The first time I ever met him he was leaving makeup, trundling down the steps of the trailer with headphones around his neck. He carried his Walkman in the deep pocket of his winter coat as if it were a gun: he needed it to walk the streets of Manhattan at one-thirty in the morning, even if it were just across the block to the set, his fingers ready to hit the play button at the first sign of danger. I had been filming all day and was going home to sleep. He was wearing tan cords, a beige duffel coat, and a loopy grin.

“Hello,” I said.

“Good-bye,” said Aslan.

His peers called him Aslan because they decided that he goes through his wardrobe at night into a whole other realm. Aslan was so mysterious that his hair and eyes and skin didn’t have a specific color. Usually beauty is about definition—black hair, say, with bright blue eyes and alabaster skin. Aslan was a beauty and we didn’t even know why, although we spent many evenings discussing him.

His shoulder-length hair was tousled and sort of dirty-brown, his skin was both tan and slightly jaundiced. His eyes might have been hazel if they weren’t olive. Almost all of him was in earth tones, as if he had been created by a team of camouflage experts. When I asked the casting director, she claimed that he came from Colorado to play in a band and that when she found him in the guitar store, he was singing Steely Dan songs slightly off-key.

Aslan, we concluded, was that boy on the baseball field who stood off in a corner twirling as the game happened around him. He was the one humming to himself while the ball flew past his ear.

Sean had been adamant that we not meet each other until the last possible minute, since he feared it might adversely affect the authenticity of our relationship. The morning after I saw Aslan, I greeted Sean with the ultimatum that he introduce us NOW or I was planning on being very difficult. Sean dragged me by the arm and into the makeshift cafeteria where Aslan was having his breakfast.

“Aslan, this is Ruby,” drawled Sean. I was wearing faded jeans and a worn T-shirt—both the jeans and T-shirt had been specially distressed by the costume designer who made them.

“I don’t know you,” he said happily, flashing a Chiclet-tooth smile that cut from ear to ear.

“That’s okay, you don’t need to know my films.”

“No, I don’t know you. I haven’t met you before,” and he bowed his head in formal introduction. Head still bowed, he peered at me with a luminous no-color eye through a strand of no-color hair arranged in no specific style.

“Yes you have!” I answered, my indignant shriek raising the director’s hackles. “Yesterday, as you were leaving makeup.”