The Second Assistant (34 page)

Luke Lloyd, on the other hand, was not gay or an actress. His office was your bog-standard production-company headquarters.

“Hi, Elizabeth. He’s on a call right now, but take a seat,” Allison said when I introduced myself. Then she pointed me in the direction of a lilac sofa with a fan of magazines before it on a coffee table—
People, Us, Variety,
and
Vanity Fair
. I sat down and whipped up a magazine so that I could look over the top of it and scour the room for details. “Can I get you a Diet Coke or some water, maybe?” Allison, who was not as homely as I had hoped but who
was
sporting a giant engagement ring, asked.

“Oh, I’d love regular Coke if you have it,” I replied. Then, when she’d disappeared back to the fridge, I shamelessly checked out all of Luke’s movie posters. That was another production-company thing—your walls were always hung with your movie posters. Luke had quite a few that I had never heard of. Most of which seemed to be in the vein of
Wedding Massacre
. Relieved, I noticed that these were interspersed with sufficient arty, indie pictures that didn’t prominently feature a
man with a machine gun under his arm to restore my faith in my erstwhile crush.

“Here you go.” Allison handed me my drink.

“Thanks,” I said and began flicking through
People
. I could hear Luke’s voice through the paper-thin walls from the other room, and I felt almost faint.

“I just can’t move forward with you on those terms, Allen,” he was saying calmly. “We renewed the option before it expired, and for you to tell me this now is just a crock of shit. I want my percentage. It’s nonnegotiable.”

Allison tapped away on her keyboard. I trembled. Why did he have to go and sound all powerful like that? It was too annoying. Then, just as I was wondering whether there might be a picture of him and Emanuelle together in his office, Allison’s phone beeped and I shot three feet in the air. Well, my stomach did. My body remained deceptively earthbound. I knew the horrible hum of the internal phone-call beep only too well.

“Sure, I’ll tell her.” Allison put down the phone.

“He says to go right in.” She smiled. I wondered if she suspected from my jumpiness that Luke and I had fooled around. Or whether she had a crush on him herself. Well, she had eyes, didn’t she, and a brain. How could she not?

“Lizzie.” Luke stood up and shook my hand. “Good to see you.”

“You, too,” I said as he pointed to a beautiful, fraying yellow chair for me to sit in. I guessed this was one of his own chairs.

“So how’ve you been?” He sat back behind his desk and gave me a sad smile.

“Good, thanks.” I tried to be brisk. I could only think of us in his car at Sundance bumping through the snow to the Stones.

“Great.” He read my body language (or maybe he read my clothes, which were not dissimilar to the ones I’d worn to Spago with Bob—fleshless, sexless, back-off-buddy garments in not-in-a-million-years hues) and sat forward some in his big executive chair. “So, like I said, I love the project, and I’d like to make you an offer.”

“Fantastic.” Marriage and babies?

“Naturally, it’d be an indie movie, but I was thinking at the higher end of the scale. Say, ten million dollars, with more factored in if we decide we need to attract more high-profile talent.”

“I see.”

“It’s just that the lead male role is so great that if we could get, say, Ashton Kutcher or Orlando Bloom, then I’d be prepared to pay more. Or at least foreign financiers would. I’m sure.”

“And do you think that the actors would be likely to do it for less than their usual payday because the material’s so clearly indie?” I asked.

“Perhaps.” He was chewing on a pencil and doodling something on a pad. Numbers, not my name, I hazarded a guess. I took the opportunity when his eyelashes were lowered to see if there were any photographs around. No. There were cards and immaculate, expensive invitations to weddings and black-tie functions, and there was a painting behind his desk, which was an oil of a racehorse. Well, he was from Kentucky, I guess. “I could send the material out to some talent and see what we get back. We could begin by packaging it. Or the other way around. I think either could work on this project.”

“I’ve always thought that packaging with talent first would be the way forward. It brings it to life more for investors,” I said.

“I agree.” We both stopped for a moment and caught each other’s eye. It was a second too long. And it was loaded. I broke first.

“I wonder where Jason is. He should be here by now.”

