Refreshed and only limping a little, she fetched her dinner from the lobby table. The view from the bar that separated the kitchen and dining area framed the mountains to the east. The sun had shifted low enough that the distant horizon almost looked like blue sky. She’d turn on music later, but right now, after extroverting all day, she wanted quiet.
Her dinner of shrimp and vegetables smelled wonderfully of five-spice and garlic. She took the time to plate it and eat at the table like a real person would, then cleaned up and brewed a cup of tea. The #Boobarella affair had been a disruption to her life, but now everything was back to normal.
Except she didn’t feel normal, not at all.
Pacing across the pale carpets to gaze down at the busy corner where trendy nightspots were just now opening their doors, she tried to shake off her malaise. This was happiness, or it had been until Suzanne’s party.
Suzanne. Had she ever truly gotten Suzanne out from under her skin? She liked to tell herself yes.
Laughing aloud in the quiet space, Jennifer made her way to the bedroom she used as an office. The space was split between her utilitarian desk and file cabinets, and a large table with a comfortable chair that faced the southeastern view of city and hills. Her old Lauren Bacall poster, matted and reframed, was on the wall opposite the window. Lauren deserved a good view.
She sat down, telling herself she ought to do yoga instead. Once she started it would probably keep her up too late. She queued up Adele’s latest album and foraged through the tan bricks of the Lego set for an eight-thick—and all the worrisome voices went away. It was the best meditation she’d tried. Another thing Suzanne had been right about. A couple of hours and she’d have all four walls of the Ghostbusters headquarters completed. Legos rocked.
Chapter Forty-One
“I’m glad you could come down. What do you have to do with your summer, anyway, retired old man?” Suzanne led the way to the great room where her father took his regular seat in the wide leather armchair while Suzanne sprawled out as usual on the couch opposite him. Her stomach was stuffed with grilled tilapia and corn on the cob. Her father’s visits always meant home-cooked food. “You still know your way around a grill.”
William Mason heaved a pleased sigh. “I couldn’t burn a thing with that fancy setup you have. I’m used to briquettes and open flame. That was tasty if I say so myself.”
She punched down a cushion a little bit. “It feels great to relax. Annemarie and I are working on a new idea and I’ve been spending more time in San Francisco than usual. Tell me all about Denmark. How long were you in Jelling?”
Her father’s lifelong passion for Nordic and Germanic culture was evident as he whisked her through pictures of cool, blue and green landscapes and close-ups of runic antiquities. His idea of retirement was to winnow down to just one graduate seminar at Stanford for his beloved comparative Nordic literature, and take on guest lecturing appearances at universities from Antwerp to Oslo. She intended to be every bit as active and resilient when she was seventy.
“That’s probably more than you wanted to know,” he concluded a while later. “I’m planning to go back next summer. I don’t think my bones would adapt to winter. June was brisk enough for me.”
“I thought you were a big believer in experiencing the full range of nature. You know, remaining connected to the planet and all that? That’s why we had windows open year round and no air-conditioning?” She got up to refill her iced tea. “Want more?”
He nodded. “I am, especially for the young. It didn’t hurt you or your brothers, did it?”
“No, it works in the Bay Area, mostly,” she called from the kitchen. “Not above the fiftieth parallel.”
When she returned with their fresh drinks she queued up an episode of Jeopardy! on the DVR, because that’s what one did after dinner with her father. It wasn’t often that she knew something he didn’t, but every once in a while a category was in her favor. She was in luck tonight. After he ran the Composers by Country category the contestants started on Oscar Shutouts.
“Who is Susan Sarandon.”
“You have the advantage over me.”
“I know, you don’t go to the talkies.”
“Disrespectful child.” He dipped a fingertip into his glass and flicked droplets at her. “I remember actors by their roles, is all. I don’t know the difference between Ethan Hawke and Elijah Wood unless you say Frodo.”
