Late Blooming Desire

Beverly had driven twenty miles of freeway and then past the address twice before she worked up the nerve to park. The building looked like nothing from the street, just a gray warehouse off a cracked LA sidewalk, with a roll-up door and a hand-painted sign that said PARKING IN REAR ONLY. Her Hyundai hatchback sat in the rear lot between a catering van and a big black SUV with tinted windows, and she sat in the driver's seat for a good five minutes with her hands on the wheel, asking herself what exactly she thought she was doing.

She was sixty-three years old. She had retired from nursing in March, after thirty-eight years of it, most of the last decade spent in the oncology ward where she learned to hold hands and not flinch at anything. She had a condo in Pasadena, a cat named Aly, and a sister in Sacramento who called every Sunday. None of that explained why she was here.

What explained it was Esme. Esme Nakamura, who she had met at twenty-one in a dorm at UCLA, back when Beverly was a serious pre-nursing student with a poster of whales over her bed and a hopeless, silent crush on the girl down the hall. Esme had been loud and funny and completely unafraid, the kind of person who wore what she wanted and said what she thought. Beverly had admired her from across the common room for two years and never once worked up the guts to say so. Then graduation came, and life came, and forty years came, and somehow last month Beverly had found her name on the internet, attached to a small film company, and had sent an email at eleven at night saying, more or less, do you remember me, I would love to see you.

Esme had written back within a day. Beverly! Of course I remember you. Come by the set any Saturday, I'm shooting all month. She had put a little winking face at the end of it, which Beverly had stared at for an embarrassing length of time.

So here she was, Saturday, June the fourteenth, in a warehouse in Van Nuys, wearing the blouse and skirt she had bought for her retirement dinner and carrying a tin of lemon bars she had baked at five in the morning out of pure nerves. She locked the car, checked the lock twice, and walked toward the door.

The inside of the building was a whole other world. The air was thick with perfume and warm, and the lights were so bright she squinted. Someone had built a fake hotel room right there on the concrete floor, four walls and a big bed and two lamps and a door with a brass number 7 screwed to it, and cables ran everywhere across the ground like vines. A woman with a clipboard looked up from a folding chair.

"I'm here to see Esme," Beverly said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. "I'm Beverly. She's expecting me."

"Bev!" The voice came from across the room, deep and delighted, and there she was. Esme Nakamura, sixty-two years old, silver-streaked hair cut short, in loose black pants and a flowing shirt, coming around the fake hotel room with her arms already open. She looked exactly like herself. Older, sure, but so was everybody, and the aliveness in her face had not aged a day.

Beverly let herself be hugged. Esme smelled like citrus and something smokier under it, and she squeezed hard and rocked her side to side, laughing.

"You look incredible," Esme said, holding her at arm's length. "Forty years of terrorizing me in my dreams and you show up looking like this."

"You do not terrorize my dreams," Beverly said, and then felt her face go hot, because that had come out wrong, or maybe exactly right. "Well. Anyway. I brought lemon bars."

Esme took the tin and peeked under the lid like a kid. "You baked. You still bake. Oh, this is going to be a good day." She tucked the tin on the clipboard woman's chair and took Beverly by the elbow. "Come on. Let me show you around before you bolt. You look like you might bolt."

"I might," Beverly admitted, and Esme laughed again, that same rolling laugh from the dorm hallway, and steered her toward the set.

The tour was short, since the whole operation was one room and a hallway of gear, but Esme gave it with real pride. She pointed out the lighting rig, the fake window with its painted city view, the wall of equipment cases with taped labels. She explained that she had been doing this since she was twenty-five, starting as a production assistant and worked her way up, that she ran a small company now with four releases a year and a crew she trusted with her life.

"I always figured you for something dramatic," Beverly said. "I just never guessed this."

"Nobody guesses this." Esme waved a hand at the fake hotel room. "My mother guessed Vegas. She was closer than most."

Two men were near the set. One sat in a director's chair with a script on his knee, a broad fellow around forty-five in sweatpants and a robe, sipping from a big water bottle. The other stood behind a camera on a tripod, younger, maybe forty, with headphones around his neck, checking something on a small monitor.

"Beverly, this is Arnie, our lead man today, and Daniel on camera. Guys, this is an old friend from college, so be on your best behavior, which Arnie means you especially."

Arnie stood and shook her hand, warm and polite, and said it was nice to meet her, and asked if she was an actress, and when she said gracious no, just a retired nurse, he told her his mother had been a nurse and it was the hardest job on earth. Daniel nodded at her from behind the camera and went back to his monitor. They both seemed entirely ordinary, which was oddly reassuring, like finding out a magician has a day job.

"They're nice boys," Esme said, walking her toward a row of folding chairs set just off to the side of the set. "Sit here. We're about to block a scene. You get the star treatment."

"I don't want to be in the way."

"Bev. You drove here with baked goods. You are never in the way."

So Beverly sat with her purse in her lap like she was at a school recital, and Esme went off to the set, and the room shifted into a kind of quiet bustle. Daniel checked the monitor. Arnie shed the robe and folded it over his chair, which Beverly thought was charmingly tidy, and then he stood on his mark in the doorway of the fake hotel room, and Esme called out some direction about intention, and the rehearsal began.

It was not what Beverly had braced for. There was no scene as such yet, just Arnie knocking on the fake door, entering, setting down a briefcase, sitting on the bed, rehearsing the little human moments before anything else. Esme stopped him twice to ask why he sat down so fast, and Arnie thought about it, and did it slower, and Beverly found herself weirdly absorbed. It was like watching surgery from the gallery, a procedure she knew nothing about but could not stop tracking.

