The Spinster Diaries

by Gina Fattore

  They used to work at an alternative newspaper.

  So it’s a small world is the point of that story.

  And it’s an even smaller world if at any point during the 1990s you lived in Brooklyn or worked at an alternative newspaper or—god forbid—did both. Like I did back in my misspent youth. And that’s why I am not making any of this up about Dave. He really is just exactly the sort of person I used to know in my old life, my past life—my life before I moved to LA and became such a moderate success in the entertainment industry. And that means I was right about him. One hundred percent completely and utterly right. So when he told me that thing about his girlfriend, I should have felt right…right? I should have felt vindicated—you know, for stereotyping him so accurately based entirely on how he dresses and what bands he listens to—but instead I felt this really strange, non-spinster-like feeling it took me forever to identify: I felt disappointed that he had a girlfriend. Huh. Go figure.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 1, 2006

  SHIT.

  Slight setback at work.

  I kinda lost it last Thursday, right before I left for my high school reunion, and I became a bit mentally unhinged, and I—double shit.

  My high school reunion.

  I totally forgot to set that up, didn’t I? Damn. That had some real rom-com second-act-set-piece potential. You know, if only I had been a little more proactive and hired someone to impersonate my fiancé. Thank god nothing major happened that required setting up. Like I didn’t meet the man of my dreams or anything. My mom suggested something to that effect as I was leaving the house Saturday night. She said something vaguely hopeful about how I looked nice and maybe I might “meet someone.” But instead what happened was that I walked into the banquet hall next to the bowling alley wearing a sleeveless, faux-wrap dress I never would have had the courage to wear in LA, and within seconds of my arrival—seconds, I tell you—the best-looking guy in the room came right up to me and told me he loved my shoes.

  Because, as I may have mentioned before, I have a pretty good rapport with the gays.

  And mind you, these were not $500 shoes. Or even $200 shoes. No, these were just some $49 shoes I got at that discount shoe warehouse place up on Sunset. You know, the one by the In-N-Out Burger.

  So that’s kinda the high school reunion in a nutshell. I’m glad I went. There were tons of people there I hadn’t seen in a long time. Most of the women seemed like they had already met the man of their dreams. And now they were divorced and trying to work out some sort of shared-custody agreement.

  And the guys?

  Well, mostly I talked to the married guys, although I assure you I wasn’t seeking them out. No, they basically just kept coming up to me all night and asking if I remembered them and apologizing profusely for the fact that their wives really wanted to meet me. And then a wife would appear—generally this was someone I did not go to high school with—and she would turn out to be a huge fan of the show I’m currently working on, which was great for my ego because it would be a real drag to spend twenty years living in big cities, listening to public radio, and reinventing yourself as a New York/Jewish intellectual only to return to the basketball-loving Midwestern town you grew up in and have lots of conversations that start, “Well, it’s on cable…” or “It’s with this guy who used to be on Veronica’s Closet.”

  Plus, you know, I weigh a lot less now than I did in high school and just generally look about ten thousand times better. So even though I don’t wear makeup or expensive shoes or straighten my hair or wax my nether regions like a porn star, for thirty-six hours last weekend I actually got to feel kinda hot.

  You know, by northwest Indiana standards.

  That happens sometimes when I travel. Sometimes—in other cities—I get the feeling that maybe I am not so very hideous to look at.

  But the feeling always passes when I return to LA.

  Not that I’m complaining or anything. I swore I wasn’t going to do that anymore. You know, complain about contemporary, twenty-first-century LA. Truly, it is not very gracious of me. Especially when you consider that I don’t have to live here. I mean, sure, I have to live here if I want to continue being a moderately successful TV writer, but I could always be like Mickey Sachs in Hannah and Her Sisters and give up my fancy, well-paying TV-writing job. That plot move is totally available to me now that I actually have a fancy, well-paying TV-writing job. It probably wouldn’t have worked out so well earlier in the year—you know, back when I was unemployed. But now that I actually have the sort of job millions of people would die for, I could easily quit it and go on some sort of religious odyssey and possibly discover the meaning of life at a Marx Brothers movie and maybe even fall in love with someone.

  Or I could just pack up and move back to the Rust Belt, where the general population is not so inordinately obsessed with body-fat ratios and personal grooming.

  I heard a story like that once. A contemporary, twenty-first-century LA fairy tale about a single, successful TV writer-girl who gave up her fancy, well-paying job, moved to Chicago, and married a very nice fat guy. I’m not sure I believe it. It sounds apocryphal to me. Like it might be a parable made up by some very nice fat guy in order to discourage women from trying to get ahead in Hollywood. Even if it’s true, that particular story line would never work for me, personally, because guess what? I have already lived in Chicago. For three whole years. And the entire time I was there, much to my mother’s dismay, no guys—fat or thin—ever evinced any desire to marry me.

  So for the moment, I’m sticking with LA. It suits me. It allows me to feel right all the time about how empty and god-awful and image-obsessed the world is, and that’s a huge accomplishment for a metropolis—a huge boon to the mental health of its spinster population. Plus, we have tons of great brain surgeons here, and that has become a lot more important to me now that my brain tumor is getting bigger.

