Everything Leads to You

“Go on,” he tells me.

“What the scene is about, at least to me, is Juniper finally trying to connect with someone. Instead of spending all this time obsessing over a stranger, she realizes that making a real connection with a real person—not just an illusion of who someone might be—is worth taking a risk. So she tells a story that has the potential to humiliate her. She shares a memory. It’s a huge moment in the film so it would work for it to be stylistically different. It wouldn’t even be as good to show a wide shot of Juniper at the florist because it would look like everything else. This scene should look and feel like a memory, and we could pull that off—you could pull that off—by cutting between her sitting in the break room telling George the story, and the close-ups of images that help us feel the story.”

“I’m liking this,” Theo says, and then his phone rings and it’s Charlie again and he tells me he has to take it. “Let’s work on this concept,” he says as he answers. “Come up with some things to show me.”

As he talks Charlie down from some kind of lens crisis, I think about what I could include in the scene to convey memory and sadness, and soon I am thinking about the set I would create if this were a movie about me. If I were trying to show people how it once felt to be with Morgan I would show the shimmering blue water of the pool at her apartment, and the line she rigged on her back deck because her unit has a washing machine but no room for a dryer. All those tank tops and pairs of bright underwear in the sun. It would be a soft nostalgia, a faded romance.

But the Yes & Yes scene isn’t only about sadness; it’s about yearning, too.

Yearning is a red-haired girl sitting on the hood of her silver sedan, reading about Marilyn Monroe. A cherry orchard at night, houselights at a distance. It’s the painstaking neatness of a paint-by-number sunset, a yellowed letter held between graceful fingers, a cautious step into the sun-filled lobby of a famous hotel.

It’s the way I feel every time I think about Ava.

Soon I’m feeling the same ache that descended after Ava’s audition, and then a similar urge to savor it. Out the window, downtown Los Angeles comes into view, that sprawl of tall buildings in the smoggy haze, the people too far away to see. In a year or so some of those people might enter a theater to watch our film. The lights will go down, allowing them to drop into themselves for as long as the movie lasts. And if I choose flowers that are the perfect shade of red, tissue paper with words subtle enough for them to overlook at first and then, later, clear enough to make them cringe, they may find themselves feeling the same way I am now. We’ll all be feeling for Juniper but actually feeling for ourselves, for how it is to be heartbroken, how it is to be alone, and maybe, if we’re lucky, how it is to be ready to open ourselves up to the fragile hope of something new.

~

Charlotte laughs forever when I tell her about Theo and Patricia.

“He said all that? No way.”

“Yeah,” I say. “He had a minor breakdown. I thought he was going to start kicking things.”

“Poor guy. We should find him somewhere perfect.”

“I actually have an idea,” I tell her. “I thought of it when we got back, but Theo was pissed off again and didn’t feel like talking. You know when you try to cheer someone up but it’s clear they aren’t in the mood? They want to wallow for a while? That’s what he was doing. Anyway. What if we ask Frank and Edie?”

“That’s a great idea.”

“I know. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before. I guess I just got swept up in the film and forgot about them for a little while, but their little cottage is sort of perfect.”

“Yeah,” Char says. “It’s totally an old-person house but it’s nice. Is it coral?”

“I can make it coral. That’s no problem. I just don’t know if Edie would be up for it. She seemed pretty set in her ways.”

“We could buy her cookies and drop by.”

“Brilliant. Plain cookies.”

~

An hour later we are armed with a dozen sugar cookies in a pink box, on our way to Long Beach.

“I wonder if Frank and Edie know who Lenny is,” Charlotte says.

“We should ask them. Maybe we should call Ava and see if there’s anything else she wants us to try to find out.”

Charlotte smirks at me.

“What?” I ask. “It’s her family we’re trying to find out about.”

“You’re right. Do you want me to do it?”

“Sure.”

Ava picks up when Charlotte calls, and I listen to Charlotte explain why we’re headed to Frank and Edie’s.

“We thought we’d ask them about Lenny,” she says. “Just in case they remember him. Is there anything you want to know? Yeah, Long Beach. Ruby Avenue. Um . . . yeah, I guess that would be okay. All right, I will. See you soon.”

“She’s coming?” I ask.