The Second Assistant

by Clare Naylor

  “Hey, Lizzie!” Jason lit up as I walked in the door of the empty coffee shop. And suddenly I didn’t feel quite so bad. Outside the marble, Pollock-lined walls of what today masqueraded as the Ministry of Fear, I was once again a sentient human being with a voice and opinions on all manner of things, from Justin Timberlake to genetically modified crops. I was also able to breathe the air without fear that it contained poisoned spores pumped out through the air-conditioning by Ryan. Spores that would react only with my DNA and nobody else’s in The Agency, but spores that would leave me with the IQ of Talitha. But without the looks. Jesus, and I’d just accused Tony of being paranoid.

  “Hi.” I gave Jason a hug. Which was a new thing between us, but not altogether unpleasant. I hadn’t had a hug since my sister was here. And that wasn’t the same. Maybe it’s a daddy thing, maybe it’s a sub-sexual need, but sometimes you just want a man’s arms around you. Big, smothering, crushing biceps that make your shoulders hunch and your lips squish together like your face is trapped in an elevator door. And it felt lovely being crunched like a bug by Jason.

  “How’ve you been? I thought about sending out a search party but figured you just didn’t like my script, thought I was a pervert, and defected to Starbucks.”

  “Never,” I said as he released me. “In fact”—I savored the moment because I knew it would be sweet for him—“I love your screenplay to pieces, and I’d be honored if you’d let me come on board as a producer.” I grinned excitedly at him.

  “You’re kidding?” Jason surveyed my face for a glaze of dishonesty. “You’re not kidding.”

  “I’m serious. I think it’s incredible. The story, the characters, the payoffs, the structure’s tight, it could easily be done for under five million, and you’re a genius.”

  “Holy shit! You even sound like a producer!” Jason laughed and picked me up and spun me around. Well, he tried. I was a little unwieldy, so he kind of plonked me back down and punched me amiably instead.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t work for the hottest talent agency in Los Angeles for nothing.” I shrugged. “Clearly all the time I thought that I was just a beneath-contempt subordinate who couldn’t patch through a phone call if her Christmas bonus depended on it, I was imbibing industry know-how by osmosis.”

  “Junior Scott Rudin,” he said. “Wanna latte, and we can discuss it?”

  “Actually, I’d love a latte. And a raspberry iced tea, but I have to get back and make amends for the most monumental fuckup since Cutthroat Island.”

  “Lizzie, you get fired every day. How bad can it be?” He got to work on my drinks.

  “This was an order from on high. Daniel Rosen wanted my head on a plate.”

  “So how come you’re still here?”

  “Death-row reprieve from Scott. Well, actually Lara. Anyway, it’s a long story and I am still here, but . . . well, I want to get on with your movie, Jason. I like it, and I realize that my career needs to be based on something other than being liked by Lara.”

  “Ah, the fickle world of the Hollywood talent agent. Well, I’m not sorry if it means that you’re on board with Sex Addicts.”

  “I really am. So maybe we can get together over the weekend and discuss it. I mean, what I just said was only my abbreviated coverage. I have a lot more to say.”

  “And I bet you can talk when you want to, can’t you?” he teased.

  “I have been known to get a little carried away in my time. But nothing that a slap across the cheek can’t take care of.” I picked up the drinks.

  “Okay, how about Sunday morning?”

  “Sounds great,” I said, grateful for having what could be deemed by the desperate as a plan for my weekend.

  “We could go hiking,” he offered.

  “Hiking?”

  If I had been successful in one thing since I’d arrived in this town, it was in hiding how supremely unfit I was. With twice the determination that it would have taken to complete a triathlon, I had managed not to join a gym, not to put so much as a toe inside a Pilates studio, not to try out for the ladies’ basketball team in my building. And certainly not to indulge in that most disgustingly wholesome of Californian activities—hiking. God, the mere thought of it made me want to take to my sofa, sew myself to a cushion, and stay there for the next seventeen years. Because not only did I not have the mental commitment to hike, I also lacked both the oatmealy socks and the cardiovascular equipment. Granted I had lungs and a heart. I just wasn’t sure how they’d like being put to work.

