Chapter 9 The Beast We Work For
The Beast We Work For
In the morning, Frankie wakes, unsettled.
Everything thick with a sense of wrong. She didn’t expect Jack to call last night, not after how they left things, but it was only as she was drifting off that she realized she’d still held out hope.
She needs to get through tonight’s premiere and tackle everything tomorrow, but it feels as though she’s driving in the dark and can only see what’s in front of her; what’s just beyond could be a drop, a free fall in the dark.
And indeed, the danger is close. At the studio, Frankie spots the head of production, the man Nico mentioned was going to lose his job.
Two secretaries flank him, struggling with boxes, while a security guard ambles slightly behind.
The executive walks slowly, defiant. Feared and revered, Nico always said about him, a perfect combination.
For six years his name was linked with the studio’s success, but now here he is, a scapegoat. Someone’s always gotta take the fall.
When the man turns in her direction, she studies the pavement and quickens her pace.
The second she gets into the office, Betty’s at her side. “Oh-this-day-oh-this-day-oh-this-day. Thank God you’re here. Tell me you’ve got it.”
Frankie opens the curtain that covers Romeo and Juliet’s addition. Romeo, a larger splash of lilac blue, twists his head to look at her before stretching one long wing. Green feathers splay, tipped in black. “Got what?”
“The cookie tin. The telegrams? I spoke to your roommate this morning.”
The cookie tin. A relic from a different world.
How could that have been just the other day?
What did she do with it? She hears herself saying she left the house while her roommate was in the shower and must have missed the message, while in her mind she retraces her steps.
The tin, it hits her, was in her bag that broke at Jack’s house.
It must have fallen out. Right now it would be under his table, waiting to be discovered.
But then a worse thought: Was it still in the bag when she filled it with food to give to the woman?
No. She’d have noticed, wouldn’t she? She remembers retrieving her coin purse and essentials from on top of the kitchen table but forgot she’d even had the tin in her bag.
“I’ll get it,” she says, praying she can. “Why? What’s going on?”
Betty eyes her. “Clearly you didn’t read those telegrams. If you did, you wouldn’t leave them anywhere.”
Never admit, Nico’s said. Always deflect. “Betty, what you did isn’t that bad. He’ll understand.”
“He’ll understand once we get them back. I really thought his stack was on my desk, but I must have put them with the bunch.”
Telegrams to Nico, Frankie realizes.
From their addition, one of the parrots lets out a screech. Calmly, Frankie leans toward Betty, whose breathing is coming up short. “Put your head down.” The woman does as told, dropping her chin to her chest. “Has he asked for them?”
Keeping her head down, Betty nods. “When he called in this morning. That’s when I realized what I’d done.
So I was honest and I told him and said you were coming in soon and I’d get them from you right away.
” Now she looks up. “You having them, that’s not such a big deal.
You know everything. But them being away and where other people could get them, especially that one, that won’t go over well.
They need to be here or in his home safe with the others, but under lock and key, right? ”
Nico’s safe. Emergency money should she ever need it, the title to cars and houses and who knows what. You ever need to get in there, he once told her, just ask Angela for our anniversary, and then let me know what it is, because I’m always a day off.
“I’ll go now.” Frankie looks at her watch. Especially that one, Betty said. Frankie replays her words. Then calmly, leadingly, says, “Especially that one, you’re right. Can you imagine?”
“No. Anything to do with Jack’s former”—she turns her voice to a whisper—“life can’t be out there where anyone can see. But imagine if Jack read it? Whew. Thanks, Frankie. You’re a peach. I owe you.”
Whatever’s in the telegram isn’t something Jack should read, and yet best-case scenario is it’s at Jack’s house. If she weren’t terrified, she’d laugh—or even just fixate on the actual content of the message, versus the message itself. But all she can think of is that she needs to locate it, now.
What would the woman from the alley do if she found it?
Frankie accelerates through an intersection, keeping an eye out for the police.
Getting pulled over would mean name-dropping the chief of police, who’s also head of the studio’s security, but Frankie doesn’t have time to be pulled over.
She remembers when June’s maid found private correspondence; no amount of loyalty could’ve matched the lure of those dollar signs.
It’s never about money until it is. And it always is.
White clouds thread the sky, though there is a knot of gray by the mountain, a storm either about to slide past or almost here.
At the gatehouse, she tells herself the cookie tin most likely just fell out, and is hopefully under the table.
Winding up the driveway, she squints at the house.
