Unscripted

by Jayne Denker

  Maybe I was more buzzed than I thought. Because normally that sort of earnestness from anyone, even Alex McNulty, would have started me sniggering and spouting sarcastic remarks. But I just nodded. The song ended, and he led me off the floor, steering me straight to an empty booth. I slid in and he followed. Even though the booth was a nice large semicircle, he sat so close to me our hips were touching. I could barely breathe. A bottle of champagne appeared from somewhere, and he poured two glasses.

  “So, not a theater person, then?” he asked.

  “Well, I like theater, but . . . you know . . . this is Southern California!” I tried to laugh, but I sounded like a hysterical loon. I made myself stop.

  “There’s theater here too.”

  I took a gulp of champagne, squinting as the bubbles went up my nose. “Oh, I know. It’s just that my background has always been in TV and movies.”

  “Oh yeah, your mom.”

  I raised my glass. “The inimitable Mona Urquhart-Sinclair-Tompkins-Hijuelos . . . um . . .” I paused, then remembered my current stepdaddy’s last name. “. . . -DiNoto.”

  “Impressive.”

  “She gets around.”

  “She’s still in the business?”

  “No.” I took another drink. Wow, look—the bottom of the glass. Somebody must have drunk it all when I wasn’t looking. No worries; Alex filled it back up again. “She’s retired, living in Palm Springs now.”

  “People still retire to Palm Springs?”

  “Old-school retirement, right? I told her she could have bought a thousand-acre compound in Costa Rica for the price of the house she bought there. Wouldn’t go.”

  “It’s just as hot.”

  “Yeah, but Palm Springs is a dry heat. Whatever that means. No trench foot, maybe.”

  Alex took a sip of champagne. “Maybe she wants to be close to the action, in case she decides to come out of retirement?”

  I shrugged. “Anything’s possible, I suppose. She did love the biz.”

  “So she, like, helped you out with Modern Women?”

  As usual, I felt myself bristle whenever someone suggested the obvious, but it was dulled a bit by the champagne, and because this time it was coming from Alex. I knew I’d forgive him more readily than I’d forgive anyone else. “No. The show is all mine. I did it without her help.”

  I must have sounded cranky anyway, because he said soothingly, “Okay.” Then, after a minute, “She’s a legend.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  He was right. Mona was a legend, and not one of those fleeting acting-type legends. Her legacy was more enduring, because she had worked behind the scenes for decades, starting out as a secretary at a movie studio—long since absorbed in a series of mergers—and working her way up, through sheer bullheadedness, all the way to producer. Now the mere mention of her name elicited awe from anyone with a healthy respect for the history of American movies. She wasn’t a celebrity; she was bigger than that. She was infamous, especially to the people who really mattered, the ones behind the scenes who wielded all the power.

  And she was an impossible act to follow.

  Honestly, when she announced she was going to retire a few years ago—really retire this time, not like all those other times she declared she was done, only to be dragged back into the limelight when Robert De Niro begged her to speak at his TriBeCa Film Festival or some other high-profile event came along—I was ecstatic. I had been living in her shadow all my life. I wasn’t ever just Faith Sinclair. I was Mona’s Daughter, my identity defined not by my own accomplishments, but by my mother’s existence.

  But Mona had been deeply ensconced in her golf-and-cocktails, dry-heat retired lifestyle with fourth husband Dominic—who begged me to call him Papa, like that was going to happen in this lifetime—when I came up with the idea for Modern Women. I shopped it to the networks and got the go-ahead all on my own. That was why Modern Women was so important to me. But nobody could understand that—and some didn’t believe it—so I never bothered to explain myself. Not even Alex, sitting so close to me that I could feel the heat of his leg through my skirt, could get me to open that Pandora’s Box.

  So I just raised my glass and said, “Here’s to moms.”

  Alex filled my glass again. Darned champagne-thieving gnomes. “She has some connection with Cannes, doesn’t she?”

  Mona again? I wished he’d change the subject. But I answered. Didn’t want to be disagreeable.

