‘No. Not at all. Of course not. Shall I … Shall I go home and come back?’
He was almost sure he understood what she was suggesting, but almost wasn’t good enough, not for him. He would always be someone who assumed the worst. He would always be the person who made the safest, dullest and most literal interpretation of an ambiguous situation. He would very likely stay single for the rest of his life.
‘Oh. You have to go?’
‘No. Not at all.’
‘That was the first time I’ve ever tried a sexy line, and you ruined it.’
‘I don’t know that any line that mentions scrambled eggs can be as sexy as all that.’
She laughed, and kissed him again. He had survived, just about. A couple of hours later, he wished that he’d insisted on leaving and coming back again.
How could Sophie not have fallen in love with Dennis, eventually? He was kind, he was single, he was vulnerable, he made her laugh (not always intentionally, true, but often enough). Every time she saw him, he seemed to have become a little more handsome. He was clever in the sense that he knew a lot about a lot, but he was clever in a way she valued more: he understood people and recognized what they might have to offer. It had taken a while, but she ached to have access to that kind of wisdom at all times, not just in script meetings. And he made no attempt to hide his adoration and admiration of her. She’d been aware of it for a long time, and it wasn’t as though she’d been worn down by it, exactly; that would suggest that she’d been exhausted by his persistence, when the opposite was true: she was energized by it. It gave her confidence, made her feel as though she was both talented and beautiful, and she craved the affirmation. Her self-doubt was like water. It found the tiniest gaps and flooded in. The girl who had decided that she was too good to be a beauty queen was long gone; so too was the girl who had never done a day’s acting in her life and turned up for auditions hoping for a job.
The last four years had brought her fame and money, but confusion too. Was she any good at anything? Had she just been lucky? If she had walked into any other rehearsal room in the world, one of the many rooms where there was no Bill and Tony, no Clive, no Dennis, would anything have happened, or would she still be selling perfumes to married men with wandering eyes? Or would the eyes have stopped wandering by now? Everywhere she went she saw younger, prettier and shapelier girls (girls who were, unlike Sophie, still girls), girls who probably couldn’t understand why brainy, witty people were trying to write a show named after her. Dennis’s devotion was a fixed point, like the North Star, something that helped her find her way back whenever she became lost in her deep, dark forest of anxiety.
She’d been watching him carefully, half-expecting his beautiful solidity to melt away with Barbara (and Jim), but the end of the show hadn’t changed him; if anything, it had enabled him to prove to her that she was all that really mattered. Maybe there were women who’d have been able to resist this month after month, but if so they were a lot tougher than Sophie. She’d found the right person at the right time, the man who made her feel good, the man who had banished her loneliness, and if that wasn’t love, then she didn’t know what was.
She had decided, though, that if she wanted anything to happen, she would have to make the first move. He was too nice, too respectful and much too damaged by his marriage to that awful woman ever to do anything, and she was sure he’d have offered a pair of ears and a shoulder for ever, through any number of divorces and professional disasters. Ears and shoulders, she decided, were all very well, but she’d need more than that if they were going to move along. She manoeuvred him into the bedroom and they kissed some more on the bed. She was almost sure that he was beginning to see the big picture, so she didn’t think that a description of it would alarm him much. And in any case, she wanted to tell him an awful truth.
‘I’ve just realized,’ she said. ‘You’ll be the first person I’ve ever slept with properly who wasn’t an actor. Isn’t that terrible?’
‘Yes,’ he said, with greater conviction than she’d been expecting.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I was only joking.’
‘So you’ve slept with people who weren’t actors?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I was joking about it being terrible.’
‘So it wasn’t terrible?’
‘I didn’t mean that either.’
‘I don’t really understand the joke,’ said Dennis.
‘I just meant … I should have slept with people from other professions by now.’
‘Which other professions?’
He was visibly alarmed by this time, and she could see that they had set off down the wrong path.
‘I didn’t have any professions in mind,’ she said. ‘Producers. I haven’t slept with enough producers.’