The work wife, p.19
The Work Wife, page 19
She saw Ted searching for the words, but he didn’t have an answer for her, at least not the one she wanted, and the truth of that was like a trapdoor that kept giving way. She wanted the impossible. She’d known it all along.
“Listen, if I get involved... It’s a feeding frenzy right now. The press twists everything,” he said.
That floating feeling again. A hit of helium and she was weightless, her body buzzing. Ted wasn’t all-powerful. Her prediction had been correct. Standing outside the gate an hour ago, praying it would open, Phoebe had gambled that Ted’s vanity was the thing he would protect, not her. It was disappointing being right, but there was no need to grieve him twice.
“You have all these people working for you now,” Phoebe said. “Your little minions running around. You’ll figure something out. Or they’ll figure it out for you.”
19
Holly
“It’s 3:00 a.m. at the Chateau Marmont. Your husband doesn’t know you’re here, or maybe...he does.”
Holly did her best to smolder for Instagram.
Rio pouted. “Oh no,” he said. “You are too pretty to be this sad.”
Holly didn’t feel pretty. She felt like an old shoe. Holly and Rio were up on the third floor, in the long, dark hallway between the children’s bedrooms. Rio had never been up here before, but he’d dragged her around the house looking for the spot with the best light to take pictures and oohed when he saw the corridor. “It’s spooky like an old hotel up here,” he’d said, and he was right. She usually prowled this hallway in athleisure, following the sounds of Katy Perry or Gears of War toward her children. Tonight, the third floor was deserted, and she was wearing black vintage Halston, flat-ironed hair, a nude lip, two new smoky eyes. The dress’s hand embroidery itched under her arms.
“You want something to cheer you up? I’ve got something in my bag downstairs, just for emergencies. You take the tiniest little dose and it takes the edge off whatever’s bothering you.”
But Holly had never been able to tolerate the tiniest dose of anything. Pot and coke both made her anxious, and Ted was such a straight edge that she’d given up trying things. She’d heard of microdosing, of course—it sounded so gentle, so clinical, so supervised—but she felt too fragile to risk it tonight with the party about to start and the first guests due to arrive.
She shook her head. “I’m okay.”
“Want to talk about it?” Rio asked, and he put the phone in his pocket and folded his hands together. He leaned back against the wall and waited.
Rio was her favorite. He was from Barstow, which was in the desert, not the mountains, but otherwise not so different from Frazier Park. All the celebrities wanted to work with him—he had that oversize personality, that lust for life—but Holly was drawn to the childish parts of him. The fish out of water with a big heart, the boy who was afraid to leave the house some days, knowing he’d be stared at, knowing he sent tongues wagging just by showing up.
“Do you think Ted will even notice me?” she asked.
Rio looked shocked, like she’d just confessed to hating peanut butter. “Come on. For real?”
“Sometimes I wonder.”
“I did some of my best work today. It will definitely not go unnoticed.” He reached forward and gently lifted a lock of hair behind her shoulder, letting the beading on her collarbone and the thin column of silver dangling from her ear catch the light from the wall sconce. Sometimes his touch was the most intimate thing that happened to Holly all week. “I think you need to go find that man of yours, looking like all of this. He won’t want to share you with anyone.”
Maybe she would. She hardly ever visited Ted’s office anymore. Over the years, she’d learned it was better to let him come to her. When he initiated their time together, it meant he was available, sometimes a bit formal but primed to enjoy her. When she initiated—like this morning, when she’d invited him to lunch—he bristled automatically and she felt like an irritation. Then she overcorrected, pulling way back to prove a point, and at that distance her love soured with questions. Did he notice the space between them? Was he happier this way? How long would it be before he smiled at her again with the everyday delight he took in his children? She knew the man she’d married—a trailblazer in so many ways, but terrified of emotional risk. Their mutual caution bled into passivity.
