The Second Assistant

by Clare Naylor

  “Welcome aboard our flight today to Salt Lake City.” A flight attendant smiled at Scott, who handed her his coat as he continued talking to Katherine.

  “We’re covered from all angles. I have fifteen lawyers working on the documentation, and even if he wanted to sue our asses, the board will back us up.” Scott marched toward the interior of the plane. I followed, smiling at the pilot, the five flight attendants, and the fact that I was about to enter the most exclusive echelon of travel known to man.

  “Excuse me, but which one is my seat?” I asked nonchalantly, as though I did this all the time.

  “Oh, you can sit anywhere you like on this plane, Miss.” The flight attendant smiled, letting me know that she was well aware that this was my first, and probably my last, trip on a private plane.

  “Of course.” I blushed and looked around the plane. Scott had made his way to one of the seats at the back, like the naughtiest boy in school that he was, and the rest of the seats were free. I slung my purse over my shoulder and made my way to a plush brown sofa beside the window. Then I picked up the matching cashmere blanket and settled myself into the seat. Who cared if the cabin crew thought I was a confirmed coach passenger? I was going to Sundance, it was going to be freezing cold, I was going to be able to wear my favorite Aran sweater for the first time in a year, and I was going to have fun.

  I pulled the revised draft of Sex Addicts out of my bag and secured my hair in a ponytail. Jason had put my name and address on the front as a contact for anyone who might like it. I only hoped that one of these days someone might actually call me back. I began to read.

  INT. HARVARD AUDITORIUM—DAY

  JACK stands alone at graduation and watches as his friends file by.

  “Lizzie, honey, you got a spare pen?” Scott put his head over the back of my seat.

  “Sure thing.” I reached down and rummaged for a pen in the depths of my purse, then emerged triumphant. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks, doll.” He ruffled my hair, and before he could pull his hand away, a shadow fell over the pair of us.

  “Scottie, my man.”

  I looked up as Scott disentangled himself from my ponytail and saw the perfect frame of one Jake Hudson.

  “Jake!” Scottie greeted him. “Glad you could make it, you dog.”

  “Yeah, well, you were right. Sundance is always full of hotties, and, hey, we like to scout for new talent, right? Thanks for the ride, buddy.”

  “Right on.” Scott and Jake banged knuckles and laughed in their handsome, uproarious way. The flight attendants practically had orgasms.

  Sundance, by the way, is an independent film festival dreamed up by Robert Redford to discover and reward young talent, and every budding film director, writer, and producer in the business makes it their business to be there. So where the young and the hip go, the older and the desperate naturally follow. Hence the proliferation of studio executives and sharky agents who think that they might be able to pick up a groovy sleeper movie on the cheap. They generally regret the trip, though, because the good movies aren’t so inexpensive anymore. They also tend to break legs and humiliate themselves on snowboards, which they can’t resist because they think that since their emotional life is that of a thirteen-year-old, their sporting prowess will be, too. This is generally not the case.

  I could see that Jake had paid a special visit to Prada Sport, and I couldn’t quite decide whether rabbit fur around his ski jacket’s collar made him look like a god or a geek. Either way I was glad that some of his luster seemed to have worn off a little. Thanks to my Luke Lloyd displacement activity.

  “And this is . . . ?” Jake, who was large enough to make the plane feel small, pursed his lips thoughtfully as he looked down on me.

  “Lizzie,” Scott said, thudding back into his seat.

  “Lizzie. I’m Jake.” He held out his hand, and I didn’t flinch when I looked him in the eye and said, “Pleased to meet you.”

  And for all he knew, it could have been the first time.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” he said as he dropped onto the sofa opposite me.

  “Not at all.” I lowered my eyes back down to my page. I actually found it remarkably easy not to shake in his presence these days. I think it was because I’d done so much aversion therapy on myself, along the lines of:

  Jake Hudson is a bad man

  Jake Hudson is a bad man

  Jake Hudson is a bad man

  So now my emotional hardwiring was able to see, think, dream about him without any ill effects at all. What I couldn’t escape was the fact that he was quite simply the most delectable eye candy you have ever seen, and so I developed a very antisocial squint in my right eye trying to look at him over the top of Sex Addicts in Love.

