The work wife, p.23
The Work Wife, page 23
“Okay, yeah. Sorry if I overreacted.”
“No problem. I always appreciate the heads-up. You guys are keeping us busy today!”
Jane turned on her Ferragamos and left. Zanne had done her duty, pointing out a potential land mine to a professional minesweeper. It was remarkable the machinery that existed to protect Ted, and from whom? Phoebe and Caitlyn? Two women just trying to do their jobs? Zanne couldn’t stop thinking about the call she’d made to Caitlyn, the way Caitlyn had sighed when Zanne stopped talking, as if she recognized all the things she was about to lose, not just a seat at a party but her name.
Zanne supposed she understood why Ted was at odds with Caitlyn—his business had been threatened—but why had Holly felt threatened? And yet she had, for a time. Zanne had heard her on the phone and seen the emails Holly had sent to the other ladies who lunched. She’s such a flirt, can you blame him? I heard she was obsessed with Nick, actually. She’s always been difficult, that’s why they let her go from that TV show, too. Zanne had written it off as stupid gossip at the time. Now she heard the subtext running beneath—a fiery Latina, a vixen’s body, a troublemaker’s mouth. Putting it all together—the gala invite rescinded in secret, the settlement, the NDA, the fact that Caitlyn hadn’t landed a role in over a year—it added up to something more than just gossip. It looked like a campaign. And Zanne had played her part in it.
“There you are,” Erin said, the desperation in her voice so plain, you’d think she’d just lost Luca at Target. James appeared behind her.
“Here I am,” Zanne said.
“We can’t find Holly,” Erin said.
“Did you check upstairs?”
“Her car’s gone,” James said.
“She took off,” Erin said, gripping her portfolio so tightly she was bound to leave fingerprints. “In her car.”
“Shit. Is her driver’s license still current?”
“I renewed it for her last year, but I don’t know if she has it on her. Should we tell Ted? You know he doesn’t like it when she drives.”
“Holly’s car has GPS in it, right?” Zanne asked.
“Yeah,” James said.
“Can you figure out where she went?”
“Really, Zanne?”
“Well—”
“Tracking Holly’s car when she obviously wants privacy? It’s crossing a line.”
“Is it?” Zanne frowned.
What exactly was crossing a line where the Stablers were concerned, when the line had been drawn so faintly to begin with? When Holly dinged up the Range Rover last fall—Zoe had begged her mother to drop her off at a sleepover, just once, like the other mothers did—Ted emailed Holly to remind her to call on Ilya, certain it would be a better use of her time since she could read or send texts while in transit. He’d cc’ed Zanne, Dawn, Erin, Julia, Ilya, and James on the email—surely that was crossing a line, too?—and Zanne had wondered what action, exactly, she was supposed to take to ensure Holly’s compliance.
“I need to head home,” James said, disappearing down the hall.
“Can I show you something?” Erin said, opening her portfolio. “I was tidying up in Holly’s closet and I found this inside the purse she was carrying this morning.” She handed Zanne a folded-in-half postcard. It was the same one Zanne had tucked inside her notebook. Warrior Bride, a film by Phoebe Lee.
“That’s Ted’s ex-wife, Phoebe. She and Holly met at the breakfast this morning,” Zanne said.
Erin put her hand to her mouth. “Outside the bathroom. Holly couldn’t wait to get away. I had no idea! Ted was married before?”
“Apparently.”
So Ted’s two wives had shared more than cursory conversation. There’s always an opportunist lurking around, Holly had told Ted this morning, before she left for the marina. She’d meant Phoebe. Phoebe had pressed the postcard into her hand, and Holly had crammed it into her tiny purse, putting it out of sight. Had Holly seen her at the party? Or worse, talking to Ted? And now Holly was gone. Disappeared in the middle of the party she was hosting. She was behaving unpredictably at a time when she and Ted both needed to be predictable, above reproach. And if reporters were following her... No. It was not good.
Mark tucked his head into the solarium. “Holly’s gone?”
