The Second Assistant

by Clare Naylor

  Noel laughed and shook his head in disbelief. “Fine, whatever. But can we make it quick? Because I have two new drafts to read, and I’m supposed to green-light these movies tomorrow. And talking about emotional shit with a bunch of earnest do-gooders isn’t going to get my work done for me, is it, now?”

  The crowd smiled with satisfaction, feeling that he’d just given them the affirmation that they needed to prove he was an asshole. Sandy led him forward, and he sat down in the library chair, which had clearly been drafted in from a friend’s home—because it looked much more humane than the concrete plinth that poor Sandy had to sit on.

  “Okay. Assassinate my character.” He leaned back and looked bored. If he’d had bubble gum, he’d have popped it in our faces like a defiant teenager.

  Noel’s sister stood up, then sat down. “I haven’t spoken to you in four weeks. We used to speak every day.”

  “I’m sorry, Samantha, I’ve been busy. I thought I returned your calls.”

  “Well, your secretary did return them, but I didn’t call you back, and you didn’t even notice that I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Jesus, Sam. I’m busy, and if you’re mad at me, just tell me. What are you so cross about?”

  “I have an entire list, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the Bambi hunt. How could you?” Samantha, who was strikingly similar in appearance to Noel, looked crushed.

  Noel started to laugh but realized he might face a firing squad if he continued. “Come on, Sam. It was a little innocent fun, and nobody got hurt.”

  “Would anyone like me to clarify what a Bambi hunt is, by the way?” Sam looked around the riveted gathering. A few people nodded so she proceeded. “It’s where men get together in the forest to hunt down naked women and shoot them with paint balls.”

  “I’ve heard about it on TV,” Lee said, then hastily added, “it sounded immoral.”

  Noel rolled his eyes. “Hell, one of the girls made twenty-five hundred bucks because she didn’t get shot.” The audience remained unsympathetic.

  “Noel, you were shooting at women with a gun as they ran through the forest naked. How is that all right?” wailed Samantha.

  “They had sneakers on, and they could have worn goggles and a helmet. I heard the guide offer it. Anyway, it was an innocent way of letting off some steam. Us guys lead stressful lives. The Bambis didn’t mind. We all had beers together afterward.”

  “You were hunting naked women. Does that not seem a bit twisted to you, Noel? Are you such a misogynist? You have a wife and a sister. A wife who made her objection clear before you went, and you ignored her. You’re disgusting.”

  “Hey, hey, it was only paint.”

  “Noel, you used to be a Democrat. You marched for gun control. What happened to you?”

  Wow. This was really intense. A little garbage in the hallway was nothing compared to this. It was the most entertaining thing I’d witnessed for a long time. Maybe I should pitch a show called Intervention to NBC. This was live drama unfolding right before your eyes, with family, loved ones, and virtual strangers participating. And Bambi hunting? I’d never heard of that one before. I’d have to look into how you get hired, just in case I was ever really strapped for cash. I had a high pain threshold and could run fast, so I’d probably be really good at it. I snickered at the idea. Out loud, unfortunately. Slowly the whole room turned in my direction.

  Noel looked over at me, annoyed. “Who the fuck is that, anyway?”

  “See, Noel, you’re hostile and abusive to a completely innocent girl. That’s Elizabeth, and you were a total asshole to her.” Alexa stepped in with this ringing endorsement. Oh, shit, my stupid giggles had put me on the spot. “Elizabeth, would you like to share your experience with us?”

  Now I’d have to speak. Everyone was waiting for me. I seemed to have lost my voice.

  “To clarify things . . .” I cleared my throat, swallowing what felt to be a bolder blocking my windpipe. Then I looked at Noel’s hairline—I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eyes. “You ran into me outside Alexa’s apartment. You knocked me over, and all my trash went everywhere, and you walked on without stopping, looking, or even apologizing, like I didn’t exist.”

  Alexa picked up where I’d left off and elaborated on my story. “We’re trying to show you a variety of examples of how you’ve changed. You used to be gallant, a gentleman, a boy who was brought up well, with manners and respect for others.”