It was good to remember that she had nothing to fear. Ted was the man who had cried in the delivery room, when she lost so much blood from the C-section that she passed out and he’d thought for a moment that she’d died. And she was the only person in the world who had no agenda with him, no score to settle, no advantage to press. The children needed him, but she had chosen him. Maybe on the outside that choice seemed obvious—rich, older man; pretty young thing—but Ted knew he was difficult. “Thank you,” he’d whispered when she accepted his proposal and when the nurses placed Flynn in his arms and in other little moments along the way. She’d saved him from his myopic, obsessive, cantankerous self. She’d given him a home.
He would be winding down his day soon, a quick run on the treadmill and then jumping in the shower to get ready for the party, the minimal involvement he would have in it. She would go to him now.
Holly squeezed Rio’s arm. “Will you stay for the party? Find me later and we can try that treat.”
“Oooh, look out.”
As she tiptoed down the stairs, Holly felt her mood lift. She would do what Rio said. She would bottle that confidence that he had in her, and she would take her husband’s face in her hands and make him see her. Before the night unspooled, she would show him that they didn’t need all of these people around, and if they were the only two people in this world, that would be enough. She went through the kitchen and out the side door, so she wouldn’t get waylaid by the final preparations on the terrace, the common chaos that so often separated her from her husband. Whitney sang “I’m Your Baby Tonight,” and Holly hummed along. She hurried down the path, past the solarium, behind the pool house, the sweet fragrance of the jacaranda making her giddy, rushing toward Ted almost like she had on their wedding day.
And then she saw Phoebe, floating out of the craftsman cottage and into the sunlight like an angel.
20
Zanne
When Zanne had asked Ted if he and Phoebe wanted drinks, he had not properly hung up the phone, giving Zanne an open line on their conversation. The second time in a day that this had happened. They would have to replace the phone; it was too much of a privacy risk. She meant to hang up, she had started to, but she couldn’t help herself.
Now she had to live with what she’d learned.
Jerry Silver had raped Phoebe, and Ted knew. He’d called it something else at the time—mixed signals, a mistake—but surely now, in light of all the other women who had come forward, he must have understood.
Zanne felt hot all over. Every time she heard another story of a man taking what wasn’t his and a woman flung around like a dirty rag, she wanted a fix, an exit ramp from life.
Phoebe was right that the two titans had seemed, if not friendly, then respectful of each other’s territory and strengths. When Ted won his second directing Oscar two years ago, the camera had panned to Jerry, who stood and clapped along with the rest of the audience, beaming as if his own brother had just won. There was certainly no hint that something so ugly and so brutal had passed between them.
God, it was awful, all of it.
Zanne hung up the phone before the meeting was over. She’d heard enough. She went out onto the porch, the midafternoon sun so bright it was dizzying. She didn’t want to be buried this deep in Ted’s past. The limits of their relationship asserted themselves violently, like traffic spikes barring return. Nothing she’d learned these last eight years helped her understand what he could have been thinking, blaming Phoebe.
Phoebe had gone to Jerry for help because she felt she had to. She must have had a plan, but somewhere along the way, the plan had slipped from her control. Just as it had for Zanne when she started modeling. She was eighteen years old and new in town. Her apartment had mice, her roommate was in a cult, her credit card was maxed out, and staying in LA was becoming less and less tenable by the day. She always felt about twenty dollars away from being crushed by it all. She’d seen the modeling agency’s ad in the back of LA Weekly and imagined posing in turtlenecks for some catalogue or standing next to a Mustang at the car show. And sure, they’d sent her out on a few calls like that, but mostly they sent her to parties. What other choice did she have? Who else was going to pay her that much just to show up? Enough to survive, enough to spare her the humiliation of going to Noah for help? Not Omega. They paid their PAs in peanuts and experience.