  Not a lot bigger.

  Not tons.

  But, you know, bigger than it was in January.

  I discovered this fun fact last Thursday, when I drove to Beverly Hills and had my second meeting with the first brain surgeon. He started by putting the MRI up on the little screen—you know, just like they do on TV. And then he told me that the tumor was getting bigger and tried to show me exactly where it was, which is another thing they always do on TV, but of course I couldn’t really tell what the hell he was talking about. It all just looked like a lot of marshmallow fluff, so I nodded and smiled and waited patiently for the brain surgeon to tell me what the fuck I should do about my brain tumor.

  Because that’s another thing that tends to happen all the time on TV.

  But once again he did not do that.

  He didn’t even come close.

  He basically just said the exact same thing he said last time. You know, about how it was all my choice, about how I had to be the one to decide. Only this time when he said it, I swear there was this little glint in his eye. This little spark of amusement. Like he’s so incredibly smart—he is, after all, a brain surgeon—that he figured out on my first visit how desperately I want him to be in charge and have an opinion and tell me what to do. So now on this, our second, visit, he’s even more perversely determined not to be in charge and not to have an opinion and not to tell me what to do.

  And I gotta say, I really dig that about him.

  More and more, after this second visit, I am feeling secure in my assessment that this particular brain surgeon is The One. After all, he did say—given that my tumor seems to be growing very slowly and I am (at least to a brain surgeon) relatively young—that he didn’t think it would be a problem to wait another year to have it removed. And then when I asked him if there were any really compelling reasons why I shouldn’t wait another year to have it removed, he replied, without hesitating…

  BRAIN SURGEON

  Sure. I could wake up tomorrow and get hit by a bus.

  (beat)

  And then you’d have to find yourself another
brain surgeon.

  And I dug that, too. Because really good brain surgeons should also have a dark, twisted sense of humor, don’t you think? At least they always seem to on TV.

  The only trouble is, now I’m right back where I started.

  I still can’t get anyone in a position of authority to tell me what to do about my brain tumor, and I must have been kinda upset about this when I showed up late to work last Thursday morning, because I ran into one of the shoe girls when I was parking my car in my designated space, and she looked concerned and asked me if something was wrong. So I said yes and somehow the whole story about the brain tumor just came pouring out of me. We even went into her office and closed the door, which is generally a sign on a TV show that a bunch of people are getting together to talk about how badly the TV show is being run by the current showrunner. But in this case it was actually more about the brain tumor, although at one point she did suggest telling the current showrunner about the brain tumor.

  So I did.

  I don’t know how to explain it except that this particular shoe girl has a real take-charge way about her. If she tells you to do something, you do it—even if you don’t want to do it—and that probably explains why she’s way more successful than I am at our chosen profession. She takes charge of things and tells people what to do—indeed, she seems to sorta kinda enjoy telling people what to do. And I gotta say I respect her for that. I do.

  Almost as much as I respect her for dropping out of the shoe contest.

  You see, it’s been superhot here lately—like it usually is in Burbank in August—and finally, she just couldn’t take walking huge distances across the lot in heels anymore, and so for two days in a row she wore the exact same pair of really cute glen plaid Chuck Taylor slip-ons—you know, the ones with elastic instead of the laces—and just like that, she was out.

  Out of the shoe contest!

  Although, she has sold two pilots to major television networks this development season, so all in all, I think she’s probably feeling okay about being out of the shoe contest. After all, the winner of the ridiculous contest known as “development season” gets to have her pilot made and maybe even wins the ultimate grand prize of getting to have her own TV show on the air; the winner of the shoe contest just gets a new pair of shoes from Barneys.

  So now it’s over.

  Not the shoe contest.

  The shoe contest is still going on.

  But my big secret about the brain tumor is officially over. After I told the showrunner about it, I went into the writers’ room and told everybody else. They all seem to be taking it okay. Although I’m sure on some level the showrunner has got to be thinking…

  SHOWRUNNER (V.O.)

  I can’t believe I hired the girl with the brain tumor!

  But of course now it’s too late to fire me. You can’t fire the girl with the brain tumor. And you also can’t fire the girl with the pay-or-play clause in her contract. Can you believe that? Can you believe that I, who am only a moderately successful television writer, actually have a pay-or-play clause in my contract? I just found that out the other day from Arnie Greenblatt. I should probably listen more when he talks. Also, I should probably read the contracts before I sign them. I swear I had no idea about this. A pay-or-play clause means they have to pay you even if they fire you, and I’ve always assumed that only the really successful TV writers have clauses like that in their contracts, but apparently I have one too. They’ve made some sort of exception in my case, which works out well from my perspective, because now I can spend even less time worrying about getting fired and more time worrying about the brain tumor pressing on my frontal lobe. I totally wish I had known about this last month when I turned in my outline and my boss failed to acknowledge its existence until we found ourselves completely starved for conversation at that terrible cocktail party we were required to attend to launch the new network.