  Oddly, Noel had gone very silent. He looked penetratingly at me, seeming to remember the incident, and, even more than shooting naked girls in the woods, this odd testimony seemed to shame him. He turned toward me and looked me in the eye. “Elizabeth, I know that I was an asshole to you. I should have stopped and helped you pick up that trash. I’m sorry.” He looked like a smashed piñata.

  “No big deal. You’re forgiven.”

  The onslaught continued, but I felt that I’d been witness to enough and to watch any more was a bit like Bambi hunting—far too easy. So I whispered my good-byes in Alexa’s ear and slipped out unnoticed while Noel’s mom was having a go at him for showing up late to his grandfather’s funeral, then taking a phone call in church while his uncle was breaking down in tears at the pulpit. As I closed the door quietly behind me, I realized that Noel sounded like he was worth saving. He hadn’t always been an asshole. He’d just morphed into a stranger, like an X-Man mutant. Maybe I’d helped a little bit, and maybe someday, if I turned into the archetypal Hollywood asshole, I’d have enough cool people and loyal friends and family to intervene on my behalf. One could always hope.

  The next morning I woke up with a start. My doorbell was ringing. Irritatingly, by the time I found this out, I’d already launched my clock across the room like a rocket, so I had no idea what time it was. I trudged to the door in my pajamas and opened it. Alexa was standing on the other side with a yoga mat in each hand. One blue and one purple. She was wearing white hot pants and a wife-beater T-shirt.

  “Good morning, Lizzie. I thought I’d give you a little free yoga instruction. It’s very important to repay a kindness with a kindness. And it occurred to me that you might need it.”

  I rubbed my eyes and yawned. What I really needed was an extra hour of sleep.

  “What time is it?” I was trying to open my eyes, but they seemed cemented shut by some mysterious fairy dust.

  “Six-thirty. I thought we could do an hour three times a week before you go to work. It’s really no problem for me, since this is when I do my own workout, and I don’t mind guiding you for a few weeks. Then you can just follow my lead. Anyway, you said you were too poor to join a gym, and this is much better for you.”

  Alexa marched into my apartment and spread out the mats. Then she sat in the lotus position on her mat and closed her eyes. I looked on. Couldn’t I just watch?

  “Babe, you need to go and put on something comfortable, something with stretch.” She opened her eyes. “Do you own any Lycra?” I shook my head sleepily. “Then your pajamas will do just perfectly,” she said, so I reluctantly sat down and crossed my legs.

  “This is a perfect apartment for yoga, Lizzie, nice open spaces,” Alexa said as she demonstrated a mudra—which was apparently what I was supposed to do with my fingers while I was sitting.

  “My boss has his own personal mudra that he uses every day,” I laughed, flipping Alexa the finger in demonstration. She didn’t seem to appreciate my joke, so I stopped smiling, did as I was told, and followed her lead. I was wise to behave, because the amount of pain that it caused me simply to sit in a cross-legged position suggested that I might need all the guru I could lay hands on for quite some time.

  I arrived in the office at eight-thirty on the dot. I’d even had enough energy to read one of Victoria’s scripts over my chai latte in the Coffee Bean. I had a sense of overall well-being and practically skipped over to Scott’s office to put his mail on his desk. Nobody else was in yet, but I noticed that the door was already a tin
y bit ajar. Usually the cleaners locked it and either myself or Lara unlocked it. I pushed it open slowly, thinking perhaps Scott had spent the night there after a battle with Mia. I wasn’t prepared when I saw a dark head fumbling behind the desk. My immediate reaction was horror, thinking I’d caught Scott in the act with one of his extramarital dalliances, but when I cleared my throat discreetly, the head popped up like a jack-in-the-box. It was Ryan. I was so shocked I just stared dumbly as he bolted past me, almost knocking me over in an attempt to exit.

  “You stupid cow!” he spit. “You’re never on time.” Then he was gone.

  I wandered in a daze over to Scott’s desk and checked to see if Ryan had left anything behind, like a clue as to what the fuck he’d been doing there. Nothing seemed to be missing, but the papers on Scott’s desk had definitely been rifled through, and it looked like someone had been trying to jimmy open his file drawer. Luckily for Scott, he’d asked me to put a serious lock on that specific drawer just two weeks before. He frequently had his stash delivered, in Beverly Hills style, directly to the office by a blond female courier on a motorcycle. I’d never seen it myself, but Lara said the weed came in a vacuum-sealed pouch with the dealer’s company logo on a sticker sealing the bag. Scott had needed a secure hiding place for it, so I’d had the locksmith come in and fit a special metal drawer and given Scott the only key.

