The work wife, p.1
The Work Wife, page 1
Advance Praise for The Work Wife
“A page-turner, an eye-opener, a heartbreaker, a delight, The Work Wife is that rare book that illuminates a world we never knew existed while also making us feel so much less alone in everyday life.”
—Julia Phillips, author of National Book Award finalist Disappearing Earth
“The Work Wife digs deep beneath Hollywood’s glittery surface, exposing the real cost of a world in which women’s talents are routinely sacrificed to preserve male egos.”
—Mira Jacob, author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Good Talk
“Written with great verve and flair, The Work Wife is a fascinating look at the sacrifices, challenges, and choices of three complicated women intertwined with a Hollywood mogul. Deeply satisfying from start to finish, this is truly one heck of a debut.”
—Jami Attenberg, New York Times bestselling author of All This Could Be Yours
“A beautifully written, feminist page-turner. Filled with biting commentary and insights into #metoo reckoning and the invisibility of behind-the-scenes ‘women’s work,’ The Work Wife is a dazzling debut. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Angie Kim, bestselling author of Miracle Creek
“This timely, wry debut tackles major subjects—ambition, sisterhood, misogyny—with intimacy and heart. Witty, clever, and propulsively plotted.”
—Courtney Maum, author of Touch and Costalegre
“The Work Wife takes us behind the scenes and into the carefully constructed lives of the Hollywood elite and their staff. It’s not pretty. Feminist and furious and sometimes very funny, The Work Wife is bursting with love for these wounded characters.”
—Marcy Dermansky, author of Very Nice
“A novel with nerve, this is the work of an empathetic mind, deeply curious about what women are asked to sacrifice to make it to the top.”
—Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie
ALISON B. HART’s writing has appeared in Joyland magazine, Literary Hub, the Missouri Review, The Millions, The Offing and the Florida Review. She is the cofounder of the long-running reading series at Pete’s Candy Store and received her MFA from The New School. She lives in North Carolina with her family. The Work Wife is her first novel. Find her on Twitter, @alisonbhart, and on Instagram, @alisonhart800.
AlisonBHart.com
The Work Wife
A Novel
Alison B. Hart
For Mike and Mia
Contents
Invitation
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Acknowledgments
Why I Wrote The Work Wife by Alison B. Hart
Let’s Bump and Pump!
A Benefit to Support
Low-Income Mothers
Thursday, June 27, 2019, 5:00 p.m.
At the Home of Ted and Holly Stabler
Pacific Palisades
(Address provided upon request)
Co-Sponsored by:
Stabler Studios
Producers Guild of America
Genders United
Tito’s Handmade Vodka
Uppababy
Amtrak
Sertodo Copper
The Theodore J. and Holly L. Stabler Foundation
1
Zanne
Zanne stood on the terrace, enjoying a rare moment of solitude as soft light tiptoed over the Santa Monica Mountains and birdsong trilled from the sycamores. She couldn’t have imagined when she joined the personal staff eight years ago that it could ever be this quiet here. It hadn’t been easy this morning tearing herself away from her new girlfriend, still curled up under the covers, to be the first to arrive at the estate. But today, Zanne was Ted Stabler’s acting chief of staff. Twelve hours from now, this terrace would be teeming with people, and right here at the top of the steps, Holly Stabler would give her hostess speech at the party.
It was a scene worthy of the cover of Architectural Digest. The terrace was paved with lantern-shaped terra-cotta tiles and stepped down to encircle a long, rectangular swimming pool. The pool had a plaster bottom that was painted black, and looked like a mountain lake where fauns and sprites might bathe, a far cry from the Pomona Y where Zanne had learned to swim. Around it, there were gatherings of lounge chairs and tables, each vignette sheltered by a canvas umbrella dyed a custom shade of fern, and beyond that, a high brick wall that shielded guests from the staff spaces on the other side. Purple bougainvillea overflowed the planters, and jacaranda blossoms honeyed the air. On the far side of the terrace, outside the wisteria-covered pool house with its retractable walls, were a fire pit and a pizza oven and a soda fountain where the children loaded up their sports bottles on hot summer days with orange La Croix, lemon San Pellegrino, root beer, and chocolate syrup. The place was already perfect for entertaining, and yet, in a few hours, the entire head count of Panache Parties would descend on the Stabler estate, and together with the personal staff’s events team, they’d transform this oasis into an adult playground where Hollywood’s highfliers would rub elbows, make deals, and raise money for Bump to Pump, Holly’s favorite charity.
Zanne walked across the terrace and down a little knoll to the craftsman cottage that housed Ted’s office. Ted’s actual chief of staff, Dawn, had asked Zanne to cover for her today so she could meet with her contractor. Did Dawn really mean for Zanne to be at her post by 6:00 a.m.? Probably not, but Zanne had never sat first chair for an entire day before. Inside, the office was spare, minimalist, the left wall all glass. She lifted the window shades and emptied the outbox, stuck her finger in the aloe plant’s soil, even though the landscapers had checklists and calendar reminders that told them when to water, and gave the desk an extra look, making sure everything was just how Ted liked it—the keyboard parallel to the edge of the desk, legal pad perpendicular to the keyboard, shades left down 25 percent of the way. Then she slipped out, the office quiet as a cathedral.
