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Sam struggles up from the couch where he’s crashed. It’s past one in the morning and he can tell from the tentative knocking that it’s Ruth. Who else would be here for him at this hour?
He’s past caring his place is a wreck. She’s seen it before and worse. He does check to make sure he’s tucked in everywhere before opening the door.
“Ruth,” he says, standing in the doorway, not letting her in. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I was just thinking about -- did I wake you? I saw your light and I wanted to see if you needed anything. Sorry, sorry, I can go.” She is looking past him at the space. In one glance she can see he’s been in all night, and he’s been writing, and getting loaded. She looks a little worried. “What happened to your shirt? And your…place?”
There is no way he is answering that. He steps aside, gestures her in. She eases around him. Ruth picks up a half-empty pizza box, heads for the kitchen, brings him a glass of water.
He is still only half-awake, and Ruth’s energy is grating on him, but he is relieved to have someone else in the space that was starting to feel pretty fucking miserable.
Tonight has been a night for brutal honesty. He doesn’t spare himself from what he inflicts on others. He was trying to work on his next project but it just wouldn’t come. Some aspect of her was in every shot. Or if it wasn’t, he was thinking about showing it to her, what she might think, how they would talk it through, whether he would cast her in his next movie – whether she would accept - how he felt weirdly happy thinking of that.
He had spent hours writing something else, something private, trying to write Ruth out of his system. It was raw and painful and he was using his writing like a purgative. He was being ruthless. Or learning to be Ruth-less, he guessed. It had taken a fair amount of coke and booze to keep him focused – and a pill he had dug up from somewhere that he still didn’t know what it was. Maybe that’s what had done him in.
And from the way he felt he found her at his door, it hadn’t worked.
Ruth is back in the kitchen making too much noise. Cleaning up after him. Bottles hit the trash can, and winces. Then it is mercifully quiet and he drinks his water, tries to figure out what she is doing here.
“Have you been writing?” she calls from the kitchen.
“Hmm. Yeah,” he says. He’s left his script on the counter, such as it is. It still needs a lot of work, and he is thinking about this, trying to step back and see where he can fix it, when Ruth comes around the corner, papers in hand.
“A new project? Sam, are you leaving GLOW?” Ruth asks. “Why now?”
“Look, relax, it’s just something I’m working on, I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “But someday, yeah, we’re all going to move on, and I’d like to not get caught with my dick hanging out.” This is one of the things he’s been hammering into his own brain tonight. That probably not too far from now, they’ll all go their separate ways. And he might not see her again. Fuck.
Ruth is still shuffling through the papers, nosy as ever. He can see she wants to be asked to read it, and hell, maybe she’ll be able to find a way out of this mess. She’s done it before. He’s about to give her permission to read it but she’s already doing it, and he lets it happen.
“I thought you hated my name,” she says, still reading.
What is she talking about? Sam looks up to see the papers in her hand have coffee grounds and pizza sauce on them, and he comes fully awake, fast. Wrong script.
“Ruth, no, that’s not – Fuck--“ he moves surprisingly quickly given the state of his head. There is way he can let her read his idiot fantasies, his emotional jerkoff material. His soft-core smut. Okay, not entirely soft-core. He curses the years of therapy that have led him to make such a stupid mistake, thinking this exercise would get him to sanity.
“Sam?” Ruth sounds hurt. “Are you casting a movie, with my name in it, but not auditioning me?”
“God, no, it’s not a script. It’s just…something I was working on,” he says. Maybe she will let it go. But of course she won’t. He is reaching for the script but doesn’t want to look juvenile, like some kind of fucking amateur, so he doesn’t grab for it, and she is still flipping pages.
He stands in front of her, glaring, trying to silently will her into giving the pages back without a scene, knowing that’s not how this scene is going to go.
“I can’t believe you named a character after me! I shall accept this tribute most graciously,” she says in a proper British accent. “Wait. This is…Are you shooting porn, Sam? Is Russell helping you?”
Russell helping him. Not only did she bring her boyfriend up in the middle of reading Sam’s wet dreams, she thinks he needs his help. “No! I told you, it’s not a script.” Sam can’t stand this another second, grabs the papers back from Ruth. He stalks to the kitchen and shoves them in the trash, burying them. He comes back to stand in front of her, locking himself in for her reaction. How much did she read? He hoped she had not gotten to the part about Ruth on her knees in front of him…or worse, the thing he had written about Zoya standing over him with that fucking whip from Melrose’s dominatrix phase. By the look in her eyes, she read something.
“Look. I was just – working things out of my system, okay? It doesn’t mean anything. You don’t have to look at me that way. Like you’ve never watched porn.” He is trying to brush it off.
“Not porn about me, no,” she says, and he grimaces. “Is it? About me, I mean? It doesn’t mean anything? What does it mean? Is that what you want?”
He thinks of all he wants from her. How can she still not know? She is always pushing him, with her earnestness and her too-direct questions and her closeness that is still out of reach, and he rubs his hands through his hair in frustration. And to keep from reaching for her. Again. “Don’t be an idiot,” he says. “Of course not. I’m a lonely old man, you know that – “
“I don’t know that many old men who write about being tied down and flogged by a Russian dominatrix,” she says.
