“I mean it this time; I’ve had it,” Kelsey said.
“What happened?”
“I’ve been telling you some of it, but not the worst,” Kelsey said. “She arrives late, she leaves early, she won’t wear what we have for her, she flubs her lines. And then today she refused to shoot the scene we had planned. Said she didn’t feel like it.”
“Jeez, that sounds terrible,” I said. “Do you think she’ll calm down and come back?”
“I don’t care if she calms down,” Kelsey said. “I meant what I said. I’m out.”
“Come on, Kels. You’re almost at the finish line. You can’t give up now.”
“Why not?” Kelsey said.
“For one thing, I just came back to work with you again. You can’t leave me here alone.”
“That’s great news,” Kelsey said. “Leaving you here alone is exactly what I’m going to do. If you can convince her to come back, you can shoot the last three scenes.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing!” I said.
“You’ll figure it out,” Kelsey said, an uncomfortable echo of what I’d told poor Caitlin and Ravi. “I need to go stare at the ocean for several days.”
And with that she left. And I was there alone. Now, it seemed, had finally arrived.
* * *
It was quiet inside Stella’s trailer, which made me hesitate. What if she and Hugo were…?
Oh, fuck it. I was sick of this. If they were, then I’d know once and for all what was actually happening. I knocked. The door opened and there stood Hugo, not Stella.
“Is Stella here?” I asked him.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi.”
He was still blocking the doorway. The last time I’d seen him had been the day I left the show to take care of Eloise. He’d texted me after Kelsey informed him that I wasn’t returning to the set. I’d confirmed that was true, and then I’d stopped responding. Thinking he might be having an affair with Stella was one thing; thinking they were having a baby together, quite another.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I’m, uh, taking over the show from Kelsey. I need to talk to Stella.”
He studied me for a moment, then stepped back. I climbed into the trailer. It was so cold it was like stepping into the refrigerated room at Costco. Stella was reclining on a gray velvet chaise she must have had specially installed, with a fuzzy cream mohair blanket pulled up to her chin.
“You!” she cried upon spotting me. “It’s all your fault!”
“My fault?” I said, astonished. “How can anything be my fault?”
“You did something to Hugo,” Stella said, “which caused him to forsake me.…”
“I did not forsake you, Stella,” Hugo said. He sounded like the patient but exhausted dad of a rebellious teenager.
“He forsook me,” Stella insisted. “Forsaked? You’re the genius writer, you tell me.”
“I’m not following,” I said.
“Barry was right,” Stella said. “Barry said I didn’t really want to work, and I don’t.”
“So why did you want to do this show?” I asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “For love.”
“Oh,” I said. “You mean so you and Hugo could be together.”
Stella started laughing maniacally. “That’s hilarious,” she said. “Hugo said that’s what you’d thought. I guess my plan worked, then.”
“Stella was using me as a cover,” Hugo explained.
“A cover for what?” I truly couldn’t imagine.
“For me and Tane, of course!” Stella said. She sat up on the chaise and tugged the blanket around her shoulders like a shawl. “I mean, it didn’t start out that way. At first I did think I wanted to work, or at least I knew I wanted to get out of that fucking hellhole.…”
“By ‘fucking hellhole,’ ” I said carefully, “do you mean your house in Malibu?”
“Duh,” said Stella, rolling her eyes. She actually would have been good at playing a teenager. “So when Kelsey sent me your stupid book, no offense—”
“I thought you loved the book,” I said, admittedly wounded.
“Love is what you say when you don’t pass,” Stella said. “Anyway, I thought it would (a) get me out of the hellhole, and (b) let everybody know I was still smoking hot.”
“And then she thought maybe she could get even more out of the deal, isn’t that right, darling?” said Hugo.
Even given the news that the two of them were not together, I felt a stab of jealousy hearing him call her “darling.”
“First I thought I could make Barry jealous by insisting you hire Hugo, and when that didn’t work—”
“It seems I have no credibility as the other man,” Hugo explained to me.
“Barry knows Hugo’s too much of a gentleman to fuck the boss’s wife,” Stella said.
“Absolutely true, by the way,” said Hugo.
“As I now know,” said Stella. “Instead of getting jealous, Barry decided that hinting at me and Hugo being back together would be a fabulous way to promote the show.”
“Why didn’t you just tell us that?”
“Barry didn’t want to risk it getting around that it was all a fake,” said Stella. “And then I had my own reasons.”
“Which were?” I asked.
Stella sat there mutely, hugging the blanket. I couldn’t take it anymore—I turned off the air-conditioning.
“You better tell her, or I will,” said Hugo.
Stella rolled her eyes. “Then you ruined everything by making Hugo fall in love with you,” she said. “So he refused to play the game anymore.”
I could feel my cheeks flaming.
“You skipped a part,” Hugo said to Stella, not looking at me.
I noted that he did not deny the “fall in love with” part.
“Okay, yes,” Stella said. “Then I started fucking Tane, at first to really make Barry jealous, and then because, well, he’s a god. I didn’t want to go to New York because I didn’t want to be so far away from him.”
