Chapter 9 #2
The rest of the cast rolled in while Verne filmed me, and I could tell from their posture, even sitting, that they were ready to film as soon as my turn was over.
But then Verne thanked me and headed out without a look back.
There was nothing else for me to do but join the group, but their conversation moved around me again, the way things had started.
I told myself that I hadn’t killed all the closeness we’d already gained just because of a few pieces of social media content.
Even for theatre people, that was a bit dramatic.
After rehearsal—and a call with Erica that barely covered anything other than our meeting earlier, but I didn’t end meetings with Erica Strickland, Erica Strickland decided when to end meetings with me—I did my best to spend as much time as possible with Rosie while I got ready.
I was due at a dinner across town with several other actresses around my age and relative fame level, most of whom I knew.
I knew that real friendships were formed from these dinners—or dinners like them, all around town—but I felt as much like I was playing a role as I did when I was on set.
Sometimes NDAs were joked about, but the truth was that I knew anything said was fair game.
Even in the age of talent having access to their own social media accounts—to the great anguish of publicists—no one was as sloppy as to publicly air anyone else’s dirty laundry.
Instead, there were unsourced rumors, unconfirmed reports, unsubstantiated tidbits dropped to the right receiver—showrunner, publicist, industry journalist. Maybe you said you were a little tired of your current role on a long-running network drama.
Perhaps you alluded to a deal you were trying to sign.
Sometimes it was as little as admitting you found someone attractive while being deeply embroiled with someone else.
Blind items and phone calls and whisper networks ran Hollywood, and I’d been smart enough to sense that from the beginning of my career.
Still, even small things could get you in trouble.
A few years back, it seemed like everyone at a group dinner begged me to bring Rosie to the next one, but several weeks after I did, a blind item popped up on Deuxmoi that a certain A-list superhero was so overly attached to her wheezing rescue dog that she couldn’t leave her at home for even one dinner party.
I was offended on both my behalf and Rosie’s. (Pugs can’t help wheezing! I almost typed in the comments from my own verified Instagram account a truly unhinged number of times.)
Tonight’s guests were basically the usual crowd, all actresses, five of us all together, the critically acclaimed one who’d already been nominated for an Oscar, the former child star who’d broken out in big-budget movies in her twenties, the former sitcom supporting cast member who dazzled in prestige TV hits, the musician who’d made a splashy film debut, and the Vindicator.
Dinner was always a low-fat protein and a low-carb side, something green plus a big fancy salad, lots of wine even though these days it felt like at least half the industry was Cali-sober.
A caterer or maid usually wheeled out a dessert at the end, and everyone would offer how delicious it looked but no they could never.
Tonight’s fare specifically was barramundi with brown rice, roasted broccolini, and a massaged kale salad with an almond vinaigrette.
Even when I was hungry, even at a time like tonight when my diet wasn’t dictated by a nutritionist reporting directly to Pantheon, even when the food was delicious and healthy and everything I wanted, I never ate much.
I did my best to avoid toxic diet culture but it was easier to eat light and fit in with everyone else, at least here in the moment.
My social media was mainly controlled by my team, but since they thought that my cooking content was on-brand, I shared as often as I could about food, how I loved making it for the people I cared about, and of course that I loved eating.
Loving eating being some kind of brave stance was ridiculous, but at least I was aware of it?
These meals, though, were barely about the food—even though the barramundi in particular was delicious and we all raved about it.
I knew these types of hangouts existed before Instagram and TikTok, but there often seemed to be some kind of angle to it.
Some of these friendships had been formed for real—I’d co-starred with two people here, and we’d gotten along fine—but there was such a sensation of engineering to the whole thing, no realer than the times Erica had arranged me to very publicly date someone whose movie’s target audience overlapped ideally with mine.
It looked good for all of us to know each other, and so we did.
All five of us were dressed like we were at a pap-heavy restaurant, not sitting around a real person’s dining room table, and that was because an assistant was here snapping candid photos we could share later.
Sometimes sponsorships got mixed up into it, too, and so tonight the assistant was also making sure the label not-so-coincidentally on every bottle of wine on the table was featured prominently in as many shots as possible.
Sometimes real life was elaborate sponcon.
Not that it wasn’t also real life! I’d certainly slapped a sponsored hashtag on a post before, gotten freebies for myself and Aisha while we performed friendship on the grid.
It didn’t prohibit actual feelings, actual friendship!
Here, though, I’d never felt like I could let my guard down.
Other people grappled with it better, knowing exactly how much to let out and keep in.
Meanwhile I sat there unsure in engineered social situations of what safely kept my name out of other people’s mouths, and therefore gave them only Professional Actress Tess Gardner, nothing more.
The thing was, though, that people loved Professional Actress Tess Gardner!
I had plenty of anecdotes ready to go, practically good enough for talk show fodder.
I knew when to laugh at jokes, and I knew when to look deeply earnest and heartfelt.
I knew how to look deeply earnest and heartfelt!
I could command attention of a table, and I could disappear so much that people’s gazes slipped right off of me.
And, of course, I knew the exact amount to eat that no one perceived my having an appetite at all.
Tonight, though, I was hungry. Being on my feet so much during rehearsals required a different level of energy than being on set, and I didn’t think much about it. My appetite was in charge, and, for once, I left feeling satisfied. (I even took one bite of panna cotta.)
Still, I’d developed a coping mechanism for the whole light dinner thing as well as the not being myself thing, which meant that even so, after I headed out with the others (never the first or last to leave), thanking the hostess on my way to the door and congratulating her for a deal announced recently in the trades, I walked to my car (“It’s so weird you don’t use a car service,” one actress said every time she saw me take out my keys, and tonight she added, “You must burn a lot of energy doing theatre!”) and drove home to pick up Rosie before safely buckling her into her car harness and hopping back on the 5 Freeway.
I drove north, past Burbank, into the suburbs, through the sections where the road twisted with the mountains.
The car could be pushed to high speeds and handle the curves, but I was also a big believer in safety and avoiding the public embarrassment of a speeding ticket.
My eyes were on the blacktop ahead of me, my music was up, and it was easy to let the rest of the world fall away.
And once it was gone, I took the next exit, found the southbound entrance ramp to circle back toward home, and stopped off at the nearest In-N-Out.
My order rarely changed: a vanilla milkshake and fries—the milkshake mainly for me, the fries mainly for Rosie.
And by the time we arrived home, I felt like myself again.