Chapter Eight Eric #3
“That would be great. I’m a little stressed. I’m on a deadline and way, way behind schedule.”
“So, let’s do the walk-through and then we’ll get to it!” Jane said brightly.
“You won’t get judgy on me, will you? Because I do have a tendency to... over-shop.”
“Don’t worry, we’ve seen some seriously messy homes, and we’re pros,” Jane reassured him.
“Yeah, I’ve watched more than one episode of Hoarders and I’m definitely not one of those types. I mean, not on a macro, pathological level—well, let me show you, and you decide. I’m a Libra through and through, so—you know, hard time making decisions sometimes.”
They stood in a room that had been converted into one big closet. The walls had built-in storage units, and one entire wall was cubbyholes so crammed with shoes they looked on the verge of collapse.
“I like shoes,” he explained unnecessarily. “I have too many, I know, but I’m not sure I want to get rid of any of them. I mean—you organize, right? We don’t need to throw stuff out, do we?”
“We don’t have to throw anything out if you don’t want to!” Esmé proclaimed, shaking her head. Jane ducked to avoid the flick of her aggressive ponytail.
“But if you are open to culling, we can help with that.” Jane felt it was important to modulate.
“Yeah, tell us your boundaries and we’ll work around them! We understand your time is extremely valuable,” Esmé added, along with an ingratiating smile.
As he looked around the room, Eric’s eyes glazed over again. “To be honest, sometimes I buy stuff and forget I already have something exactly like it. That happens a lot in fact, and then I forget to return it. It’s a little embarrassing.”
This glimpse of vulnerability touched Jane.
Eric pushed a shock of hair off his forehead. “Maybe we should start with my office.”
Eric was a television writer, and the walls of his office were covered with posters of shows he had worked on.
That was where Jane found herself face-to-face with a poster for Kelsey’s witch show, Spellbound .
What a ridiculously small world she lived in.
Jane studied the poster. A much younger Kelsey stared off into the distance with an alluring pout, surrounded by her costars, all similarly fetching.
“Oh that show was such a guilty pleasure,” Jane remarked. She couldn’t divulge that she actually knew Kelsey. She had signed the nondisclosure agreement her organizing company required of all employees.
“I had no guilt! I totally loved it!” Esmé exclaimed, ponytail bobbing for emphasis. Clever how subtly she was undermining Jane, who now realized that calling the show a “guilty pleasure” could seem like a backhanded compliment, or even insulting.
“That show was so stupid!” Eric laughed.
“We had the best time when we worked on it, because it was so ludicrous! Those girls fighting demons and losing their virginity in the same episode. And sometimes, of course, it was the demon who took their virginity. And someone had decided that since they were witches, they could even lose their virginity three or four times, which I still can’t wrap my head around. ”
Jane, relieved that he had taken no offense, remarked, “Well, it was nothing if not aspirational.”
Eric laughed heartily. “Yeah, everyone would re-virginize if they could! Some people latched on to it as this feminist empowerment thing but if it was, trust me—it was entirely accidental. It was my first gig as a writer, and I was so happy just to be working.”
Jane scanned the office. The desk was covered with stacks of papers.
One wall was lined with rows of shelves filled with typewriters.
She had never come across a typewriter collection, which was surprising, since she had organized at many film and TV writers’ homes.
Another shelf bore a collection of lunchboxes themed to old television shows.
She could imagine little Eric, so proud to bring his bologna sandwich and chips in his special lunchbox to school each day.
She could see the sweet little boy he must have been.
Unlike his closet, full of stuff you could find in any gay man’s closet in LA, these collections were interesting and unique—even if they were taking up way too much space.
“I love all these typewriters,” Jane said.
“They should be in a museum!” Esmé added.
“Thanks. I have even more in storage.”
“In storage?” Jane blanched. If a client had a storage space, that indicated an intractable attachment to objects and an inability to let go.
Despite his apparent spaciness, Eric didn’t miss a trick. “Yes, I know, it’s a little Hoarders to have a storage space, but... I love my typewriters!”
“Storage spaces are great!” Esmé offered. “It’s a really good way of not parting with things that you love while clearing your space at home.”
Jane vehemently disagreed but kept that to herself.
After working in Eric’s office for a few hours, Jane and Esmé still hadn’t touched the hallowed collections of typewriters and lunchboxes because there was so much paper to be sorted.
Books, magazines, scripts, contracts. Eric told them he was going paperless, but the digitizing was a work in progress.
She was hoping—while being chagrined by the desire—to find an old script or some other memento of Kelsey’s show.
But she didn’t. It was years since that show had wrapped.