“And then you realized that if you came to New York, you could bring him with you,” I said, dawn breaking.
“You got it,” said Stella. “What surprised me was falling in love with him. I never thought I’d feel again the way I felt about you, dear Hugo.”
“She’s ’round the bend about the guy,” said Hugo.
“I am ’round the bend and over the moon and crazy in love and I don’t care who knows it,” Stella said.
“Everybody’s going to know it shortly,” said Hugo.
“You mean because… that’s right, I am having Tane’s baby. And even if I were having sex with Barry, which I’m not, it would be clear the baby was not his, so why hide it? I’ve been married more than ten years, so according to California divorce laws, I get half. And if Barry tries to fight me on it, I’ll make him take the kids.”
I couldn’t tell if she was joking. Now that I was no longer worried about her and Hugo, I could refocus on what had brought me in here in the first place.
“What does all that have to do with finishing the pilot?” I said.
Stella seemed stumped for a moment, and then seemed to remember the reason. “There’s no point in my finishing the pilot, is there?” she said. “Since I have no intention of doing the show.”
“You’re not going to do Younger?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“But what happens to our show?”
She shrugged. “Ask Barry. He owns the rights.”
“You have to make him give them back to us,” I said, furious.
Stella laughed. “I don’t think he’s going to care what I want right now.”
“I’ll go on shooting the rest of it, if that helps,” Hugo volunteered.
“There’s no show without me,” Stella said.
I hated to admit it, but she was right.
She threw off the blanket and stood up, stretching and yaw
ning.
“Ah, I feel so much better,” she said, as if she’d just taken a peaceful nap.
I had to admit, as horrified as I was by her behavior and what she’d done to our show, I was also impressed.
“This is the first time I’ve ever heard you say what you really think,” I told her.
“I know, right?” she said. She gripped my arms and looked me hard in the eyes. “It’s amazing. You should try it sometime.”
twenty-five
I called Mrs. Whitney—I was very relieved to learn she was home from the hospital now—and broke the news to her that the show wasn’t going to happen.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I know you were counting on it as a way of bringing in some money.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said, “because there’s no more Empirical Press.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t have the energy to go on,” she said. “I’m shutting down the publishing company.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What? No. You can’t just close it down.”
“I suppose I could sell the company—I’ve had lots of chances over the years—but I could never see one of those big conglomerates doing it justice,” Mrs. Whitney said.
“I could help run the place until you’re feeling better.…”
“There’s no money to pay you, Liza.”
“You wouldn’t have to pay me. Maybe we could work out some kind of partnership instead of a salary.”
“You’d really want to do that?” Mrs. Whitney said.
“I would love to.”
There was a long silence, then Mrs. Whitney said gently, “I’m not going back to work again, Liza. And without me, there is no Empirical.”
It seemed unkind to keep arguing with her about what she did with Empirical Press. She’d created this firm from nothing and spent her whole life building it; it was her decision what became of it. In a day or two, when she was feeling stronger, maybe we could talk about it again.
“I just want to tell you, Mrs. Whitney,” I said, a lump forming in my throat, “how much I admire you, and how much I’ve always looked up to you and tried to emulate you.”
“Stop that,” Mrs. Whitney said edgily. “That’s something people do to you when you get older; they put you up on a pedestal. And I don’t like it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, stricken.
“Idealizing me like that is a way to keep from getting close,” Mrs. Whitney said. “It keeps you from seeing me as real.”
She was right. I had done that. I was still doing it now. I wanted to see her as perfect, beyond wants and needs, because then I could believe that my life would also be like that one day.
“Can I come visit you?” I said. “I’ve never finished reading Proust either. I could read it out loud.”
“Oh God, that sounds deadly,” said Mrs. Whitney. “But you could come over and bring me a bottle of Taittinger’s—rosé, please. You can tell me all about Hugo Fielding then, and I’ll tell you about Helena.”
She said she’d ask Betty to schedule a date.
* * *
When I saw Empirical Press on the ID of my phone the next day, I thought Betty was calling to arrange my champagne visit to Mrs. Whitney.
Instead Betty, actively weeping, told me that Mrs. Whitney had died. I calmly asked her details—when, what happened, where was the service—and carefully took down all the information. I thanked her, hung up, and then broke down, sobbing.
Mrs. Whitney didn’t want her ghost to linger, she’d said in her written instructions, so the memorial service was just a few days later, in the Trustees Room at the New York Public Library. Mrs. Whitney had planned the whole thing herself, when all those tests at the hospital had delivered the worst possible news: stage 4 pancreatic cancer, with a few months or maybe weeks to live. She’d only gotten days.
But even Mrs. Whitney made mistakes: She hadn’t foreseen how many people would turn up at her own funeral, so they had to move the crowd twice, first to a larger meeting room, and then to Astor Hall, which held more than five hundred people.
Margaret Atwood spoke: Mrs. Whitney had published her early poetry. So did Jodi Picoult, Christina Baker Kline, and Benilde Little. The room was filled with writers and editors and publishers and readers.
