Outside In

by Courtney Thorne-Smith

  But he likes me.

  It doesn’t matter. You aren’t looking.

  Why not?

  Because you are heartbroken and humiliated.

  So?

  So, you moron, that means you need to be miserable.

  That’s stupid.

  You’re stupid.

  Real mature.

  You’re mature.

  You’re stupid and mature…infinity.

  Touché.

  “Oh, stop it!” she said aloud, hoping to break the (insane?) cycle of arguing with herself. She should be having this conversation with someone else. Granted, unless that someone else was a snotty nine-year-old, the banter would probably be at a slightly higher intellectual level, but the point was that she shouldn’t be sitting in her mother’s kitchen talking to herself.

  She should be talking to her girlfriends. But the truth was, she didn’t have any. She didn’t have any college friends, mostly because she hadn’t gone. She’d done some local commercials while still in high school, and when the subject of college had come up, her mother, never a big fan of education for education’s sake, said, “Oh, Katie, why do you want to waste your time with college? We both know that your looks are your greatest asset. Why squander your prettiest years sitting in a dark classroom?” So she had forgone college altogether and started auditioning, cringing silently every time a well-meaning casting agent asked brightly, “So, where did you go to school?”

  In the years on her own before she met Hamilton, she’d had a couple of friends, girls she met here and there on movie sets, but those relationships came and went with each new location shoot. She found it difficult to maintain friendships with women. She was never quite sure what was expected of her or what, if anything, of value she had to offer. Penelope’s theory had been that Kate’s insecurity with women came from the fact that she had never been able to hold her own mother’s interest for long. Sitting alone in her mother’s kitchen now, Kate was forced to admit that the theory had merit. Maybe she should call Penelope right now…or not. She was pretty sure that any contact with Penelope would be nothing more than a long, drawn-out I told you so, and that would feel the tiniest bit less than supportive.

  She almost wished that she was working today so that she could see Paige. Paige would have something brilliant to say—brilliant and funny and wise. Actually, Kate had Paige’s home phone number from the time she had done her makeup for an awards show. She could call her right now. Kate picked up her cell phone and looked at the time: eleven-thirty. It certainly wasn’t too early to call. Was it too late? Paige was probably already out enjoying a busy day of bike riding, shopping, and brunching with friends. Or maybe she was settled in at home with the Sunday New York Times, feeling grateful to have a quiet day before the start of her grueling workweek. Either way, the last thing she needed was to get a call from Kate. It might even be ethically wrong to make a personal call using a number that had been given for work reasons. And poor Paige would probably feel like she had to take the call, since Kate was, for all intents and purposes, her boss. It was like sexual harassment without the sex: emotional harassment. How pathetic would it be if she got sued for using her position to force someone to be her friend? Maybe she could just hit on Sam instead. The lawsuit would be less humiliating and maybe he would talk to her afterward. Do you get postcoital cuddling and chatting with your sexual harassment?

  It seems only fair.

  Of course, if life were fair, Kate would be in Italy right now, eating pizza while Michael read her poetry that he had composed just for her. Well, maybe that would be if life were incredibly wonderful, but why bother fantasizing about a fair life? The truth was that Michael probably couldn’t even afford to take her to Italy, certainly not the way she had gone with Hamilton.

  With Hamilton, it was first class all the way, from the plane ride to the elegant hotel suites and chauffeur-driven BMW sedan. They ate in only the best restaurants and spent their days shopping in the best designer stores. In hindsight, it would have been easier—and cheaper—to just stay home and hire a limo to drive them around Beverly Hills. For Hamilton, though, the point of travel wasn’t to experience another culture—it was to re-create all of the comforts of home in a place about which he could later brag at dinner parties. The actual place was much less important than how it sounded in the sentence “Yes, well, you know, Kate and I spent our holidays in [insert latest hot spot here].” Occasionally, when Kate had read about an interesting destination in a magazine and brought up the possibility of going there, Hamilton’s first question had always been “Who has gone there?” His vacation-destination rating system was based on the number of celebrity visitors as much as the number of stars. The minimum amount required for each category was five.