  “So you’re with Scott,” he said, leaning in toward me after about ten minutes, once he’d settled onto his sofa and strapped in. And after he’d finished flirting with the flight attendant.

  “Well, no, actually I’m his . . .” I was fully intending to be honest about my status as second slave to Scott, but he interrupted me.

  “Darling, we’re both well aware that you’re not the boy’s wife.”

  “I know that I’m not his wife, but neither am I his—”

  “It’s fine.” He reached over and put a hand on my knee. My naked-but-for-a-few-denier-of-sheer-pantyhose knee. He eased a thumb into one of the grooves. I twitched out of his way. “I understand.”

  “Great.”

  I tucked my knees into the brown suede of the sofa and resumed my reading, and, thankfully, a moment later the plane took off. I cast a look behind me outside the window and watched the haze of rain over the ocean as we soared. I felt elated. I was on a private jet, and sitting opposite me was the most attractive man in Hollywood. Who cared if I hated him? I could look, couldn’t I? I wondered whether when I was forty I’d look back on this dot on the graph of my life as one of the highest points or whether it would simply be the start of a charmed, successful future. I crossed my fingers for the latter but hoped I’d never become too cynical to appreciate it. Then I remembered that nobody had called back about Sex Addicts and that I was a second assistant, so I probably shouldn’t get too far ahead of myself.

  “Would you like some lobster salad, Miss?” Above me a flight attendant was pushing a trolley of delicious dishes. “Or perhaps a cheese plate?”

  “I’d love a lobster salad.” I moved my script to one side so that she could put the food down. “Oh, and a cheese plate, too, if that’s okay.”

  “Wine or champagne?”

  “Red wine would be lovely.” I was planning on eating and then falling asleep for the rest of the flight . . . well, I had been until Himself had appeared. Now I might be afraid to fall asleep for fear of sagging chins and drooling head lolling.

  “Oh, I love a girl with an appetite.” Jake had settled himself back into his seat with a Scotch on the rocks and was looking at me as if I were the lobster salad.

  “Got to keep up my strength,” I said mindlessly.

  “Oh, yes, I’ll bet. I hear Scottie can go for hours.” He winked. I shivered. Ugh, the idea of having sex with Scott was worse than incest.

  “Actually, Scott’s my—” I began again, attempting to set the record straight.

  “Here’s the low-carb meal you ordered, sir.” The flight attendant shimmied down the aisle and presented Jake with his plate of lettuce with a flourish.

  “Great, thanks.” He beamed at her. Not in the least embarrassed about the fact that he was on a diet. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly prejudiced about men who take care of themselves, but there always strikes me as something wholly unmasculine about a man who’s a shameless proponent of Dr. Atkins. Or any regime that suggests he thinks only of looking good. I’d prefer a more corpulent man who has read Proust any day of the week. Except perhaps today. Because despite the low-carb stuff, I was looking at Jake right now and thinking how unutterably fantastic it would be to kiss him, just on
ce.

  “So, darling, where are you staying in Sundance?” He devoured a lettuce leaf and gazed intently at me.

  “To be honest, I’m not really sure, I guess in a condo—”

  “With Scott?”

  “Well, probably.”

  “But you might be able to sneak away, right?” he asked sotto voce as Scott snored loudly on the seat behind us.

  “Sneak?” I still wasn’t sure whether he was coming on to me or whether he was trying to ascertain whether I’d be available to purchase Marlboro Reds and cook him bacon and eggs in the middle of the night.

  “Come on, baby. I think you’re gorgeous,” he said. And for a second I nearly lost my head. The flight attendant was standing at attention nearby and looking at me as if I were the luckiest girl on earth. “You know you want to.” He winked, and déjà vu hit me like a hockey puck on the temple. The guy had kissed me and not remembered me. Come on, Lizzie, that’s pretty insulting, I thought. And, strangely, at that very same moment I had a flash of something else, of something that Lara had once said in her inimitably scornful way: There’s no better buzz than fucking the girlfriend of someone more powerful than yourself. Instantly I realized what Jake’s game was. He thought that I was Scott’s girlfriend, so he wanted to bed me.

