Chapter 2
Since Honeymoon Stage was not scripted television, there was no union guaranteeing the staff’s base rates, no health insurance, no residuals. The network had little to lose on the project, and because of this, they’d somewhat washed their hands of their day-to-day involvement.
“Which is good,” said Lauren, the associate producer who welcomed me in on my first day.
“Because we can basically do what we want.” Her leather mules seemed expensive, but it was pretty clear her red hair color had come out of a box.
Although only five foot three, Lauren held herself like a supermodel.
She was the competent kind of pretty: perky nose, ambiguous ethnic heritage (which I would later learn was half-white, half-Vietnamese). I wanted to be her immediately.
I’d arrived at the house after forty-five minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic with only AM radio, the busted audio buttons on my brother’s old Volvo sedan one of the reasons I’d inherited it.
Lauren had apparently been watching for me—she’d probably been the one to buzz me through the gate—and before I’d even fully parked, she was ushering me inside.
I double-checked my watch, confirming I wasn’t late.
Shutting the car door reminded me of saying goodbye to my mother outside the dorm on my first day of college, equally intoxicating and scary. Hopefully there’d be a Jen or a Celia somewhere inside. I wasn’t betting on Lauren to share lipstick or start braiding my hair.
She brought me briskly through the rotunda-ed entryway, and I followed her around an ornate curved staircase, across marble-tiled floors and past blank cream-colored walls.
The whole place smelled like an expensive candle, the kind with a nondescript name like Golden Breeze or Juniper Sunlight.
It did not seem like someone’s home. Other than the couch I’d seen in the stringout, the downstairs rooms were devoid of furniture.
None of the overhead lights were on, and the midmorning haze combined with that emptiness made what might otherwise have been a typical Calabasas mansion into something ghostly and strange.
The light strips under the cabinets buzzed.
“So here we are,” said Lauren, leading me to the butler’s pantry.
I jumped back to avoid being hit with the swinging doors.
“Here” was a room roughly the size of my whole galley kitchen, outfitted as Video Village—monitors running visual feed from all the cameras placed throughout the house, plus what I assumed must be the manned ones, those particular screens blank.
A few laptops and some thick pairs of headphones.
A sound-mixing board and a guy in the corner with a Big Gulp.
He looked up. “New PA?” He was a nerdy-looking guy, gangly with a prominent nose, probably in his early forties. He had on basketball shorts and a T-shirt, which made me feel ridiculous in my own borrowed Oxford shirt and Mary Jane pumps.
“Dan’s our director,” Lauren told me.
“I’m Cassidy Baum.” I held out an awkward hand. Dan mugged for Lauren, but then shook it.
“Dan Iaconetti.” His grip was firm.
“Where’s everybody else?” I asked. Dan took a noisy slurp.
Lauren had been tossing equipment in a heavy-duty black bag—what looked like a charging cable, another headset.
She added a sleeve of Zebra Cakes. “Those are exclusively for Devon. Don’t let anyone else have them.
” Devon was not someone I knew, but that didn’t matter.
It seemed that Lauren was sending me somewhere, that I was about to undertake my first official mission.
The recording studio, maybe, where Maggie was at work on a new album.
An exclusive Beverly Hills boutique. “They’re filming at a gas station on Las Virgenes.
Take a left past the gates, and it’s the one by the trailhead.
Come back after, and I’ll show you around. ”
I shouldered the bag and was almost out the swinging doors before I forced myself to turn. “After . . . I drop this off?” Already the strap bit into my arm.
Lauren blinked at me. “And then whatever else they need.”
Noted. Be wary of clarifying questions. In New York, my superior had given instructions so clear my own breath couldn’t fog them over.
Double-check this spreadsheet. Xerox this man’s ID.
Get the coffees. I’d been forever getting coffees.
Already, it felt like Honeymoon Stage was letting me in on the action.
I let the doors swing shut on Video Village and retraced the steps we’d taken through the mostly empty house, my bag of AV goodies thumping along beside me.
The bag was too big for my trunk—I didn’t want to break any equipment or, god forbid, crush those snack cakes by cramming it down—so I maneuvered it into the back seat of my car, where it sat on top of some boxes I’d been meaning to deliver to Jen’s storage unit and blocked most of my back windshield.
