The Second Assistant

by Clare Naylor

  “Right. I see.” But I didn’t. And when I got back to my desk, I dropped the box on the floor with such a resounding thud that even Courtney looked my way.

  “She’s on her way up,” Courtney said. “I suggest you go straight on in to Scott’s office. Just deal with her in there. He’s over at Warner Brothers, so he won’t be back for the rest of the day.”

  “Yeah, just don’t keep her out here. It’s too upsetting,” Talitha agreed.

  “Will someone tell me what’s so terrible about Mia Wagner?” I said as I got up from the floor where I’d been closing shut the box of photocopied scripts.

  “Yes, why doesn’t someone tell her what’s so terrible about Mia Wagner?”

  There, in front of me, was a petite, pretty redhead who didn’t look as if she would say boo to a goose. But she’d just asked a difficult question, and nobody was going to answer. Over to me.

  “You’re Mia. Hi, I’m Elizabeth, Scott’s new second assistant.” I thrust out my hand and smiled.

  “Elizabeth.” She shook my hand but didn’t return the smile. Instead she vacuumed me with her gaze. Every out-of-place eyelash, every button on my shirt, the scuffs on my shoes, the fact that I’d recycled my skirt from the dry-cleaning pile at home—nothing escaped Mia Wagner.

  “So what can I do to help you?” I asked hastily before she could notice that I was a frumpy suburbanite who had no business being in Hollywood in the first place.

  “It’s my birthday next week, and I need to make sure that my husband buys me something that I love,” she said. And for a moment I had to think hard to remember who her husband might be. Because this immaculate, well-spoken, and brittle creature had about as much in common with my crumpled heap of a boss as she did with . . . well, me, I suppose.

  Mia Wagner was wearing a red Louis Vuitton bouclé shift dress, and her hair was Pre-Raphaelite in color but post–Jennifer Aniston in style. Her arms were porcelain white and honed to perfection with something ladylike like Pilates, not a bulging muscle or shiver of flesh in sight. And while she couldn’t have been a minute older than thirty-two, she was timeless and ageless in an almost spooky way—she would always have been described as elegant but, I imagined, never as sexy. Except in a strict sort of way, which some men go for. And I wished that she wouldn’t look at me like that. I wanted to reassure her that I wasn’t sleeping with her husband, because that was clearly what was on her mind. But then again, if Immaculate Mia was his type, she ought to be able to tell that I would hardly cut it, even in the poor-substitute department.

  “Shall we go into Scott’s office, where we can discuss this in private?” I suggested, remembering what the girls had said about getting her out of the way. But judging by how everyone was staring, I’d have thought they’d prefer it if we stayed, so they could watch. I wondered what they were waiting for. A tantrum? A gymnastics routine? A lightning change into Wonder Woman? I suppose whatever it was that made Mia a nightmare would be revealed in good time. Lucky me.

  “No,” she said. “I thought we’d go out and choose something together.”

  “Oh, well, Scott’s not in the office this afternoon,” I explained. “But I’m sure he’s got your gift all taken care of. You needn’t worry.” I made a mental note to order a devastatingly tasteful bunch of flowers and have them sent to his house, just in case he did forget.

  “I didn’t mean my lame fuck of a husband,” she said disdainfully. “I meant you.”

  “Oh, you want me to come shopping with you? Now?” I asked, stalling for time and hoping that Lara would appear and save me.

  “I don’t have all day.” She glanced at her discreetly diamond-framed Patek Philippe watch and looked at me as if I were a lame fuck, too. “So why don’t you get your purse, and we can go?”

  “Well, I really ought to clear it with Lara.” I tried to be polite. “She’s the other assistant, and it might be better if she were the one to go shopping with you because . . .” At this point Courtney and Talitha practically ducked under their desks with looks of astonished incredulity on their faces. Clearly they expected stilettos at dawn at the mention of Lara’s name. Thanks, guys, for telling me that there was a little froideur between Mrs. Wagner and Mr. Wagner’s assistant, I thought.

  “I know who Lara is,” she spit venomously. “Which is why I’m asking you. Now, please, would you just come with me? The valet is probably smoking a cigarette in my car as we speak.”

