Everything Leads to You (20 page)

“Commute from Leona Valley?”

“Yeah. It would have been really long but it would only have lasted a few months. Then I would have moved out the right way, with money in my bank account and a place to show up and work five days a week. Maybe a couple of friends here already.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, I thought I would find a job at a bakery, because baking is something I’m good at. And the hours would be crazy—the shifts start so early in the morning—so I thought I would save time on the commute and it would also be a good escape because I would be out of the house before Tracey got up.”

She’s put all the ingredients in a neat cluster on one side of Toby’s counter and is now finding measuring cups and spoons.

“Let me know if you need any help,” I say.

“Cake pan of any kind?”

I nod and find one we thrifted from the Rose Bowl a couple years ago. We bought it because it was this great coppery color, not because we had any intention of using it. I hope it works because it’s all Toby has.

“Great! I’ve got it from here.”

I hop up onto the counter, out of the way of her prep area.

She’s quiet for a moment, taking stock of everything she has, and it dawns on me that she’s making this cake without a recipe, which is not something I even knew was possible.

She cracks the first egg into a glass bowl in one quick motion.

“So anyway, I researched all of these bakeries and I thought of a way I could prove myself considering that I was a teenager with no formal experience. I chose seven bakeries and made seven full-size German chocolate cakes from scratch. I drove out here and delivered them all, and one by one, the people who worked there looked at me like I was crazy.”

“Why?” I ask. “That sounds like a great thing to do to impress people.”

She shrugs. “I thought so, but it didn’t help that most of the places I went didn’t have traditional cakes. They were all very gourmet. Like with bourbon and sea salt, or classic cakes with a spin, like vegan Red Velvet made from beets. Lots of olive oil cakes, which I had never even heard of, but that now I love. Anyway, only one baker at one bakery ate a slice of my cake in front of me. It was the La Cienega Bakery and it was the owner who was there working, and when she tasted it she told me it was delicious but that they weren’t hiring. I still held out hope that someone would quit and she’d have an opening. That’s who I thought you guys might be when Jonah said a woman had called me. I thought it would be a perfect birthday present to be offered a job.”

“Instead you got us.”

She smiles. “When I pictured having friends here, I saw us crammed into a tiny apartment. I imagined waitresses taking community college classes or aspiring chefs working as line cooks. I thought we’d probably live in a sketchy neighborhood and pool our money to make stir-fry for dinner.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“No. I mean, don’t get me wrong; that kind of life sounded incredible. But,” she says, looking up at me, “what could be better than this?”

~

Forty minutes later, the cake is in the oven. I’m laying the portraits we bought out on the floor to determine how they should hang, and Ava is reading her own copy of the script, pen in hand.

Charlotte lets herself in.

“Thank you, Ava. Whatever that is, it smells amazing and I am starving,” she says, dropping her computer bag onto the couch.

“Why not ‘Thank you, Emi’?” I ask.

“Because all you know how to cook is pasta and scrambled eggs.”

“And toast.”

“Yeah, but you usually burn it.”

“Not true,” I say. “It’s a matter of preference. I happen to like my toast crisp.”

“Still,” she says. “There’s no way that amazing smell is thanks to you.”

“She did find me a cake pan,” Ava says, laughing.

She’s clearly amused but I’m not because I don’t want her to think I’m some loser who can’t toast bread. I want her to think that I’m that fun kind of girl who will bake cookies on a Tuesday night, or make french onion soup on Bastille Day.

“Don’t be mad,” Charlotte says. “You have to leave
some
talents for the rest of us.”

She smiles at me and I can’t help but smile back because it’s a pretty nice thing to say.

“Fine.” I shrug. I turn to Ava. “Secret’s out: I can’t cook.”

“I can’t decorate,” she says.

“That doesn’t bother me,” I say, and it comes out flirtatious, and I want to keep going, so I say, “I’m terrible at math.”

“I’m a bad speller.”

“I don’t even know my multiplication tables.”

“I can’t do a real push-up.”

“I wanted to learn Spanish but I can’t roll my
r
’s.”

