels and suddenly started applauding.
“Oh my god! This is great!” She ran to Amy and pecked her cheek. “Your daughter totally approves!”
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said.
“Actually, it is, or will be in another twenty minutes,” Amy said, grabbing her daughter and returning the kiss. “Assuming you get the hell out of here and give us some privacy.”
Jill plucked some stray avocado from the bottom of Amy’s lips, then turned to me and bowed.
“She exits the scene with dignity and grace, like a true professional.” She grabbed an apple slice and touched my hand. “See? I know how to read a scene. You really need to cast me in your play.”
“Bye, Jill,” Amy said.
Like some 1940s Hollywood icon, Ava Gardner in a white hat and gloves, Jill backed out of the kitchen, blowing kisses, then calling from the hallway, “Radiohead? Jeez, don’t be so emo, Mom. Put on some Bruno Mars!”
We listened to her footsteps scurrying up and down the stairs, and then she was gone, her key turning the deadbolt, the screen door falling shut.
Amy finished her iced tea as I wiped off the counter.
“You have no reaction?”
“She’s a charming girl,” I told her. “You should be proud.”
“Not about Jill, you big doofus. I basically said I was going to sleep with you. Did you miss that little nugget?”
“I thought we were just doing our thing—you know, bantering back and forth…”
She looked out the window, where some birds were buzzing a small oak.
“If we’re too late, I get it,” she said. “You’ve got the California Girl waiting back in Paradise. And who knows? Maybe you’ll be Mister Off-Broadway Big Shot again, all those hot young actresses lined up backstage. I get it.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, knowing that, if we stopped to think, or talk, or do anything, the moment might collapse. “The only thing you get is this.”
And I rushed across the room and kissed her beautiful mouth.
. . . . .
“This is the worst sex scene I’ve ever read,” a producer once told me. “It’s too long. Nobody fucks for four pages—half a page, at most. And the characters never shut up…”
“They’re expressing their love,” I said.
“That’s what the sex is for! And all this description…look, Marcino, there are no good words for certain body parts, and as soon as you write the word ‘panties’ you’re a creep. And there’s too much direction. Does it really matter that his left hand touches her right breast? And what are you, some kind of foot man? You can’t write that a male lead kisses each of her toes. Ninety percent of the bankable male actors in this town will see that and stop reading. Leading men do not suck toes.”
“I think this character might ...”
“…might never make it to the screen if you don’t fix this rotten scene.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Get them in a room and get them naked,” he said, “and let the rest take care of itself.”
. . . . .
Perhaps we should have left the house and gone back to the B&B—after waiting our whole lives, an extra ten minutes seemed hardly an impediment—but the moment demanded spontaneity; we could feel it in our fingertips, in our pores, in every nerve ending firing beneath our skin. Amy bolted the front lock and joined me on the couch.
“This feels right, doesn’t it?” she said. “We’ve done everything but …”
“You and me,” I said.
“I’m not drunk. I know what I want.”
“What about that warning against operating heavy machinery?”
“Isn’t it more like a hand tool?”
She wasn’t wearing a bra. We undid the buttons of her pajamas, slowly, as I kissed the tiny freckles between her breasts.
“We love each other,” she said.
“Always have.”
“Everything else…all the shit…”
“Doesn’t exist,” I whispered. “You and me.”
She tugged on my belt as I touched her hips, our hands grabbing and stroking. Suddenly we were naked, in a room …and the rest took care of itself.
. . . . .
Another great thing about making pizza: after you finished, you didn’t have to think or reflect; there were no questions or discussions about what the mushrooms or the green peppers really meant; you didn’t have to talk about whether pizza changed everything between you and the person who ate it. For sex and pizza, the time commitments were about the same, yet you didn’t have to stress on whether the pizza really satisfied. You wanted it to be good, but if the sauce was too bland, or God forbid, the crust too soft, it wasn’t an indictment of your worth as a man. You could blame the oven or the dough or even the tomatoes and go make another pie. With sex, it wasn’t that easy. Unsatisfied customers rarely waited while you readied a second serving.
Maybe it was crazy that after finally making love with Amy I was thinking about pizza, but it seemed a safe harbor from all those rampaging emotions I felt hanging between us. Over the years, we’d done almost everything except that all-important “it,” and now that the final ingredient had been added to the recipe, did it change the
