Steve Martin - Shopgirl

Since we all live in our own worlds, Jeremy assumes that word of his exploits and success with amplifiers has reached the coast. He loves that an attractive redhead has been informed of his savvy entrepreneurship, so when she says do you wanna meet later for a drink, he glances over at Mirabelle – which reinforces Lisa’s erroneous belief – feeling unexpected regret that it was not she who had done the asking. But he gives Lisa a fact-finding once-over, and says yes.

Lisa laughs and flirts with him for another half hour then ups the stakes.

“Can you leave now?” she asks.

“Yeah, sure.”

“What about Mirabelle?” says Lisa, feigning concern for another person.

“I do what I want,” replies Jeremy, never thinking to mention that they are not a couple.

This comment releases a flood of estrogen into Lisa’s bloodstream and has her dreaming of sex, babies, and a home in the valley.

Jeremy doesn’t understand Lisa’s aggressiveness but he doesn’t need to. And neither does his recently elevated consciousness. There is no way the tranquil waters in which his brain floats so serenely can also calm two testicles of an unattached twenty-seven-year-old male.

“Let me say good-bye to her.”

Lisa almost, but not quite, feels embarrassed. “Okay, but I’ll wait outside.”

At her apartment, which has been cleared of roommates by prearrangement, Jeremy gets the works from Lisa. He is shown the illustrated Kama Sutra of Lisa Cramer, cosmetics girl first class, with additional notes contributed by a dozen How to Fuck books, two radio psychologists, the gossip of two highly sexed girlfriends, articles in Cosmo , and an incredible instinct for arousing a man’s superficial interest. He is slowly stripped and stripped for, he is levitated with oral hijinks, massaged and toyed with, rolled backward and masturbated, and finally finished off with a cosmic ejaculation while Lisa deep-breathes and chants. Afterward, Lisa’s belief that she has just blasted the head off Ray Porter is reinforced when she asks if she is better than Mirabelle, and Jeremy, who has no idea that he is not Ray Porter, has no choice but to nod yes. After a customary but brief period of forced cuddling, Jeremy rolls out of her apartment with Lisa’s last words being, “Call me.”

While Lisa thinks she is giving him the works, Ray Porter arrives at the art party, scoops up Mirabelle, and takes her to dinner, where their familiar and bottomless lust asserts itself. Driving to his house, he reaches under her jacket and between the buttons of her dress, where he feels the spongy resilience of her breasts. At his house, they are destined to make love but a conversation starts instead. A deadly, hurtful conversation that begins by Ray Porter casually reasserting his independence, talking to her like a friend who is in the know, as if she were his partner in finding someone else.

“I was thinking of selling the house here, getting an apartment in New York. I love it there. Every time I land I get a rush. There’s a four bedroom I like that a friend is selling, big enough in case I ever meet someone.”

He says it, and there is a message in it, but its cruelty is not intended.

Mirabelle tires. The speech, delivered as though it were an aside, drains her of momentum. Her arms dangle to her sides, and she drops into a chair. She knows this, she knows everything already, she has heard this. Why does he have to reiterate? To remind her that this is nothing?

She looks up at him and asks him a horrible question. “So are you just biding your time with me?”

The answer is awful, and Ray doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say anything at all, just sits next to her. Mirabelle’s mind blackens. The blackness is not a thought, but if it could be pressed into a thought, if a chemical from a dropper could be dripped onto it causing its color and essence to become visible, it would take the shape of this sentence: Why does no one want me?

He pulls her into him, her forehead on his shoulder. He knows that he loves her, but he cannot figure out in what way.

So she sits there, her short fingernails digging into him, trying to hold on to something that will keep her together, that will keep her from flying apart in all directions. As she clutches him, she feels herself sinking into a cold dark sea and there seems no way out of it, ever. The proximity of the man she has identified as her salvation makes it worse. He takes her to the bed and she lies face down on the covers and he rests his hand on the small of her back, occasionally stroking her. He tells her that she is beautiful, but Mirabelle cannot align this thought with his rejection of her.

The next morning, Lisa picks up the ringing phone.

“Hi. It’s Jeremy.”

“Who?” says Lisa.

“Jeremy.”

“Do I know you?” says Lisa.

Jeremy jokes, “When do you really know someone.” Getting no laugh, he continues, “Jeremy from last night.”

Lisa goes through the list of men she spoke to last night. None is named Jeremy, though sometimes men will find her and call her because they think they’ve made eye contact with her when they really haven’t.

“Refresh me,” Lisa says.

Jeremy is dumbfounded at the possibility that all his exploits, all his catapulting, could be so quickly forgotten by morning. He continues, “Me, Jeremy. I was at your place last night. We did it.”

Something all wrong dawns on Lisa, “Oh, Ray!”

When Jeremy hears “Oh, Ray,” he presumes it is slang or pig Latin or some contemporary expression of elation that has gotten by him. So he says it back: “O, ray!”

“God, you were great last night,” offers Lisa.

“O ray,” says Jeremy.

“What?” says Lisa.

Jeremy, involved in a conversation he can’t follow, finally asks, “Do you know who I am?”

“Sure, you’re Ray Porter.”

“Who?” says Jeremy.

“Ray Porter, from last night.”

“Who’s Ray Porter?”

“You are…,” then she adds, “aren’t you?”

In the morning after the agony of the night, Ray drives Mirabelle to her car, in time for her to get to work by ten. He watches her walking stiffly away from him, overdressed for the morning, bearing her anguish so solitarily. He wonders if it will be the last time he will ever see her.

She puts on her driving glasses and starts up her new-for-her Explorer. She waves a small-fingered good-bye to Ray, and he notices her diligent concentration on driving as she pulls away.

She enters Neiman’s, passes the disgraced Lisa, walks up four flights, and slides into her niche behind the counter. She stands there for the rest of the day, again stunned by an inexplicable world, her movements limited to those that her body has memorized.

Ray and Mirabelle’s relationship does not collapse that day; it subtly dwindles over the next six months. There are fits and starts, but they can all be graphed on a downward slope. He takes her to dinners, drives her home, hugs her goodnight. Sex is over. Sometimes, she tells him he is wonderful and he presses her closer to him. She accepts a date with a sports equipment rep but she cannot offer him even the little bit required to keep him interested. Ray finally grasps that he is giving her nothing and that he has to think for the both of them and separate from her. He pulls back and she reflexively, protectively, does the same. For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, not depressed exactly, but involved in a mourning that at first she thinks is for Ray but soon realizes is for the loss of her old self.

She is lying on her bed, day having passed into night without her ever getting up to turn on a lamp. She lights a candle in her darkened bedroom and is held in its tender illumination. Outside, sounds from surrounding apartments transition from dinnertime to TV time to quiet time. Her depression has consumed all of its fuel. She is exhausted from doing nothing to heal herself. As the darkness and solitude surround her, she drifts into communication with her smartest self. She admits that her college days are over, that her excursion into Los Angeles was transitional, and that Ray Porter is a lost cause.