“That’ll take too long.”
“You can just go downtown to the passport agency. Too long for what? Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. Just toying with an idea.”
“Victor?”
“Yeah?”
“You never go anywhere.”
They hung up and she marched up the hot stairwell. When she got back to her desk, Marcus handed her a message from a watch enameler in Beacon, New York, one of the many she had called the night before. The enameler had misdialed and reached Marcus by accident.
“This lady can do the quasi-net.” Marcus handed Kezia a Post-it note.
Kezia blinked at him.
“The quasi—”
“Oh, the cloisonné!”
“Sure.” Marcus shrugged and walked back to his desk.
Kezia examined the message. The watch enameler could not replicate the clasps exactly but she could get close enough. And she could do it within Rachel’s time frame. It would save them both the trouble of Kezia getting on a plane and pleading her case to an ornery Frenchman. And she knew she could talk Rachel into “close enough.” It was a minor miracle. But all Kezia could picture was the look on Victor’s face as he whispered to her on the beach about an invisible French necklace. Five seconds ago, he said he was fine. She should believe him. He was a grown-up. If he said he was fine, he was fine.
She crumpled the message and threw it in the trash.
TWENTY-ONE
Nathaniel
It was the driver’s first day on the job. The guy took forever to find Nathaniel’s house, then they hit traffic, and then, for some reason Nathaniel could not fathom, he absolutely refused to turn into the Soho House parking garage. Instead, he let Nathaniel off outside an office complex across the street. Nathaniel checked his phone. No time to argue. By the time he made his way up the marble stairs of the club, trying to play down his panic in front of the maître d’, Lauren was waiting, seated by a shallow lake of lily pads.
“I’m sorry.” He was sweating.
“No biggie.” She jovially lifted her phone as proof.
She ordered the salmon with quinoa, an unsweetened iced tea, and the check.
“I’m the one who’s sorry,” she explained. “I would stay here all afternoon but I have to be back at the office by two.”
As if that was something Nathaniel would have wanted, to burn away the afternoon like it was haze over the valley. Pilot season, a debutante ball for pitches, had just begun. Lauren was a gatekeeper, a junior development executive that led to a studio that led to a network that led to fame and fortune. He didn’t like her assuming he had no other obligations.
“Okay.” Nathaniel inhaled. “So basically the show would go like this: Instead of there being one thing off-balance, where the cop is a psychic, the lawyer is a serial killer, or the teacher is, like, totally unqualified to teach . . . Instead of that, everything’s off. No one is special. Everyone’s a mess. The series would be called Pretenders. Like Heroes. But good.”
He waited for a reaction greater than a nod.
“It’s interesting,” said Lauren, the jury still out on her sincerity. No, it wasn’t, not really. But good for him if she thought so. Lauren was about eight years older than him. No small part of him wondered if she took this meeting because she might like to sleep with him. Near-forty single women in Los Angeles could be terrifying creatures.
“I like the idea of fake superheroes,” she mused, “but you’d have to find a way to propel it through the arc of a series.”
“Totally.” He laughed, hard.
The laughing was a real problem. He had no idea this much fake laughter was going to be required to get by in Los Angeles. Someone really should have said something. The thing was Nathaniel was normally so good at it. But he had been thrown by a weekend of seeing those who once knew him best, of letting his vocabulary out of its cage (penitentiary, immurement, hoosegow). He was off his game.
His phone buzzed, another cheerful text waiting to be unlocked. Today was his birthday. He was born at 12:47 p.m., information readily available to him because a girl he used to sleep with made him find out so she could “do his chart.” He would become thirty over the course of this very lunch. Maybe if Lauren knew this, she would just give him a pilot. Everyone else and their mother had one. Literally. He knew a guy who had just sold a “moving back in with mom” show cowritten with his mother.
