Juniper’s botanicals, even more perfect in person.
~
Later that night I get a call from Morgan.
“Guess where I am,” she says.
“Um?”
“Screening Room Five. You know Harvey? The projectionist? He’s getting today’s footage ready for the execs tomorrow.”
“Sounds like Harvey’s a good friend to have.”
The executives and department heads get invitations each day to view the footage from the day before. Gathering in small screening rooms to watch multiple takes of the same scenes from various angles and points of view might sound tedious to some people, but I’ve been dying for an invitation to the dailies since I started interning. Space is limited and I’ve never gotten to go.
“There’s more,” Morgan says. “Today they shot scenes eight and twenty-two.”
I’m so immersed in Yes & Yes that it takes a moment to remember what these scenes were. But only a moment.
“Holy shit,” I say. “How does it look?”
“It’s your room,” Morgan says. “I wouldn’t start without you.”
So twenty-five minutes later I’m walking into a projection room that is empty besides Morgan and her new buddy Harvey, a guy probably in his sixties with thick glasses and a comb-over. When I thank him for letting us sit in, he tells me he’s just doing his job, but it’s clear that he’s loving having us as an audience. I doubt he usually takes his time the way he is now.
“I’ve set up the dailies almost every night for forty years,” he says. And then he proceeds to tell me forty years’ worth of stories. All the famous films of which he’s seen every take, all the stars who needed a dozen takes to get something right.
“Did you ever show dailies from a Clyde Jones movie?” I ask.
“Sure did. Silver Stirrups. Not his finest film, but certainly his last one. He should have quit while he was ahead. Before that one was Midnight River. Now that would have been going out with a bang. But even in Silver Stirrups he only needed a couple takes for each scene. He was a real professional.”
At that, Harvey ascends the stairs to the projection room, leaving Morgan and me alone.
“Clyde Jones?” she asks. “Are you suddenly into Westerns?”
I just shrug. I’m not even tempted to say something evasive like, I’m asking for a girl, or He reminds me of someone. Even though saying those things would be true, there is something about how I’m feeling right now that makes me want to keep quiet about it. Something about Ava I want to protect. Every time I’m reminded of her it feels like I’m keeping a secret. Not only about her famous grandfather but about her crooked smile and her raspy voice. About her hesitations and her confessions and her focused, private thoughts.
Morgan is heading toward seats in the center and I follow her, sink into the plush red velvet. Some of the most influential people in the business have sat in this screening room, probably in this exact seat. I check out the console between us and see that with a press of a button I could call up to Harvey and ask him to play something over or speed through something else.
A scene begins but it isn’t of the music room yet.
Harvey’s voice comes out of the speakers: “I have to go through scene sixty-eight before I get to the ones you’re here to see. It’s a quick one, though, so hold on to your hats.”
Morgan laughs.
“This guy is amazing,” she says.
I turn to see her face, lit by the screen.
“I like him,” I say.
“Yeah.” She smiles at me. “I do, too.”
“I couldn’t tell if you were being sarcastic.”
“You should hear his other stories. Katy and I ended up at a bar with him a couple weeks ago. He shut the place down.”
On the screen, the father is entering the living room of the house in a hurry. The first shots follow his face closely. But then the next shots show the room. I recognize Clyde’s highball glasses resting on a gleaming bar cart. The sofa and rugs and chairs are all in muted tones and around the room are pops of color: red roses in a vase, full-color family portraits on a wall, a mostly turquoise globe.
It’s easy to see what Ginger was doing when she planned this room. Every detail that we notice is important. The flowers a reminder of the couple’s anniversary. The globe an indication of the distance about to come between them. The portraits depicting the happy family so we can see how much they stand to lose by the misfortune about to strike them.
Even before the scene changes to the music room, I realize why Ginger replaced my green-and-gold sofa with Clyde’s gray one. Then the clapper flashes onscreen, Scene 8, Take 1, and there is my room, larger than life, and my entire body is flooded with my own wrongness.
Ginger has used the same strategy in this room. Almost everything is muted except for the important parts: the music stand to show us the daughter’s talent, the trophies to show her youth and innocence. My sofa would have commanded too much attention for Ginger’s concept, and while her choices are not the ones I would have made, I can see that they make sense. They work well for this film. Really well for this film, in fact.
My sofa would have looked great if this room were in isolation, but it’s part of a film where every scene will be cohesive. When Ginger told me that she was the production designer she probably wasn’t just on a power trip. She was probably trying to tell me that she was the one with the vision for film, that she knew every aspect of the sets and the locations. As an intern I knew only a sliver.
I thought the music room was mine but it was always hers.
“How does it feel?” Morgan asks.