  Equally, my clothes and hair may have changed since I made Hollywood my home, but underneath those Petit Bateau T-shirts and Joie combats was still a girl who worked in politics. In D.C. I had existed on heroin-strength black coffee, the occasional protein bar, and turkey subs snatched on the run, and the only exercise I had was racing to a meeting or shuffling around at a cold bus stop on my way in to work. Besides which, hikers had hair the color of wheat, freckles, and shiny-apple faces. I simply wasn’t the hearty, hiking type.

  “Sounds good. What time?” From what twisted, deep-down place did that come? I wondered as I made my way back to the office and prayed for flooding in Fryman Canyon on Sunday morning. At 7:00 A.M.

  14

  We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?

  —Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates

  Psycho

  I could hear the phone ringing from the other side of the door. It was a determined ring that said “It’s your mother, and I will not leave a message.” My answering machine clicked on as I dropped the keys on the floor in my haste to make it. But after the beep a frosty click could be heard in my apartment, and three seconds later the phone began to ring again. I undid the two locks that were the originals from when the apartment had been built back in 1923. I hadn’t thought to put in a new one, and neither had any of the other girls in my building. Most of us owned nothing valuable enough to steal, and if it was sex the intruders were after, we’d probably be too tired. Apart from the preternaturally energetic Alexa, and then her pelvic floor was tighter than a nutcracker and would doubtless leave any offender wishing he’d stuck to Internet porn.

  I opened the door and lunged for the phone. I still harbored some vestigial hope that it might be Jake Hudson every time it rang. But of course it was always my mother.

  “Elizabeth? Is that you?” Why did she ask that whenever she called? What other female did she think would be answering the phone of her single daughter who lived alone in Los Angeles?

  “Yes, Mom. Of course it’s me. How are you?”

  I flicked my shoes off across the length of the room and headed for the refrigerator. Oh, great, it was grocery-shopping night, when I got to throw out all the vegetables I’d optimistically filled my basket with last week. The fennel that I was going to bake. The butternut squash I was going to cut in half and scrape and fill with butter and sprinkle with brown sugar and then put in the oven for forty-five minutes. The same fennel and butternut squash that were now significantly shrunken and malevolently staring out from their shelf, determined to make me feel guilty because, as well as proving me wasteful and lazy, they’d also like to remind me that I’d eaten pizza six out of seven nights when I claimed not to be able to afford it.

  “I’m okay, honey,” my mother said unconvincingly. I settled on cereal for supper and tossed the healthy dead stuff in the trash. “Apart from the fact that I had a fall the other day. Those dogs will be the death of me.”

  “You fell? Why didn’t you tell me? What happened?”

  I hated it when she did this. She never told me when something serious happened until it was too late. Then I felt horribly guilty for weeks afterward that I hadn’t been in touch more often. Of course, my brother, Tim, was there to take her to the hospital, and Melissa was there to nurse her back to health. It was just lousy Elizabeth who was nowhere to be found. As usual.

  “Well, honey, you’re so busy all that way out in California, and I don’t like to bother you with such sill
y little things. Besides, you have enough to worry about, like earthquakes, forest fires, and race riots.”

  Well, I hadn’t until this moment, but better add them to my list of things to keep me awake in the frail, suicide hour before dawn.

  “I’m never too busy to speak to you, Mom.” I sloshed some dubious milk onto my cereal and rinsed off a spoon. “So what happened?”

  “I took the dogs for a walk, and they went after a rabbit, and I’d stupidly wrapped both leashes around my right wrist, and they took off and lifted me off my feet. Dragging me halfway across a field by my arm. But I’m okay. I’m just black and blue, and we have your father’s annual black-tie fund-raiser for Save the Dolphins on Saturday, and I look like I’ve been through a meat grinder.”

