“We should talk,” Maggie said.
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Let’s go for a walk,” Maggie said.
We met at the Fourteenth Street stairway to the High Line. It was a rare beautiful New York summer day, not too hot, not too humid, the sky as blue and cloudless as California’s. Maggie was wearing a jumpsuit with the sleeves and legs cut off and blotches of paint and plaster all over it. The Hauser & Wirth show had opened the door to invitations from galleries and museums around the world. Frankie, who had summers off, had taken the kids to the beach to give Maggie the time and the solitude to make some new work.
We climbed the steep iron stairway, me behind Maggie, feeling as if I were being led up to the hangman’s scaffold. What was such a big deal she had to meet me at this special place to discuss it in person? But by the time we reached the elevated pedestrian walkway, where the air was fresher and the chaos of the city seemed far away, I’d gained some perspective.
“Oh, I get it,” I said, vastly relieved at what I believed was my realization of why Maggie wanted to talk to me. “You’ve finally got the house to yourself and you need the time alone to work. I totally understand. I’ll find somewhere else to stay.”
I had already jumped ahead in my mind to the possibilities: stick it out on Caitlin’s couch for a bit longer, stay in Mrs. Whitney’s spare room over on York Avenue. If worse came to worse, I could camp with one of my old mom friends in New Jersey, but as time went on and our kids left home, there were fewer and fewer of those.
“This isn’t about you staying with me,” Maggie said.
I wasn’t sure if this was good news or bad news.
“I want to talk about the day your granddaughter was born.”
“I was already on my way back to New York when you called me,” I said, already defensive. “I told you that, right?”
That day spent jetting across the country, not knowing whether my grandchild was going to live or die, seemed even crazier in retrospect against the contrast of this pastoral corner of the city, with its potted greenery and ambling tourists.
“Yeah, you told me that, but just because you were coming home of your own volition a month after you said you would doesn’t mean you were doing the right thing.”
“I was doing my best,” I said. “Nobody thought Caitlin was going to go into labor that day. She was only thirty-two weeks pregnant.”
“But I told you two weeks before that to come home. It was like you cared more about running around with your Hollywood friends, going to parties and getting high, than being with your kid.”
I stopped walking and looked at Maggie. People streamed around us, the sun shone down, but it was like I was being mugged by my own feelings. I had not been so angry at anyone since the day I left Josh.
“That is really unfair,” I said. “You were the one who made a big case about me taking that job and going out there! You almost made it sound like it would be antifeminist treason to turn it down in favor of staying in New York with Caitlin, which if you remember was what I wanted to do.”
“I remember you saying you were going to stay in New York with Caitlin; I don’t know about wanting to. You seemed to want to do nothing but party once you got there.”
“I was working my ass off,” I said. “Was I supposed to be miserable every minute?”
“You were supposed to get your work done and come home,” Maggie said. “You were acting like a college kid on spring break, having so much fun you missed the first day of classes.”
“I am going to regret for the rest of my life that I wasn’t here with Caitlin that day,” I said. “Why do you have to make me feel even worse about it?”
“I don’t think you realize how scared I was, Liza! Ravi took forever to get there, the baby was in distress, and they were asking me to make decisions about Caesareans and all this medical stuff, and you had shut down your fucking phone!”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. I was unambivalently sorry about turning off my phone that day, not only because Maggie couldn’t reach me when she needed me, but because I wished I’d dealt with Kelsey and the conflict over the show more directly.
“But you know, once you did reach me, you could have told me what was going on. You didn’t have to keep holding all of that responsibility by yourself.”
“I didn’t tell you because I love you,” Maggie said. “I was trying to protect you from worrying when you were too far away to do anything.”
I tilted my head and studied Maggie. “Or maybe you wanted it. Maybe you wanted to prove you were a better mother than me.”
“Being a good mother means being there for your kids,” Maggie said piously, “and you haven’t been there for a really long time.”
“I am there for Caitlin, but she’s an adult, not a child,” I said. “I was there for her full-time when she was growing up, while you built your career, and now that I’m trying to build mine, you can help me without making me feel like I’m failing as a mother.”
We both stopped talking then, but began walking, at a more meditative pace. I was really glad that we were on the High Line rather than down on the streets. The High Line seemed magically to adjust, depending on your mood: It could feel calm or exciting or novel or secure; it had been all those things to us on this single walk. I’d felt freer than I might have down below to express my anger, but now all my angry feelings flooded out of me like, well, like your water breaking when you go into labor. I felt so exhausted, suddenly, I could have lain down on one of the wooden benches and fallen asleep.
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said finally. “I don’t think you failed as a mother. I was just so fucking terrified.”
“Oh God, me too,” I said.
“If I lost either one of them,” she said, “I could never forgive myself.”
We kept walking.
“I would have killed you,” I told her.
“You wouldn’t have been able to,” Maggie said. “Because I would have already killed myself.”
“I actually prayed on the plane, the entire five hours. All these prayers from Saint Cassian’s came back to me.”