I’m embarrassed to know that I was wrong, to remember the things I said and how ridiculously young I must have seemed to Ginger. And I’m sad to see what this room could have been if I’d had complete control over it. How close it is to my version of perfect. But somehow, I’m also proud of it. I may have just been an intern, fulfilling someone else’s vision, but I did it in a way that was my own. It’s possible that no one else would have chosen that particular music stand or that poster. The sheet music is still scattered and I love the messiness of it, how it feels lived in and more authentic than the living room.
And then there is the simple, pure thrill of seeing my first work on a big screen in a private screening room on the lot of a major studio.
I take a breath, overwhelmed by all of it. What I feel is too complicated to explain to Morgan, so I just smile and let her interpret that however she wants to.
~
Forty minutes later we are in the parking lot, standing in between our respective vehicles, trying to brush off the awkwardness of having watched countless takes of a girl losing her virginity. Morgan leans against the side of her truck, and since I’m standing on the passenger side of my car, I figure it’s never too soon to begin the unlocking process.
When I emerge from the passenger’s seat, she reaches for my hand. Against my better judgment, I let her take it. I feel the familiar tightening somewhere below my stomach when I think of all the times she’s touched me. Maybe I’m supposed to step into her now, like so many other times when she took my hand. Maybe we’re supposed to be kissing, bodies pressed against the truck. But instead I just stare at my hand in hers until I find my voice.
“What are you doing?”
“Are you going to make me ask you?”
“Ask me what, exactly?”
She shakes her bangs out of her eyes and really looks at me.
“If you’ll come back. I want you back.”
I close my eyes and when I open them again I make sure that I’m looking at something other than her.
This conversation isn’t that different from the five others we had before getting back together. But it feels different, because wanting someone is not the same as loving her, and now I understand that Morgan do
es not love me. When you love someone, you are sure. You don’t need time to decide. You don’t say stop and start over and over, like you’re playing some kind of sport. You know the immensity of what you have and you protect it. So I look into Morgan’s eyes, and I say, “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Oh,” she says, letting go of my hand. “I thought you wanted to.”
I’ve never been on the lot this late. Most of the buildings are completely dark, only a few lights shining from offices. I met Morgan only a few buildings over, by a set built for a TV show, and it was bright and hot and I was a newer and more confident version of myself. I was the girl people wanted to kiss. I didn’t know what it felt like to be unwanted.
“To you I was just a girlfriend in a long string of girlfriends,” I say. “But it was something else for me.”
“You had girlfriends before me.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
I can almost hear Charlotte telling me that Morgan was my first love, telling me that it’s over. And if Morgan needs me to, I’ll repeat both of these things to her so that everything is clear and final. But soon she says okay and she doesn’t ask me anything more. I guess she knows already. My one-sided love was probably obvious to everyone all along.
She sighs and then smiles. And even though the smile is just further proof that I don’t matter that much to her, I find myself relieved. I don’t feel any trace of the satisfaction I once imagined would come with turning her down. I just feel tired and a little bit sad.
“So what happens with you now?” she asks. “Is there someone else?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “There might be.”
“That sounds like a yes.”
“No,” I say. “Really. Nothing has happened. I’ll be shocked if anything ever happens.”
“That’ll make one of us.”
And then she’s stepped forward, she’s put her arms around me. It’s a good-bye, so I hug her back, breathing in the tangerine shampoo that I will associate with her forever, remembering how we used to shower together in her tiny blue-tiled bathroom after days spent by the pool, and how in the beginning, when things still felt easy and right, holding her close like this—underwater, in the sunlight, in the quietest nighttime hours—was the best feeling in my life.
When she starts her truck I start my car, too. But after she’s pulled out and disappeared, I turn off the engine again. In the parking lot, I sit for a long time, nothing but stillness and darkness through the windows.
Then I dial Charlotte.
“Okay,” I say when she answers.
“Okay?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”
This time, I know exactly what I mean.
“Oh,” she says, after a few seconds of silence. “Good.”
Part 2
THE LOVE
Chapter Ten
“I read it twice,” Ava says, dropping her purse on Toby’s couch and perching on the armrest. “I’ve never read a screenplay before and it took me a while to get used to it. But once I did the story just took off. All of the characters feel so real.”
“They do, right?” I say.
“I like how it’s so focused on all these tiny details. Like the baby food jar that cut Miranda’s ear.”
“We were thinking you could sit in the orange chair,” Charlotte says, attaching the camera she borrowed from her mom on its tripod.
Ava takes a seat as I tell her that I agree.
“It’s like this intimate peek at life through all these details, and that’s part of why the sets are so important, even more important than they are in other films, because so much of how the characters see the world is through these small objects and observations that other people wouldn’t make.”
