“Ouch,” says Alexis. “And yet. So true.”
Josephine pushes the tray of seafood toward Margaret. “Oyster?” she asks. “Japanese.”
“Oh, no,” Margaret says, sizing up the seafood pile and doing some mental addition about its cost. “I’m not that hungry. I’m just going to have a salad.” She eyeballs the bottle of champagne as Claire pours her a glass; a bottle of Dom Pérignon’s got to be, what, eighty dollars? A hundred? Surely they won’t expect her to share the bill for that since, after all, she didn’t order it. But just one teensy glass would really hit the spot.
A waiter materializes behind her and silently hands her a menu. It lists only three salads; the cheapest, microgreens with anchovy foam, is $18. Dismayed, Margaret scans the menu, but the only item any cheaper is a side dish of mashed potatoes for $13, which, regardless of its ludicrous price ($13 for potatoes?), she would simply look silly ordering as her main course.
“The microgreens, please,” she tells the waiter. “And that’s it.” Margaret sees him glance at her, size her up, and write her off as just another anorexic actress picking at lettuce. Margaret wants to explain to him, I don’t have an eating disorder, really; I’m just on a budget! but he’s already turned on his heel and vanished. The smell of roasting salmon from the kitchen makes Margaret’s stomach gurgle loudly—the only thing she’s eaten today is mac-n-cheese from a box—and she resists the urge to gobble down the forbidden lobster tails. Instead, she takes a dinner roll and slathers it thickly with butter.
Claire, who needs a booster seat to see over the pile of discarded oyster shells, says something no one can hear over the blaring electronica sound track. She has cropped her blond hair into a Mia Farrow pixie, exposing tiny shell-like ears hung with oversized gold chandelier earrings, which Margaret knows were purchased from the proceeds of Claire’s last solo art show; she’d sold one of her photographs—a full-sized self-portrait of herself naked except for leather chaps, titled Hairless Claire—to the pop star Bobby Masterston. Margaret tries not to stare at the earrings, or at Josephine’s Balenciaga purse or Alexis’s cashmere hoodie. She tries not to care—she knows perfectly well that she shouldn’t care, that doing so is just succumbing to an advertising-driven culture of consumption, and why should it really matter whether the dress she’s wearing has a designer label or whether the car she’s driving has leather seats, as long as she’s attired and gets where she needs to be? Isn’t that the whole point of everything she’s been writing? But the bitter realization is that Margaret does care. She cares when she’s invited over to Alexis’s new house, a gorgeous midcentury oasis with an ovoid swimming pool and views all the way to Santa Monica, whereas her own home is a sweltering studio apartment in a concrete-block building that smells of mold and cat urine. She cares when her friends go on two-week vacations at four-star yoga retreats in Bali, while she can’t even scrape up enough cash to make it across the border to Rosarito Beach. She cares about her friends’ increasingly expensive wardrobes, their automobiles, their furniture, their stereo systems, and, most of all, their enviable professional successes.
It was easy, initially, to pretend that all the people in their social group were equals. Struggling artists, writers, filmmakers, actors, everyone in their mid-twenties: creative talents with big goals and small budgets. Margaret, as the impoverished editor of her own magazine, had felt that she was among peers. But at some point their paths diverged, and as they came up against their thirties her friends had started to make real money—selling screenplays, directing films and music videos, holding art openings—whereas she was still on a yard-sale budget. It was easier, when she was with Bart, to ignore the financial gap between them: Bart was also starting to make money, lots of money, and he insisted on paying for Margaret on those occasions when she balked at $15 martinis, and on anteing up more than his half (specifically, his 85 percent) for the charming little Spanish bungalow they were renting in Los Feliz. But now he’s gone, and so is the bungalow and so are the martinis, and what has replaced them in the last four months is the credit card debt that compounds daily. And though Margaret had thought she was just paces behind her friends, about to catch up any day, now she knows that she is miles behind. Maybe not even in the race.
