Page 12 of My Unscripted Life

I hope it’s not that one.

“Have you read the script?” Ruth comes bursting into the room with such force the door slams into the wall. Her braid is loose, her headset is askew, and she’s got a stack of papers almost as big as her head balanced on one hand. On top is the sketchbook, looking decidedly more mangled than when she handed it over earlier in the week.

I shake my head, and she says, “Read it. I’m going to start having you do some more stuff with placement on set, and I’d like you to have a picture of the full story. Look for any place where there’s a camera instruction to focus on specific items. Those are our responsibility. If you have questions,ask.”

My power of speech is gone. Despite her hard edges, I must have impressed her somehow. Getting more responsibility from Ruth feels big. Huge. The sheer number of instructions she just gave me, at least twice as many as usual, tells me that.

“Script’s in the red binder on the worktable. It doesn’t leave this room, you got me? I see that red binder anywhere out there, it’s your ass.” She narrows her eyes at me like an executioner just waiting to drop the ax, if only I’d give her a reason. I nod, careful not to “yes, ma’am” her.

I expect it to take me all day to read the script. It’s for a whole movie, after all, but it takes me only the better part of an hour. Movie scripts, it turns out, aren’t that long and are mostly filled with white space, the dialogue squished into a column running down the middle of each page. Directions for lights and cameras and props and costumes run across the entire page, but even those are fairly brief. There’s so much left unsaid, so much up for grabs. It’s like a puzzle made up entirely of edge pieces, and the director gets to fill in the middle. I can see why Benny wants to do it. It seems fun and exciting to be able to make all that up and shape the story.

The movie is calledJust One Color,and it’s about a poor young graffiti artist named Jonas (played by Milo) who finds himself thrust into the elite art world when a photo of one of his murals goes viral. There’s a romance plot line, where Jonas falls for the daughter of an art dealer who subsequently screws him out of his newest piece. I flip back to the cast list at the front of the binder to see who’s playing Kass, the art dealer’s daughter, but the space is blank. The other two principal cast members are Paul Anderson and Gillian Forsyth. They’re both indie actors, famous enough that if you saw one of them in the grocery store you’d probably whisper to your friend,Hey, isn’t that the actor from that movie?But you might not be able to produce his or her name. Still, I can’t help getting excited. Paul was in that movie where he played an aide to the president of France, and he’s pretty smokin’ if you’re into middle-aged hipster dudes with salt-and-pepper hair. Gillian has mostly done movies about women having various midlife crises. There was the one where she was a single mom, and one where she was a federal judge, and one where she hunted space aliens and fell in love with her boss. The rest of the cast is listed there, though, mostly older indie actors whose names I recognize but whose faces I can’t come up with. I make a mental note to do some Internet searching so I don’t embarrass myself should I run into them around set.

Ruth appears in the prop room, a stack of eight-by-twelve blank canvases in her arms. She dumps them on the work table next to the red binder and the sketchbook.

“I need you to fill these in. Scene seventeen.” She nods at the script binder.

“Fill them in withwhat?”

Ruth whips out a small spiral-bound notebook from her back pocket and flips through until she finds what she’s looking for. She reads from her notes. “Abstract,” she says. That’s all. Justabstract.Gee, and I was worried she’d be vague about it. “Paint and supplies in the back. Let me know if you need something that’s not there.”

I place one of the blank canvases on the easel and stare at it, but I stall out right away. My brain is devoid of all thought. I don’t think I could evenspell“abstract” if I had to, much less produce it. Suddenly the enormity of where I am and what I’m doing comes crashing over me. In the last five days I’ve been catapulted into an entirely different world with its own customs and language. I was flying completely by the seat of my pants, assigned to pack boxes…and now I’m apparently a professional artist. At my job. On set.What is life?

I can feel my heart beating hard and my palms starting to sweat, so I quickly close my eyes and focus on my breathing. I channel Naz and her calm voice from that time she made me do sun salutations with her out on our front lawn. My muscles were screaming and sweat was pouring down my face, but if I just focused on her voice, I found myself sinking into downward dog. So I try to recapture that now.

I breathe in deep, filling my diaphragm like a balloon, then release and relax. Breathe in, fill up, release, relax. I run through it a few times until I feel my heart slow from a sprint to something more like a fast jog. I let my thoughts wander back to my first day on the job. It was only a few days ago, but it feels like a few weeks. Already my life is so different from what it was when Rob’s car pulled up in front of the Coffee Cup. I feel the weight of the lanyard on the back of my neck. I smell the sawdust floating around the empty warehouse. I hear the muted sound of a buzz saw working away in the next room. I see the man hanging the broken chandelier inside the giant dollhouse that first day.

I open my eyes and attack my paints. I grab all the cool, dark colors from the case and start squeezing them onto the palette, mixing with the brushes. Then I turn back to the blank canvas and take one more deep breath.

It feels like time disappears in the span of that breath, and before I know it I’m staring at four finished canvases with a fifth on the easel. There’s paint streaked up and down my forearms and caking my hands. At some point I’d ditched the brushes and started using my fingers for a rougher, less refined look. Inspired by the attic set they’re building just outside the door, I finger-painted a crude version of the peeling wallpaper pattern I caught a glimpse of through the opening. On the floor next to it is a canvas painted midnight blue with swooshes and swirls of beige, an interpretation of the sawdust floating through the warehouse next door. Next to that are three more, each covered in paint and definitely abstract.

“Abstract expressionism. Cool.”

I recognize the voice immediately, but it’s still hard to believe it’s real and talking to me, so I turn to confirm. Yup, standing there in a pair of dark skinny jeans and a tissue-thin gray V-neck is Milo Ritter. His Ray-Bans are tucked into the V of his collar, pulling the shirt down just enough to give me a glimpse of the tan, taut skin of his chest. I feel like a frat boy staring like that, so I force my eyes to go anywhere but his chest.Focus on the words,I tell myself.

“It’s actually more abstractimpressionism,” I say.

He cocks his head at me, an unasked question on his face, and I send a silent thank-you to Mrs. Fisher for her insistence on the study of art history. I continue, “Abstractexpressionism is devoid of representation, like Jackson Pollock, but this is meant to be slightly representational, hence abstractimpressionism.”

Milo stares at the canvases, so I step back and try to take them in with his eyes. It’s something Mrs. Fisher always encourages. When you’re creating something, it’s really easy to just bein it,but it’s important to try to see it how an outsider would, because 99 percent of the time art is viewed without the artist standing there.If your art requires an explanation, it’s not done,she always says.

“You sound like a MoMA docent,” he says. I feel like he’s mocking me, but I choose to ignore it.

“I’ve never been,” I reply.

“To MoMA?”

“Yeah. I mean no,” I say. This is the longest conversation we’ve ever had, and I’m still having trouble speaking. I take a beat, then try again. “I haven’t even been to New York.”

“Lucky,” he says. His eyes are still on my paintings, but I can see he’s not really looking at them now. His thoughts are somewhere else.

“Lucky? Seriously?”

He snaps out of whatever brain bubble he was trapped in. He turns his gaze to me, and his bright blue eyes nearly knock me over like they have magnetic properties. “What, you don’t like it here?” he asks.

“I like it fine, but it’s not New York. Or Chicago. Or Los Angeles. It’s not even Atlanta or Nashville. It’s quiet. And boring. Did I mention boring? It’s boring.”

“There’s something to be said for quiet and boring. It must be nice to be anonymous.”

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