The Second Assistant (36 page)

I don’t know how long I tormented myself with thoughts of the treacherous twists of the knife of fate that had brought us here. To this place where I liked him and he liked me and, despite the French tart, we wanted to hang out together. But we weren’t. Didn’t we at least owe it to ourselves to see what it would be like to walk down the street together, to sit in a movie theater, to talk about our childhoods? Even if we only discovered that we didn’t work—that he checked out other chicks all the time, that he didn’t share his popcorn, and that he’d spent his teen years playing sports instead of listening to
Darklands
—didn’t we have to try at least?

But then, what could I do about it? I’d never called a man in my life, and calling a Hollywood Man and suggesting a date was not the safest kindergarten for trainee manhunters.

Men like Luke Lloyd, even if they have the waistline of a
hippopotamus, the manners of a chimpanzee, and the sexual predilections of the Marquis de Sade, are never at a loss for a date. Because they have something that every man and woman on the face of the earth wants—they have power. Now, I don’t know if it’s true that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but I do know from my peregrinations in politics and entertainment that power gets you laid any night of the week and absolute power gets you laid in any animal, vegetable, or mineral fashion you choose. Any night of the week. By anyone you care to shake a business card at. And I don’t think that this is just an L.A. thing either. I think it’s a universal, harking back to the days when we had more body hair than Bliss Spa could handle, early-primate-type instinct. And it can’t easily be overturned one Saturday morning in January.

So instead of calling, I got up and scrubbed my kitchen floor in my nightgown. I had no sensible cleaning products, as I’d never really taken an interest in my kitchen floor before yesterday, when the rot had set into my life, so I used a brilliantly effective recipe of dish detergent and Jolene Crème Bleach. When I finished, I took a toothbrush to the stove and marveled at the filth I’d been cohabiting with. Perhaps if life never improved, I’d become a Clean Person. I’d dedicate myself to pristine baseboards and moth-free closets. I’d perfect the art of dusting, and beeswax would be my friend.

“Screw that.” I flung down my greasy toothbrush at nine o’clock, when it became apparent that cleaning and I were just having a meaningless fling, and peeled off my rubber gloves. “Where did I put it?” I wandered through my apartment looking for the taxi receipt on which Luke had carefully printed his cell-phone number.

“Luke, this is Elizabeth Miller,” I said as a sleepy voice answered the phone.

“Lizzie.” He didn’t sound pissed at me for waking him up, which was something.

“I’ve been thinking.” I sat on my windowsill and pressed my forehead against the glass as I looked mindlessly at the palm trees along the promenade.

“Right.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes?”

“Are you sure?”

“Seems that way.”

“The French tart?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your girlfriend? Is she in France?”

“I don’t know where my ex-girlfriend is.”

“Good.”

“Is that why you called me at . . . nine
A
.
M
.?” He sounded bemused.

“Oh, if you’re busy or something, then fine. We can talk later. Or not. It’s not important,” I said as I opened the window and looked down at the concrete path six stories below.

“Lizzie. I’m awake now. I’m sorry if I sounded disinterested. I couldn’t be more thrilled that you’ve called, and I’d love to hear what you have to say.”

“You don’t sound very sincere.”

“Lizzie,” he pleaded. My feminine intuition, or perhaps his beleaguered tone, told me that I’d pushed him about as far as he would go. So I backed off a little and jumped down from the window ledge onto my living room floor.

“Well, you know how we were having that whole professional-relationship thing? That I said I didn’t want to mix business with pleasure, and so we were working together but not dating?”

“I remember that distinctly, yes.”

“Right. Well, the thing is, circumstances have changed now, haven’t they?”

“In that we’re no longer doing business together?”

“Exactly.”

“Lizzie, I think I know where you’re going. In fact, I’d be really excited if this was leading where I think it’s leading.” I could hear him take an exhausted breath. “But would you mind just getting to the point?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Thanks so much.”

“I’ve just been fucked by my boss, and I’d prefer it if it were you.”

Luke took me to dinner at Gladstone’s that night. Which no self-respecting producer would ever usually do. It’s a cheesy outdoor lobster-and-seafood restaurant by the beach at Malibu, where everyone
sits under heat lamps, gets buttery chins from the crab claws, and knocks back pitchers of low-grade alcohol. Luke was cool with the whole thing, because he liked Gladstone’s, and he didn’t really have a huge amount of respect for the fact that he was a producer anyway. And I didn’t mind going to the secretaries’ Saturday-night venue of choice on a date, because . . . well, for one thing I was with him, and for another, no matter how you spun it, I was a secretary.

“So here we are.” Luke leaned across the table and handed me a shrimp.