His office was down the hall and he’d been listening.
“We lost her,” Erin warbled.
The Stablers didn’t get lost. Ted and Holly didn’t understand how carefully their family’s movements were tracked throughout the day, responsibility handed off from staffer to staffer as they passed from one activity to the next. He’s awake, someone would email, and Katya would know to start Ted’s breakfast. In the shower, someone would write, and Raj would go to the gym to wipe down the machines he’d used. Leaving piano, and Steve and Julia would check Google maps to predict Zoe and Holly’s arrival at home. Coming up the driveway, and the math tutor would head to the children’s study with his flash cards and manipulables to wait.
“Why’d she take off?” Mark asked. “Because of the ad? I’ve seen a few people who guessed that Ted and Holly are the Hollywood Couple, but I’ve also seen votes for Kim and Kanye, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ryan Murphy, and half a dozen of the Real Housewives. I get that it’s embarrassing, but it’s gonna blow over. The bigger problem is the leak,” Mark said.
“Leak? Where?” Zanne asked. Had a water main broken on the driveway again? Was the faucet dripping in the downstairs powder room?
“We’ve got a mole. Someone who works here wrote a tell-all about it on InsideScoop—pretty convincingly, I might add.”
“Oh no,” Erin whispered, eyes wide.
“When Ted and Holly find out, heads will roll.”
Zanne’s heart began to heave, but she made her eyes go dead inside the way she used to when unpleasant things were happening. Just be smart, she’d told herself earlier, and then she’d gone and written that confession. Just be smart, she’d told herself so many times, right before she used again.
“All the more reason why this isn’t a great day for her to be disappearing on us,” Zanne said.
“Is it ever?” Mark said.
It was true that their jobs got exponentially harder whenever the family veered from the daily plan, following their own whims and timelines. But today there was more than just a tightly choreographed schedule that would be derailed by a family member going rogue.
“There’s a reporter who’s been trying to talk to Holly,” Zanne said. “I’m worried the press might follow her.”
“Let’s check her credit card,” Mark said.
“What?”
Mark smiled at her. “Come on.”
He led them back to his office under the back stairs, where the laundry room was meant to go if you were the kind of family that did your own laundry. Mark sat at his desk and moved through a serious of screens and keystroke shortcuts, adroit at checking on the family’s recent purchases.
“How do you know—” Zanne asked, because Joe was the accountant on staff, not Mark, and it had never occurred to Zanne to log into the family’s bank accounts. Use their credit cards? Sure, they all did that. How else would you pay for an elephant for a cocktail party? And if you were a woman, you’d recite by heart Holly’s birthday and social security number when the bank’s fraud department called to confirm that you were Holly and you really just dropped fifteen thousand dollars on an elephant for the evening. So maybe it wasn’t so weird that Mark had jumped to the next logical step and was now accessing the Stablers’ accounts directly, despite it being another staffer’s area of responsibility. There was an argument to be made that he was just taking some initiative.
“Let’s see what you’ve bought today, Holly,” Mark said, rubbing his fingertips together like the hacker in a heist movie. “What have you been up to?”
Zanne moved a box of old remote controls and dragged the extra chair over next to Mark. She sat down. Erin stood behind them.
“Here,” Mark said. He pointed at the first item listed, top of the stack. “Seventy-seven dollars at The Pier at Malibu. Did she go out to eat or something?”
“She was supposed to go to Gladstones this week with Rebecca Freeman,” Erin said. “Maybe they changed plans?”
Zanne said, “No, she’s fishing.”
Mark laughed. “Gone fishin’! That’s hilarious.”
“Right now?” Erin asked. “During the party?”
“She’s been trying to get out of this party all day. Remember? She wanted to rent a boat and go to Catalina. She gave us an impossible task to pull off with the elephant and the giraffe and the monkey and thirty goddamn giant yellow hats, and we did it, but what she really wants to do is sit in a dinghy and float. Remember this morning? She said her dad would roll over in his grave if he saw all of this.”
“Oh, Holly. Poor thing.”