  When the phone rang, Kate was surprised to hear herself answering it in the strangely affected way she had been taught by her mother when she was six years old. “Keyes’ residence, Kate speaking.” Old habits…

  “Hello, Kate. It’s Hamilton.” She wanted to tease him for matching her exaggerated formality, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t appropriate to lovingly tease the man who had just left you for a tramp. She would have to check her mother’s Emily Post.

  “Hello, Hamilton.”

  “How are you?” Was he kidding?

  “Are you fucking kidding?”

  “I don’t think that language is necessary, Kate.”

  “You know what, Hamilton? So many unnecessary things have happened to me in the past forty-eight hours that I really feel justified using whatever language I want.”

  “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. Penelope warned us that you would probably exhibit some juvenile behavior.”

  “Exhibit some juvenile behavior? What does that even mean?”

  “Which words are you having trouble with, Katie?”

  “Hamilton, stop it.”

  “Well, I just don’t know how far you have regressed. You sound like a thirteen-year-old, with your insolent tone and throwing the f-word around like it’s going out of style. For all I know, your vocabulary has regressed as well.”

  “My vocabulary is fine,” seethed Kate.

  “That’s good to hear. I know it’s a sore spot for you because of your lack of education.”

  Ouch. “Hamilton, why are you calling?”

  “Well, I was hoping to have a pleasant conversation.”

  “Well, then, perhaps you shouldn’t have boinked another woman.”

  “Oh, Kate, grow up. I need to have an adult conversation with you. Can you do that?”

  She stuck her tongue out at the phone and then said, “Yes.”

  “Good. I am actually calling on behalf of Sapphire. She is concerned that you might make things awkward for her at work.”

  “I might make things awkward for her?”

  “Yes. I told her she had nothing to worry about, that you are first and foremost a team player. But now I am not so sure.”

  Kate wanted to tell Hamilton that he was right to feel unsure, that his darling Sapphire had a lot to worry about. She wanted to tell him that she was going to make life on the Generations set a living hell for his new girlfriend, that she would use her considerable goodwill with the crew to turn everyone against her—well, more against her than they already were.

  But she didn’t. Because she knew it wasn’t true. “Tell her not to worry, Hamilton. I have no intention of causing problems at work.”

  “That’s my good girl,” he said, hanging up the phone.

  19

  10:30 p.m.

  11:23 p.m.

  12:54 a.m.

  1:45 a.m.

  At 2:15 a.m., Kate finally surrendered to her sleeplessness and got out of bed (well, cot). It was always difficult to get a full night’s sleep when she had an early call at work. Her fear of oversleeping was so intense and her anxiety about being late for work so overwhelming that she was never able to accomplish more than a light doze. Even that was peppered with panicky mo
ments where she would jolt straight up in bed, sure that she had overslept, often stumbling all the way into the kitchen before she calmed down enough to look at a clock. Her rule was that if it was before two a.m. she went back to bed, but anything after that meant she was allowed to doze on the couch with the television on, clutching an alarm clock like a security blanket. She was baffled by co-workers who strolled into work a half an hour late, who thought nothing of keeping the entire crew waiting while they treated the assistant director’s panicked search for them as a wake-up call. She realized that sitting up watching the clock all night was probably not the healthiest counterpoint to such behavior, but until she could face being five minutes late without indulging in a self-flagellation fest, it was her best alternative.

  This particular Monday morning, Kate had the extra, super-special sleep buster of knowing that she would be facing her husband’s new girlfriend at work. Every time she closed her eyes she saw a different, hideous version of Hamilton and Sapphire together. She always envisioned them intertwined with their legs and arms wrapped around each other at improbable angles, and they were always laughing at her, but their location changed from scene to scene. Sometimes they were giggling away on their (Kate’s) bed, whereas in other scenes they were standing in front of various romantic landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower or the vineyards of Tuscany, miraculously holding their acrobatic embrace. None of the other tourists in Kate’s nightmares seemed to notice the naked lovers. Maybe they were all enjoying a good night’s sleep.