  Damn. A fancy party! Yet another lost opportunity for a rom-com second-act set piece. Truly, it wasn’t much of a thrill. I mean the part when he told me he liked my outline was good, but the rest of it was kind of a drag. The shoe girls had all left early that day and gone over to change their clothes together at one of their houses. I was kinda impressed by that, because it seemed like something girls would do in a movie. You know, change their clothes together. I gotta hand it to them, too. Whatever they did to each other en masse like that really worked. They all looked really good. Particularly the really tall, really blond, really skinny one. I know this because I ended up hanging out that night with the only guy I know in LA who has ever kinda-sorta even halfheartedly tried to sleep with me, and his main topic of conversation all night was how good the really tall, really blond, really skinny one looked and variations on that theme, like could I introduce her to him.

  Which is probably within his rights.

  After all, the guy has been trying halfheartedly to sleep with me for like ten years now, and I’ve been blowing him off for ten years because he’s basically my friend and he’s totally nice and all that but—shit, how to put this tactfully?

  He sleeps with prostitutes.

  And I don’t want to judge, but that just doesn’t work with my genre of choice.

  Think about it.

  Suppose a thirtysomething rom-com heroine were to drink too much at a work-related cocktail function filled with network executives and television critics, and end up sleeping with some guy who also sleeps with prostitutes. You don’t exactly have to be a professional writer to know where that setup is going. Surely she would catch some incurable disease, right? Or quite possibly end up becoming a prostitute herself. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t really have time for anymore diseases at the moment. My plate is full. Plus, that setup doesn’t say “romantic comedy” to me. That doesn’t scream Hannah and Her Sisters. That’s an indie film that plays for only one week at the Sunset Five, and I’m the only one who goes to see it because it got a good review in the Weekly, or maybe it stars some young actor I used to work with and I always try to support her whenever she does something edgy.

  No, in my genre of choice—in romantic comedies—leading men don’t sleep with prostitutes. They are occasionally allowed to stop and ask prostitutes for directions, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how the whole prostitute thing got started with this guy, because the way he always explains it to me, it seems like you call them on the phone and they come directly to your house. You know, Risky Business–style. So there’s very little chance of anyone getting lost and needing directions, and so if you are thinking…

  SELF (V.O.)

  At last! Finally! A love interest! Sleep with him! Sleep with that guy!

  …don’t. Don’t think that. Because it’s not happening. I have come way too far with The Spinster Way to just give up on it one random summer night in the backyard of the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena. And for what? For the thrill of sleeping with some guy who has spent the entire night talking to me in a self-pitying way about how incredibly hot all the other girls at the party are? I, personally, think that when you put those two things in the balance, The Spinster Way comes out way ahead. After all, with The Spinster Way, you get to go home early and leave with your self-respect, and with the other way—well, I’ve never really tried the other way, so I’m not real clear on what its supposed advantages are. That is the giant, overarching GirlWorld mystery I have yet to solve, although I will admit that in the two months since I started this job that millions want, this job where I have to spend all day, every day, in the general orbit of the shoe girls, I have been picking up a lot of useful new information about how to be and look and talk and act less like myself, less like a spinster, and more like your average, everyday resident of GirlWorld. I’m not sure I will ever want to apply this information, but I’m taking it all down just in case.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2006

  I HAVE JUST been asked to leave the set by one of the actors.

  This has never happened t
o me before, so I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do. I’ve been ignored by actors, had them fail to acknowledge my existence, that type of thing. But being asked to leave the set is a totally new experience for me, so now I’m just sitting here in my office trying to figure out what my next move should be. It’s barely 7 a.m., so the place is totally dead. It’ll be hours before any of the other writers—or even any of the assistants—show up and join me. Like if Dave were here, I could go stand by his desk and talk to him about the Richard Hawley CD he loaned me or something that was on TV last night, but since he’s not here—since no one is here—and the episode they are filming today is one hundred percent completely and totally my responsibility, I should probably be mature about this whole thing and march right back across the lot to the very set I was just kicked off of.

  Or I could just wait here in my office a little while longer and keep Journaling for Anxiety™.

  I’m still not exactly sure how this happened. The day started off so promising. I parked in my designated parking space. I found the right stage. I found a place on the sidelines where I could watch the rehearsal, yet not be too close. That’s my philosophy of how to be a writer on the set of a TV show. I like to be present, but largely unseen. I’m sure other TV writers have their own philosophies, but that’s mine. I got it from Flaubert, who never really spent much time on the set, although in a letter to his mistress he once wrote, “The author in his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.”

  So there I was, trying as hard as possible to be invisible, when the first AD asked everyone to leave the set so that the first rehearsal could be a private rehearsal, with just the actors and the director. That seemed rather strange to me because by the time you get past year three of a long-running American TV series, everybody involved in the proceedings is generally so completely and totally over the whole fucking thing that the only time you would ever really need to have a “private” rehearsal is if you were doing some sort of sex scene.