“Traffic, maybe,” Luke said, and he began jotting numbers down on a pad. “So those are the figures that I’m floating, and I think I can get you a green light, but it would have to be with a bigger back end than up front. Would you both be okay with that?” Luke asked. Which basically meant that we got our money later, if and when the movie was a success, rather than beforehand. I looked at my watch again. No Jason.

“I don’t really know. I mean, it sounds fine with me, but strangely enough he and I haven’t really discussed what sort of ballpark figures or payment schedule we’d prefer,” I said honestly.

“Well, do you want to call him and see if he’s nearly here?” Luke asked. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to be getting on with other stuff, but I assumed he would be. Being a big producer and all.

“Sure. That’d be great.” I stood up walked toward Luke’s desk. He handed me the phone, and I dialed Jason’s number, which I knew by heart.

“Hi, you’ve reached Jason Blum. Please leave a message.”

“Jason. It’s me. Just checking that you’re okay and on your way. I’m
at Universal now.” I handed the phone back to Luke, who had elegantly been pretending to do something online. Without clicking or clunking or typing. There were no photos on his desk either, I noted. “Voice mail. Sorry,” I said, suddenly feeling embarrassed. Were we going to have to sit here and twiddle our thumbs until Jason arrived?

Jason never did show, in fact. I sat with Luke for another twenty minutes, and we had a halting conversation about casting and locations, but we both had our eyes on the door the whole time and other things on our minds. And no matter what anyone ever tells you, it’s really, really weird sitting in a business meeting with someone who less than a week ago was kissing your nipples. Eventually I made my excuses and left. Having apologized ad nauseam for Jason’s no-show. I hammed up the terrible fates that might have befallen him—car accident, emergency tracheotomy, hockey puck to the head, broken-down car in South Central, burning accident involving his pants and an iron—my fears were limitless.

My anger, too, was pretty much
sans frontières
.

“What the fucking hell happened to you?” And various permutations of that same message were left on Jason’s home number and cell phone throughout the rest of the day, until both machines suffered the electronic equivalent of cardiac arrest and stopped taking my calls. But by ten o’clock that night, my fury had been replaced by something altogether more terrible—the fear that something bad really had happened to Jason. I had been back to the Coffee Bean, and they were in the dark, too. He hadn’t shown up for his shift today, and poor Alannah was still there valiantly holding the fort. I went to his duplex on South Sweetzer and stood on the lawn beside his lemon tree looking up to the windows of his second-story apartment. The place was in pitch darkness. I even threw a few pebbles for good measure.

“Excuse me, have you seen Señor Jason?” I asked Perdita, his seventy-year-old downstairs neighbor who had a crush on him and made him hamburgers and fried ice cream when her husband was out playing chess.

“He left the house this morning at seven-twenty and hasn’t been back since. He looked very smart, though. Nice shirt,” she said. I feared the worst.

Back at my apartment, I tried to remember if I had met any of Jason’s friends or family who might have news of him. But L.A. was as strange in that respect as in so many others—most people were itinerant and had no family to speak of. I knew that Jason was from New York City and that his father was an art dealer and his mother was a schoolteacher, but short of calling my friends at Interpol again, I might as well give up for the night. As to any friends he had . . . well, I knew that he usually hung with a bunch of USC alumni when he wasn’t with me, but who they were and where they all lived was about as mysterious to me as why Fellini was considered to be a genius.

“I give up,” I told Alexa later when I tapped on her door to see if she wanted to come sit on the roof with me for a homemade margarita before bedtime. “I just can’t imagine what on earth could be serious enough to make him miss this meeting. I mean, apart from the very worst of things.”

“It’s pretty weird, I have to confess.” Which, coming from a girl who believes that we live in the third dimension of spirituality and if we all stopped believing in the universe at the same moment it would cease to exist, made me a little nervous.

“I just can’t think about it anymore. I even called a few of the local hospitals this afternoon, but it was like getting blood out of a stone trying to find out if he might have been admitted. They’re so private. Anyway, I’ll go fix those margaritas, and I’ll meet you on the roof in a few minutes,” I said, and rummaged in my purse for the key to my apartment.

