How to End a Love Story(13)
“Yeah.” Grant clears his throat. “Be vulnerable. If I don’t see each and every one of you cry before this room is over, you’re fired.”
That gets a laugh, which she finds surprising. Does he even have that kind of authority around here? He has the ear of the showrunner, which counts for something. But then, so does Helen.
She should have said something first, when she had the chance.
Grant glances at her for a fraction of a second and she feels a creeping warmth flushing up the side of her neck. It lasts even after he redirects his attention to the rest of the room.
“No, but honestly”—he grins in that friendly, winning way he has—“I feel lucky to be making art with all of you. Which sounds lofty, but that’s what we’re doing here, so I’ll tell you my darkest secret.”
Helen’s throat seems to constrict as she stares at the side of his head.
“Which is that when I was nineteen, I had a sex dream about my mother, and my therapist told me that’s very normal.”
Helen blinks. What?
Nicole cackles, Saskia bursts into embarrassed laughter, and Helen clocks Suraya giving Grant a subtle, smiling nod of approval.
“Well, that makes me feel better about myself,” the youngest male writer—Owen—drawls. “Is it my turn? My darkest secret is . . . hm, how deep are we getting here? Like ‘I hate my brother’s wife’ deep?”
Owen launches into a story about his older brother’s wedding weekend and Helen starts mentally counting down how many people have to go before they get to her. This spontaneous bonding exercise seems to be happening only at the whim of Grant Shepard. Surely if it was actually necessary, Suraya would have started it?
Helen isn’t even sure what qualifies as a dark secret. She’s reminded of all the times she’s been a silent participant in excruciating group conversations that never seem to go well for her. She always ends up waiting too long for a natural point to interject, and when she finally speaks, it’s usually something she can instantly tell was the wrong thing to say—she’s overshared, or undershared, or asked a follow-up question that’s too probing when she only meant to be polite.
The married-couple writing team—Tom and Eve—jointly tell a story about Tom having a one-night stand with a former child actress who Eve had grown up obsessed with, and how they ran into her while on their first date, years later.
Helen chances a look at Suraya. The showrunner is nodding and laughing. Helen tries to school her features into a fun, I’m actively listening expression.
“Can we address the fact that you definitely wanted to fuck me more after you found out?” Tom asks with a raised brow.
“Sometimes I picture you guys together and it’s hot to me, I’m sorry,” Eve says.
Suraya interjects with an anecdote next, because they’ve reminded her about a time her partner once pissed her off so much, she almost walked out on their then-three-year-old daughter.
Helen feels a prickling sensation at the side of her face and knows that Grant is watching her. She tries to affect a this doesn’t bother me posture, propping up her elbow, resting her chin in her hand, and resolutely not looking at him. She thinks she hears a short ha of air from his general direction.
By the time they get back around to Helen, the room seems to be buzzing with the energy of newly discovered inside jokes, and she tries not to feel like she’s at a disadvantage, going last.
“I don’t know if I have any dark secrets,” Helen starts.
“That’s okay, we’ve spent enough time procrastinating,” Suraya says, and turns to the giant, six-foot-wide glass dry-erase board on the wall. “Let’s talk about our show.”
Helen instantly feels both relieved and slighted.
Suraya stands and scribbles courtyard, unearthing secret box at the top left corner of the dry-erase board, then adds courtyard, burying secrets + a body at the bottom right corner.
Then she turns to the room and says, “Well, what happens in the middle?”
And they start talking about whose body (in the books, it’s a teacher) and how did they die and the young female writer with cool eyeliner—Nicole—raises her hand and tells a story about her least favorite grandmother’s death and somehow they’re back on the dark secrets train and Helen thinks longingly of the bar in Midtown where she could be sipping a martini instead.
Grant reminds himself he did try to warn her, over their lunch and in his general address to the room—that polite, serious conversation had very little use in a writers room. He watches as Helen’s face flushes with distinctly East Coast embarrassment at a story he’s certain Nicole has told at least a dozen times to complete strangers before.
This is the biggest difference between his interactions in LA and his interactions with old friends in Dunollie, New Jersey. He’s spent most of his adult life in a city where erring on the side of blistering vulnerability is professionally rewarded—every working screenwriter he knows has an arsenal of three or four stories that make them sound like terrible people, like they’re confessing dark secrets, when really, they cost next to nothing to reveal.
Grant finds the moments he enjoys the most in a writers room often come after everyone has run through their personal arsenal of stories. It happens after a few days, sometimes a few weeks if the room skews older, and there’s always a bubble of quiet after the laughter from the last well-exhausted story dies down.