And I realize that what I’ve said makes it seem like I want to get back together with Morgan, when I don’t. Especially not now, with Ava standing here next to me in Goodwill, a pile of portraits at her feet, her hair pulled to the side in a ponytail, a wisp of it fallen on her graceful neck, her eyes wide and vulnerable, clearly embarrassed by presuming that I’d find her attractive just because I like girls.
In the conversation we’re not having, the one that actually isn’t about Morgan at all and is instead about Ava and me, I would be saying, When you look at me this way I want nothing more than to kiss you. I would be saying, Maybe I did know you figured I was straight. Maybe it felt safer that way. I would be saying, Could this be a good idea—you and me?
Instead I say, “But I finally got over her.”
Ava, looking at the bin of small pieces of art instead of at me, asks, “Do you see her a lot?”
“Yeah. She’s working on the film. She kind of got me the job.”
“How can you do that? I don’t know what I’d do if I had to see Lisa again.”
I shrug. “You’re probably still in love with Lisa,” I say. And then, “I’m ready for something new. Someone new, I mean.”
She reaches into the bin, moves a few framed pictures aside. I can see a smile tug at the corners of her mouth but she still doesn’t look at me. She lifts out a small portrait of a woman in a thin green frame.
“I’m not in love with Lisa,” she says.
A buzz comes from inside her purse. She sets the portrait on top of the pile and pulls out her phone.
“Hello?” she says, and then she turns to me, her hand flying to her mouth. “Yes,” she says. “Hi, Theo.”
I stare at her with my eyes wide, not breathing until she says, “Yes, of course I’m still interested. Yes, I can come right now.”
She hangs up.
“They want me to come in and read for the part. I can’t believe this.”
“You’re perfect for it.”
She laughs, incredulous.
“I have to go. But wait! Let’s take a picture first. Who would have ever imagined that my life might change while digging through art bins at Goodwill?”
She reaches into her purse, saying again how she can’t believe this is happening. But I can. This is what was supposed to happen, what needs to happen. It’s one of the steps that leads to the happy ending I imagined for her at the Chateau Marmont, the character doing what she didn’t know she was capable of, an early hint that the film you’re watching is of the life-affirming kind.
And I’m wrapped up thinking of the scenes that will follow: Ava on set, embodying Juniper. The press conferences and business lunches. The red carpet and first screenings. Some minor setbacks to temper the triumphs, moments of stillness and of action. She’s the perfect person to be cast into this life: so beautiful and kind, so sad beneath all of that charm. Ava’s holding her phone out in front of us, not just celebrating a moment but making it into a scene the way a perfect character would.
But.
A character in a movie doesn’t startle you with a tight grip on your waist when you imagined she’d have a lighter one; she doesn’t smell like the morning, or press her soft face against yours, so close that you feel her eyelashes against your cheekbone as you pose for a photograph together, tilting the phone up for the best light, pulling it farther back to get the setting, working on the composition so the clutter of the shop frames the photograph but together, in the center, are both of you.
Chapter Fourteen
“Do we need real dinner?” Ava asks when she appears in my doorway a few hours later. “I feel like baking a cake.”
A grocery bag is propped on her hip. I peer inside: flour, olive oil, eggs, baking soda, strawberries.
“A celebratory cake,” she adds, grinning.
“It’s official?”
“I was the only one they called back.”
“I knew it!”
I take a step back and let her in, saying, “Cake is clearly the perfect choice for a celebratory dinner.”
“I’m so glad you agree.”
“So tell me about it,” I say as we head into the kitchen.
“I don’t even know what to say. All we really did was fill out some paperwork but it was still one of the most exciting afternoons of my life. Just think about it. Less than two weeks ago I was knocking on your door with no idea why I was here. Now I’m acting in a film with famous people. I’m SAG eligible.” She shakes her head. She scans Toby’s apartment. “I have friends,” she says. And then, more quietly, “I feel like I belong here.”
“That’s because you do,” I say. “Acting is in your blood.”
“It still feels unreal.”
She steps over to the sink and turns on the hot water. She washes her hands slowly, her eyes the kind of far away that makes it easy to stare at her without fearing getting caught. Her hair is still in its side ponytail, but this time every strand is perfectly in place. I wonder what Theo thought when she walked in his door, whether she looked as luminous to him then as she does to me now.
“Before I left Leona Valley, when I pictured my ideal life, this sort of thing never even entered into it.”
“What did you picture?” I ask her, leaning against the kitchen counter while she rinses strawberries.
“Well, I was trying to be smart about it. I thought I could get a job in LA and commute for a few months until I earned enough to be able to rent a room somewhere.”
“Commute from Leona Valley?”
“Yeah. It would have been really long but it would only have lasted a few months. Then I would have moved out the right way, with money in my bank account and a place to show up and work five days a week. Maybe a couple of friends here already.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I thought I would find a job at a bakery, because baking is something I’m good at. And the hours would be crazy—the shifts start so early in the morning—so I thought I would save time on the commute and it would also be a good escape because I would be out of the house before Tracey got up.”
