Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

It was following one such failed, nonflirtatious audition that I met Simon Robbie. Whether Robbie was his last name or whether he went by two first names was unclear. He was a guy my age who sidled up to me at the counter on a Wednesday night and introduced himself. He was wearing a dirty yellow T-shirt with the name of a Little League team on it, and corduroy pants that were sliding off his skinny hips — your standard hipster look. Also, he had sideburns.

“I’m Zoe,” I told him, which was a lie. I was into constructing false personae at this time. The world was my stage, was how I looked at it.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, then looked around the place. “What do you recommend to eat at this place? I’m looking for something new and different, some kind of culinary adventure.”

“I recommend you go eat somewhere else,” I said.

Simon Robbie looked offended. “Hey, I was just making conversation. No need to be a jerk.”

“I just meant the food here’s pretty standard,” I said. I decided that Zoe would be a kind girl from a small town, captain of the History Club in high school. She’d have a fondness for dressing up in period costumes at Halloween — Marie Antoinette, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Mao — and feel seriously disappointed if people didn’t recognize who she was. “It’s an egg-roll, chow-mein, fortune-cookies-bought-in-bulk kind of place.”

“Gotcha,” Simon Robbie said. “Hey, did you already eat? I was thinking maybe I’d eat here at the bar with you? Would that be okay?”

“I see no problem with that,” I-as-Zoe said, and gave him a friendly smile. I saw Stacy coming out of the kitchen and waved her over. She looked pleased. She thought that a twenty-year-old woman who ate by herself in a Chinese restaurant three or four times a week was in dire need of friends. Simon Robbie ordered three appetizers — scallion pies, wonton soup, egg rolls — and no main course.

“Nothing else?” Stacy said.

“Not for now,” Simon Robbie told her. “I like to keep my options open,” he said to me, and winked.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

While eating he asked me about myself, sometimes gesturing with his left hand as if to say, “More details!” while he shoveled in mouthfuls with his right. The food was greasy and a ring of oil soon appeared around his mouth, wide and shiny, like a clown’s lipstick. I told him all about Zoe’s childhood on a farm, how her father had to give up the land his family had worked for generations and moved them to a small, grimy town where he worked in a factory, assembling cell phones. I said he hated this so much that the sight of a person talking on a cell phone drove him into a blind rage and one day, when Zoe was sixteen, she came home with a cell phone of her own and he threw her out of the house and ever since then she’d been on her own.

“That’s intense,” Simon Robbie said.

“Yeah.”

“So what do you do now?”

For some reason this was the only thing I didn’t want to lie about. “I’m an actress,” I said.

“Wow, cool, excellent,” he said through a mouthful of egg roll. “What do you act?”

“I do theater mostly,” I said. “Sometimes commercials, for the money. You know how it is.”

Simon Robbie chewed and swallowed. “No, I meant what kind of people, ” he said. “Show me.”

I’m acting right now, I almost said, but didn’t. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I told him.

“Oh, okay, I totally understand,” he said. “I’m in insurance myself, and when people ask me questions about it outside of work, I’m like, dude, no more, call me at the office. You know what I mean?”

“You’re in insurance?”

“I sell life-insurance policies door-to-door,” he said.

I couldn’t believe I’d met someone whose job sounded worse than mine. It made me warm to him. “How do you like it?” I asked.

He finished chewing an egg roll, wiped his mouth, and shrugged. “Life is long,” he said, “and this is just one phase.”

I toasted this philosophy with my beer. Stacy came by and asked if we wanted anything else to drink. Simon Robbie ordered tea, and I said I’d have the same. The place was emptying out, Mr. Lu’s angry cries from the back coming less often now. With the tea Stacy brought some cookies, and I cracked mine open and read the fortune. You will never win the lottery, it said. I showed it to him.

“Then why do they print those numbers on the other side?” he said.

I shook my head. The fortune had put me in a bad mood. We sat for a couple of minutes in silence, Simon Robbie opening his fortune— Be kind to everyone you meet, his said, which wasn’t even a fortune in my opinion, given that it said nothing of the future — and ate our cookies. I drank some weak, bitter tea. “Well, I guess I’m off,” I finally said, and waved to Stacy for the check.

“Wait a minute,” Simon Robbie said. “I need to ask you a favor.”

“I’m not much for favors.”

“Please?” he said. “It’s important, and I’ll buy you dinner. I’ll buy you dinner tonight and for the next week.”

“That’s a lot of egg rolls.”

“It doesn’t have to be here,” he said, nearly pleading.

“Okay, what is it?” I asked.

“It’s my mother. She’s always after me about a girlfriend, every time I see her. If you could just come over with me, even for ten minutes, pretend that we’re on a date, it would shut her up for a least a few weeks. Please?”

“You want me to pretend I’m your girlfriend?” I said. I’d forgotten that I was Zoe, and my tone was incredulous and unkind.

He nodded. Stacy put down the check and he counted out the cash, then looked at me with puppy-dog eyes.

“I only live five minutes away,” he said.

I wondered if he cruised the Chinese restaurants in this neighborhood each night, the pizza joints, the Greek diners, looking for a girl who seemed willing to impersonate a girlfriend, if he knew I’d made up Zoe and her cell phone traumas and could tell I was practiced in the immorality of lying. I wondered if he’d give me cash, or if I’d actually have to eat dinner with him every night. Would it be nice to have someone to eat dinner with, or horrible? I had no idea. I was staring at his yellow Little League T-shirt, seeing how it was smudged and smeared with enigmatic stains, and it suddenly occurred to me that he might not be a hipster at all, that it might be a T-shirt from his own long-ago team. It was the saddest thought I’d had all day.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We walked for a few minutes in silence, past a skateboard park and a theater where a movie was just letting out. Simon Robbie sauntered along with his hands in his pockets, pushing his cords even farther down his hips, his mouth pursed as he whistled some kind of tune. I almost reached into my bag for my cigarettes, but then realized Zoe wasn’t the kind of girl who smoked. It was important to stay in character no matter what events might unfold. After a few blocks he took my elbow, very gentlemanly, and tugged me down a side street packed tight with little run-down houses. There were no streetlights and the place was dark and deserted. At another time of my life, I might have been scared. But Simon Robbie didn’t look very strong; his arms were stringy and thin. I figured I could take him if I had to.

“Here we are,” he said, guiding me up the steps of a white house. In the front windows sat three or four cats, their yellow and green eyes blinking out into the night. When he opened the door I was greeted by an overwhelming smell of detergents and ammonia and room fresheners. It was like being hit over the head with a bowl of potpourri.

“Mom?” he called as we walked in, and the cats turned to look at us, crouching down in defensive positions. The living room, as you might expect, was exceptionally clean, with a couch and a television and a round rug made of rags, and everything except the rug was glistening. On the coffee table, magazines were stacked in neat, geometric rows.