TWENTY-THREE
Maeve
“Do you hear that?” I’m standing in the living room area in Finn’s adjoining hotel room’s suite, mic out, headphones plugged in, trying to get room tone.
Finn steps into the room and cocks his head. “No? Did something interrupt it?”
Whenever we record an interview, we get one minute of room tone, which is an audio recording of basically nothing, in the room we’re in. No talking, no moving things, just as close to total silence as it gets. Which is never actually silent. It feels silent until you have the headphones on, and then suddenly there’s the buzz of electric overhead lights, the hum of a fan or AC, someone laughing as they walk by in the hallway—we can hear it all. In our Streamify studio it’s soundproofed, so we have no outside noise and all I can hear is the faint hum of lights.
“No, but there’s something besides the sound of the lights. And there shouldn’t be; I turned the air off.”
Finn takes the headphones from me and puts them on, scanning the room slowly. I follow his gaze, and then I think I see it. I pick up the mic and move it closer and closer to the window as he listens on the headphones. When I’m a foot away, I pause and watch him listen. He nods and rips the headphones off.
“It’s stuck open, like, the tiniest bit.” He presses down on the window from the top, to no avail. Obviously. If it could’ve been shut farther, I would’ve done it. I crouch on the floor and look at the crack. The wood has warped over time, since we’re basically staying in a museum, and there’s maybe half a centimeter of space. Too small to feel a draft, but enough to hear it. I take a breath and stand. “It’s fine. I’ll get room tone and we’ll work with it.”
Finn goes to the other room and returns with a T-shirt that he tries to wedge into the crack. We moved all of his things into my room, so that we can film in this one. “Does that help?” he asks once the shirt is in place.
I shake my head. “It’ll be in the video. And I am not masking it out in post, so don’t even ask.” In one of our early videos we had a Truly sitting out on the table, and I spent five hours masking in Premiere, frame by frame, so that I could use the Content-Aware Fill to erase it. In a photo, it’s easy to remove things like that, but in a video it’s a whole different story. Finn had helped by supplying me with constant snacks and shouting words of affirmation as he watched over my shoulder.
“Fair,” he agrees as he pulls the shirt out. “Remember when someone had a heart attack in your building mid-episode? And the ambulance parked outside for hours?”
“How could I forget? I don’t know why we didn’t stop recording. We had to redo everything.”
“It was, like, the tenth episode! We didn’t know how loud it would be in post yet.”
I walk over to the monitor and gesture to Finn to sit in so I can check the lighting and framing Chris set up for us while we were sleeping off our vats of pasta. He walks over to the chair we’re saving for Karli and sits in it, looking to the side toward our seats like she will be. As I adjust the close-up camera angle slightly, I keep talking. It’s nice to be able to talk again. Last night broke the tension we’ve been having, and it’s almost too easy for things between us to feel good again. “You know, if I recall, it was you who claimed that on movie sets they record through sirens all the time, and mics are designed to weed out extraneous noises.”
Finn looks at me with his peripheral vision, not moving his head so I can keep adjusting. Karli is Finn’s height and roughly his complexion, which makes this pre-light even easier. “Well, how could I have known the mics we rented for free weren’t up to par with my mom’s movie sets?”
“Hmm, I wonder. Can you be me next?”
Finn gets in the chair closest to Karli’s, but facing hers, and slouches down a foot so I can direct the camera on his face. “Are you sure you don’t want to just sit in? I’ll do you.”
“Yeah?”
He nods and walks over, we switch places, and I barely notice the half second that our arms brush when I walk by him. I sit in my chair and turn as though I’m looking at Karli, and Finn starts adjusting the camera that’s for my close-up. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around everything that’s happened in the past few months. Not even between Finn and me, but the fact that I just flew to Milan Fashion Week on a private jet, am interviewing a supermodel whom I watched on TV in high school, and am going to the Prada show tonight in an outfit a stylist selected for me. Finn appears at home with all of this, which makes total sense, but every time something new happens I’m waiting for it all to be snatched away.