She’s put all the ingredients in a neat cluster on one side of Toby’s counter and is now finding measuring cups and spoons.
“Let me know if you need any help,” I say.
“Cake pan of any kind?”
I nod and find one we thrifted from the Rose Bowl a couple years ago. We bought it because it was this great coppery color, not because we had any intention of using it. I hope it works because it’s all Toby has.
“Great! I’ve got it from here.”
I hop up onto the counter, out of the way of her prep area.
She’s quiet for a moment, taking stock of everything she has, and it dawns on me that she’s making this cake without a recipe, which is not something I even knew was possible.
She cracks the first egg into a glass bowl in one quick motion.
“So anyway, I researched all of these bakeries and I thought of a way I could prove myself considering that I was a teenager with no formal experience. I chose seven bakeries and made seven full-size German chocolate cakes from scratch. I drove out here and delivered them all, and one by one, the people who worked there looked at me like I was crazy.”
“Why?” I ask. “That sounds like a great thing to do to impress people.”
She shrugs. “I thought so, but it didn’t help that most of the places I went didn’t have traditional cakes. They were all very gourmet. Like with bourbon and sea salt, or classic cakes with a spin, like vegan Red Velvet made from beets. Lots of olive oil cakes, which I had never even heard of, but that now I love. Anyway, only one baker at one bakery ate a slice of my cake in front of me. It was the La Cienega Bakery and it was the owner who was there working, and when she tasted it she told me it was delicious but that they weren’t hiring. I still held out hope
that someone would quit and she’d have an opening. That’s who I thought you guys might be when Jonah said a woman had called me. I thought it would be a perfect birthday present to be offered a job.”
“Instead you got us.”
She smiles. “When I pictured having friends here, I saw us crammed into a tiny apartment. I imagined waitresses taking community college classes or aspiring chefs working as line cooks. I thought we’d probably live in a sketchy neighborhood and pool our money to make stir-fry for dinner.”
“Are you disappointed?”
“No. I mean, don’t get me wrong; that kind of life sounded incredible. But,” she says, looking up at me, “what could be better than this?”
~
Forty minutes later, the cake is in the oven. I’m laying the portraits we bought out on the floor to determine how they should hang, and Ava is reading her own copy of the script, pen in hand.
Charlotte lets herself in.
“Thank you, Ava. Whatever that is, it smells amazing and I am starving,” she says, dropping her computer bag onto the couch.
“Why not ‘Thank you, Emi’?” I ask.
“Because all you know how to cook is pasta and scrambled eggs.”
“And toast.”
“Yeah, but you usually burn it.”
“Not true,” I say. “It’s a matter of preference. I happen to like my toast crisp.”
“Still,” she says. “There’s no way that amazing smell is thanks to you.”
“She did find me a cake pan,” Ava says, laughing.
She’s clearly amused but I’m not because I don’t want her to think I’m some loser who can’t toast bread. I want her to think that I’m that fun kind of girl who will bake cookies on a Tuesday night, or make french onion soup on Bastille Day.
“Don’t be mad,” Charlotte says. “You have to leave some talents for the rest of us.”
She smiles at me and I can’t help but smile back because it’s a pretty nice thing to say.
“Fine.” I shrug. I turn to Ava. “Secret’s out: I can’t cook.”
“I can’t decorate,” she says.
“That doesn’t bother me,” I say, and it comes out flirtatious, and I want to keep going, so I say, “I’m terrible at math.”
“I’m a bad speller.”
“I don’t even know my multiplication tables.”
“I can’t do a real push-up.”
“I wanted to learn Spanish but I can’t roll my r’s.”
“Wow,” Charlotte says. “This is interesting,” which is a cue to stop but I could keep going forever, listing all my flaws in order from the most innocuous to the least. I am afraid of spiders . . . I fall in love too easily . . . I have fierce spells of self-doubt. Because in the conversation beneath this one, what we’re really saying is I am an imperfect person. Here are my failures. Do you want me anyway?
“I want to hear all about everything,” Charlotte says to Ava.
“She’s SAG eligible,” I say.
“I know. I was there when they signed the paperwork. Rebecca and I are redoing the budget for the third time. What did you think of Benjamin?”
“Oh, he was there?” I ask, surprised that Ava didn’t mention him right away.
She nods.
“He was . . . nice,” she says.
Charlotte and I laugh.
“You don’t have to like him just because he’s famous,” I say. “Or because he’s your costar.”
“It’s not that I don’t like him. Like I said, he seems nice. It’s just that in movies he’s so sexy. I don’t find many guys that attractive, but even I understand the appeal. Like his role in Call Me Yesterday? When he’s all brooding and misunderstood? But today he was just kind of . . .”
“Oh, we totally understand,” Charlotte says.