  “Lots,” I agreed. “She’s been on juries there more times than I can count.”

  He nodded. “And the Sundance Institute, I heard?”

  I nodded back, and my head seemed to be moving in slow motion. “Yep. Hey, you studied up on my mom.”

  “I just . . . hear things, here and there.”

  Patting his hand—and my hand seemed to land on his with a thud, even though I was going for more of a delicate touch—I said, “Don’t worry about it.” It came out “Dunnworrabahtit,” but then again I was pretty sure I was acting cute and alluring, so it didn’t bother me. I had other things on my mind. I looked up; Alex’s face was swimming in and out of focus. “You’re so gorgeous,” I heard myself say. The critical part of my brain gasped, horrified; the infatuated part told it to shut up and mind its own business.

  He grinned down at the tabletop and murmured, “Thanks.” When he looked up again, he seemed very serious. “I think you’re great, Faith,” he said. My stomach trilled even as the critical part of my brain thought, Hey, that wasn’t much of a compliment back. The infatuated part of my brain told it to shut up again. “What you’ve created, with the show—I really think it’s going to be something. Even bigger than this season, I mean. And it’s all because of you—your scripts, your direction, your vision.”

  “That’s so sweet, Alex.” Yes, I was cooing. So sue me. I had to get this hookup moving. We were on hiatus now; if I worked it right, when we came back for the second season, it would be firmly established that Alex and I were a couple, and we could walk onto the set together and everybody would just have to accept it because it was already a done deal. Not that I’d thought about it before now, of course. Much.

  “So I was wondering . . . ,” he began.

  I leaned closer and raised my eyebrows. “Yeeesss?” Oh God, I was sounding ridiculous. I really had to put down the champagne.

  “Next season, what do you think of having David, you know, do some really . . . cool stuff?”

  Cool stuff?

  A little alarm bell went off deep in the recesses of my alcohol-addled brain. “I have some ideas for David, Alex. Don’t you worry.”

  He fidgeted. “Oh, I know you do. You always write the greatest stuff. But I was wondering if maybe we could . . . I don’t know . . . brainstorm together? Come up with some really amazeballs story lines?”

  Amazeballs? Suddenly the critical part of my brain overrode the infatuated part and pointed out that I could never, under any circumstances, be with someone who used the word “amazeballs” without irony. Even someone with biceps like Alex’s.

  A cold feeling settled in the pit of my stomach, the same place that had been fizzing just a few moments before, as he went on, “I just . . . I really want to stretch, you know? Sometimes being David can be kind of . . . not challenging.”

  “‘Not challenging,’” I echoed, boggling at how Alex’s command of the English language tended to break down over the course of an extended conversation.

  “You know,” he said again, and I started twitching at his repetition. “You know how it is.” Agh! He said it again!

  I turned to face him squarely, and the champagne fog started dissipating in the heat of my rising bile. “No, Alex. No, I don’t know how it is. Tell me.”

  “I was just thinking that maybe David could tackle some meatier stuff.”

  “I see.”

  He laughed. “Come on, Faith. I can do the stuff you give me in my sleep.” And then he did it. He reached out and tucked his hand under my hair, crad
ling the back of my neck. Then he gave me his patented melt-a-woman’s-undies look—up from under lowered lashes. And damned if it didn’t work. To seal the deal, he murmured, “Please?”

  Faced with that much sex appeal, all focused on me like a laser beam, I folded. Crumbled. Caved. I was ready to give him anything he asked for. I even would have renamed the showThe Alex McNulty Hour if he’d asked. He waited, silent. He knew the power he had over women, and heck, maybe he knew the power he had over me in particular. He knew he didn’t have to do anything more.

  “I’ll . . . see what I can do,” I whispered.

  * * *

  The next day, when the martinis and champagne had morphed into a hangover headache that seared my eyeballs and made my brain feel two sizes too big for my skull, I had second thoughts. Was I going to let a two-bit actor who was just hitting the big time by embodying my character and saying my words and following my direction start calling the shots on what direction his character arc took? Insanity. If it had been anyone else in the cast making the request to collaborate on their character, I would have patted them on the head, complimented them on their strengths (reciting their lines in a meaningful way, hitting their marks, keeping the number of takes to a minimum), and sent them on their way. Why didn’t I do that with Alex?

