“We’ll work it out,” Jess said. “I’m hearing they’re about to up their order from thirteen to twenty-three! No hiatus, but you’ll bang ’em out. You’re a superstar!”
Figgy went quiet. For a second the only sound was the slurp of Sylvie devouring slices of Serrano ham like so many strips of fruit roll-ups.
“Twenty-three episodes?” Figgy said. “Am I finally gonna get paid?”
After a pause, Jess filled the silence with a sound: beep, beep, beep.
“Hear that?” he said. Then he did it again, with a fidelity that Alex found surprising, mimicked sound effects not being a talent Alex would expect to find in an Armani-clad TV agent: beep, beep, beep.
“Hear that? That’s the money truck, Figgy, backin’ on up.”
• • •
Alex knew enough not to believe anything that came out of the mouth of an agent. All that crazy beep-beep-beeping—that was just theatrics. Alex wasn’t even sure what it meant, precisely—tens of thousands of dollars? Hundreds? Millions? How much went to agents, lawyers, and taxes? Figgy certainly didn’t seem all that fazed, getting off the phone with a raised eyebrow and a shrug before returning to her ceviche.
It was only later, while the kids worked off lunch inside the humid innards of an enormous indoor play structure, that Alex looked over and found Figgy crying. She was slumped over on a bench beside the snack bar, her shoulders rocking. Alex reached over and pulled her into a hug. She’d been so composed the night before, which Alex chalked up to the fact that big shows of emotion were rare in Figgy. (At the movies when everyone else was doubled over in hysterics, she’d stab out a finger and declare, “That’s funny.”) But now, eighteen hours later on a moist vinyl cushion at the Little Critters Indoor Playground, it was all crashing down.
“I’m so fucked,” she said, going limp in his embrace. “I’m utterly and completely fucked.”
Alex held her tight and stroked her hair. They sat like that for a while, until the sobs subsided and she looked up, her face splotchy and wide open.
“That call?” she said. “The network and the pickup and the notes? Twenty-three episodes? In six months? There’s no way. I’ll die. I’ll never make it. I’ll strangle Kate by her skinny long swan neck. Or she’ll kill me first. Last year was bad enough, and no one was paying any attention. We were just this weird cable show. Now everyone is expecting it to be, like, great. And not just great in the same way—better.”
Her eyes went glassy again.
“Aw Fig.” Alex ran his hand down her back. “This is nothing but good. Forget all that agent business. Just make your show.”
“This isn’t like before. I’m looking at twenty-three episodes in six months with the network up my ass and a star who hates my guts. It’s the real fucking thing. I’m not gonna have time for you or the kids or days like this or anything but… feeding the beast. I’m about to get swallowed up whole.”
“Stop. You’ve got this. You’ve done it before—this is just a slightly higher level. How different could it be, really?”
The question hung there. The truth was, Alex had no idea how different it would be—for the show, for her, for him. Could she keep it together? He’d help, of course. But what did that mean, exactly?
“It’s like the trophy—the Emmy,” he said. “You’re the atom. I’ll hold you up. You do the wild spinning thing. I’ll keep you steady.”
Figgy wiped her nose and smiled. “So you’re what? The lady holding the atom? With the tits?”
“I guess so—yeah,” he said. “Don’t forget, though—I’ve got those lightning bolts. So don’t even fuck with me.”
A long moment passed. He bumped her with his shoulder. “And what about that money truck? We can start looking for a house, maybe a nanny? And maybe you should buy something, just for yourself. Anything. What do want?”
Figgy wiped her nose and thought it over. “A castle,” she finally said. “David Chase got a castle in France for The Sopranos. I want a castle.”
Three
BestSelf operated out of an unglamorous Culver City office suite with four full-time staffers: Erin the receptionist, Linda the business manager, Alex the account exec, and BestSelf’s president and creative director, Jeff Kanter. As usual on Monday mornings, Alex was first to arrive; alone at his desk, he sat with a giant chai and a stack of cookbook proofs, soaking up the sweet silence. After the excitement of the awards and a weekend of family adventuring, a couple of hours alone in the empty office felt positively luxurious. By the time Kanter came in, Alex felt restored and energized, like a grownup again.
