Everything Leads to You(21)

“It’s Ginger,” I say. “She tells me she trusts me and that I can do whatever I want, and then when I’m not even there, without even talking to me about it, she just makes this change and ruins everything.”

“Not everything.”

“I don’t want to keep working with her. I want to work for myself.”

Toby clears his throat. He leans back in his chair.

Finally, he says, “This is how it works. You bust your ass. Not everything goes your way, and then, after a while, you get to that point. You get to make your own decisions and people look to you for approval on their work.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

“You will move up in the studio,” he says. “I know you can do it. You just have to bite that tongue of yours and not let her see you so upset.”

“She already has.”

“Well, show her you’re over it.”

I nod.

“See this project through. See The Agency through. Then see where you are.”

“Okay,” I say, but my heart isn’t in it. There is this distance between us, and I can’t tell him everything I’m thinking, which is that I don’t know that I want to move up in the studio if working for the studio is going to be like this. If I can search for months and months in so many places, and then have all that work undone in a moment.

Charlotte appears by the driver’s side window.

“Charlotte’s escorting me off the lot,” I say.

“That bad?”

“Yeah,” Charlotte says, buckling her seat belt. “She told Ginger that she was ‘aware of their respective positions.’”

“Damn,” Toby says with a half smile, half grimace. “Go cheer her up, okay?”

“I’ll do my best,” Charlotte says.

~

As Charlotte drives us off the lot, she says, “I’m taking you to the canals.”

“That’s a good idea,” I tell her. “I love the canals.”

The canals are why Venice is called Venice, but not that many people know about them. Most people who don’t live here just head to Abbot Kinney for food and shopping, or the beach for the beach. But the canals are beautiful. They were designed by Abbot Kinney himself, and they are lined with houses, so when you walk along the canals, you’re basically walking through people’s front yards.

We park and cross over a footbridge and begin our mazelike stroll.

To our left is water; to our right are the illuminated living rooms and kitchens of the insanely wealthy and stylish.

“I couldn’t live here,” Charlotte says. “These people are so unselfconscious.”

That’s where Charlotte and I diverge, because I could totally live here. What’s the point of decorating your home if nobody gets to see it? But on a night like tonight I understand where Charlotte’s coming from, because I wish more than anything I could find someplace dark and quiet and away from civilization.

“Clyde f*cking Jones,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m so sorry I didn’t get to see the room the way you planned it.”

“I didn’t even get pictures!” I moan. “It looks so stupid with that couch.”

“It doesn’t look stupid—it’s a really nice couch—but it also doesn’t look like a cast-off piece of furniture.”

“No,” I say, “it doesn’t. It looks like a four-thousand-dollar Adrian Pearsall sofa, because that’s what it is. I thought this movie was supposed to be about a normal middle-class family.”

“At least Kira gets to lose her virginity on a really nice piece of furniture.”

“It doesn’t even matter,” I say. “It changes the whole mood of everything. Ginger can have her mid-century-modern teen sex scene. I was going to give her a fairy tale.”

We cross another bridge and I have to pause to stare into the house in front of us because it’s just so amazing. The entire side is glass. A spiral staircase rises from the living room to a lofted bedroom. In the gleaming, silver kitchen, just a few feet from us, a man is cooking dinner.

“I’m really hungry,” I say.

“Me, too,” Charlotte says.

We wander farther.

“Morgan’s going on a date tonight.”

Charlotte sighs. “And how do you know this?”