“I know. I’m still in shock.” I peeled off the shell. “I was beginning to think that I’d end alone and living in my car on Sunset when I was sixty.”

“With gray dreadlocks?”

“And a fetish for collecting Fanta cans.” I tried not to dribble dripping butter down my top. “Still, there’s no guaranteeing that’s not going to happen just because I’m going on a date with you thirty-four years before my potential decline.”

“I guess. But there’s something you don’t know about me,” he said, and took a sip of his beer.

“Which is?”

“Which is that once I get a woman, I don’t let her go too darned easily.”

“You have a dungeon?”

“I have something much cooler.”

“I know.” I winked at him and we both laughed.

“I’m glad it left an impression on you.”

“It scarred me for life.” I smiled at him with his baggy white shirt and handsome, suntanned face. “I mean, if it hadn’t been quite so memorable, I wouldn’t be here. I just couldn’t really get you out of my head.”

“I wouldn’t have let you go,” he said, and put his hand over mine on the table. “Even if you hadn’t chased me, we’d still be here.”

“I didn’t chase you, you pig. I asked you to dinner.”

“Whatever.”

“Big difference, buddy.” I shot him a look. He caught my hand and kissed it.

“So the truth of the matter is that for all your protestations about
not wanting to date in the business and all, I feel just as strongly about that kind of thing as you do.”

“So strongly, in fact, that you dated an actress for three years,” I said with as much derision as I could muster for a man who was holding my hand. For a man who I
wanted
to hold my hand.

“She was French.”

“So?” I didn’t really want to discuss his last relationship with La Tarte on my first date with him, but I suppose we had to get it out of the way.

“It didn’t count. She lived somewhere else. She didn’t know how to use a StairMaster or that no-fat milk existed. She spoke a different language, for Christ’s sake. How could I resist?”

“Wow, you have really tough criteria.”

“Would you take me seriously for once, please?”

“I’ll try,” I said, and curbed my smile.

“You’re the first woman I’ve met in this town who I could ever think about reading the
Sunday Times
with. And you might think that’s jumping the gun and it might freak you out, but I want you to know that this does not happen every day.”

“That doesn’t freak me out,” I said.

“You’re sure, angel?” He was so southern I wanted to die.

“No, it makes me happy. I’m really happy not to be freaked out by a man in a town where freaks seem to be waiting on every street corner to get me. Because I was starting to think that if I had to kiss one more freak, I might not make it through.”

“I really am your savior, then.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “ ’Cause you know anything’s possible in the movies.”

My! People have a way of coming and going so quickly here!

—Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale
The Wizard of Oz

W
hen I drove into The Agency’s parking garage on Monday morning, something had changed. And it wasn’t simply me. It wasn’t that I had spent the weekend with Luke and we’d lain on the grass in front of the Getty Museum and talked about nothing for hours. And it wasn’t that we’d walked along the beach eating ice cream cones or that he’d promised to teach me to ride a bike and I’d bought a copy of
Crime and Punishment
for him in Book Soup. No, what had changed had absolutely nothing to do with the rose-tinted glasses of new love. It had to do with the fact that there was a pack of journalists outside the front door of the building and there was a peculiar atmosphere of foreboding at The Agency.

“José. What’s going on?” I asked as I walked toward the elevator where Tall José was waiting.

“Ah, you’ll see,” he said with a tremendously serious look on his face.

“José, you must know. You were right to warn me about Daniel’s being the devil. You’ve both been right about everything. So what’s this all about?”

“We can’t say.”

“You can’t tell me why the press is outside the front door?”

“Lizard, you will find out for yourself soon enough,” the other José said, and pressed the button for me. Then he was silent.

“Don’t either of you have any words of wisdom for me?” I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. Everything was suddenly very different. Nobody was doing what they were supposed to do, and even the Josés, the standard-bearers of all that is right, had altered. I wanted my old world back.

“Josés, please say something.”

“Lizard, we have nothing left to teach you,” Tall José said as he patted my shoulder and guided me into the elevator. A butterfly settled in my stomach as the elevator rose smoothly to my floor. My reflection was the same in the mirror—same murky blond hair, same black skirt and top, same bag overladen with Victoria’s weekend reading. But something was different. Something was definitely up.

As I walked across the vast, brilliantly bright expanse of lobby to my corner of the office, the receptionists’ phones were ringing off the hook. The beeps sounded like a demented computer game. Like Scott’s deleted e-mails gone crazy.

“I’m sorry, we can’t comment on that right now” was being repeated like the refrain of a swan song behind their glass counter. I turned to look, but nothing there was really any different: four girls with neat headsets, superstraightened hair, and better makeup than mine. And the cropped-haired, lilting-voiced guy with the camp pout. It all looked absolutely as per usual. It just wasn’t. I hurried across the floor in my scuffed black court shoes and headed for my corridor.

