She will be happy if Pedro Almodóvar attends her birthday party. Is that too much to ask? Here’s a truly fun and twisted story about a hard-charging first grade teacher with a $200-an-hour career coach and a simple birthday wish.
Check those RSVPs,
The Editors
I have one advantage in my effort to win over Pedro Almodóvar and that is I am a woman. Femininity and motherhood are among the most common themes of his films. What I mean by “win over” has grown more realistic over the past few months. I know that you can’t force anyone, including a celebrity, to be your friend. As my career coach Matt told me, connection is two-sided. I won’t necessarily feel a connection to Almodóvar in person, Matt tells me, just because I feel a connection to his movies. “The content and the content creator are two different things,” Matt says. Matt is good at making simple sentences sound like ancient sayings, which is why he is able to charge two hundred dollars per hour, and he is worth it.
I’ve attempted to set more reasonable expectations, as Matt advised. I have rarely seen Matt without his white visor, and, the one time I did, his hair was so thin and sweaty and pressed against his red-streaked temples that I decided to forget that image, because I couldn’t remember it and maintain my view of Matt as a person I trust to run not only my professional life but aspects of my personal life as well. Besides, you shouldn’t judge someone and their ability to coach your career based on their appearance. This is not something Matt has said, but something I could imagine him saying. Matt has said that you should look your best because you are your own billboard.
My birthday is next week, and I have decided that I will be happy if Pedro Almodóvar attends my party—that’s all. I have no expectations beyond that. He can stay for as long or as short as he wants, although I do hope that he will drink one of the specialty cocktails I am requesting and I do hope that he will play one song on the jukebox the restaurant has said I can bring if I find an outlet for it.
My goal is to give Almodóvar the opportunity to meet me. Based on the advice of Matt, I want to allow for a relationship between the director and me to develop naturally, as it would with any other person. And if that doesn’t work out, then I will have to live with the disappointment. But I will know I tried. Matt says I should imagine both positive and negative outcomes of the party, so I can be prepared for both. But the truth is I have spent more time imagining the positive outcome. I understand that this makes me a bit like Esteban in All About My Mother, waiting in the rain for an autograph, but I hope the similarity between me and one of the characters in his 1999 film will create sympathy for me in the mind of Almodóvar.
According to my Internet searches, Pedro Almodóvar lives in Spain. The last definite residence is in Madrid. I used the birthday money I expect to receive from my parents, plus credit card points, to pay for a plane ticket to Madrid. I made this decision after multiple discussions with Matt, who told me that expecting Almodóvar to fly to my city of Indianapolis would not be reasonable. While I saw his point, I countered that Indianapolis is home to the Motor Speedway Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is currently showing an interactive Dalí exhibit. Matt said he didn’t think the Spanish connection was enough to entice Almodóvar to make the trip. He told me this via Zoom. We always meet on Zoom. Matt lives in Austin, Texas, but he is moving to LA next month to augment his career coaching business with personal training, to provide a more holistic approach, and I told him I think that’s a great idea.
The truth is, I owe Matt some money. After paying for the plane ticket to Madrid, and paying for the German private detective to find the personal address of Pedro Almodóvar, and paying for the custom-printed birthday invitations, and paying for the deposit on the private room at the tapas restaurant, I am in debt. When we met today, Matt said it was OK if I pay him later, as long as I leave a positive review on Google. I told him I would leave several. Matt said, “’preciate you.” The man I am married to does not know that I have charged these expenses to our credit card, or that I am planning to fly to Spain for my fortieth birthday next week. This makes our relationship much like Penelope Cruz’s and her love interest in Parallel Mothers, a movie that the man I am married to has never seen. When he and I met at a speed-dating event, he complimented my cheetah-print earmuffs.
Matt asked right away if my interest in Almodóvar was sexual. Matt said this was important for him to know. I told him no, of course not—not more than Almodóvar’s art is sexual. And, yes, I am attracted to his movies. But to the man himself, no. I understood why Matt needed to make sure I wasn’t creepy. My interest in Almodóvar is platonic, I told Matt. It’s spiritual. I watch an Almodóvar film, and it feels like a projection from my own soul. Matt said I should explain this to Almodóvar when we meet, because you should always lead with your why.
When we met today, Matt asked me if Almodóvar has RSVPed. Instead of answering, I said that I’d always assumed motherhood would involve more cross-dressing and murder. This was a reference to Almodóvar’s films. I recognize that I was being facetious when I said this, because I didn’t want to admit that Almodóvar had, in fact, not replied to my invitation, and I acknowledged that to Matt, and he said he appreciated my honesty. I’ve always been honest with Matt about my real hopes and dreams, ever since our first session, because otherwise he can’t advise me. And that’s how he learned about my decades-long wish to develop a friendship with the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, not unlike Pablo and Antonio’s relationship in Law of Desire.
