Chapter 20
Twenty hours after I ditched Henry on the side of the road, I met my husband for the first time.
I was sitting on a slim black leather couch in the middle of what felt like an airport hangar, surrounded by fit and frowning people wearing headsets inside their glass-walled offices.
I was sleep-deprived and ragged with regret over the way things had ended with Henry.
I had arrived an hour early for my interview with Jonathan, figuring I’d find a coffee shop and sit and wait.
Jonathan’s office was located in what looked like an old warehouse in Culver City, immediately off the highway on a street that did not even have sidewalks.
I’d gone around the corner and sat on the pavement for forty minutes until it was time to go and check in.
Ten minutes after my interview was supposed to start, a guy came out of one of the glass-walled offices and strode toward me with his headset around his neck. “Faye?” he asked.
I stood and shook his hand. He was mid-to-late twenties, a grown-up wearing a pressed shirt and tailored jeans.
Light scruff on his jaw. Hazel eyes. He asked me if my trip had gone all right, if I had hit any of the legendary Los Angeles traffic on my way to their offices that morning.
He said he had a terrible commute himself but it was worth it to live on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica and walk to the beach barefoot every morning to surf.
I could immediately picture him paddling into the Pacific, whipping wet hair out of his eyes, his phone back on sand, rattling with reminders about important meetings with important people.
He was easygoing but successful in a way that made me want to split him open for answers. How did you do it? How do I?
“I’m just happy I made it,” I said.
Jonathan’s former assistant continued to smile at me. He hadn’t stopped smiling since the moment he laid eyes on me. “Jonathan is almost ready for you. Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee?”
“Maybe some water,” I said, and he motioned me to follow him into the kitchen area.
On our way he pointed out various corners of the office and explained who worked where and what they were doing.
They had two shows currently in production and seven in development.
Jonathan had recently promoted him from assistant to production coordinator after three years on the desk.
He was trying to get this role filled quickly so he could fly to Cincinnati, where they were in the last month of production on something, and he started to tell me about the project but stopped abruptly.
“You brought a copy of your résumé, right?” He glanced from the small bag hanging on my shoulder to my empty hands and back to the small bag again.
“Shit,” I said. “Oh my God. Shit.” I clapped a hand over my mouth.
I had printed out five copies of my résumé on sturdy stock paper in the office of the clubhouse, enclosed them in a plastic file folder, then left that file folder in the suitcase I unpacked in the back seat of PT’s car on the way to the airport.
He put his hand on my arm, stopping me and glancing around the office to make sure no one was watching. “Come with me.” He took me over to his desk and had me sign in to my email while he ravaged the supply closet for the good paper.
“Thank you,” I said as we stood next to each other at the printer.
It was 2014, and the surest sign that you could be trusted to get someone’s coffee and make a dinner reservation was if you remembered to bring a hard copy of your résumé to your interview and then followed up with a handwritten thank-you note within forty-eight hours.
“Thank you,” I said again, near tears this time, because I had barely slept, and I had hurt the person I loved and obliterated the brief but comfortable existence we had created at the lake, and I was imagining what it would feel like to go into Jonathan’s office and see the look on his face when he realized I had forgotten a copy of my résumé—like I was raised in a barn—and the idea that this person I had just met saved me from such a devastating fate had left me weepy with gratitude.
“Hey,” my husband said softly. “I’m happy to help.”
I was a good assistant. Not great. Occasionally bad, though my husband helped cover for me in an instance where I screwed up a car service and booked Jonathan in a window seat instead of the aisle.
I spoke to Henry once more, when I returned home after the interview.
Home-home, to my parents’ place in Massachusetts.
I had accepted the job, and he wanted to know where he could mail my things.
I told him I would reach out when I found a place in Los Angeles, then never did.
I felt bad for him, and it made me angry to feel bad for someone else when my life was taking off in the way I’d hoped it would.
My husband went to Cincinnati. He came back and soon left for Toronto. There was a lull in production after that, things tied up in development, and that’s when things started up between us.
The office was full of young people who were friends with other young people who worked at other production offices, talent agencies, management companies, studios.
We went to happy hours together. I made best friends, enemies, had crushes, and eventually made out with my husband in an Uber ride home from an LCD Soundsystem concert at the Greek.
We hid our relationship from everyone. There wasn’t a strict no-dating-your-coworker policy, but my husband was paranoid about his private life.
Jonathan had passed on two ideas my husband felt strongly about, and around my two-year anniversary as Jonathan’s assistant, he was toying with the idea of leaving and starting his own thing.