Lara wasn’t at her desk. Courtney and Talitha weren’t there either. I could see through the glass doors of Mike’s office that Courtney was sitting with him. And that, shockingly, Talitha seemed to be talking to her boss, Gigi, whose unprecedented presence would have been reason enough to set alarm bells ringing. Clearly, they were both being briefed on something. Scott’s door was closed, and I was about to tap on it to see whether he and Lara were having a similar discussion, but then I remembered that their version of congress between boss and assistant would have been more likely to involve debriefing. So I went to my desk again. There was a photocopied sheet of paper on top of my keyboard that read:

AN OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT WILL BE MADE AT 12:00 REGARDING CURRENT EVENTS WITHIN THE AGENCY. ALL MEMBERS OF STAFF ARE
REQUESTED TO MEET IN THE BOARDROOM ON THE 2ND FLOOR PROMPTLY. PLEASE DO NOT COMMUNICATE WITH MEMBERS OF THE PRESS IN THE INTERIM.

I stared at the words and wondered what they could possibly mean. Then Scott’s office door opened, and instead of Scott and Lara, three men emerged in navy blue workmen’s overalls. Two were carrying Scott’s desk, and the other was holding the door open. Scott’s Lakers sticker was still there.

“Excuse me?” I ran over to them. “Where are you taking that?”

“Can’t say, Miss. Sorry,” a red-cheeked man with a Queens accent informed me.

“But that’s my boss’s desk,” I insisted.

“Then you’d better ask
him,
” a string bean with acne chipped in.

“I could just follow you to see where you’re going,” I told them cockily, but they ignored me. Had Scott been fired? I wondered as I watched another team of men come in and remove his television set. Or were they the marshals? Had Mia bled his bank accounts dry, and these guys were the receivers impounding his property? I wondered if it was part of my job description to stop them as I watched the back of Scott’s plasma screen vanish out the door.

I sat down at my desk while I still had one and wondered what in hell’s name was going on. I switched on my computer, hoping for e-mail enlightenment, but all that was there were two junk-mail offers to enlarge my penis and one e-mail from Jason. But before I could click on it to open it up, Courtney walked out of Mike’s office looking flushed.

“Isn’t it wild?” she said as she sat back down at her desk and made no bid to turn on her computer. Or play her flashing messages.

“What’s going on?” I hated admitting ignorance to her, but there was no getting around the fact that I appeared to be the only person in the building who didn’t know what was happening.

“You mean Scott hasn’t told you?” She ought to get a job in a spa giving salt scrubs, she was so practiced at rubbing it into people’s wounds.

“Well, no. He hasn’t.”

“That guy is unbelievable.”

“I know,” I agreed. “So what
is
going on, Courtney?”

“Hostile takeover,” she said smugly.

“What?”

“Hostile takeover.” She slumped back, safe in the knowledge that she wasn’t going to be doing a scrap of work today. Then she reached into a drawer and pulled out a throat lozenge—oh, yes, because she planned on doing a
lot
of talking.

“So where’s Scott? Has Daniel fired him?” I asked, not really understanding what she meant.

“Elizabeth, you’re so naïve sometimes.”

“Listen, will you just please tell me what’s going on? My boss is missing, his first assistant’s not here, and his furniture is being removed from the premises.”

“It’s not being removed from the premises. It’s being taken to the fourth floor.” She took off her sandal and admired her pedicure. I wanted to throttle her.

“Courtney.” I tried the warning tone that Scott and Luke used to such great effect on me.

Weirdly, it seemed to work. She sat up straight, put her sandal back on, and explained, “Katherine Watson and Scott have formed an alliance with the backing of the board to take over The Agency. Daniel has been ousted as president, and there’s now a battle royale to lure clients. Daniel’s setting up his own management group and wants to take the big names.”

I looked at her in disbelief. This meant that I never had to see Daniel Rosen again. I would never have to pass him in the corridors and hiss at him as if I were Othello and he my Iago. Though if I ever crossed his path on the red carpet at the Oscars, I might still be tempted to trip him up or shoot peas at him from afar.

“Scott’s president?” I was flabbergasted.

“He and Katherine are copresidents.”

“Oh, my God! I had no idea.”

“Nobody did. So for once you weren’t the only one in the dark.” She stared pointedly at Lara as she walked in through the door looking very casual in Joie pants and T-shirt, with her shades on.

“Morning,” Lara said, and strolled on by to her station, where she tossed her khaki Marc Jacobs purse and began clearing out her desk.

“Oh, some people don’t waste any time,” Courtney snapped. “Moving to the fourth floor already, are we?”

