Chapter 4
In an early episode, Maggie is at a boutique, and she browses racks of clothes and lifts up pieces of jewelry.
She says “I love this,” and “I like this!” and “Oh, this is so wonderful!” The audience does not know the name of this particular boutique, a fact that seems, from a modern perspective, like a huge missed opportunity.
Maggie purchases some things and does not purchase others.
When she gets home, she shows Jason her spoils, and he makes a big to-do about how much money she has spent on the miniskirt and sweaters, as husbands—har dee har—are wont to do.
Over the course of the series, there is never any mention of how money is coming into the McKee–Dean accounts.
Maggie certainly works a lot. She’s always on the road; she’s filming commercials and playing small-to-medium-size venues.
She’s putting out her own line of gel pens, booking a guest spot on a sitcom.
But when she’s at home? Boy can she spend money.
Here she comes out the door of the boutique, laden with shopping bags, a single paparazzo snapping her from behind a hedge.
Across the parking lot, a man stands with his hands shoved in his pockets, his face blurred.
“That was what’s her name’s job,” said Rahul, capping a lens.
“Okay, well now it’s Cassidy’s job.” Dan slurped his Big Gulp and turned to me. “Drop whatever you’re doing right now and get this guy released.”
What I was doing right then was compiling a list of spin classes in gyms big enough to accommodate our filming needs, and I was happy to abandon the mostly mindless task in service of some interesting detective work.
On a larger shoot, a production assistant in post might have been sent on this goose chase while I continued with my fieldwork.
But we were renegades, mavericks, making TV with a skeleton crew.
I closed my spreadsheet and logged into my email to take a closer look at the still shot of this stranger who, most likely, I would never track down.
Of the millions of people living in Southern California, not to mention tourists shopping in Beverly Hills, it seemed unlikely I’d find “this guy” with no identifying details save a quick still of his face.
“Oh!” I said. “It’s this guy!” I was as excited at the prospect of remembering this particular man as I was to have an immediate solution to Dan’s problem.
Dan frowned. “You know who that is?”
“Cassidy’s got X-Men powers.” Rahul held out a fist for me to bump.
“This guy hit me with his car once.” There was no reason to go into any further detail. Much of my job included driving expensive things from place to place, and I didn’t want anyone to question my ability to do so. Besides, that was literally what had happened, if not the full picture.
“Kismet,” said Dan. “You go and get him.”
“If you can’t get the signature, hold that car crash over him, yeah?” Lauren said to me as I was leaving. “That kind of leverage is how we get results.”
I had to drive home for the napkin with his number, and Celia was surprised when I unlocked the door.
“Shit! I thought you’d come to rob me.” She was eating a yogurt and wearing her fuzzy turquoise bathrobe, E! News on the TV. “What are you doing? They didn’t fire you already, did they?”
I rolled my eyes. “Important investigative work. I’ve been promoted from ‘make lists’ to ‘find person to sign document.’”
Celia laughed. She could always be counted on to take people’s jokes in the kindest possible light.
“Well good for you.” She licked her spoon. “You don’t by any chance still have that pair of brown heels that I could borrow for my audition this afternoon, do you?”
“My Steve Maddens?” I said. “You can wear them.”
The napkin was taped to my mirror. Celia and I spent a minute debating if the second digit was a seven or a one, but the phone number was otherwise legible. My target picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?” Sometimes a sound or a smell would transport me immediately to the moment in my life I’d most vividly encountered it.
I could never smell tar without the visceral sense of being stuck in the back seat of my mother’s car, my brother flicking Starburst wrappers at me in an attempt to make the inching highway traffic even more miserable.
When the mystery man answered the phone that afternoon, his scratchy voice popped me right back to the bottom of the driveway.
I remembered his hands. I remembered he was handsome and tall, and I was lucky he’d been nice to me after I backed directly into his car.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m the one who hit your car a few weeks ago?” I remembered too late that I was deflecting all blame. “In Calabasas?”
“Ah,” he said. “Yes. The other day. When I was going pretty fast.”
“That’s actually not why I’m calling,” I said.
“Oh, it’s not?” This guy was definitely flirting. Across the room, Celia wiggled her eyebrows in response to my change in posture.
