 WHOEVER YOU WANT ME TO
BE
Cheryl Alu
After five years of marriage my husband
stopped saying my name. At first, it seemed odd and I thought I might be imagining it, but
after a while I accepted that it was true. What does it mean to say just that one
word?—a person’s name. It can mean, I love you. Or, You betrayed me. Or,
I’m happy for you. Or, I’m sorry for you. Or, Is that you? Or, Don’t worry,
I’m here. I never thought about the power a name holds until I stopped hearing mine.
In the building where I work I
sit beside a wall of glass that faces the street. From my desk, which is two feet from
another desk, in a room filled with desks, I watch the prostitutes who hang out at the bus
bench on Sunset Boulevard. When no one is actually sitting on the bench, I can see the
face of Judy George, Realtor of the Month. She looks successful and happy in her work. I
watch the prostitutes while I do things like file the death certificates of recently
deceased union members and stuff envelopes with smaller envelopes and form letters
expressing the sorrow of the Screen Actors Guild for the passing of a loved one. Sometimes
I’ll include a check for the beneficiary. A residual check earned by their dead actor
relative for a performance in some minor TV or movie role that they probably don’t
remember. Or maybe they do remember. Maybe it’s their favorite thing to remember
about their dead actor.
The other women in the office
will often stop working and look out the window with me. The older ones are the worst.
They make the nastiest jokes about the girls and what they do. I try to picture these
women, my co-workers, doing the things they joke about, and I can’t. Then I can, and
I wish I hadn’t. Katie is the only one who says she feels sorry for those girls.
Katie is the only one I’ve told about my husband moving out. Whenever my mother calls
from her home on the East Coast I say he’s in the shower or at the store.
I spend a lot of time on the
phone but not for business. Mostly, I talk to this guy I’m seeing now. I met him in a
bar the day after my husband moved out. Danny has irregular hours and spends his
afternoons getting high and calling me at work. He can talk at length about almost
anything. He’ll start with some fact about dwarf stars, say, and then move on to
maritime law, which might take him to celestial navigation; then onto sushi and from there
it’s an easy segue to Japanese ceremonial suicide. He tells the kind of stories, that
when he’s finished you wish you’d listened to the whole thing. But usually I
don’t. Usually, I forget to listen and I let his voice be a soft background to my
thoughts while I watch the girls on the bench.
Most days, there are three or
four girls in rotation. Cars pull up, a girl approaches the passenger side window and
after a few seconds she usually gets in. Twenty minutes later she’s back. Twenty
minutes is average. It can be as long as forty-five or as little as ten. I time them and
when a girl is gone longer than an hour, I worry.
Lately, I’ve been spending
my lunch hours shoplifting from the stores on the low-rent end of Hollywood Boulevard.
Small stuff. Underwear. Make-up. Travel-size bottles of anything. I never stole anything
as a kid and I used to hate to be in a store with my father because he always stole
things. I’d never actually see him do it but then in the car on the way home
he’d put his hand in his jacket pocket and take out a hair clip or a pin or a
bracelet. I hated those joyless gifts. Hated the way he’d just say, "Here,"
as if giving me change for the parking meter. I didn’t know why he took stuff but he
seemed to need to do it. He had to leave the store ahead of the game. And so here I am
doing the same thing. I tell myself I’m alone now and I have to watch expenses.
Once, the store manager followed
me out of the Rite-Aid and I ducked into a photo booth and pulled the dirty gray curtain
closed. I watched the brown shoes with white socks stop beneath the stiff pleats of the
fabric that separated us, and then they turned around and walked away.
Every Thursday I go to lunch
with Katie. She works in contract administration two desks away from mine. She has a
seven-year-old son but she’s never been married. The thing about Katie is that
she’s above-average beautiful. And she can make you feel beautiful too, as long as
you’re not standing in front of a mirror with her beside you. She makes it easy to
believe that the incredible way she looks is really just a clever trick that anyone could
learn to do. Even you.
* * *
My favorite prostitute is the short blonde one who is always
angry. I like that she doesn’t have the kind of body you’d think a woman would
need to be a successful prostitute. No tits, no ass, no hips… just attitude. It makes
me think maybe all men aren’t idiots after all. At least some of them must like a
little attitude with their blowjobs. And this girl’s attitude comes across all the
way to my second-story window. She’ll approach a car with her middle finger
straight-armed out to the prospective client, calling out insults as if he’d somehow
offended her by showing an interest. The finger might discourage a few of them, but not as
many as you’d think. Most of the time she’ll drive off with the guy and when he
brings her back she’ll jam that same finger into the air to say bye-bye.