Claire is still speaking in her soft little feather voice, but Margaret can’t understand a word she’s saying. Josephine cups her hand to her own plump lobe. “We can’t hear you, honey,” she shouts. “Speak up.”
Claire cranes her neck and speaks louder. A few of her words drift over the music “…Margaret know…celebrating…news about Josephine’s mppffh…?”
Margaret turns to Josephine for translation, but Josephine is looking down at her plate, waving her hand vaguely. “It’s nothing,” Josephine says. “Nothing’s signed yet. It’s all hot air.” Her elusiveness is alarming; Margaret does not like to be the only person at the table who doesn’t know what everyone is talking about.
Across the table, Alexis leans over and shouts, “Josephine’s new screenplay was bought by Disney. They see it as a vehicle for Ysabelle van Lumis. Impressive, right?”
Claire, gingerly pinching a limp pink shrimp by its tail as it drips cocktail sauce, looks up with a horrified expression on her face and stares bullets at Alexis. Josephine coughs, and under the table Margaret feels a shoe graze her shin en route to Alexis’s. “Ouch,” Alexis says. “That hurt.”
“What?” says Margaret, growing increasingly concerned.
“Nothing,” says Josephine.
“Oh, come on,” says Margaret, looking around the table and trying to interpret the stricken looks on her friends’ faces. “You know that I already know Ysabelle van Lumis is going to be in Thruster with Bart. You don’t have to avoid mentioning his name with me. I’m not that fragile.”
There is an awkward silence, and no one looks directly at Margaret. She peers at Alexis, the most likely person to give it to her straight. “Is he dating her? Ysabelle van fucking Lumis?”
Alexis leans in, her brows crumpled, and sighs. “Well, they were seen holding hands during dinner at the Ivy last week. ‘Canoodling,’ according to, well, a certain celebrity magazine whose name we shall not speak for your sake. So read into that what you will.”
Margaret feels a peculiar twisting somewhere around her esophagus. She’s not sure which is worse—the knowledge that her friends (and anyone else reading Us Weekly) now know more about Bart, the man she lived with for well over three years, than she does herself or the intimation that her ex-boyfriend appears to have bounced back from their breakup so quickly (and with a bona fide movie star, no less!), whereas she has yet to delete his picture from her computer’s screen saver.
“It’s just a rumor,” Josephine says soothingly. “I mean, come on. You know how full of shit those tabloids are. Hand-holding means nothing these days, anyway.”
Margaret knows that hand-holding is not, in fact, nothing, but right this moment she knows that she can decide between feeling even worse than she already does by imagining her ex-boyfriend mid-coitus with a cream-faced underaged starlet, or having another glass of champagne. She decides she would rather have the champagne. She swallows her doubts, tilts the glass back, and lets the last of the bubbles tickle their way along her throat. Josephine quickly refills her flute.
“Tell me what your screenplay is about,” Margaret says, changing the subject.
Josephine cocks her head, puts a finger to her chin, and strikes a pose. “Log line: High-concept teen romance. A modern adaptation of Wuthering Heights in the milieu of a Laguna Beach teen beauty pageant.” She looks at Margaret and wrinkles her nose. “Really, it’s the kind of trash you’re going to eviscerate in Snatch.”
The entrées arrive at this opportune moment, giving Margaret a chance to gather herself. She looks down at her plate, where a mountain of shrubbery floats on a fishy-smelling pool of foam. The aroma of her friend’s entrées—mounds of sea bass smothered in potato-olive puree, Madeira-soaked steaks still bleeding o
n the plate—makes her feel anemic.
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that to you,” she mutters, feeling vaguely ashamed. This isn’t exactly true—she would do that. She’s done it before, much to the detriment of her relationship with Bart. Perhaps now she’ll be wise enough to think twice before she does a critical review of one of her friend’s projects. But, of course, she won’t have the opportunity anymore, will she?