  “Jesus, Mom, you should have called me right away.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to bother you, and I’m fine. But it got me thinking of you, sweetheart. I hate it that you’re so alone out there in Los Angeles. It gives me sleepless nights. What if you get sick or hurt yourself? Who’s going to take care of you?”

  “Mom, they have doctors in Los Angeles. And if I’m really sick, then you can just come and take care of me.”

  This was not the answer she was looking for.

  “So have you met any nice men recently?” She sounded admirably casual, but we both knew that this was the point of the call. Finally.

  “No, Mom. I don’t think there are any nice men in Los Angeles. There is one who seems nice on the surface. But I know that after one date he’d turn from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. Or cause me more heartache, rejection, and disappointment than I think I can bear at the moment.” Oh, God, I wanted to kick myself. Too much information for one worried, devoted, bruised mother.

  “Elizabeth, I think you need to come home right away. We’ll pay for your plane ticket, and you can stay here with Dad and me until you find a job. I heard that young senator from South Carolina is looking for a new team to spearhead his reelection campaign, and he’s even green, darling.” I glanced at my overflowing garbage bin, which displayed the myriad colors of red cans, brown bottles, blue papers—all glaringly in need of division and recycling. Like cooking my vegetables, this would never happen. I turned my back on the distinctly ungreen trash and focused on my mother.

  “Mom, it’s not really that bad. It’ll all be much better when I have a few close girlfriends here and I won’t have to use you as a sounding board for my problems. Which aren’t even real problems, they’re just natural blips when you move thousands of miles from home to a strange city and a new job.”

  “Well, all the more reason to come home. You’ve never had problems making friends before. Clearly there’s something wrong with Los Angeles. And have you spoken to Tim?”

  Tim, my perfect older brother, was a lawyer for Doctors Without Borders. He’d recently been tapped for a place on a war-crimes tribunal in Africa.

  “No, Mom. We keep on missing one another. I’ll call him Sunday.”

  “He’s told us secretly that he’s going to propose to Daphne. But let him tell you for himself. Of course Dad and I are over the moon.” Oh, great. I didn’t think that it was possible for my perfect brother to get any more perfect, but he’d topped himself. He’d met Daphne six months ago on Capitol Hill. She’d started a nonprofit organization that raised money to turn the worst public schools in D.C. over to the private sector. Apparently it was having amazing results. She was also pretty, stylish, and really cool. I was happy for him. And I thought it might just take the pressure off me for a moment. But instead it had the opposite effect.

  “Why can’t you find a nice man, Lizzie? I don’t understand. You haven’t had a boyfriend since Patrick, and that was your last year at college. I’m starting to wonder if you have commitment issues, darling. Perhaps that’s why you didn’t stick with politics either. Your dad and I were thinking that maybe you should talk to somebody about it.”

  “Like Tim?”

  “Perhaps a professional.”

  “A shrink?” I asked, faintly horrified. My family’s intimacy, though fantastically supportive and loving, could also feel a bit interfering at times. To say the least. I took a deep breath to prevent myself from yelling at my mother. Which wouldn’t have been productive and would just have confirmed their theories that I would benefit from a dose of therapy. “Mom, I don’t have commitment issues. I had the occasional boyfriend at the White House—you just never met them. And the job with Congressman Edmunds finished through no fault of mine.”

  “No need to be so prickly, darling. It was just a thought. Some say it’s a by-product of being the middle child. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  I had to get her off the phone or I’d say something that I regretted.

  “Oh, Mom, what do you know? There’s somebody at the door. I think it must be my neighbor, Alexa. She said she might come by and have some supper with me. Talk soon. Give my love to everyone.” I ignored her irritated whimperings and hung up. Sorry, Mom, love you but can’t be dealing.