What could he do tonight that wouldn’t be lame? He was too old to care about this stuff. Recently he had spotted a patch of white whiskers along his jaw—weeds in need of daily whacking. The other week, worried about his heart and unable to sleep, he bought an electric tension-reducing pillow shaped like a banana. But he could tell from the way he woke up, head-butting the pillow, that he wasn’t using it correctly.
“What kind of pillow is so complicated you’re not using it right?” Percy laughed.
His phone buzzed again.
Nathaniel left it in the shadow of an untouched basket of flatbread. That way Lauren might think he was professionally in demand. He would use any prop he could to get what he wanted, especially now that he was too old to be granted the “genius” label just for completing a project.
“Do you need to get that?” she asked.
Nathaniel pretended to scan for a professional emergency.
“No.” He dismissed the screen. “It can wait.”
“Mr. Popular.” She grinned. “You’re blowing up.”
She had a good, wide smile. Los Angeles had its faults, metaphorical and geophysical, but it was not a malicious place. People were nice here. Hollywood was the grade school teacher who started you off with an “A” until you failed. New York was the one who gave you an “F” until you proved you deserved better.
“The girl version of your show is ‘secret royalty.’” Lauren leaned back in her chair. “It’s how we women view princesses.”
We women. The People’s Republic of Labia.
“According to the movies,” she continued, “there’s always some valid reason to hide being heir to the throne of a small country. That’s our secret power, that men can’t tell what we look like when our hair is in a ponytail.”
“Surely that’s not your only secret power.”
“Sorry?”
“I think ponytails are hot.”
Lauren smiled into her plate, twisting her hair back behind her ears.
“Ponytails are like mug handles,” he kept going, “you gotta have something to hold on to. Like reins.”
She stopped touching her hair.
“I don’t mean that in a rapey way.”
“I know.”
“Because I don’t think rape jokes are funny.”
“You’re safe. I didn’t think you were making a rape joke.”
“Except that now we’re both thinking about rape.”
“Are we?”
She put her hands in her lap.
“I do like the idea of a show with a female empowerment element guiding it.” She was practically talking to herself now.
“There would be an element to be guided, for sure. Not, like, forcefully.”
Was he incapable of going five minutes without making a rape reference?
“You need to think about the week-to-week engine. Think about what they want. Do they want to be normal? Do they want to help one another or destroy one another?”
“Well, they don’t want the same thing each week. That’s part of the realism.”
“That’s good, I like that.” She nodded and halved a piece of salmon.
No one in Lauren’s position wanted to be shortsighted, the one who couldn’t spot potential. Lauren spent her days throwing half-cooked noodles at the studio wall, waiting to see what stuck. All Nathaniel wanted was to be a noodle.
“Actually, I suppose the most important question is: What’s the love interest?”
“I’m not sure. These characters aren’t manufacturing their talents to get laid.”
“Why not?”
“Because then you have to resolve it and once you scratch that itch, an audience loses interest. Guy A and Gal B finally get together and the series suffers. I’m not saying this as a writer, I’m saying this as a person who watched too much TV as a kid.”
Nathaniel put his hand on his heart. He looked as nonthreateningly into Lauren’s eyes as possible. She laughed, fake-choking on her fish.
He could feel his authority bubble toward the surface. “Sexual tension is like putting a gun in the first act.”
“I can’t stand that sex-and-violence mix.”
“It’s Chekhov . . .”
“Oh!” Lauren corrected herself. “I didn’t realize he wrote crime fiction.”
“He did a little,” he heard himself say.
This was the price of his life out here: have no balls now in the hopes of having the biggest swinging dick in the room later.
“I like it.” Lauren picked up her phone. “I’m sorry this is so rude but I just have to tell these people I’m running late.”
“No problem.”
