Chapter 19
While Gabe’s entertainment career showed signs of life, mine was flatlining. I took a million meetings, but nothing stuck. The jobs were either low paying or low prestige, too morally gray or too boring. The gigs I really wanted never called me back.
When I complained to her, my mother suggested that I write out a more specific list of skills I’d learned in my time on the Honeymoon Stage set so I’d be ready to sell myself in interviews.
I sat at the kitchen table, trying to make “replaced dead flowers” sound marketable, and found myself imagining an entire conversation between me and Rahul about spraying the trees on the property with paint so that they’d shimmer more romantically on camera.
Without meaning to, I’d made us sound ridiculous—not me and Rahul, but the work we did, the fact we’d cared so deeply.
In a way, it was ridiculous, all the facades and shellacking that had made our show “real.” If I fleshed it out, here was my sitcom.
Each time I got passed over for a job, I’d open up the document and fiddle: a character detail here, a wacky situation there.
The producers on my imaginary Reality show weren’t Lauren and Dan, but they weren’t not Lauren and Dan either.
The rest of the crew sprang from my imagination, save for the show’s host, who was always flaking. That character was based on my dad.
“This is funny,” said Gabe one afternoon, looking over my shoulder. “This stuff is good.”
“It’s just to blow off steam, nothing serious.”
“It’s a great idea,” Gabe repeated. “Why not make it serious?”
“Gabe.” I turned to him, incredulous. “I’d never work in Reality again. Talk about blacklisting. I pitch this seriously, and everyone would hate me.”
“You know Jake’s dad is a big shot at Fox.
Jake’s been looking for a project to bring him.
” Jake was one of Gabe’s Hollywood friends, the type who did half the work for twice the reward simply by accident of birth.
He’d be a great contact to have were I to try and take TV writing seriously.
“Let me mention it to him,” Gabe said. “Just float it.”
I said why not. It was easy to agree, as I was certain nothing would come of it. I’d never envisioned myself as a writer. Gabe was the writer. I was just messing around until I redeemed myself and got back on a set.
Three weeks after Gabe’s suggestion, I had three more job rejections and forty pages of a pilot for Reality June, a workplace sitcom about a plucky PA and her ENG crew. I let Gabe read the full draft, and he gave me a book about screenwriting the next day after dinner.
“Thanks for letting me down easy,” I said when I unwrapped the package.
“The opposite,” Gabe said. “It’s for making an already good thing great. And I floated the concept to Jake. He likes it. A lot.”
“Well, Jake can have the concept,” I said, clearing our dishes. “Just not my expertise.”
Gabe scoffed. “It’s your idea. He cannot have it.”
I scrubbed vigorously at the sticky-sweet marinade congealed on the side of a pan. “Jake will have to find somebody else that he can sell to his dad. I’m not ready to make myself even more toxic in Reality TV.”
“Okay, but why are you still working on it?” Gabe came over to join me at the sink. “If it’s really going nowhere, why are you writing it?”
“It’s therapeutic,” I said. “Or maybe masochistic?”
“That sounds exhausting.”
It was. Still, life went on. We went on a weekend trip to Sacramento where I met Gabe’s parents—his dad looking sweetly down his glasses at me, his mother immediately hooking her elbow through my arm. I took up CrossFit. We talked about getting a dog.
When Gabe’s album came out, it did okay but not great. He wasn’t salty about the numbers, although I knew they weren’t what he’d hoped for.
Between us sat the specter of Maggie McKee’s declined endorsement.
As I watched Gabe spin the wheel of rock stardom yet again without winning, I couldn’t help but think that, despite all her manipulation, despite what it might have meant for my relationship with Gabe, he should have taken Maggie up on her offer.
He would for sure have gotten that Rolling Stone profile with Maggie McKee as a duet partner.
He could have booked bigger venues, gotten their music video in regular rotation.
Instead, he played his bars and local clubs and sang for radio DJs in the hope they’d catch on to what he was trying to do with his music and bring it mainstream.
He’d sigh and say Not all hard work pays off, and I would just about want to die, knowing the easiest road had been his for the taking, and if it hadn’t been for me, he would have taken it.
“You don’t know for sure it would have made any difference,” said Rahul when I met him downtown for drinks.
He was working on a show about a seven-foot-tall man dating a series of short women, and I’d reached out to see if he knew of anything good currently hiring for PAs.