“Hey!” Kanter said, hustling past Alex’s desk. “Saw you on the tee-vee Saturday! Ready for your close-up? Everything set for later?”
“Almost,” Alex said. “We can prep whenever you’re ready.”
“Two clicks,” Kanter said, snapping his fingers and clapping his fist against his palm. Kanter was a snapper. Also a back slapper. And a hugger—he was famous for never ending a meeting without a full, wraparound embrace. Alex had long ago made peace with his boss’s deep and profound cheesiness.
That was the Jeff Kanter mystique—how much he cared. About his business, his clients, his causes, and the fact that everyone knew that he cared. He was known to weep in pitch meetings. He was positively Clintonian in the way he could bring calm and confidence to a room with one soulful frown. It was a different story in the office, away from clients. One on one, he was often moody and blunt and hypercritical. He was also, Alex learned, strangely indifferent about his actual family. One day Alex asked his boss about the photos on the credenza behind his desk—they were blurry shots of small children scrambling around an inflatable raft, their faces turned away from the camera.
“Family whitewater raft trip,” Kanter said. “Grand Canyon.”
“When was that?” Alex asked.
“Ninety-two? Three? I don’t know. Brenna said I needed to get some family photos in here, so I gave the interior designer a roll of film that I had in the glove compartment.”
Alex figured that the kids in the photos were now—teenagers? Or all grown? “Wow, Jeff—that’s super depressing.”
Kanter waved him off. “Not as depressing as being stuck on a whitewater raft with three kids for ten days.”
Kanter hadn’t gotten to be successful by being Super Dad. Over the course of his career he’d won six CLIOs, a dozen Ogilvys, and a reputation as a rock star of food marketing. He made almond butter sexy. He was the top creative on Burger Stop’s “Feed your monster” campaign. He was singlehandedly responsible for the entire category of toddler sports drinks.
Then came the unfortunate business with the carrot. Working with the California Carrot Council, Kanter came up with the idea of sculpting roots and scraps into bullet shapes, then packaging the pieces in clear plastic magazines. VeggieBullets! Boys gobbled ’em up. VeggieBullets were so successful that growers went to twenty-four-hour shifts to meet demand. In the rapid ramp-up, growers apparently skimped on sanitary provisions for the farm workers. A precise cause was never identified, but an E. coli outbreak in Tampa left two kids dead and one on dialysis. “Carrot contamination kills two: VeggieBullets blamed” read the headline in the Herald-Tribune. While neither Kanter nor his agency was named in the $32 million class-action suit that followed, he had been so front and center during the rollout that his client list had shrunk to zero overnight.
After laying low for a year, he opened BestSelf, a “boutique brand innovation and consultancy focusing on social purpose”—i.e., a tiny shop catering to nonprofits that were treated as pro-bono pissants at the big agencies. Alex was four years into a midlevel copywriting gig at Feinstein Pierce when he met Kanter at a demographic conference in Huntington Beach. At the time, Alex was getting increasingly sick of his job and harboring doubts about the whole profession. Jeff convinced him to join BestSelf “to do something unprecedented.”
Alex’s own mother was appalled when he told her he’d accepted a job with Kanter.
“The carrot killer?” she asked. “I understand advertising is just a… stepping stone for you into other creative work. I’ve made peace with that. But I just don’t know how you can you live with yourself, working for a man like that.”
“Ma, he didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “It’s not his fault that growers were too cheap to provide portapotties. All Kanter did was get kids to eat more vegetables. And look what he’s done since then. Nothing but good.”
That much was true, kind of. They’d done a decent campaign on behalf of a state recycling initiative and produced a series of PSAs to promote spaying and neutering of pets. Mostly, however, Kanter specialized in nonprofits of dubious worth backed by bloated foundations. Today, for instance, Alex was doing final revisions on a promotional cookbook for TestiCure, a testicular cancer charity run by real estate developer Simon Russo Jr., a cancer survivor who claimed he “owed his life to brussels sprouts.” (Alex thought radiation therapy, hormone treatments, and the radical inguinal orchiectomy might deserve some credit, too, but never mind.)
Alex was nearly done making corrections when Kanter emerged from his office and headed over with Erin and Linda in tow, the three of them grinning and big eyed. “So?” Kanter said. “Tell us!”
