Steve Martin - Shopgirl

Ray can drive her home but there is the car problem. Her car is parked outside, and if he drives her home there will be the morning headache of taxicabs and meeting times.

“You can stay here in the guest bedroom.”

One of Christie’s eyelids droops lazily. “I want to stay with you.”

Ray is not amused with her. He firmly says no and takes her to the spare bedroom. She, stunned, sees the door close on her. Then she turns, sees the bed and falls on it face first.

Ray Porter sinks into his thousand-dollar sheets as if he were sliding into heaven. He is alone and happy about it, but he does worry that Christie will feel her way along the hallway and find him. His usual speedy calculations slow to molasses, and big thick questions blob their way down his thought tunnel: How long does this go on? Why am I alone?

Ray is asleep, and dreaming of knocking. Knocking? He wakes at the moment of deepest third-stage slumber, so groggy that only one of his senses – his hearing – is functioning. He lies there, wondering if there is a burglar in the house. He pulls himself out of bed and walks down the hall, brave only because he quickly computes that the odds of there actually being a burglar are slim. He can hear the noise in the distance…is it down the street? There is construction down the street; would they be working at 3 A.M.? He hears it again, but this time realizes it is someone knocking on his front door.

He pulls open the door and there is Christie, standing fully dressed, except she has no shoes.

“My shoes are in your backyard.”

The only logical scenario is so illogical that he does not ask her what happened. She must have gone to the backyard, slipped off her shoes, decided to leave, left the house forgetting her car keys and been forced to knock on the door rather than sleep outside, or something like that. He gets the shoes, bundles up Christie, who is underdressed for the chilly night, puts her in his car, and drives her the eleven miles to her home.

The next day, he sends her flowers.

Mirabelle puts on her pink argyle sweater and her pastel plaid short skirt to wear to the 5 P.M. Ruscha opening, and when she exits her car in the sheltered Beverly Hills parking lot, she looks like a rainbow refracted in the spray of a lawn sprinkler. At the far end of the lot, a car is being locked and a man steps away from it. In silhouette, he files a paper in his billfold. His suit tapers at the waist and his hair falls over his forehead. He starts to walk away, but Mirabelle is illuminated by the last remaining rays of yellow sunlight that stray into the garage, and she catches his eye.

Then he says, “Mirabelle?”

Mirabelle stops. “Yes?”

“It’s me, Jeremy.”

He approaches her at an angle, the light now raking across his face, and she can finally see him. Although he is the same person, this new Jeremy has nothing to do with the old Jeremy. It would take three Old Jeremys to trade in for one New Jeremy, as the New Jeremy is the sleeker, better model, with many desirable features.

“It’s so nice to see you again,” he says.

So nice to see you again? Mirabelle thinks, “What is he talking about?” This is not Jeremy lingo. Is she supposed to say “so nice to see you again” back? It isn’t particularly nice to see him again, but it isn’t unpleasant either, and she is curious about him. But before she decides what to do, Jeremy casually unbuttons his one-button suit, leans forward, and kisses a continental hello on one of her cheeks.

“Are you going to the opening?”

“Yes, I am,” says Mirabelle.

“I didn’t know if I’d make it back to town before it closes, so I wanted to see it tonight. Can I walk with you?”

Mirabelle nods, surveying Jeremy’s sumptuous leather shoes and the precise fall of his pant legs draping over them. She wonders what happened.

What happened was this. Jeremy’s three months on the road, which expanded into a year of multiple trips eastward, not only were a financial success, relatively, but were a success of another kind: Jeremy evolved from ape to man. After touring with Age for only a couple of weeks, Jeremy was invited to stay with them on their bus. After a gig, the bus would leave at around 1 A.M. and be driven three hundred miles or so to the next stop. Usually everyone on the bus would stay up a couple of hours, then retire to individual sleeping bunks with draw curtains that recalled a 1940s train, minus Ingrid Bergman. Inside the bunks were headphone jacks that plugged into a central sound system. One of Age’s members was a Buddhist, new enough to the discipline that he went to sleep every night listening to audiotapes of books on Buddhism and meditation. Jeremy would plug in because he was bored. At first, he was sickened that he was listening to spoken-word tapes and wind chimes, but soon, after one particular meditation provoked a surreal vision in which he toured his bedroom at age four, the nightly routine became the high point of his evening and he began to listen, and listen intently. But more important, as the Buddhism tapes dwindled, new tapes from shopping mall bookstores were purchased from the same shelves that stocked the now exhausted supply of Buddhist recordings, and Jeremy was suddenly plugged into the entire current canon of self-help.

These books, listened to in the hypnotic rolling darkness of his Greyhound bunk, taught Jeremy about the Self, inner and outer, Jungian archetypes, the male journey and rites of passage, the female journey and rites of passage, the care of the soul, and Tantric sex. He got a heavy dose of relationship books, beginning with Men Are from Mars …and ending with a parody book called Loving Someone Dumber Than You (Jeremy identifying with the “you” and not the “dumber”). As the bus rolled on through Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Nevada, under a million stars undimmed by city lights, Jeremy had his consciousness raised and therefore his life altered, by accident.

They walk across Santa Monica Boulevard and Jeremy explains the success of his business and how he is back in L.A. looking for a place to set up larger manufacturing quarters for Doggone Amplifiers. As he walks with her, he picks up her hand and says, “You look great; you really do look great.”

This is what Lisa sees as she zeros in on them from fifty yards the other side of the Reynaldo Gallery: a man in a well-cut new suit holding Mirabelle’s hand as they walk up Bedford Drive. And she assumes Jeremy is Mr. Ray Porter.

“Are you here alone?” Jeremy asks Mirabelle.

“I’m meeting a friend.”

“Travel has left me friendless in L.A.,” says Jeremy as he opens the door for her and escorts her in. Lisa slips in behind them and statistically becomes, at the already crowded party, the only woman there with a lavender perfumed cunt.

Five o’clock is early for a party, but not in L.A. where the average wake-up call is 7 A.M. Dinners are normally at 7:30 on the dot, which is perfect for a jet-lagged New Yorker who arrives and is eating at 10:30 his time. So this party is just starting to fill up, and many of the familiar faces are there. Artist/Hero is there, with a date this time, but he remembers Mirabelle and calls her over. Jeremy separates from her and goes to the bar for a newly discovered favorite, soda water, cranberry juice, and vodka. Lisa views this as Primetime and sidles next to him, overhears his order, and asks for the same thing. She waits till the drinks are delivered, then moves her aromatic twat within striking distance.

“Oh my God, I’ve never seen anyone else order one of these,” says Lisa.

And she is off and running. She laughs at everything Jeremy says, which is difficult because Jeremy is not by nature a funny person. But Lisa knows that finding him funny is essential to her conquest of him, and she therefore finds herself chuckling even at his most innocuous utterances, including several observations about the current political scene. When she realizes these comments are serious, Lisa has to abort a grin midway and quickly twist her face into her version of profound concentration. Her assault continues, cajoling, poking him a couple of times, coyly dipping her tongue in her drink. Then she looks over at Mirabelle and says how insulting it must be for Jeremy to have her chatting up some other guy when the one she came in with is so attractive. “I have a secret,” she says. “I know who you are. I’m Lisa by the way.”