“And… Who is Glenn Close.” She flicked him back. “Evacuate the Death Star because it is on like Alderaan.”
Her trash talk was premature. She got to enjoy her iced tea while her father and a contestant ran the World Rivers category. Answering a half-second too late was the same as wrong.
“You were saying?” he asked, after answering ahead of the contestant with, “What is the Paraná?”
The category switched back to Oscar Shutouts. “I was saying ‘who is Sigourney Weaver,’ that’s what I was saying.”
The last clue on the board was revealed as Hyde Butler walked away with the trophy, but his leading lady is still waiting for hers.
“Who is Jennifer Lamont,” Suzanne said slowly. Part of her thought someone she’d been with being an answer on Jeopardy! was extremely cool. The voice of reason bemoaned that there was no escaping the woman. She paused the program. “Remember when I told you about getting dumped by a model years ago?” She’d told her parents about the first time the woman had dumped her, but not the second. She hadn’t wanted to parade her stupidity.
“Vaguely. When you were in New York?”
“Yes. So that’s who it was.”
“I’d forgotten her name, if you ever told us.”
Suzanne shrugged. “I ran into her recently.”
“Isn’t she starring in a Hitchcock remake? She always seems very competent. I was intrigued at the idea of a woman playing a part written for someone as iconic as Jimmy Stewart.”
“She’s as attractive as ever.”
He gave her a sideways look. “This sounds perilously close to a discussion of your love life. Where’s your mother when we need her?”
“Valhalla.” They lifted their glasses in a shared gesture of remembrance.
“Your mother has Valhalla eating vegan and using renewable energy by now,” her father pronounced after a fleeting expression of still hurtful grief had passed.
“Why would they need renewable energy? They have Thor. He can store lightning any time he wants with the right collection and storage design.”
“Not everybody has access to the hammer.”
“Not everybody is worthy.”
He laughed and said, “So are you dating Ms. Lamont?”
“No, it’s not like that. We met up again once before, about ten years ago, and it still didn’t go well. She believed that coming out would end her career.”
He looked up from packing his pipe with the cherry-smoke tobacco, the aroma from which she found deeply comforting. “And you didn’t believe that?”
“No, I did. It’s just…”
“You wanted it not to matter to her.”
“Not so much that we—we didn’t get as far as seriously dating or declarations or anything. She just walked away after some good times. I didn’t have anything to offer her that she wanted.”
“She doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who could be won with mere baubles.”
“Yeah, I definitely found out those don’t work.”
“I see. Well, like anything worth having in life, if you want it, earn it.”
“I don’t want it.” She sounded like a huge liar, even to herself. “I can’t change the fact that I am too risky for her.”
“A situation with no happy resolutions.”
“She could have done other things for a living.”
“Why should she? She’s pretty good at acting, isn’t she? Where’s the ‘you go girl’ for a woman who’s put her career first and achieved great results?”
She should have never brought it up. Th
ere were things he didn’t understand. “She’s treated a lot of people badly, and pretty much, after a fling with a woman was discovered, she said it was just an experiment. We know how much guys love that whole scenario. Boom, suddenly she’s a big star.”
“Then she sounds like a not very nice person you should steer clear of.”
She felt like a teenager, not a forty-five-year-old who ran a multimillion dollar venture capital fund. “That’s what Mom told me after Ricki Laguna said she’d go to prom with me and went with that awful Kirsten Hughes instead.”
“I always thought you and Annemarie might settle down.”
“Gross! She’s like my sister. Don’t ship us.”
He puffed lightly on his pipe until the tobacco caught. The nightly ritual was one of her earliest memories of childhood. “Ship?”
“Relationship. It’s when you take any two people and propose a relationship between them, usually in disregard for their actual reality, or in the case of fictional characters, their established canon. Somewhere out there someone is writing love stories about Frodo and Loki.”
He looked pained. “I see. It doesn’t explain why, if you don’t want to be single, you still are.”
