Chapter One Kelsey #4
They went on to have a lively discussion while Jane’s boss tried, without much success, to mask his boredom.
After the meeting, Jane was flushed with excitement.
She asked Peter if he wanted her to get a copy of the book for him or, at a minimum, bring him coverage—a synopsis written by someone in the story department—because Jane knew there was no way he would actually read a nineteenth-century novel, or any novel, for that matter. He guffawed.
“Come on, Jane, we’re never doing Violet.”
“ Villette .”
“It’s Masterpiece Theatre shit. Maybe PBS will do it.”
“That director is brilliant, and lots of Jane Austen adaptations have done really well—”
“Those movies were singles or doubles. I’m looking for home runs!” In point of fact, Peter kept a baseball bat in his office, which he would swing at imaginary balls while on calls and sometimes even in meetings. “Listen, Jane, there is a ceiling on what these women’s pictures will gross.”
Gross indeed.
Frustrated, Jane went out on a limb and wrote the director a passionate email, praising her talents and saying that she really hoped to work with her someday and that she would be looking for material for her.
She fantasized that surely the director would recognize a kindred spirit and hire her away to work on developing projects that would be compelling and complicated.
But she never heard back. She tried to reason away her feelings of rejection. This was, after all, Hollywood. But she couldn’t. It hurt.
Was this the moment when she stopped aspiring to excellence and resigned herself to toggling between acceptance of mediocrity and an abject terror of total, humiliating failure? The evil of banality worried her so much more than the banality of evil.
Jane’s street was lined with small homes built in the forties and fifties intermingled with a few ugly two-story apartment buildings from the seventies and eighties, the result of a period of lax zoning laws.
She pulled into the driveway of her rented house, a modest craftsman painted a reassuringly neutral slate gray.
A tall cedar, its heavy branches always looking a little careworn, as if wilting from their own weight, dominated the front yard.
Underneath it, a scrubby lawn was abutted by a small bed of roses that somehow thrived without much care.
Hedges of towering junipers along the property line screened them from neighbors.
The driveway on the left side of the house led to a detached garage that had been finished to serve as a guest house or home office. Jane parked in front of it.
How did she ever end up in North Hollywood, in the Valley?
Jane and Teddy had found the house together.
Given their budget and the escalating cost of rentals in Los Angeles, it was a great find.
A house felt much more adult than an apartment, and they both wanted a yard.
It was good enough, but Jane knew she would never love it.
What an exhausting day it had been. Kelsey had already texted to ask if Jane could come back next week. Jane said yes. What she didn’t say was that she was actually looking forward to it.
She grabbed her purse and a garment bag out of the trunk, hoping for a warm hug and scruffy kiss once she was inside. Instead, she found Teddy on the couch engrossed in a game of Fortnite , headphones clapped over his ears, tethered to that egregiously misnomered joystick.
With his round, boyish face, Teddy still looked like a college student, and dressed like one, too, usually in ratty T-shirts and jeans.
His smile was invariably mischievous and there was always a sparkle in his green eyes—even when hazy and bloodshot from smoking weed.
He wore his unruly tawny hair longish, mostly because it required minimal care that way.
There was a cowlick at the base of his neck, and the errant lock of hair, which looked as if it had been styled by a curling iron for a flip hairdo, was improbably adorable to Jane.
Low maintenance was also the regimen for his beard, which he would let grow until Jane complained.
Then he would be clean-shaven—and adorably puppyish—until it grew back. His lack of vanity was refreshing.
Teddy spotted her out of the corner of his eye, gave a wave, and muttered something semi-intelligible about needing more time.
She needed to get a dog, she thought, as she walked into the cramped laundry room that abutted the kitchen. They were reliably affectionate.
She set down her purse, then unzipped the garment bag, revealing a Chanel suit, a matching jacket and skirt made from a beautiful tweed of pink, blue, and black.
It was impeccably tailored and perfectly understated.
Classic. Iconic. Kelsey didn’t like wearing it, but Jane would.
Kelsey rescued dogs; Jane rescued garments.
In its new home, the Chanel would be catalogued and cherished.
Jane considered this assisted decluttering, nothing more.
Kelsey wouldn’t miss the suit; in fact, Jane had done her a favor by relieving her of the burden of its negative associations.