“This might sound weird, but were you at the Grove like a month ago?”
He laughed. “It does sound weird, and I really couldn’t tell you. It’s possible. It’s definitely possible.” I heard a metallic crashing on his side of the call and a muffled “Hold on a second” directed at someone nearby.
“I think you were,” I said. “I’m not stalking you, I promise. I work for a TV show, and I’m pretty sure you’re in one of our shots. I need you to sign a release.”
“What’s the show?”
“What?”
“What show do you work on?”
Technically I was supposed to keep that quiet unless he signed an NDA. Honeymoon Stage was all hush hush until the network aired their promos, and though I found this a dumb rule, it would be even dumber of me to flat out break it.
“A network Reality show.”
“Oh.” His voice was flat. Did he think I was bullshitting?
“I promise I’m not extorting you to get you to pay for my bumper. I’m extorting you for other reasons.”
“Oh yeah?” I had him laughing again, which was good.
“I have this job, see, and it pays my rent. So in a way you’d be, I dunno, entirely responsible for my career and well-being.”
“Gabe! Come on!” The voice came from his end of the call, and he muttered to someone in response.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Where were we?”
“My career. The release. So how about it, Gabe?” I was taking a chance on the name, taking a chance on this whole thing, really.
I wasn’t playing things the way Lauren had instructed, but I had the sense trying to guilt this guy was going to get me nowhere.
Plus I was admittedly eager to see him again.
All the Reality romance had made me crave some of my own.
Celia abandoned any pretense of minding her business and leaned forward at the edge of the couch, fist under her chin.
“When you put it that way,” he said, “I have no choice but to consider.” Music played from wherever he was, a few quick guitar riffs.
“Why don’t you bring by this paperwork, and I’ll see what I can do.
This afternoon?” I agreed, and he gave me an address in a part of West Hollywood I’d never been to.
As soon as I hung up, it occurred to me that a coffee shop or park seemed safer than what might be some back alley.
But I’d agreed, so I was headed there at three.
My reward for finding Gabe was a forty-five-minute drive back to Calabasas, and the shunting of my gym spreadsheet to one of the interns.
These faceless peons worked in the production office in Glendale and had all the disadvantages of my own PA job without the perk of getting paid.
They couldn’t necessarily be trusted to do a good job, but there wasn’t much risk in this particular endeavor.
X-Man, Rahul mouthed from behind his camera when I slipped back on set.
“What did I miss?”
“Not much. She’s been on the phone. He’s talking about repainting the railings on their upstairs balcony. The usual shit.”
“Fun.”
“Cassidy!” Lauren walked up behind me. “Go to Sherwin-Williams and grab all the sample cards in any shade of navy. Or any dark kind of blue.”
“Right now?” She rolled her eyes at me. “I’m meeting this guy in West Hollywood. To sign the thing for Dan.” I wasn’t unaware of stoking a fire here—Dan had seniority, and Lauren didn’t appreciate the reminder.
“Okay, go to the Home Depot in West Hollywood then.”
“Is there one?”
“Figure it out.”
I popped in to update Dan on my progress, then went back out to my car. I was really putting miles on the old girl, or at least putting in time. In LA, I could spend the same amount of time going three blocks that I might going thirty miles without traffic.
Earlier that day, before Dan burst out of Video Village with his laptop and a quest, back when I was supposed to be spreadsheeting and flipping through the phone book, I had been watching Jason and Maggie.
It was too cold for the pool, but she’d asked what the point of having it was if they weren’t going to use it, so they’d gone out together to sit on the lounge chairs.
She had her feet in his lap. They’d been quiet for a moment, waiting, I supposed, for inspiration.
No one followed them out—Dan must have decided that the mounted camera could get what we needed—and so for that moment they had the illusion of being alone.
After eight weeks of filming, they knew that they were never alone, but just because you know a magician is showing you tricks doesn’t mean you can’t, for a moment, declare that you believe in magic.
I might have been wrong. They might have been thinking about how that camera was watching them.
They might have seen me watching them through the dining room windows.
But if they were, they did a better job of hiding it than usual, a better job of playing themselves straight.
Jason massaged Maggie’s foot. She tilted her head in his direction.