  Kate padded into her mother’s kitchen and set about trying to make a pot of coffee. Marcia couldn’t stand clutter (outside of Kate’s luxurious junk room, of course), so she immediately removed all foodstuffs from their original packaging and transferred the contents to her extensive collection of Tupperware. As a result, her pantry looked beautiful, but only she knew which blue-lidded opaque container held which food. Kate was forced to open each container one by one, breaking three fingernails before finally discovering the coffee grounds wedged between a pink powder that smelled like strawberry Jell-O and a white powder that she hoped was flour. She also hoped that the tiny r written on the underside of the lid stood for “regular.” She was counting on caffeine to get her through today. If she had to face this day on a cup of decaf, she feared she would literally fall apart. Her parents would come home to find her reduced to nothing more than little bits of hair and teeth littering their floor.

  Her mother would be furious about the mess. Then, of course, she would immediately pick up the pieces of her daughter and put them into the appropriate Tupperware container. Kate hoped her mother would take the time to label her. She would so hate to be mistaken for the Jell-O and made into a fruity mold for her parents’ condo-association picnic.

  Waiting for her coffee to percolate, Kate wondered idly if it might be a good idea to have some breakfast. She cringed as she remembered the humiliation of being covered up in what was supposed to be her sexy lingerie scene. She hated knowing that the group of people huddled around the camera pointing and staring at her had been discussing her body and that they decided it wasn’t acceptable—that she wasn’t acceptable. She could hear Paige saying, “You are not your body,” but if Kate wasn’t her body, then what was she? Or, more to the point, who was she? She stood in front of the open refrigerator, looking at the neatly displayed rows of nonfat, sugar-free packaged foods and tried to turn off the voice in her head that was repeating, “Less is more, less is more,” on a continual loop. Her mind was like a computer that was programmed to locate the lowest-calorie food available in any given situation and choose only that.

  But sugar-free Jell-O is not a healthy breakfast food.

  It’s only ten calories.

  It is a cup of chemicals.

  Yeah, but it’s only ten calories worth.

  She closed the refrigerator door and walked back to the counter, hoping that she could speed up the coffeemaker by staring at it. She would have her coffee here and then have breakfast at work. Paige could choose it for her. Maybe if Paige talked really loudly about the wonders of a healthy breakfast (as she was wont to do), she could drown out Kate’s programming. It seemed especially cruel that the original programmer had used her mother’s voice. She thought about another of Paige’s sayings: “Of course your mother pushes all your buttons. She installed them.”

  Kate doctored her coffee the best she could using her mother’s creamerlike diet powder and took her cup into the TV room. She glanced at her mother’s exercise bike and pink three-pound hand weights and considered them carefully. She really should work out. Then a frightening thought occurred to her: or not. She could work out…or not. She looked around the room, half expecting her mother or Hamilton to jump out of a closet and scold her for such blasphemy.

  But nothing happened.

  She just continued to sit on the couch, a mere three feet away from a perfectly viable piece of exercise equipment, and sip away. No one yelled at her, and she was fairly certain that her clothes were not getting tighter by the minute. Of course, she was wearing flannel pajamas, so the true test wouldn’t come until later, when she faced her day’s costume, but she was feeling a new sense of mutinous glee. She was going to skip her workout and have breakfast. Granted, it didn’t have the knife-wielding, rope-swinging drama of a real high-seas type of mutiny, but for a rule follower like Kate, it packed a very similar emotional wallop.

