The Second Assistant

by Clare Naylor

  Then I caught sight of Lara’s beaming face and realized that I had to rally. This was an amazing event in her life, and she wanted me to be happy for her.

  “Right, then, no more martinis for you, young lady,” I said sternly, moving her half-finished drink out of the way. “I’ll order you an orange juice, and we’ll discuss what you’re going to call Scooter there. Because if you really want me to be your friend, you’re not allowed to name it after a baseball or basketball star. Okay?”

  “Funny you should say that,” Lara touched my arm conspiratorially. “Because only last night Scott tried to convince me that Shaq could be a girl’s or a boy’s name.”

  “So what about Mia?” I hesitated to ask, but it must have dawned on them between scans and baby naming that Mia would have to find out eventually.

  “She’s promised him the mother of all divorce battles. She’s hired the biggest, meanest lawyer in town.”

  “Shit, poor Scott,” I said, knowing that Mia would sting him for all he was worth. I hoped he’d be able to keep their kid in diapers by the time she was finished.

  “Oh, it’s fine. She’s been having an affair with some crazily rich old guy who used to own a TV network. You should see him—he’s had so much work that he looks like he’s been reanimated—but at least Mia’s been unfaithful, too, and Scott has proof, so she won’t get more than half,” Lara said cheerfully.

  And when I thought about it, I honestly believed that Lara and Scott might not care even if they had no money. I could tell that they were both clearly mad about each other, now that I had enough pieces of the jigsaw to figure it all out—the mooning looks, the filthy fights, the fact that they were still together despite Lara’s bitching and Scott’s occasional infidelity—it was as plain as the ring that wasn’t on Lara’s finger.

  And she must have read my mind, because she turned to me and said, “We’re getting married in Vegas just as soon as the divorce comes through.”

  “That’s great news,” I said. “A Vegas wedding, that’ll be fun.”

  “You’ll come, won’t you?”

  “I’d love to. I mean if I’m invited.”

  “Of course you’re invited. You’re one of my closest friends.” She patted my knee. And even though I didn’t exactly feel a sisterly, warm vibe from Lara most of the time, I think she really meant that. Which was both lovely and sad at the same time.

  “And the honeymoon?” I skipped on quickly.

  “Arizona,” Lara proudly informed me.

  “Arizona?” I imagined there was some groovy new hotel there, news of which hadn’t reached my unhip ears yet.

  “Scott’s going to the Meadows Rehab Clinic to clean up before the baby’s born, and I’m going hiking in the canyons nearby. So we’ll both be happy.”

  “Fantastic,” I said dubiously. But then, just because it wasn’t my idea of a honeymoon . . .

  “Oh, Elizabeth. I’m just so happy.” Lara said, and knocked back her orange juice. “He’s so sweet and sensitive. I can’t wait to be married to him.”

  All of which merely reinforced my theory that there’s somebody out there for everyone. Because if a smart, cool, beautiful girl like Lara could want to scrape a wastrel like Scott up off the sidewalk and love him, then maybe even I could meet someone funny and great who I liked.

  But then I remembered that I had. And now it was over. I hugged Lara good-bye and scuffed my shoes against the ground as I walked back down the hill to where my car was parked on Sunset.

  I tucked my purse under my arm and wandered up the street a short way until I saw a liquor store. I went in and paced around a bit. I wondered whether I should buy a bottle of vodka or something to forget. Maybe if I became a drunk and had to go into rehab, Luke would come to visit me or buy me a basket of muffins. Then I saw my martini reflection in the window of the store. I didn’t want sympathy. I wanted Luke Lloyd back. I had to stop drinking—booze made me reckless. I bought a packet of Junior Mints and went home.

