Everything Leads to You(64)

“You got insurance?”

“Yes. I have insurance.”

“Is it pornography? I can’t have pornography shot here.”

Theo seems on the verge of exploding, but he runs his hand through his hair and smiles down at her.

“It is not pornography,” he says in a voice that is part polite, part menacing.

Patricia sighs and unlocks the iron gate and then the front door.

“Go on in,” she says. “I have some calls to make.”

We make a quick lap of the house—splotchy carpets, dingy walls with water stains from what must have been a leaky pipe, dreary lighting in most of the rooms. How difficult is it to find just a humble, decent house?

I expect Theo to say we should move on, but instead he says, “Well, Emi, what do you think?”

“It would be a pretty bleak interpretation,” I say. “Is that what you’re going for?”

“It isn’t what I had in mind exactly, but I’m feeling desperate. It’s a good day rate.”

“That’s true.”

I know how important the good price is, and also that it’s my job to take whatever we can get and then transform it into something we want. So I do another lap and I look for opportunities this time.

When I get back to Theo, I say, “Let’s go for it.”

Already, I know of a few things I could do to make the space nicer. If a cluster of framed artwork hung over the water damage on the main living room wall, for example, the house wouldn’t appear to be on the verge of collapse. Morgan could affix coral-colored wallpaper to plywood that we could prop against the kitchen walls. I could beg for more curtains. I could make this work.

I tell him some of my ideas and he says yes, over and over, so fervently.

“Emi,” he says. “You’re a miracle.”

I savor that sentence, allow myself to bask in it. Hope it might revive some of my lost confidence. And then I follow him out to the front steps where Patricia is waiting, a fresh coat of hot pink lipstick smeared on her lips.

“So, one hundred dollars a day, you said?” Theo says.

“That’ll buy you until three.”

“On what day?”

“Every day. I’m going to need it after that for viewings.”

“Three is quite early.”

“And if someone rents it before then, the deal’s off.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, if someone signs a lease.”

“This isn’t what you said on the phone,” Theo says.

“Put yourself in my position. I need to find a renter. What if I find someone to sign a year lease but they need the place right away. Am I supposed to say no because you need it for a week?”

Theo’s hands fly to his head. Towering above her, he says, “Please. If you will. Put yourself in my position. How can I accept an agreement that could mean that even if I were halfway through the week of filming, I could have my location pulled out from under me. Then I would have half the scenes that are meant to take place in this house completed, but the other half undone. What would I do then?”

Patricia is fazed neither by his impressive stature nor his argument.

“I have to make a living. A hundred a day is a real bargain. I can give it to you day-by-day but that’s all I can do.”

“So you’re saying that I have to decide whether it’s worth this so-called bargain you’re offering me for a piece-of-shit house with water damage and stained carpets to risk losing days of shooting to a hypothetical renter?”

He’s yelling now, and Patricia’s hot pink mouth is hanging open and I try to lighten things up by saying, “Well, looks like we’ll be moving on, right, Theo?” in a kind of happy-go-lucky lilting way.

And then when no one responds I walk to his car and wait by the passenger-side door.

~

After venting for half an hour as we inch along the 405, Theo finally falls silent. I let him have a few minutes and then I say, “So is it safe to change the subject?” and he says, “Please do.”

So I ask him about scene 42, the scene Ava read to audition for the part, because I’ve been thinking of what they told me the day I accepted this job, that they had envisioned the entire scene playing out as Juniper tells the story: the flower stand and the florist, the city street.

“Right,” he says. “We ran out of money. It was one of the easier things to cut. But even with a spectacular Juniper, it’s a long time to hold an audience’s attention.”