Silver, Part 2

(continued from part 1)

And so he cooked her dinner. She came over to his place, expecting a wooing: posters of her (all taken *after* she turned 18, of course) decorating the place, newly-bought décor to evince a certain level of glamour. What she got was a typical twenty-something apartment, any and all style courtesy of Ikea's budget racks, with most of the t-shirts consolidated into one pile. The tablecloth was the only visible attempt to clean the place up, and it was the sort of thin plastic that one buys last-minute in the grocery store. For someone so used to the red carpet, it was new to walk into a space whose philosophy of interior decoration was afterthought.

Brian poured both of them a glass of wine. She took it and, as was polite, offered him the opportunity to show off his purchasing power and prowess. "What kind of red is this?" She settled in for a discourse on varietals and their respective bouquets--

"Umm, red?" And he went back to chopping the tomatoes. In the background he was playing a new pop tune. The band wasn't that great, and certainly weren't famous, but the song was catchy, reminded everyone who heard it of some tune they liked, and they were willing to do a cross-promotional music video. Of course, quickly, the table was set and light conversation was had. Comfortable and invigorating without being intellectually exhausting. The sun set and then the light was by candle. Of course, other dates happened later. They went ice skating (both of them were awful and said yes in the hope the other would be able to coach them as cute couples did, but instead just stumbled around the rink for an hour before succumbing to their mutual coldness). She convinced him to go jogging with her, and he survived only because she stopped to sign an autograph at the same intervals as he stopped to check if he was, in fact, as he believed having a heart attack.

As a romantic comedy fixture, Cindy had filmed many a montage and came closer than the next guy to understanding their purpose. Most people think a montage is used to show passage of time. How else would the audience understand that it was now a month later and a relationship was cemented? And this is wrong because the average audience member is not willing to accept the simple fact that audiences, of any medium are, by and large, stupid. They are willing to accept development wildly disproportionate to elapsed time.

No, the montage is the only way movies can hope to turn reality into real life. Real life is where we live. In real life, your girlfriend is the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth. Your in-jokes are the funniest, your love life the greatest. There is a spark between you. Tangible. No one in your presence could deny it. Reality, however, is that you are two clothed primates drawn together by one of yours deep-seated feelings of insufficiency and the other's ticking biological clock.

Writers cannot craft a universally compelling narrative of love because no love is universally compelling. No compliment, no matter how loaded with adoration and praise means half as much as "nice sweater" coming from a beloved. No insult, no matter how laden with profanity and tales of sexual obscenity, hurts one-thousandth as much as a lover's uncertain glance. The reason for the montage is because it is impossible to write down, in all its particulars, a relationship. No imagination, even one infinitely better than reality, can match real life.

And so, we settle for a montage of scenes of pretty people doing activities we almost believe could lead to emotion. Only teenage girls and virgins could ever truly fall in love based on what they see on the screen. The rest of us leave the theater confident in our superior capability to engage in emotion. All because of the magic of cutting from scene to scene without allowing us to see what is actually going on.

Back at dinner (for despite talking about the running and the subsequent dates, dinner hadn't really ended), dessert, a nice crème brulee that was perfect to both of them despite its objectively obvious technical shortcomings, was finished they slowly drew together, a single whisper's distance from the other's cheek--

They kissed. They smooched. They necked. And soon (by now the pop song previously alluded to had hit its romantic climax) there was nudity. And there was sex. Not the kind of gratuitous nudity so popular in today's romantic comedies where all we get is a hint of buttocks or perhaps a passing frame of nipple. Honestly, whose first post-coital instinct is to (as Meg Ryan's characters invariably do) pull the sheet up to cover precisely enough of their breasts to attain a PG-13 rating while still leaving the promise of cleavage? No, they left the sheets scattered on the floor and basked in their mutual warmth. Their relationship was not built exclusively on the sex, but it was certainly a part of it.

Of course, the montage has to have distinct start and end points, or else the audience will perpetually fear their vantage point might jump out from under them. The best technique for signaling the end is a quick and drastic change in tone, to make it clear that the emotion (i.e., the beginning of a relationship) has crescendoed and should now move on. The more abrupt and surprising the zig and/or zag, the better--

"You're Cindy Whittaker!" came a voice out of the fog of disturbed sleep.

"What? Huh?" She rolled over and quite quickly refound her bra and indignation. "Who are you?"

"That's Tony, my roommate," said Brian. "Back from Philadelphia early? Right, no matter." Brian reached for his boxers, more calmly than Cindy's frantic grabbing at items of clothing. "Do you think maybe you could give us some, y'know, privacy?"

"You're Cindy Whittaker!"

"Out!"

Tony compromised on turning around and continuing with his droning. "I'm your biggest fan, I know everyone says that, but I really am. I even saw--"

"I have to go," said Cindy, to Brian. She turned to Tony, "I'm sorry, I appreciate your fan--"

"--you in that sleeper film noir feature you did: 'Café on the Brink of Sorrow'--"

"Don't mind him," Brian said. "He won't even notice you're gone for half an hour. He does this sometimes."

"You sure, cause, I don't want this to get weird?"

"Just go." They were both clothed, and Tony had turned back around to regale her with his Cindy Whittaker fan club bona fides. "I'll see you later?"

"Umm, yeah." Then came the moment of maximum awkwardness in any social interaction: the good-bye physical contact. The essential question of which is: What is appropriate given your history and current surroundings? Though it sounds trivial and unimportant, many men have gone crazy trying to learn its calculus and reasoning.

She extended her hand right as he went to kiss her. He backed off and took her hand, right as she leaned in towards him. The two seemed doomed to a vaudevillian back and forth (over the soundtrack of Tony's recounting of her filmography) before he pulled her in to him and kissed her. Really kissed her. A kiss that was hello, goodbye, and how you doing all in one. What more was there to do? She left.

Tony slapped his roommate on the back. "Pretty fucking incredible. You're sleeping with Cindy Goddamn Whittaker. My roommate is balling Cindy Whittaker. I mean, you have to wonder what she's thinking, right?"

"What? No."

"I mean, no offense. I think you're great. But you must know what I mean. She's--" he accented each syllable as if talking to a foreigner who had a solid grasp on English only when spoken slowly and loudly "Cin-dy Whit-a-ker."

"And I'm Brian Seston."

"Are you just messing with me? She's a movie star. She could have any guy she wants." He paused. Tony had a habit of pausing right before he said the wrong thing. In many people, this would be when they reevaluate whether it was actually worth saying, but somehow Tony still always said what was on his mind. "You-- you gotta figure she's just slumming it, right?"

"Is it really so foreign a concept that she might actually like me for me."

"No, I mean, you're a cool guy. I hang out with you. I live with you, it's great, really. But, you're a video store clerk. You have been for 5 years. You're not even a manager. I know, I know, you don't have ambitions to the bourgeois. But she's famous. She's on the internet."

"Yes, she's on the internet. And that palace of urban legends, inane email forwards and videos of white guys dancing is never incorrect in deciding societal importance."

"OK, ok. I see your point. Sure, she's no different than the rest of us." Tony paused. Again. "So, her breasts-- they real?"