He remembered a conversation he’d had with Robin when he had been preparing to shoot The Odyssey and was rereading it and The Iliad, neither of which he had looked at since he was a freshman in college. This was when they had first begun dating, and were both still trying to impress each other, when a sort of giddiness was derived from deferring to the other’s expertise. “What’re the most overrated lines from the poem?” he’d asked, and Robin had rolled her eyes and recited: “’We have still not reached the end of our trials. One more labor lies in store—boundless, laden with danger, great and long, and I must brave it out from start to finish.’” She made some retching noises. “So obvious. And somehow, that’s been co-opted by every losing football team in the country as their pregame rallying cry,” she added, and he’d laughed. She looked at him, slyly. “You played football,” she said. “I’ll be those’re your favorite lines as well.”
“Absolutely not,” he’d said, in mock outrage. This was part of their game that wasn’t always a game: he was the dumb actor, the dumber jock, and she was the smart girl who went out with him and taught him what he didn’t know.
No comments:
Post a Comment