The place didn’t even have a name — neither on the door outside nor on the menu. It was just a Chinese restaurant across the street from my apartment. I started going there the week I moved in, having dropped out of college and come to the city to make my name, find fame and fortune, the whole nine yards. The very first time I had the kung pao chicken and the hot and sour soup, the next morning I got a call from a casting agent who wanted to audition me for a detergent commercial. I didn’t get the part but still decided the chicken was my lucky dish, so whenever I was feeling down, or tired, or in need of a boost, I’d go back. I felt that way a lot, so I was a regular.
During the day I was temping at a mortgage company, a job so tedious it caused me actual physical pain — backaches, headaches, stomachaches. The money was good, though, and I’d been temping there for so long they changed my status to perma-temp. I made fifty cents more an hour than the ordinary temps, and my boss gave me a plant to put in my cube. All day long I sat in there and proofread people’s mortgages, which were passed from bank to bank, back and forth, like chips in a poker game. For legal reasons I had to make sure that the stamps on the front of the mortgage matched these poker-game trails documented at the back. When I was done proofreading a big stack, I filed them in a cool, dark, windowless room we called the Cave. Sometimes I lay down in the Cave and took naps. I didn’t mean to slack off, but the idiocy of the work made sleep irresistible. Nobody ever seemed to notice, anyway, just like they didn’t when I was gone for two hours in the middle of the day on an audition. They were just as bored themselves, and at times it felt like we were all in a trance, dreaming this shared tedious dream.
After work I sometimes went to a class or an audition, or came home to check my messages to see if I’d been called back for anything, which I hardly ever was. Often, too tired to cook, I’d head across the street to the Chinese restaurant. A counter at one end served as a kind of bar, meaning Stacy would bring you a beer if you sat there long enough. When I was done eating I’d occasionally hang out there for a while. It never occurred to me that a young woman sitting alone at a bar could expect a certain amount of attention, that she could be sending out any kind of message to the world at large. I believed that a woman ought to be able to behave exactly like a man did, in any situation. This attitude often got me in trouble. I refused to flirt with male casting agents and directors; I wouldn’t wear makeup to auditions for roles where I was supposed to be the attractive ingénue. “In your heart you want to fail,” one of my actor friends told me once, a statement that, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was absolutely true.
It was following one such failed, nonflirtatious audition that I met Simon Robbie. Whether Robbie was his last name or whether he went by two first names was unclear. He was a guy my age who sidled up to me at the counter on a Wednesday night and introduced himself. He was wearing a dirty yellow T-shirt with the name of a Little League team on it, and corduroy pants that were sliding off his skinny hips — your standard hipster look. Also, he had sideburns.
“I’m Zoe,” I told him, which was a lie. I was into constructing false personae at this time. The world was my stage, was how I looked at it.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, then looked around the place. “What do you recommend to eat at this place? I’m looking for something new and different, some kind of culinary adventure.”
“I recommend you go eat somewhere else,” I said.
Simon Robbie looked offended. “Hey, I was just making conversation. No need to be a jerk.”
“I just meant the food here’s pretty standard,” I said. I decided that Zoe would be a kind girl from a small town, captain of the History Club in high school. She’d have a fondness for dressing up in period costumes at Halloween — Marie Antoinette, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Mao — and feel seriously disappointed if people didn’t recognize who she was. “It’s an egg-roll, chow-mein, fortune-cookies-bought-in-bulk kind of place.”
“Gotcha,” Simon Robbie said. “Hey, did you already eat? I was thinking maybe I’d eat here at the bar with you? Would that be okay?”
“I see no problem with that,” I-as-Zoe said, and gave him a friendly smile. I saw Stacy coming out of the kitchen and waved her over. She looked pleased. She thought that a twenty-year-old woman who ate by herself in a Chinese restaurant three or four times a week was in dire need of friends. Simon Robbie ordered three appetizers — scallion pies, wonton soup, egg rolls — and no main course.
“Nothing else?” Stacy said.
“Not for now,” Simon Robbie told her. “I like to keep my options open,” he said to me, and winked.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
While eating he asked me about myself, sometimes gesturing with his left hand as if to say, “More details!” while he shoveled in mouthfuls with his right. The food was greasy and a ring of oil soon appeared around his mouth, wide and shiny, like a clown’s lipstick. I told him all about Zoe’s childhood on a farm, how her father had to give up the land his family had worked for generations and moved them to a small, grimy town where he worked in a factory, assembling cell phones. I said he hated this so much that the sight of a person talking on a cell phone drove him into a blind rage and one day, when Zoe was sixteen, she came home with a cell phone of her own and he threw her out of the house and ever since then she’d been on her own.
“That’s intense,” Simon Robbie said.
“Yeah.”
“So what do you do now?”
For some reason this was the only thing I didn’t want to lie about. “I’m an actress,” I said.
“Wow, cool, excellent,” he said through a mouthful of egg roll. “What do you act?”
“I do theater mostly,” I said. “Sometimes commercials, for the money. You know how it is.”
Simon Robbie chewed and swallowed. “No, I meant what kind of people,” he said. “Show me.”
I’m acting right now, I almost said, but didn’t. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I told him.
“Oh, okay, I totally understand,” he said. “I’m in insurance myself, and when people ask me questions about it outside of work, I’m like, dude, no more, call me at the office. You know what I mean?”
“You’re in insurance?”
“I sell life-insurance policies door-to-door,” he said.
I couldn’t believe I’d met someone whose job sounded worse than mine. It made me warm to him. “How do you like it?” I asked.
He finished chewing an egg roll, wiped his mouth, and shrugged. “Life is long,” he said, “and this is just one phase.”
I toasted this philosophy with my beer. Stacy came by and asked if we wanted anything else to drink. Simon Robbie ordered tea, and I said I’d have the same. The place was emptying out, Mr. Lu’s angry cries from the back coming less often now. With the tea Stacy brought some cookies, and I cracked mine open and read the fortune. You will never win the lottery, it said. I showed it to him.
“Then why do they print those numbers on the other side?” he said.
I shook my head. The fortune had put me in a bad mood. We sat for a couple of minutes in silence, Simon Robbie opening his fortune—Be kind to everyone you meet, his said, which wasn’t even a fortune in my opinion, given that it said nothing of the future — and ate our cookies. I drank some weak, bitter tea. “Well, I guess I’m off,” I finally said, and waved to Stacy for the check.