He’d responded that if he knew of anything good hiring, he wouldn’t be filming Seven’s Heavens, but we should meet up anyway, it had been too long.
After several martinis, I’d told him the basics about Maggie and Gabe.
She’d been sociopathic, yes, but she would have been good for him.
“He would have had more opportunity,” I said. “If I wasn’t so jealous.” Rahul shook his head.
“Might. You’ve gotta learn to embrace the might.
Not everything is preordained. Working on a Reality set messes with you, but sometimes shit just happens.
” I was sure we were both thinking about the days following Sally Ann’s death, when I’d spun out and been demoted while he sucked it up and kept doing his job.
“Also, she’s the problem. Maggie’s always been smarter than they give her credit for, and by that I mean she’s always been a total bitch. ”
“Well, I mean . . .”
“You know it’s true. Jesus, who hurt her? People out here are all kinds of messed up. It’s better to get on a show where the weird is on the outside. Somebody weighs nine hundred pounds or has half a face or something else that, in circus times, would have put them in a freak show.”
“That’s mean,” I said.
“Is it?” Rahul popped a handful of bar peanuts. “Is it mean if they make money for it? If it’s gonna happen to them anyway, isn’t it better that they get to be in charge?” He sounded like Maggie.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Aren’t the producers in charge?”
Rahul shrugged. He squinted at me. “You did say you want to get back into TV, didn’t you?”
I thought I did. Didn’t I? I certainly wanted out of the apartment.
A job where I could interact with people face-to-face, build something meaningful.
I missed the buzz of being on set, the mental Tetris of production.
I didn’t want to live vicariously through Gabe’s career; I needed something of my own.
Rahul offered to drive me home that night, but I declined and took a cab. “If I hear of anything good, you’re my first call,” he told me when we parted. “In the meantime, go easy on yourself.”
Several months after the release of Gabe’s album, Lauren called me in the middle of the workday.
Work, for me, meant writing sitcom treatments destined for some drawer, and Mr. Pichietti’s semilucrative newsletter copy, as well as a growing list of blog and marketing updates for the dog-walking service I’d rejoined as a part-time walker, a position I’d then parlayed into an editorial role.
I was no longer some bright young thing who could chase golden retrievers willy-nilly.
I was a professional, interviewing dog psychics and giving pet owners tips on how to balance animal chakras.
Instead of building out a select version of an actual person that my audience would think was the real deal, I was building out select versions of dog breeds.
This was clearly less exciting than Reality TV, but much firmer ethical ground.
Although we had a small second bedroom that I could use as an office, when Gabe was out of the house, I usually worked from the kitchen table. When I saw Lauren’s name on my caller ID, I saved a scintillating few sentences I had been writing about canine color theory and closed my laptop.
“Hello?”
“Cassidy. Lauren.” The greeting sounded like boot camp roll call, prompting me to straighten my shoulders. “I have an offer for you.”
I hadn’t heard from Lauren since that day in her backyard. I’d assumed her offer to hook me up with a job when things with her show were ready to go was just a gesture. Yet here she was, on the phone, as if ages had not passed, although her baby was a toddler already.
“Hi.” Why bother with pleasantries if Lauren was diving right into things? “What’s the offer?”
“I have the show. The one I was just telling you about.” Apparently, time worked differently in television. It was true, though, that at one point she had been telling me. “We got the go-ahead, but there’s a problem.”
I stood, phone pressed between my cheek and shoulder, and started tidying the kitchen counter, wiping coffee mug rings and toaster crumbs. I said, “Tell me more.”
Lauren’s show was called Real-Life Lovers, and it would focus on the trials and tribulations of a group of normal couples as they all lived together in a mansion following their marriages.
The totally normal everyday problems of normal everyday newlyweds, full of backstabbing and cheating and pool parties and booze.
She was trying to get Jason Dean to host.
Lauren’s problem was Dan.
“He’s power hungry,” Lauren told me. “Success has gone to his head. We went in as co-executive producers, and he wants to bump me down. He’s pretending the whole thing was his idea.”
“When really the whole thing was your idea?” I asked.
“Of course it was.” Lauren sniffed. “Anyway, I need allies. I want to bring you in to produce with me. To know you’ll have my back.”
Here was the job offer I had been waiting for, coming in at a level I wouldn’t get anywhere else. Theoretically it was, like Maggie’s offer to Gabe, a no-brainer.