When people hear this story, they picture a Jerry Maguire situation.
Me as Renée Zellweger, willing to follow a boisterous Tom Cruise anywhere.
But it was never so much an act of faith as that.
My husband bided his time. Waited for the right moment.
His brother, the superstar agent, was in the process of putting together a merger that would turbocharge executive pay at the agency that now represents me.
When it went through, he not only became rich himself but because he had made other, more senior people rich, an umbrella of untouchability opened over him and he got to decide who stood under it and not.
That was when my husband decided it was safe to start something that would potentially put him in competition with Jonathan.
Not long after, he got one of the projects Jonathan passed on greenlit by a major studio.
It was a show about young women making their way in Los Angeles created and written by a young woman trying to make her way in Los Angeles, and one day she came over to talk to my husband about something, and we met for the second time, but it was the first she really clocked me.
“Well, you’re pretty,” she said. “Have you ever acted before?”
I thought about the tears I produced in the back of PT’s car, my profuse apologies the morning I had to leave for my interview that I had not meant but had pacified Henry long enough for me to escape. “Not professionally.”
She laughed. She thought that was interesting.
She wanted actors on her show who were not actors.
It wasn’t like she handed it to me on the spot.
There were auditions, chemistry tests. Test screenings and rewrites and reshoots.
I quit my job with Jonathan, and he was mostly annoyed he had to find a new assistant, but there was no bad blood, and now when we see each other out in the world, he greets me warmly and not just because I made something of myself.
It’s because, as the sister-in-law to the superstar agent, I get to stand under the umbrella of untouchability too.
And people who break his kid brother’s heart by serving him with divorce papers face a far worse fate than simply standing out in the rain.
My brother-in-law is a bully. He’s crude and money-obsessed and vengeful. I’ve seen what he’s done to actresses he believes have spurned him. I saw what he did to the creator of my show, who is no longer in my life, who is now living in her parents’ attic back home in Indiana.
I don’t really know what happened between them.
They dated casually for a few months, and from what I can gather, he was the one who broke up with her because he believed she was cheating on him with someone on her set.
I don’t know if she was, but I do know that even if she had been, she did not deserve what came next.
Some mouthy mouthpiece with a large and furious Twitter following dug up old tweets that were brazenly anti-Semitic.
The creator swore she’d never written them.
They were doctored; part of a smear campaign against her.
So many of our peers and decision-makers in Hollywood are Jewish—did I not find it suspicious that it was this group in particular that she had allegedly offended?
I don’t know, I had said to her, feeling exhausted.
I had no idea who to believe. My husband balked when I asked if he thought his brother had anything to do with it, and the creator refused to apologize for things she didn’t say, which of course only inflamed the situation more.
Suddenly I was being asked to take a stand—if I still supported the creator, that meant I supported bigotry. Which one was it?
I had to make a statement. I had to disavow her.
I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.
It was only later, on my wedding day, that my brother-in-law put his cards on the table.
He had asked to take me for a spin on the dance floor, and there, his hand a little too low on my back, he whispered in my ear, Break his heart and I’ll bury you in Indiana too.
He spun me wide, and so I saw he was grinning at me in his sneaky game show–host way, those veneers like white bricks in his mouth.
I went pigeon-toed, knock-kneed. This was the slick new reality of my slick new life.
I can imagine exactly how it would happen for me.
It would start online in the comments section, where well-compensated trolls would blaze a deadly fire.
Did I cheat? Did my sweet husband want a baby but I was too vain and selfish to give him one?
Am I actually not that pretty and did I only get this far because I had the privilege of receiving a scholarship that allowed me to attend the same college as a successful producer twenty years my senior?
Jonathan is gay, so at least no one can say I slept with him.
Some people might defend me. Because all I am is a woman who asked for a divorce, right?
Phase two will go for the jugular. Some set designer from some production I worked on will come out of the woodwork and say I was a toxic employer.
Once there was a clash between our director and line producer and we sided with the director, who was a white man.
The line producer was not. It will not matter that my husband’s name is also on our LLC.
I’m the woman. I should protect other women, even when they are demonstrably in the wrong.
I should do better, know better. And for anyone who may feel bad for me, they will be reminded that I have my millions to cry into, millions that will be drained and divided by the divorce and legal battles over who gets ownership of which project and why, and by the time all is said and done, my financial adviser will have little to advise me on.
It does not matter that I have more to offer, more I want to do, that I’m talented and shrewd and bankable. This life is on loan. And truthfully? Knowing that keeps me sharp. I am someone who needs the fear.