The Second Assistant (28 page)

“Great, thanks.” He beamed at her. Not in the least embarrassed about the fact that he was on a diet. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly prejudiced about men who take care of themselves, but there always strikes me as something wholly unmasculine about a man who’s a shameless proponent of Dr. Atkins. Or any regime that suggests he thinks only of looking good. I’d prefer a more corpulent man who has read Proust any day of the week. Except perhaps today. Because despite the low-carb stuff, I was looking at Jake right now and thinking how unutterably fantastic it would be to kiss him, just once.

“So, darling, where are you staying in Sundance?” He devoured a lettuce leaf and gazed intently at me.

“To be honest, I’m not really sure, I guess in a condo—”

“With Scott?”

“Well, probably.”

“But you might be able to sneak away, right?” he asked sotto voce as Scott snored loudly on the seat behind us.

“Sneak?” I still wasn’t sure whether he was coming on to me or whether he was trying to ascertain whether I’d be available to purchase Marlboro Reds and cook him bacon and eggs in the middle of the night.

“Come on, baby. I think you’re gorgeous,” he said. And for a second I nearly lost my head. The flight attendant was standing at attention nearby and looking at me as if I were the luckiest girl on earth. “You
know you want to.” He winked, and déjà vu hit me like a hockey puck on the temple. The guy had kissed me and not remembered me. Come on, Lizzie, that’s pretty insulting, I thought. And, strangely, at that very same moment I had a flash of something else, of something that Lara had once said in her inimitably scornful way:
There’s no better buzz than fucking the girlfriend of someone more powerful than yourself.
Instantly I realized what Jake’s game was. He thought that I was Scott’s girlfriend, so he wanted to bed me.

“Actually, I’m not sure that I do want to.” I smiled politely and took a mouthful of lobster salad. Oh, that was manna from heaven for him. A refusal. He was like Hannibal Lecter—I swear he made that funny lip-smacking noise. A slow grin crept across his face. “Mile-High Club?” He winked.

“What about it?”

“No,
how
about it?”

“How about not?” I took an overambitious slug of wine and nearly choked, but he didn’t notice my bulging look.

“Have you ever tried it?”

“To be honest”—I was fortified by the gallop of the pinot noir cavalry to my head—“I’ve always thought that fucking in a sink under fluorescent lights with your foot on a toilet was a pretty unsexy notion.”

“You’ve never done it with me, though. And I can arrange for the lights to be dimmed. If you’re shy.”

“I’m not shy, I’m just not interested. Sorry,” I said, and wished that I’d been a little kinder in my rebuff. Not that he deserved my kindness, just that I felt bad. But, clearly, heaven knows no pleasure like a man scorned. Because right now Jake Hudson was in clover. It was obvious that nobody had turned him down since the day he had his braces removed in high school.

“You can’t turn me down, Lizzie.”

“Hmmm. I suspect that I can. And that you’d rather like it.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes.” I ate my last piece of lobster and reclined into the sofa with a satisfied sigh. “I think you do.”

“You’re so smart. You have no idea what a turn-on that is and you’re beautiful to boot. Please agree to have a date with me.”

“Where, in the bathroom?”

“In Los Angeles. How about when we get back? If you’re spoken for
at Sundance.” As he said this, he pulled his navy blue sweater over his head, and it left his hair tousled like the billboard again.

And much as I wanted to keep on saying no, so that he’d keep on wanting me, I just desperately wanted to kiss him again. To feel his thighs beneath his jeans. To taste the whiskey on his breath.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said, lifting my lashes to meet his eyes with possibly the most perfect timing of my life. (Well, apart from the occasion I’d made the split-second decision to go into a store to buy some Hubba Bubba just as a brick crashed fourteen stories down onto the sidewalk where’d I’d been standing.)

“What?” He leaned forward with a look of undiluted excitement. “Tell me.”

“If you can remember my name by the time we get back to Los Angeles, you can take me to dinner.”

“I can?”