“I guess,” Zanne said. She couldn’t summon the sympathy for Holly that Erin could.
“I’m going to just check with Rebecca’s assistant to make sure they didn’t reschedule.”
“Okay,” Zanne said, but she knew she was right.
Erin went to her office next door. Mark turned his chair to face Zanne. “What do we do now?”
“I don’t know. This wasn’t covered in the staff manual.”
“I heard...” He trailed off.
“What?”
“I heard something once, about an extraction plan.”
“An extraction plan?”
Something in the back of Zanne’s brain lit up, a weak flicker that began to throb more brightly as her attention went to it.
“You would know more about it than I do,” Mark said.
“But they didn’t mean it for a situation like this,” she said. “That was for, like, if one of the kids got kidnapped. Or if there was a custody dispute, and someone tried to leave the country with them.”
The protocol had been developed before her time, but Zanne remembered coming across it when she updated the emergency protocols a few years ago. She’d been focused on the common catastrophes and making sure the information provided was accurate and the reasoning sound—double-checking the addresses for the nearest hospital emergency rooms, swapping out the expired survival kits with new batteries and headlamps and fire extinguishers, making sure IT was backing up to an off-site server and upgrading the generators to newer models. Some of the hypotheticals were too outlandish to take seriously, though Flynn’s fishing trip had since reminded Zanne that nothing was too outlandish to prepare for. A heart attack in a blackout. A tsunami after an earthquake. Looting in the middle of a wildfire.
She remembered only the basic gist of the extraction plan. There were men who could be dispatched. The men were with law enforcement, but this would be moonlighting. They were paid a retainer to answer the call. They carried guns.
“No, this is crazy,” Zanne said. “We’re not siccing a bunch of goons on Holly.”
“No. Of course. I’m sure she’ll be back soon. You gonna tell him?”
“That is the question.”
The longer Holly was gone, the more likely it was that Zanne would have to tell Ted. But right now, what point would it serve? She stood to go. Her phone pinged and she looked down, half expecting it to be Holly sending a picture of the sunset at Malibu pier, #nofilter.
But it was Jane who’d texted. Thanks for the heads-up. We’re on it!
“Oh no,” Zanne said. She could kick herself for having brought the publicist into this mess. Half an hour ago, the contours of the problem had seemed simple and sharp. A reporter was working on a story, and the publicist would make sure that it was favorable to her top clients. But now things were moving too quickly and people with only half the story were guiding decisions that couldn’t be undone. Holly was gone, Phoebe was back. If the situation blew up, Zanne’s failure to contain it would be self-evident.
Zanne texted Jane, Thanks. Send links when you have them.
Jane was already texting back.
“Everything okay?” Mark asked.
“We’ll see,” Zanne said.
The link arrived and she clicked on it. It took her to On Set’s website. There was barely an article, just the lede, “Stabler Slams Silver,” and then a statement from Ted. Zanne read the statement quickly.
“Fuck,” she said before she even got to the end of it. How did this happen so quickly? Ted must have drafted it himself after the meeting with Phoebe and told Jane to push it out. He was lying about what he knew, and if the press found out, it would be a nightmare. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“I can help, Zanne. Just tell me what you need.”
What she needed was a giant muzzle. One that could silence Ted, Jane, Mark, and the voice in her head that told Zanne she was going to get fired, today, no severance, and then what? What would she have to offer Gaby? She’d lose the job, the house, and the girlfriend in one fell swoop.