He put down his chai and tapped the pile of proofs with a blue pencil. “Layout looks great. Should be good to go.”
“No, silly!” Linda said. “No one cares about that! Tell us about the big night!”
Linda wanted to know whether he’d seen Julianna Margulies in person and what he thought of her scoop-neck dress and whether he agreed that the two of them looked alike, twins maybe, fraternal at least. Erin wanted to know why he wasn’t home wrapped in one of the gorgeous cashmere throws they gave out at the after-party, given his obviously weakened state. (“Poor dear,” she croaked. “All flustered like that on national TV.”) Kanter played it cooler, hanging back and saying only that Figgy’s speech was “masterful—totally on point.”
“So, presentation’s at two, yes?” Alex said after ten minutes of Emmy chat. “Should we go over the cookbook? Run over main points?”
With that, Linda and Erin rolled their eyes and scurried back to their desks.
“If we must,” Kanter said, hopping up on the edge of Alex’s desk. Alex had spent the last six weeks collecting the recipes (Chili con Tempeh, Seaweed Caesar Salad, Tofu Sloppy Joes), arranging the photo shoot, and doing pagination and proofreading. Kanter peered down at the pages, shoulders bunched and a faint twitch around his mouth. Alex pulled out a recipe for the Soystrami Reuben. The photograph pictured a dollop of mustard sliding silkily down a shred of pinkish protein.
“Start with this,” Alex said. “Russo’ll wet himself. You should’ve heard him on the conference call—couldn’t shut up about that marble rye.”
“What the hell is ‘soystrami’?” Jeff said. “I don’t even want to think what that tastes like.”
“I had a bite at the shoot,” Alex said. “All the flavor of packing peanuts. But look at that picture! We make soystrami look good.”
“That you do,” Kanter said, popping off the desk. “I’ll read it through on the way over. Nice work.”
Alex bunched together the pages and gathered them into a leather binder. Just as he was about to hand it over, he stopped. He’d done this same transaction dozens of times before—the hand-off. He’d done the brainstorming, the prep, the research, the production. Now Kanter would take what Alex had prepared and waltz into the client meeting in his sleek gray suit and berry-colored shirt, radiating golden-boy confidence. He imagined him opening with a riff on the Australian Open or the Tour de France or whatever high-end gentleman’s sport was in season. Then he’d get down to business, underscoring how excited they all were, what an impact this was going to have. Then he’d present the work—Alex’s work. If the mood was right and approval was in the air, he’d flash the cover art like a magician showing the card picked at the end of a trick and get the sign-off right there.
Not that Alex had seen all that much of Kanter in action. He wasn’t invited to client meetings. That was Kanter’s domain. Kanter was the public face, the show pony, the salesman.
“Kiddo?” Kanter said, giving the binder a quick tug. Alex was still holding it, his grip locked.
He blinked. “I was just thinking,” he heard himself say. “Maybe I should come along? You know, as backup?”
“Backup? What for?”
“You know—in case they have questions? I know this backwards and forward—I could be an asset.”
Kanter gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Alex, this is a bullshit promo piece—you know that. It’s strictly donor fulfillment. It’s nothing. Stay here, get started on the PSA for the shaken babies. I’ll go, keep Russo happy, be back by three.”
Alex tightened his grip on the folder. “I’d really like to come along.”
Kanter gave him a sidelong look. “What’s up with you, Sherman?”
“Maybe I’m a little proud how this turned out.”
Kanter smirked and raised an eyebrow. “Soystrami? Seriously?”
Alex face went hot. “Okay, maybe it pisses me off that you don’t want anyone in the room who knows more about the material than you do. Maybe—”
Kanter pulled the binder away and stepped back. “Whoa, kiddo. You want to meet with clients, fine, we’ll talk about it. But not today—not for this. I promise you—you’re not missing anything.”
And with that, Kanter swiveled away and retreated to his office. Alex sat down and took a swig of his chai, agitation swirling in his chest. Of course, Jeff was right—it was just a bullshit promo piece. But for some reason he couldn’t quite explain, he felt an overwhelming desire to deliver the cookbook himself, to see the clients’ reaction when they saw that glorious sandwich.