It had been easy enough to put on a skimpy dress from Hot Topic and stand close to one of those men for a couple of hours. The alcohol flowed freely and they were so desperate and sad, they always had something to make the time pass—pot, coke, ecstasy, speed—and if they didn’t, Zanne did. Had anyone forced her to leave with them? Not exactly. But could you call it consent when she was tottering in those heels, some guy’s arm around her waist, and she was tired, so tired, and the front seat of his car was a place to sit and the window was a place to rest her head, and she just wanted to close her eyes and forget? She knew what the money was for, those hundreds left on the coffee table in the morning, rationally she did, but also it felt like she’d gotten one over on everyone because she knew something no one else did. This wasn’t her. This wasn’t even precisely her body. The real Zanne was locked away, shut up tight, pounding at the door to go free. And one day, finally, Zanne let her out. She chopped off all her hair and threw away her phone, the one the agency always called her on, and before she had time to panic or change her mind, she packed her car and drove back to Massachusetts.
Fuck Ted if he’d never seen a plan slip through his fingers. Fuck him if he’d never had to choose whose thumb to be under. Vultures circled—a producer, a grip, older men who could’ve set her up or at least paid the light bill—but Zanne refused to go to them for help or cash. She kept her slate clean at Omega, and instead she went to those parties, where strangers tipped her for being pretty, for listening to their tales of woe or smiling when they tried to be funny. If she had to humble herself to make it in this town, she thought, on balance, that it would be better if she didn’t know the men. Maybe she’d been right. Maybe not. Was it a curse or a blessing that the only detail she could clearly recall was a sharp scent, a panicked mix of beer and musk?
All her life, people had looked at Zanne and seen one type of girl, when inside she felt completely different. They expected her to be mysterious and alluring and experienced, to give as good as she got, even if she wanted none of it. The attention had started young—when she was a baby, according to her mom—strangers at the grocery store, babysitters at the playground, even her teachers telling her how pretty she was and marveling over her eyes. They were blue like deep water, like twilight, sapphires, true blue, not a hint of green. She’d heard it all, and nothing she said in response was ever right. If she said thanks, she sounded conceited; if she deflected, she was ungrateful; if she said nothing at all, she was just rude. Mrs. Rivera sometimes came to her defense with that righteous fury of hers. “What are you staring at, pendejo? Can’t you see she’s a child?” But when Zanne tried that tactic herself, it usually backfired. All those compliments boomeranged back as insults—tease, bitch, cunt. The best thing to do, she’d learned, was to pretend she hadn’t heard. Especially as she got older—when her male teachers stumbled over themselves and even her own father looked at her like she was a maddeningly ripe fruit sent to perplex him—pretending ignorance was a necessary defense.
When those men at the parties looked her over, she let her eyes go lifeless. She thought of dead things. A goldfish in a toilet bowl, charred trees after a wildfire, her mother. Sometimes that was enough to make men stop. Sometimes it only made things worse. So she’d lock herself in the bathroom, put her key into a baggie, and do a bump. She’d look in the mirror, wipe her nose with her thumb, and wonder what her mom would think of her doing blow in the bathroom of a bar. Maybe she would’ve understood. It was a fantasy Zanne had liked to slip inside, that her mom was watching over her, on her side no matter what. She could feel her mother all around her, suffusing her with warmth. Then she blinked and she was back in the bathroom again, the smell of piss on the seat, the fluorescent tube flickering above, the echo of her mother still there in her face. Was it just the blow? No. Maybe.
Standing here now, on the porch outside Ted’s office, Zanne’s jaw ached just as fiercely as it had in those teeth-gnashing days when she still used. She was grinding her teeth again. She inserted her tongue between her molars to make herself stop. The fight with Gaby, what had happened to Phoebe, what had happened to herself—all of it left Zanne feeling exhausted and unclean. Lauren sprinted past with two more yellow fedoras. Whitney Houston pledged her total devotion over the sound system. It was almost time. The party was about to start.