24
Phoebe
Phoebe stood with her back to a potted umbrella tree, gobbling down a pig in a blanket and pretending to text. For half an hour, she’d been circling the party and getting nowhere. She recognized some faces from the producers’ round-robin and the conference program, others from Variety, and one guy she could’ve sworn was an intern at Omega back in the day. The only people who looked up when she passed near were the single men. The older men had brought their wives for protection, and there was no reaching them. No matter who she spoke to, 50 percent of the conversation involved scant eye contact, people glancing over her shoulder for literally anyone more important. They talked about the weather, traffic, cleanses, real estate, SoulCycle, and traffic again, but whenever they got to the “what are you working on” portion of the conversation, it was like hitting gridlock. Once it became clear that Phoebe could not help them, nor they her, there was nothing left to say. She couldn’t greenlight, hire, boost, or buy anything, and the men (and it was mostly men) she spoke with were full of excuses for why they couldn’t work with her. They were looking for a comedy; they were already packaging deals for three other directors; it was too bad nobody was making small, quiet films like hers anymore, everything was Marvel and superheroes and explosions. Who said anything about quiet?! she wanted to yell. Who said her movie was small? The only thing small was the budget, and she would’ve been happy to have a bigger one. But there was no sense protesting when you’d already lost your audience.
Phoebe kept an eye on Dana, a Netflix VP she’d met with at the round-robin, in line at the bar. She’d been pleasant but noncommittal, as one was at those things. This party was the place to chat her up, without the formality and the constraints of the conference’s rules. Once Dana had her drink, Phoebe would try to talk to her again. She wished Malcolm was here or better yet Alicia, someone to nudge her forward the way she used to nudge Ted. Phoebe had the right instincts for networking but never enjoyed it—who did?—and you could will-gather yourself into a corner if you weren’t careful.
It wasn’t rocket science—talking to people, learning their names, remembering how important it was to stay flexible and that any good negotiation left both sides feeling like winners. She’d learned this by watching Umma at the grocery. Umma knew which drivers to be sweet to, slipping them candy to take home to their kids, and which ones to yell at or else they’d take all day unloading, blocking traffic and pissing off the ajummas next door. She made it her business to know which sales reps were on the way up and eager to give discounts on ramyun, and which ones had just been demoted and needed a bump in volume to justify a price cut. Her trump card when she needed an out was invoking her husband—the convenient idea of him, anyway; an iron fist, cold and unyielding, when anyone who knew Apa knew what a soft heart he had. “I need to check with my husband,” she’d say, and then five minutes later, having done her math to ensure the deal was a good one, she would return from the empty stockroom, all smiles and appeasement. “He said no, but I convinced him.” With her example, Umma had taught her daughter that if you wanted your business handled right, you handled it yourself. Because if you came to this country with one sheet, one pillowcase, and thirty-five dollars to your name, if your nearest family was five thousand miles away and in no position to help if you went belly up, and if you somehow started a business that could feed your family and pay for your children’s piano lessons, you didn’t outsource. Self-sufficiency wasn’t just a value, it was your only choice.
That was why Phoebe had handled the business end of The Starfighter. Like her mother, she knew when to play good cop and when to play bad. On set—where everyone knew how faint Ted’s hold was on reality (the clock, their budget, the mercury, the needs of mere mortals to eat and use the bathroom), and how little appetite he had for a fight, how derailed he could get by tiny insurrections and then how disappointed in himself he was afterward for the energy he’d spent, the shooting time he’d lost—she was firm. She made sure no one took advantage while Ted was submerged in his dream. Back in Burbank, where The Starfighter filled Omega’s coffers, Phoebe was a shape-shifter, charming one minute and apologetic the next. It was easier, frankly, to meet with the execs alone and play her trump card when she needed it. “Come on, guys. You really want me to take these numbers back to Ted when Silvertown is sniffing around? Jerry Silver came by the house himself. I’ll do what I can to make sure Ted knows how much you value him, but let’s be honest. Money talks.”
The lucky bastard. Only in the last year did she realize what a gift she’d given Ted by letting him contend solely with his artistic vision. She’d seen up close the way his talent doubled between the first two films. And there’d been so many films since then, nearly one a year. His set pieces were better now, his visual grammar sharper, his understanding of the interplay of light and sound that much deeper. That focus of his, really, was what she’d wanted when she’d hired Alicia. She’d wanted a partner to back her up, tracking all the names so that she would be free to be simply the director, the one with the vision. But she couldn’t afford that level of service. She’d have to nudge herself.
