Chapter 3 #2
“Cassidy, go find out how long she’ll be.
” I had not grown any more comfortable with Lauren in the time I’d spent assisting her.
I’d been hired to do the grunt work, and she knew that instructing me in a gentler tone didn’t change the fundamentals of plunging a toilet.
If a production crew was, as so many executives waxed on about, a family, then Lauren was the older sister who refused to let me borrow her blouse. I worshipped her. She terrified me.
“Like, ask Maggie if . . . ?” I looked at Rahul, shouldering his camera, with a panicked plea for help. He shrugged.
“Cassidy.” Lauren snapped her fingers three times quickly.
“Yeah, okay.” And off I went to bother Maggie McKee.
She sat cross-legged on a bed in one of the guest rooms, thumbing through a magazine and drinking a green juice.
Where it had come from, I couldn’t say. Her team of stylists and management and scheduling people constantly bustled through the house, responsible for both making Maggie McKee and maintaining her.
I tapped on the door, and she cheerfully told me to come in.
When I did, she looked up and said she needed her nails done.
My mouth fell open, and I did some dumb little move with my jaw.
“Not by you. I know who you are.” Maggie smiled at me. “I’m just mentioning.”
“Lauren wants to know when you’ll be back down to film?” I didn’t love the uptick at the end of my own sentence.
“Lauren, Lauren, Lauren,” Maggie said, not unkindly. She slid a straw wrapper into her margin to mark her place, and when she closed the magazine, I saw it was not a fashion spread but Time. “I just needed a minute.”
To expel your cold KFC? I wondered but did not say aloud. Maggie stretched, her T-shirt rising to reveal a sliver of flat stomach. “I do know who you are,” she continued. At this I paused, standing very still as she slid off the bed and into her slippers. “You’re Dede’s niece.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, as if I was just remembering we had a connection and Dede wasn’t the sole cause of my current employment.
“I remember you from, what, kindergarten?” Maggie said as we walked. It was third grade, but I didn’t correct her. “You lived with her for a while during that family thing. Your brother was so cute. I was a baby, but he was, like, my first older crush.”
I personally hadn’t found Andrew cute as an eleven-year-old, but it wasn’t entirely implausible that she had.
“He’s in medical school now,” I said. “In Chicago.”
“And still cute?”
I shrugged. “I’m the wrong person to ask, I think.” By now we were down the spiral staircase and reentering the arena.
“Bring a picture tomorrow. Important questions must be answered.” At that, Maggie slipped into the living room, where Jason stood fiddling with the remote control. She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.
Lauren caught my eye, one brow raised. I had done well.
That night I thought a lot about how seriously to take Maggie’s dictate.
I had pictures of my brother from various family gatherings, nights out in the city, an old holiday card.
I could easily pop up with my laptop and show her adult Andrew, and we could reminisce about that year in Ohio, and I’d feel less like her hired help and more like her pal.
But if I did, I could just as easily be met with a blank stare, like the one she’d given when Lauren asked about getting an interview with Maggie’s old songwriter.
“We could do a segment on how you two work together. Get him out to the house, show a day-in-the-life.” Lauren had been spitballing, hardly committed, but Maggie’s reaction stopped her short.
“No.” Maggie’s voice was hard, her expression icy with disdain.
This was a mistake on her part. She’d shown Lauren a vulnerability.
This songwriter was clearly a sore spot.
I could see Lauren filing the response away, though she didn’t immediately press Maggie further.
I didn’t blame her. Maggie’s was a cruel knifelike cold, worse than anything I remembered from middle school, when I’d been stabbed in the back by many a fellow tween girl.
One of my few childhood memories of Maggie was when I’d had on a T-shirt that said Girls Can Be Anything and, upon reading it, Maggie told me that they couldn’t.
It stuck with me, the way she’d smirked, her hair mouse-brown then, and in pigtails.
I had cried that day because I wanted to be a firefighter—god only knows why—and Maggie swore that it wasn’t going to happen.
I was afraid that she would make me cry again now, that she would tell me something about myself and this job that I knew to be true but was set on denying. She’d take the little model world that I was building and smash it to pieces.
Maggie McKee and I were not friends, and we weren’t ever going to be friends.
I wouldn’t bring my laptop, or a photo. Maggie wasn’t to be counted on, no matter what face she’d put on with me that day.
Instead, I would focus on Lauren. If anyone was going to help me advance at Honeymoon Stage, it would be Lauren, with her henna hair and sensible footwear.
Lauren, with her headset, whispering down the spooked horses, sowing the seeds, running the farm.
Around the same time that we shot the first season, Maggie was working on her second album, and one morning we all went with her to the recording studio.
It wasn’t that we, as a crew, were usually discouraged from joining her, but rather that we were not as enthusiastically encouraged by her manager and publicist in the way we were encouraged to follow her out to the mall.
“It doesn’t showcase the marriage,” her manager said, implying that somehow her shopping habits did.
This time, however, the network was filming a special on the making of the album, which we would capture in a bizarre ouroboros of camerawork.
Our team would continue to act as crew for Honeymoon Stage, and Ian’s team would be the documentarians.
I packed into a van carrying lighting equipment with the other PA, Lauren, and Maggie’s makeup artist, Sally Ann.