“Wow,” Charlotte says. “This is interesting,” which is a cue to stop but I could keep going forever, listing all my flaws in order from the most innocuous to the least. I am afraid of spiders . . . I fall in love too easily . . . I have fierce spells of self-doubt.
Because in the conversation beneath this one, what we’re really saying is
I am an imperfect person. Here are my failures. Do you want me anyway?

“I want to hear all about everything,” Charlotte says to Ava.

“She’s SAG eligible,” I say.

“I know. I was there when they signed the paperwork. Rebecca and I are redoing the budget for the third time. What did you think of Benjamin?”

“Oh, he was there?” I ask, surprised that Ava didn’t mention him right away.

She nods.

“He was . . . nice,” she says.

Charlotte and I laugh.

“You don’t have to like him just because he’s famous,” I say. “Or because he’s your costar.”

“It’s not that I don’t
like
him. Like I said, he seems nice. It’s just that in movies he’s so sexy. I don’t find many guys that attractive, but even
I
understand the appeal. Like his role in
Call Me Yesterday
? When he’s all brooding and misunderstood? But today he was just kind of . . .”

“Oh, we totally understand,” Charlotte says.

“It’s the collapse of the fantasy,” I add.

Ava cocks her head.

“It applies to almost anything. You know that scene in
Call Me Yesterday
that takes place in the back room of the school?”

“Yeah?”

“You know how it’s super-dark and claustrophobic?”

She nods.

“That room actually had no ceiling and only two walls. It’s in a giant warehouse. Nothing claustrophobic about it. And you know that fight scene where Benjamin’s all shirtless and sweaty? I bet between takes he put on a robe and drank Perrier. You’ll see how it all happens. We work so hard to create an illusion and to make it seem real. But for us, the more you know about what happens behind the scenes, the more difficult it is to maintain the fantasy.”

“Does it spoil things a little?” she asks.

“You just have to make an effort to forget.”

“Which doesn’t work a lot of the time,” Charlotte says. “Watching a movie with Emi is like getting a tutorial on how films are made.
Look at that shot! They must be using natural light. That backdrop is so fake.
”

“I’m not
that
bad.”

“You’re pretty bad.”

“But when a movie is really good, it’s easy to forget.”

Charlotte nods. “That’s true.”

Ava closes her script and looks at the cover.

“I think our movie is going to be really good. Don’t you guys?”

I nod yes and this moment almost feels like a premonition. Here we are, in the room where we will shoot the first scenes, with the girl who will play Juniper working on her lines and the beginnings of the set in place. These portraits are everything I wanted them to be; I can already picture how they will look on Toby’s wall. And even though we still don’t have George’s house or the grocery store, even though I’ve been starting awake most nights worried about all I need to do, there is a calm in this room that assures me that we are exactly where we are meant to be.

Chapter Fifteen

Theo and I have appointments at five potential locations for George’s house.

The first one is infested with rats. The second has a terrible, unidentifiable smell and I end up coughing so hard that Theo says, “Let’s get out of here. Run for your life!” The third one has such cramped rooms that it would be impossible to fit everyone inside with our lights and the cameras. The fourth is too modern with high ceilings and stainless steel everywhere.

We are desperate by the time we pull up to the fifth.

We park and walk up to it. Paint is peeling off the walls of the house in thick strips, but we try to stay optimistic.

“I don’t think we could use it for the street-view shot,” I say.

“Nope,” Theo says. “No way.”

“But we could choose a different house for that.”

“Right. No big deal.”

A middle-aged woman pulls up in a dirty car and sits there for a moment, digging through a giant purse.

“You figure that’s her?” Theo asks.

“Probably,” I say, but she doesn’t look over at us or appear to be in any kind of hurry.

Eventually, though, she gets out of the car and crosses the street toward us.

“Patricia?” Theo asks. “Hello.”

“You have an accent. Are you legal to live here?” Patricia asks, scrutinizing his face.

“Yes, in fact, I am. But as I said on the phone, we’re only looking for a one-week rental for a film.”

She looks at me and then back to him.

“How old is she? I can’t rent to minors.”

I laugh but Theo tries his best to keep his composure even though this woman obviously suspects him of some statutory rape–immigration scandal.

“This is Emi. She is eighteen years old. But it wouldn’t matter anyway because she is not interested in renting the space. I would be renting it and only for a week to shoot a film.”

“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.”