“Umm,” I said. I might be desperate for TV work, but having escaped Lauren and Dan’s web once, I was not especially eager to get myself tangled back up in it.
“I want to ruin him,” said Lauren.
“Oh?”
“I want to grind him down. I want to make production companies talk about Dan Iaconetti the way they once talked about Cassidy Baum.” Lauren had fire in her voice. “Sorry, but it’s true. I want to end him.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them to the home that I had built with Gabe Leighton.
Mr. Coffee dripped out in its pot. A basket of laundry sat on the couch, waiting to be folded.
A poster from Gabe’s recent tour leaned against a side table, framed and ready to be hung on a wall.
My daily life, small and uncomplicated. Drama-free. Mostly happy.
There were cracks, though, in that happiness.
My work wasn’t fulfilling. Gabe was hard on himself about his career.
I worried he would wake up and realize that I was the roadblock, the big reason for his failures.
If I went back to Lauren, I’d have more influence in Hollywood.
I’d have a job in TV. I could find a way to help him.
“Let me think about it,” I said. “When do you need an answer?”
“Yesterday,” said Lauren.
“Let me think about it,” I said again. “And I’ll get back to you.”
I planned to bring Lauren’s proposal to Gabe that night and talk it over, but he came home in a mood. All he wanted was to run a bath and put on some music. He told me nothing in particular had happened. I thought that was likely the problem.
At this point Gabe had amassed a loyal following.
His shows sold well; he got invited on the road.
He made enough money and had enough clout that he could keep on making music, which he’d always claimed was the only goal.
But I’d hear him on the phone with his family saying, “I’m trying, Ma.
Hopefully soon.” He wanted to make his parents proud, to make their many sacrifices for his career worth it, and all that it would take was one big hit.
An invitation to perform on SNL or a song played on a popular TV show.
The kind of opportunity that—I still insisted on believing—working with Maggie might have given him.
Gabe had been working since childhood, reinvented himself twice.
Surely soon he would reap the benefits of what he had sown.
I wasn’t sure that he knew what those were—he didn’t want the media circus, he didn’t want bottle service at the club.
He wanted the people he loved to be proud of him.
I was so proud of him. I told him every day.
He just had to learn how to be proud of himself.
I didn’t bother pointing out how many musicians never even got this far—how many people would love to be in his shoes with a major-label record and a fan base and steady writing work that paid. It wouldn’t have helped.
That evening I sneaked into the bathroom, sat at the edge of the tub. He had moody Led Zeppelin playing on stereo.
“You know a big career’s not about the actual quality of the music. It’s the whole marketing machine. They’re like the kingmakers. It’s about who gets the golden ticket.”
“True.” Gabe nodded, but I could tell I wasn’t reaching him. I trailed a finger in the water, then reached up to touch his arm.
“It’s totally random, which person gets the opportunity. Or gets born with rich parents.”
“Cassidy, I had the opportunity.” Gabe looked solemn. “I had The Tiger Crew. And I wasted it.”
I held his head, and it made wet marks on my T-shirt. “You didn’t waste anything.”
“Cassidy.” Gabe nuzzled me. “Come here.” He pulled back, and then leaned forward to kiss me, a wave of bathwater rushing my bare legs in my ratty pajama shorts. “I love you,” Gabe said. “Marry me.”
I froze. My heart ran laps in my chest, panicking. “What?”
“Marry me,” Gabe said again, sitting up so that more water splashed over the lip of the tub. “Let’s get married.”
“Umm.” For the second time that day, I was responding to a major proposition with unintelligible bleating. Unlike earlier, I knew my answer immediately. “I mean yes,” I said. Yes, of course. Yes, forever. Yes. Yes. “Yes, I want to. It’s just . . . it’s a weird way to ask me.”
“I figured you wouldn’t want the traditional kneeling and flowers,” said Gabe, lacing our fingers.
His chest hair glistened with water. “It’s not out of the blue.
I’ve been planning this. I have the ring already.
I could have found a better time, but right now I wanted to ask you.
So I asked you.” His mouth was serious, but his eyes sparkled.
“Yes,” I said. “The answer is yes.” Gabe pulled me closer until I was almost on top of him, my shirt hem sopping.
“Get in,” he said. “The water’s great.”
And so, I did.