  Finally I decided that there was nothing for it but to call him up. But it was so indecently early on Saturday morning that I was afraid that if I left a message on Luke’s machine and he saw the time I’d called, he’d never speak to me again. Five A.M. was the hour of stalkers. It was the hour of joggers. It was the hour of breast-feeding mothers. Normal people didn’t watch for the pale, encroaching light of dawn. But I couldn’t sleep. I’d lain awake for what felt like hours, listening to my gurgling toilet tank, with a feeling of blind terror at the thought that I might never see Luke again. And if I did see him, I’d have to smile and kiss him on the cheek and nothing more.

  For not only were we never going to be lovers now, we weren’t even going to work together. I couldn’t console myself with the prospect of weekly meetings and eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts with him on our movie set in the fall; there would be no dream of us getting drunk at the wrap party and declaring our feelings; there would be no dazzling at our premiere. Nothing, in fact. Apart from what might have been. I felt nauseous at the thought. I really, truly think that I loved him. Of course, not in any profound, eternity-band, for-his-faults-and-all way, but I did think that he was the only man I’d met—ever, really—who I liked so much. Who made me smile even when he was dumb or cross or ridiculous. And for whom I had the hots quite so uncontrollably.

  I don’t know how long I tormented myself with thoughts of the treacherous twists of the knife of fate that had brought us here. To this place where I liked him and he liked me and, despite the French tart, we wanted to hang out together. But we weren’t. Didn’t we at least owe it to ourselves to see what it would be like to walk down the street together, to sit in a movie theater, to talk about our childhoods? Even if we only discovered that we didn’t work—that he checked out other chicks all the time, that he didn’t share his popcorn, and that he’d spent his teen years playing sports instead of listening to Darklands—didn’t we have to try at least?

  But then, what could I do about it? I’d never called a man in my life, and calling a Hollywood Man and suggesting a date was not the safest kindergarten for trainee manhunters.

  Men like Luke Lloyd, even if they have the waistline of a hippopotamus, the manners of a chimpanzee, and the sexual predilections of the Marquis de Sade, are never at a loss for a date. Because they have something that every man and woman on the face of the earth wants—they have power. Now, I don’t know if it’s true that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but I do know from my peregrinations in politics and entertainment that power gets you laid any night of the week and absolute power gets you laid in any animal, vegetable, or mineral fashion you choose. Any night of the week. By anyone you care to shake a business card at. And I don’t think that this is just an L.A. thing either. I think it’s a universal, harking back to the days when we had more body hair than Bliss Spa could handle, early-primate-type instinct. And it can’t easily be overturned one Saturday morning in January.

  So instead of calling, I got up and scrubbed my kitchen floor in my nightgown. I had no sensible cleaning products, as I’d never really taken an interest in my kitchen floor before yesterday, when the rot had set into my life, so I used a brilliantly effective recipe of dish detergent and Jolene Crème Bleach. When I finished, I took a toothbrush to the stove and marveled at the filth I’d been cohabiting with. Perhaps if life never improved, I’d become a Clean Person. I’d dedicate myself to pristine baseboards and moth-free closets. I’d perfect the art of dusting, and beeswax would be my friend.

  “Screw that.” I flung down my greasy toothbrush at nine o’clock, when it became apparent that cleaning and I were just having a meaningless fling, and peeled off my rubber gloves. “Where did I put it?” I wandered through my apartment looking for the taxi receipt on which Luke had carefully printed his cell-phone number.

  “Luke, this is Elizabeth Miller,” I said as a sleepy voice answered the phone.

  “Lizzie.” He didn’t sound pissed at me for waking him up, which
was something.

  “I’ve been thinking.” I sat on my windowsill and pressed my forehead against the glass as I looked mindlessly at the palm trees along the promenade.

  “Right.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “The French tart?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your girlfriend? Is she in France?”

  “I don’t know where my ex-girlfriend is.”

  “Good.”

  “Is that why you called me at . . . nine A.M.?” He sounded bemused.

  “Oh, if you’re busy or something, then fine. We can talk later. Or not. It’s not important,” I said as I opened the window and looked down at the concrete path six stories below.

