Chapter Three The Deal
Chapter Three
The Deal
The next morning, I set down the Beast at my desk and went directly to Toby’s office. When I got there, the door was closed. I could see through his glass office wall that four people were in there with him already. Why were all these dudes in there?
Toby looked up and saw me through the glass. He waved me in, but I hesitated and mouthed that I could come back later. He shook his head, waved me in again, and I opened the door. There, positioned around Toby’s desk, were Brick from ad sales, Carl the business guy (whose official title I never remembered), Kevin from marketing, and a balding man with a gray-and-red tie.
“Hi,” I said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Not at all, we’re wrapping up,” Toby said. “And this involves you, so I wanted to introduce you to somebody.” He indicated the gray-and-red-tie man. “This is Vance, he works for Fitness West.”
Vance leaned over two other guys to hold out his hand. “I’m assuming you know us.”
Oh boy. “I’ve never been, but I’ve been hearing about it.” Fitness West advertised themselves as “wellness for every woman.” I looked at that slogan every time I rode the Metro for what felt like months. The ad showed a woman in purple yoga pants and a matching sports bra, extending one leg behind her while standing on the other, and reading a book at the same time.
“Cecily, I’m going to let these guys go, and I’ll give you all the specifics myself. Tons more good news.” Oh no, I thought. Again with the “good news.” Toby had once told me he had good news, and it turned out that I had to write a manual for new employees about how to navigate our complicated proprietary system of saved audio files so they would know exactly where every backup was, exactly how to publish or republish finished shows, and exactly how to lock and unlock whatever they needed to work on. I was the unofficial Keeper of the File System, which meant people had sent me emails for years with subject lines like “AAARGH HELP ME.” So it hadn’t, in fact, been good news.
“Gentlemen,” Vance said, standing, “I have a meeting on Capitol Hill. I’m looking forward to working together. And with you, of course.” He nodded at me. They all filed out, the entire Office Bullshit Club, and I sat across from Toby. “You didn’t even wait for me to say yes.”
“I knew you were going to. I had faith in you.”
“Well, I have conditions,” I said.
“Conditions for what?”
“For this. For doing this show.”
“Okay, go. I’m ready.”
“Number one: I want to meet Eliza off the record first. I’m not making any promises until I’ve talked to her.”
“I was going to suggest that anyway. She’s at the ready.”
“Okay. Number two: I want you to agree that after I do this, you’ll let me make a pilot for my show. You don’t have to commit to making the whole thing, but you have to let me make a pilot. You have to give me two good producers and a good editor and enough time.”
His face was unreadable. “Okay,” he said tentatively.
“Number three: Julie has to produce, period,” I said. “If you back out of that, the deal’s off.” He looked concerned. “Look, I know how things are. And everybody out there? Your twenty-four-year-old PAs who have a hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt and are living with four roommates in Petworth because they hope you understand the future? They know how things are, too. Practically every other shop has already had layoffs this year.”
Toby hesitated, but then he nodded. “There’s no question we may have some tough times ahead. As I told you yesterday, it would help to have a hit.”
“Right,” I said. “Right. And I’m assuming my job is safe because you work me like a mule.”
“Are you kidding?” he said. “You’re my best producer. I want you to train everybody who ever works here. And of course, if you’re a team player, that’s only going to be a stronger conviction on my part.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then if we do this, Julie is the lead producer. She’s the only person I trust to keep this from being everything you have promised me it’s not going to be.”
“She has less experience than some of the other people at her level.”
“But she’s better at her job.”
He would have loved to disagree, but I knew he couldn’t. “So that’s number three. That, and your word that after we do this, you find another assignment for her, whether she wants to work on my pilot or not. I can’t ask her to take this on if it means she’s going to get lost in the shuffle at the end.”
He screwed up his face. “Is that it?”
“One more,” I said. “You have to promise me this will not be bullshit. If this woman wants to coach me, that’s fine. But if I’m doing it, it has to be real. If I like the people she sets me up with, I’ll like them. And if I don’t, I don’t. You have my word that I’ll go in with an open mind, and I’ll listen to her, and I’ll go on her dates. But you have to give me your word in return that if I don’t hit it off with anybody, that will be the story we tell. Because if this is all an ad for her company, I can’t do it. The show has to be the truth. That’s the deal,” I said. “Those are the conditions.”
He sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his middle, which was taut from the stationary rowing machine he talked about so much. “All right. You have a deal,” he said. “I accept your conditions.”
“And all this holds whether the show is a success or not.”
“Yes. As long as you do your part and you take it seriously.”
“I’ll do my part.”
“And take it seriously,” he repeated. “You don’t have to fall in love, but you have to try. You can’t do it to make fun of it. The advertisers will riot. And Eliza has this business manager, her name is Marcela, and Marcela terrifies me more than the advertisers. She terrifies me more than my mother. If you don’t cooperate, I think she’ll burn down the office.” He held out his hand to me. “But we can shake on it, and your job and Julie’s job will be just as safe as I can make them.”
Toby knew me. He knew I really loved Julie, and it gave him an advantage when negotiating, because he didn’t love any of us. I shook his hand. “Deal.”
“Look happy!” he said. “Be excited. Eliza says doing the work makes people their best selves.”
“You know, every time I hear something like that, it makes me want to quit all this and go be a cheesemonger.”
“Why a cheesemonger?”
“For the cheese.”
“Ah.”
“I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” I said.
He shrugged. “I’m not making you. We have an arrangement.”
