Chapter 26
Morgan
I had to go back and finish the movie.
That surprised people who'd only read the headlines and figured a man who'd torched his own campaign on live television would never set foot on the lot again. But a contract was a contract and a crew was a crew. I'd signed the one so I owed the other.
So I got on a plane and went and did my job.
It was the same lot. That messed with my head a little, walking back onto it. It was the same fake ranch in Santa Clarita, the same distressed rails, the same lights I'd been lit by since I was four years old.
Three months before, I'd stood in that exact spot pouring somebody else's grief into a take and calling it the best work of my career. That's what the job had always been for. A place to put a life I didn't have.
I walked back onto it with a sunburn and a callus from a fence I'd built that was real and eleven texts in my pocket from a man who couldn't spell. The lot had lost every bit of its old power over me. It was just a place I went to work now.
The cost was real. The big deals went the way Renata said they'd go.
My quote got cut and cut again. There was a stretch of about a month where somebody ran a new version of my unraveling every week, and a lot of people I'd called friends for fifteen years discovered they had my number wrong.
I was, in the language of that town, difficult.
A cautionary tale told at lunches I was no longer invited to.
There were nights in a rented apartment with the offers gone quiet when the old fear came up the back of my throat.
I had to sit with it in the dark until it went off.
It always went off now. There was a place it couldn't follow me to and a man at the other end of a phone who didn't care in the slightest whether I was insurable.
Renata caught some of it, the way she said she would. Two clients got skittish about an agent who'd let her biggest name walk into traffic, so they left and she called to tell me herself.
"I'm not telling you to make you feel bad."
"You're saying it because it happened."
"I'm saying it because eleven years ago I'd have hidden it from you and billed you anyway. Anyway. It's working out."
"Ren."
"There's a whole tier of people in this town who've been waiting on somebody to represent them honestly, and apparently that's me now. I've signed four this month. Four, Morgan. One of them can actually act."
"So, I ruined your business?" I asked with a laugh.
"You ruined my business and made my career inside three months. I haven't decided how I feel about you." I could hear the smile in her voice. "Go feed your cows."
She hung up on me, and I sat there grinning at a dead phone a thousand miles from home.
Bauer never warmed back up.
He'd staked his picture on a story about me and I'd set the story on fire. He was professional and cold but he got his movie. On the last day of filming he came over while they were striking the set.
"You were good in it."
"Thank you."
"I mean it. You were better than you've ever been and I'm going to spend a year explaining you to people." He put his hand out and I took it. "I'd have said yes, you know. If you'd come to me first. About the family."
"I know."
"Well." He let go. "You didn't."
Then he went off to talk to the first AD, and that was the last conversation I had with a man I'd have followed off a bridge in February.
I earned every second of it and I would do all of it again.
I wasn't sure I'd ever hear from him again.
Box office success would make that decision for both of us.
The crew was different.
They'd watched the featurette get pulled and watched me refuse to name a family on national television, and they closed around me on that set in a way I had never once had and never known to want.
The teamsters saved me the good coffee. The script supervisor who'd cried at my fake ride-out in the winter started showing me pictures of her actual horses, and one of the grips came and found me at the truck about a week in.
"My granddad ran cows in Meeker," he said. "Sixty years. Wasn't nobody ever asked him about it neither."
That was the whole conversation. He nodded at me and went back to work. I stood there with a paper cup in my hand and had to get myself together before I could follow him.
I had never once in thirty years of sets been one of them instead of the thing they were all pointed at. It turned out to be worth more than the trailer with my name on it, and I'd had to lose the name to get it.
There was a kid on the picture. He was eighteen, playing my character's son, beautiful and terrified and so far inside it that I could see him grading himself between every line.
I could read him from across the set. I'd been him.
One night I caught him by the catering truck running his sides over and over with his hands cramped tight around the pages. He was doing the math I'd done at his age and at every age after. What do they want. Who do I have to be.
I sat down next to him and didn't give him one note about the work.
"There's a real one in there under all the trying," I said. "That's the only thing anybody ever actually comes to see. Guard it, because this business is going to spend your whole career telling you it isn't enough."
He looked at me like I'd handed him something heavy.
Maybe I had. It was the only thing I owned that was worth anything and it had cost me everything else. I gave it away to a scared kid by a catering truck and felt rich doing it.
That was the difference I kept noticing, all those weeks. The warmth was just mine now.
I'd spent thirty years being the friendly one, the easy one, the man who lit up a room, and it was the biggest acting job of my life. It was warmth pumped up out of nothing to cover the nothing. I'd been so good at it I fooled everybody, including me most days.
When I laughed on that set it was because something was funny. When I was kind it was because I meant it. Nobody could have told the difference from the outside anymore because it was all real. I wasn't being Morgan Masterson.
I was Morgan Sobel. I always had been.
***
Holt texted like a man being charged by the letter.
ferrier coming thursday
trouble got into the feed again dumb as a post
lane says hi
I'd been with people who wrote me paragraphs. Who workshopped their texts and sent me the second draft. He just sent what he meant.
I read them about forty times each.
I learned to read him the way I'd once learned to read a room, except he was the only audience I ever wanted.
He called me the night before I wrapped and didn't have anything to say again.
"How's the cow."
"Which cow."
"The one that's dumb as a post."
"She got in the feed again." A long pause on his end, the kind I'd learned to sit in. "Morgan."
"Yeah."
"What time does your flight get in?"
"Nine. But you don't have to come get me, I'll rent something—"
"What airline?"
"Holt, it's three hours each way in the dark."
"What airline, Morgan?"
I told him the airline and when I landed he was there, standing at the bottom of the escalator in a clean shirt with his hat in his hands like a man meeting a train in 1954.
I got to the bottom of it, dropped my bag and kissed him in front of the whole airport.
He put a hand in the back of my hair and kissed me back like there wasn't one soul in that building.
We didn't talk much on the way up the mountain. He put his hand on my knee somewhere past Kremmling and left it there. I watched the dark come down over country I knew now, the peaks coming up black against a sky already crowding with stars.
Chapel and Steeple and Spire.
We came over the rise and the kitchen window was lit up. There were trucks in the yard that belonged there, and an old man on the porch who had waited up.
I had spent my whole career learning a thousand ways to walk into a room.
I forgot every one of them, and just went home.