Chapter Two
SIENNA
We didn't talk about the billboard again that night, or the next morning, or for most of the week after, and something in the specific ease of that avoidance told me we'd both silently agreed it wasn't worth disturbing yet, that the machine would run its course and things would settle the way they always had before.
Three nights after the premiere, Grant came home late from a full day of press, tie already gone, shirt untucked, dropping onto the couch beside me with the particular collapse of a man who'd smiled professionally for eleven consecutive hours and had nothing left over for smiling voluntarily.
"I'm not cooking," I said, not looking up from the takeout menus already spread across the coffee table, three of them, the ones we always ended up deciding between no matter how many new restaurants opened nearby.
"Thank god," he said. "I sat through a junket today where a man asked me, with a straight face, what my character's favorite breakfast cereal would be. I had an answer ready. I have never wanted to disappear into a couch cushion more badly in my life."
"What did you say?"
"Raisin bran. I don't know why. It felt true to the character in a way I couldn't defend afterward."
I laughed, actually laughed, the kind that came up out of nowhere and surprised me a little, and he looked pleased with himself in the specific way he always did when he managed to make me laugh after a long day, like it mattered more to him than anything the junket itself had produced.
We ordered from the Thai place two blocks over, the one we'd been ordering from since before either of us could afford to tip properly, and ate cross-legged on the living room floor instead of at the table because some habits from the Fig Street apartment had simply never left us, no matter how much space we eventually had to spread out into.
"Can I ask you something," Grant said, halfway through a container of noodles, in a tone that told me he'd been building up to it for a while. "The studio sent over the next script. The one after this press cycle winds down. I want your read on it before I say yes to anything."
"You always want my read."
"You're always right," he said. "It's inconvenient, honestly. I keep hoping one of these years you'll be wrong about something so I have an excuse to ignore you."
I took the folder he handed me, flipping through the coverage pages while he watched, waiting, the way he'd waited on my opinion of scripts for the better part of two decades now, since the very first audition sides I'd read with him on the fire escape of an apartment neither of us could really afford.
There was a shorthand between us that had built up over that time, a private vocabulary for exactly this kind of exchange, and I found the note I always found myself making in the margins, the same abbreviation I'd used since we were twenty-four.
"The second act sags," I said. "Same problem as always. Everyone's afraid to let the character actually be unlikable for ten pages before the turn. If you play it safe here, the ending won't land."
"That's what I thought too," he said, "but I wanted to hear you say it before I told them I thought it. In case I was wrong and just wanted an excuse to be difficult with the studio again."
"When have you ever needed an excuse to be difficult with the studio."
"Fair," he said, grinning, and reached over to steal a piece of my chicken without asking, another habit from Fig Street that had never once needed updating.
Later, packing up the empty containers, I found myself opening a drawer in the credenza looking for a rubber band and instead found an old cassette tape, unlabeled, buried under a stack of takeout menus we'd apparently been keeping for a decade.
I turned it over in my hands, no idea what it was until Grant looked over and went very still.
"That's the audition tape," he said. "The one for the network pilot. The one that actually got me somewhere."
I remembered it the second he said it, remembered it so completely that for a moment the room seemed to tilt slightly around the memory.
We hadn't owned a video camera worth anything back then, just a rented one from a shop on Vermont that charged by the day, and I'd filmed him in our living room against a bedsheet we'd hung over the window for a backdrop because we couldn't afford proper lighting or a proper location.
He'd been so afraid that morning he could barely eat, pacing the apartment reciting the same four lines over and over until they stopped sounding like words at all, and I remembered sitting him down at the kitchen table, both of us cross-legged on the floor exactly like we were now, running the scene with him one more time before we ever turned the camera on.
"You almost didn't go," I said. "Do you remember that? You said the casting director already hated you from the first round and there wasn't any point putting ourselves through the tape."
"I remember you telling me that if I didn't go, I'd spend the rest of my life wondering, and that wondering was worse than any rejection they could actually give me."
"You went. You got the callback. You didn't get the part, technically, but the casting director remembered you two years later and put you up for something else, and that's actually how all of this started, if you trace it back far enough."
"We celebrated with gas station champagne," he said, laughing at the memory now, turning the cassette over in his hands like it might still play something if he waited long enough. "Four dollars a bottle. We didn't even have real glasses, we drank it out of the mismatched mugs from my grandmother."
"You cried."
"I did not cry."
"You cried," I said again, certain of it, "and then you told me you were going to marry me before you even had a callback confirmed, like the two things were somehow related."
"They were related," he said, quieter now, setting the tape carefully on the counter instead of back in the drawer.
"Everything that happened after that tape happened because you sat on the floor with me for three hours helping me not sound like a robot.
I don't think I ever actually told you that clearly enough. "
"You've told me. Seventeen years of telling me."
"I don't think I have. Not clearly enough. Not in the specific way it deserves."
Something in his voice had gone serious in a way that caught me off guard, and I looked up from the take-out containers to find him watching me with an expression I recognized from a long time ago, back before either of us had learned to perform anything for anyone, back when his face still gave away exactly what he was feeling without any polish smoothed over it.
"I'm serious, Sienna. Whatever happens with this next movie, whatever the studio wants to do with the release, I need you to know none of it happens without that tape. Without you sitting on a bedsheet-covered floor with me being more patient than I deserved."
I didn't have an answer for that, not one that wouldn't have embarrassed us both, so I just reached over and took his hand, the same hand that had shaken so badly the day we filmed that tape it had taken three takes just to hold a coffee cup without spilling it, and held it until the moment passed into something easier, something that didn't need words attached to it at all.
We didn't have a way to play the tape anymore, no working device left in the house that could read it, but neither of us suggested throwing it away.
Grant found a small wooden box in the hallway closet the next morning, the kind meant for keepsakes rather than practical storage, and set the cassette inside it along with the ticket stub from our first real date, a movie neither of us could actually remember the plot of anymore, only that we'd shared a single bucket of popcorn because we couldn't afford two.
He set the box on the shelf in our bedroom, visible, unhidden, and neither of us mentioned it again, though I noticed, in the weeks that followed, that he'd occasionally open it just to look inside, the way you check that a favorite photograph is still where you left it.