Dating : Dasha

Relationships end when you’re not hungry, which is why most break-ups happen after a meal. But I wasn’t dating Dasha. And I hadn’t eaten anything.

I’d waited over a half an hour for her to arrive at the tucked-away restaurant not more than one-minute walking distance from her house she shared with her husband in the foothills of Beachwood Canyon Drive in Hollywood. She had texted me she would be late, but offered no reason, and though I don’t typically mind killing transitional time in unfamiliar, upscale settings, I had grown inpatient on this occasion. More than that: I was mad at her.

I can remember the first time I got mad at a girl I liked. It was in high school. I was in my childhood home, standing in our downstairs bathroom for some reason, and Allison was apologizing to me over the phone about why she couldn’t go with me to some place or event. I don’t recall what I said to her in response, but it was meant to tell her I was mad. And I was mad because I liked her and she had let me down. It was meant to tell her I was mad because I liked her. I remember hanging up the phone and walking down the hallway toward the dining room, then staring at myself in the wide mirror, and seeing how I looked when I felt satisfied.

With Dasha, it was different. She was like my mom. And, no, she wasn’t like my real mom — though my real mom is an astrology buff who I did call once when Dasha wanted to pinpoint the exact time of my birth in order to figure out my moon sign — she was like my mom in the way I felt comfortable around her. Also she was older. She had life experience. She was an Ivy League graduate of Russian immigrants, and a former Paramount executive who had a hand in developing the Matrix sequels. She had lived in New York and dated a junkie.

After being laid off from Paramount, Dasha decided she didn’t want to just help creative people develop their projects anymore; she wanted to be the creative one. She wanted to act. But she wasn’t quite sure if she wanted to make a career out of it, or if she could, so she took classes: one for improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre on Franklin, and one for scene study at the Berg Studio near MacArthur Park.

I met her at Berg’s. She always sat up front, paying attention to others instead of hoping others would pay attention to her. “I could actually sense you fighting for your dignity,” she once commented to the class after watching me play Katherina in a gender-swapping scene from The Taming of the Shrew. And she was a heady actor, like me: “Why a seagull? Why does she keep saying seagull? Is it because she feels trapped and wants to fly away? Or is it because seagulls are monogamous?”

Her emotions only rose up when taking notes from Berg, a sexually ambiguous rat-like figure who clawed his way into students’ minds, bodies, and pocketbooks. “There is no character; there’s only you.” This was one was one of Berg’s taglines, and if directed at a particular student — in this case Dasha — followed up by a keenly self-questioning question. “Am I being clear?”

“I… I’m not sure I understand,” she said with a Paramount executive shrug.

“Good. Right there. What you just did. That’s the character!” Berg loved it: the challenge. I did too.

After class, I approached Dasha, complimented her on her scene work, and told her about a short film script I wrote that had a character in it she might be perfect for. It was a sleazy Hollywood move, but I wasn’t Hollywood — I lived in an apartment near USC, a neighborhood in which Dasha would later confess to feeling too frightened to park her BMW hatchback — and I really did have a script. It was called “Hand-held Love Story” and was about a woman of Russian descent who compulsively holds strangers’ hands in movie theaters until one day she meets a man — a younger man — who won’t let go.

“Hi, sorry I’m late.” When Dasha at last arrived at the restaurant, hurrying to sit down across from me in the booth, I couldn’t help but notice the size of her boobs. Had they grown? “Good. You already ordered,” she said, looking down at my untouched eggs. “Please, go ahead and eat.”

Part of Dasha’s charm was her lack of shame. She once told me about how on the night of her first date with her husband, right before he was supposed to arrive, she made the impulsive decision to take a shower, leaving her front and bathroom doors open so as to create a steam-filled path for him to find and join her.

I didn’t think he liked me much, her husband, even though we had a lot in common. We’d both gone to film school, both had artistic ambitions combined with comic sensibilities, and both were attracted to his wife. But he had confidence, and the kind that comes with hipster good looks and a lot of success. I might have represented a failed version of himself. Hence the lack of hellos. He once came back to the house after a late-night editing session on a TV show to find me, Dasha, and a performance artist friend of hers drunk and smoking cigarettes on their front porch. He seemed happy to see the performance artist, though he barely registered me. As for Dasha, there was a hint of tension in their embrace. She didn’t normally smoke cigarettes, but had asked me for one that night, and I imagined him tasting the foreign (possibly nostalgic) residue of tobacco on her lips before going inside for the evening.

He certainly didn’t like my script. When Dasha, after reading the draft I sent her, asked him if he might be interested in directing it, he said would need to re-write it first. I wasn’t opposed to the idea, but Dasha was a step ahead of him in this regard. She and I had started to meet at that point on a somewhat regular basis with the ostensible intent of making the script — and her character — more real. An experienced note-giver she would, between generous pours of delicious red wine from bottles she obsessively collected and stored beneath the floorboards of her kitchen, offer logical-sounding revisions to dialogue (“It doesn’t feel real. I feel like an actual sex worker would just say something like ‘mouth is 20’”), or suggest additions of specific props (“What about Red Vines?”) and costume flourishes (“She should have a feather coming out of her hat.”) I, meanwhile — between zealous bites of homemade hors-d’oeuvres and gossip about how Dasha’s husband was worried about her shopping addiction — dutifully typed up her re-writes, believing them to be best for the project.

And, in a way, she was right. My initial script lacked dimensions of realism, especially for her character, yet as I continued to alter the scenes in the way she dictated, eventually granting her the title of co-writer, I felt the romance of what was supposed to be a romantic movie start to ebb away. It had indeed become real and with that, insufferable.

“I have some news to tell you,” Dasha said, her smile forming crow’s feet on the ends of her eyes and further disregarding any explanation of her lateness. “I’m pregnant.”

It was the first and only time a woman had ever said those words to me, and they weren’t involving me. They were about her and her husband and the life they had created together, the life I would never meet.

“Congratulations,” I said. Acting classes had taught me a thing or two. “I’m happy for you.” Cold eggs in my stomach.

If I had written the scene for us, it would have been different. Less smiling. More tears. Hints of abortion. “I love you, too.” Shower scene. I can even imagine Dasha’s note on this draft: “I like it. But it doesn’t feel real.”