“It’s the collapse of the fantasy,” I add.
Ava cocks her head.
“It applies to almost anything. You know that scene in Call Me Yesterday that takes place in the back room of the school?”
“Yeah?”
“You know how it’s super-dark and claustrophobic?”
She nods.
“That room actually had no ceiling and only two walls. It’s in a giant warehouse. Nothing claustrophobic about it. And you know that fight scene where Benjamin’s all shirtless and sweaty? I bet between takes he put on a robe and drank Perrier. You’ll see how it all happens. We work so hard to create an illusion and to make it seem real. But for us, the more you know about what happens behind the scenes, the more difficult it is to maintain the fantasy.”
“Does it spoil things a little?” she asks.
“You just have to make an effort to forget.”
“Which doesn’t work a lot of the time,” Charlotte says. “Watching a movie with Emi is like getting a tutorial on how films are made. Look at that shot! They must be using natural light. That backdrop is so fake.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“You’re pretty bad.”
“But when a movie is really good, it’s easy to forget.”
Charlotte nods. “That’s true.”
Ava closes her script and looks at the cover.
“I think our movie is going to be really good. Don’t you guys?”
I nod yes and this moment almost feels like a premonition. Here we are, in the room where we will shoot the first scenes, with the girl who will play Juniper working on her lines and the beginnings of the set in place. These portraits are everything I wanted them to be; I can already picture how they will look on Toby’s wall. And even though we still don’t have George’s house or the grocery store, even though I’ve been starting awake most nights worried about all I need to do, there is a calm in this room that assures me that we are exactly where we are meant to be.
Chapter Fifteen
Theo and I have appointments at five potential locations for George’s house.
The first one is infested with rats. The second has a terrible, unidentifiable smell and I end up coughing so hard that Theo says, “Let’s get out of here. Run for your life!” The third one has such cramped rooms that it would be impossible to fit everyone inside with our lights and the cameras. The fourth is too modern with high ceilings and stainless steel everywhere.
We are desperate by the time we pull up to the fifth.
We park and walk up to it. Paint is peeling off the walls of the house in thick strips, but we try to stay optimistic.
“I don’t think we could use it for the street-view shot,” I say.
“Nope,” Theo says. “No way.”
“But we could choose a different house for that.”
“Right. No big deal.”
A middle-aged woman pulls up in a dirty car and sits there for a moment, digging through a giant purse.
“You figure that’s her?” Theo asks.
“Probably,” I say, but she doesn’t look over at us or appear to be in any kind of hurry.
Eventually, though, she gets out of the car and crosses the street toward us.
“Patricia?” Theo asks. “Hello.”
“You have an accent. Are you legal to live here?” Patricia asks, scrutinizing his face.
“Yes, in fact, I am. But as I said on the phone, we’re only looking for a one-week rental for a film.”
She looks at me and then back to him.
“How old is she? I can’t rent to minors.”
I laugh but Theo tries his best to keep his composure even though this woman obviously suspects him of some statutory rape–immigration scandal.
“This is Emi. She is eighteen years old. But it wouldn’t matter anyway because she is not interested in renting the space. I would be renting it and only for a week to shoot a film.”
“You got insurance?”
“Yes. I
have insurance.”
“Is it pornography? I can’t have pornography shot here.”
Theo seems on the verge of exploding, but he runs his hand through his hair and smiles down at her.
“It is not pornography,” he says in a voice that is part polite, part menacing.
Patricia sighs and unlocks the iron gate and then the front door.
“Go on in,” she says. “I have some calls to make.”
We make a quick lap of the house—splotchy carpets, dingy walls with water stains from what must have been a leaky pipe, dreary lighting in most of the rooms. How difficult is it to find just a humble, decent house?
I expect Theo to say we should move on, but instead he says, “Well, Emi, what do you think?”
“It would be a pretty bleak interpretation,” I say. “Is that what you’re going for?”
“It isn’t what I had in mind exactly, but I’m feeling desperate. It’s a good day rate.”
“That’s true.”
I know how important the good price is, and also that it’s my job to take whatever we can get and then transform it into something we want. So I do another lap and I look for opportunities this time.
When I get back to Theo, I say, “Let’s go for it.”
Already, I know of a few things I could do to make the space nicer. If a cluster of framed artwork hung over the water damage on the main living room wall, for example, the house wouldn’t appear to be on the verge of collapse. Morgan could affix coral-colored wallpaper to plywood that we could prop against the kitchen walls. I could beg for more curtains. I could make this work.
I tell him some of my ideas and he says yes, over and over, so fervently.
“Emi,” he says. “You’re a miracle.”
I savor that sentence, allow myself to bask in it. Hope it might revive some of my lost confidence. And then I follow him out to the front steps where Patricia is waiting, a fresh coat of hot pink lipstick smeared on her lips.
“So, one hundred dollars a day, you said?” Theo says.
“That’ll buy you until three.”
“On what day?”