In any event, what Kelsey didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
She held the jacket up to her face and inhaled. Kelsey had claimed she never wore it, yet it reeked of her fragrance, a cloying rose-vanilla olfactory assault. It was dizzying; it was disgusting; it was intoxicating; it was intolerable.
She briskly zipped up the garment bag, ferried it out the back door and into the detached garage that had been converted into what the landlord referred to as an Accessory Dwelling Unit.
Teddy deemed it a guest cottage and had suggested they Airbnb it, an idea that horrified Jane.
Now the space belonged to her; she called it her workshop.
Technically it was a workshop, because she used it to experiment with different organizational rubrics, but really, it was her sanctum.
She turned on the lights, admiring her carefully curated collection of clothes and shoes, all rigorously sorted: by season, by formality, by color.
The room was filled, floor to ceiling, with shelves, closets, drawers, everything was meticulously labeled even though Jane knew by heart the placement of every object.
The garments were at peace, hanging gracefully in neat rows or folded into happy geometry, organized by hue into a series of rainbows, or securely nestled in the appropriate boxes or bins.
While all of this may not have sparked joy—that was a ludicrously high bar—it sparked calm and contentment.
The next morning, Jane sat in the kitchen nook sipping coffee while reviewing emails on her laptop.
These emails were as relentless as the LA summer sun—persistent, demanding, blinding.
Most of her friends texted, but nothing stopped the barrage of emails, some business-related, some from people she actually wanted to hear from, but most were spam, scams, solicitations.
The virtual world was scaling a nauseatingly steep exponential growth curve, and viral inanities were proliferating even faster.
Another manifestation of the disease of indiscriminate abundance that was infecting everything.
She had already been up for over an hour when Teddy, in baggy boxers and a tattered T-shirt, shuffled into the kitchen. He poured himself coffee, then sat down next to her. Quite close to her, actually.
“Morning, babe.”
Jane needed to clear her email inbox before heading out for the day. More than twenty emails made her anxious.
“Heya. Listen, sorry, but I have tons to do and I’m running late.”
She remained intent on her laptop, and it didn’t register that Teddy was leaning into her until he brushed back her hair and kissed her tenderly on the neck. Jane felt a frisson of pleasure. She was tingling. Part of her needed this, craved this.
“You smell so good.”
“What?”
“You smell so good.”
She should not have worn the Chanel before having it dry-cleaned! Even worse, now the fragrance was starting to grow on her.
“Thanks, Teddy. Sorry, rushing!” Her lips grazed his scruffy cheek, then she snapped her laptop shut and stood up.
Teddy, smiling mirthfully, admired her. “Is that a new dress?”
“Well, it’s a suit, actually, but yes, it’s new. New, but vintage.”
“You always find the coolest stuff. I like it, it’s very business-y, but you make it so sexy, too.”
As Jane felt herself actually blush, she looked at her watch. “Got to run.”
“Go get ’em, Jay! If you need anything, you know where to find me.”
Indeed she did. Teddy worked from home on all his gigs—video game development, day-trading, cryptocurrency.
He was very into the gig economy because it meant “freedom.” She knew it also meant unpredictability, fear of commitment, and arrested development.
She once found out that Teddy was driving for Uber, something he had never even mentioned.
Really, she never knew what he was doing.
Did she truly love Teddy? She hated thinking in these terms, but once she’d turned thirty, she and most of her girlfriends who weren’t already inextricably committed had begun asking themselves similar questions: Is the guy I am with “the one”?
Can I see myself starting a family with him?
Can I rely on him? Because their answers to a least one of these questions was “no,” three of her friends had recently dumped their long-term boyfriends.
Moreover, some of her recently thirty friends had already frozen eggs, and Jane was beginning to wonder if she should, too.
Jane wasn’t sure she wanted kids, and she hated the idea of relying on anyone, but nevertheless, to her chagrin, these questions were haunting her.
Teddy was so sweet to her. Why couldn’t she go all in, love him unconditionally?
Sometimes she pined for a sense of openness, of abandon.
She did not want to succumb to perpetual misanthropy; she did not want to go on living only in her head; she did not want to be unhappy.
She would have to somehow assimilate the part of her that was longing to let go, to unfurl.
She should let herself be a little messy, even if it terrified her.
And she would. As soon as she got a few things sorted out.