Maggie linked her arm through mine and tugged me close. “I want to hear about the private plane that Hugo Fielding hired for you,” she said. “But that’s a two-martini discussion. Let’s go home.”
“Does that mean I can stay with you?” I asked.
“Of course you can stay with me,” she said. “But I want sordid details.”
I wished the details I had were more sordid. Or maybe less sordid. Right now, Hugo was marooned somewhere uncomfortably in the middle—he’d become my favorite masturbation fantasy, but one I felt too guilty about to enjoy.
“Hugo and I had a moment in LA, but nothing happened, not really. And now Kelsey says Stella’s agreed to shoot the show in New York because she’s having an affair with Hugo and wants to be far from home with him.”
“Shut up!” Maggie said. “Do you think it’s true?”
“I don’t know. That night at the mushroom party, I felt something genuine from him. But what Kelsey says makes so much sense, much more sense than him falling for me.”
“Who cares?” said Maggie. “I think you should at least fuck his brains out.”
Anyone watching us would have guessed we were discussing roast chicken recipes and Oprah’s latest book club pick. Something I was discovering about being middle-aged and looking it was that people always assumed that whatever you were thinking about or talking about was boring to the point of being stultifying. Which could be a big advantage, I supposed, if you were a CIA agent or drug smuggler.
“I could get hurt,” I said.
“You could have fun.”
“What if he’s really with Stella?”
“Then it’s on him to tell you. And her. Plus she, might I remind you, is married to someone else. You and Hugo are both single people.”
“He’s an actor,” I pointed out. “It might all be fake.”
>
“And a person who would fake anything is someone you need to stay away from,” Maggie said placidly.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize she was talking about me.
eighteen
Kelsey landed in New York and hit the ground running. She had—we had—less than a month to get the pilot shot. That included hiring a crew, arranging locations, producing costumes. One unexpected benefit of agreeing to work on the show again was that it came with a free place to live—the second bedroom in the apartment Kelsey rented—which meant that Maggie’s poor nanny could have her room back.
“You’re not a New York resident and you don’t have a place here, so you qualify for an out-of-town stipend,” Kelsey said. “Just like me.”
The place Kelsey found was a corporate apartment, bland but comfortable, located downtown on the river, facing New Jersey. Hello, New Jersey. I wish I knew how to quit you.
Stella and Hugo were slated to arrive on Sunday night, and we were scheduled to start shooting on Monday. The very first scene, when Alice gets hired at Gentility Press, was going to be shot at… Empirical Press. How meta was that?
Mrs. Whitney had been delighted to have us shoot at Empirical on one condition: She got to play herself.
“I can’t screw it up too badly,” she said. “This is my shot at immortality.”
Kelsey and I assured her that she was already immortal, but that we couldn’t imagine anyone who would bring more to the role of Mrs. Whitney. She waived the location fee, but insisted that all the books on the shelves and desks at the fictional Gentility Press be those published by the real Empirical Press. Just when you thought Mrs. Whitney was a publisher solely because she loved books, she showed you how she turned that passion into a business.
It was bizarre walking into Empirical Press after the set designer and decorator got through with it: Though it felt like a hundred years ago that I’d worked there, seeing the place done up to look exactly as it had back then also made it seem as if no time at all had passed.
The velvet sofa looked comfortably luxurious rather than tattered; the wooden desks were polished, with books and papers stacked neatly—too neatly—on top. The seats were all occupied by extras, looking extraordinarily well groomed and elegantly dressed, more like people who worked in a fashion designer’s showroom than like real editors.
I was on the editors’ side of the room, encouraging everyone to roll up their sleeves and slump their shoulders, when there was a rise in the timbre of the voices of a hundred people, and a heightened vibration in the room. I looked up to see Hugo and Stella making their entrances, double-kissing people hello, waving across the room. The stars had arrived.
Hugo caught me staring and broke into a big grin, waving wildly. I gave him a small, tight smile back, the kind of smile that said, Nice to see you, but I hear you’re in love with somebody else, asshole. That apparently was not the message Hugo got, because he seemed to be headed across the room toward me.
I quickly whipped around and began messing up one of the too-tidy desks, spreading the books around and actually throwing a sheaf of papers up in the air. Then I noticed the poor extra who was sitting at the desk staring at me in horror, probably wondering whether he should call security. I tried to gather the papers back together but instead shuffled them onto the floor. When I finally turned around again in mortification, I found that Hugo had apparently not been aiming to see me at all but was hunched over the script with Kelsey, who’d been dressing in head-to-toe black since she’d landed at JFK, and Mrs. Whitney, looking even more slender and glamorous than usual.
Kelsey walked away, but Mrs. Whitney and Hugo kept talking. I really wanted to know what they were talking about, but not as much as I wanted to stand back and watch them talking. Hugo was flirting with Mrs. Whitney, I realized, quite outrageously, and she was flirting even more outrageously back.
You are even more gorgeous than you look in the movies, I imagined her saying.
You are a fascinating woman, I imagined Hugo saying in return. I would love to go out with you, but then again, I’d go out with anybody.
