Everything Leads to You(41)

A scene begins but it isn’t of the music room yet.

Harvey’s voice comes out of the speakers: “I have to go through scene sixty-eight before I get to the ones you’re here to see. It’s a quick one, though, so hold on to your hats.”

Morgan laughs.

“This guy is amazing,” she says.

I turn to see her face, lit by the screen.

“I like him,” I say.

“Yeah.” She smiles at me. “I do, too.”

“I couldn’t tell if you were being sarcastic.”

“You should hear his other stories. Katy and I ended up at a bar with him a couple weeks ago. He shut the place down.”

On the screen, the father is entering the living room of the house in a hurry. The first shots follow his face closely. But then the next shots show the room. I recognize Clyde’s highball glasses resting on a gleaming bar cart. The sofa and rugs and chairs are all in muted tones and around the room are pops of color: red roses in a vase, full-color family portraits on a wall, a mostly turquoise globe.

It’s easy to see what Ginger was doing when she planned this room. Every detail that we notice is important. The flowers a reminder of the couple’s anniversary. The globe an indication of the distance about to come between them. The portraits depicting the happy family so we can see how much they stand to lose by the misfortune about to strike them.

Even before the scene changes to the music room, I realize why Ginger replaced my green-and-gold sofa with Clyde’s gray one. Then the clapper flashes onscreen, Scene 8, Take 1, and there is my room, larger than life, and my entire body is flooded with my own wrongness.

Ginger has used the same strategy in this room. Almost everything is muted except for the important parts: the music stand to show us the daughter’s talent, the trophies to show her youth and innocence. My sofa would have commanded too much attention for Ginger’s concept, and while her choices are not the ones I would have made, I can see that they make sense. They work well for this film. Really well for this film, in fact.

My sofa would have looked great if this room were in isolation, but it’s part of a film where every scene will be cohesive. When Ginger told me that she was the production designer she probably wasn’t just on a power trip. She was probably trying to tell me that she was the one with the vision for film, that she knew every aspect of the sets and the locations. As an intern I knew only a sliver.

I thought the music room was mine but it was always hers.

“How does it feel?” Morgan asks.

I’m embarrassed to know that I was wrong, to remember the things I said and how ridiculously young I must have seemed to Ginger. And I’m sad to see what this room could have been if I’d had complete control over it. How close it is to my version of perfect. But somehow, I’m also proud of it. I may have just been an intern, fulfilling someone else’s vision, but I did it in a way that was my own. It’s possible that no one else would have chosen that particular music stand or that poster. The sheet music is still scattered and I love the messiness of it, how it feels lived in and more authentic than the living room.

And then there is the simple, pure thrill of seeing my first work on a big screen in a private screening room on the lot of a major studio.

I take a breath, overwhelmed by all of it. What I feel is too complicated to explain to Morgan, so I just smile and let her interpret that however she wants to.

~

Forty minutes later we are in the parking lot, standing in between our respective vehicles, trying to brush off the awkwardness of having watched countless takes of a girl losing her virginity. Morgan leans against the side of her truck, and since I’m standing on the passenger side of my car, I figure it’s never too soon to begin the unlocking process.

When I emerge from the passenger’s seat, she reaches for my hand. Against my better judgment, I let her take it. I feel the familiar tightening somewhere below my stomach when I think of all the times she’s touched me. Maybe I’m supposed to step into her now, like so many other times when she took my hand. Maybe we’re supposed to be kissing, bodies pressed against the truck. But instead I just stare at my hand in hers until I find my voice.

“What are you doing?”

“Are you going to make me ask you?”

“Ask me what, exactly?”

She shakes her bangs out of her eyes and really looks at me.

“If you’ll come back. I want you back.”

I close my eyes and when I open them again I make sure that I’m looking at something other than her.