Tribute

of her own bathroom. No playback from a recording studio or soundstage had ever pleased her more.
    WHEN FORD OPENED THE DOOR, Cilla held out the traveling bottle of cabernet. He took it, held it up and estimated there was nearly half a bottle left.
    “You lush.”
    “I know. It’s a problem. So how about a drink before we go scout out this gym?”
    “Sure.”
    She’d left her hair down, he noted, so that it spilled, ruler straight, inches past her shoulders. Her scent brought a quick, vivid sensory memory of the night-blooming jasmine that rioted outside his grandmother’s house in Georgia.
    “You look good.”
    “I feel good. I bought three toilets today.”
    “Well, that certainly deserves a drink.”
    “I picked out bathroom tile,” she continued as she followed him back to the kitchen, “cabinet knobs, light fixtures and a tub. A really wonderful classic slipper-style claw-foot tub. This is a big day. And I’m thinking of going Deco in the master bath.”
    “Deco?”
    “I saw this fabulous sink today, and I thought, yeah, that’s it. I could do a lot of chrome and pale blue glass in there. Black-and-white tiles— or maybe black and silver. A little metallic punch. Jazzy, retro. Indulgent. You’d be tempted to wear a silk robe with marabou feathers.”
    “I always am. As I’ve always wondered what is a marabou, and why does it have feathers?”
    “I don’t know, but I may buy that robe just to hang in there and finish it off. It’s going to rock.”
    “All this from a sink?” He handed her a glass of wine.
    “That’s how it usually works for me. I’ll see a piece, and it gives a tug, so I can see how the rest of the room might work around it. Anyway.” She lifted her glass in toast. “I had a good day. How about you?”
    She sparkled, he thought. A trip to Home Depot, or wherever she’d been, and she sparkled like sunlight. “Well, I didn’t buy any toilets, but I can’t complain. I’ve got a good handle on the book, the story line, and managed to put a lot of it on paper.” He studied her as he sipped. “I guess I understand your sink, after all. I saw you, you gave a tug. And the rest works around you.”
    “Can I read it?”
    “Sure. Once I get it smoothed out some.”
    “That’s awfully normal and untemperamental. Most of the writers I’ve known fall into two camps. The ones who plead for you to read every word as it’s written, and the ones who’d put out your eyes with a shrimp fork if you glimpsed a page of unpolished work.”
    “I bet most of the writers you’ve known are in Hollywood.”
    She considered a moment. “Your point,” she conceded. “When I was acting, script pages could come flying at you while you were shooting the scene. I actually liked it that way. More spontaneous, keeps the energy up. But I used to think, how hard can it be? You just put the idea down in words on paper. I found out how hard it can be when I started to write a screenplay.”
    “You wrote a screenplay?”
    “Started to write. About a woman who grows up in the business—an insider’s view—the rise and the fall, the scrambling, the triumphs and humiliations. Write what you know, I thought, and boy, did I know. I only got about ten pages in.”
    “Why did you stop?”
    “I failed to factor in one little element. I can’t write.” She laughed, shook back her hair. “Reading a million scripts doesn’t mean you can write one. Even a bad one. And since of that million scripts I’ve read, I’ve read about nine hundred thousand bad ones, I knew a stinker. With acting, I had to believe—not make believe, but believe. Janet Hardy’s Number One Rule. It struck me it’s the same with writing. And I couldn’t write so I could believe. You do.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I could see it when you started telling me about this new idea, about this new character. And it shows in your work, the words and the art.”
    He pointed at her. “You read the book.”
    “I did. I confess I intended to flip through it, get the gist so I wouldn’t fail the quiz if and when you asked me about it. But I got caught up. Your Seeker is flawed and dark and human. Even when he’s in superhero mode, his humanity, his wounds show through. I guess that’s the point.”
    “You’d guess right. You just earned yourself another drink.”
    “Better not.” She put a hand over her glass when he reached for the wine. “Maybe later, over dinner. After you show me the gym. You said it was