  Well. I knew why. I wanted into his expensive jeans, that was why. But I didn’t have time to indulge my romantic whims. I was Faith Freakin’ Sinclair, master of the Modern Women universe. So I popped some more ibuprofen and resolved to tell him no deal, I worked alone. Soon. I was going to tell him soon.

  But of course I dragged my heels. With the show over, I just couldn’t envision picking up the phone and calling him at home, much as I wanted to. And, I noticed, he never contacted me either, so how serious could he have been? In the first week or two after the wrap party, I was afraid he’d show up at my door any minute, ready to start our, er, collaboration. But he never dropped by, never called, never texted. By the time I mustered up the courage to find him, he was gone. His agent told me he had traveled to India, then probably Thailand, on a “spiritual quest.”

  Yeah, Alex did have a habit of chasing after different shiny things that caught his eye. Apparently making his character “deeper” was off the shiny-things menu in favor of his spiritual growth. Or something.

  On one hand, I was relieved that I didn’t have to tell him I’d changed my mind; on the other hand—and I hated to admit this—I was sort of disappointed that he wasn’t around. And I was forced to face the fact that no matter how earnestly he had looked at me the night of the wrap party, no matter how flirty he was with me, no matter how much he implied that he wanted something more between the two of us, he was able to turn on a dime and go halfway around the world, forgetting everything we talked about. Forgetting about me. And what did that say about his feelings toward me? Or, rather, the lack thereof?

  Chapter 6

  “Faith? You okay?”

  I blinked. For a second I almost didn’t remember where I was. But the stickiness of the fake wood veneer under my elbows reminded me I was in Evan and Sean’s house, zoning out in front of my tablet at the rickety second-hand kitchen table as I tried to come up with some witty webisode scripts that wouldn’t make them stare at me blankly and ask me to include more vomit or other bodily effluvia to make it funnier. Of course, nothing was on the screen in front of me. I had been spending too much time thinking about Alex and not enough time trying to come up with ways to turn these boys into the next intertubes meme.

  I stretched, even though I didn’t need to, and said in what I hoped was a relaxed tone, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Just . . . you know . . . meditating.”

  Evan nodded sagely. “Sure. Hey look,” he said, settling himself on the other brown vinyl chair, “something’s come up that’s pretty exciting.”

  “Really?” I sat up straighter and tried to look interested. If this was another long-winded tale of maybe scoring a new server . . .

  “Yeah.” He picked at the side of his index finger with his thumbnail, a habit that always made me want to slap his hand and tell him his fingers looked like they had been gnawed by wolverines. I held my tongue (and my hand) and instead raised my eyebrows encouragingly. If he got this story out within the next five minutes, there’d still be time to have him fetch my midafternoon latte.

  “Um.”

  I nodded, all the while screaming inside for him to spit it out.

  “Um, Jamie met this guy—he’s a producer? In reality stuff?” I nodded again. Spit. It. Out. “Name’s Trev. And, well, we were all talking, and we—he—came up with this great idea for a reality show. He pitched it to MTV, and they want to put it on their Web site. And we’d put it together.”

  “That’s great, Evan.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “They want it to be young, of course—MTV working hard to still be cutting edge and everything.”

  “Right.” I didn’t bother mentioning MTV was nearly as old as I was.

  “So. Um. We’re going to focus on that, and we, uh, won’t be needing your help. Anymore.”

  I didn’t know if my jaw actually hit the tabletop, but it felt like it should have. Was this little weenie firingme?

  He rushed on, “I mean, you’ve been great and everything, and we really like you.”

  “But?”

  “But like I said, they want it to be young—young ideas, setups, direction, everything.”

  “And I’m not young.”

  “Well, yeah, but . . . no. I mean, what they have in mind is, like, twenty . . . something.”

  “I see.”