Then Esme said, "Okay, the actress comes out of the bathroom in ten, so let's run the middle portion once, clothed, just the physicality," and Beverly understood with a small electric jolt what portion was coming.

Arnie lay back on the made bed, and Esme directed him with a flat, workmanlike calm. Chin this way. Hand there, not there. Weight off her hair when she gets here. And Arnie did it all, and it was clinical and it was choreographed and it should have been nothing.

It was not nothing. Beverly sat with her purse in her lap and felt warmth climb her neck. She was looking at a naked-shouldered man nearly twenty years her junior arranging himself on a bed under bright lights, and her body, which had been politely dormant since her divorce nine years ago, sat up and paid attention. She crossed her ankles and looked at the floor and then looked back up, because she was sixty-three, and she had earned the right to look at whatever she wanted to look at.

She thought about the dorm common room, twenty-one years old, pretending to read while she watched Esme argue happily about movies with everybody. All those hours of watching without letting herself watch. Here she was doing it openly, in a warehouse in Van Nuys, and nobody minded, and Esme kept glancing over between directions with a little smile like she knew exactly what she had invited and why.

Arnie ran the blocking again. Daniel murmured something about the light on the pillow and adjusted a lamp. The catering van outside beeped as it parked. The whole thing was so ordinary and so strange and so warm all at once that Beverly had to press her lips together to keep from grinning like a fool.

Esme called a break and came over, dropping into the folding chair beside her with a satisfied sigh. She looked at Beverly's face, and her eyes were sharp and pleased.

"So," she said. "Still deciding whether to bolt?"

Beverly laughed, a little too loudly, and said no, of course not, she was fine, and Esme looked at her with that same expression she'd had across the dorm common room forty years ago, the one that said she could see straight through any sentence Beverly constructed. It was unnerving and wonderful in equal measure. Some things survived four decades apparently.

"I'm fine," Beverly said again, softer, and Esme reached over and patted her knee.

"Sure you are. You've crossed your ankles so tight they're fused." Esme took a sip from her own water bottle and looked out at the set, where Arnie was re-folding the robe he'd already folded. "You know, I had a whole speech prepared for today. About how it's fine to just watch, no pressure, the chairs are comfortable, the lemon bars smelled amazing by the way. But then I watched you watching us, and I thought, well. Maybe I should at least mention the other door."

"What other door?" Beverly asked, and her voice came out smaller than she intended.

Esme turned in the folding chair to face her. She kept her voice low, under the hum of the equipment, though nobody was listening anyway. Arnie was in the bathroom now, presumably putting the robe back on, and Daniel was fiddling with a cable. "Some directors like observers. I like participants, when the participant actually wants it. Not for the camera, Bev. The camera wouldn't even be on. I mean for you. If there's something you've been curious about, this is a strange little factory where curiosity gets taken seriously."

Beverly stared at her. The warehouse air, thick with somebody's perfume and the coffee smell from the folding table, seemed to press gently on her chest. "You're asking me to..."

"I'm asking you nothing. I'm telling you the option exists." Esme's eyes were kind and completely serious. "You say no, we never speak of it again, and you get the star treatment from your chair, and Daniel makes you coffee, and I interrogate you about Aly. You say maybe, and we talk about what maybe means. Those are the doors."

Beverly looked down at her purse. The zipper was slightly open and she could see the corner of her reading glasses in there, the ones with the beaded chain her sister had sent from Sacramento, and that absurd domestic detail seemed to anchor her somehow. She was a retired nurse. She had spent thirty-eight years around bodies, most of them at the end of their stories, in the oncology ward, and she had never once flinched at any of them. It seemed ridiculous that her own should frighten her now.

"I've been curious," she heard herself say, "about a great many things. For a very long time."

"Tell me one," Esme said.

And Beverly, sixty-three years old, sitting in a folding chair in Van Nuys with flour still somehow under one fingernail from the lemon bars she'd baked at five in the morning, told her. She kept her voice down. It took a while, because she had never said any of it out loud, not to her ex-husband, not to anybody, and the sentences came out crooked and needed rearranging. Esme listened without interrupting once, which Beverly suspected was a professional skill of hers, and when Beverly finally ran out, Esme nodded slowly, like a doctor confirming a diagnosis she'd already suspected.

"Okay," Esme said. "Yes. We can do that. Gently. Today, if you want, with Arnie, who is the gentlest man in this industry and will follow my lead exactly. Or not today. Or a different day. There's no schedule here."

Beverly's heart was behaving disgracefully. She made herself breathe the way she'd taught anxious patients to breathe, four in, hold, six out. "Today," she said. "Before I lose my nerve. I drove twenty miles of freeway and I brought baked goods and if I go home without doing the scary thing I'll be furious at myself by Sunday."

Esme smiled, and it changed her whole face, and Beverly felt twenty-one again for one dangerous second.

* * *

The next twenty minutes were the strangest of Beverly's life, and she had once helped hold down a man in the ER who thought he was being abducted. Esme explained everything as she went, in that same flat workmanlike calm she'd used on Arnie. The actress had agreed to sit the scene out today, this being a small company with four releases a year and no desperation in it. Arnie put the robe back on, which Beverly found hilarious given the circumstances, and came over and shook her hand again and told her, sincerely, that it was an honor, and Beverly told him his mother was right about nursing, and they were both being so polite that Daniel glanced over from his monitor with an expression of quiet amusement.

Then Esme took her by the hand.

They walked onto the set, onto the fake hotel room carpet that smelled faintly of dust and lavender spray, and Esme sat her down on the edge of the bed and crouched in front of her so they were eye to eye.