“Really? Because I don’t know any who don’t.” Ruth rolls her eyes. “Maybe you need to meet more interesting people.” He is successfully defusing the situation. “You know I respect you and all that bullshit, I’ve made you co-director. I’m just going through a flawed, possibly self-destructive, creative process, as my ex-wife’s therapist says.”
“You think?” Ruth says. “Is this why…I just don’t want this to be like Tom Grant,” she says. As soon as she says it, she regrets it. She looks up at Sam’s face, and before his eyes shutter, there is a terrible look. Something like betrayal.
“That’s what you think? Is that how you see me? Great. Okay. Get out,” Sam says.
“No, of course not, I—“
“Listen, you came to me! I didn’t ask you to come here. I sure as shit didn’t ask you to dig through my fucking trash and read what doesn’t belong to you. I’m fucking nice to Camera Guy – Russell– what more do you want? Tom Fucking Grant, really.” His contempt s worse than shouting to her. The shouting is regular. This is quiet and painful. “I tried to kiss you – once – I thought maybe you wanted it. I was wrong, I guess. I left you the fuck alone when you didn’t. But you think that I would –“
“No, I don’t, Sam, please,” Ruth says. “I don’t know why I said that. It’s just that he wanted to ‘wrestle’ with Zoya, too, you know? And I didn’t. Want to. At all. And he just assumed that I would. Or I had to. But that isn’t you. And it’s not that I didn’t want it, with you. I just – I was scared. But not like that. I know you’re not Tom Grant. You would never…make me take a bath with you.”
“A bath? Is that what happened? You never told me that. Jesus, that’s creepy.” He looks so distant from her, but something about this detail seems to have snapped him back into being on her side.
“And you’re right, I did come here, uninvited. I looked in your trash. That’s creepy too, in a way,’ she offers.
“Yeah, it is,” Sam says. “Why are you here, anyway? Are we doing this? Let’s have it, we’re already into it now.”
She sits on the couch, becomes suddenly aware that with Sam standing still in front of her, the angles are like the scene she just read. She is relieved when he sits down too. He is no longer radiating hostility at her, more like hurt. She feels awful. But she felt awful before she got there.
Her brain is still spinning. Reading herself as that powerful in someone else’s mind was…complicated. Heady. Embarrassing. Arousing. Confusing. She’s not used to being the object of someone’s fantasies. And is it even about her, or just Zoya?
Sam looks broken, sitting there, like he is waiting for the next blow. She had come here seeking comfort, and company, validation. Distraction from the fight she’d had with Russell. Maybe she was using Sam, and that was wrong.
Even more wrong than what she had done to Russell, which had not been on purpose. Calling out someone else’s name while they were making love wasn’t her fault. Russell had been nice about it – he hadn’t even gotten mad. He was such a great guy - but it had been one thing too many, after she had done the same thing in her sleep weeks before. Ruth had said she was overtired, and it didn’t mean anything – just like Sam had just said to her about his fantasies – but maybe they were both wrong. In any case, Russell had said she needed to work some things out, shooting a look across the parking lot at Sam’s door, and left, and the girls were insatiable to know why, and she couldn’t possibly explain it was because she kept calling out Sam’s name.
There is one person she can tell. After his embarrassing written confession, this could equalize things between them again. It would show him she trusts him and knows he isn’t Tom Grant.
He is staring at the floor, probably still angry, and in a rush she says, “I came here because – Russell and I broke up.” He looks up now, but it hasn’t fixed anything, she can see that. “And you thought I needed to know this at one in the morning, why?” he says. God, she must think he’s a total schmuck. That he’ll be so pathetically grateful for this news and have nothing better to do than hear it. But you are glad, and you didn’t have anything better to do, asshole, he thinks. You spent all night thinking about her. He’s still angry at her assumptions though.
“I just wanted to talk to someone about it – and I couldn’t tell anyone else because…That’s not important why.”
“So you came all the way over here to tell me something you can’t tell me. Got it. Fantastic. And now that we’ve done that –“ he is escorting her to the door. He stops. “Ruth. You know everything about me. I’m an open fucking book to you. What do you want me to say? I’m sorry you broke up? I’m not, really. You’ll get over it. Or you won’t. It’ll make you a better artist.”
“You think I’m an artist?” This might be the nicest thing Sam has ever said to her. Sam groans. This is not the point he is making.
“Good night,” he says, pushing her out, slamming the door on her. He imagines her expression; it gives him petty satisfaction. Then he remembers the nakedness of the pain on her face when he told her she was replaceable and Debbie closed her out, how even in that moment he knew it was a shameful thing to do, and he is suddenly ashamed again. From outside, Ruth says quietly, and a little dramatically, “I came to tell you that Russell and I broke up because I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” It’s a relief to say it, to be free.
On the other side of the door, Sam is waiting for the blow. The woman he loves – fuck, does he love her? – came here to tell him she can’t stop thinking of him, and he shoved her out of his house and slammed the door on her. Yeah, that seems like something he would do.
He waits to hear her say he is an asshole and this is a bad idea, but she doesn’t. Ruth already knows he’s an asshole, she knows all about him and has always seen right through him, and she’s still here, on his doorstep. Is this really happening? She can’t be this insane, he thinks. He is unbearable. Everyone has said. But equally unbearable is letting her leave. What the fuck is he doing standing in here with a door between them? He needs to see her face to be sure. She is so readable.
He opens the door. He is alone.