In the parlor area, Zanne sat down at Dawn’s desk and logged into the computer to go over the calendar. Holly Stabler would be up soon and expecting an update on the party preparations. Ted Stabler—the wunderkind who’d directed The Starfighter trilogy, three of the highest-grossing films of all time, and parlayed that success into the creation of a multimedia empire—was a late riser, but once he began his day he worked tirelessly, often until one or two in the morning. Teeing up the conditions he needed to task-shift seamlessly without squandering a minute would take all of Zanne’s focus. On top of that, she had the party tonight to oversee. If the party went well, Zanne, deputy of special projects, might get the chief job when Dawn retired, any day now, but if it was a flop, it would doom her chances for promotion; she could even be fired. And then there was Gaby. Zanne’s stomach did a little flip, part anticipation, part fear. Her girlfriend’s interview for the personal staff was later this morning. The executive assistant position paid well, like all the positions here, and it would keep Gaby in LA. But Zanne wished the interview weren’t today.
For now, she had to clear her mind and concentrate. There were emails to return from Hong Kong, London, and New York, agendas to review and talking points to draft. And there was the events team’s run-of-show for the party to drill down on and make sure there were no loose ends, no mistakes. Zanne got to work, anxiously at first, but soon she felt herself dissolving into the flow, no body, no breath, only brain, consuming information and either rejecting or reshaping it according to the sole criterion of how well it hewed to the Stablers’ priorities. She savored these last moments of peace before the main house would begin to buzz with the urgency of the Stabler family’s wants and needs. Meanwhile, she knew the cottages tucked behind the main house were already filling with the landscapers and housekeepers and executive assistants and IT geeks and travel assistants and researchers and drivers and jacks-of-all-trades who kept this place running better than a Swiss watch, even better than an atomic clock, striving collectively for the exactitude contained in Coordinated Universal Time, pegged to the leap second even as the rest of the world spun on in uninformed bliss.
* * *
At 6:30 a.m., an email crashed into Zanne’s inbox, shattering her flow. Monkey got loose. In the server cage. Come quick!
Ninety seconds later, Zanne stood among the small crowd of landscapers gathered at the end of a long hall in the IT cottage, fingers pressed against their ears to tune out the high-pitched screeching. She poked her head inside the server room to confirm with her eyes what her ears already knew. Yep, that right there, crouched atop the racks, was Alfie, an escaped capuchin monkey that was supposed to be “ adorable in a suit” and “well-behaved” and “good with all people, including children.” Instead, he was losing it.
“Shitshow,” Zanne said under her breath.
If only Bill, the animal handler, had arrived on time at 10:00 a.m. instead of keeping farmer’s hours, this would have been the events team’s problem and not hers. Then again, you could go down a rabbit hole of if only’s—if only Holly Stabler hadn’t thought a jungle nursery theme for tonight’s party would be “cute,” if only academic jobs grew on trees, if only capitalism didn’t exist. Life had taught Zanne to let go of hypotheticals and deal with the conditions before her. She shouted at the others, “Where’s Bill?”
One of them pointed to the storage room next door, where a ladder was set up beneath the access panel to the cottage’s attic. She climbed up and popped her head in the vaulted space.
“How’s it going, Bill?” she hollered. Bill Jorgensen—solidly built, with a full beard that had already gone white—could have had a thriving film and TV career as Santa Claus. Surprised to see her, he hiked up his jeans by the belt. “I thought maybe I could get him from above, but if I punch down through the ceiling, I’ll get debris all over him.”
“And the server!” she shouted.
“That, too!” he said, nodding.
“Jesus Christ,” Zanne said quietly, wondering for the millionth time how so many men got their stellar reputations when all she’d ever seen them be was average. “Come on down, Bill,” she said.
Zanne hopped off the ladder and went down the hall to where the IT workstations were set up. She followed the maze of gates strong enough to protect state secrets, grabbed the server cage keys from the safe, and doubled back in time to find Bill pleading with Alfie to “Settle down, bud.” Alfie would not. At the sight of Zanne, he shrieked his displeasure. She flinched—what was that sound? Part pig, part cricket, part laser to the meat of her brain.
She put the key in the padlock and paused. “Now, Bill,” she said, “when I open this cage, are we gonna have a problem?”
“Alfie’s my best baby! Don’t worry, I’ve got this.”
“Okay. Get ready.”
Zanne turned the key in the padlock and opened the cage door. Alfie stopped vocalizing, watching with interest as Bill walked in to comfort him, arms outstretched as if reaching for his son.
“That’s right, bud. You’re such a good boy.”