“And by the way, please keep the arrangement part between us,” I said. “Julie would kill me.” If she wouldn’t let me chip in for science camp, she certainly wouldn’t allow this. He nodded. I would just tell her I decided it was worth it to get a chance to host something, and to work with her. Which, in part, was true. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that you’re not cut out to be a host, Justin had said. You’re a born producer. He was not right. He was too much of a jerk to be right. “So what now?”
“Okay,” he said. “The thing is, the schedule is a little bit tight. We want twelve episodes, and the finale needs to drop on Valentine’s Day.”
Of course he wanted it to be Valentine’s Day. Of course he did. I looked down and counted months on my fingers. “So we have to premiere at the end of November or something.”
“Well,” he said, “we’re going to put out six, then take two weeks off for Christmas and New Year’s, then put out six more. So actually, we need to get the first one out in the middle of November.”
I went back to my fingers and counted weeks this time. “That’s, what, eight weeks from now?” It wasn’t something we couldn’t do, but it was going to be a sprint.
“Nine,” he said brightly.
“Oh, a cakewalk, then.”
“Well,” he said, “the thing is, Fitness West has a new program starting in the middle of October that’s especially for singles. That’s part of what they want to promote. I told them there was no way we could ask you to start putting episodes out in a month.”
“Thank you for that, at least,” I said. Maybe he did understand what he was asking.
“But we wanted to offer them something.” Nope. He didn’t. “So Brick had an idea, kind of a new promotion model. We want to hit the day of that launch of theirs on October…” He looked down at a list on his desk and jabbed at it with one finger. “October16—we’ll run a preview that day. Like a preview episode. We introduce you, introduce Eliza, we start getting the buzz going. We’ll drop it as a bonus in all the feeds we have, so it will get lots of ears. And by the time your show really starts a month or so later, you’ll already have subscribers lined up.”
“So technically it’s thirteen episodes.”
“No, it’s twelve. And a preview. I know it’s a little bit of a time crunch.”
“A little.”
“We’re not asking for outside research or outside voices, though; it’s mostly going to be the two of you and the people who are involved in your story. We’re trying to make it low-touch.”
“Low-touch” was a phrase Toby generally used to suggest that he expected me to do four people’s jobs for six months and be rewarded with all of eight hours off before I had to start the next thing.
“Once the show really launches in November, we’ll have two episodes a week. One is for everybody, one is boncon for subscribers. Second one, you don’t have to worry about. It’s just Eliza answering listener questions and giving advice.” Palmetto Premium cost $6 a month. You got ad-free episodes, occasional videos of hosts showing you around their offices, and then the prized bonus content, which Toby was trying to get everybody to call “boncon.” I generally stayed out of the boncon business, not because I didn’t like money as much as the next person, but because at Palmetto, it was also the extra work business.
“Is that it?”
“Well, the reason we’re trying so hard to accommodate Vance is the other reason he was here,” Toby said. “As it turns out, our friends at Fitness West have decided they’d like to be premium sponsors.”
I had never heard of a premium sponsor at Palmetto before. “What is that? Is it something besides money?”
“It’s just a sponsor that your show has a special relationship with.”
So it was a lot of money. “Oh,” I said. “Are there push-ups involved?”
“No, no,” Toby said. “No, they just want to partner with you, because the show really fits their vision.”
“Which is what?”
He looked back down at the notes on his desk. “?‘Supporting women in all the aspects of their lives.’?”
So I had missed the part where Toby, Brick, Kevin, and Carl the business guy all got together to talk to Vance about supporting women in all the aspects of their lives. Perfect. “Okay,” I said. “What’s that look like?”
“Show art will have a little logo in the corner. We’re still workshopping it, but something like You Go Girl by Fitness West would show as the title.” He looked at my face when I heard those words. My face, as always, probably looked exactly the way I felt, which is why I tended to be a bad diplomat. “Relax, it won’t literally be called You Go Girl, it’s a placeholder.”
“So was The A-Hole Chronicles, ” I said, dipping my chin to glare at him. Two years earlier, Toby had put a show into production where each episode was about some woman’s bad boyfriend. All through production, he called it The A-Hole Chronicles, and I kept telling him to name it, and he kept saying it was just a placeholder, and then all of a sudden it was launching in six weeks, and do you know what it wound up being called? The A-Hole Chronicles . Which kept it from being covered by half the outlets our PR team pitched to, and which kept me from telling my mother I had even worked on it. It flopped. “And what does the premium sponsor need from me?”
“Just some extra announcements and a couple of collaborations for social, things like that. It’s just more support. It’s a good thing.”
“I don’t have to run laps?”
“Nah,” Toby said. “They’re not exactly gyms anyway, he calls them wellness hubs. You’ll love it. They’re anti-gyms, really.” He handed me a thin spiral-bound information packet of some kind, and when I paged through it, it showed treadmills, spin bikes, free weights, people doing yoga, and a smoothie bar. But there was also some kind of classroom where it looked like a woman was pointing at a whiteboard and teaching a lesson on stress reduction. To me, this did not quite qualify as the anti-gym. The anti-gym would be, say, several rows of vending machines with nothing but Doritos in them. And maybe a supersized couch with a lot of pillows, and giant glasses of wine and Homer Simpson–style donuts brought by on trays every few minutes.
“Okay,” I said.
“We’re going to get you a membership,” Toby said, “and they’ll set you up with some social opportunities and things.” This was careening toward “doing push-ups on Instagram” territory. But an opening was an opening, and hosting was hosting. Besides, if they wanted me on social, that could mean only one thing: I was turning into a personality. That was one of the steps I was supposed to be taking.
“I’m so proud of you for doing this,” he said.
“Don’t be proud of me until I meet her.”