Nora Goes Off Script(44)
When I walk out to the tea house, the door is closed. This has to work today, so I open the door, just the way I like it, and go back into my house to start again. I make a fresh mug of tea and re-sharpen my pencils. I approach the tea house and that old feeling is there. It’s a combination of inspiration and motivation. It’s magic, and I’m about to enter another world. I set my things down just so and build the fire.
Hair in a knot, I open my laptop and begin to type. I promised Jackie I’d have a complete script for TRC by October 1, which really shouldn’t be a problem. I write the story of a male actor from Manhattan who goes out to an old country house to film a movie and falls in love with the woman who lives there. They butt heads for a while, but then he steps in and helps with the school play. On the day of the play he’s sucked back into his own world, but has a change of heart and returns as the curtain rises. There’s a chaste kiss as the camera pulls back.
I’m light while I write it, and as I do so, I understand why I write. To write is to re-create something as you’d like it to be. I can filter my heartbreak through the giddy weightlessness of an afternoon romance movie, and suddenly it’s silly. It’s practically trite. My big love affair is an eighty-minute vehicle for selling tampons and life insurance.
He finds her schedules adorable. She shows him the simple pleasure of the sunrise. He shares that his cold penthouse apartment has no view at all, even being so close to the park. The first kiss is interrupted, per normal. They both change for the better.
Telling myself this story in this way confirms that it wasn’t real. It was a fantasy, something I should recognize because I’m in the fantasy business. All of that intensity and love nonsense was new to me, but to Leo it was just the drama that he brings to a part. And I’ll hand it to him, he’s a pro. In reality, I was living a boilerplate movie, as simple as Mad Libs. I decide I’ll probably finish this one in three days, because so much of it is written for me. Easy money, I think as I lie down for my nap.
I wait until September 20 to send it to Jackie, mainly because I don’t want her to know how fast I wrote it. I always think she’ll negotiate for more money if she thinks it was a whole month’s work. I don’t wait until October 1, mainly because I don’t want to put an entire mortgage payment on my credit card.
She calls me during dinner three days later. “So you fell in love with him?”
“Who?” I’m just buying time as I take my phone out to the front porch so I can have this conversation in private.
“Leo! Nora, I’m not an idiot.”
“That’s funny, because I am.”
“Just wow. Is it all true?”
“Sort of. But in real life there was a lot of sex, and he didn’t come back.” I regret not bringing my wineglass outside with me.
“I’m really sorry. The agony of it comes across on the page.”
“No, it doesn’t.” I sit up straight, defensive. “I deliberately wrote it Romance Channel style—low emotional stakes and quick resolutions.”
“No, you didn’t. And besides the end, which feels totally false, this is another fantastic script. Here’s my plan, I’m going to tell TRC you have the flu and push off that deadline. Then I’m going to wait until the first reviews of The Tea House come in, maybe October 5. If they’re as good as I hope they are, I’m going to sell this for a million dollars.”
“Wait. What?”
“I think The Tea House is going to be huge, Oscar huge. People are going to want your next script and this one is powerful. Just fix the end.”
I’m so confused when I get off the phone that I go get my wineglass and the bottle and come back to the porch. It sounds like I need to reread what I sent her, maybe it wasn’t as light as I’d thought. Having a film produced about how I really felt about Leo would be epically humiliating. Having a million dollars would be epically relaxing.
And then there’s the trouble with the end. You can’t end a movie with a woman just staring at her un-ringing phone, periodically checking on her dangling “Hey.” There is no setup that allows for him to come back or for her to save face. He just left and never called again. He sent money for chrissake. No, I’d rework the bulk of the script and pull all the feeling out of it. I’d give her a dog and they’d walk the dog a lot together. Maybe she could have a secret dream to start a cupcake shop. I could take this nightmare and turn it into a TRC movie yet.
I spend a week pulling my heart out of that script. The dialogue, I hadn’t noticed, was real conversations we’d had. I replace them with reflections on their hopes and dreams—he had always wanted to try woodworking. She, with the cupcake shop. Long gazes, quick brushing of hands. I make her children identical twin girls and give them all the best lines. I add a set of parents who are appropriately helpful in giving advice, but only when asked.
It takes Jackie one day to get back to me. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s the TRC version of my story. Complete with a dog and cupcakes.”
“So you’d rather have twenty-five thousand dollars than a million? You’d rather give up this moment where you are about to become a majorly sought-after Hollywood writer than just tell the truth?”
This wounds me a little. I like to think of myself as truthful. It felt good to write The Tea House because it meant something and explored the gray areas of my life. But sharing that story cost me nothing, I came out victorious in the end because I survived Ben’s leaving. And I survived so well because I was so sick of him. The whole point of the story is that sometimes people leave and don’t take anything with them. Leo took practically everything with him.