  “Lizzie. I’m awake now. I’m sorry if I sounded disinterested. I couldn’t be more thrilled that you’ve called, and I’d love to hear what you have to say.”

  “You don’t sound very sincere.”

  “Lizzie,” he pleaded. My feminine intuition, or perhaps his beleaguered tone, told me that I’d pushed him about as far as he would go. So I backed off a little and jumped down from the window ledge onto my living room floor.

  “Well, you know how we were having that whole professional-relationship thing? That I said I didn’t want to mix business with pleasure, and so we were working together but not dating?”

  “I remember that distinctly, yes.”

  “Right. Well, the thing is, circumstances have changed now, haven’t they?”

  “In that we’re no longer doing business together?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Lizzie, I think I know where you’re going. In fact, I’d be really excited if this was leading where I think it’s leading.” I could hear him take an exhausted breath. “But would you mind just getting to the point?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Thanks so much.”

  “I’ve just been fucked by my boss, and I’d prefer it if it were you.”

  Luke took me to dinner at Gladstone’s that night. Which no self-respecting producer would ever usually do. It’s a cheesy outdoor lobster-and-seafood restaurant by the beach at Malibu, where everyone sits under heat lamps, gets buttery chins from the crab claws, and knocks back pitchers of low-grade alcohol. Luke was cool with the whole thing, because he liked Gladstone’s, and he didn’t really have a huge amount of respect for the fact that he was a producer anyway. And I didn’t mind going to the secretaries’ Saturday-night venue of choice on a date, because . . . well, for one thing I was with him, and for another, no matter how you spun it, I was a secretary.

  “So here we are.” Luke leaned across the table and handed me a shrimp.

  “I know. I’m still in shock.” I peeled off the shell. “I was beginning to think that I’d end alone and living in my car on Sunset when I was sixty.”

  “With gray dreadlocks?”

  “And a fetish for collecting Fanta cans.” I tried not to dribble dripping butter down my top. “Still, there’s no guaranteeing that’s not going to happen just because I’m going on a date with you thirty-four years before my potential decline.”

  “I guess. But there’s something you don’t know about me,” he said, and took a sip of his beer.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is that once I get a woman, I don’t let her go too darned easily.”

  “You have a dungeon?”

  “I have something much cooler.”

  “I know.” I winked at him and we both laughed.

  “I’m glad it left an impression on you.”

  “It scarred me for life.” I smiled at him with his baggy white shirt and handsome, suntanned face. “I mean, if it hadn’t been quite so memorable, I wouldn’t be here. I just couldn’t really get you out of my head.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you go,” he said, and put his hand over mine on the table. “Even if you hadn’t chased me, we’d still be here.”

  “I didn’t chase you, you pig. I asked you to dinner.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Big difference, buddy.” I shot him a look. He caught my hand and kissed it.

  “So the truth of the matter is that for all your protestations about not wanting to date in the business and all, I feel just as strongly about that kind of thing as you do.”

  “So strongly, in fact, that you dated an actress for three years,” I said with as much derision as I could muster for a man who was holding my hand. For a man who I wanted to hold my hand.

  “She was French.”

  “So?” I didn’t really want to discuss his last relationship with La Tarte on my first date with him, but I suppose we had to get it out of the way.

  “It didn’t count. She lived somewhere else. She didn’t know how to use a StairMaster or that no-fat milk existed. She spoke a different language, for Christ’s sake. How could I resist?”

  “Wow, you have really tough criteria.”

  “Would you take me seriously for once, please?”

  “I’ll try,” I said, and curbed my smile.

  “You’re the first woman I’ve met in this town who I could ever think about reading the Sunday Times with. And you might think that’s jumping the gun and it might freak you out, but I want you to know that this does not happen every day.”

  “That doesn’t freak me out,” I said.

  “You’re sure, angel?” He was so southern I wanted to die.

  “No, it makes me happy. I’m really happy not to be freaked out by a man in a town where freaks seem to be waiting on every street corner to get me. Because I was starting to think that if I had to kiss one more freak, I might not make it through.”