Or was he? Alfie screeched, jumped on Bill’s head, punched him in the ear, and scrambled down his back and out of the cage. Zanne watched it happen, powerless to do anything but jump out of the way. Bill spun around like a confused tornado. Out in the hall, the landscapers let out a chorus of expletives. Bill tore after his monkey, down the corridor and out the front door, the men close at their heels, leaving behind a stench that reeked of smoke, something electric, and faintly of...urine? An archipelago of droplets lay on the tile floor and the main server began to hiss.
“Fuck me,” Zanne said. She pulled out her phone and dialed the IT manager.
“I’m twenty minutes out,” he said, a note of panic in his voice, as if he’d been caught out past curfew.
“The monkey pissed on the server. We need to switch over to the backup.”
“I...uh...” Zanne could hear his gears turning, trying to yoke those three disparate words—monkey, pissed, and server—into the kind of logic problem MIT had trained him to solve.
“Now, Greg! Talk me through it,” she said.
The next ten minutes were tense and ridiculous (not the red wire, I said the blue wire!—like they were in their own buddy cop movie) but also strangely satisfying for Zanne. To have foreseen, if not the monkey itself, then the possibility of network failure, to have averted it by good planning, to have been the one, always the one, to make things right—it was why Ted and Holly Stabler had hired her, why she’d climbed so quickly up the ranks of their personal staff of thirty. Afterward, Zanne filled a bucket with soapy water and mopped the floor clean, allowing herself this brief moment to do one thing well before she returned to the problem of the monkey. So many parts of the job were like this—almost soothing in the precision and patience they required—if you could find your way past the ludicrous banality to meditative enjoyment.
She made it outside just as Bill coaxed Alfie down from a fig tree, slipping a leash over the monkey’s head.
Zanne tugged at her short, black hair. Nothing surprised her about this job anymore. Not the range of competencies it required, from a fluency with security protocols and two-factor authentication to an encyclopedic knowledge of Minecraft and LOL Surprise! dolls; or the succession of raises she’d received, each bigger than the last; or the deep sense of personal responsibility she felt to make the Stabler family’s dreams come true, come what may of her own. Now she could add monkey wrangling to her résumé, too.
“What’d I tell you?” Bill said, beaming at Zanne, as if he’d just lassoed the moon. “Alfie’s my—”
“Alfie’s fired, Bill,” she said.
Today was too important to the Stablers, and to her future here, to be derailed by predictable chaos. Zanne would keep this day on track and nothing—not an ill-behaved monkey or a tech disaster or a ho-hum party—would get in her way.
2
Holly
Ted lay flat on his back—slack-jawed, legs akimbo, sheets kicked aside—looking like he’d been murdered. Holly slipped out of their bed, her shift completed but his only half begun. When they were dating, she’d tried to match her schedule to Ted’s, falling asleep in his arms around 2:00 a.m. But fifteen years into marriage, she’d long since faced facts. She was a morning person, her husband was a night owl, and they would rarely do much more than brush past each other in the night. At least he didn’t snore.
She went to the gym for her scheduled half hour on the Peloton, but the live stream was buffering, buffering. What was the point of pushing herself if she couldn’t tell where Sasha, her avatar, was on the leaderboard or how she stacked up against other women in their thirties? She made do with one of her preset scenic rides from the digital library, dodging taxis on the streets of Midtown Manhattan, but the video cut out twice and she didn’t get that fizzy sensation of being transported into another life. There was just this life and all the obligations that came with it: the speech this morning, the party tonight, all that air-kissing. She grabbed an overnight chia seed pudding Katya had left in the refrigerator and then headed back to the master suite for a shower.
In her closet, she found the asymmetrical navy blue pantsuit her stylist, Rio, had laid out for her. It was edgy, but was it the right look for the conference? Holly wasn’t sure now. She’d been invited to give the keynote address at the annual Producers Guild of America conference, and she wanted to appear professional but not too severe, fashionable but approachable. Holly wasn’t a producer and didn’t want anyone to think she didn’t know her place, even if “her place” was changing these days. She could do adoring wife of a film legend in her sleep, but the face of Hollywood’s movement to reform itself after #metoo was a role she was still settling into, even eighteen months after the first of those ladies’ luncheons that got the ball rolling. She wasn’t a victim herself (thank God), just a concerned citizen and a sympathetic ear. But those early conversations with actresses, filmmakers, and all the other wives had spawned an advocacy group, and now she was one of Genders United’s most recognizable members. She put on the blazer and pants and strode toward the mirror, imagining herself at the dais speaking the words she’d signed off on last night, a clarion call to the industry for gender equity. But it felt like a costume, like she was the female detective in a police procedural getting tough with a witness. No, she thought, no one likes a scold. She changed into the pale pink Jenny Packham jumpsuit and the strappy gold Jimmy Choos Rio had marked “backup.” She took a selfie and texted it to him for approval.
Knockout! Rio texted back, followed by a string of fire emojis. She’d been married to Ted long enough to spot the mixed metaphor, but she didn’t care. The compliment made her feel pretty.