  “Okay, right, well, of course. I’ll just put the phones on voice mail,” I said reluctantly, and followed her invisible bottom and the military click of her heels along the corridor to the parking garage.

  “So I’m going for something with resale value,” she said as she zooshed up the air-con and eased into fourth gear. And if I hadn’t felt a little apprehensive at being hijacked by my boss’s terrifying wife, I might actually have enjoyed the fact that I was driving away from my office in a navy blue BMW sport with the most exquisite pale calf-leather interior, by a woman who actually had on driving gloves. We drove along Wilshire past Saks Fifth Avenue and Kate Mantalini’s, through the lanes of graceless SUVs, and I felt as though I’d just stepped into a fashion spread. Everything in Mia Wagner’s world was beautiful. Right down to the Puccini aria that was drifting at a perfect volume from her stereo.

  “Resale value?” I asked uncertainly.

  “If they’re gifts, then he can’t get them back. So the more expensive the better. Jewels and art work best.”

  “I’m sure Scott would never ask for gifts back,” I said, defending Scott’s generosity. One thing he wasn’t was cheap.

  “In the event of a divorce,” she informed me. “It’s my little insurance policy.”

  “Oh, I see.” I tried to sound worldly, as if I knew all about divorce laws in the state of California. Which I figured I soon would anyway.

  “So let’s start at Butterfields, why don’t we?” She turned and gave me the merest flicker of a thawing smile. “Oh, God, Elizabeth, you probably think I’m terrible, don’t you?” she asked as she pulled up in front of the auction house. “But I wasn’t always like this. That’s why I’m so determined to get as much as I can out of this marriage. Because if money can’t buy happiness, it can certainly offer a little compensation for abject misery.”

  “I’ve never been to Butterfields before.” I didn’t really want to get into this right now. “Were you looking for a painting or a sculpture?”

  “I was thinking of a Dalí or a Miró. Maybe not Miró. I’m a little concerned that Spanish surrealists are overinflated in the market right now. I wouldn’t want anything that would lose value,” she said as we handed the keys over to the valet and made our way into the building. “But then again, who cares? It’s not my money that I’m throwing away.”

  Actually, it transpired that Mia Wagner wasn’t just a fickle little fashionhead with a fondness for pretty things. And as we wandered among the paintings on sale, me gasping and Mia taking notes in a tan Smythson ledger, I realized that she was a very smart woman. Certainly, way smarter than her poor, probably about to be poor, husband.

  “I haven’t always been a cunt,” she said matter-of-factly. Clearly exhibiting the one trait that she and Scott had in common, a good grasp of Anglo-Saxon. “When I first met Scott, we had fun together. I was working at the Gagosian in New York, and he came to a private viewing with David Bowie and some movie star whose name I can’t remember. And I tried to explain to him why Damien Hirst wasn’t just about dead sheep. He tried to get me back to the Mercer where he was staying, and he was so insanely charming that I went. Even though my boyfriend was at the same party.”

  “That sounds like Scott,” I said. “The charm offensive.”

  “ ‘Offensive’ being the operative word,” she said, quickly remembering that we were here to screw her husband for a few million dollars, not sing his praises. “Anyway, we had an amazing courtship, and it was all very fancy with romantic breaks in Bora Bora and weekends in Rome, and it’s
not as if I was a stranger to all that flash. I’d dated men before who had way more money and glamour than Scott. But he made it all fun. We’d be in Harry’s Bar in Venice, and we’d be dying laughing. Or we’d be smooching beside a fire in Aspen, and he was the sweetest, most giving, most considerate man in the world.” She jotted down the reference number of a Mondrian in her book. “But I didn’t realize that that’s what Scott does. He gives. He is the gift that keeps on giving. Only now he gives to everyone else. He gives to every stray actress who crosses his path, he gives to Daniel Rosen—who isn’t fit to lick his boots—he gives to the valets, the busboys, the directors. And he gives to women. He can’t resist women. The ones in Range Rovers at the traffic light who roll him for his car—”

  “He told you about that?” I was stunned. I’d planned on having that particular secret nailed up with me inside my coffin.