Damn Stuart Gelkind. For more than a year he strung her along, promising her that Snatch was going to be the linchpin in the new alternative-publishing empire he was starting, the edgy female title that would sit on the magazine stands along with Mother (his planned eco-activism magazine) and AMP (his magazine devoted to unsigned indie bands) and New Sprout (the raw-foods title). He was going to purchase Snatch for a sum that seemed, to Margaret, breathtakingly large—$425,000, plus options! Together, they were going to turn Snatch into an even bigger, better magazine. Glossy covers. Full-color photos. Celebrity interviews (inspiring ones, of course, like indie-movie actresses and hip female politicians). Paid contributors. With Gelkind’s backing Snatch would be more than a struggling feminist zine run out of Margaret’s apartment; it would be a new kind of young women’s magazine, a twenty-first-century anticonsumerist Sassy, a real mainstream publication that inspired girls to think for themselves.
All Margaret had to do was keep Snatch afloat for a few more months (and then a few more, and just a few more, until more than a year had passed), build up circulation to make the publication more appealing to the investors Gelkind was lining up, and when the financing finally came through they would be ready to go. It was a sure thing, Stuart vowed, and she believed him. He was, after all, the son of conservative publishing magnate Maxwell Gelkind, and even if Stuart’s interest in this project sometimes seemed more about spiting his father than about his real commitment to independent publishing, certainly the kid had access to people with very deep pockets. The future looked very promising, and if Margaret found herself paying what otherwise would have seemed an extravagant sum for the lawyers to negotiate the acquisition agreement, and the FedEx bills for all those documents, and the direct-mail solicitations that Stuart had suggested would build up circulation, and the new copier and the glossy paper, it had seemed an unimpugnable investment.
And although Margaret had a momentary twinge about selling out, she told herself that this was a different form of capitalism than, say, her father’s predatory variety of business. She would take ads only from enlightened companies—organic food chains, indie-rock labels, cosmetics not tested on animals—and only ads that were empowering to women. She even splurged by hiring two freelance ad salespeople to focus on just that. And if, after six months, they hadn’t actually sold many ads, she consoled herself with the fact that setting a new paradigm always took time.
And then, last Friday, just a week ago, with the investors finally confirmed and the acquisition papers ready to sign, Stuart had asked to meet her at the Coffee Explosion on Sunset. She knew something was wrong when he didn’t pay for her soy latte; he had always paid for her latte, a gesture one part noblesse oblige and one part future employer.
Stuart, sweating in his Brooks Brothers shirt, stared into the crème of his macchiato and refused to meet her eyes. “Look,” he said. “There’s no easy way to say this so I’m just going to be frank. We’re not going to be able to buy your magazine.”
Margaret could feel the blood draining from her face. She had a mental flash of the pile of bills on her desk, a stack of unopened envelopes two inches thick, waiting for Stuart’s long-promised check to finally arrive. There was a moment of silence before she was able to stammer, “Who is ‘we’? I thought ‘we’ was you?”
“The investors I brought in,” Stuart said, now gazing resolutely out the window as if fascinated by the parking lot. “They decided that Snatch didn’t really have a viable business model after all. You have to admit, the circulation hasn’t exactly skyrocketed this year, despite the direct-mail solicitations—”
“We have fifteen thousand subscribers,” Margaret protested, her voice strangled by the tennis ball that had seemingly lodged in her throat. “That’s still pretty good.”
“I know, I know,” said Stuart. “But the investors I brought in…well, they had a different vision. Bigger, you know? It’s a pretty limited audience you’re reaching. I mean, you know how hard it’s been to sell ads. The investors still think that I should do a women’s magazine, but just something a little more fun. Honestly, Margaret, you know how much I love Snatch, but it’s just too…fringe to be mainstream. I mean, the last issue had a ten-page spread of vibrator reviews? With how-to diagrams!”
“Forty-six percent of all women own vibrators—what’s fringe about that?” She did cringe, though, just a little, remembering the editorial she had written for the issue—an essay she’d composed in a drunken stupor one evening two weeks after Bart left—in which she’d declared vibrators the “great liberating tool of the female masses, making men totally irrelevant and putting women in charge of their own sexual destinies.”
Stuart shrugged. “Well, it’s not going to sell in Peoria.”
