Chapter 10 Liz
Liz got into her car, thinking it must have been the first time an Audi as old as hers had been parked at the valet.
Buff Range Rovers and curvy Aston Martins glistened in the sunlight as Liz drove away, replaying how badly the brunch had gone.
Even though she and Victoria looked like “before” and “after” photos in a makeover story, Liz had nurtured a morsel of hope that maybe they weren’t so different after all.
Maybe they could become friends. But…no.
Hard no. Did Victoria not realize how condescending she had been, or did she not care?
Was she so used to dishing out guidance over sixty-dollar pancakes that she had lost touch with how she came across?
When Liz got home, Preston greeted her from an armchair in the living room. Liz saw that he was marking up endorsement contracts, making neat little notes in the margins with a black ballpoint pen. His demands looked like an army of ants colonizing the white pages.
“How was the brunch? With your new mom friend?”
“Fine,” Liz said.
“Where’d you go?”
“The Hotel Bel-Air.”
“Swanky! Should I be jealous?” Preston joked.
Please. Please be jealous.
Liz chuckled and switched topics. “Do you want to try that vegan Mexican spot tonight?” Liz was trying to support Preston’s meatless enthusiasm even though she despised tofu anything and thought seitan tasted like a microwaved eraser.
“We have the Clippers game!” Preston said, thrilled. “Remember? We’re in the box, with Travis and Lulu.”
“Right,” Liz said, trying to cover her dismay.
Preston’s friend Travis and his girlfriend Lulu were perfectly nice, but they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
Liz always felt uncomfortable around their constant PDA and nonstop declarations of love and infatuation, unsure where to look and deeply insecure about her own relationship in comparison. “I must’ve spaced on it.”
“But we’re good?”
“Yeah! It will be fun!”
It wasn’t fun. Afterwards, Liz’s cheeks burned from forcing a smile for so long.
Between the brunch with Victoria and the basketball game with Travis and Lulu, who might have made a baby of their own during halftime if such a thing could be achieved through a layer of clothing, Liz just wanted to get into bed and put the whole day behind her.
She decided that a self-care Sunday was in order so she could clear her head before she had to report to work on Monday and delve into the grand shit show that was The Catch, season 8, episode 8.
On Monday, it took less than an hour for Liz to determine that the prenatal yoga class, cheap foot massage, and manicure she had indulged in were not enough. Not even close.
“Liz-o,” her boss, Cam, said as the expensive, heavy scent of his Byredo cologne collided with the stagnant air in her editing bay.
Cam slid across the desk and perched on the corner of it.
Like they were best friends. Like workplace etiquette wasn’t a thing.
Like Liz wanted his ass four inches from the Trader Joe’s cactus she had bought to brighten up her little corner of hell. “What’s shakin’?”
Liz looked at Cam’s empirically attractive face; now that she had gotten to know him, it was as appealing as an iguana’s.
It sat atop a wiry frame that, try as he might (and he had, with creatine, HGH—you name it), Cam could never get to bulk up and align with what he considered the peak male form.
Liz thought that if Cam hadn’t achieved success in reality TV, he might’ve become a con artist. But Cam had thought up The Catch and it had taken off.
He had EP cash, a Porsche, a model/influencer girlfriend, and a standing boys’ trip to Cabo with Ryan Seacrest. Many people found her boss clever and charming.
Liz just tried to keep her head down and get her work done without having a mental breakdown.
“I’m almost done with B-roll for episode eight,” Liz told him, her words clipped.
“Love it. Liz-o, you’re so solid. Buuuuut…” Cam said, drawing it out like he was about to announce a raffle prize she had won. “A birdie told me you missed some primo bathroom action in episode siete.”
Liz looked at her monitor like it might open up a porthole for her to dive into. “I did?”
Cam cocked one of his manscaped eyebrows at Liz, any pretense fading fast. “You tell me.”
“There was some stuff, with Allegra and Jazz, in the bathroom, but it didn’t seem…”
“Juicy enough?”
Decent, Liz wanted to say. Humane. Moral.
“They were both really drunk,” Liz told him. “Jazz was dry-heaving, and Allegra was crying, and it didn’t seem…juicy. It just seemed sad.”
“Drama, Liz-o! That’s what slaps! That’s what people want to see.”
