From Jennie Nash’s work in progress….
Henry came early to the writer’s room, which should have been my first clue that something was about to change in the narrative of our lives. In seven years of collaborating on a TV show the world had chosen to love, he had never been early. Not once. He was fiercely committed to having breakfast with his wife and two daughters every day, and since the show was ours – his and mine – he could do whatever he wanted.
The day he was early, that is precisely what he was there to announce: what he wanted.
“Hey,” he said, breezing into the room.
I looked up from my laptop and my bowl of oatmeal. I stood up and moved towards him, a surge of adrenalin pumping through my veins. I could tell from the look on his face – the reluctant half smile, the crease on his forehead – that he was in some kind of pain, and my instinct was to throw my arms around him, to soothe him. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
He laughed and dumped his bag on a chair. “Is it that obvious?”
I looked at the big clock on the wall. “It’s 7 am.”
He shrugged. “I wanted to talk to you before everyone else showed up.”
“What’s wrong?” I repeated, and already my mind was spinning possibilities. That is the particular affliction of an imaginative mind – the ability to imagine in excruciating detail the myriad tragedies possible in any given moment. He was sick – late stage pancreatic cancer; the actor we had landed to play Romeo had been killed – car accident in Malibu at dusk; the advertisers who had purchased the entire season to showcase a campaign for celebrity-designed T-shirts had pulled their support due to some egregious behavior from our ruthless producer.
“I met with Jason Leeds yesterday,” he said.
“HBO Jason Leeds?” Now I imagined fresh glories, deciding that what was wrong with Henry was, in fact, that something good had happened. We were being tapped to swoop in and fix a movie script everyone had deemed unfixable – the dream team! -- or we were being offered the chance to write a movie of our own for some new initiate they had.
“That’s the one,” he said. “He offered me a job. It’s a new initiative – original feature length programming, my own feature.”
It took a moment for those words to sort themselves out in my mind. “He offered you a job?” I asked, to clarify.
Henry nodded and shrugged again, a sort of “what’s a guy to do” shrug, and I felt something in my gut give way, like fabric ripping, like flesh tearing.I searched Henry’s face and saw there the truth of what he had just said – the reason for the pain: this was the end of our golden run. He was leaving me.
“It’s a huge opportunity, Ruby. I couldn’t say no.”
You could have, I thought. You could have said, “Not without Ruby.”
“When?” I asked.
He waved his arm through the air of the room where we had spun so many stories, where we had lived out so many lives, and what he clearly meant was now, right now, in the crucial early days when our new season was taking shape.
“He said I could take a few weeks, but he wants it soon.”
I wanted to cry out, to swear, to stamp my feet like a child. I wanted to beg, to say, please no, to say, why now?to ask, “Was it something I did? Was it something I said? Is there anything I can do to make you change your mind?” I wanted to tell him I was nothing without him, that this would kill me. All these thoughts sounded so much like a jilted lover, however, that even I could recognize the disconnect in giving them voice.
“You really think you can pull it off?” I asked, which was, on the surface, a question about time management, about the limits of creative energy, but what I was really wondering was whether he thought he could pull it off without me. The way we normally wrote was THEIR PROCESS TK FROM OTHER PAGES
To my surprise, he laughed – a self-effacing laugh – and he said the thing I had been thinking. “I’m not sure,” he said, and lifted his eyes to look straight into mine. “I’m not sure I can do it without you.” He took a deep breath and blew it out as if were gearing up for a fight. “But I need to try.”
I nodded. I felt the same doubt about not being able to write without him, but the difference was that I didn’t need to prove it. I would have gone on working the way we had been working until this show ended, and the next one, and the next.
I continued to try to be professional and business-like. “When do you plan to tell everyone?”
He stepped towards me now, and put his hand on my forearm. I felt the heat of it, the familiarity of it, the comfort of it. Henry had once been my lover. I had once almost married him. In that moment when he touched me, I felt that whole history. “You’re not mad?” he asked.
Now I shrugged – a deliberate attempt to pretend that I didn’t care. “Every golden run has to come to an end,” I said. [ACTUAL SHAKESPEARE QUOTE TK]
He smiled. “Macbeth. A story of betrayal.”
“If the quote fits…”
He deflected by barb. “Hey -- I had a new idea,” he said, “For the final season.”
“We don’t need a new idea. We have Gatsby. We were going to get to see him live and fight it out for Daisy.”
“Gatsby would be good, but this is better.”
“Better than Gatsby.”
“Romeo and Juliet.”
I laughed. “We decided we would never do something so obvious. Star crossed lovers?”
“Maybe to Shakespeare,” he said, “But not to us. Plot Twist does stories about what happens instead of what happened, right? So instead of dying, they live. And life never goes as well as you think it’s going to in the heat of falling in love. I mean, love always somehow ends up at Costco.”
“Love ends up at Costco, Henry? What kind of a worldview is that?”
“Love gets pedestrian, love gets to be about who does the dishes and who walks the dog.”
“So what, they get married and then Romeo’s going to get restless, have an affair and break Juliet’s heart so much she kills him?”
He clapped his hands, stepped towards me and kissed me on the check. “And that is why I love you,” he said. “I say boo and you see a whole story unfurl.”
“Henry, I wasn’t serious.”
“No, it’s so good. I mean, he’s what, seventeen, eighteen? He’s a stud, right? Under the thumb of his dad? Sure, Juliet’s a catch now – but what if she got pregnant. Now she’s hormonal and demanding...and he’s thinking, what the fuck did I get myself into?”
“Seriously, Henry? That’s your view of women and pregnancy? The father of two girls? What would Linda say?”
“This is a safe space,” he said, pointing to a poster on the wall of our writing room that said as much. “What’s said in this room stays in this room. I was just brainstorming.”
“Well it would never work. They slept together one night,” I said. “The nurse outside the door standing guard. It’s too big a coincidence to get pregnant after one night.”
“Aha!” Henry said, “But I looked it up. The original line in Shakespeare is TK. They slept together for three months. It was plenty of time to slip up.”
“You really want to do Romeo and Juliet?”
“Wouldn’t it be a great way to go out? Just imagine how much the fanbase will love this. They’ll go nuts trying to out-think us, especially if they know it’s the last season.”
I wanted to hate him, but I smiled. He sounded exactly the way he had when he had first proposed we write together – infectious, filled with hope, consumed with a belief that he could only create something worthwhile if he created it with me.
“Is that why Jason Leeds wanted you, Henry? Because of your social media savvy? The way you’re always thinking about the fans? I thought you said it was about your writing.”
“Forget about all that, Ruby,” he said, “We have one last season to write, twelve shows. Let’s kill it. What do you say?”
I looked out the window, to where cars were starting to arrive in the parking lot, to where the sun was shining as it always did in LA, to a place outside this room where love stories weren’t so intricately contrived. I wanted to say, “Fuck you,” and walk out and let him figure out how to end our show. But I could never let him down that way.
“Sure,” I said, “Okay. Yes. I’m in.”
He was a foot taller than me – a big man, with big hands. He came over and enveloped me in his arms. He kissed the top of my head. “Thank you,” he said.
I forced myself to keep breathing. I forced myself to speak. What would I do if I couldn’t write with Henry? If I couldn’t spend my days with Henry? BRING IN PASSAGE ABOUT HIS BEING THE CENTER OF HER LIFE TK.
Come on,” he said, “We better go tell Sharon before the rest of the team gets here.”