X Jack
X
Jack
“Hands down, the best place to eavesdrop,” CJ announces a few days later as we pull up chairs at a metal, circular table next to a well-trafficked coffee cart on the lot. She tilts her head toward two nearby suits having a seemingly tense conversation. One of them grips an empty coffee cup tightly.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” I ask.
She squints her wide eyes like she’s trying to focus. The words “condensing” and “fourth-quarter revenue” and “drama library” waft toward our table.
“I think we’re witnessing the birth of a new streaming service bundle.”
I pretend to check my calendar on my phone. “Sadly, I don’t think I’ll be able to attend the christening.”
CJ tsk s at me. “But you’ll send a gift.”
“I’ll have my people call their people,” I joke.
“Quick, say you’re starring in Avatar4 , and see how long it takes to leak to the trades.”
I laugh and watch her take a sip of the iced coffee she wouldn’t let me pay for. My eyes rest on her lips, and I force myself to look away, up at the cloudless sky.
“So, your questions?”
I would’ve been happy to go back and forth, enjoying our dip into an ease that we haven’t quite found since Gatsby started. I almost forget this conversation has a stated purpose, one that I proposed.
“Right.” I clear my throat, and her eyes brighten. “Earlier, I heard you talking with the DP, and you said you wanted him to get more wide shots. How come?”
CJ places her coffee down purposefully. A pool of condensation gathers underneath it.
“Two reasons,” she starts, ready, willing, and able to defend any decision she makes or directive she gives. “First, to see the elements the team designed in one frame. To get the full effect. Second, from a story perspective, we talked a lot about how much of the frame Gatsby and Daisy would take up. But we designed the sets so that both Gatsby and Daisy would be basically dwarfed by their homes and the wealth that surrounds them, the thing that they’re both powerless against.”
I can’t help myself. “That you designed. You did that.”
“All of this is a group effort.”
“No one is here. You’re allowed to take credit,” I tease.
She relents and sips her drink. “OK, yes, the sets I designed. But you never know what one detail people are going to love or fixate on for years, and it can come from anyone: the director, the star, the prop master, a PA.”
CJ’s phone buzzes, and she flips it over, her lips shifting into a wistful smile as she reads a message.
“Is everything OK?” I ask.
“My daughter’s school has this thing where each letter in the alphabet gets a day, and each kid gets assigned a letter. ‘B’ is today, and it’s Agnes’s letter. She wanted me to buy her a shirt with a giant bee on it, but I convinced her to make one with me instead. Her only condition was that we use lots of glitter. Her grandfather just sent a picture of her in it.”
“Sounds very cute.” I want to ask to see, but I don’t know what’s appropriate.
She turns her eyes to me, weighing something, then flips her phone toward me too. Agnes is visibly CJ’s daughter: the playground-wild version of her hair and upturned nose, but with a rounder face and missing her brown eyes. She’s smiling like she’s found a golden ticket, and I can see the arm of the person snapping the photo.
“That’s sweet of your dad to take her to school when you’re on set.”
“Oh, Stuart is not—well, he’s kind of my dad.”
I can feel the confusion register on my face.
“OK, so he is my dad, but I didn’t know he was my biological father until I was a teenager. He’s gay but was in more of an... experimental phase when he and my mom first knew each other. He traveled a lot when I was growing up, so my mom thought it’d be easier to sort of pass him off as my fun Uncle Stuart instead of a dad figure, so it’s been hard to see him as my actual father as a result. Even after... everything that happened with my mom. And how much he helps me with Agnes.”
“Is Agnes’s father, does he...” I start to ask, attempting to choose my words carefully and falling short.
“She’s with him some weekends.” She pauses and sits up straighter. “Having her was very much my decision... on my own. He wasn’t ready to sign up for fatherhood, and I knew that. And he works on film sets, too, and travels a ton. We met through mutual work friends.”
“That must be a lot, single parenting.”
“I got pregnant a little while after my mom died. It wasn’t on purpose, but after all of this loss and grief, it felt like something new, something right. My life had already completely imploded, and I figured, if I ever wanted a baby, why not now? You know, you always think, I’ll be ready when I’m older or It isn’t a good time. But when is there really a perfect time for anything?”
I nod, probably too emphatically, in an effort to encourage her to keep answering questions I wouldn’t dare ask.
“Plus, all those years of seeing my mom doing it by herself made me think that I could do it too. It feels like... a way of honoring her somehow.”
“I’m sure she would be enormously proud of you. Of all you’re doing,” I say quietly.
She smiles a little at this and looks lost in thought. Her right hand, with an emerald band on her middle finger, rests across from mine on the table. The urge to take it in my own comes over me; I move both my hands to my lap to ensure I don’t.
“At the very least, she would absolutely get a kick out of seeing Stuart snap into action as a family man,” CJ replies after a moment, whatever thought she was lost in shipped back to the edges of her mind. “Although I swear any night now, I’m going to come home and catch him showing her one of the wildly inappropriate experimental films he made when he was younger.”
“He’s a filmmaker?”
“Some obscure stuff, but he had a few cult hits in the ’90s. He likes to say he would’ve been John Waters if John Waters wasn’t John Waters.”
A bell goes off in my head. “Wait, you’re not talking about Stuart Blitz, are you?”
She looks at me like I’ve won Countdown . “You know Stuart Blitz?”
“I got my hands on a VHS of Wheels of Steel when I was in high school, and I wore it out watching it so much. I thought the motorcycle gang was the coolest thing on the planet. You should have seen the leather jacket I wore around during that phase.”
“I can’t believe you’re a big fan of Stuart’s. I thought that was reserved for friends and family only.” Her phone buzzes again, this time with an alarm. “OK, well, I have a meeting with Timmy, but let’s do this again.”
I take comfort even as she walks away, well aware now that she wouldn’t say it if she didn’t mean it.