Swim

questions he’d ask about where I’d come from, the way he’d slide a Diet Coke across the table when we worked late into the night, anticipating down to the second when I’d need a fresh can. I liked the big black plastic glasses he wore, and his rusty Karmann Ghia, and the way he honestly didn’t seem to care at all what anyone thought of him (which, of course, made everyone like him, and want him to like them, too).
    The first thing we wrote together was a prom scene, where Cara, one of the four girls of The Girls’ Room, accepts two different invitations to two different proms, while Elise, her room-mate, doesn’t get invited at all and agrees to stand in for Cara at one of the dances. “This is nonsense, isn’t it?” Rob asked, tossing his empty coffee cup into the trash can after six hours and four drafts.
    “Don’t ask me,” I said, stretching and yawning (after six hours and four drafts, my self-consciousness had faded, right along with my Dermablend). “I never went to the prom.”
    “My school didn’t even have one,” he told me.
    “Where’d you go? Some military academy?”
    “Swiss boarding school,” he said.
    I stared at him. I thought he was kidding, but with Rob, you could never be sure. I didn’t know a single thing about his history: not where he’d grown up, not where he lived now, not whether he was married or involved with anyone.
    “All this stuff aboutdresses,” he grumbled, glaring at the notes we’d been given. “Girls really care that much?”
    I sat back down in my own chair, trying for grace. “Girls do.” “You know what we need?” he asked. “Pie. Come on. I’m buying.”
    “But this is due in...” “We’re not getting anywhere. We’re spinning our wheels. We need a break.” He jingled his car keys in the pocket of his khaki cutoffs that trailed threads down his hairy legs.
    “You look like a lemon meringue kind of girl.”
    I got up and followed him as he did an exaggerated cartoonish tiptoe past the model-slash-receptionist. “I got your back,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth as he pushed the heavy glass door open and we race-walked into the sunshine of the parking lot. “Head down, head down!” he whispered, opening his car’s door and hustling me inside. “If anyone sees us...”
    “It’s curtains?” I said, getting into the spirit.
    “Nah,” he said as the car rumbled to life. “They’d just want pie, too.”
    We moved into a shared office a week later and worked together for the next six months, bouncing ideas off each other, reading dialogue across the table, even acting out the parts. Rob kept balled-up athletic socks in his desk, and he’d shove them down the front of his T-shirt to impersonate Cara, the most improbably endowed of the quartet, who was played by a twenty-four-year-old named Taryn Montaine. Rob swore he recognized her from a softcore porno that still aired late at night on Showtime. “I know it’s her,” he’d said after forty fruitless minutes scouring the Internet for a picture that would prove it. “She just got a new fake name to go with her new fake tits.” When he got bored with searching for pictures of a pre-implant Taryn, he’d look at me with a lazy smile.“You know what you need?” he’d ask. He always did know, whether it was a burrito for lunch or a bag of chips or a butter rum LifeSaver, or a drive to Santa Monica. (Once he rented Rollerblades, and I sat on a bench and laughed at him stumbling around for half an hour.)
    We were together for ten hours a day on normal days, something closer to twenty on the Thursday nights when we’d tape. I still didn’t know much about his personal life, but I knew every T-shirt he had in his wardrobe. I knew that his cleaning ladies came on Tuesdays and that he had a poker game every other Friday, that his father had died of emphysema and his mother lived in Arizona. I knew how he looked first thing in the morning (rumpled, tired), and how he looked late at night (more rumpled, more tired, with more stubble). He called me Lemon Meringue, and once or twice he’d actually introduced me as his work wife, making my heart beat like a little girl who’s gotten just what she wanted for her birthday.
    I tugged my goggles back down, flipped over again, and kicked toward the end of the pool, forcing my aching arms high over my head, then knifing them into the water. Five months after we’d written it, the first episode Rob and I had collaborated