The Rom-Commers(35)

I started walking toward the diving board at the far end.

“What are you doing?” Charlie called after me.

“I’m checking out the high dive.”

“I already told you—no swimming.”

“I’m not going to swim,” I said. “I’m just going to bounce a little.”

“You’re going to bounce a little?” Charlie demanded, breaking into a jog to come after me.

But by the time he got close, I was halfway up the ladder to the platform. He grabbed at my ankles—but I kicked his hands away, and he stayed on the ground.

Once I’d passed his grasp, he said, “Come down from there. That’s off-limits, too.”

“I was a competitive swimmer in high school. I’m practically amphibious. Chill out.”

Charlie watched as I reached the top and then walked out to the end, fully clothed, sneakers on. “Come down,” he ordered.

But what could I say? That familiar bounce of the springboard always felt so good. Also, I really didn’t like being ordered around.

Instead, I positioned myself backward at the edge, just my toes, heels hovering over the water, and got a nice rhythm going.

Charlie was halfway up the ladder, craning around the rungs in horror. “Please don’t do that!”

“Why is this stressing you out? This doesn’t concern you.”

“Yes it does. Because if you fall in … I can’t save you.”

“I’m not going to fall in.”

“You don’t know that. That board hasn’t been touched in a decade. It could snap like a toothpick.”

“It’s not going to snap,” I said. “And even if it did, I wouldn’t need you to save me.”

“Not if you hit the water wrong. I’ve researched this. If you hit from high enough at the wrong angle you can pop your internal organs.”

I kept bouncing. “Is that the technical term? ‘Popped organs’?”

“And I don’t swim,” Charlie went on. “So if that happens, I’ll just have to stand here and watch you drown. And I really don’t feel like doing that today.”

“If I pop my internal organs,” I said, “then I’ve got bigger problems than you not knowing how to swim.”

“I know how to swim,” Charlie corrected. “I just don’t swim.”

“Same difference.”

“Come down,” Charlie commanded.

“No.”

“It’s my pool.”

“They’re my internal organs.”

And that’s when I saw Charlie’s face adjust itself a little. “Fine,” he said with a shrug, like he’d made a sudden decision not to care anymore.

“Fine?” I asked.

“Whatever,” Charlie said now, almost like he’d shifted into a new character, and he started to walk back toward the house.

I didn’t know if it was because I’d read everything this man had ever written, or watched every YouTube interview in existence multiple times, or studied the structure of all his scripts like a Shakespearean scholar might obsess over iambic pentameter … but bouncing there on Charlie’s high dive in all my clothes, looking down at his suddenly totally disinterested face … an unbidden insight about Charlie Yates started rapping at my consciousness: When Charlie Yates is scared of something, he pretends it doesn’t matter.

I flipped back: He did it in his writing. His heroes were always unflappable, always totally unfazed by life’s horrors—guys who’d show up for the battle, encounter the beleaguered company they were there to reinforce, be ordered by the captain to retreat, and say, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.”

His heroes were guys who got cooler in the face of fear.

He wrote guys like that, but he also was a guy like that. With reporters, for example, in interviews. If they got too close to a topic he didn’t want to touch—his mother, for instance, asking for details about his parents splitting up when he was eight—he’d tilt his head with a half smile and say something totally blasé, like, “I must have been a pretty big pain in the ass.”

He’d done it with his shrug just now when he’d talked about almost drowning, too, and he’d done it at brunch by looking at his sock when he casually mentioned soft tissue sarcoma.

Nonchalance as a weapon. Disinterest as a weapon. Aerosol cheese as a weapon.

Was I right? Had I just figured out something vital about Charlie Yates?

“Hey, Charlie!” I called.

He turned back, squinting up at me.

Right there, at the edge of the high dive, I sat down. Then I dangled my legs off the edge.

Charlie stared up, horrified. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sitting down.”

“I can see that.”

“I just want to ask you a question.”

Charlie sighed. “What?”

I gave it a beat, and then I asked, “Why did your wife leave you?”

It was a hell of a question. The second I asked it, though, I knew I was right. His face shifted to extra indifferent. Then came the shrug. Then he said, “I guess she just got sick of my shit.” Then he added, “And I don’t blame her, either.”

There it was.