  “I really am your savior, then.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “ ’Cause you know anything’s possible in the movies.”

  27

  My! People have a way of coming and going so quickly here!

  —Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale

  The Wizard of Oz

  When I drove into The Agency’s parking garage on Monday morning, something had changed. And it wasn’t simply me. It wasn’t that I had spent the weekend with Luke and we’d lain on the grass in front of the Getty Museum and talked about nothing for hours. And it wasn’t that we’d walked along the beach eating ice cream cones or that he’d promised to teach me to ride a bike and I’d bought a copy of Crime and Punishment for him in Book Soup. No, what had changed had absolutely nothing to do with the rose-tinted glasses of new love. It had to do with the fact that there was a pack of journalists outside the front door of the building and there was a peculiar atmosphere of foreboding at The Agency.

  “José. What’s going on?” I asked as I walked toward the elevator where Tall José was waiting.

  “Ah, you’ll see,” he said with a tremendously serious look on his face.

  “José, you must know. You were right to warn me about Daniel’s being the devil. You’ve both been right about everything. So what’s this all about?”

  “We can’t say.”

  “You can’t tell me why the press is outside the front door?”

  “Lizard, you will find out for yourself soon enough,” the other José said, and pressed the button for me. Then he was silent.

  “Don’t either of you have any words of wisdom for me?” I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. Everything was suddenly very different. Nobody was doing what they were supposed to do, and even the Josés, the standard-bearers of all that is right, had altered. I wanted my old world back.

  “Josés, please say something.”

  “Lizard, we have nothing left to teach you,” Tall José said as he patted my shoulder and guided me into the elevator. A butterfly settled in my stomach as the elevator rose smoothly to my floor. My reflection was the same in the mirror—same murky blond hair, same black skirt and top, same bag overladen with Victoria’s weekend reading. But something was different. Something was definitely up
.

  As I walked across the vast, brilliantly bright expanse of lobby to my corner of the office, the receptionists’ phones were ringing off the hook. The beeps sounded like a demented computer game. Like Scott’s deleted e-mails gone crazy.

  “I’m sorry, we can’t comment on that right now” was being repeated like the refrain of a swan song behind their glass counter. I turned to look, but nothing there was really any different: four girls with neat headsets, superstraightened hair, and better makeup than mine. And the cropped-haired, lilting-voiced guy with the camp pout. It all looked absolutely as per usual. It just wasn’t. I hurried across the floor in my scuffed black court shoes and headed for my corridor.

  Lara wasn’t at her desk. Courtney and Talitha weren’t there either. I could see through the glass doors of Mike’s office that Courtney was sitting with him. And that, shockingly, Talitha seemed to be talking to her boss, Gigi, whose unprecedented presence would have been reason enough to set alarm bells ringing. Clearly, they were both being briefed on something. Scott’s door was closed, and I was about to tap on it to see whether he and Lara were having a similar discussion, but then I remembered that their version of congress between boss and assistant would have been more likely to involve debriefing. So I went to my desk again. There was a photocopied sheet of paper on top of my keyboard that read:

  AN OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT WILL BE MADE AT 12:00 REGARDING CURRENT EVENTS WITHIN THE AGENCY. ALL MEMBERS OF STAFF ARE REQUESTED TO MEET IN THE BOARDROOM ON THE 2ND FLOOR PROMPTLY. PLEASE DO NOT COMMUNICATE WITH MEMBERS OF THE PRESS IN THE INTERIM.

  I stared at the words and wondered what they could possibly mean. Then Scott’s office door opened, and instead of Scott and Lara, three men emerged in navy blue workmen’s overalls. Two were carrying Scott’s desk, and the other was holding the door open. Scott’s Lakers sticker was still there.

  “Excuse me?” I ran over to them. “Where are you taking that?”

  “Can’t say, Miss. Sorry,” a red-cheeked man with a Queens accent informed me.