  “Of course he didn’t tell me. We don’t really speak anymore.” She turned to me and shrugged. “I have him followed. Every meeting, every premiere, every trip to the gym. And incidentally, you might want to cancel the gym membership for him, because he hasn’t been in ten months. He has alternate forms of exercise nowadays.”

  “I see,” I said. Not really wanting to be party to quite so much information about Scott, but having little choice.

  “Anyway, the thing is that Scott has time for everyone except me. So between them and the drugs and the never knowing when to quit partying . . . well, it’s not exactly a marriage.” She gave a long, hard stare at a Dufy and then moved closer to examine the frame.

  “Have you thought about couples therapy?” I know, I know, lame. But it was all I could think of to say.

  “Well, if it’s a toss-up between the opening of an envelope at Mann’s Chinese Theatre or two hours with a shrink, guess who wins?” she said bitterly. “Scott doesn’t want to save our marriage any more than he wants to quit pushing that white shit up his nose. So it’s really just a matter of time before I call my lawyer.”

  “But if you loved him once, and he clearly loved you . . . well, isn’t that a good enough reason to try just one more time?”

  She looked at me exactly as I suspected she might: as if I had been dropped from a spacecraft.

  “I know, I’m too romantic for my own good, but I like Scott, and I don’t know you, but I think you’re probably amazingly good for him, and it seems such a shame.” I don’t know why I was being so outspoken for the first time in my life. But I suppose it was because I did like Mia. For all her outrageously amoral ways, she was a smart and funny woman, and, as she said, she hadn’t always been like this, so underneath she was probably as kind and considerate as Scott was. Underneath.

  “Oh, we’re beyond salvation, honey,” she said, and patted me cheerfully on the back. “I caught him screwing the dog walker last week. Which was the final nail in the coffin. She was incredibly trustworthy, and I had to fire her. So now the dog suffers. I realized that I’d never be able to have children with Scott. And so, really, our relationship’s over. It’s just a question of getting what I can while I can. Because, frankly, after four years of marriage to a man who is incapable of picking up a single item of clothing from the floor and who’s in denial about the fact that he’s addicted to everything from sex to Excedrin PM, I feel I’m entitled.”

  “Well, when you put it that way . . .” I said, careful to remain professionally unopinionated.

  “Now, as far as I’m concerned, this is all second-rate art.” Mia closed her book decisively. “There’s not a single piece for over a million dollars, and I think I’d prefer something more fun for my birthday. Let’s go to Harry Winston’s.”

  Let’s go to Harry Winston’s.

  Now, I’m not especially jewel-oriented, and I don’t know my carats from a hole in the ground, but show me the woman who can resist that particular battle cry. Not me, that’s for sure. And soon enough all thought of betrayal of Scott and loyalties and professional etiquette was hurled to the curb as I took my seat in Mia’s dream machine. Since I’d given up dating in this town, I suspected that living vicariously through Mia for just one afternoon was as close as I was ever going to get to being a Hollywood wife. So I determined to enjoy myself—even though back at my desk there were sixteen scripts without brads that needed distributing, more unreturned phone calls than Lara had Cosabella G-strings, plus I still needed to visit Jason over at the Coffee Bean and talk with him about Sex Addicts in Love. So much for my blossoming new career as a Hollywood player. I’d had my head turned at the first glimmer of distraction.

  In the car Mia took calls from at least four girlfriends. And though I pretended not to hear, it was impossible not to elicit that they were variously Jen (who was married to Brad), Courtney (who clearly wasn’t an assistant at The Agency), Sarah Jessica (there is only one), and Julia (go figure). She was planning a smallish lunch party at her place on Saturday, and they should all come and absolutely did not need to bring anything. No, not even a bottle of rosé. All right? It was just going to be an informal little something out on the veranda, and maybe they’d have a swim afterward. Perfect, lovely. Can’t wait. Kind of thing.

  And when she’d finished on the phone, Mia turned off her Puccini and put on some Missy Elliott and sang along: “Can you pay my bills? Let me know if you will cuz a chick gotta live . . .”

  And live she did. And I was going along for the ride. For the next two hours, Mia and I were the best of friends. She may have been a ruthless opponent in the divorce arena, but she was a lot of fun in the plush environs of a diamond emporium.