  I went back to my desk and waited with unmitigated excitement for my boss to arrive. I was finally going to get my revenge on Ryan, and I hadn’t even had to plot it. There was nothing malicious about reporting what I’d discovered. Actually, I really had no choice in the matter. If I kept it to myself, I’d be betraying my boss’s loyalty. I wondered if Ryan had a drug problem. Maybe someone had told him where Scott kept his stash and he was jonesing for a hit. The Agency was like one big party of whisper down the lane, so it wouldn’t surprise me. But then why hadn’t I heard about Ryan’s addiction problems? No one told me anything.

  The shit certainly hit the fan when I reported to Scott what I’d walked in on that morning. But Scott didn’t respond as I’d expected him to. I was certain that the second the news of Ryan’s attempted break-in slipped from my lips, Scott would have raced in a rage from the office and demanded of Daniel that he fire the little weasel thief. But instead Scott smiled and motioned for me to shut the door.

  “Lizzie, did you mention to Ryan that you were going to tell me?”

  I blinked a few times. This wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting. “No. It wasn’t my immediate instinct. But I’m not afraid to admit to him that I turned him in, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Do you think he would ever imagine that you wouldn’t tell me? I mean, does he think perhaps that you’re in awe of him or afraid of him?” Scott looked graver than I’d ever seen him. I thought hard so as to do his interest in the subject some justice.

  “Unfortunately, I think he could easily believe that I’m afraid of him. He’s been a jerk to me from day one. He works for Daniel, who hired me in the first place, and he delights in bullying me whenever he has the opportunity. So it’s perfectly plausible that I wouldn’t tell you in order to gain his favor,” I told Scott.

  “My guess is, Lizzie, that Ryan won’t leave this matter alone. So if he asks whether you told me about this, I want you to tell him that you haven’t mentioned it. Not a word. Try to sound genuine. Practice it in the mirror if you have to. I’m not going to say anything to Daniel.”

  “But shouldn’t Daniel know? Maybe Ryan’s a thief and is stealing from him, too.”

  “Lizzie, he’s not a thief. That’s all you need to know. Okay? What happened this morning was that you arrived at the office at nine and didn’t see a thing out of the ordinary.”

  I shook my head in passive consent and walked out of the office.

  I spent the rest of the day nervously jumping at my own shadow. I kept expecting to turn around and find the snake Ryan slithering near my shoulder in an attempt to save his ass. I really had no qualms about lying to Ryan and didn’t even need to practice my fibbing skills on this occasion. Though I’d have much preferred it if I could call him up and tell him to get his slimy ass down here because Scott and the LAPD wanted to arrest him for trespassing and attempted theft. That would have given me a much greater sense of well-being than an hour of yoga.

  But whatever Scott was up to, I was pretty certain that Ryan would never escape unscathed. What did bother me was the victory grin that I knew would be plastered across his smug face when I told him that I hadn’t mentioned a word to Scott. Though it would be a bald-faced lie, he’d never guess that, assuming instead that his intimidation tactics had worked and that his exalted position as Daniel’s chief ass licker had prevented me from filling my boss in. He’d immediately see it as a trump card just sitting in his hand. But if I could spin it correctly, I could make it seem like a favor I was doing him, instead of a knee-jerk fear reaction. Then at least I’d get to save face and do my boss’s bidding at the same time.

  Yes, I said to myself as I washed my hands in the bathroom, that’s exactly what I needed to do. I had to go up and see Ryan before he found me and tell him I was saving his ass. Then at least I could forge a momentary truce between us, no matter how false the base, and buy myself a little peace and quiet. And as my mother always said, you catch more flies with honey. But I guess my mother couldn’t have envisaged any human being as repellent as Ryan.

  As I walked back down the hallway to my office, I pondered exactly what to say to Ryan, and I realized that I’d never really left politics after all. Perhaps I was reliving the Iran-Contra affair, Hollywood style. But then who was Reagan? More important, who was Poindexter, or Ollie North? I chewed on my pen intently and decided that the analysis was best saved for my next meeting with Dr. Vance. What I really needed to do now was escape the office for my lunch break so I could build up my strength before I made the long ride up to Daniel’s office and assumed my role in whatever drama I was too unimportant to know that I was involved in.

