The Prop Master's Letters

I found the first note on a Tuesday, twelve days before wrap, tucked into the inside pocket of a navy blazer I was letting out for the lead actor, who had apparently been eating very well on location. The paper was a scrap of script page, the margins still printed with dialogue nobody would ever say on camera, and the handwriting was Luis's, loopy and hurried and smudged with graphite the way his handwriting always is after a day of hauling crates and tagging furniture.

The note said, in full, "Your hands are the best thing in this whole building. Watched you pin a hem this morning and forgot what I came over here to ask you."

I read it four times, standing at my work table with a needle still in my mouth, and I will admit that my face went warm and my eyes went a little hot and I had to sit down on my stool for a minute. We have been married twenty-seven years, Luis and me, and we have worked on three films together before this one, and somewhere in those twenty-seven years we had let the notes and the teasing and the whole private language of ours get buried under schedules and budgets and a bathroom renovation that nearly killed us both. So there I was, a fifty-two year old woman holding a needle and a scrap of paper, grinning like I'd found money in an old coat.

You have to understand, the competition part came later, but the idea arrived right then, in that minute on the stool. I finished the blazer, because I am a professional, and then I went hunting.

The prop warehouse sits next to our workroom, a long echoing barn of shelves where Luis keeps everything from mock cell phones to a whole fake fireplace, and he keeps a battered teacup on the corner of his desk, the one he uses for coffee in the mornings even though it is technically inventory. I took the teacup home that night, wrote my reply on the back of a fabric swatch card, and returned it the next day nested inside the cup like the world's smallest secret.

The note said, "When you're concentrating, you hum. Low, off key, like a furnace thinking. I have loved that sound for thirty years, since the film festival in Torino where you argued with a projectionist about aspect ratios. I was twenty-three and you were twenty-two and you didn't notice me at all for two days. I noticed you plenty."

I signed it with a little drawn bird, because that's my thing, don't ask, and I put the cup back exactly where it lived, handle turned the same direction, and I spent the rest of the day feeling like someone passing notes in class, which is a ridiculous thing for a woman my age to feel and I recommend it highly.

***

It took him two days to answer, which I know was deliberate, because Luis is not a quick man when he wants to be and he is a very deliberate man when he is enjoying himself. The answer came in my sketchbook, sandwiched between two costume plates for the funeral scene, on paper torn from a legal pad.

"Caught you," it said. "Twice this week you've stared at me across the set. Wednesday during the rain scene, Friday during the breakup take. You think you're subtle. You are not subtle. You are a fifty-two year old woman with excellent taste staring across a soundstage at a prop master with gray in his beard, and I have never been happier at my job. Your move, Marjorie. The bird was a nice touch. You can't draw. I love it."

So he had me there, I had been staring, and I wasn't even really trying to hide it anymore, because there is something about a man in his fifties carrying a foam boulder across a set like it's made of glass that does things to a person, and I mean a person who has seen that same man carry actual furniture, actual heavy things, for three decades. There's history in watching a man be careful. That's all I'll say about that, for now, except that I read his note at lunch and laughed out loud and had to show nobody nothing, which is its own kind of fun.

My answer went into his toolbox, under the tray where he keeps the good screws he guards from the grips, and this one took me a while to write, because I decided, standing in my kitchen at eleven at night in my reading glasses, that if we were doing this, we were really doing this.

"Here is a confession," I wrote. "For about two weeks now I have been thinking about your mouth. Specifically your mouth on my neck, the spot under my left ear that you found on our honeymoon in Oaxaca and have somehow never forgotten in twenty-seven years. I think about it during the dailies. I think about it when you walk past my table. Wrap is twelve days away and I am counting, Luis. The kids are both away that first weekend and the house is ours. Just so we're clear."

I felt absolutely wicked leaving it there, I want you to know, like I was twenty-three, except with much better vocabulary and a fully specified calendar. The set dresser who shares the warehouse space with him has no idea what she walks past every day, and that is exactly how I like it.

***

His reply came the very next morning, which told me everything, because Luis answered within hours this time, and the note was waiting for me folded inside the costume bible, written on a full page of the actual script, scene forty-two, with all the dialogue crossed out in pencil.

The note was long, longer than the others, and I am going to treasure the paper until it crumbles, I mean that. He wrote about the green dress. We did a period piece six years ago, our second film together, and there was a dinner party scene where I had to be on set for a fitting emergency, and I was wearing, of all things, a dark green bias-cut gown from the thirties that we had built for the actress, and I had put it on to check the drape at the side seam, and apparently Luis walked into the workroom, stopped, and lost the power of speech entirely.

"I have thought about that dress maybe four hundred times," he wrote. "You stood at the mirror with pins in your mouth and the green fabric moved when you breathed and I had to turn around and walk back out of the room and stand in the hallway, needing a minute. You were forty-six and you were the most beautiful thing on that lot and I didn't say a word, because the timing was wrong and the kids were calling and there was never a right moment. I'm saying it now. I am fifty-three and I am saying it now. That dress. Your hands. The hum you make when you work. Wrap is twelve days away and I am counting too."

Well. What do you do with a man like that, after all these years. You marry him, if you're lucky, and apparently you also start a paper war on a low-budget romance shoot, and I sat there at my work table surrounded by muslin and thread and I read the note three times and then I got up and locked the workroom door, which I never do, and I did not do anything about it right then, because we were at work, but I planned a great deal.

I had one note left to write, and I knew exactly where it was going, and I knew exactly what it was going to say, and it was going to change the game entirely. The score, if you're keeping track, and I was keeping track, was two notes each, all compliments and confession, and the next one had to be the