  She pulled the chenille blanket down off the back of the couch and wrapped it around her shoulders, snuggling into the corner of the sofa with her warm mug and the TV remote. When she turned on the television and saw that there was a two-hour Bette Davis biography starting in exactly one minute, Kate felt that there was a loving power in charge of the universe. She knew that somehow she would be taken care of. For the next two hours, her caretaker would be the divine Bette Davis.

  Kate’s sense of goodwill carried her all the way through her shower and her drive to work. It wasn’t until she pulled up to the gates of Starlight Studios that she felt the nauseating power of fear and dread begin to work their dark magic on her psyche. She really, really wanted to stay home from school today. Her childhood friend Cassie used to be allowed one mental-health day a year, when her mother would let her stay home from school for no reason other than that she wanted to. She and her mother would spend the whole day eating popcorn and watching soap operas and old movies on TV. I need a mental-health day, thought Kate, although she knew that she would be nurtured by the same empty house and plastic cup of sugar-free Jell-O that had embraced her as a child. Oh, fuck it. If I am going to be lonely and miserable, I may as well get paid for it. She managed to rally enough energy to offer the guard a smile and a halfhearted wave as she willed herself to drive through the gate and toward the soundstage where Generations was filmed.

  She pulled into her assigned parking spot, noting with relief that Sapphire’s spot was empty. Maybe there had been a change of schedule and she wouldn’t be coming into work today. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Kate relished the thought of just one day to work in peace, to pretend that her life hadn’t fallen apart. She practically skipped from her car to the makeup trailer.

  It wasn’t until Paige opened the door of the trailer, a look of shocked disgust on her face, that Kate turned around to see Hamilton and Sapphire walking hand in hand across the parking lot.

  20

  Michael was watching them, too, from his less-than-macho vantage point of crouching inside Sapphire’s trailer and peeking through the curtains like a busybody neighbor. He, too, had spent a sleepless night worrying about this day. He wasn’t worried about seeing Sapphire, however. He had spent his anxious night plotting how he would get through his meeting with the Annoying Duo without being spotted by Kate. At four-thirty in the morning he had finally decided that his best course of action would be to arrive early and hide out in Sapphire’s trailer, thus evading an awkward meeting with Kate. He knew that she would eventually discover that Michael the charming writer was
actually Michael the moneygrubbing agent, but he wanted to make sure that she was good and in love with him when that day came…if not pregnant with their first (second?) child.

  So at six a.m. he found himself stretching awkwardly over the couch/bed in Sapphire’s trailer in order to see Kate through the tiny window. She looked devastated, and why wouldn’t she be? She was watching her husband and her costar strolling into work like two teenagers in love. He had been hoping that a breakup was behind Kate’s staying with her mother, but he wouldn’t have wished the pain caused by this tactless display on anyone.

  When Hamilton and Sapphire finally arrived at the door, Michael shifted his position so that they would find him sitting casually on the couch. Even so, he was forced to witness a mini make-out session in the doorway, complete with an ass grab and a couple of energetic pelvic thrusts. Wishing in vain for a hose to turn on the rutting twosome, he coughed loudly in the hopes of drawing their attention.

  “Michael!” said Hamilton, casually disengaging himself from Sapphire. “Well, aren’t you the early bird?”

  Sapphire giggled as though he had said something very clever, and Michael wished he had thought to bring some ginger tea or saltines.

  “So,” said Michael, getting to his feet and straightening his jacket, “when did this, um, ‘thing’ between you two start?”

  Hamilton smiled at Sapphire indulgently. “Well, Michael, that’s difficult to say.”

  “And why is that?” asked Michael.

  “Because we are soul mates,” chimed in Sapphire, settling into the banquette and tearing the plastic wrap off a grossly oversize blueberry muffin.

  “I’m not sure I follow,” said Michael, turning his head to avoid witnessing the plunder.

  “What’s so hard to follow?” Sapphire asked, her eyes wide. “I called my psychic, Norman, last night, and he told me that he knows for a fact that Hamilton and I have been in love through several lifetimes.”