Alexa and I sat for the rest of the night on a couple of her Nepalese prayer mats with salty, limy margaritas in our hands and looked at the lights dotted along the horizon. There were boats out on the sea, the Ferris wheel on the pier was studded with rhinestone brightness, and the breeze from the ocean meant that we had to hug our knees into our chests to keep from getting goose bumps.

“I ought to have been celebrating with him now,” I said.

“We can celebrate without him. You still did fantastically well. You’ve almost got your deal. That’s amazing, Elizabeth.”

“Thanks. I guess you’re right.” I lifted my glass and clinked it against hers. “And I’m sure he’ll be fine. No news is good news, right? That’s what we always used to say when my sister was in Sierra Leone.”

“Exactly.” Alexa smiled sweetly at me. Then she lay back and looked at the sky. “We’ll only go to bed when we’ve seen a shooting star and wished on it for Jason to be okay.”

“Perfect,” I said, placing my margarita to one side and lying back on the asphalt.

As God is my witness, . . . they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this . . . If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill.

—Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara
Gone With the Wind

“
E
lizabeth, I am so sorry,” Lara said as I walked into the office, hollow-eyed from a night of insomnia and worry. “About what?” I said, and felt my knees weaken. She knew something about Jason that I didn’t. Oh, my God, I had to sit down before I fainted. The news was bad. I made for my desk, my hands groping in front of me.

“This.” Lara handed me a copy of
Variety
. I shot her a puzzled look. “Oh, no, you haven’t seen it!” She whipped the copy back out of my hands.

“Seen what?”

“You should sit down.” She pulled my chair out for me.

“No way. Tell me what you’re talking about.” My voice shook with emotion.

“Elizabeth. I’m sorry.” She didn’t move. Just stood there with
Variety
in her hand and looked at me with horror. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I snatched the magazine away and held it before my body with my trembling hands.

Then I let out a scream that was so primal it would have cured my
neuroses, Victoria’s neuroses, and Woody Allen’s all put together. In fact, this was a primal scream of such apocalyptic proportions that it’d be a wonder if anyone in the building ever suffered from a neurotic moment again. Or heard anything again, for that matter.

“He didn’t,” I said with my eyes narrowed to slits.

“I’m afraid he did.” Lara was almost as cut up about the whole thing as I was.

“Fucker.”

“Lousy, executive-cock-sucking fucker.”

“How could he?”

“More to the point, where is he?” Lara said, and slammed
Variety
down on my desk so that I could see it again, just in case it hadn’t been true the first time.

FIRST-TIME SCRIBE BLUM TO HELM
“SEX ADDICTS” FOR REVOLUTION IN $3M DEAL

And, really, what more did I need to know? Apart from the last line, which cheerfully informed me that

Blum is repped by Agency prexy Daniel Rosen.

Talk about raising the dead. Scott’s head emerged from behind his door, and he had a thunderous look on his face.

“What in Christ’s name is going on here?” he demanded. Lara and I looked at him with such a force field of hatred toward the male species that he simply blinked and retreated like a mole back into the earth.

“I blame Daniel Rosen,” Lara said. “That morally bankrupt little fuck should just park his Aston Martin in the garage and inhale deeply.”

“Well, I blame Jason. How could he do this? How could he sign with Daniel and then go and land himself a fucking deal at Revolution? He knew that he wasn’t going to come to that meeting yesterday. Jesus, he was probably celebrating at the Four Seasons with a bottle of champagne and a cock massage.”

“What are you going to do?” Lara asked, her green eyes glinting with menace.

“Set you on them,” I said, wishing I could.

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about Daniel. He’s old news.” She looked enigmatically toward Scott’s closed office door. “And if he isn’t—then I’ll make it my mission in life.”

I held
Variety
close to my chest, willing the print on the front page to change. I longed for a few words—five, to be exact—to appear hidden deep in the paragraph that Lara and I had overlooked, saying,

Elizabeth Miller attached to produce.

But when I pulled the copy from my chest and examined it closely, nothing had altered. I was still fucked. Mind-numbingly fucked. And this time there was no pleasure in it.

“Oh, and Luke Lloyd called.” Speak of the devil.

“Lara, I just can’t deal with him at the moment.”

