A Place of Hiding

She said, “Matt? Matt?” and knew a moment of irrational panic when she thought she’d lost him. Damn phones and damn signals, always fading in and out.

But he came back on the line and it was quieter. He’d ducked inside a restaurant, he said. “This is make or break for the film. China, this one’s a festival winner. Sundance for sure, and you know what that can mean. I hate letting you down like this, but if I don’t make a pitch to these people, I’m not going to be worth taking you anywhere. To Cambria. To Paris. Or to Kalamazoo. That’s just how it is.”

“Fine,” she told him, but it was not and he would know that by the flat sound of her voice. It had been a month since he’d managed to carve two days away from pitch-meetings in LA and funding-scavenges across the rest of the country, and before that it had been six weeks while she coldcalled potential clients for herself and he continued to pursue the horizon of his dream. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wonder if you’ll ever be able to put it together, Matt.”

“I know. It seems like it takes forever to get a film going. And sometimes it does. You know the stories. Years in development and then —wham! — instant box office. But I want to do this. I need to do it. I’m just sorry it seems like we end up apart more than we’re together.”

China heard all this as she watched a toddler trundle along the sidewalk on his tricycle, trailed by his watchful mother and even more watchful German shepherd. The child came to a spot where the cement was uneven, lifted on an angle by the root of a tree, and his wheel rammed into the resulting eruption. He tried to move his pedals against it, but he could do nothing till Mom came to his aid. The sight of this filled China with unaccountable sadness.

Matt was waiting for her response. She tried to think of some new variation on expressing disappointment, but she could come up with nothing. So she said, “I wasn’t really talking about putting together a film, Matt.”

He said, “Oh.”

Then there was nothing more to discuss because she knew that he would stay in New York to keep the appointment he’d fought so hard to get and she would have to fend for herself, another date broken, another wrench thrown in the works of the great Life Plan.

She said, “Well, good luck with your meeting.”

He said, “We’ll talk. All week. All right? You okay with this, China?”

“What choice do I have?” she asked him and said goodbye. She hated herself for ending their conversation like that, but she was hot, miserable, dispirited, depressed...Call it what you wanted to call it. In any event, she had nothing more to give.

She loathed the part of herself that was unsure of the future, and most of the time she could keep that side of her character subdued. When it got away from her and gained dominance in her life like an overconfident guide into chaos, it never led to anything good. It reduced her to adhering to a belief in the importance of the sort of womanhood she had long detested, one defined by having a man at any cost, lassoing him into marriage, and plugging up his life with babies ASAP. She would not go there, she told herself repeatedly. But a fraction of her wanted it anyway. This led her to asking questions, making demands, and turning her attention to an us instead of keeping it focused on a me. When that occurred, what flared up between her and the man in question—who had always been Matt—was a replay of the debate they’d been having for five years now. This was a circular polemic on the subject of marriage that had so far achieved the same result: his obvious reluctance—as if she actually needed to see it and hear it—followed by her furious recriminations, which were then followed by a break-up initiated by whoever felt most exasperated with the differences that cropped up between them.

Those same differences kept bringing them back together, though. For they charged the relationship with an undeniable excitement that so far neither one of them had found with anyone else. He had probably tried. China knew that. But she had not. She didn’t need to. She’d known for years that Matthew Whitecomb was right for her.