Since my husband moved out six
months ago I haven’t met a man I don’t want to like me, even ones I loathe or
feel indifferent toward. I want them all to want me. She, on the other hand, seems to want
them all to hate her. The thing you learn about marriage is that when a person watches the
Weather Channel for hours, he’s not really watching the Weather Channel, and the lies
he tells are all the truth you need.
On the phone with Danny I tell
him about my favorite prostitute and he gets very interested, which is unusual for him, to
be interested in a topic I’ve introduced. He asks me questions about her. Well,
there’s her hair, I tell him. It’s too yellow but it works, and I like her odd
way of dressing. Not overtly sexy, she mixes provocative with army surplus and manages to
make it look sexy. What I really like is the way she closes a car door that unmistakably
says "fuck you." She doesn’t slam it at all; she lets it go easy, her arm
making a slight upward motion as it moves away from the door. Go on and go, it says. Who
needs you?
Danny has changed the subject
and is talking about electron spin reversal and I’m thinking how do all the
bus drivers on the Sunset route know not to stop when there are only the prostitutes at
the bench, because they never do. Is this discussed at the bus terminal? Is it part of the
training? My boss puts a piece of paper in front of me. On it he’s written Hang up
now. I ignore it.
"Danny," I say. "
I have no idea what you’re talking about."
"That’s okay," he
says happily. "Neither did Joan."
Joan is his stepsister. Her
Greek father married Danny’s Irish mother when both their children were small. They
grew up together—the pale, blond, beautiful Danny and his dark Mediterranean
stepsister—looking like the negative and positive print of a picture.
* * *
Now when Danny calls, the first thing he wants to know is
what’s she doing? Our favorite prostitute. We call her Cinderella, I’m not sure
why. Maybe because her life so isn’t. I start with what she’s wearing. Then I
describe the car she’s gone off in and we speculate about what she may or may not be
doing, depending on the make and model of the ride. She’s become more real and unreal
at the same time. She’s a little sex game we play, although we never speak about her
when we’re together actually having sex.
But then we don’t speak
about a lot of things when we’re together. The future, for instance. Or the sad
remains of my husband’s clothes that still hang in the closet. (If I don’t
remember to shut the door I can see them when Danny and I are in bed.)
We don’t speak about the
fact that he’s in love with his stepsister. (I know this because he talks about her
way too much, the way some guys talk disparagingly about an ex-girlfriend you both know
he’s never going to get over. It’s clear the things he says he hates about her,
the things he complains about the most, are the things he loves. Like Joan is so
manipulative, and Joan is daddy’s little girl, and Joan lies but never gets caught,
and everything comes too easy to Joan, and Joan’s never had a broken heart.)
We never speak about the way his
mother looks at me when she’s thinking that I’m closer to her age than his.
(Apropos of nothing, one day she says to me, "Growing old isn’t that bad. Your
skin gets a little loose is all.")
We never, ever speak about what
we do or who we do it with when we’re not together. The list of things we don’t
speak about is long and interesting and growing all the time.
* * *
"Do you
want to buy some pot?" It’s her, my favorite bus bench girl. She’s standing
in front of the double glass doors at the entrance to my office building talking to me.
"I work here," I say,
indicating the building behind her, in case she may not have noticed it.
"Yeah. I’ve seen you
goin’ in and out," she says. "You always look so sad. Job must be a bitch.
You want to buy some pot?"
"Well, I guess everybody
has to deal with their share of assholes in this life, right?" I say this and hope
she’ll go back to her bus bench. Back to the place where she belongs, where I can
make sense of her. But she doesn’t move. She studies me and it makes me feel awkward,
clueless and badly dressed. She’s wearing a black bra clearly visible under a white
nylon blouse, several sizes too small, and low-riding cargo pants and very high heels. She
uses a necktie as a belt and manages to make it all look like cutting-edge fashion that
everyone is going to be wearing in the next five minutes. I think it has a lot to do with
her no-tits-no-hips body. I mentally go though my own wardrobe trying to approximate this
outfit. I know I have cargo pants; but those shoes?
"So, you got any acting
jobs? I’ve done some acting. I’m good."
I explain that we don’t
hire actors. This is the actors’ union, where I work.
"Oh, yeah? Actors have a
union, huh? I can type eighty-eight words a minute. I used to work for an attorney in
Beverly Hills. Maybe I’ll freshen up my résumé and start punchin’ a
time-clock."
Now I think she’s making
fun of me. Pretending to want a job in the straight world. Making me feel foolish for
having one.
