That was his career, or lack thereof, summed up in a single sentence by a man with marinara sauce on his tie. "I’m Lance Collins. You're my agent," he said feebly.
Richard laughed and said to his companion, "I'm his agent. I'm supposed to get him Hamlet, and I don't even know who the hell he is." He turned to Lance. "Call my office. Make an appointment. I'm eating my lunch."
But Lance didn't leave. At that moment, he wasn't even sure his legs still worked.
"Look, kid," Richard said. "It's not me. It's you. Everybody's got talent. And you're a good-looking kid, but you can buy looks. Name recognition—now that's the honey. You can't put a price on that. You go get yourself famous, and then we'll talk about the kind of roles you want."
Lance knew there was a cliché about carts and horses, but he couldn't remember how it went. Luckily, Richard's companion chose that moment to wipe his mouth and ask, "Were you just sitting with Julia James?"
Lance looked back at the woman who sat alone, scribbling in a notebook, and said, "Yeah. I guess."
Richard emitted a little squeal. "Hey, kid, why didn't you say so? That's great I mean, that's off-the-charts fantastic. How long you been seeing her?"
"Oh." Lance looked from Richard to the woman and back again. "You've got the wrong—"
"I say what's right and wrong," Richard corrected. "And believe me, this is right! Hey, who needs Hamlet? We've got Taming of the Shrew." Richard laughed at his own cleverness. "Whatcha waiting for?" Richard asked. "Tell your girlfriend to come over!"
"You've got the wrong idea. She isn't my girlfriend." "Not your girlfriend?" Richard asked as if this were a kink in his master plan to take over the universe. "Who knows?" "Who knows what?" Lance asked.
"That you're here with her," Richard said, growing impatient.
"I'm not here with her," Lance insisted.
"If nobody knows you're not, then you are," Richard said, flipping his hands like a magician who had just made a quarter disappear. "You're here. She's here. A few tasteful photos and—"
"This was a mistake." Lance stood and left the table.
As he headed to the door, he passed Julia and heard her on her cell phone saying, "You can't make it? That's fine. I just hope you get to feeling better. Take care of yourself. Bye-bye." As she hung up, she looked at him and asked, "How did it go?" But the expression on his face must have been answer enough because she said, "That's a shame."
She'd placed his pilfered rose in the vase on her table. Water spots still darkened the linen tablecloth, but it seemed to Lance as if it had been a year since he'd joined her there.
"I'm sorry," she said, no doubt sensing that Lance hadn't enjoyed his time on the other side of the room.
"Thanks anyway," he told her and walked away.
Was it the entire basket of bread that Julia had eaten or the morose look on the man's face as he turned and walked out of Stella's that caused her to lose her appetite? She honestly didn't know. But since Harvey, her agent, wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be joining her for lunch, Julia laid some bills on the table and went to say good-bye to Giovanni.
Two free hours felt like an unexpected blessing. She could window-shop or people-watch in the park—theater of the living, she'd always called it, and Manhattan was its greatest stage. But when Julia stepped beneath the restaurant's awning, a cool, wet wind slapped her across the face. Rain pelted the sidewalks, and pedestrians darted past like darkened blurs with newspapers and briefcases held overhead.
Definitely not people-watching weather. On the street, traffic crawled, so Julia shivered beneath the awning, remembering that sudden thunderstorms always produced a shortage of taxis in Manhattan, while dry weather led to a bumper crop—the very opposite of rain's effect in Oklahoma. Shivering, she considered going back inside to finish her meal when she glanced behind her and noticed she was sharing the shelter of the awning with the same man who, moments before, had shared her table. An awkward pang flashed in Julia's gut, but the rain grew harder, and she wasn't eager to brave the weather and walk away.
Do I know him? Julia found herself wondering. He didn't seem like someone who worked in publishing, and she hadn't exactly been a social butterfly during the years she lived in Manhattan, but she couldn't shake the sense that she'd seen him somewhere before—maybe on a Wheaties box. Tall and strong, with sharp, gray eyes and broad shoulders, he had a clean-scrubbed, fresh-faced, All-American Quarterback way about him. She saw him cross his arms—strong, agile, hunky arms—and she thought she might be right, but then he caught her staring, so with the customary grace of every gangly girl who has ever been caught staring at the captain of the football team, Julia jerked her eyes back to the street. Where's a bathroom to hide in when you need one?
When at last a cab did pull to the curb, they both stood awkwardly for a second before she nodded at him and said, "It's yours."
"No," he said, shaking his head. "Take it."
"Really," Julia said and gestured toward the waiting car. She gave him her best "I'm an independent woman who appreciates the gesture but is happy to decline" nod, but the young man took her arm and led her out into the rain, opened the cab door, and once she was inside, closed it behind her.
Julia suddenly felt out of her element. "Where to?" she heard the cabbie say, but her eyes never left the man who had turned up the collar of his jacket and was lumbering down Seventy-fifth Street, a dark silhouette in the gray shower. "Lady," the driver said impatiently, drawing her back to the task at hand, "where are we going?"
"FAO Schwarz," she told him, and they pulled away from the curb.
They drove slowly, trying to meld back into the heavy traffic, so the pace of the cab matched the pace of the young man who hunkered against the wet wind. It looks really cold out there, she thought. Pneumonia weather. A shower of guilt washed over her. It violated her every feminist notion to take the only available taxi in New York when it was pouring rain. Plus, her mother would have told her it was rude. She cracked the window and yelled, "Stop!" When the cab halted, she cracked the window wider and yelled to the dark, wet figure on the sidewalk by the car. "Hey, come on. Stop."
He looked at her, and Julia no longer saw a cocky quarterback who was concentrating on the big game. Maybe it was the way the rain ran through his hair and streaked across his face, or maybe it was the way he slouched, hands in pockets, as if the weather was the least of his problems, but Julia said, "Come on, share it with me."
Lance looked up at clouds and reached down to open the door. As they pulled into traffic and disappeared down Seventy-fifth Street, Richard Stone bolted from Stella's, climbed into a chauffeured Town Car, and yelled, "Follow that cab," as if he'd been waiting his entire life to say it.