  “Actually, I’m not sure that I do want to.” I smiled politely and took a mouthful of lobster salad. Oh, that was manna from heaven for him. A refusal. He was like Hannibal Lecter—I swear he made that funny lip-smacking noise. A slow grin crept across his face. “Mile-High Club?” He winked.

  “What about it?”

  “No, how about it?”

  “How about not?” I took an overambitious slug of wine and nearly choked, but he didn’t notice my bulging look.

  “Have you ever tried it?”

  “To be honest”—I was fortified by the gallop of the pinot noir cavalry to my head—“I’ve always thought that fucking in a sink under fluorescent lights with your foot on a toilet was a pretty unsexy notion.”

  “You’ve never done it with me, though. And I can arrange for the lights to be dimmed. If you’re shy.”

  “I’m not shy, I’m just not interested. Sorry,” I said, and wished that I’d been a little kinder in my rebuff. Not that he deserved my kindness, just that I felt bad. But, clearly, heaven knows no pleasure like a man scorned. Because right now Jake Hudson was in clover. It was obvious that nobody had turned him down since the day he had his braces removed in high school.

  “You can’t turn me down, Lizzie.”

  “Hmmm. I suspect that I can. And that you’d rather like it.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yes.” I ate my last piece of lobster and reclined into the sofa with a satisfied sigh. “I think you do.”

  “You’re so smart. You have no idea what a turn-on that is and you’re beautiful to boot. Please agree to have a date with me.”

  “Where, in the bathroom?”

  “In Los Angeles. How about when we get back? If you’re spoken for at Sundance.” As he said this, he pulled his navy blue sweater over his head, and it left his hair tousled like the billboard again.

  And much as I wanted to keep on saying no, so that he’d keep on wanting me, I just desperately wanted to kiss him again. To feel his thighs beneath his jeans. To taste the whiskey on his breath.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said, lifting my lashes to meet his eyes with possibly the most perfect timing of my life. (Well, apart from the occasion I’d made the split-second decision to go into a store to buy some Hubba Bubba just as a brick crashed fourteen stories down onto the sidewalk where’d I’d been standing.)

  “What?” He leaned forward with a look of undiluted excitement. “Tell me.”

  “If you can remember my name by the time we get back to Los Angeles, you can take me to dinner.”

  “I can?”

  “Maybe,” I said, and flicked the button next to me to dim my reading light. I don’t think I’d ever been so cool in my entire life. And I knew that I couldn’t keep it up, so I’d have to go to sleep. Well, actually, I couldn’t go to sleep, because that would shatter the illusion. So what I really had to do was to spend the next fifty minutes pouting so that I’d look beautiful in repose, and digging my fingernails into my palms in order not to drop off to sleep and ruin everything.

  21

  Haven’t you bothered me enough, you big banana-head?

  —Marilyn Monroe as Angela Phinlay

  The Asphalt Jungle

  “Scott, they’ve only made up one bed.” Me and my omnipresent wheelie suitcase stopped in our tracks. I examined the blister on my hand. After the driver had dropped us on the doorstep of the Wildflower Mountain Home, where we were staying, I had lugged my suitcase up three levels and around four bedrooms—each with a bare, unfriendly mattress—before I’d found “our” room.

  “Wassup?” Scott tossed his bag onto the bed and failed to notice my throbbing palms. Just as he’d failed to notice how my suitcase kept lashing out and beating me up as we made our way through the house—up stairways, through doorways, around tables. Well, if he had noticed, he hadn’t thought to intervene.

  “Was Lara going to stay here with you, or did she have separate accommodations booked?” I asked as I looked longingly at the plump duvet, which had crunched in a finest-Siberian-goosedown way when Scott’s bag had landed on it.

  “Lara?” Scott took off his jacket and walked into the bathroom. “Oh, yeah, well, I guess she just forgot to tell them to make up an extra bed or something for her.” I watched as he flung his shoes across the en suite bathroom and then leaned over to put the plug into the bathtub. Then he cranked up the taps, and steam began to fill the room. “Hey, you got any woman’s shit to put in my bath?”

