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a bowl against his hip and mixing the pancake batter with a large wooden spoon, “so I didn’t get too worked up about it because I figured that I must have been led to L.A. for something else.”
    “Which was?”
    “Haven’t figured that out yet. But at the time, I thought it was because I was supposed to meet the woman who’d been hired to direct the film.”
    “Enter the woman,” Kerri said. “I knew it. And her name?”
    “Why do you want to know this?”
    “Because you’re interesting. Besides, I did all the talking last night.”
    “You did not.”
    “I did. I blabbed on and on and you were too polite to tell me to shut up already.”
    “Not true. I enjoyed hearing about your life.”
    “So let me enjoy hearing about yours. The director’s name was…?”
    “Megan.”
    “Was she pretty?”
    “Yes. She was pretty.” He and Megan had hit it off immediately. Both dreamers with working-class backgrounds—she from Long Island, New York, he from a small town in western Pennsylvania—they had plans of hitting the big-time. After moving in together, it soon became apparent that two dreamers in one household was at least one too many. “Someone needed a real job,” he said, “and Megan decided that it should be her because she needed a whole production company with access to millions of dollars to get a decent shot as a director while I only needed my laptop and time.” Sooner or later, Megan was sure, Seth was bound to write something Hollywood wanted to buy and then they’d be in the door. She took a job in the human resources department of a film company, which allowed her to make connections in the business while still earning a paycheck.
    Seth put the batter aside and laid two frying pans, one large and one small, on the stove. Kerri listened intently as he told her how hard he’d worked cranking out script after script, as well as treatments for film and television and how he’d learned to reduce an entire movie down to a logline or a one-minute pitch. “Creating the stuff was just the first step. Then you had to get the right people to read it or at least listen to the pitches. We didn’t know the right people. So Megan suggested that we start crashing parties to meet them. She was good at working the room, finding out who could and couldn’t open doors. I wasn’t. I hated it. It was awful. I did get some meetings though and had a couple close calls, but like the lottery, a ticket is worth millions or nothing at all. I was trying so hard to come up with the right number that my writing was turning to shit. Living in the city was expensive and Megan wasn’t making much. Financially, we were barely surviving. It was tough. Put a huge strain on our relationship. By the time we were actually getting invited to the occasional networking party, I was pretty discouraged and we weren’t getting along at all. I just couldn’t do the parties anymore.”
    “Why didn’t she go to these parties by herself?”
    “She did. And a few months later, she met a rich producer who was looking for a young, unknown director to do a movie in Barcelona.”
    “Did she get it?”
    “Eventually,” Seth told Kerri as she hopped off of the stool and poured herself another cup of coffee. “At first, she figured he was just hitting on her. I mean, who is going to hire an HR girl to direct his film? She called him ‘the Eye Doctor’ because every sentence out of his mouth started with ‘I’ and went on to tell an anecdote starring himself and some famous actor or director. This was exactly the kind of guy that made those parties unbearable for me.”
    “Was he hitting on her?”
    “Of course. We were living on soup and crackers and he was taking her out to L.A.’s trendiest restaurants. Business dinners, of course.”
    “Except they weren’t.”
    “Hell, no. I told her what he was up to, but she didn’t believe it or didn’t want to believe it. This was her big shot. Her once-in-a-lifetime