“They didn’t remember any of it the next day,” Liz said. “It felt kind of wrong to put that out there.”
“That’s what they signed up for, Liz,” Cam said more sternly, dropping the nickname to show he meant business. “Your job is to bring anything like this to me. I decide what’s gold. And if you hadn’t noticed, I’m pretty damn good at it.”
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“I’ll let it slide this time. Maybe you’re not yourself because you’re pregnant.”
Liz was hit with a wave of vertigo. When she recovered, she pulled at her oversized button-down, which was obviously not fooling anyone.
“Would you rather we think you’re going HAM on the H?agen-Dazs?” Cam said, winking.
Liz forced a half-hearted laugh. It was nuts.
Everyone she worked with acted like there was no HR department at all, like the lack of ethical boundaries in their show had seeped over into real life and The Catch production offices were the gun-slinging, ass-slapping, epithet-dropping Wild, Wild West.
“I was going to tell everyone soon,” Liz said.
“Guess we beat you to it. Congrats!”
“Thank you,” Liz replied, praying he would leave now.
But Cam still wasn’t budging. Not for the first time, Liz wished she had the ability in life, like in TV and movies, to cut away from a moment, to smash to a new scene, to dissolve out of the undesirable and fade into a new set of circumstances.
Cam shot her finger guns and finally got up. “Good chat.”
Mercifully, Cam left the editing bay. Liz tilted her head back in her desk chair and looked at the track lighting bifurcating the cottage cheese ceiling.
She didn’t like how it had been conveyed, but Victoria was right: This job was soul crushing.
She needed out. Unfortunately, Liz was also right.
She needed gainful employment. Her ancestors hadn’t invented fire, planted a stake in oil fields, or presciently gobbled up valuable real estate; she didn’t have the freedom that being independently wealthy yielded you to make attractive life decisions based solely on their merit or personal happiness.
Liz couldn’t afford to quit and surf the uncertainty of unemployment without knowing when her next paycheck would appear.
Liz tried to wrest control of her thoughts and focus her attention back on episode 8.
When she had paused it to talk to Cam, the fiery Allegra, who was one of the more popular contestants, was making out with Dylan, who was doing an admirable job of pretending to be straight, though sometimes he laid it on a little too thick with mentions of “bro code” and had a habit of sticking his hand up the female contestants’ shirts like it was a fishing expedition and he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d encounter.
Allegra hadn’t caught on to the fact that Dylan was the gay catch, or that he had made out with no fewer than four other contestants during their “seven minutes in the closet.” Which was exactly like the adolescent game that sixth graders cooked up in basements all over America, only with a supposedly sexy, romantic, and grown-up closet, designed by a buzzy HGTV personality.
It was supposed to be clever. But the “seven minutes in the closet” portion of the show was another sad detail of many that, together, manufactured a delusion that two people wholeheartedly embraced.
It was a farce—an utter mockery of love, romance, and relationships.
Then again, the reductive and abhorrent train wreck that was The Catch provided entertainment that hinged upon an illusion that was mutually agreed upon by viewer and participant.
Real love wasn’t found through competition and contests under the blaze of set lights; its reward wasn’t a partnership with Zales, and everyone knew that. And yet…
Liz wished she could wake these people up. She wished she could flee the editing bay. She wished she could go back and take a different path in the choose-your-own-adventure version of her life. But she couldn’t do any of that.
Liz clicked play. On the screen, one of the women threw a green smoothie into Allegra’s face. Cam was going to love it.
Liz hustled to get across town to Mother’s Haven, where she was attending her first new mom’s class with Dawn.
Determined not only to fly in the face of the example Angela had set, but also to enter into motherhood in the most knowledgeable, prepared manner possible, Liz was looking forward to learning about feeding schedules and CPR.
She made a mental note to ask Preston if he knew how to do the Heimlich.
When she arrived, Liz climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered a hybrid classroom-playroom.
There was a large, colorful rug that covered the floor, with various toys sprinkled about the periphery.
You’ll be playing here soon enough with your little ones, they promised.
One of the walls was mirrored and the other three were covered with murals and photos of previous classes of mothers and babies.
The infants were arrayed for their photo ops with their backs on the carpet, arranged so they looked like flower petals around a Frisbee bearing the logo for Dawn’s class.