Zanne couldn’t know what she now knew and also bow and scrape at Ted’s feet. Let someone else sweat through their shirt hoping they made the appropriate amount of eye contact with him. It should’ve been Dawn sitting at that desk today, and it should have been Dawn who called Caitlyn Alvarez and coolly told her that the Stablers could no longer accommodate her at their table at the gala, that someone would be in touch to discuss another event at a more convenient time. It should have been Dawn listening to Caitlyn deflate across the telephone line, all the fight going out of her like a balloon caught in a tree, no threat to anyone but herself. And today Zanne should’ve stayed home and let someone else deal with the runaway monkey and the yellow hats while she played hooky with her girlfriend.
Why had she made the call to Caitlyn—because Ted had asked nicely? When Zanne was eighteen, she’d been desperate; she could chalk up her bad choices to that, at least. What was her excuse now? Career advancement?
All around the estate, people were working furiously to pull off the party of all parties. And tomorrow they’d be back at their desks again, looking for a better walking shoe for Ted’s skinny feet, a better bike helmet for Zoe, a better guitar teacher for Flynn, a better yoga guru for Holly. Better, better, better. What a ridiculous performance they were all engaged in, pretending that these matters were urgent or intellectually complex. Chief of staff, what a joke. This wasn’t the West Wing. They were servants, not trusted advisers. They were renting their brains out by the hour, and there was always someone—smart and broke, just like they used to be—who would happily take their place.
Your only choice at the end of the day was to stay or leave. You could find another job, one where the pay was commensurate with the actual risks you were engaged in. Or you could stay and make more money than you’d ever thought you’d have the chance to make. All you had to do was consent to this permanent state of tension: fretting about the dumbest tasks, holding anxiety for billionaires who felt entitled to a worry-free existence, handling what they couldn’t handle, no questions asked.
Had Ted thought about Phoebe at all these past two years, as Jerry’s victims dominated the headlines? How could he not have, and yet Zanne doubted it.
But if she left—refused the promotion, handed in her resignation—who would suffer? Not Ted, who would find someone else to do his bidding. Not Mark, whose self-confidence only seemed to grow with each new indignity heaped on his plate. Not Erin, who would survive them all, whose enduring strength was how little she thought of herself.
No, Zanne would not leave. Just be smart, she told herself. She would not become emotionally invested in the Stablers. She would expect less of them, not more, and she would keep that promotion.
For months after she was first hired, she’d had a speech ready to deliver if she needed it, the burn-it-all-down-and-quit speech about the perils of privilege and the value of respect among unequals. But the trick, she’d always known, would be not to need it, nor to get provoked into an invective against CEO compensation figures and Hollywood’s treatment of women, minorities, and the working poor, nor to suggest that if someone in Ted’s position wanted to make a real difference in the world, he could send his kids to public school, not just bankroll a documentary every now and again.
Zanne had had years of practice with Noah and thought she could restrain herself in her dealings with Ted, too. Abjection took many forms.
She saw now that what she needed was a speech for herself. You will not shoot yourself in the foot. You will not let someone else leave with your money. You will dance with your beautiful girlfriend and then take her home. When Gaby got back, Zanne would apologize and try again. She would show her the house in Mar Vista one more time. It was nothing to be afraid of. It was modest, perfect for a couple but easy to rent to a young family if they ever needed the income, a sound investment. It wouldn’t chain Zanne to this job; in time, it would free her from it.
She went back inside the cottage, just in time to see the door to Ted’s office open and Phoebe exit alone. Zanne craned her head to see if Ted would be handling the farewell as personally as he had the welcome, but it seemed not.
“I’ll see you out,” Zanne said.
Phoebe stepped onto the porch first, the sunlight haloing around her like it was claiming her. Zanne followed, and they walked together up the knoll, past the pool house to the terrace, where everything was almost ready. Mark was screwing together an easel next to the train track. On the table next to him was a foam core sign that would rest on it: All Aboard! Take a Ride on the Pump Car Express. The track changed to “Baby, I Love Your Way.”