Eric kept popping in to check on their progress. Jane couldn’t tell if he was avoiding writing (in her experience, a very common occupational hazard), or if he was nervous about them going through his stuff, or if he was trying to be friendly.
“I promise you we will not throw away anything. Once it’s all sorted, you can go through it and discard whatever you want,” Jane reassured him.
“I can see so much crap to chuck. It’s overwhelming.”
As he stood in the doorway, Jane noticed the faraway look coming over him. She wondered what was flooding his brain. Stress about his stuff? His deadline? Who knew. But he seemed like he wanted to talk.
“Must have been wild, your first job being on that show with Kelsey. There used to be so many stories about the cast....”
“Oh yeah. They were kids. I was a kid, too, really.... It’s like a very special kind of bubble. And fame, I’m not even sure you can call it a mixed blessing, I think it might be a full-on curse. They couldn’t go out in public without attracting crazy mobs when the show was at its peak.”
“I remember,” Jane said.
“It was ubiquitous,” Esmé added gratuitously.
“So they would hang out with each other all the time, and their relationships would get really intense and dysfunctional....”
“Oh I heard all kinds of stories!” Esmé exclaimed.
“Yep, and some of them are true. They were all cuckoo in their way, but also very endearing. I was still really young and got swept up in the drama, both on and off camera.”
Jane pointed to a stack of magazines. “Will you want those sorted?”
“Oh god no, don’t waste your time. I mean, who still gets magazines? I’ll throw them all away and cancel my subscriptions, which I’ve been meaning to do forever.”
The doorbell rang, prompting a chorus of barking from the dogs. Eric reappeared moments later with a woman at his side.
“Jane, Esmé, this is Mia, who referred me to you.”
Mia was a pretty twenty-something attired in chic business casual.
“Someone at work raved about your company, and I immediately thought of Eric.” Mia had a slight Irish accent, which was pleasing to Jane’s ear.
“She was my assistant, so she witnessed my organizational roadblocks in extreme close-up,” Eric explained sheepishly.
“Indeed! I’m rather tidy, so I did what I could, but it’s been a few years, and we all know about entropy.”
“How did you ever put up with me?” Eric asked, smiling affectionately.
“Oh please!” Mia turned to Jane and Esmé. “He was the best boss ever. So sweet.”
Their genial banter was touching. Jane thought about the bosses she’d had during her show biz career. She could not imagine wanting to stay in touch with a single one of them.
Mia turned to Eric. “All of Mitchell’s stuff is out of here, I hope?”
“Except for some boxes in the garage.”
“Eric! You have got to cut the cord. He is manipulating you!”
“Trust me, it’s easier to let him keep his crap here.”
Mia looked appalled. “Easier because he’s emotionally blackmailing you!”
“Well, yeah, that too,” Eric conceded. “I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with him now so path of least resistance....”
“You follow that path and you know where you end up, right?”
“I have some ideas, but please—do tell.”
“In the gutter, surrounded by rancid trash, wasting your time and energy on the entirely wrong people!”
“Harsh, Mia.”
“It’s only because I want better for you! Don’t let him keep taking advantage.”
Eric looked over at them. “Sorry! We’re getting in the way....”
“Yes, apologies. Just can’t help myself sometimes.”
“She really can’t.”
Eric and Mia shared a laugh.
“I only wanted to pop in and see how it’s going, and clearly it’s going smashingly, so I’ll be off.”
Jane, seated on the floor surrounded by the flurries of papers, watched them walk off. She felt a warm inner glow and realized she couldn’t stop smiling.
Jane was grateful she had no plans that night. There was only one thing she needed to do: put Kelsey’s witch show into her DVD player and watch.
Eric had multiple box sets of Spellbound . DVD box sets were artifacts of the nineties and the aughts. Jane had suggested keeping just one, but that was a bridge too far. He wanted them packed up so he could put them in his storage unit.
As she obliged, Jane had discretely slipped one Spellbound box set into her Goyard tote bag, a wardrobe staple she had liberated from the obscenely garish megamansion of a Russian oligarch where it was suffering from neglect, forlornly moldering in the depths of a forgotten closet.
It was the first time she’d watched the show since meeting Kelsey.
Now that Jane was hyperaware of Kelsey’s real-life mannerisms, she could see her in the character and realized there wasn’t a lot of distinction, really.
Very early in the first episode, Kelsey had a big, dramatic scene with a demon that was breaking her heart.
It was all so absurd: stilted dialogue, chintzy special effects.
But in a close-up, Kelsey’s face was so open and vulnerable.
And then she started crying. Somehow Kelsey made it all feel real. It was pretend, but she was all in.
Committed.