  “Woman’s shit?” I was tired, and it was clear that Scott was not about to go all gentlemanly and offer up his luxury quarters to freezing-cold me.

  “Bubble bath.”

  “Somewhere in here.” I sat on my suitcase and contemplated whether I should just push it back down the stairs or whether I could be bothered to spare the décor by shuffling down one step at a time, behind the beast, as though it were a rodeo horse.

  “Great. I don’t use sulfates, though. They dry out your skin. Hasn’t got sulfates, has it?” I looked at him incredulously and understood fully why Mia felt entitled to rape his bank account on a daily basis. Hell, I hadn’t even spent one night under the same roof as Scott and I felt a twenty-two-carat tantrum coming on.

  “You’re worried about dry skin?” I asked as he hunted through his bag for his toothbrush.

  “It gets itchy when it’s dry.”

  “Doesn’t cocaine have the same effect?”

  “No, cocaine makes you high.”

  “I mean, doesn’t it make your skin itch? And also doesn’t it make you look like shit?” I wanted that bed. So much, it wasn’t decent. I had been up since 5:00 A.M. because I’d had to make sure that Scott’s Sundance schedule was idiotproof and laminated and that his cell phones were charged, and then I’d had to go to Rexall over my lunch break and buy padlocks for all his drawers and filing cabinets, and then I spent the afternoon erasing all his e-mails because he couldn’t do it himself, due to the fact that the ping sound gave him preepileptic sensations. Apparently. Though why he wanted his e-mails deleted and his drawers bolted shut was beyond me. I suspected it was early-stage paranoia, but Lara had seemed to think it was perfectly reasonable when I’d tentatively mentioned how peculiar I thought it was. “Scott’s instincts are usually pretty sound” was all she’d said. Then she’d resumed Chapter 19 of her novel.

  It was a shame that his manners weren’t as sound as his instincts. Because I had to watch as he hummed himself into his steaming bath, complained about my inability to produce sulfate-free products, and then asked me if I’d mind fetching him a whiskey. He’d seen a bottle of Jack in the game room on the first floor when we came in, and there’d probably be ice in the freezer, he guessed. I strappe
d my suitcase to my hand and heaved it out of Scott’s room onto the cold landing, leaving behind the dazzling floor-to-ceiling views of the snowy mountains from his picture window.

  “Oh, and, hey, can you get me Lara on the cell phone? There’s something I need to ask her.”

  “Scott, her parents are in town,” I yelled back from halfway down the steep stairs where I was hanging on to my bronco case for dear life. “Can’t I help?” I had visions of Lara’s elderly parents imagining that she was a call girl if her “boss” started phoning her in the middle of the night. I know that my mother would jump to that conclusion under the same circumstances.

  “No, you can’t help. So get her on.”

  “It’s late, Scott.”

  “Lizzie.” That was the warning tone, and I couldn’t ignore it.

  “Okay, let me just get down the stairs and I’ll bring in the phone with the Jack Daniel’s, okay?” I took his silence for approval and bumped down the remaining six steps to the second floor, where I’d spied a relatively cozy-looking bedroom, without bed linen but with its own stone fireplace.

  As I lay in bed later, wrapped in the blankets that I’d found inside an ottoman, I listened to a distant owl. It had been so long since I’d seen snow, and even longer since I’d been in the countryside, that I actually found it difficult to drop off to sleep without the constant sound of sirens and the backfiring of engines outside. But this was lovely. Except, I realized, for the empty expanse of bed beside me. It was one thing to sleep alone on a close, balmy California night with the sheets kicked off, but it was another entirely to be in a place of such staggeringly beautiful scenery as Park City, with the deer and the elk and mountains and forests and the moon hanging low and heavy in the inky midnight sky, and to be alone. And that night, more than any other in my life, I yearned for someone to fill the space beside me. That said, I didn’t yearn enough to make me want to tiptoe up to Scott’s room for a snuggle. Or even enough to make me reach for my cell phone and call Jake Hudson, who had slid his card into my hand at the airport as I was about to get into the limo with Scott. So I suppose I wasn’t really that desperate at all, I reassured myself as I sank into a dribbling, lolling, unattractive, but heavenly sleep.