Chapter 19 #2
Henry must feel that my hand has gone cold in his. He gives it two quick squeezes, like a defibrillator supplying an electrical current to my failing heart. Look alive. “A lot of very successful people got their start as PAs,” I add in a perky tone.
“Not you, though.” Emma’s wet lips curl into a rather sinister smile.
“I started as an assistant to Jonathan,” I say, my chest hot. “If you would prefer an opportunity like that, I can help to arrange it. It just means a much longer commitment, and you likely won’t get production experience for a while. It took me three years to step on set.”
Emma has her hands on the arms of the chair, and she picks at the nubby fabric, flicking the fuzz onto the floor for Corrine to clean up at some point. “I thought you were coming here to make me an offer on my script.”
I give her an incredulous look to which she has to concede.
“I mean, okay, I get it, we can’t use that script for obvious reasons. But to make an offer for me to write something else.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“How does it work?”
“If you’ve written something I like and think is viable, I would attach as a producer and shop it around to the studios. If it’s a fit for them, they are the ones who make us a financial offer to option it as we develop it together.”
“Great,” Emma says brightly. “Let’s do that.”
I keep my voice even. “But you don’t have anything for me to take out.”
“I’ll start working on something.”
“But I can’t promise you it’s going to be something I want to attach myself to.”
“Ummm.” Emma winces apologetically. “I think you kinda do.”
My face turns terrifying.
“Sorry,” she adds quickly. “Never mind.”
“No. Go on.”
“It’s just”—Emma scrambles to win me back—“I know you and your husband have built something really cool together. I’d love to be a part of that.”
“That is what I’m offering you.”
“I can’t go to Los Angeles right now. Or Atlanta.”
“How come?”
“Well.” Emma jams her hands between her legs and squirms girlishly. “Campbell. He’s divorcing Corrine. So I need a sort of work-from-home situation.”
Next to me, Henry stays silent, listening to our seltzers fizz frantically in their glasses. He has told me the less I know the better. That the only thing I need to do is offer Emma something tantalizing enough that she will promise her discretion for the next few days.
“Emma, as much as I would love to lock myself in my office, work on something for a few months, then sit back, let it sell, and get back to my regular life, this industry does not work like that, not even for someone like me who has already established herself.”
“Really?” Emma scrunches her cute little nose dubiously.
“Really. First, you have to write something that is even good enough to be picked apart by your agent and producers, and then you have to collate all their notes and take another stab at it, and then you do that again and again until you hate the project so much you’re not even sure if you want it made at all.
And then, when everyone agrees it’s ready for market, you may or may not get an offer, and if you do, you have to be prepared to do that over and over again with studio notes, and each time you earn a little bit more money.
“But that’s getting way ahead of ourselves, because your priority at the moment should be getting a foot in the door.
That looks like being on set. With an address in Los Angeles.
You need to meet people your age who will grow up to become the agents and producers and studio execs who will deign to pick your work apart.
You need to make connections and trade favors and eat some fucking crow every now and then. Being good is not good enough.”
“You said yourself the world has changed. That everything is remote now. That you have to know what the rules are to break them.” Emma cringes slightly at herself. “I read that in your interview in the style section. I loved it, by the way.”
“But you don’t know what the rules are yet.”
“You just told me.”
“Me telling you and you experiencing them are not the same.”
Emma shrugs. “I’m not taking a blood oath to never move to Los Angeles and do all the things you’re talking about.
I just want to sell something I’ve written.
” On my face, she must see some sort of fading, that I am close to folding, because she grins.
“It will be good. I promise. I’m really good, Faye. I won’t let you down.”
She will. Anyone who wants it like this is deficient in the magic needed to make something good.
The fondest months of my life are those I spent carving out time to write on set, surrounded by people who had accomplished more than me.
Squeezing in a single exchange while a makeup artist dusted my T-zone with mattifying powder, finding the words to put to the terror and rage my character felt when she realized she might miss her flight, then going back and finding better words, and better words still.
The angst I felt waiting for my agent to read it before I dared show it to anyone else.
