There was something about the woman’s full head of unruly hair—blond with a punk red stripe—and her sensible sweater over torn black tights. She seemed to dress too old and too young for her age, as if she’d gotten advice from all the wrong books. In other words, she looked like the world’s rarest and most desired of creatures: a trivial woman.
Or maybe I just hoped she was.
“Excuse me?” I said, panting, when I caught up.
Standing at a light, she looked at me, very slowly. I noticed three things immediately: Her makeup was applied too heavily, another promising sign. She was attractive, in a weird sort of way, with high cheekbones, full lips, and piercing blue-gray eyes. And there were tears all over her face. Well, why wouldn’t there be? I thought, suddenly. Her father was just found dead.
“I’m the one who found your dead father,” I said.
There was a long pause, as I cursed myself. This wasn’t exactly a “meet cute,” like in a romantic comedy. I remembered that Cary Grant had turned down Billy Wilder’s Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon. Bog-art and Cooper were, respectively, miscast in them, instead.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I babbled. “Your father, I … I’m the one, the one who … his heart attack … I …”
“Oh. Oh.”
To my surprise, she didn’t burst into racking sobs. In fact, it seemed that part of her day was over. She briskly wiped away what moisture was left on her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said, sensibly. “That must have been awful.”
“Well, not … as bad as for you … I mean …”
She shrugged. “We weren’t close. I hadn’t seen him for years.”
“Oh. Well, I know what it’s like not to … get along … with your family.”
“Do you? That’s nice. I mean, it’s … not nice, but I don’t know the right word for what it is. I’m Dena Savitch.”
“Roy Milano.”
We shook hands. Despite her matter-of-fact demeanor, I could still feel the tears that dampened her palm.
“May I buy you coffee?” she asked.
“Sure. Except let me.”
“No,” she said, definitively. “I insist.”
—
Dena Savitch also insisted on ordering for both of us. When our coffees came, she popped open the little milk container, sniffed it, then okayed it for my use. I assumed that her reaction to anxiety was to impose order. This was in contrast, of course, to my own obsessive recounting of film facts and stats. There were all kinds of ways to be trivial, I thought, hopefully.
“How did you know my father?” she asked me, bluntly.
“I didn’t. He contacted me.”
“You sell something? Have a business, what?”
Her grilling was unnerving yet kind of charming. “I think he wanted to sell me something.”
“A service of some kind? Some belongings? I have no idea what my father was into.”
After a pause, I decided to plunge in, to definitively see if she shared my way of life. “He said he had The Day the Clown Cried.”
She paused, but only to unwrap a sugar cube. “What’s that? One of those corny clown paintings?”
My heart sank. Had I thought wrong, was she really normal? As I watched Dena crush the sugar with her fist into just the right size sprinkles, I was heartened: right type, wrong topic, maybe.
“It’s a famous uncompleted film,” I said, and proceeded to explain. I told her how Jerry Lewis’s previous film had also been about World War Two: Which Way to the Front?, a comedy. As I went on and on, she proceeded to look around the room. Only when I finally trailed off did her attention return. Still, it was clear she’d heard something.
“Well,” she said, “I guess my father really needed cash.”
I stared at her. “You’re saying he might have actually had it?”
She shrugged. “As I said, I don’t know what he’s been doing lately. He left my mother when I was little. But he was a movie fan, I remember that.”
“It’s not enough to be a fan, see, he’d have to be …” and off I went again, explaining that Jerry Lewis had done a previous dramatic turn in The Jazz Singer on TV in the fifties. This time, Dena’s gaze floated upward, and she seemed to count the ceiling tiles. Only when my voice stopped—when I wet my whistle with my now-cool coffee—did she meet my eyes once more. This time, too, she’d heard just enough to respond. She checked me out, analytically.
“I can see why he called you,” she said, not unkindly. “Why anyone would have, under those circumstances.”
I studied her now. I remembered how, when I was a child, my mother would start doing chores—cleaning, cooking, sorting laundry—whenever I regaled her with trivia. “I’m listening, I’m listening,” she would say. Yet I knew she would sometimes sneak off by herself, in the afternoons, to the city, to see films.
For all my attempts to hew Dena to me and mine, maybe she wasn’t trivial; she was maternal.
But not necessarily in a bad way.
“Look,” she said, suddenly. “I think we can help each other.”
