Chapter 7 Damian
I was early. The wardrobe department kept its waiting area at the end of a long corridor with a door at each end, which I liked, because two doors means two ways a problem can come and two ways I can move it back out.
I had dragged a chair to the spot where I could see both.
I sat in it with Maren's call sheet on my knee and read it a second time.
The fitting was for the press-kit photoshoot. The supervisor was a woman named Inez. I had run her two weeks ago. She came out from behind the rack with an armful of hangers and leaned toward me, her voice low.
"You should know something. The dress on the brief. The silk one." She glanced back toward the fitting room. "I pulled it this morning and her hands started shaking. She didn't even notice she was doing it. I don't think she knows."
I kept my face still. "What was wrong with it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it. That's the thing.
" Inez shifted the hangers higher. "It's almost the exact dress she wore the night somebody left that flower in her car.
Same color. Close enough cut. I only know because I dressed her for that junket too.
" She shrugged, but her eyes were not casual.
"So I switched it. Black knit. She'll never have to think about why. "
"Thank you," I said.
I had read the wardrobe brief that morning. Line by line, the way I read everything, and the silk dress had been a line on it, and I had not flagged it. Inez caught with her hands what I had missed with my eyes.
The fitting room door opened and Maren came out in the black knit, turning to check herself over her shoulder.
"Okay, be honest," she said. "On a scale from amateur actress to serious actress, where does this land?"
"Serious actress."
"Oh thank god. The silk one on the rack was screaming the other thing at me and I couldn't figure out why I hated it so much." She frowned at the rack for half a second, then let it go. "Inez has saved my life so many times. I'm putting her in my will."
"She'd want it in writing."
"I'll have Thomas notarize it. He carries a pen."
Outside, I had the car where I wanted it. I checked the street out of habit and opened her door.
The fast way home went past the lot behind the hotel where she had parked the night someone left the orchid on her seat. I was not driving her past that lot. I had worked out a different way two days ago and driven it once on my own.
I pulled out and turned the wrong direction for home.
"This isn't the way," she said.
"I want to see if the new light on Beverly is as bad as Brady keeps saying. He's been complaining about it like it insulted his mother."
She looked at me. She knew it was a lie. She decided to let me have it.
"Brady would file a grievance against a traffic light," she said. "He files grievances against weather."
"He filed one against my beard last week."
"Your beard is the victim in all this."
I tapped my phone and the music came on low, and she went quiet for a second.
"You remembered," she said.
"You mentioned it on the second night."
She had told me that this was the album she used to play in her father's hospital room near the end, because he hated the silence and the machines made too much of it. She had said it fast, the way she said the things that mattered, and then changed the subject before I could answer.
"I didn't think you were listening," she said.
"I'm always listening. It's my second least likable quality."
"What's the first?"
"You know the first."
"You're always sure," she said, and she was smiling now, which was the point. "It's top three for me, by the way. I ranked them."
"You and Brady should publish a list."
I let the canyon do some of the work for a mile, and then I tried to make her laugh.
"I watched a movie late one night last week," I said. "Couldn't sleep. One of those romantic comedies where the whole thing falls apart in the second act."
"Which one?"
I told her. She made a noise like I had insulted a relative.
"That movie is a delight."
"It's broken. The second act doesn't earn the third. They fight about nothing, they make up about nothing, and the lead does way too much with her hands the entire time. She acts with her hands like she's trying to land a plane."
"She's nervous. The character is nervous."
"There's nervous and there's air traffic control."
She laughed, and I kept my eyes on the road and let myself feel good about it.
"Okay, professor," she said. "If you're so smart, tell me why the kiss in the rain works in some movies and makes you want to throw the remote in others. Because I have a theory and I want to know if you're going to embarrass yourself."
"It works when the rain costs them something," I said. "When standing in it is a decision. It fails when the rain is set dressing and somebody turned on a hose so the poster would look good."
She was quiet a second.
"That's annoyingly correct."
"I'm always correct. We've been over this."
"We have not been over this. You declared it. There's a difference."
By the time we hit the freeway she had me on the subject of a director I do not like, and I told her exactly why, which was that I had been at a panel in a hot room a few years ago where the man talked about himself for forty minutes and then mispronounced the name of the cinematographer who made his whole career, and I had decided in that room never to forgive him.
"That's it?" she said. "He was rude at a panel?"
"He was wrong at a panel. Loudly. About someone who couldn't defend himself."
"You're holding a grudge against a man you've never met over a name he said wrong at a conference."
"Yes."
"I love that for you." She was wiping her eyes now, laughing with her whole chest, the laugh I had been driving toward without saying so. "You have an enemy and your enemy doesn't know you exist."
"He'll find out. When his next movie's second act falls apart, I'll be there."
"In the theater?"
"In spirit. Taking notes."
She laughed again, and the freeway carried us home the long way, which was the entire point of taking it.
I pulled into her driveway and put the car in park. She had her hand on the door but did not open it yet.
"Thank you for the long way," she said. "I know it wasn't about the traffic light, because you don't care about that. Why, then? Real answer."
I thought about how to say it so it would be true and small enough to carry.
"The man who's been writing you has been taking your own life and turning it against you," I said.
"Your email. Your car. The flower your father used to bring your mother.
He takes ordinary things and makes them into something you can't touch anymore.
" I looked at her. "My job, until this is over, is to give them back.
One at a time. Starting with a road you don't have to be afraid of. "
She did not say anything for a moment.
"That's a lot of road," she said quietly.
"I've got time."