Maggie and Jason had shelled out for their own private gate in this gated community, and a driveway that twisted the length of a long city block to hide their front yard from the street.
It still shocked me how many places in LA were entirely hidden, how many ways there were to disappear from a city that always had eyes on you.
Just around the corner was a bustling expressway, but at the right angle, coming down from the McKee–Dean drive, you could imagine you were the only person on earth.
I inched my way backward, an exercise in blind faith.
I was bubbling with excitement, though aware my giddy energy could easily push me over the top of the bottle.
This opportunity could turn into a trap, waiting to shunt me back east to my mother and that ex-boyfriend I did not especially pine for but had never been able to quit.
I was at the end of the driveway, through the gate, and backing into the street.
No matter that a less punchy PA would have known to turn her car around in the circular drive—I was successfully embarking on my real life, done with walking people’s dogs and regrettable booty calls and postcollege anxiety.
Here came Cassidy Baum. Delivering important snack-food items and whatever else was in that massive bag blocking my rear windshield from view.
Backing into oncoming traffic with an ear-splitting crunch.
“Shit.” I whispered it under my breath, so soft that even I could barely hear myself.
Maybe I could just sit there and pretend it hadn’t happened.
I did sit there, hands on the wheel, knuckles growing ever whiter, hoping whomever I’d hit would go away.
Instead, a man came over and tapped on my driver’s side window.
Seat belt still buckled, I cranked it down.
This wasn’t my first car accident, but it was the first in which I was obviously at fault.
The irony of the apologies I’d made in high school when some minivan rear-ended me—seventeen-year-old Cassidy jumping out of the car in the rain and acting so contrite that an uninvolved woman sidled up and whispered that she’d seen the whole thing and I should shut my mouth or I’d have trouble with insurance—was not lost on me.
I sat there trying not to look at the guy leaning down toward my car.
“Are you okay?” The first thing I saw was his hands.
They were large and lean, big palms, long, slender fingers.
A bicep tattoo peeked through the sleeve of his T-shirt, maybe a shield of some sort, I couldn’t tell.
He wore an expensive-looking watch and a thumb ring that theoretically should have turned me off but instead did the opposite.
“Oh,” I said finally, prying my own hands off the wheel. “Um.” I swallowed and let myself look at his face. “You were coming up on me pretty fast,” I said. Dress for the job you want, respond to the situation in which you wish you’d found yourself.
His mouth pursed. Of course he had a nice mouth, a nice everything. He seemed to be in his mid-twenties, with dirty-blond hair and blue eyes and the kind of face that seemed both handsome and endlessly transformable. Uncomfortably good looking, but not in that overly groomed Los Angeles way.
“I was coming up fast.” When he spoke, his voice was gravelly, and though his expression remained serious, I thought he might be laughing. I unbuckled my seat belt and got out of the car.
“Well, I guess not that fast,” I said, looking between my dented back bumper and his relatively pristine front.
I’d expected much worse. He smiled at me.
He had dimples. Goddammit. I fought my instinct to apologize, both for backing up without looking and for standing there all bland and frazzled in my silly little work clothes.
My job. I couldn’t let some sexy stranger ruin it. If my car could still drive, I had to drive it to the ARCO. I wouldn’t slack on my first official PA assignment, no matter how perfectly dimpled the cheeks of my interruption were.
“This is so flaky, but I really have to go.” I looked back up the driveway, hoping Lauren wasn’t flapping down to fire me.
“You’re not hurt or anything? Do we need to, like, exchange insurance?
” Really all this guy had was a small scratch in his paint, surely something those hands would have no trouble fixing. I’d gotten lucky.
“How about numbers?” he said. Was he asking for my number? Like, asking asking? I dug around in my glove box, then handed him a takeout napkin and a pen. The ballpoint blotted at the first digit, and his tongue went to the side of his lips as he scratched out the rest.
Before I got back in my car, I pulled the passenger seat all the way forward and repositioned the boxes, shimmying the equipment bag down to free up a sliver of my windshield. Through it, I watched the man watch me as I drove away.