Nathaniel gestured that he was going to the bathroom. Lauren nodded. He went inside, where a dark hall covered in Polaroids was, counterintuitively, home to the floor’s only steps. Nathaniel nearly tripped on the way down. They had one of these photo booths at Caroline and Felix’s wedding, too. Grey and Paul had dragged him in against his will, made him wear Mardi Gras beads. He examined the Polaroids as if they were paintings in a museum. He dawdled as long as he could. By the time he returned to the table, he was prepared for her to dismiss his pitch as bearing a smidge too much of a resemblance to Uncle Vanya.
“Hey. Right. So I like it. I like how sweeping it is. And you clearly have the nuance down, which is the thing. But the thing is . . .”
Had they not just established that the role of The Thing would be played by The Nuance?
“It’s all in the execution.”
Her noncommittal enthusiasm frightened him. And not in the “die by encouragement” sense but in the “on spec” sense. Were there two more dreaded words in the English language? Dear Lord in Heaven, just give him a blurb on Deadline and let him go. He was losing the pert feeling in his face.
“You know how it is.” Lauren shrugged, already getting her parking validated in her mind.
Lauren’s last program to make it on the air had been the short-lived Nailed It, about a manicurist and a carpenter who date. He wasn’t exactly applying to Harvard here. A fact that had zero bearing on how much he longed for her approval.
“I got this.” She threw her corporate card inside a padded envelope.
A waiter materialized and removed it.
Lauren did not want to fuck Nathaniel, not even for sport.
“Listen, you know we all adore your writing—”
What could she possibly have read of his?
“—but the best thing for you is to work on something on spec. Do you have a pen I can steal? They forgot a pen.”
She looked over her shoulder. Nathaniel dug in his pocket and gave her one. She signed like a doctor. He didn’t think she meant actually steal the pen but then she dropped it in her bag, got up, and encouraged him to “stay up here as long as you’d like.” Again with the nothing-better-to-do implying.
“Thanks,” Nathaniel deadpanned, “I feel like the hooker you just left in your hotel room.”
Lauren laughed as hard as she had the whole lunch, throwing her head back.
“You are the best.” She looked like she might hurt herself.
Nathaniel circled around the balcony and sat in an upholstered chair, safe from view. He didn’t feel like ordering a car yet. He turned off his phone for a moment of quiet birthday contemplation. He was surrounded by glass. Glass coffee table, glass partition, glass windshields, glass city. Thirty. Thirty and what had he accomplished? A few articles here and there, buried deep within websites read exclusively by people who didn’t matter and couldn’t help him. Dude Move. The headline of his obituary if he didn’t get another gig. He leaned forward. It was a clear day and the city stretched for miles, buildings that ran straight into the mountains, interrupted by the occasional “for your consideration” billboard. Symmetrical rows of palm trees that resembled the rigor mortis tails of giant poodles, buried snout-first in the ground.
He wanted to go to a party tonight, yet he was sick of attending parties. Room after room filled with people for whom nothing in the world was a big deal, who only mustered enthusiasm for the retro joys of their own childhoods—board games, astronaut ice cream, middle school dance moves. It kept them safe from the slings of solipsism because hey—they weren’t obsessed with themselves now, they were obsessed with themselves then. Totally different. All these fucking writers who were offered deals just for knowing the right people. Nathaniel was weary of the fight, of convincing himself that writing thirty pages of dialogue was better than writing thirty pages of anything else, of being coaxed into that mind-set and rejected upon arrival. He was sick of being on the wrong part of the lawn or at the wrong party altogether when Jack Nicholson—Jack fucking Nicholson—showed up and lent his hat to Bean.
Notification: Bean has uploaded a new photo to her feed—204 people like it and 39 have commented!
Could you be any prettier, girl?
You look exactly the same. Fuck you. xoxo
Amazeballs!
Heeeeere’s Johnny.
I want to lick this face, bring it to me in Ohio.
Um . . . is that who I think it is in the pic w/u?! Doin’ Akron proud.
