Читать книгу The Deep Whatsis - Peter Mattei - Страница 6

Intern is extremely cute, alright, granted, her face at least, no question, it’s like God smiling on sunshine, and she’s cool, she quote unquote gets it, but still I plan that after this morning’s pretend-awkward good-bye, which hopefully will happen in a mere couple of hours, to never see her again. For the moment however she is totally crashed and it’s around 6 AM and I’m not really tired, which may have something to do with the stimulants we were ingesting at the bar where we met.

“What’s up?” she said as I turned around, spun really, why I’m not sure, sloshing a double Rittenhouse rocks in my right hand. I was meeting this friend of mine, Seth Krallman, playwright turned pot dealer turned yoga guru, but he was blowing me off, what a surprise.

“Don’t I know you?” she said.

“No,” I said, never having seen the girl in my life.

“Yes, yes I do know you,” she said. “You got the tuna.” And then she told me it was she who brought the big sashimi platters into the editing session for us at lunchtime, the Viva Paper Towel editing session at the edit house where she worked, and she remembered me because I requested the Oma Blue Fin, rarest and most expensive of fish. It was like ninety dollars a roll and I barely touched the thing.

“I thought it was pretty lame,” she said. “For the price.”

“That’s cool,” I said. “Do you always eat people’s leftovers?”

“Do you always waste really expensive food that is a) on the endangered list and b) caught by slave labor?” she asked, cocking her head to the earnest side and waiting for an answer.

“Um, I’m looking for a friend of mine,” I said.

“No you’re not,” she said.

“No?”

“No, you’re buying me a drink, aren’t you?”

Maggie Mallory Margot is an intern at Unkindest Cuts, and I posted a slew of financial services commercials there two years ago so they owe me “big time.” I’m not saying they told her she had to go home with me—I think she did that for her own reasons and because she drank too much, thanks mostly to my largesse. Now, sleeping there, she looks a bit more fleshy than I remember, curled up on the floor, pale, motionless. But, I must say, she’s quite good looking: I make a mental note that she probably ranks in the upper third quadrant of girls I have ever had quasi-sexual relations with in terms of physical attractiveness; when you look at her in a certain light or from a certain angle, she’s feral, and her eyes cradle a syrupyness you can almost taste. What would Howard Roark say about her? He was no writer but would always do something, something bold and innovative, writing being the opposite of that. I tap a note into my phone: “idea for short film, what if Howard Roark gave a TED talk?” I think about wanking but I don’t.

Then I decide not to go back into my bedroom, because I can’t sleep and because I want to make sure she doesn’t wake up and steal something from me. So I sit down at my desk in the living area and take a look at the latest draft of the screenplay I am writing, which is called either GAME THEORY or KILL SCREEN or MAD DECENT—I haven’t decided yet. I’ve been writing it for three years and I am still trying to figure out the inciting incident, which is the most important thing, at least according to some book I bought in LA when I lived there. Every guy in advertising is working on a screenplay they will never complete but I have more drive and discipline than most so maybe I will, although I am still on page two.

For the name of my main character I chose my own name, which is Eric Nye, and my own age, which is thirty-three, and my own hometown, which is Canfield, Ohio. I think that is a good touch. I think they call it self-referential.

I rewrite the opening sentence a few times and mostly I stare at the screen, adjusting my hard-on, which is perpetual for medicinal reasons, at least that is my theory, then I realize that the sun is coming up over the Williamsburg Bridge, which you can see outside my triple-pane window. Suddenly I can smell something funny and I go into the living area and sure enough she has upchucked—on my throw rug, believe it or not, which she managed to pull toward her and scrunch up to use as a pillow because she rolled off the nineteen-hundred-dollar St. Geneve one that I had provided for her.

I wake her up and she’s a bit more cogent than before and so I walk her into the bathroom and turn the shower on and stick her head under it. Poor sad little girl, whatever will become of you? Then I dry her off and hand her the T-shirt and give her a bottle of Voss to wash her mouth out with. Her beauty has been fairly well line-itemed at this point, and I am not happy to report that she is even more sexy when 50 percent clothed. When she finally gets dressed and exits with a halfhearted wave of shame I jerk off, take my pills, and call a car service.