I should be worrying about staying number one in the ratings so we can beat The Paul Myers Show , knock Paul Myers down a peg, and make gender pay gap history. And even though that is my goal … what I worry about at night isn’t that not happening. It’s waking up in the morning and having all of this ripped away because someone realized that I don’t belong here, and they could throw someone like Cassidy into my role and have the show do twice as well.
“Dollar for your thoughts?” Finn says softly.
“Shouldn’t it be a penny?”
“I’d pay a million, actually.”
“Do you think the show’s still good like this? I almost feel like, with the celebs, anyone could be interviewing them and it would do well.” That’s almost my real worry.
Finn walks over and sits down in Karli’s chair, facing me. “I think anyone could interview them and people would watch. But not that it would be like this. They wouldn’t share these private things with other people. You hold what they say carefully, you know? They trust you not to exploit it in a fame grab, to take it seriously, to use it to advance important conversations. Most people would just try to get them to list their favorite sex positions or something dumb to get an outrageous viral clip. But you’re not most people.”
Why is it that I believe things only when Finn says them? My therapist, my sister, Shazia, ten million people online—they could all say similar things, and I wouldn’t hear them. But when he says it, I believe it. Before I can respond, someone starts knocking on the door, and then opens it.
“Ciao!” Karli exclaims. “I had the desk make me a key for the filming suite. Hope you don’t mind!”
“Of course not! It’s so great to see you!” Finn rushes to greet Karli and they hug.
“Wow! I can’t believe I’m meeting you,” I gush as I hug her next. I come up to her shoulder.
“Me? I can’t believe I’m here with you! Huge fan! Did you know I grew up in Williamsport? Not too far from you.”
“In middle-of-nowhere-PA hours, that’s around the corner,” I joke. Williamsport is in farmland, hours from an airport, at least a forty-minute drive to a grocery store or mall for most people. Everyone out there gets used to driving long distances to do anything . “Finn, would you mind getting Karli mic’d? I just have to run and change.”
I duck into the other room and pull on a Tell Me How You Really Feel sweat suit and start quickly applying mascara and lip gloss. We’re basically set up, but Karli is a half hour early, so I wasn’t quite ready. From the other room I can hear her and Finn chatting about Fashion Week, his mom’s latest projects, their favorite spots in Italy. But then I hear Karli ask about Cassidy, and my ears perk up.
“How’s Cassidy? Is it gauche to ask what happened? You two were always the cutest together. That romance you two did is my comfort movie.”
“Clip that to your shirt.” It sounds like Finn is mic’ing her. An awkward time to answer a relationship question. I pause, mascara wand still in hand, and listen intently. “You know Cassidy, she’s amazing. Gorgeous, smart, talented, the full package. We tried, but dating like that was a huge mistake. We don’t have the chemistry and compatibility you need to date as adults. And I realized I had feelings for … someone else, which was unfair to her, too. I’m a chronic idiot.”
I wonder if Finn knows I can hear him through the wall. He has to be talking about me. I know he is. And he’s speaking quietly, but not quite whispering, which makes me think he’s trying to answer without me hearing. I cap the mascara quickly and walk out without warning, and his eyes jump to mine with a start. Interesting. The entire situation is a trigger point for us, so I understand him not wanting me to hear. But his response …
It seems like he really means that.
This whole time I’ve assumed that he’s been placating me, trying to calm me down by saying what I want to hear, so he can have his cake and eat it too. He got to date Cassidy, and when that didn’t work he decided to try to reignite things with me, his sloppy seconds. There’s no way he was dating Cassidy, the It girl, and dumped her for me. There’s no way. In the letter he said he just wanted to be friends again, anyway.
But as I set the wide shot, Karli and Finn still chatting away, I can’t help but stare at Finn through the shield of the monitor for a moment longer than I need to. Now that I’m not busy hating him, it’s harder to ignore that I’ve never actually stopped loving him.