“I like single. All the best superheroes are single, after all. I don’t feel incomplete. It’s just that I know my life would be different, possibly better, if She-Boob Sword Mistress hadn’t been afraid of being outed.”
“Suzanne Marie,” he said sadly.
Both names. She was in trouble.
“You know you’d call out a man who talked about any woman that way. By her anatomy.”
Holy crap, her father was a better feminist than she was. “It’s not the body, it’s that she doesn’t use her powers for good.”
“Therefore, she sounds like a not very nice person you—”
“—Should steer clear of,” they finished together.
“Maybe instead of your love life we should talk about work. Or better yet, are you going to do any more lecturing at the university? You enjoyed it didn’t you?”
“I loved the place so much I moved here, and I really think the students liked the seminar.” She hadn’t fully understood the attraction of her father’s academic life until she’d prepared and delivered a ten-week lecture series and worked with students. “I was going to put a feeler out to the provost about this fall, but starting a personal foundation with Annemarie is more of a priority.”
“I thought you already ran a foundation.”
“The company does. We’re not the company, not completely. She needs some fresh horizons, and I have some interesting ideas about applying what CommonTech Foundry has done to make girls ubiquitous at science fairs and math competitions to other fields, like the arts.”
“You always were more like your mother.”
“I prefer to think I’m a blend of both of you. Your big brain and her activist heart. Shall we finish up the rest of Jeopardy! or do you want to watch a movie?”
He drew on his pipe while scratching under his trim gray beard. “Jeopardy!, then movie.”
“Hang on, text from Annemarie.” She frowned at her display. “She wants to call our new foundation Annemarie and Suzanne Save the World Together.”
Her father let out a bark of laughter. “That’s probably not a good idea.”
“It’s very descriptive.”
“A.S.S.T.W.T. Think it through, oh my daughter.”
She’d been had. Grateful that he’d seen the joke, she sent back, “I know you are but what am I?” before hitting play.
Chapter Forty-Two
“You know why men don’t take us seriously? Why none of us ever gets a seat on any of the news that airs after three p.m.?” Jennifer gestured at the semicircle of bare legs as she rose to her feet. “Because serious people don’t have magnifying glasses in front of their crotches. They have desks!”
She planted one stiletto against the shin-high clear glass coffee table and shoved. Shoved again. The fine fishing lines that were supposed to help topple the table in the right direction quivered as set techs pulled. The damn thing didn’t budge.
Her four scene mates broke into giggles.
Jennifer dropped character. “Did someone nail this thing down?”
“Cut!” The director’s harsh voice was loaded with annoyance.
Filming this episode of Baghdad by the Bay had been a nightmare, Jennifer gathered, the least of which had been finding a last-minute replacement for their originally planned guest star, one who could get to San Francisco on a few days notice. Another score for BeBe, who had found her two days of highly lucrative and visible work while touting it as Jennifer saving the day.
Jennifer had given up major R&R at home with two scripts, a novel and binge watching the last season of Fargo. It hadn’t been hard to do—her brain was so preoccupied with this Friday’s release of Rope and the upcoming media blitz it was hard to relax. It had been hard for weeks, ever since her work on American Zombie Hunters had wrapped up. If anything else was making her restless she didn’t want to think about it. She’d get home tomorrow night, put last minute things in her already packed bags for the trip back east, and make her flight to New York by three.
Technicians swarmed the elevated set for the show’s newsroom, one sheepishly muttering, “We forgot to undo the safety hooks.”
“Ms. Lamont?”
Jennifer turned to one of the co-stars. Amy Lebeaux was a disarming bundle of button-cute blondness with a southern drawl. “Call me Jennifer. I mean it.”
“Jennifer.” The last syllable came out as a soft “fuh” that Jennifer quite liked. “I’ve been telling myself not to go all fan girl on you, but I can’t help it. It’s been one of my dreams to work with you. The whole time I was in acting school I told myself I wanted to be just like you.”