As a general rule, Sally Ann acted for the Honeymoon Stage cameras the way Maggie McKee did onstage: glittery, half naked, always mugging with a massive Dentyne smile.
She was a Maggie lite—not quite as blond, not quite as busty, her eyes smaller and her freckles harder to hide.
She was around my age, maybe a year or two younger, and I got the sense she wanted more for herself than to be a makeup artist for the stars.
LA was full of this type of girl—biding her time while she looked for her big break.
We weren’t friends, and we weren’t really colleagues.
She definitely made more money than I did.
“So exciting!” Sally Ann squeezed my knee, and I faked a smile.
Rahul had told me that Sally Ann came from a small town in Kentucky, where she sent money back home to support a kid she said was her sister, though he had his doubts.
Rahul wasn’t generally a gossip—unlike Sally Ann—so I was mostly inclined to believe him.
Whatever the story, I’d personally seen the inside of Sally Ann’s locket, a silver heart on a chain she always wore, with her on one side and a toddler on the other.
“Can you believe it?” she said, as if we weren’t simply traveling from one place of Maggie’s work to another.
It was my first time in a recording studio, and I was struck by how dark it was.
Black sofas and black soundboards and a huge sheet of glass through which we watched Maggie warm up her voice.
She had on a T-shirt, Uggs, and this purple infinity scarf that looked to me like she’d made it herself but probably cost $500.
Rahul and Eli filmed the cameras filming Maggie, and I was surprised by how good she sounded.
“Why doesn’t she sing like this on her other album?” I asked Sally Ann, who’d remained next to me, ready to pop around the glass to powder Maggie’s nose. The girl-next-door look did not abide oily skin. Sally Ann shrugged.
Maggie did a few takes of her new song, her producer pausing her every so often to give notes that only she could hear through her headset.
Then she changed into a leopard-print shirt and had Sally Ann gloss her up.
There wasn’t anywhere designed for primping, so I held up both a mirror and one of our set lights.
“Not too much,” said Maggie. Sally Ann blotted with a tissue that she then tossed on the floor.
“I’ll get these lashes on you, and then we’ll be ready.”
Maggie sat on the couch, legs crossed at the ankles. Ian asked her questions, and his cameraperson framed her as a talking head.
“It’s definitely more of an adult sound,” Maggie said of the new album.
“Growing as I grow, you know.” There was a Maggie that read Time magazine in her slippers, and a Maggie that leaned into not knowing what a sponge was for, and yet another Maggie that writhed onstage in knee-high boots.
This Maggie was a different iteration. She spoke softly, with a demure sweetness that belied the entire project of herself as a pop star.
Who, little old me? she seemed to be asking us. “Ian, can we pause?”
He nodded, and we all took a break, which in this case meant we all stood around in the tight studio space waiting for our break to be over. Sally Ann brought Maggie a cough drop and a large bottle of water. “Okay, sweetie, is that better?”
Maggie nodded. She was just starting up again when we heard tapping on the door. Jason entered without apologizing for the interruption.
“You look amazing,” he told Maggie, who smiled the first genuine smile I’d seen all morning.
“I was just coming from the gym, and I thought I’d stop by.
” The back of his T-shirt was wet from the shower, as if he’d rushed to get here.
“Take your lunch break now?” Although he posed it as a question, he didn’t actually seem to be asking.
His hand was already extended to help her up off the couch.
“Baby, we’re still working.” Maggie used her interview voice, which made me wonder who she was trying to be for her husband. The cameras were no longer rolling.
“Baby.” Something passed between them then, a conversation that the rest of us weren’t privy to. Jason’s eyes got slightly harder; Maggie’s smile got tight. If ever I’d believed in telepathy, it would have been in that moment as we all stood and watched them wait each other out.
“Ian?” Maggie asked finally.
He nodded. “Give us fifteen.”
Jason softened, his affability returned.
For the next fifteen minutes, I watched him watch Maggie, waiting to see if he would show that sharpened edge.
I imagined there might be some lingering jealousy on Jason’s part—his career doing what he loved had ended, while Maggie’s seemed newly begun.
This was the center of her professional world, and he had to be thinking about how he’d never stand up on the mound again, the crowd around him cheering, the game in his control.
He’d never do those sweaty postgame interviews, his team all piling on after a nail-biting win.
But he looked at Maggie with undiluted pride, nodding as she talked about her process.
Either he was a much better actor than I’d realized, or else he truly did love her.
It seemed to me that love was easier for the rich and famous.
Sure, people complained about the downsides of fame, but at the end of the day, if you had money, all the rest of it was simpler.
You could stay because you wanted to stay, not because you had to.
When my dad walked out on us, my mother had two young children and an English degree.
She hadn’t worked since before Andrew was born.
I didn’t believe in the kind of love that launched a thousand Hallmark cards.
But I did believe that money made leaps of faith more possible.
Maggie started talking about the logistics of the vocals she’d put down, animated and effusive as she explained her inspirations. The way Jason smiled as she lit up was sexier than any photo shoot. Jason had always been handsome, but this was the first time he had kind of turned me on.
Rahul saw it too. He got a perfectly framed shot of Jason’s face as he watched his wife.