Alex was still stewing, staring off into the middle distance when his phone buzzed. It was Figgy—she’d been conked out that morning when he’d gotten the kids ready for school.
“Ach,” she said roughly. “I think I’m allergic to our house. I feel like my head’s going to explode.”
“There’s some grapeseed extract in the cabinet—mix it up with some warm water and honey. Don’t sneer at the holistic juju—just do it.”
“Ach,” she said again, dubiously. “You’ll get the kids at one?”
Alex swallowed. “One? What’s at one?”
“The kids—they’re out today at one, remember? The flyer in Sam’s backpack?”
“Shit,” Alex said. Teachers at the kids’ school insisted on communicating vital information via flyers that invariably came home smudged with banana or lost amid a jumble of worksheets. Figgy made it a habit to go through their backpacks when she got home and the kids were asleep. “Why can’t they email like regular people?”
“Public school—hello?” she said. “I’m not even sure they have computers. Anyway, they’ve got some ‘staff development’ thing this afternoon and the kids are out at one.”
Alex sighed. The TestiCure presentation was at two. Kanter wanted him to get started on materials for the shaken-baby spot, but right now he felt no particular desire to do Kanter’s bidding. “I could cut out early,” he said. “What’ve you got today?”
“Lunch with Herb, the studio guy? With the crazy eyebrows and the teeny-tiny Korean wife? I’m supposed to go and make nice—Jess says they’re about to sign off on the deal.”
Alex coughed. “That was fast. How’s it looking?”
“Who knows? The schedule’s crazy—we’re looking at no hiatus and six-day shoots and the network wants outlines in a week. I’m already having panic attacks. And today I’m supposed to be at Mr. Woo at noon to eat lettuce cups with a guy with a private plane.”
Alex leaned back in his chair and tried to imagine what sort of deal they were talking about. The metrics were mysterious, but Alex knew the proportions were outsized; he understood Figgy stood to earn more in her signing bonus than Alex made in an entire year. “All right—fuck the grapes
eed. Take two Benadryl and go make nice. I’ll get the kids and see you at home.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Wish me luck.”
“Luck,” he said. Alex put down the receiver and gathered up his things. If he ducked out now, Kanter might worry Alex planned to ambush him at the TestiCure meeting. Let him sweat it a little. He’d hit a taco truck in Echo Park and make the carpool line at school by one. At least he was needed somewhere.
• • •
Over the next few weeks, Alex felt himself disengage from work, the commitment and interest he always took for granted suddenly gone. Maybe it was the way Kanter had shut him out of the cookbook pitch, or maybe it was the fact that Figgy’s deal had closed; whatever the reason, his own work now felt like a hobby he’d outgrown long ago and had somehow forgotten to give up.
Alex was fiddling with his phone one morning in line at Interlingua, the fair-trade coffee joint on Sunset staffed by baristas who approached the preparation of a latte with the precision of Swiss watchmakers. Dressed in tweed waistcoats and newsie caps, the staff looked like officers in a steampunk army, even as they spoke to the customers like Malibu surfers. No one said, “Here or to go?” Instead, they asked, “Hanging out or taking off?”
Alex looked up and saw a familiar figure crossing the courtyard, dressed in a fuzzy plaid shirt and skinny jeans that gave his legs the silhouette of a seabird. It was Huck, Katherine Pool’s Plus One.
“Well, well, well,” Huck said, gently punching Alex’s shoulder. “If it isn’t Dead Shoe Walking. Come sit—me and my boy Brandon got the hookup, get you a soy cap before this line moves a step. Come.”
Alex followed Huck back to a table in the corner, where his friend Brandon was deep into what sounded like a well-rehearsed rant about oil reserves and the International Monetary Fund. With his shaved head, aviator sunglasses, and a multi-pocketed jacket, he looked ready either for a runway in Milan or a military operation in Croatia. “You shoot?” he asked.
“Sorry, what? Shoot, like guns?”
“Yes, shoot like guns. Bang bang,” Brandon ran a hand across his stubbly head and turned to Huck. “Don’t tell me you’ve brought another hippie to the man table. Haven’t we had enough patchouli up in here?”
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