“Maybe,” I said, and flicked the button next to me to dim my reading light. I don’t think I’d ever been so cool in my entire life. And I knew that I couldn’t keep it up, so I’d have to go to sleep. Well, actually, I couldn’t go to sleep, because that would shatter the illusion. So what I really had to do was to spend the next fifty minutes pouting so that I’d look beautiful in repose, and digging my fingernails into my palms in order not to drop off to sleep and ruin everything.

Haven’t you bothered me enough, you big banana-head?

—Marilyn Monroe as Angela Phinlay
The Asphalt Jungle

“S
cott, they’ve only made up one bed.” Me and my omnipresent wheelie suitcase stopped in our tracks. I examined the blister on my hand. After the driver had dropped us on the doorstep of the Wildflower Mountain Home, where we were staying, I had lugged my suitcase up three levels and around four bedrooms—each with a bare, unfriendly mattress—before I’d found “our” room.

“Wassup?” Scott tossed his bag onto the bed and failed to notice my throbbing palms. Just as he’d failed to notice how my suitcase kept lashing out and beating me up as we made our way through the house—up stairways, through doorways, around tables. Well, if he had noticed, he hadn’t thought to intervene.

“Was Lara going to stay here with you, or did she have separate accommodations booked?” I asked as I looked longingly at the plump duvet, which had crunched in a finest-Siberian-goosedown way when Scott’s bag had landed on it.

“Lara?” Scott took off his jacket and walked into the bathroom. “Oh, yeah, well, I guess she just forgot to tell them to make up an extra bed or something for her.” I watched as he flung his shoes across the en suite bathroom and then leaned over to put the plug into the
bathtub. Then he cranked up the taps, and steam began to fill the room. “Hey, you got any woman’s shit to put in my bath?”

“Woman’s shit?” I was tired, and it was clear that Scott was not about to go all gentlemanly and offer up his luxury quarters to freezing-cold me.

“Bubble bath.”

“Somewhere in here.” I sat on my suitcase and contemplated whether I should just push it back down the stairs or whether I could be bothered to spare the décor by shuffling down one step at a time, behind the beast, as though it were a rodeo horse.

“Great. I don’t use sulfates, though. They dry out your skin. Hasn’t got sulfates, has it?” I looked at him incredulously and understood fully why Mia felt entitled to rape his bank account on a daily basis. Hell, I hadn’t even spent one night under the same roof as Scott and I felt a twenty-two-carat tantrum coming on.

“You’re worried about dry skin?” I asked as he hunted through his bag for his toothbrush.

“It gets itchy when it’s dry.”

“Doesn’t cocaine have the same effect?”

“No, cocaine makes you high.”

“I mean, doesn’t it make your skin itch? And also doesn’t it make you look like shit?” I wanted that bed. So much, it wasn’t decent. I had been up since 5:00
A
.
M
. because I’d had to make sure that Scott’s Sundance schedule was idiotproof and laminated and that his cell phones were charged, and then I’d had to go to Rexall over my lunch break and buy padlocks for all his drawers and filing cabinets, and then I spent the afternoon erasing all his e-mails because he couldn’t do it himself, due to the fact that the ping sound gave him preepileptic sensations. Apparently. Though why he wanted his e-mails deleted and his drawers bolted shut was beyond me. I suspected it was early-stage paranoia, but Lara had seemed to think it was perfectly reasonable when I’d tentatively mentioned how peculiar I thought it was. “Scott’s instincts are usually pretty sound” was all she’d said. Then she’d resumed Chapter 19 of her novel.

It was a shame that his manners weren’t as sound as his instincts. Because I had to watch as he hummed himself into his steaming bath, complained about my inability to produce sulfate-free products, and
then asked me if I’d mind fetching him a whiskey. He’d seen a bottle of Jack in the game room on the first floor when we came in, and there’d probably be ice in the freezer, he guessed. I strapped my suitcase to my hand and heaved it out of Scott’s room onto the cold landing, leaving behind the dazzling floor-to-ceiling views of the snowy mountains from his picture window.

“Oh, and, hey, can you get me Lara on the cell phone? There’s something I need to ask her.”

“Scott, her parents are in town,” I yelled back from halfway down the steep stairs where I was hanging on to my bronco case for dear life. “Can’t
I
help?” I had visions of Lara’s elderly parents imagining that she was a call girl if her “boss” started phoning her in the middle of the night. I know that my mother would jump to that conclusion under the same circumstances.