FAYE!!!! she had written me, and my angst grew wings, busted out of its protective shell, and took vibrant flight.
HOLY SHIT. Emma will not get that from me or from anyone.
There is nothing holy about doing things this way.
And yet.
There is a sunny confidence about Emma, sitting there on her boucle throne, the lady of another lady’s manor, that all but guts me.
I’d bet anything she has one of those they’re just jealous mothers.
Any time someone was mean to her, any time she wasn’t invited somewhere, she didn’t make the team, she didn’t get what she wanted—her mother, who definitely had Emma young, who probably wears her hair long and half up in a scrunchie, put her arms around her daughter and assured her it was because she was so exceptional, not just in her talents but as a person, that others found her too threatening to include.
Emma believes she deserves good things in life not because she has put in the time or effort but because she is good.
Some might call this entitlement, but the older I get the more I think it might be nice, to be so assured of your solid human gold.
I would not have what I have if I had a mother like that, but maybe, I’d manage to survive without it. Maybe my magic is a black one.
I smile defeatedly at Emma. “Okay, then.”
Emma slides her hand into the space between us so that we can shake on it.
Her skin is cool and dry and her grip loose, as though there was never a need to worry to begin with.
Of course things would work out in her favor.
This was the outcome Henry needed, and so the relief I feel is mainly tied to that, but also, a little bit, to this tactile reminder that Emma is Emma and I am me.
Emma won’t ever feel as low as I do on my lowest days, but then again, there will be few occasions to fly.
The three of us pile into Henry’s runabout and spend the ten-minute ride to the parking lot in companionable silence.
The plan is for Emma to drive Campbell’s car to the Albany train station, Henry and I following in Henry’s car, and then one of us will return Campbell’s three-row jetliner on wheels to the parking lot at the lake.
We say goodbye and climb into our respective vehicles.
As we exit the leafy, unpaved private drive onto a two-lane road, the radio catches a signal and the dim interior of Henry’s Tahoe gooses with a nineties boy-band song I know by heart.
“I’m not attaching myself to anything she writes,” I tell Henry.
“You won’t have to,” he says. “I promise.”
“How can you promise that?”
Before Henry can answer, the treacly chorus cuts out, and the display screen shows an incoming call from an impossible name from my life back in California. Henry ends it with a sharp jab of his pointer finger.
“Your phone must have connected,” he says, staring straight ahead. “Call him back once we are closer to the city. It’s just going to keep cutting out here.”
In the rearview mirror of Henry’s car, there are more mirrors, fastened around the headrests, ostensibly so that Henry can keep an eye on his kids while he drives.
Here and there, we pass squat, rundown homes situated next to massive farming structures on sprawls of land so green it makes my eyes hurt.
We don’t get green like this in Los Angeles.
Trucks and battered SUVs are parked in the driveways, lights on in the windows.
The speed limit is only thirty-five. I could open the door, protect the back of my head, roll onto the side of the road, and listen to the stifled voice in my head.
Run, it is saying, I am saying, however faintly.
I could say that last night was about doing what I had to do to survive.
About Stockholm syndrome. About PTSD. I could convince the authorities and probably my therapist too, and that’s how I would live with myself.
But the thought of leaving Henry makes me feel hollowed out and black, drained of a life in color.
I remove my hand from the door handle. There is no green like this in Los Angeles.
Two hours and seventeen minutes after we started, we see our first sign for the Albany-Rensselaer train station. Henry pulls up alongside Emma at a traffic light and rolls down my window, gestures for her to do the same.
“We have to grab some groceries,” he tells her. “Park in the lower lot, and we’ll pick up the car on the way out.”
Emma nods and lifts her hand in a neighborly wave. I flutter my fingers at her. The light turns green. We turn in different directions.
“What’s that about?” I ask Henry.
“I thought you could cook for me tonight, since you turn green whenever I put a plate in front of you.”
“I generally try to avoid blowing through my sodium allotment within the first minutes of waking.”
Henry actually laughs. “Fair.” Up ahead, I see the familiar white font of a Whole Foods sign. But Henry does not slow down.