In fact, Almodóvar and his films were the only items on the list of things that bring me joy, which Matt asked me to fill out before our first meeting. I suppose I could’ve added other things, like tiramisu or the clack of almond-shaped fake nails or the way your fingers smell after eating a clementine, but I didn’t feel like it, and that was the point of seeing Matt in the first place. I had a baby, and people like my sister in law kept saying they were jealous, and at first I thought I’d never experienced someone be jealous of me before, so maybe this was how it was supposed to feel. But it felt like my life was inverted. My dreams were full of clear drama and saturated colors, like an Almodóvar film, while my days were vague, and the sun was bright enough to block out color. My husband showed me past class photos to encourage me to put on a coat and leave the apartment, but all I could remember of the students were the germs on their hands and inside their noses and mouths. Today, my husband reminded me that my maternity leave ends next week, and I didn’t tell him that not only will I not be returning to Calder Elementary School next week, but I will also not be in the country.
My husband likes Almodóvar OK. My husband is six years older than me and a professor of urban space. He prefers movies about one good man versus several bad men, or a bad system. He was ambivalent about having a baby, and when he changes our baby’s diaper, he always leaves the lid open on the diaper pail, so the nursery smells like our child’s urine and feces.
Although I am a first grade teacher, at one time I wanted to be an actor. I went to theater camp every summer for seven summers until I was a counselor. I have been in two different Wizard of Oz adaptations, and in both I was a witch. I like to think Almodóvar would have appreciated my witch performance and make-up, which I applied myself. When I read books out loud to my first graders, I speak in different voices for different characters, and this, Matt pointed out, is not unlike acting. We both agreed that, at this point in my life, attending Cannes is not a realistic career goal. I told Matt I appreciated his honesty. Matt asked if I had considered regional theater, and I said that all those people are amateurs. Almodóvar would know what I mean about that, but I am not going to bring this up with him, because, although I want to convey that I understand celebrity status, I don’t want to appear snobby.
When I learned that there was a fire in the tapas restaurant in Madrid, requiring it to close for the foreseeable future, Matt said this was what he called an opportunity. It was hard for me to believe in the fire at first, since I had never seen the tapas restaurant in person, and I wondered if the woman who emailed to cancel my reservation was telling the truth. But this suspicion on my part was likely the result of sleep deprivation.
“An opportunity for what?” I asked Matt during our Zoom meeting.
“An opportunity for Plan Bs,” he said, “like, for example, returning to first grade teaching.”
And this was when I learned that Matt had spoken to my husband. The man I am married to had believed we were the victims of identity thieves, and, in order to find the culprits, he had contacted the vendor that appeared most often on our credit card bill, which was formerly Dream You Consulting and now Whole You Consulting, and this was how Matt informed my husband that not only had I voluntarily charged eight career counseling sessions, but I was also planning to celebrate my fortieth birthday at a restaurant in Madrid with Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar.
Matt values honesty, he said, and he was disappointed that I hadn’t told my husband about my plan.
I told Matt that I was disappointed in him for breaking our confidentiality, especially because I had grown to consider Matt not only a career coach but a friend, and Matt said he wasn’t friends with dishonest people, and I said I wasn’t friends with turncoats, and Matt said he had a no-name-calling policy in his Terms and Conditions, and my baby started crying, and I tried to leave the Zoom meeting before Matt ended it, but I wasn’t fast enough.
After that I closed my laptop and lay on the floor of the nursery while my baby writhed on my chest. I looked at the mobile that my sister in law had bought us to hang over the crib. It had small fish of different colors that turned this way and that. I looked at the ceiling fan. I looked at the stuffed animals that we couldn’t put in the baby’s bassinet because of suffocation risk. At some point, I fell halfway asleep.
When I opened my eyes, my baby was tugging my hair into her mouth, and my husband was standing in the doorway. He was wearing sweatpants although he never works out, and I wondered if he had started wearing sweatpants at home during the day. He regularly gets hurt riding his skateboard to work, and he is never too embarrassed to dance.
He walked over and sat on the floor and then he lay down with his face pushed into the rug and one arm slung over the baby and me, and then he started to cry.
He sounded like a monkey, which frightened me at first. The baby turned her head to look, and that was when I realized that I hadn’t invited him. I had invited Matt, even though this was more of a ceremonial invitation, since Matt had told me he was away that weekend. I had invited Almodóvar, and I had invited my sister in law, and I had invited my college roommate who had been acquitted of insider trading, and I had invited my cousin who lives in Brussels, but I had not invited the father of my baby, the man who was crying on the floor next to me, wetting the rug with mucus. I’d built the crib myself, and I was pretty sure the headboard was on backwards, and I appreciated that he’d never mentioned it. I raised my hand and placed it on his back, which rose and fell with his uneven exhalations. I felt like the protagonist at the end of Volver, when she learns that her mother isn’t dead. Her mother has been alive the whole time, and thinking of her every minute, and now they have so much to talk about. I love that part. Of course this isn’t an exact parallel to my situation. But I began to sing softly and with just as much passion as Raimunda. Thinking of Volver made me want to watch it again. It made me want to show the film to my baby, when she’s old enough. It made me want to ask my husband if plane tickets were refundable, and whether he’d noticed the jukebox in the basement, and whether he had any requests.
-30-
Cora Frazier's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and n+1. She created and wrote the podcast series I Think You’re Projecting. She has taught writing at CUNY, Rutgers, and NYU, where she will teach a fiction course in the School of Professional Studies this June.