I answer that it’s a small
office and I don’t think there are any open positions. I immediately regret saying
"open positions" to a prostitute but the moment goes by quickly.
"Shit yeah, I used to work
for an attorney until he went to jail. Gives you some idea how good of an attorney he was.
That’s when I got into acting. I was in a movie with Sean Penn. Maybe you saw
it."
I wait for her to say the title
but she never does.
"Maybe I did," is all
I can think to say. I sense that she likes me, or more accurately that I, and everything I
represent, displeases her in an amusing way.
"So, you want to buy some
pot or what? Trust me, you look like you need to get high. It’s good stuff."
"Okay, sure," I say.
But I don’t really want to buy anything. I just want to keep talking to her.
She flicks her hand and suddenly
there’s a black Towncar right up close to the curb. I recognize it as a car I’d
seen often at the bus bench and I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before now.
The guy behind the wheel looks bored. He has close-cropped hair combed forward and a long
straight nose. It’s the profile of a Caesar on a gold coin. He wears a cashmere
turtleneck sweater even though it’s too warm for it. He could be Black or Asian. He
could be twenty or fifty.
Cinderella slides into the back
seat of the car, leaving the door as an open invitation. The driver watches in his
rear-view as I slide in beside her. I close the door and wonder why in hell I’m doing
this. There’s a soft hip-hop beat coming from a speaker behind my head and when the
driver turns around to us, the moving air brings the smell of his cologne. This man smells
like Earl Grey tea and black pepper. It’s so wonderful it makes me smile.
"How much?" I ask,
knowing I don’t have enough cash no matter what the answer is.
* * *
Sitting on the floor of my nearly empty living
room—one leather chair, one Oriental rug, one dying palm, four stacks of books that
make a table—I’m on the phone with Danny telling him how I did this insane
thing; letting Cinderella and her pimp drive me to my ATM and how I bought what I hope is
marijuana. He doesn’t believe it at first. He says that it was a crazy thing to do
and I agree with him. Then he wants details.
So I tell him how we parked five
blocks from where I work—also five blocks from where Cinderella works, it occurs to
me now. I tell him how I gave a handful of twenties to the man behind the wheel who
smelled so good I wanted to lick him. And how, once the deal was done, he lit a very thin
and perfect joint, and with the A/C blasting, and the hip-hop thrumming, and the car
standing still—but feeling as if we were floating—we smoked behind tinted
windows. The more I tell, the more I remember. I’m surprised how much there is to
tell because the whole adventure only lasted twenty minutes. The usual amount of time for
Cinderella. And then, before I knew it, she was back where she started and so was I.
At one-thirty in the morning the
phone rings. I sleep with the TV on now so at first I’m not sure if it really is my
phone. The caller is my soon to be ex-husband.
"Hello, you," he says
too casually. Too friendly.
"Who is this?" I say,
buying some time to decide whether to be angry, pleasant or disengaged.
He gives out an impatient little
puff of air. "It’s me. Jeffery."
"And to whom do you wish to
speak?" I ask, sounding now like someone I don’t even know.
"You. I want to speak to
you. Stop playing."
You. Her. She. Anything but my
name. The only thing I hear is the sound of a person who’s drunk, trying to breathe
normally.
"I just want the rest of my
stuff. When can I come over?"
"Anytime."
"Yeah? How about now?"
he says, thickly. Letting all sorts of possibilities hang in the air.
I push the Talk button by
mistake and the phone beeps unnaturally loud. Then I push the End button and I say,
"Good-bye, you" to the dial tone.
* * *
Katie isn’t at work today and I wonder if the
bruises on her arm have anything to do with that. No bus bench girls either. I’ve
been thinking about them all morning and doing nothing with that stack of files on my
desk. All those dead actors waiting patiently. I’ve been letting the work pile up,
coming in late, leaving early and spending lots of time on the phone. The boss
doesn’t like it. He asks another woman in the office to get him his coffee today.
This is supposed to make me feel bad. This is supposed to be a warning.
Danny calls. He’s stoned or
buzzed or both. He needs to talk; or rather, he needs to be listened to. As usual, the
conversation seems to have started without me. He’s already halfway into a story
about a fish that’s called the Sarcastic Fringehead . They’re very territorial,
he’s telling me, and they have big, oversized jaws that extend nearly to the gills.
But they rarely fight. They just give each other lots of attitude. There’s a nervous
excitement in his voice that makes me a little afraid for him. I want to hear this story
through. For once, I want to get to the point of it with him, but my mind shifts. I hear
him say Anacapa Island but it’s too late. I’m already thinking again
about why the girls aren’t on the bench today and if Katie’s little boy knows
why his mother isn’t at work.