“No, you can’t help. So get her on.”

“It’s late, Scott.”

“Lizzie.” That was the warning tone, and I couldn’t ignore it.

“Okay, let me just get down the stairs and I’ll bring in the phone with the Jack Daniel’s, okay?” I took his silence for approval and bumped down the remaining six steps to the second floor, where I’d spied a relatively cozy-looking bedroom, without bed linen but with its own stone fireplace.

As I lay in bed later, wrapped in the blankets that I’d found inside an ottoman, I listened to a distant owl. It had been so long since I’d seen snow, and even longer since I’d been in the countryside, that I actually found it difficult to drop off to sleep without the constant sound of sirens and the backfiring of engines outside. But this was lovely. Except, I realized, for the empty expanse of bed beside me. It was one thing to sleep alone on a close, balmy California night with the sheets kicked off, but it was another entirely to be in a place of such staggeringly beautiful scenery as Park City, with the deer and the elk and mountains and forests and the moon hanging low and heavy in the inky midnight sky, and to be alone. And that night, more than any other in my life, I yearned for someone to fill the space beside me. That said, I didn’t yearn enough to make me want to tiptoe up to Scott’s room for a snuggle. Or even enough to make me reach for my cell phone and call Jake Hudson, who had slid his card into my hand at the airport as I was about to get into the limo with Scott. So I suppose I wasn’t really that
desperate at all, I reassured myself as I sank into a dribbling, lolling, unattractive, but heavenly sleep.

The film festival was a blast. At first I’d started out with every intention of seeing every minute of every movie that I was scheduled to see. But with the nod from Scott, I dropped that notion as quickly as a hot potato.

“Lizzie, don’t be crazy. You don’t have to sit through the whole thing, okay? Unless it’s genius and you think we should sign up one of the cast or the director, don’t bother.” I took that as my cue to relax a little. And certainly I stopped taking my miniature Booklover’s Flashlight that I’d picked up in Barnes & Noble into the screenings so that I could see my notepad. At first I’d seemed like the class creep, sitting there trying to make notes, attempting to draw parallels with Spike Jonze or Aronofsky and waiting till the last of the credits had rolled to write down any name I felt deserved honorable mention. But by the second day I’d become blasé and made the executive decision that if the film was good enough, I’d remember it.

On our first day, Scott was awake before me. He came back from his morning run with his beanie hat on, snowflakes in his hair, and his cell phone glued to his head.

“So where’s my first meeting?” He stood in my bedroom doorway and didn’t seem to notice that I was still dreaming of castles and princes.

“I’ve written it all down on the laminated sheet I left on the breakfast table last night,” I croaked. I was actually quite surprised by Scott’s oxymoronic existence. The health-conscious junkie. The hardworking playboy. I think that’s another Los Angeles peculiarity. Certainly I came to realize in time that you always knew that you were sharing a house with a producer or an agent because you developed a secondhand brain tumor from his unstinting use of his cell phone. Morning, noon, and night. Also, they were only ever clad in exercise clothes or a white towel with bare chest displayed and they never knowingly conversed with anyone in the same house or in the same time zone. For some reason best known to God.

“Okay. So are you ever going to get up?” Scott said as he stretched out his hamstrings. “I’ve got a breakfast meeting in town, and unless
you get in my car with me, you’re going to be stuck here. And I need someone to carry all that shit around for me.” That shit being a file that weighed about eight ounces.

“Good thing I’ve been doing all that weight training at Venice Beach, then, huh?” I said as I sat up in bed and pulled my sheet around me.

“Sure.” Scott wasn’t paying any attention to me as he hit redial on his phone.

“I’m up. I’m up,” I promised, and waited for him to leave the room so that I could clamber naked from my bed.

“Did Lara help you with what you needed, by the way?” I called out as he moved into the hallway to get better reception. When I got her on the phone for him last night, she’d sounded amazingly unperturbed, and possibly even pleased, that her boss was calling her while she was at dinner in Chi Venice with her mom and dad. Obviously they weren’t as suspicious and overbearing as my parents.