Why yes, Anna from Akron, it is who you think it is. There she is, Bean, the prettiest girl to slink through the halls of your high school, with different-colored eyes and not a deep thought to rub between them. She’s “lookin’” coy and “wearin’” the fedora of Jack Nicholson. And there, tattooed along a bicep that promised to keep its shape forever, are the words “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself,” pulled off a farm-to-table menu in Marfa, Texas, that pulled it from D. H. Lawrence.
He was tempted to click “Add to Family.” Just to be psychotic.
If his old friends only knew. They assumed success in all fields for him.
Nathaniel pocketed a matchbox from an unused ashtray. Then he pocketed the whole ashtray. On the way out, he clumped down the marble steps and turned on his phone. Twelve missed calls and several thumb scrolls’ worth of texts? All he had done had been born, not won a Golden Globe. Something was wrong. A few of the texts were from Kezia and Sam but more “call me” than “happy b-day” in nature. The closest he got to a “happy birthday” was Percy with a “planzzz 4 tonight?”
He ignored Kezia.
was in mtg, he texted Sam, whats up?
Victor got robbed. They took everything but his bed.
he ok?
yeah. All his shit’s gone tho.
man. sucks.
What else was there to say? Had they not all just been together in Florida, this was the kind of information that wouldn’t have trickled west for another month.
gotta go, wrote Sam, as if they were actually speaking.
gay, Nathaniel typed back.
Two actors, a character actor and a famous one, sidled up behind him.
“Blood pressure,” said the character actor as they all squeezed into the elevator. “Blood pressure is the silent killer.”
“I thought carbon monoxide was the silent killer.”
“No way,” said the character actor, pressing the button, “it’s blood pressure.”
A moment of silence passed in the padded cell of the elevator. As the door opened, a guy and a girl were waiting, eyes still adjusting from the brightness outside. Nathaniel recognized the girl instantly. The actors looked her up and down.
Bean. Bean wore a wifebeater and a shark-tooth necklace that pointed to her pelvic bones. Her hair was up, exposing the quail feather tattooed on the right side of her neck. This was not Jack Nicholson accompanying her. But beyond that
rudimentary process of elimination (one man down, four billion to go) lay an indiscernible wasteland of collarless leather jackets and five o’clock shadows. Not Jack Nicholson was probably in a band. Probably a folk jam band called something like Not Jack Nicholson. Not Jack Nicholson lived in Venice with his dog and his vintage guitars, drinking slow-drip coffee, selling photos of homeless people in Airstreams to rich people in refurbished Airstreams. Not Jack Nicholson talked trash about the DP on his independent film. Not Jack Nicholson hated West Hollywood. He liked simple. Simple. And yet he always found himself over here, dragged from his bungalow to a free sushi dinner.
The actors exited the elevator, glancing briefly at Bean’s ass. Nathaniel put his glasses on and moved swiftly. The ashtray in his pocket just barely grazed her.
“Ow,” she muttered, rubbing her wrist.
He kept walking before she had a chance to recognize or not recognize him.
TWENTY-TWO
Victor
Mother of Fuck, I’m calling them!”
Victor had yet to release the phone from his hand. “Hello?” came a mystery voice—male, professional, confused. “Is this Victor Wexler?”
He had forgotten how to handle this situation. The problem of not knowing who was on the line, much like the problem of dialing the wrong number, was in danger of extinction.
“And who may I ask is calling?”
My mom can’t talk right now, she’s in the shower.
“I’m looking for Victor Wexler.”
Victor caved. “This is he.”
“Victor, this is Silas Gardner. We met at Caroline and Felix’s wedding.”
He tried to picture a Silas. All he saw was corn pipes and barn raisings.
“I believe we met in the bathroom,” Silas said, trying to help.
Got it. Aviators. Explosive diarrhea. Got it.
“Hope you guys had a nice time at the wedding.”
Silas was still confusing Victor for someone who kept tabs on his peers.
“So listen, Victor, I am sorry to bother you. I know this is a bit unorthodox.”
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