"…and they’re
only nine inches long but the thing is, they have this major attitude and they get all
scary looking…" Danny is almost laughing now. "And so that’s why we
have to change her name from Cinderella to Fringehead. It’s perfect."
"What?"
"You know, our
Cinderella…"
I asked him if it’s our
Cinderella’s pot he’s been smoking and he says, yes, and I should get more.
He’ll pay. Then he wants to know what she’s wearing today.
I stare out at the empty bench
and say, "She looks good. She’s wearing the cut-offs. The really shorts ones
that show some butt-cheek. They’re camouflage, the orange and brown desert kind. And
she has a yellow bandana tied around her boobs as a kind of halter-top. She’s like
some tacky beautiful rainbow. And the chunky boots. The ones that look too heavy to lift.
But they make her legs look great."
I hear him take a long drag on a
cigarette….a joint? He almost purrs doing it. Then he says something in a low
intimate voice and after a second I realize it’s not me he’s talking to.
"Who’s there?" I
ask.
He takes too long to answer.
"Joan," he says, still holding the smoke in his lungs. Then he lets it all go.
"Joan," he says again.
But I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or calling to her.
There’s an old woman on the
bench now. She has one of those rope shopping bags and the bus is stopping for her.
"A red Viper’s just
pulled up and Cinderella’s going for it," I say.
"Fringehead," he
corrects me. "That’s her name now."
I put off going to lunch as long
as I can, but when I leave the building there’s still no one there on the bench. Only
Judy George, Realtor of the Month, with graffiti on her forehead.
I drive to the photo machine in
front of the Rite-Aid. I go inside the booth and spin the round seat to make me taller. I
pull the little curtain closed and sit quietly for a minute. I feel unprepared for
everything. Like going on a camping trip with just a comb and pack of gum. That’s
what it feels like now.
I feed the machine all the
quarters it wants and I wait. There are five flashes and then I wait some more. While the
machine makes developing noises I glance down and notice a strip of photos in the slot.
Done already? I lift it out and see a happy couple. Two faces smiling for the camera and
the world. How did this man get into my pictures? But they’re not my pictures.
They’re of whoever was in this booth before me. A couple who simply forgot to take
their pictures with them. A couple who probably took bunches of pictures and forgot about
these.
Another strip of photos falls
into the slot. These are my pictures, but I don’t touch them. I leave the booth with
what I have. The couple I don’t know.
The boss is sitting at my desk
waiting for me when I get back. He’s grinning and looking at my phone, watching it
ring. He’s lit that cigar that he always has but never lights because there’s no
smoking in the building now. But he doesn’t care about that. He’s breaking the
rules and he’s having fun doing it—just like me, I think, is the message. He
blows thick hot smoke right onto my phone and then some right onto my keyboard and then
some right into my face while I’m standing next to him. Everyone in the room is
watching. He looks odd sitting in my chair because it’s too high for him and he seems
precariously balanced. I stand there, not sure what to do, my arms folded across my chest,
kind of hugging myself. I can feel the edges of the metal frame I stole from Rite-Aid
inside my jacket and sharp against my ribs. It’s for the picture of the couple I
don’t know. The funny thing is, it came with a picture of a couple I don’t know,
but my couple seems better somehow. I realize I’m smiling inappropriately.
* * *
The cigar smell made me a bit dizzy and nauseous but
outside, sitting on the bus bench, I take a few deep breaths and I begin to feel better.
Did I actually say "I quit" or did I imagine that part as I was walking out? I
look up at the window trying to see the place where I used to sit but I can’t see
inside the building. I can only see palm trees reflected in the glass. Clouds and palm
trees against a black sky.
A bus stops in front of me,
blinking Sunset/Downtown. The doors fold back and the driver looks down at me. I’ve
never taken a bus downtown so I climb on board and take a seat near a window. The bus is
cleaner and emptier than I thought it would be. Across the aisle is a woman with heavy
legs and feet swelling up out of her shoes. She’s nodding, half asleep. As the bus
jerks away and into traffic I catch a glimpse of my car parked there on the side street.
Then my car and the building where I work—used to work—moves into the distance.
Then they’re gone. If I stay on the bus long enough it’ll bring me back. |
Cheryl Alu is a writer/producer living and working in Los Angeles. She has
written and produced series television for ABC, NBC, Fox, UPN, and Nickelodeon. She is
presently writing for Columbia-TriStar Television. She is also Senior Editor of