Steve Martin - Shopgirl

“…nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I could do it for…“

Jeremy has heard only one financial phrase in his life, and he opens and closes every door in his memory bank until he finds it:

“…a finder’s fee.”

“And what would you find?” says Chet.

“Bands to use the amps. And if another band starts using the amps because of a band I got to use the amps, I’d like a finder’s fee for them, too.” And then hastily adds, “of five hundred dollars.”

Chet can’t see any reason not to take Jeremy up on his proposal. After all, it’s a kind of commission basis, an Avon Calling of rock and roll. Since a set of amps can cost fifteen thousand dollars, it will be easy to shoot five hundred Jeremy’s way. He doesn’t see any problem in finding a new stenciler; in fact, his nephew is just out of high school and is looking for a job in the arts. Jeremy, overestimating his own value, is thinking the exact opposite: “I hope he doesn’t realize he’s going to have to find someone else to stencil.”

Chet accepts the offer but does have to lay out some cash. Two hundred and twenty-two dollars for Jeremy to buy a new suit. Jeremy is enterprising enough to stretch the dough into an extra pair of pants so he won’t look like a carbon copy of himself day after day. He then spends five dollars on a copy of GQ for his road bible on dressing and finds cool ways to manipulate his own six shirts into a weekly wardrobe. On the road, he learns to scan newsstands and surreptitiously tears pages out of magazines with ideas for style.

Jeremy’s first gig is with the only professional band currently using Doggone amplifiers, Age – pronounced AH-jay. Age has scored some success with a one-shot hit record and Jeremy offers to accompany them for free in exchange for on-the-road amp repair. He will travel on their bus and bunk with a roadie. His real mission, of course, is to convince some other band, somewhere else, that he is a genius acoustician who has developed the ultimate amplifier and that Doggone amps are the only amps that any hip band can possibly consider.

Three days before Thanksgiving, he boards Age’s auxiliary bus for a sixty-city road trip, starting in Barstow, California, heading toward New Jersey, and ninety days later, in a masterpiece of illogical routing, ending in Solvang, California.

RAY AND MIRABELLE’ S SUBSEQUENT DATEafter the night of their consummation is as good as the first, but Ray will be out of town on Thanksgiving, so Mirabelle is forced to rely on her unreliable friends. She speaks to Loki and Del Rey several days before, who say they are going to a backyard feast in West Hollywood, but they don’t know the address yet and will call her when they get it so she can come. Several days before, she lays out her clothes for the occasion so she won’t accidentally wear them too soon and have nothing to wear on the big day. Mirabelle’s real ache comes from not being with her family, but it is either Thanksgiving or Christmas, and Christmas is the better and longer stretch during which to get away. Because of her unimportance to Neiman’s she swings it so she can get a full five days off, assisted by a big lie that her brother’s psychiatrist is going on vacation and the whole family is needed during the holidays to keep him straight. Mirabelle delivers this plaint to Mr. Agasa with a slight cry in her voice that says she is about to break down in tears. The genuine sympathy Mr. Agasa shows for Mirabelle’s perfectly healthy brother embarrasses her, especially when he volunteers several book titles that link good mental health with exercise, forcing Mirabelle to dutifully write them down and file them in her purse.

On Thanksgiving morning, Mirabelle wakes with dread. She worries that there might be no call from Loki or Del Rey, which wouldn’t be the first time they’d let her down and not thought twice about it. She can’t dump them as friends because she absolutely needs even the slipshod companionship they give her. They are also her only source of party info, as she has been ostracized as a loner by the Neiman’s girls. She waits till 10 A.M. to make calls to them both, leaving messages on their machines, asking for the address of the Thanksgiving dinner. At this point, Mirabelle foresees a disastrous day ahead of her unless one of these two flakes calls her with the address. First, she has no cash. Second, even if she did, she knows that everything is shut tight on Thanksgiving, except the classic diner that she would have to dig out of the Yellow Pages and perhaps drive to downtown L.A. to find. She opens her refrigerator and sees a Styrofoam box containing a skimpy half sandwich she had rescued uneaten from a lunch two days ago. Horrified, her brown irises narrow in on this leftover, which she sees as her potential Thanksgiving dinner.

She goes for a walk on the vacant, empty street in front of her house, hoping when she returns to see a flashing red light on her answering machine. There is absolutely nothing stirring in the short blocks around her house. She can hear activity, the slam of a car door, voices chatting, a dog barking, but these sounds are distant and disembodied. She passes the school yard near her apartment and hears the clanking of a chain, swinging in the breeze against a metal pole. She sees not a person.

By the time she angles her way back and up the stairs to her apartment, it is noon. From across the room, she can read that the light is not flashing, is not signaling an end to her worry. She goes back outside and repeats her thirty-minute walk.

This time, she calculates. She calculates the time it will take for Loki or Del Rey, once they retrieve the message, to actually call her. Once home, they will probably play the message within the first ten minutes of arrival. There might be other messages on their machines to return, there might be other things to do. This means that it will be a half hour from the playback to her phone call. Mirabelle knows that her walk is just a half hour long, and using a calculus discerned from Ray Porter, figures that there is going to be no new call on her machine when she gets back. So she takes a sideways turn and extends her walk by ten minutes.

When she gets home, she jiggles the door open and sees – out of the corner of her eye, not wanting to betray to herself her own anxiousness – the red light of her machine blinking at her in syncopation. She waits a minute before playback, occupying herself with a made-up kitchen chore. It is Jeremy, calling from the road, vaguely wishing her a happy Thanksgiving and simultaneously canceling out the thoughtfulness of his call by boasting that he’s using the phone for free.

Mirabelle sits on her futon, knees to her chest, and sinks her head over. Her foot taps impatiently on the floor as the clock ticks over, first an hour before the party is to start, then an hour after the party is to start, then it rolls upward to 4 P.M., when darkness begins to creep around the edges of her windows. She gets out her drawing paraphernalia and during the next hour fills in a background of oily black and leaves the eerie, floating nude image of herself in white relief.

The phone rings. Any call will be good on this deadly day. As it rings, she glares at it, momentarily getting even with the caller for the delay, then snatches up the phone and listens.

“Hi. What are you doing?” It’s Ray Porter.

“Nothing.”

“Are you going somewhere for Thanksgiving?”

“Yes.”

“Can you cancel it?” says Ray.

“I can try.” She amazes herself with this answer. “Where are you?”

“Right now I’m in Seattle, but I can be there in three and a half hours.”

Ray has felt at 4 P.M. what Jeremy once felt at midnight: the desire to be swimming in Mirabelle. Except that the distance is shorter from Seattle to Los Angeles than it is from Jeremy’s to Mirabelle’s when two people want exactly the same thing. Ray has a plane standing by, at a mere nine thousand dollars, and by the time she has hung up the phone he is out the door.