The Right Intention

Charlotte had an artistic eye and she loved nothing more than seeing her work come to life on screen.  She was an art director in the Golden Age of Cinema, the best at what she did, and this she knew.  William, her apprentice, perhaps just as intellectually capable, but certainly inferior in experience, liked to go toe to toe when it came to the philosophy of placement.

"Too much to the right.  They're slanted to the right.  How is this ever going to look like a real street if we have palm trees that aren't even upright?" Charlotte asked.

"It's not going to look like a real street.  This is a fucking soundstage.  And for the record, palm trees almost always veer to the right.  They never go straight up.  Ever.  You taught me that once upon a time," William said.

"I did?  I don't remember that.  Who told you they go straight up?  It wasn't me.  Who said that?  Says who?" Charlotte asked.

"Says history.  Why do you do this?  Every single time.  You try to romanticize everything.  You try to gloss it and set it up like a department store diorama," William said.

"I do not!" she barked back.

"You do.  You have absolutely no idea how to recognize that a flaw can function as a dimension," he explained.

Charlotte thought about this for a moment.  It was a startling and depressing statistic, but true, nonetheless.   Not only about her work but about her life on the whole.  Her body was the product of her life as a gym rat and the work of several renowned doctors whose names she would take to the grave.

She did the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning and sat at the kitchen table until it was done, not because she enjoyed it, but because she had been told that it helped dramatically reduce the risk of Alzheimer's.  And on Sundays, she rose an hour earlier to make sure she had enough time to complete it before the day's errands.  For years, she had been unforgiving with her time, but only because she used that time in the pursuit of perfection.

"Just stand the tree upright," Charlotte said to him.  "Just do what I say."

"No," William replied.

"Just do it!" she exclaimed.

"I'll do it, Charlotte," he acquiesced.

"Thank---"

"But only if you tell me why you insist on such chasing precision," William interrupted her.  He was not used to giving ultimatums, certainly not to Charlotte, a woman 12 years his senior.

It was in this moment that Charlotte realized she didn't know exactly what it was that drove her to be this way.  She was inclined to blame it on the military household she had been raised in.  She was always inclined to blamed it on something other than herself.  That way, her track record could remain untarnished.  But because this realization seemed threaded with uncertainty, she believed now was as good a time as any to come to terms with the matter at hand.

"It's the fountain of youth," Charlotte said to him.  "An overflowing fountain of youth."