Liza seemed to actually believe you were interested in her, my now fictional Mrs. Whitney said.
I’m interested in every woman! fictional Hugo said. It’s all a lie!
Then as if from a cloud of smoke, there was Stella, draping her long blond arm over Hugo’s shoulder, taking an ostentatious sniff of Hugo’s neck, and finally bursting into musical laughter. Her hair looked like Sleeping Beauty’s.
“Liza!” Real Stella squealed with delight upon spotting me and teetered over on her four-inch heels to give me one of her trademark four-cheek kisses.
“You’re here!” I said.
“I have to follow my passion,” said Stella.
Ha!
I hadn’t quite looked at Hugo yet. But that didn’t stop him from crossing the room and giving me an enormous hug. I mean really enormous.
“So excited to be here,” he said.
“Where are you staying?” I asked, pulling away so I wouldn’t feel quite so much of his excitement. Or my own.
“We have a place uptown, on Central Park West,” Stella said. “Where John Lennon died.”
“You have a place in the Dakota?”
“It’s only a four-bedroom,” she said.
“Do you have the kids with you?” I asked Stella.
“Oh no, it wouldn’t be fair to drag them across the country,” Stella said. “Kelsey said she didn’t bring Theo either.”
“Theo’s a dog,” I pointed out.
“Same thing,” said Stella.
Actually, no, though it was usually the dog owner not the mother who needed to be disabused of that notion.
“So are you two,” I said, pointing from Stella to Hugo and back again, “both staying at your place at the Dakota?”
Hugo gave me a strange look. “I’m in those corporate places downtown, near you,” he said.
“Though he could stay over,” Stella said. “Anytime he wants.”
“Your husband wouldn’t mind?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? He’d cum at his desk just hearing about it.”
That comment propelled me out of reality for so long that I only came back to the room when I heard Kelsey clapping her hands. She might have been clapping for a long time.
“Are we ready to shoot this thing?” she said.
* * *
Shooting a television show is one of those occupations that involves dozens of grown-up people standing around looking like they’re not doing anything, except if you’re really standing around not doing anything, you’re in the way.
I’m not saying I had nothing to do. I’m saying I didn’t even have a clue what the possibilities were. Kelsey was the showrunner, which meant she was the final on-set authority on everything. The director, the cinematographer, the AD, the production designer, even the actors—they all turned to her. So my job, theoretically, was to consult with her if she wasn’t sure on some creative decision and to handle any rewrites that might become necessary in the course of shooting. Because even though you’ve rewritten something twenty-five times, you may get all the actors saying their lines at a location and the words simply don’t sound right, as if the lights and the camera caused some alchemic reaction.
Mostly, though, I stood there with my arms crossed over my chest, shifting to the left and to the right, trying to stay out of everyone’s way, while also trying to look serious and purposeful. We were shooting a scene early in the script where Alice comes in for her job interview as her fake millennial self and fears she’ll be exposed when Mrs. Whitney interrupts the interview. Alice worked for the same company twenty-five years ago; will Mrs. Whitney remember Alice and ruin the whole enterprise before it gets off the ground?
Spoiler alert: Mrs. Whitney doesn’t remember, and Alice gets the job.
Before Kelsey called “Action!”, Stella, posing as Alice posing as a twenty-six-year-old, came into the office
where we were shooting—Mrs. Whitney’s own white-themed office, as it turned out—for a lighting check. She was dressed in a hot-pink patent leather skirt that barely covered her ass cheeks and a tank top that said Jersey Shore.
I leaned over and whispered in Kelsey’s ear, “Seriously?”
Kelsey called the wardrobe person over, who said the shirt was Stella’s idea. Then Kelsey talked to Stella, who changed into a white tee shirt.
It was a single-camera show, which meant that every shot had to be staged and filmed on its own: There weren’t multiple cameras shooting from different angles, catching every dimension of a scene at once.
Instead we filmed Stella lying by omission to the young HR woman about her age and experience, bright innocence on her face, then shot the HR woman nodding and questioning, then shot Mrs. Whitney entering the office and shaking Stella’s hand, and then filmed Hugo interrupting them all. The lingering, interested glance between him and Stella—I see you, and I like what I see, though I know I’m not supposed to—had to be shot in close-up an excruciating number of times. They didn’t even have to say anything, just lock eyes and shake hands for a few beats too long, but Stella kept giggling in the middle of the handshake, or dropping her head on Hugo’s shoulder, and once even entwined him in a big kiss.
I finally couldn’t watch it anymore and tiptoed off the set, slipping into the little employee lunchroom that was tucked back near the elevators. I was counting on it being the one place in the entire office that had not been discovered by the crew, and I was right. It was deserted, except for one person: Mrs. Whitney, looking very out of place sitting on a black plastic chair in her white Chanel suit with her Ferragamos off and her feet up.
“Having fun?” I said.
She startled and set her feet on the ground. “Oh, Liza,” she said, her hand at her throat. “Do you need me for something? I didn’t mean to sneak away; I just needed a bit of a break.”
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