“Actually, I’m moving to The Colony.” Lara smiled and winked at me. For once Courtney was speechless. “Elizabeth, can you and I have a word in private?” she asked and pointed to Scott’s erstwhile office.

“Sure,” I said, and we wandered in and leaned against the few sticks of furniture left.

The room had a hollow echo, and shafts of dust flickered in the sunlight. Nothing remained to suggest that Scott had ever been here. I wondered who would move in next. There was obviously going to be an enormous reshuffle.

“You know that I couldn’t tell you about this, don’t you, Elizabeth?” Lara slipped her sunglasses up onto her head and looked imploringly at me. “I didn’t even really know that much about it myself. Just that Scott was really stressed and excited. And he only told me vaguely in the end, because I accused him of having an affair with Katherine Watson when they started going to meetings alone off the premises.”

“I suppose I do understand.” I shrugged. “But it was a bit hard to bear Courtney’s smugness.”

“Oh, God, I know. And she’s going to be even harder to live with when she finds out that she’s being promoted to a junior agent under the new regime.” Lara rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

“She is?” Poor unsuspecting clients, was all I could think.

“Scott wants to keep Mike happy and on the same side, so he promised he’d do that for him.”

Lara and I looked at one another and both said “Whatever” at the same time.

“Anyway, it’s all good, I guess,” she laughed.

“Yeah, now when you marry Scott, you’re going to be one of the most powerful wives in Hollywood,” I told her. But she already knew that.

When Lara left for a busy morning of shopping and a pregnancy yoga class, I idled back to my desk and wondered what was going to happen to me now. Would I still be working for Scott? Would I still be an assistant? I tried not to listen to Talitha and Courtney, who were bitching in the kitchen next door about Lara’s new purse and trying to make head or tail of The Colony comment. At least for once I knew something that they didn’t. Was
this
how it felt to be important?

No sooner had I sat down than I heard a terrible keening sound from behind me. I turned around when I realized that it was coming from Victoria’s office.

“Get your filthy hands off my things!” she was shrieking.

“Sorry, Miss, but I’ve got orders to pack up all your things and escort you from the premises,” a security guard was telling her.

“How dare you?” Victoria yelled, and then she emerged into the main office area with her arms full of Barbies. “How dare you hold my dolls by their hair?”

“Sorry, Miss, I’ll be more careful with them. I just have to get them, and you, out of the building,” he said. Courtney slid out of the kitchen and materialized beside me.

“Victoria’s going with Daniel to set up the management group. She told Scott this morning that she would rather live in her car than work for a no-talent junkie like him.”

“Wow, go Victoria!” I said. “I didn’t think she had it in her.”

“Go Victoria is right,” Talitha said as she joined us, and we all three watched in amazement as Victoria exited with her armload of little friends. “And if you touch me or my dolls again, I will murder you!” she said. Then she screamed at the poor, horrified security guard till he backed off.

“Oh, well, good to know that all that primal-screaming practice was useful for something, hey?” Talitha giggled as the door slammed shut behind my banshee of a mentor.

With nothing much else to do other than marvel openmouthed over recent events, I went to my e-mail to see what Jason had sent me. Another creepy apology would do me very nicely. I wasn’t noble enough not to want to get my pound of flesh from him. What I read was actually worth much more:

            TO: SCOTT WAGNER

            CC: ELIZABETH MILLER

      FROM: JASON F. BLUM

 

SUBJECT: REPRESENTATION

 

Dear Scott:

 

It was good to meet with you yesterday evening, and I thank you for taking the time to see me at what I know is a critical juncture for you. It was much appreciated.
I simply wanted to confirm my decision to remain with The Agency as a client of yours rather than transfer with Daniel Rosen to another management company. This, as we discussed, is entirely due to my allegiance and respect for your colleague Elizabeth Miller. I have had extensive dealings with her and have found her to be exceptionally inspiring, hardworking, and, in short, extraordinary. To forgo the professional guidance of Elizabeth would, I feel, be detrimental to my career.

 

Therefore I hope that The Agency will agree to manage my career as a writer and director henceforth.

 

Yours truly,
Jason Blum

Ha, I thought. Then I was overwhelmed by gratitude toward Jason. I picked up my phone and called his cell.

“This is either my agent Scott Wagner or Elizabeth Miller calling me.” He’d obviously programmed The Agency into his phone already, presumably so that he could speak with Daniel, though. “I’d know that number anywhere.”

“It’s Lizzie.” I smiled.

“I knew it was you, darling.” Darling? That was new. And very un-Jason.

“Where are you? Are you busy?” I asked, wondering if he was over at Revolution in a creative meeting.