“I know, but he said he read
Variety
and was concerned that you might not know yet.”

“Was he really concerned?”

“Yeah, Lizzie, he really was. I also think he was bummed that he wasn’t going to be making the movie, but you were the first thing he mentioned.”

“He must think I’m the biggest moron.”

“No. I think he thinks you’re too trusting.”

“And he would know,” I quipped. I couldn’t think about Luke Lloyd at the moment. My head was spinning, and I was feeling mildly nauseous.

Lara made me leave the office immediately and had even tried to slip me a hundred-dollar bill from Scott’s petty-cash envelope.

“Treat yourself to a massage at the Beverly Hot Springs. It’ll take your mind off your misery. These enormous women, with their bathing suits rolled down to their waists and their breasts flapping about, scrub you to within an inch of your life. You can feel all the dead skin just flaking off.”

“Good idea, maybe my skin will grow back thicker.” I’d pressed the money back into her hand. “I can’t take it, Lara. Anyway, I just might decide to drown myself in one of the springs.” Besides which, I really needed to keep my job right now, and stealing from my boss was not the best way to go about that. So instead of loping off to drown my
sorrows in the hot spring with some grannies and a few naked pop stars, I drove back to my apartment.

A fog had settled over Santa Monica as I drove down San Vicente, unable to see more than a few feet in front of my windshield. I switched on my lights, concerned that with my luck I’d get plowed down by a hit-and-run actress in a four-wheel-drive monstrosity. This had become something of a trend lately, and surely it couldn’t be long before it was as fashionable as being skinny enough to have a lollipop head. I finally reached Venice, though for once the sea wasn’t visible through the haze. The angry crashing of the waves against the sand had replaced the blue horizon, which usually lifted my spirits no matter what. I guess today I wasn’t supposed to be exalted.

I walked down the hallway of my building, barely able to hold my head up. I had been an idiotic fool. It was my own fault. I’d never asked Jason to sign any sort of contract; our agreement had been done on a handshake and a chai latte. We were friends. Or so I’d assumed. Never once had it occurred to me that he’d cut me out of the whole deal without even the courtesy of a phone call. I guess I had nobody to blame but my naïve self. As I approached my apartment door, I saw, on the floor, three dozen long-stemmed roses with a card attached. I took another step, leaned over, and tugged the card off the cellophane wrapping. But before I’d even opened it, I recognized Jason’s childish, ugly handwriting.

Dearest Lizzie,

I’m so sorry about this entire mix-up. I should have told you sooner, but Daniel didn’t tell me he was leaking it to the trades. Please, can we talk about this? I’ll be at home waiting for your call all day.

 

Love,
Jason

I tore up the note with such venom that I gave myself at least three paper cuts. Then, with aching fingers, I battered those roses around my hallway until the corridor looked as if a twister had roared through a flower show. I scooped up all the pieces and went to find Jason. I
wasn’t going to accept his stupid apology—how dare he? After I had risked life and limb to give the damned script to Daniel Rosen. He was sorry about the mix-up. Jesus, as far as I was concerned, there was no mix-up. He was a lying skunk of a rat bastard, and I would make him pay. Miraculously, I no longer felt depressed. I felt elated. Energized by the pure desire for vengeance. No. Jason and I weren’t going to have a dialogue.
I’d
talk, and then I’d kick his ass. I’d take the roses, or what was left of them, and shove those long stems right up his scrawny little behind. Now, that would give me immense satisfaction—considering they still had the thorns on them. I wondered if he’d paid for them with the $3 million he was getting for selling me out.

When I arrived outside of Jason’s, I was still seething. I parked my Honda illegally and marched up the stairs to his doorstep. I banged on the door, and when Jason buzzed it open, I marched up his stairs and threw the pile of ripped-up roses directly in his face.

“Fuck you!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, and then turned around and sprinted down the steps and back to my car. Then I turned around again and climbed back up the stairs two at a time. I wasn’t finished yet. Jason was still standing there in shock, with rose petals stuck to his shirt.