  “Do you know that Harry Winston was the last person to own the Hope diamond?” she whispered as we walked from the bathwater-warm air of Rodeo Drive through the doors of the store. The cool air gave me goose bumps, and I rubbed my arms as I followed Mia, who had made a shameless beeline for the larger glass cases containing what I was about to learn were Important Pieces. These were the jewels with names, histories, and the kind of price tags that Mia was looking for. And it soon became clear that this wasn’t the first time Scott’s credit card had taken a hit in here.

  “Mrs. Wagner. So lovely to see you. And looking so well.” A man in a charcoal gray suit smiled in an oleaginous way at Mia and bowed and scraped his way to find us a glass of champagne each. This was definitely the life, I thought as I stopped worrying about being busted for fraud by the security guard on account of my twenty-dollar Canal Street Cartier rip-off watch and instead began to lose myself in a world where the purchase of million-dollar gems is just another Wednesday afternoon activity, to be scheduled in between lunch at Indochine and a sacrocranial at home in the master suite at 4:00 P.M.

  “How about this one?” Mia pointed to a yellow diamond solitaire pendant surrounded by pavé diamonds. Or so I was told. I wouldn’t have known a pavé diamond if it had shaken hands with me and introduced itself. The man handed us our glasses of champagne and opened the cabinet for her.

  “It’s a splendid piece,” he said, and placed it around her tiny little neck. I wondered for a moment whether she might fall flat on her face with the weight of it. I swear, it was the most obscenely large boulder of a thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

  “The yellow makes me look a little sallow, don’t you think?” Mia turned to me. What was I supposed to say? I hadn’t a clue about jewels, and, more important, I didn’t know the vernacular. Was it like buying a pair of shoes? Should I ask if she had anything to match it?

  “What will you wear it with?” I ventured after a large gulp of champagne. Because she was waiting for me to say something, and nothing was rushing to mind.

  “I hardly think that’s a consideration.” The man was looking at me as though I’d crawled from under a stone. Presumably your average granite rock and not the Krupp diamond.

  I don’t think he really could comprehend just who I might be. Clearly I wasn’t Mia’s best friend, who would have been one of the usual clientele who hadn’t washed her own hair since her divorce in ’97 and
was clad in that unmistakably stealth-wealth, quiet-cashmere way. But then equally I wasn’t the illegal maid. So he could neither bring himself to agree with me nor be blatantly rude to me. We, the underlings, those who could only afford to look, reached an accommodation by simply ignoring one another.

  “You hate it,” Mia said neurotically, and quickly had the yellow pendant removed from her neck. “What about emeralds? Much better with my hair anyway,” she decided as a pair of emerald earrings found their way to her lobes and hung there as large as robin’s eggs.

  “Those are special,” I pronounced, finding my jewel-buying vocabulary at last. “The clean lines work well with your eyes.” Whatever that meant. But it was enough to persuade Mia to pass them over to me so she could see them à la distance, as Holly Golightly might have said.

  “Here, you try them. I can’t tell whether they’re in proportion.” So I did. I lifted my hair and fastened the dazzling green creations in place. They felt heavy but brushed the skin on my neck enticingly. I turned to look in the mirror, and there, attached to my earlobes, were a couple of gems that probably cost more than my parents’ home. How was that for a sense of proportion?

  “Oh, they’re amazing,” I said in a hushed tone as I turned to show Mia. And they were amazing. I felt like Elizabeth Taylor. Just off to take a dip in the pool at Cap Ferrat in my tiara, darlings, I wanted to say with a tinkling laugh.

  “A bit on the grotesque side,” Mia pronounced, disturbing me and Richard Burton on a yacht in Capri.

  “Me?” I asked, shaken from my reverie. But she didn’t answer.

  She had already moved on to an altogether new shopping opportunity, the vintage piece. Woo-hoo, I thought as I wondered whether anyone would miss a pretty little ruby I’d spied sitting out on a counter in a velvet box, which obviously wasn’t going to go to any home as happy and loving as the one I would be able to give it. I resisted the urge and shuffled over to where Mia was bent over a warm glass case, looking grave.