Margaret seethed. She took an angry swallow of her latte and looked around the café, at the screenwriters busily tapping away at their laptops, at the retirees meticulously consuming every word of their daily Los Angeles Times, at the bored barista jittery from stolen espressos. She felt, suddenly, more angry than upset at Stuart’s self-entitled carelessness. “You promised me,” she hissed. “Do you know how much I spent—of my own money!—to make this happen? And now you’re just walking away and leaving me holding the bill?”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’m probably going to ditch New Sprout, too,” he said, shrugging. “Raw food is too last year.”
She grabbed for the most hurtful thing she could say to him. “God, you’re just like your father.”
Stuart looked at the bottom of his coffee cup, as if waiting for it to refill magically. “Well, it turns out he has kind of a point. I don’t want to, like, lose money. This was supposed to be an investment. I mean, I know you hate greedy capitalists and all that, but this is a business, you know?”
And that was that. Snatch—her baby—was dead, murdered by Stuart Gelkind; though if Margaret was going to be honest with herself, the magazine had been on life support before Gelkind ever came around. The day of its death, Snatch was $92,000 in the hole. To be more specific, Margaret was $92,000 in the hole, since she had been paying all the bills out of her own pocket (or, more specifically, off her numerous credit cards) for the last year anyway. To be really specific, Margaret was exactly $92,548 in the hole, according to the math that she had done on Monday, a few days after Stuart dropped the bomb, as she fiddled with her pocket calculator and watched her father’s company go public on CNBC. (That was three days ago, though, so the figure is probably higher now. Which means Margaret owes $92,548 plus three days of criminal interest to MasterCard, American Express, Visa, and one or two other credit card companies, all of whom want it back. Now.)
All that Monday, the first weekday she hadn’t worked in months, maybe years, she’d sprawled on her couch in an uncharacteristic stupor, chain-smoking cigarettes and watching CNBC—the cable hijacked from an upstairs neighbor—while fanning herself with a six-month-old copy of Granta. She was hypnotized by the endless loop of inscrutable symbols scrolling by on the bottom of the screen; every twenty minutes her father’s symbol—APPI—would swim by, and her pulse would quicken, and the bills would go ignored for a few minutes. The numbers crept upward, always. She wondered what each fraction represented to her father: A hundred thousand dollars? Five? A million? What had he done to deserve that kind of money—prey on male vanity with overpriced placebos? And then she thought of her own numbers creeping ever higher, each minute adding more interest to the bottom line of her credit card debt. Not to mention the money she owed Bart. It was incredible that her father’s portion of just one of those Na
sdaq fractions—one-quarter! one-half!—was probably more than her entire debt.
The thought had flickered across her mind then—just as it did this morning when Bart e-mailed, and just as it does even now, as she gazes down at her $18 microgreens—that one call to her parents would, in all likelihood, make her financial problems go away. But she refuses to do it; she has too much pride to go groveling back to Mommy and Daddy. She just knows that they have been waiting for her to fail for four years now—she can just imagine the “I told you so”s she’d hear when they found out about the magazine’s demise. She can already hear the lectures about fiscal responsibility, see the disappointed faces reflecting on her “lost potential.” So why give them an excuse to judge her? (This may be, she suspects, the reason she still hasn’t summoned the strength to tell them that she and Bart broke up, either.)
And besides…just maybe…maybe there’s still a chance she could resuscitate Snatch. Right? Stuart could change his mind and call. Better yet, she could do it by herself: She could find funding elsewhere. Or the ad salespeople could suddenly materialize with an enormous buy (never mind the fact that on Monday she’d told them, along with her other two part-time staffers, that Snatch was on a publishing hiatus). Or…something. She’s just not ready to succumb to the fact that it’s over, and until it’s really, truly over there’s no reason to tell her parents. She can fix this.
Anyway, she hasn’t even had the opportunity to tell her parents about Snatch’s demise; her parents still haven’t bothered to return the message she left on Monday, congratulating her father on his IPO, and she certainly isn’t going to call them twice.
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