Caught off guard, Jennifer said, “Is that wise? I’ve terrified a few people from time to time, but only when I meant to.”
“Who’d want to scare people on accident? You stand up for yourself and that makes it easy for me to do. I ask mahself, ‘What would Jennifer Lamont do?’”
Even though she sincerely hoped there were things she’d done that Amy Lebeaux would never, ever do, Jennifer was won over. “I’ll take that all as a compliment.”
“It is.” Amy’s cute little nose twitched, an irresistible attribute that had won the public heart. “You’ve never been anybody but you.”
“You have to be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”
“I love that quote! Isn’t that Oscar Wilde? Y’all crack me up.”
“Places!”
Jennifer reacted to the director’s command by returning to her seat on the stage. She was surprised she needed to blink back a threat of tears. “Thank you, Amy. You made my day.”
She honestly did not know what to make of what the young actress had said. On the one hand, she had never shied away from admitting she was ambitious. She understood her own worth. She didn’t need anyone to like her, only to respect her. But her lies were like chains around her neck, and lately they had been threatening to choke her. Had adorable Amy not read the gossip pages? Some of it was true, at least about Selena Ryan.
Like a ticker at Times Square, the thought marched across her mind: I’d rather be the person she thinks I am.
What would Amy say if she knew Jennifer had walked away from all personal entanglements so she could ignore the emptiness of life in a closet? It was a very nice closet, complete with professional and material success, but still a closet. Her real need for quiet after a day of work was the excuse she used to keep her personal life empty. While her agent and publicist and fans could be put off with workaholic explanations, she couldn’t afford friends—friends asked questions she no longer wanted to answer with lies. Better to simply avoid them altogether.
The next take worked beautifully with the table imploding and shattered safety glass harmlessly spilling across the stage. On-air personnel headed for dressing rooms while the technical crew
began the job of cleanup and resetting for the busy schedule tomorrow. Jennifer headed for the dressing room designated for her, shooing away an eager intern who asked if she needed a cab or a restaurant recommendation. She had been in and out of San Francisco many times, though this was the first time since Suzanne’s party.
Amy Lebeaux’s comments were still ringing in her ears as she left the studio clad in walking shoes and wicking workout clothes she’d brought with her in the morning. The small studio district connected to the pavilions near the ballpark, and she could walk miles along the waterfront on sidewalks shaded by skyscrapers. It was still unusually hot for San Francisco summer, but nothing like the temps in LA.
The walk would do her good. Any day now the first critic reviews of Rope would hit the trades. It could be okay. But the reviews could also start with “Who does Jennifer Lamont think she is, taking on a Jimmy Stewart role?”
Her tote with her street clothes and the day’s essentials slung across her back, she pinned back her hair and pulled a Project Runway ball cap down to shade her eyes. Dark glasses in place, and she was just another woman enjoying the warm afternoon.
She set a brisk pace, but there was no outrunning her churning thoughts. The media blitz promoting Rope began the day after tomorrow and it wouldn’t be like any movie she had done before. She’d taken on what was regarded as a man’s role, and she knew there would be plenty of pushback. The classic film purists didn’t think anything modern could compare to the Golden Years, and that Hitchcock was sacred and nobody should ever touch it.
Then there were the outright creeps who were already lined up to decry the woeful state of political correctness that said the wimmins had to have all the big parts these days and woe, oh woe, the poor mens who couldn’t get work anymore. They would be loud and persistent.
The marketing people for the production company were anticipating the hand-wringing, happily intending to use any chauvinist outrage to promote the film. Jennifer was ready to stare them down because she was proud of her work. She was proud of the two young male co-stars who had never once questioned the gender dynamic. When someone had told them there would be people who’d think they weren’t manly because a woman ultimately outsmarted them, both Cliff and Sibo had been dumbfounded. The memory of Sibo saying, “Women are smart. What’s their problem?” deeply pleased her.
Captain of Industry Page 23