All the curtains are open, and the outside lights are switched off, which means that Jack’s housekeeper is there.
Yet another person who might’ve found the tin.
When she knocks on the door, Frankie prays to see anyone but Jack so she can beeline to the kitchen.
O’Shea answers, and looks relieved. “He’s outside.” He nods toward the French doors in the living room, beyond which is the terrace.
Sycamore and white alder and cottonwood and oak.
Chaparral and sage. Frequently Jack sits outside, reading scripts and searching treetops for red-tailed hawks and woodpeckers, so when she sees him at the huge wrought iron patio table, the pewter clouds bunched above the mountains in the background, she’s thankful.
He’s just enjoying the last moments of sun.
Until she gets closer, and spots the telegrams spread out on the table.
For a split second she’s relieved—they’re here, her worst fear dodged.
But then he turns to look at her, and she sees the heartbreak on his face, and that’s when she realizes that he doesn’t understand why they do this to begin with.
To him, it must seem horrible. An unforgivable invasion of privacy.
Quickly, she explains. “Not everyone tells us what they’re mixed in with. We can’t fix something we don’t know about, so we read these to head off disaster—”
“You knew she was remarried and in Akron?”
“Who?”
“Donna. My ex.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, this guy did.” He holds up a telegram. “A private investigator, giving Nico the update. Still married to Holden Bussfield and living in Akron. ‘Still’ living there means Nico’s known where she is this entire time. He told me she was skipping from town to town.”
Frankie takes a seat. “What would it have changed?”
“I would’ve talked to her! I would’ve done something.”
“Don’t you think that’s what Nico was afraid of?”
Now Jack looks at her, surprised. “You think I would’ve hurt her?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Jesus, Frankie. I meant talk to her. Convince her to leave me alone, take her claws out of my life. If she’s fine now, she doesn’t need me.”
“You really think she’d just back off? With all the money she gets?”
“I could’ve done something. At least I could’ve apologized. It might’ve been a start.”
“You can’t just show up, Jack. In any town, or at any house—you do that, it’s news. It gets out.”
“But it’s my life.” With this, he stands, shoving the chair back. Metal scrapes against the stone floor. Then he’s at the edge of the terrace, braced by the darkened sky, a drop before him. “I deserve the information. I deserve a chance to handle my own life.”
Even as she speaks, she knows she should stop, but frustration pushes against her.
“You walked out. You left a mess. You did that. And this whole time, the studio’s been cleaning it up and protecting you from someone who’s blackmailing you, but you see the studio as the enemy?
At least let me talk to Nico about it. Let me get the full story. There’s always more to it.”
He turns to her with a strange calm. “You’re right. I am angry at them, not just because they’ve hijacked my life but because this wedding means I can never openly be with who I want to be with. The real question is, why aren’t you angry?”
You have to know when a dream is just a dream.
“This is my job.” With that, she starts gathering the telegrams, putting them back in the tin.
“Your job is not your life.”
Neither are you. Though she stops herself from saying it, he must catch the momentum of her thoughts.
Coldly, he says, “Well, I guess we have something in common: the beast we work for.”
Frustration spills over. Anger that her job and her personal life have collided, that one demands she fail at the other. And then there’s what he’s asking her to risk. What he expects her to jeopardize, after she’s come so far.
“Do you know what it’s like watching your mother not eat?
Wanting to believe her when she says she’s full, because you’re that hungry?
She was thirty-nine when she died. She hadn’t eaten a proper meal in I don’t know how long, just so I could have something in my stomach, and she died for it.
” These words compose a fear she’s always shied away from.
Even speaking it out loud seems to give it life, and now she wishes she could take it back.
“Frankie, you don’t know that—”
“What I know is that you think you understand me because you once lived on the edge, but the edge would’ve been miles up from where I was.
Now you want me to go against the studio and my boss, who’s the only reason I can take care of myself.
But you and I worked because I would never do that.
” His silence seems to push her closer to where she doesn’t want to go.
“And you knew that, didn’t you? Was that part of my appeal?
That I would never force your hand? Until now, when it works better if I speak up and risk everything. ”
At her words, he turns his back, facing the Arroyo. She watches his shoulders rise with a deep breath. Already her regret is bitter, and she’s about to try and lessen her words’ sting, but he turns and his expression makes her stop.
“Betty told me you’d been promoted. They really doubled down, didn’t they? Congratulations, Frankie; they bought you too.”
Always know when to leave, Nico has said. Without giving Jack a chance to say more, she takes the tin, turns, and walks away.