one
FRIDAY
Despite having put extra effort into drying her hair, into taming her brows, into all the routines that had become more exhausting and more necessary in the recent terrible years, Sarah arrived early to the meeting. Looking around the aggressively charming room, she was overcome with a scrubbed-clean sensation that she couldn’t immediately identify. Sarah reminded herself that there was no reason for this surge of positive feeling, that she’d surely have heard something over e-mail or text if there were any real reason for it. But when Caroline arrived in a burst of clashing patterns, with her thick black hair upswept in a jade-green banana clip that looked improbably fashionable, Sarah recognized the feeling; it had been a while: hope.
“Oh, honey,” Caroline said, with an enviably unrestrained hug. “I can’t believe it’s been a year.”
“I know.” Sarah nodded. “I know.”
“It always goes so fast, doesn’t it?” Caroline sat and whipped out a pair of plum-colored cat-eye reading glasses, quickly scanned the menu, and placed it facedown.
This year, Sarah thought; nothing fast about it.
“So,” Caroline began, “I don’t think you’re actually interested in what you sent me.”
“I’m not?”
“No. I’m sorry but you’re not. That’s not where the fire is. But,” Caroline said meaningfully.
“There’s a but.”
“I expect the world of you and always will. You know that?”
Sarah nodded dutifully.
“I have a suggestion. Are you open to hearing it?”
“Of course,” Sarah said, exasperated. “Of course I am.”
The waiter appeared. She became flustered while ordering—“I’ll just have what she’s having”—as if she needed Caroline to see any more evidence of her inability to think clearly. And of course Caroline insisted on ordering a bottle of Sancerre. Sarah had originally loved Caroline’s penchant for daytime drinking, and at the outset it always sounded like a great idea, but Sarah always felt slightly paranoid after sharing a bottle with her, as if she’d spoken too candidly or else had said too little.
“You look so nervous,” Caroline said, as the waiter walked away. “You don’t need to look like that. Not with me.” Her mouth twisted like a little fist before offering a smile more practiced than all the smiles that had ever preceded it.
This lunch, Sarah realized, might be our last.
Caroline leaned forward. “I think you should revisit the other script.”
Sarah felt a pulsing in her temples. “I told you I couldn’t do that.”
Caroline nodded. “I know you did.”
“When I was working on that script, Caroline—it was as if I had no choice.”
“Exactly.” Caroline nodded. “That is what I’m saying. That’s how it read, even then, when it was so raw.”
“I still can’t believe I showed it to you. It was a mess.”
Caroline nodded. “It was.”
Sarah shrugged. “Even though it was a mess, I thought that script had a beginning, middle, and end. I didn’t realize that the story I was telling—that was just the beginning.”
“So, this is what I’m trying to tell you: You have perspective now. You know where it can go.”
“I know where it went. But I can’t write about it. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to. Not with this ending.”
When their salads arrived, Sarah made sure to take a few bites. The beets were too vinegary, the greens too spicy; she took several sips of wine.
Caroline shrugged. “You don’t need to commit to reality. The story can be whatever you want it to be. And maybe making a film about it—”
The wine suddenly tasted cloying; heat flushed Sarah’s arms, her face. She nearly spat it out.
Caroline touched the napkin to her mouth and held it there for a moment.
Then this woman of unshakable nerve, this person who had believed in Sarah when no one else could see her talent, her agent of over twenty years, her one remaining connection to a professional reality, closed her eyes before placing the napkin gently on the table. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
* * *
ON THE TRAIN BACK TO BROOKLYN, Sarah bit her nails down to the quick, after a summer of successfully growing them out. Never would she have imagined ending up as someone who rarely wrote more than an occasional fragment, or for whom the shame of not working was so familiar. She tried reminding herself that she still taught a class (Film Aesthetics 1 & 2) each semester at New York Film Academy and she sometimes returned to the screenplay idea she’d sent Caroline, but Sarah knew what working felt like and what it took out of her, and this was not it.
Nearly a decade ago she had promised Caroline a second screenplay. It was the reason for this annual lunch; every year, the Friday after Labor Day, they met to discuss her progress. She hadn’t any new screenplay to deliver, but she had sent five pages of notes and ideas about Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice, who breastfed her child against her mother’s wishes only to have her infant daughter reject her milk and then, after securing a wet nurse, decided to breastfeed the wet nurse’s son. Up until Sarah had sent the e-mail, the fragments of this story lived only in a document on her laptop entitled “third project,” as if Sarah were so entirely uncommitted to Queen Victoria’s forward-thinking and emotionally complicated daughter that she couldn’t even bother with a working title. Regardless of how polished or unpolished those pages were, a period film would be too expensive to produce even if she could call in some final favors with her stylist friend or get the wardrobe sponsored. She knew it was a nonstarter and yet somehow she’d sent it anyway.
Sarah had made one film, over twenty-five years ago. It had been lauded as strange and beautiful. She’d made this film quickly and cheaply, never imagining its success and certainly not imagining that it would be the best thing she’d ever do. She’d spent her youth writing stories and had made this one film out of a desire to escape and to conjure, but she couldn’t do either anymore.
To use one’s imagination for art or even for leisure: this seemed like the world’s greatest luxury.
Here was the thing she couldn’t get used to: she had only one story now. It was obvious to everyone who knew her.
She closed her eyes and tried to let these thoughts roll by, to shift her focus to something good. She’d felt real and true excitement a couple of months ago, hearing Kiki’s voice for the first time in eight years. Her old friend had left a voice message, then e-mailed within the hour. Both times she said she realized it had been years since they’d spoken, but she just had to tell Sarah and Matthew about the new arrival.
Copyright © 2020 by Joanna Hershon