  16

  I’m going up and up and up, and nobody’s gonna pull me down.

  —Lana Turner as Lora Meredith

  Imitation of Life

  I launched myself from bed on Sunday morning with the speed of a decrepit ocean liner setting sail from harbor. I did not want to hike in Fryman Canyon. I wanted to sleep in my bed.

  “Oh, God, no,” I moaned through a mouthful of pillow as I buried my face deeper. Should I just call Jason, yell at him for making such an indecent proposal to me in the first place, and arrange to see him at a sensible hour? Yes, that’s exactly what I should do. I stuck an exploratory hand out from beneath my sheet and felt for my cell phone on the bedside table next to me. Hello, phone? But it wasn’t there. My phone was in my purse, which was on the back of a chair in the kitchen, which was a whole room away. I pulled my hand back in and groaned like a wounded animal.

  Eventually guilt got the better of me, and I dragged myself across the floorboards to the bathroom, with my knuckles practically dusting the earth in an early Homo sapiens manner. And unlike the girls in the commercials on television, half a bottle of grapefruit shower gel did not do it for me. Neither did standing beneath needles of hot water. What finally woke me up and persuaded me to live another day was that age-old spur, revenge. Or perhaps just residual anger from Friday, which I was obviously still harboring as it had invaded my dreams, infusing them with such violence that I had to check for bruises as I pulled off my pajamas.

  As I made an impoverished attempt at dry-skin brushing with a wet washcloth, I remembered the look on Ryan’s face when I’d told him my lie. He had smiled in such a smug, supercilious way that I’d longed to smack him and willingly cover my white cuff in his orange makeup. What I thought would be a moment of victory for me, and a temporary truce between us, had been a moment of sheer degradation. Instead of seeing it as an olive branch I was handing him and showing some appreciation like a normal human, he’d seen it only as a feather in
his cap. I’d been dying to spill my guts and reveal the Machiavellian plan that I was a pawn in, but then I’d end up losing my job. Scott’s instructions had been very clear, and I’d agreed to follow them. If only I’d guessed how ego-bruising it would be to allow Ryan to think he pulled my strings like a master puppeteer. I seethed and longed to ask him if he used Bobbi Brown liquid foundation or preferred Chantecaille Real Skin. I wanted to bust him in the salon on a Saturday morning getting his nails buffed. I wanted to tell everyone that I’d once caught him checking out his own ass approvingly in the elevator mirror. I wanted to discover documentary evidence that proved beyond reasonable doubt that he subscribed to InStyle magazine. I wanted to kill him.

  In reality, the only way I was ever going to wipe that smile off his face permanently was to rise above my current gutter-level status or get him fired, which for whatever unknown reason wasn’t in the immediate cards. My only choice was to soar above him and then look down and pour scorn—since it was unlikely that I’d be able to lay my hands on any boiling tar and feathers. In that moment in the shower, it became clear to me that, in the absence of medieval torture paraphernalia, I was going to have to torment Ryan by signing a deal for Sex Addicts. The kind of deal that made headlines. The kind of deal that would see me swiftly elevated from shakily situated second assistant to Scott Wagner to full-fledged producer with an office of my own, a deal at a studio, and Ryan’s having to order congratulatory flowers for me from Daniel. Not to mention a proud father-daughter type of relationship with Daniel Rosen who’d want, of course, to schedule lunch, which would cause Ryan to gnash his teeth in the night and then have to spend a fortune on a gum guard.

  “Oh, yes.” I stepped from the shower and no longer felt like three miles of bad road, even though I realized quickly that I was towelless. I owned only one towel, and it was growing its very own rain forest in the corner. It hadn’t been washed since my arrival in L.A., due to the fact that it was white and would have to occupy its very own load. Yet despite this setback, I flicked myself dry with the backs of my hands and felt hope surge within me. “Oh, yes,” I repeated. Jason and I were going to make this happen. And if I had to hike for it, then I’d hike for it. If I had to climb Kilimanjaro, then I would. Bring on Everest. I was going to stride my way to success in oatmeal socks if need be.