“This looks good,” Charlotte says, and when I join her behind the camera I discover that “good” is an understatement. Maybe she is talking about the lighting and the framing of Ava’s face, but as Ava goes over her lines I find myself captivated. Some people who are great looking in real life just don’t look right on-screen. The attractiveness doesn’t translate. But Ava looks even more beautiful through the camera. Even without makeup, even though she isn’t aware of us at the moment as she turns the pages of the screenplay, she is luminous.
But the question hovers over the room: Can she act?
“Should we run through it?” I ask her.
“We can record it a few times, right?”
“Sure,” Charlotte says.
“Then let’s just start. I practiced a lot today and I just want to dive in. If that’s okay.”
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I tell her. “I’ll read George’s lines from over here. And when you look up, look toward me instead of directly into the camera.”
She takes a deep breath. She sets the screenplay in her lap. “I’m ready.”
Charlotte presses a button and the red light of the camera begins to flash. She nods at Ava.
“My name is Ava Garden Wilder and I am reading for the part of Juniper.”
She shifts in Toby’s orange chair and sits a little straighter. She glances at the screenplay. Closes her eyes. Opens them again.
She begins.
JUNIPER
Listen. I don’t think it’s stupid. I think that sometimes people want something so much that they manifest it. Or at least they try to.
GEORGE
That’s kind of you.
JUNIPER
No. It’s not kind of me. It’s just what I think.
(Pause)
Okay. I’m going to tell you about this thing that happened to me once. I’ve never told anybody.
GEORGE
All right.
JUNIPER
This was, like, two years ago. I was taking Botany 101 and we were studying Ranunculaceae and I was obsessed with them. Like, they were all I ever wanted to look at. And I was walking home, up Divisidero to my shitty little rented room, and I passed a flower stand, and there was a bouquet of them. Really gorgeous ones. They weren’t cheap and I was almost broke. It was a choice between dinner and flowers and I chose flowers because it was a dark time in my life and my room was hideous and my heart was broken and I needed something beautiful. The florist was an immigrant, probably in her thirties, and her English wasn’t great. I told her I wanted the flowers and she nodded and said something to me that I didn’t understand. And then she said, “I love you, okay?”
GEORGE
Really?
JUNIPER
Yes. And she repeated it. “I love you, okay?” she said. And this thing happened. I suddenly got the sense that everything was going to be okay, that I was going to be okay. It might have felt to me like the world was crumbling. I may have been totally alone and broke and doomed in all my relationships, but this could happen. This florist could see something in me that would make her profess this. I didn’t have to understand where it was coming from; I could just accept it. So I said, “Thank you.” And I smiled at her. And she looked confused for half a second but the confusion passed and she took the flowers and wrapped them up and I gave her the money. She said good-bye, and I thought, How amazing. To tell me she loved me and then just go on with her job.
GEORGE
That’s a great story. Nothing embarrassing about it.
JUNIPER
I’m not finished. I started walking home. It was raining by then and I kept thinking about the florist. I wondered what country she was from, how long her journey to California had been, who she left behind and who she took with her. For once, the rain wasn’t cold and the panhandlers weren’t begging. I stopped and looked at myself in the reflection of a café. I remember thinking that I looked like the kind of person I would want to know if I just happened to meet myself. That might not sound like a big deal to you, but . . .
GEORGE
No. I understan
d how that could be a big deal.
JUNIPER
Suddenly, everything was so pretty. The rain, the shiny sidewalks, the downtown skyline. And especially my ranunculus. I lifted them up to see them.
(Pause)
They were wrapped in this terrible tissue paper with tacky pink cursive that said “I love you” all over it.
GEORGE
(Softly)
Oh.
JUNIPER
Yeah. She hadn’t been asking my permission to love me. She had just assumed that the ranunculus were a gift for someone I loved. And who, presumably, loved me, too.
GEORGE
So what did you do?
JUNIPER
(Pause)
I threw them away.
~
We are all silent. Charlotte turns off the camera. Ava sets the screenplay, still open to the scene, next to her on the chair. I look toward the patio, in the direction of the ocean, and try to identify the feeling that has taken me over.
It’s an ache. A heavy sadness. The kind that is brought on by heartbreak and then perpetuated by everything that reminds you of the way it’s broken. The kind that feels impossible to shrug off or tuck away. But there is another feeling, too, surfacing, and soon I discover that it’s the kind that makes the heartbreak almost something to savor because it is so simple and true. Like the Patsy Cline song on the night this all began. Like the most gorgeously written screenplays. Like the most graceful performances.
And then I feel myself break into a smile, and when I turn to her, I see that Charlotte is also beaming.
The answer is yes. Ava can act.
“Let’s try it again,” Ava says. “I want to pause longer before I say ‘I threw them away.’”
“Fine with me,” Charlotte says. “But you did a really great job.”