The Rom-Commers(34)
“You want it?” Charlie said then. “Just take it! It’s yours, okay? Now we’re even!”
“But we’re not even. Because I didn’t really win it!”
“Nobody really wins anything!”
“Tell that to your thousand-dollar coffee maker!”
Charlie frowned, like he’d never made that connection.
Which just made me madder.
How dare he take his life for granted? How dare he stand here in a mansion full of awards and act like nothing mattered! “You want me to take it?” I said. “I’ll take it! And I’ll spray-paint it bubblegum pink and write my name on it in red Sharpie with little hearts! And then I’ll tell everybody I won an Academy Award for a rom-com so rom-commy it was called The Rom-Commers!”
I wanted so badly to finish with “I quit!” right then—to charge out, Oscar and all, and never come back.
But I guess I wanted a chance to write with Charlie more. Because, instead, I just dropped that Oscar back in with the others. And then I walked myself out Charlie’s back door without saying another word.
* * *
CHARLIE GAVE ME a minute—several, actually—to cool off. And then he quietly came outside, too, and stood beside me as I stared at his pool.
Finally, I said, “You’ve got a pool with a high diving board?” My tone was calmer now but still had insult-to-injury undertones.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “It came with the house.”
“A high dive came with the house? Do they even make those anymore?”
“It’s vintage,” Charlie said. “This house used to belong to Esther Williams.”
I turned to face him. “America’s mermaid, Esther Williams?”
Charlie looked surprised that I knew who she was. “Yes. She lived here. In the fifties. And she put in that pool. You know who she is?”
“You could say that. I’ve seen every single one of her movies.”
“For your mermaid rom-com?”
Ugh. Now I remembered: He’d read it. He’d read it and called it aerosol cheese. He didn’t deserve to live in Esther Williams’s house.
But stepping outside was restorative. It was a warm day—and sunny.
Maybe we needed a change of activity.
“We should go for a swim,” I said next.
But Charlie shook his head. “I don’t swim.”
I turned. “Never?”
He shrugged, like he was about to tell me something fundamentally boring. “I had a near-drowning accident as a kid.”
“Why do you own a house with a pool if you don’t swim?”
“My wife wanted it. Ex-wife.”
“Did she swim?”
“She didn’t swim, either, to be honest.”
“Why did she want a pool, then?”
“She liked the idea of swimming,” Charlie said. “But she didn’t like to mess up her hair.”
I thought about my own hair—the fact that it was pre–messed up. Maybe that was a type of blessing.
I could feel Charlie looking at my curls, pulled back, as ever, in their little pom-pom ponytail. “I bet you don’t have that problem,” he said.
Was he complimenting me or insulting me?
“Swimming is my sport,” I said, moving on. “I swim every day at home. It’s the one thing I do for myself. Every morning at five A.M.—”
“Ouch,” Charlie said.
“—I swim sixty laps.”
“Every morning?” Charlie challenged, like I had to be exaggerating.
“Yep.”
“Even on weekends?”
“Yep.”
“Isn’t it tiring?”
I shrugged. “Life is tiring. Swimming is just swimming.”
Then I turned to head back inside.
“Where are you going?” Charlie asked.
I turned back. “To get my suit.”
“You brought a swimsuit?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“To swim.”
“How did you know I’d have a pool?”
“I didn’t even know I’d be staying here! But I knew I’d find a pool somewhere.”
“You can’t swim here,” Charlie said.
“Why not?”
“This pool’s off-limits.”
“Off-limits?” I asked.
“It’s not for swimming,” Charlie said.
“Your pool is not for swimming?”
“It hasn’t been cleaned in a while.”
I looked down at the water, sparkling like a mountain spring.
Charlie added, “And it’s not safe. You know? It’s not built to code. That diving board’s a death trap.”
“I think Esther Williams knew how to build a high dive,” I said.
“She was a professional.”
I sighed and put my hand on my hip. “Are you telling me I can’t ever swim in your pool?”
“Pretty much.”
“But why?”
“Because.”
Nothing about this conversation made sense. But the idea of me in that pool clearly made Charlie unhappy. And maybe I was still mad about his whole Velveeta-themed comedy routine back in the bathroom, but the more unhappy I made him, the happier I felt.