The True Love Experiment

I should have foreseen that extremes are the norm with Fizzy, and that our time together would be the most fun I’ve ever had with someone but also the most torturous. Over several weeks, The True Love Experiment begins to take shape, and Fizzy and I skive off every Friday in our continued search for joy. We take the train to the Broad Museum and talk about quiet, introspective joy. We visit the Last Bookstore nearby, where she buys me a collector’s edition of ’Salem’s Lot, and I buy her a framed cover of one of her favorite romance novels. The following week, she treats the entire crew to tickets to a live showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I get home that night and drink more than I probably should, all in an effort to clear my head of the way her entire being lights up inside when she’s letting loose, how badly she sings and how much I adore that she does it with gusto anyway, how she takes the adoration from the crew and returns it to them, doubled, and how I’m beginning to abhor the prospect of her finding true love in only a handful of weeks.

Shooting officially begins tomorrow, but even knowing my workday will likely begin before dawn, I’ve got one more place I want to take her.

Fizzy and I blow down the freeway, windows open, wind whipping. The orange globe sun hangs heavy and seductive at the horizon. It’s our last joy outing—at least the last one we’ve planned, and I’m sure the plan I’ve made is actually quite daft. We will be alone, it will be dark, with the sounds of crashing waves all around us. I can already imagine Fizzy running barefoot on the sand, tackling me, pushing through the pathetic restraint I’m clinging to.

Torrey Pines is a four-and-a-half-mile stretch of coastline located between Del Mar and La Jolla. Traffic is uncharacteristically light, and we make it to the parking lot just as the sun is beginning to dip into the water. As I park and meet Fizzy at the front of the car, I’m unprepared all over again for the sight of her in simple jeans and a T-shirt, sneakers, and a fuzzy sweater tucked over one arm.

There is so much riding on the show, but there are moments like this when I look at her walking toward the sand and can’t remember what any of it is. When she talks about something she’s passionate about or bursts out laughing, when she hands someone their ass or lets her tiny fissures of vulnerability show, I find myself rationalizing the reasons I should just give in. Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe nobody needs to know. Maybe I’m overthinking and it won’t ruin everything. We’re both adults; we’ve both had sex with people before and it was just sex. Maybe I can compartmentalize.

During the day, gliders and parasailers launch themselves from the red sandstone cliffs in the distance, and sunbathers, surfers, and swimmers crowd the beach. Tonight it’s mostly empty, with only a few stragglers along the shore or straddling their boards in the ocean, bobbing along with the incoming tide. The sky seems to change by the second, a melting canvas of blue to purple to red to orange.

“So.” Fizzy stretches, revealing a swath of skin between her shirt and the waist of her jeans. “The beach.”

I smile at the disdain in her voice. “Not a fan, I presume?”

“Oh, I get it, it’s beautiful.” She sits on the sand. “But it’s a little like sex on your period. It sounds like a lot of work, and you definitely don’t want to do it every day, but once you get going, you’re like, ‘Hey, this isn’t too bad.’ ”

“Oh my God, Fizzy,” I say with a small laugh.

She looks up at me. “What?”

I sit down next to her, swallowing down the way infatuation rises like a sleeper wave in my chest. “I’m not even going to touch that one, I think.”

She laughs, slipping off her shoes and wiggling her toes into the cool, damp sand. “Now that we know how I feel about the beach, tell me what we’re doing here.”

“Well, I grew up on the water, so I brought you here because I feel very peaceful at the shore, but tonight’s not about the beach specifically. It’s a moment.”

She tucks her knees to her chin, wrapping her arms around her legs as she listens. Around us the sun has dipped below the horizon, the sky darkening like a bruise.

“My weekends with Stevie can be pretty routine,” I explain. “We go for a bike ride, take Baxter to the park or somewhere he can run and play, we watch movies and do homework and cook together. Basic stuff. When she was about six, Baxter had surgery on his paw and couldn’t come with her for the weekend. We decided to try something different. We packed a picnic and came to watch surfers and ended up staying most of the day. We should have gone home once the sun set—it was getting cold, and I knew she’d be a bear the next day—but she was having so much fun just running around and doing cartwheels in the surf that I decided to stay a bit. It got dark and we were just getting ready to leave when I saw this blue spark in the water, and then another. When the waves crashed it was like there were hundreds of fireflies in the surf.”

“Oh, I know this one.” She snaps her fingers, trying to recall the word. “Bioluminescence. It’s algae, right?”

“Right. Some types of algae use bioluminescence to avoid predators, so when it’s disturbed by something moving through the water, or even something getting too close, it produces this burst of blue light to scare them off.” I point. “Look over there.”

She leans in and follows my gaze to where a surfer is leisurely cutting across the surface on their way to the shore, leaving a swirl of blue light in their wake. “It doesn’t look real,” she says.

“I remember the amazement on Stevie’s face and how I wanted to bottle that moment and experience it over and over again.”

Fizzy looks up at me. “That’s the answer you should have given me in your office.”

“Answer to what?”

“When I asked you about what gave you joy.”

My eyes move like magnets to her mouth. “But then how would I have monopolized all your time these past several weeks?”

She laughs.

“Besides,” I say, “I never asked you what brings you joy.”

Fizzy leans into me, bumping my shoulder. “This. Hanging out with you.”

“But before I became the best thing that ever happened to you?”

“Jess and Juno. My family. Travel.” She inhales deeply. “Sex. Writing.”

“Still feeling stuck?”

She nods. “I can’t remember the last time I opened a Word doc.”

“To be fair, you’ve been busy. There’s this whole reality show we’re planning.”

“But maybe that’s a convenient excuse.” She picks up a small piece of seaweed and drags it across the sand. “Every idea I come up with fizzles before I can even get started.”

“I don’t pretend I understand what this is like, but is it something you’ve been able to talk about in therapy?”

“Oh, for sure,” she says. “But I got so tired of going over the same thing and not getting anywhere. I would do little writing exercises, but they felt pointless.” She stares out at the water for a long moment. “I know I’ll be okay if I don’t write again. I know that the death of my writing wouldn’t be the death of me. But I miss that me. I liked that me, and I’m not sure how to find her. Focusing on it in therapy started to make it worse, if that makes sense.”

“It does.”

“I’m normally pretty self-aware and can work through most things, but this—” She shakes her head. “It’s got me beat. I’d all but lost interest in any man until yo—” She pauses, and then squints out at the ocean. “Until, you know, the show.”

Until you, she was going to say. My heart twists uncomfortably.

She clears her throat. “But yeah, love stories. My current brain block.”

“Maybe your brain needs to live one for a change.”

“Look at you, producer.” She smiles over at me. “Bringing us full circle.”

I watch her tilt her face to the sky, eyes closed as she takes a deep breath. Finally, tonight, our last night before I endeavor to help her fall in love with someone else, I can admit it.

I am falling in love with her.

“What can I say,” I murmur. “I try.”