  The next morning, with the fingers of my left hand hovering between a Cinnabon and my lips, I began sorting through the mail. I separated it as efficiently as I could, and the piles that resulted—one for me, one for Lara, one for Scott—were of mind-bending neatness. It was the day of my new leaf, and it was still too early to have made a single mistake (that I knew of), so I was feeling exhilarated by how good a day I could have. I was even more excited to discover that my mail pile, rather than just being full of the usual out-of-date circulars and requests for photographs of Cameron, contained a very smart manila envelope. And for once the contents were actually interesting, too. Not woo-hoo interesting, but definitely up my Strasse in this new efficient mode.

  I’d been approved for the company health plan and now had my own Blue Cross card with my name on it and “The Agency” written underneath. I petted the soft plastic. This meant that I could go to the dentist and have my teeth cleaned, and maybe I’d even find a nice dentist who would agree to bleach them, too. Also, Courtney had said that if I went to see a dermatologist, they’d give me facials and I’d only have to pay my fifteen dollars copay. Apparently the medical profession in Los Angeles was very willing to stretch the boundaries of acceptable coverage to help out the young and the struggling. So now that I was one of them, I needed the teeth and skin to make it in this town.

  I began leafing through the booklet looking at all the things that were and weren’t covered. I could have in-home care, but not a private room. I was allowed to check in to a rehabilitation clinic for drug and alcohol abuse, but I was only covered for a thirty-day stay. Which probably ruled out heroin but left a window for oxycodone addiction. I was also entitled to sixteen visits to a mental-health-care provider. Which sounded free to me. I licked the Cinnabon off my fingers slowly and pondered what my mom had said. Maybe I did need to see a shrink. Maybe there was a reason that I didn’t have a boyfriend and the rest of the world did. I mean, it wasn’t as though there was any stigma attached to your going to a shrink in this town. In fact, quite the opposite. Everyone probably wondered what weirdness I was in denial about that I didn’t discuss my issues in an open way in a leathery environment on a weekly basis. They probably thought that I was a seething black cloud of neuroses and passive-aggressive tendencies. Or perhaps that I was egomaniacal for even thinking so much about myself. That was the trouble with psychotherapy: You were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t.

  “Help!” I said out loud.

  Then I began to think about the little Freud that I knew. He believed that there was no such thing as an accident. I hadn’t just accidentally asked for help. And there was no such thing as a joke. I hadn’t jokingly asked for help either. I actually wanted it.

  By the afternoon I had canvassed various people on their head-shrinkage of choice in a bid to find a suitable person to care for what I was by now convinced was my fragile mental state. Talitha swore by Dr. Amanda, who gave her revolutionary advice ab
out relationships. But not so revolutionary that Talitha’s life stopped seeming to everyone in the office like a confusing, busy episode of Sex and the City. Still, Dr. Amanda scored high on the patience factor. She must have had to listen week in and week out to detailed conversations about the creative executive at Buena Vista whom Talitha had slept with the weekend before and who hadn’t called. Even though he’d been to Harvard, had a wealthy family in San Francisco with a second home in Napa, and, if all went according to plan, he’d be a senior VP within the next tax year. Well, at least Dr. Amanda got paid to listen to Talitha. Which was more than could be said for most of us in the office, who couldn’t kick her out after an hour. I crossed Dr. Amanda off the list because I didn’t want to risk being in the same room when her poor brain exploded.

  I glanced at Courtney, who was sitting at her desk with a sour-lemon look on her face as she doubtless dispatched some bitchy quip to IFILMpro about Mike’s wife or his hair-regrowth situation. IFILMpro is a chat forum where movie-industry professionals anonymously assassinate their coworkers, bosses, and movie stars online. I think it was for discussing business matters, too, but that wouldn’t have appealed to Courtney; her bloodlust could only be satisfied by eviscerating people. So it was no use looking to Courtney for a possible shrink—she didn’t have emotions to talk about. She was a gossipmongering automaton who spent every spare hour working out how best to appear busy and indispensable to Mike. I wished I could be more like her and not think about annoying things like the meaning of life or human relations.