“You are a disgrace to the human race. I was your friend, and we were partners. I hope you’re happy with your deal, because you’ve just sold your soul to the devil. And for what? Money. I had a great deal set up for you. It was an honest deal with an amazing producer. I hope they rewrite your script, kick you out of the editing room, and piss on your dream like you have on mine.” I spun around on my heels and walked at a dignified pace down the stairs, got in my car, and drove away.

The fight had drained from me like air out of a leaky dinghy. I couldn’t make the drive all the way back to Venice, certainly not in my flattened state. Hell, I felt like I couldn’t even make the drive to the end of the block. Luckily, nothing in L.A. is far from civilization, and I remembered this dive bar where Jason and I had gone on one of our many script sessions when his apartment was starting to close in on us. I sighed with relief when I saw its pink façade and little striped awning. The word “Taquería” over the entrance made my mouth water for a margarita and an endless supply of guacamole and chips. A much better source of comfort, I thought, than a fat Asian woman ripping the
skin from my body in the name of beauty. I valet-parked at the restaurant next door, as I felt I deserved a little spoiling, and swung open the heavy door of El Carmen.

It was still daylight, but you’d never have guessed from the velvety darkness that swallowed me when I walked in the door. Without a single window, it was the type of bar that had looked exactly the same for the past fifty years. Day or night. You could imagine Raymond Chandler knocking back whiskey on one of the many barstools. The bar ran the length of the room, and, hauling myself up onto one of the red vinyl stools, I gazed deliriously at the two-hundred-plus types of tequila. I was home, at least until I could no longer see and had to drive back to Venice risking my life and the life of my trusty car. I handed over my credit card to the bartender and made a swift prayer to any deity who was listening that it wouldn’t be rejected like its pathetic owner. I must have looked in need, because the bartender didn’t even run it. She just stared at me hard and then poured my tequila sampler. One. Two. Three.

Two minutes and three shots later, I breathed in, taking my first proper hit of oxygen all day. I just had to remember that I hadn’t really lost anything real.
Sex Addicts
had been a fantasy. I’d never really believed that Jason and I would pull it off, even though I’d certainly worked as if the whole thing might come true. So I had to stop looking at it like a setback. I was in the same position I was in a week ago, but wiser. And a lot more hostile. That was something, wasn’t it? I’d learned that deals—no matter who they were with—had to be realized on paper. And also that Los Angeles, no matter how good the weather, was a dog-eat-dog world. The picket fences didn’t make it Kansas.

“Excuse me, Miss, but can I get you another round?” the bartender asked. “Different tequilas this time?”

“Sure, whatever you think.” She smiled and poured me a few more.

“Can I buy you one?” I asked her, realizing that getting wasted by myself wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Instead of drowning your sorrows, you just ended up wallowing in them.

“Sure,” she said. I pushed her one of my three drinks, and we clinked glasses. “You know, I don’t know what you’re upset about, but whatever it is will eventually end.” Little did she know that was my fear. I didn’t want it to end. What was I going to dream about now?

At that moment the door to the bar opened and the light flooded in. I didn’t recognize Jason standing there until the door closed behind him. Then I turned away and pouted into my tequila.

“I came looking for you. I saw your car parked on Third Street. I’ve been in and out of every place on the street,” he said nervously. I think he was afraid I might rip the bull’s head off the wall and run at him. He wasn’t wearing his Peruvian sweater for once. He had on something altogether softer.

“Congratulations” was my best reply after three shots.

“Can I sit down?”

“It’s a free country.” He sat down next to me as the bartender approached him—with thinly veiled hostility, I was happy to note.

“What do you want?”

“A margarita, please, with Cuervo Gold.”

“Cuervo Gold,” I mimicked childishly. “Aren’t we Mr. Fancy Three-Million-Dollar Director now? Oh, and by the way, I like your sweater. Is it cashmere?”

“Lizzie, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I’m torn up about this whole thing.”

“Well, then you shouldn’t have done it.” I took my last shot of tequila and spit it right back out. I didn’t really want to get drunk after all. I wanted to pick myself up and start dreaming again. I waved to the bartender.

“Do you by chance have any coffee, maybe, and some tacos?”

“Sure, doll. On the house.” She winked at me, and Jason smiled. “For her, but not for you. Prick.” Jason withered beneath her gaze.