“Why would you ask Maren?”
Marc shrugged and turned his attention back to the horizon to finish his beer. “Wanted to know if she understood English. She does. Some. Also, pretty sure I’ve had more women flirt with me than you have. I think I know what it looks like,” he said eventually, pushing up off the edge of the table. “I’m going to start loading the van.”
Cecilia skipped dinner.
A handful of the crew were driving into town to check out the nightlife and a restaurant, but Cecilia was reluctant to spend money on an outing their bookkeeper might not reimburse. (Meals? Yes. Leisure activities, excessive drinking, and nightclubs? No.) Also, she was counting her calories. So she did what she often did on location, and downed a SlimFast bar and an Earl Grey tea alone in her room before settling in to make the dreaded call back east to Lorry. Although she would not admit it to herself, in her gut, she feared this was the beginning of the end.
They’d met in the summer of 1994. Randomly, she’d thought, on the 3:49 train heading to Brewster North. He’d sat down across from her and asked if he could borrow a pen, and before she disembarked at White Plains to spend the weekend with her parents, he’d managed to get her business card. It wasn’t until their first phone call forty-eight hours later that he confided he’d seen her buying her ticket at Grand Central and followed her onto her train. But by that point she was already smitten.
He’d had her pen (a Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball, $5.99 for a set of five) messengered to the studio that morning, accompanied by a brief note on personalized letterpress stationery, and an original poem:
Overwhelming diffidence
Overcome
Beyond comprehension,
Desire
Serene, as light, and beyond compare
The will
Persists
And a dialectic is born
Blossoms, exquisite and luminous
The unfolding,
Unfurling
Slow, sound, sweeping
And Time is stolen
In shadows
Rushing with promise
Time,
Time.
Time,
Oh, would that we had but one more stop.
—Lorry
Cecilia was not entirely certain what to make of it, but Lorry had included his phone number in the note, and so that evening, back at her Upper West Side apartment, she pushed aside her doubts—the fact that he was five years her junior and on a self-imposed hiatus from college while he tried to figure out his next step (he’d managed to divulge the above between 125th Street and Hartsdale)—and called him.
“So you’re really twenty,” she’d said.
“I’m really twenty.” His voice was deep, warm. She had been trying all day to remember it, to recall the details of his face. Golden skin, a kind smile, beautiful brows, lashes. “And you are…?”
“I’ll be twenty-five next month.”
