Dark Bill by Amy Turner

In a fit of first-month relationship giddiness he jumps out of bed one morning and goes to Gelson’s for post-hump croissants. I am trying to be bon vivant cool, as if I always start my Tuesdays at nine with pastry, when in fact—unless I’ve gone to the gym and they are made out of a complete protein spelt flour—I run from croissants. I wait for him in bed, feeling lazy and sexy, like a Hilton sister. He returns with The New York Times and a mischievous twinkle in his big brown eyes.

“Got ya a little present, baby.” He hands me a Weekly World News. “I didn’t want you to know how much it was,” he says, and I laugh at the kitschy gesture, examine the cover, and see that he is not kidding; he has actually crossed out the price with a pen. I don’t say anything. On our first date he told me he couldn’t be with a materialistic woman, but this is just bizarre. Before I met Bill, I thought that I just wanted something to climb all over and make me feel good, and I contemplated buying a jungle gym. But then I went to this party…

Standing rudderless in the din of celebrities and hangers-on at some newly anointed “edgy” screenwriter’s house, I catch the strains of the Lucinda Williams song where she asks that her lover “don’t cause me pain, just play me John Coltrane.”

“I love this song,” I say, and a man with dark hair flopping over dark eyes confirmed, “It is a very sexy song. She’s crazy. I was at a bar in Nashville and the bartender almost tossed her ’cause she was so mean.”

“You were at a bar in Nashville? Why?”

“I was there writing—”

At this point, the neighbor who’d brought me to the party approaches and interrupts, “Oh, my God! Amy, have you met Bill? Bill, this is Amy. She’s fabulous! She wrote the most beautiful book!”

“What do you do, Bill?” I ask.

“I’m a writer,” he says. “Director.”

“Interesting,” says my hyperbolic neighbor. He tilts his head back, points at me, opens his mouth wide, like a Bette Davis muppet, and cries out, “This one is a genius!” Then he walks away. (The “book” the neighbor referred to is a collection of poems, of which there are ten hand-bound “limited editions” in circulation. Around my apartment.)

“What do you write?” says the dark Bill. I can’t say, “I’m not sure, but my kitchen’s covered with Post-it notes and it has the same effect as that scene with the air fresheners in the movie Seven,” so I say, “Oh… I’m working on a lot of different things right now. I’m uhm, an actor-writer.” The writer title feels like a lie. I always identify myself as the thing I’ve most recently been paid for—unless it involves carrying a tray of food. I’d just come off a few months of being an actress. “Are ya any good?” he says.

“I don’t know.”

“That means you probably are.” He smiles. And I smile, and it should’ve stopped right fucking there because the sky opened up, and an aurora borealis of neurosis exploded into one banner of light, spelling out: “I’m brilliant, I’m shit, love me!” And then he tells me about writing his script about Nashville and says, “The trick is to never do anything you don’t want to do.”

There were signs. Omens, actually. On our first date I was walking up to meet him at the movies, all first-date cute in pink skirt and virgin-whore mani-pedi (nail polish can be considered the modern-day female Rorschach test. Any woman with ballet slipper, baby pink on her fingers and wet, fire-engine, cherry-red on her toes is renting a condo in the virgin-whore complex).

A car began honking at me, and I cringed until I saw it was Rick, my ex-boyfriend. I left Rick in Paris seven years ago with a combat boot toss at his head after he left for our four-week vacation in France with exactly one hundred dollars and no credit card.

Rick despised my “materialistic” tendencies. I did not want every dinner to be a home-cooked vegan feast, I liked the idea of a hotel or hostel and did not want to impose upon his French punk rock friends any more.

…than need be. (If you’ve ever shared a bathroom with a French punk rocker, you will understand.)

It has come to my attention that if you’re broke and you are my boyfriend, you complain about materialism a lot. You have a laundry list of excuses and voodoo dolls of corporate people who have screwed you out of deserved projects; on special occasions you take me to Thai restaurants with a C from the health department on the window, and you could be classified as clinically depressed except for the fact that you still have a voracious sex drive. At the time, this all seems romantic and charming, until I can’t eat another bite of mee krob while you’re blaming Wal-Mart for your lack of fame and fortune.

Seated in a café after the movie, Bill lays his life out for me like a D.A. making a closing argument. “I’m forty-three. I’ve been married. I’m not rich. I can’t deal with women that are materialistic.” I laugh, and ignore the materialistic reference. “You’ve been in L.A. too long,” I say. I like him. He’s funny and honest and handsome. So what if his shirt’s threadbare and his shorts are missing the top button?

The next time we go out he invites me over to dinner at his friends’ house and I am reminded of how our lives are in dramatically different places. He’s forty-three, he’s got friends with kids and outdoor grills. They’re nice, but it is a social black hole, it feels like just yesterday I was vomiting in the Viper Room trying to find my four fake IDs and now I hear myself saying, “Love the salmon. What did you use for a marinade?”

Bill and I spent most of our time together late at night because I was waitressing. This was good, because we didn’t spend money, and I worried about that. He kept going out of town for film festivals so the chemistry was thick, full of longing and reunions. He returned from one trip and had to head to a friend’s engagement party, an event he invited me to. But I had learned to recognize the social black hole and declined, although I invited him over for a late-night visit afterward.

Fooling around immediately, kissing his fingers, nibbling the soft part between the thumb and index, I tasted a taste I’d recognize anywhere.

“Oh, my God,” I say, my hand sandwich making me sick. “Did you do coke tonight?”

“Oh, God,” he says.

“Oh, Jesus. You did coke tonight. Oh, my fucking God. Are you retarded? Why would you do coke tonight? Why would you do that when you know you’re coming over here?”

“I just did a bump.”

“That’s lame. You’re lame. Do you do coke all the time?”

“No. It was just friends, it was just there, I just did it, it was dumb.”

“Yeah. It was. What do you mean you ‘just did it’?” My face and nether regions puckered and I tried not to be judgmental.

“Honey, I’m sorry, it was stupid. I don’t do drugs all the time.”

“Whatever,” I say. “I can’t believe I just tasted it on you. I feel like a German shepherd.”

“Next time I come over I’ll bring you a ‘don’t pet me, I’m working’ vest.”

We developed a little joke about how we had yet to show the other any writing samples. We worried that if we hated each other’s work we wouldn’t be attracted to each other. He begged me for something, so I gave him some poems. A week later he came over, and said weakly, “I read your stuff. I liked it… but we need to talk about your use of the semicolon.”

My use of the semicolon??? I turn over the Cliffs Notes to my soul and you give me blue pencil?

The next Sunday afternoon I invite Bill to join me on my walk. (I’m a genius, I think, a free fun date.) Bill is a big guy, sexy-big, and he has cultivated the intellectual bohemian’s smarmy repulsion for gyms or dietary concerns. He is a man with no workout regime and an unabashed love of bacon. Halfway through the walk he begins to complain. “You know, Amy, I’ve got a really bad knee.” This is hard for me to deal with. My inner Texan football coach father is twanging,

“It’s a long way from your heart.” Then Bill slows to a near crawl, puts his hands on his hips, and says, “Plus, I’ve got asthma.”

“Walk it off, champ,” I say.

He is sweating a lot. “How far are we going? You know, you’re really in shape and I’m not, you can’t just expect me to do this.”

Then I snap. “I can’t expect you to walk?”

“Not a million miles.”