“Lara?” He clearly got whomever he was calling’s voice mail, because he kicked my doorframe. “Yeah, she did help me. She sorted out what I needed.”

Scott’s first movie screening was in a multiplex where they gave out free popcorn and Coke. Mine was in the unheated library. Unfortunately, it was a really interesting documentary. I say “unfortunately” because I had to sit on the hardest, least ergonomic, most ass-numbing seat in the history of chairs. And I also had to sit next to a hyperscented D-girl from Warner Brothers who was trying to flirt with the guy on the death chair next to her. She kept making intellectual-sounding murmurs and stroking her own knee with more suggestiveness than would have been decent in a Dirk Diggler movie. Let alone the Sundance Library. I wondered what Robert Redford would say if he could see her. The guy she was supposed to be flirting with didn’t seem to notice, I think because he’d fallen asleep during the opening sequence, where the Amish teenagers left their community and took to the open road. When Scott and I hooked up later, I told him that he ought to meet with the director, who I thought had a great eye for detail and story. She was also young and apparently cute, so he agreed, and I set up a meeting for tea the next day.

I also wondered whether I’d run into Jake Hudson on my travels. It was pretty much inevitable, I thought as I sat alone in the Bluebird
Café writing up my notes and taking smaller-than-usual bites of my bagel in case he, or anyone else, should walk in and require me to say hello. I read the Sundance Specials in the trades, and I boned up on who was hot, who was buying what, and which stars were in town. If Scott missed a single person or event because I’d failed to alert him, then I’d be in serious trouble.

“Oh, hey, how’s it going?”

It was Courtney. She looked like an escapee from
Doctor Zhivago,
with bunny fur draped around her face and her hands tucked into a white muff.

“Courtney, I’d forgotten that you were coming.”

Actually, I hadn’t, and she’d given me her cell-phone number several times before we left the office and told me that she’d definitely get me into this party that Harvey Weinstein was throwing at his house tonight. But I just knew that it would involve lying and humiliation to get beyond the door, and I wasn’t sure that I’d have anything to share with Harvey if I did meet him, so I’d sort of forgotten to call Courtney. Besides which, I saw her every single minute of the day back at The Agency, so three days apart weren’t going to wreck our beautiful friendship.

“Yeah, I’m here with Mike.” Mike was now doing public again. His hair had grown in beautifully after Rogaine, but he was so thrilled to have it that he insisted on wearing it long, like a bad eighties rocker. Courtney sat down at my table. “Though I have got to say that the talent is so lame this year. All the movies blow.”

“All of them?”

“So I hear.” She opened my Fresh Samantha juice and helped herself. I wasn’t sure if Courtney had ever seen a movie with a budget of less than $60 million anyway, so Sundance was hardly going to float her boat. She was, though, all about the scene. “So Harvey’s party is tonight. You want to come?” Courtney had never ever been so friendly to me, and I knew that it was just because she didn’t have anyone else to hang with.

“I’m not quite sure what Scott’s schedule is and I haven’t got an invite. I hear they’re like gold dust.”

This was actually true. The Sundance party circuit was reputedly even more fearsome than L.A.’s. On my way in from the airport with
Scott last night, our car had driven down Main Street, and I’d gotten a flash of the hellaciousness of it all. There was a private party in every restaurant, and standing outside each one were bouncers and publicists with lists and traffic jams of 4x4 limos, so beloved of celebrities and hot young directors. Scott had told me that no bastard got into any gig worth going to in this place without a bracelet. And that was only the studio parties. The more exclusive ones, like Redford’s and the Miramax party, were held in condos or private homes. It would take me at least one Academy Award or a wedding ring from Mr. Weinstein himself to get into either of those parties.

“Scott’s going to be there anyway, and I’ll get you in. I know the bouncer.”

“Okay, sure. Thanks.” Well, that seemed to solve that. Even though I didn’t especially want to gain entrance through the kitchen window, I knew that there was no getting out of it. And I knew that if I turned up there, I’d run into Scott, who would know that I’d crashed the party. Then I’d seem kind of cheap and unprofessional. But I figured that ultimately he’d be more forgiving of my transgression than Courtney would if I didn’t go. “What time?” I surrendered.