I was standing with Kelsey and Maggie, listening to Sutton Foster—Mrs. Whitney’s new friend, the person who should have played me—sing “I Will Survive.” At first people tried not to laugh, but then we couldn’t help it, the whole place broke down, dancing, singing, laughing, crying. Mrs. Whitney always had an excellent sense of irony.
I felt someone slip up beside me and take my hand: Hugo. He lifted my fingers to his lips and then held them there for so long he had stopped kissing and was just breathing. He gripped my hand in both of his through the whole service, as if he wanted to be sure I couldn’t get away.
After the service was over, Betty appeared out of the crowd and gave me a big hug. Then she handed me an envelope. It was Empirical Press stationery, my full name written on it in Mrs. Whitney’s handwriting. A shiver ran through me.
“Does this have something to do with the envelope I brought her in the hospital?” I said. “I never found out what was in that.”
Betty shrugged, though she often knew more about everything than she let on.
“She gave it to me sealed and told me to get it to you, after…” Betty trailed off. “Well, here we are. Now you take care, dear. Let me know if you need anything.”
The four of us—me, Kelsey, Maggie, Hugo—stood together on the steps outside the library.
“I could definitely use a drink,” said Maggie.
“Bemelmans?” I asked.
When we’d settled into a corner booth, Kelsey said, “She brought me here when she told me she was making me editor.”
“I was always jealous that you got to go out to lunch with her,” I said.
“I was a senior editor,” Kelsey said. “You were a little junior assistant.”
“I was totally paranoid that Mrs. Whitney was going to recognize me from the first time I worked there. When I finally talked to her about it, after she knew the truth, she said we all looked alike, she never noticed anything!”
“I heard about Mrs. Whitney for years,” Maggie said. “She was the woman Liza wanted to be when she grew up.”
“I still do,” I said, shaking my head. “What am I going to do without her as my role model?”
“You still have her,” Hugo said. “You have her in here.” He thumped his heart.
“What was in the envelope her assistant gave you?” Maggie asked.
I’d nearly forgotten about it.
“I’ll read it at home,” I said, figuring it was a personal letter from Mrs. Whitney, and I didn’t want to start bawling, not yet.
“You can’t hold out on us,” said Kelsey. “Come on, it’ll be like she’s here with us.”
I looked to Hugo for support. “Spill it,” he said.
“I’ll open it and start to read,” I said, “and if I’m comfortable sharing, I will, and if I’m not, I won’t. Can everyone live with that?”
They grudgingly agreed.
I opened the letter and started reading.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Is it bad?” said Kelsey.
“The opposite of bad.”
It was not a long letter, but nevertheless contained massive news.
“ ‘My dear Liza,’ ” I read.
“ ‘Thank you for coming to see me today. Our talk made me realize something I never thought of before. Along with continuing to run Empirical Press or shutting it down, there was a third option: leaving it to you.’ ”
When I read that line aloud, it felt real to me in a way it hadn’t when I first read the sentence. I let out a yelp, or possibly more of a scream. Heads swiveled and everyone at our table started talking at once. But there was more in the letter, and I held up my hand to stop them. I needed
to finish before we could really talk.
“ ‘Think about whether you really want to take this on,’ ” I read aloud. “ ‘And if you do, I advise that you do it differently than I did and consider taking on a partner. I wish I had time to run the company in partnership with you as you suggested, but the next best thing is to imagine you doing it with someone else. Running a business by yourself can get lonely. You need someone, at work and in life, who loves and supports your fullest self.’
“ ‘Of course, I’m also leaving you the cabin in Maine, but think about whether you really want that too. It’s awfully far away and it’s a tumbledown place, but it made me so happy that it proved so restorative for you. It’s yours if you’d like, and perhaps in the future you’ll pass it on to someone who appreciates it the way you do.’
“ ‘Also enclosed is the contract for the TV show. I was so embarrassed when I realized I’d forgotten to sign it, I wanted to explain in person at the hospital and sign it right away. When you told me how badly the show was going, I thought maybe I’d hold off. This is the only signed copy. You can send it in to the network or you can tear it up and nullify the deal. It doesn’t matter to me anymore; do what’s best for you.’ ”
“That little sneak!” Kelsey said. “She told me she’d sent it to Fernando, but then Fernando thought she’d sent it to Stella, and Stella said she had it, why were we bugging her. Meanwhile Mrs. Whitney was totally playing us!”
“Aren’t you glad?” said Hugo.
As Kelsey and I watched openmouthed, he plucked the contract from my hand and tore it up.
“I guess Whipple Studios doesn’t own the TV rights to your book anymore,” he said.
Kelsey and I looked at each other, then back at him.
“Without a valid contract,” Kelsey explained, “all the rights revert to us. We can go out and remake the show with somebody else.”
At exactly that moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of Sutton Foster walking through the hotel lobby.
I looked back at the letter, though I wasn’t registering much anymore. But I made myself read the last paragraph.
“ ‘Give my love to that darling Hugo and clever Kelsey and your lovely daughter and granddaughter, and of course to yourself too. I am so sad that I have to say goodbye.’ ”
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