The Rom-Commers(36)
Charlie Yates had a tell.
The things that he acted like mattered the least? Those were the things that mattered the most.
What would happen if I pushed past the nonchalance?
“Tell me about the day she left,” I said.
“No,” Charlie said. Then, “Why?”
“Because I’m not coming down until you do.”
“Maybe I should just walk away and leave you there.”
“Maybe you should. But then I will definitely do a swan dive off this thing. And maybe pop an organ or two.”
Charlie squinted up to study me. Then he finally asked, “It has to be that? I have to tell you about that? There’s no other way you’ll come down?”
It felt so mean, but I had to know if I was right. Slowly, like there was no room for negotiation, I nodded.
Charlie sighed.
Then he looked around like he was checking for escape routes.
Then he frowned, and looked up at this crazy woman swinging her feet from his diving board … and then his face went extra nonchalant. He glanced off to the side like he was waiting for a bus or something, and then, in a tone like no one on earth had ever uttered a more boring statement, he said, “My wife left me on the day I found out I had cancer.”
Fourteen
THAT WAS HOW I decided to stay.
More specifically, that was how I decided to try to convert Charlie Yates into a fan of rom-coms. A tall order. Maybe too tall. But that little epiphany about him changed everything.
Suddenly, I was curious about him in a new way.
Curious enough to stay.
I could give up anytime, after all. I might as well hang out for a bit in Esther Williams’s mansion.
And so I climbed back down that high-dive ladder and followed Charlie to the dining table and sat across from him to start negotiations in earnest—from the new power stance of being happy to go home, but also willing to stay, if he’d give me enough of what I wanted.
Here’s what I wanted: to do the screenplay right.
And seeing how aggressively indifferent Charlie was to the whole project … given his tell, I suspected that maybe, possibly, in some deep-down place he’d never admit to, he might want that, too.
And maybe—just maybe—in that same deep-down place we might find something more interesting and complex than just disdain. Something rich and nourishing enough to cure his yips. And jump-start my career in the process.
It was worth looking, anyway.
Was I dreaming too big? I knew too much about Charlie now to be overly optimistic. But I had a shot, at least. I’d just have to take it slow.
On the walk from the pool to the dining table, I’d decided on some long-term goals:
Take Charlie on a journey of de-snobbification about rom-coms.
Write a kick-ass screenplay together.
Watch it get made into a great movie that would bring laughs and hope to folks all over the world.
Not be a failed writer anymore.
And how do you reach your long-terms goals? With short-term goals:
Don’t get fired.
Micromanage Sylvie from afar so well that my father survived the duration.
Completely overhaul that appalling screenplay from the ground up without giving Charlie a chance to stop me.
Easy.
* * *
IF YOU’LL ALLOW me to skip to the good part: The negotiations went well.
I told Charlie—with the confidence of someone who was ready to just walk right out—that I would stay only if he agreed to: one, change his deeply uninformed and insulting unhappy ending into a proper, joyful, satisfying one, and two, actually research the crazy stuff he’d thrown into that script—the skinny-dipping, the line dancing, the kiss.
“Fine,” Charlie said.
“Fine to what?”
“Fine to everything.”
“Fine to changing the ending?”
“You’ve converted me on that.”
“And fine to doing all that research?”
“Yes. Fine.”
“You realize that means actually doing those things. With me. For research.”
“I’m not going skinny-dipping with you,” Charlie said then, like this whole thing might be an elaborate plan to get him naked.
“I’m not going skinny-dipping with you, either,” I said.
“Good,” Charlie said, a little too disinterestedly.
“And you don’t have to swim,” I said, “but you do have to get in the pool.”
Charlie held still, like he was mentally scanning for an out.
“How long has it been?” I asked.
“Since I went swimming?”
“Since you got into any body of water at all. A bath, even?”
Charlie looked up, like he was calculating. Then he said, “Twenty-eight years. Give or take.”
I nodded, like Exactly. “You can’t write about being in the water if you can’t remember what it’s like.”
Charlie’s jaw tensed as he considered that.
I pushed on. “Rom-coms are about falling in love.”
“I know that.”
“And falling in love is about having feelings.”
“I don’t disagree.”
“And you can’t write about feelings—or help the audience feel them—if you can’t feel them yourself.” Note that I did not add, You’re also going to have to rethink your toxic and unexamined views that love doesn’t exist.