  “You want some water or something, Faith? You look kind of pale.”

  “I’m fine,” I snapped. “Well. That’s . . . great. I’m really happy for you. It’s an exciting opportunity.” Oh God, I sounded like a guidance counselor. Maybe I was old. One thing was certain—I didn’t need to stick around this place any longer. Which is what I wanted. Right? I turned off my tablet and slipped it into my bag. “I guess I’d better let you get to it, then.”

  Hefting my bag on my shoulder, I made for the front door. Sean, never the most social of creatures, lurked in the shadow of the hallway. The coward. At the door, I turned back to the boys.

  “Just curious—was it because I wouldn’t put vomiting strippers into any of the sketches?”

  Both Evan and Sean hesitated before reluctantly muttering variants of, “Yeah. Kind of.”

  “It’s always the vomit . . .”

  Shaking my head, I headed out into the L.A. afternoon.

  * * *

  I was in such a fog as I drove away from Random Shit Productions that I didn’t even realize where I was till I had run out of land. I was in Santa Monica; in a few blocks the ocean would stretch out before me. Oh well. I wasn’t all that eager to get back to my house anyway. I grabbed a Pinkberry, drove to Ocean Avenue, parked my Cayenne alongside the park, and meandered toward the pier.

  The place was teeming with tourists, which was fine by me. When I was feeling emotional, nothing made me happier than to be anonymous in a huge group of strangers. It reminded me that I wasn’t the center of the universe. Or something. I headed down the steep ramp, past the souvenir shops and the rides and the musicians, to the very end of the pier, where fishermen still fished once in a while.

  I leaned on the railing and stared out at the ocean. With everything behind me, physically as well as emotionally, I started to feel a little better. I scraped the last of my yogurt out of the cup while seagulls gave me the eye. Not sharing today, guys. Sorry. Around me, tourists came and went, taking photos of each other with the water in the background, then scooting back to the souvenir stands to buy shells that came from somewhere else in the world.

  Even the Web boys didn’t want me.Damn. That thought wouldn’t leave my brain. Rejected by those little dudes and their stupidly named “business” . . . that was cold. Wow. I mean, I would much rather have been having power lunches with studio execs and spending mill
ions of dollars instead of, well, dollars for a weekly production budget, but still. Getting dumped stung. I guess, in the end, I wanted to be the one who walked out instead of getting the boot from a couple of snot-nosed Internet jockeys.

  So what was I going to do now? I had no idea. Couldn’t stay on the end of the pier forever, though. I’d have to fight the seagulls for dropped fries and leftover bait to survive, and I knew I’d lose.

  A young couple, clearly in love and eager to take yet another selfie, decided to add the Santa Monica pier to their collection of photos in a thousand places where the location was less important than their faces in close-up. They positioned themselves along the railing, heads mashed together, cell phone held high, unintentionally shoving me aside. I inched away. It was at times like these, when I had coupledom shoved in my face (and up against my arm) that I realized I might, just might, be a little lonely.

  I wished I had someone to talk to about all this. Ages ago I chose work over relationships, and most of the time I didn’t regret it. The only time problems arose was when that stupid romantic attraction stuff invaded the work space. And for me that only happened with Alex.

  * * *

  With our second-season shooting schedule looming, no one had heard from him, not even Anthony, his agent. I was on the phone with Anthony constantly, demanding updates, but he couldn’t confirm that Alex was back in the country, let alone L.A. I was absolutely livid. One of my cast was AWOL, and that would have been unacceptable even if he wasn’t the biggest star on the show at the moment.

  I went into the table read for the first episode ready to write him out of the script. I had all sorts of ideas for explaining David’s permanent absence, most involving a fiery death. But just before we started, Alex came sauntering into the room looking tanned, relaxed, and ready to work. He’d even brought a pencil to take notes, for a change. He rounded the table, nodding to everyone, but reserving the first greeting for me. I did my best to be professional-frosty, but he kissed me on the cheek anyway.

  “Hey, boss,” he said. “Good to see you. Excited to get working again.”