More Muffia (The Muffia Book 2) (25 page)
Pending no school functions, I’m there. BTW, K, I found a slew of businesses linked to that address, including a sports drink, a DVD workout program, a Twitter follower generator, and yes, porn. There were also job postings on Craigslist linking to that address. Anyway, you look at it; they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, so we WILL shut ’em down!
Pretty much everyone said they wanted to be there, which meant that when the time came for the bust, half of us would actually show. A couple of Muffs commented on liking
When Will There Be Good News
?, which was gratifying, and three or four mentioned their dresses for the upcoming benefit. All of them had something to say about my online dating pursuits when
Ding
—another email from Gary popped into my box.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Skype
Come on, just for a little bit? I’d like to see you. It’ll be fun.
Fun? I didn’t think so. The answer was still no, but apparently he wasn’t getting it.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Skype
Some other time, Gary. I’m not much of a Skyper.
I hit
send
, clicked back into the Muff thread, when
Ding
—Gary sent another email.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Skype
Come on. We can watch each other.
If I hadn’t known it before, I now had a firm grasp of what he meant by fun. Well, it was time to put an end to the euphemism.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Skype
I’m not getting naked on camera, Gary.
Ding—
From: [email protected]
Subject: Skype
You might really like it.
Ding—
From: [email protected]
Subject: Us
I might. But I’m not doing it.
Ding—
From: [email protected]
Subject: Skype
Money back guarantee.
Sheesh, he was persistent.
Before I had a chance to think about how to respond,
Ding
—he emails me again.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Skype
Or you can send me a sexy picture and just watch me. It would make me very happy.
I
knew
I shouldn’t have answered that email. There’d been a reason why I’d gone on a date with John over Gary—though at present I couldn’t remember the reason—when the reality was neither of them was a good fit. In fact, they were both the lowest of the low hanging fruit—so low as to be already on the ground. And it was my own fault. All my life it seems, most of the guys who come on to me are the ones I don’t want. I was kidding myself if I thought it would be any different now that the meat market has moved online. The nice guys—the handsome, smart, quiet guys who had it all going on—didn’t need to expend energy getting a date. Women found them. So if I wanted one for myself, I would need to expend more energy than I was currently exerting to get one. For now, though, I just needed to shut Gary down and explain why.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Skype
Sorry, Gary, I don’t want to watch you masturbate. Maybe if I was 17 I’d be curious, but now it’s just not satisfying. I haven’t even met you, so it’s a little presumptuous of you to think I’d even want to. It’s not like you’re paying me for my time—and please don’t offer. I’d recommend videotaping yourself and putting it on the Internet. I’m sure there are millions of other women out there who’d watch you do yourself. Maybe you can even sell it. Good luck.
I left out that I knew a porn purveyor who could help with distribution. Let him figure out how to do that on his own.
Hostile? Perhaps. But was it “nice” of him to jump to masturbation? I think not. Gary was not a gentleman, nor was anyone else I’d met on the website. Frank was a gentleman, but he wasn’t interested. But could I have him wrong? Maybe he was one of those nice, handsome guys who had it going on but was used to women making passes at him. That’s it; I just hadn’t expended enough energy.
Well, if I ever get another chance
...
In that spirit, I deleted all the
NowLove
emails having to do with winks and nudges, and so-and-so-wants-to meet-yous in my inbox. And I got back to what mattered—my Muffs.
From: [email protected]
To: TheMuffia
Subject: re: Shut ’em down
Dear Muffs, Thanks for all your support. As soon as I know for sure that they’re inside shooting, I’ll put out the APB on the 911 and come over asap! xxK
Closing the laptop, I sat back.
Men.
The whole subject was tough—organic chemistry when you’re an art major kind of tough. So tough that busting a porn ring seemed safer and easier by comparison.
“Hi, Titania,” I said, catching up to her as she stepped off the elevator into the lobby of the Talent Partners Building at about noon the following day. She was dressed provocatively, per usual—pretty pumps, bare legs, slim leather skirt, and a crisp, white blouse unbuttoned to reveal just a hint of cleavage into which a tiny gold pendant dangled. She was a hot little number, no matter which sex she favored, and the male security guard registering the building’s daily visitors gave her a flattering stare.
“Hi, Quinn,” she said, haltingly—as if she suspected I was about to give her bad news. The girl was no ninny.
It was lunchtime and we weren’t alone in the lobby.
“I wanted to talk to you about something,” I said, drawing her toward me.
Her overly-mascaraed eyelashes fluttered open and closed—a few times in succession—like a baby bird testing its wings before it actually knows they work.
“Um...okay,” she said, inching toward the building’s front entrance. I began inching along next to her.
Glancing over my shoulder, I fortunately didn’t notice any Talent Partners clients or employees—only those I presumed were affiliated with the building’s other occupants. I leaned in, not like Sheryl Sandberg recommends, but just so as not to have my voice bounce around the marble-enclosed foyer. “Are you trying to get me fired?”
She stopped, not looking at me, and opened her handbag as if searching for something. “Whaaa...t?”
Oh, come on, you heard me.
We were standing just inside the building now, in front of the doors—not a great place to pause.
“Let’s keep moving, shall we?” I pushed on the revolving door, each of us in our separate glass compartment as the door spun around its center before spilling us onto Wilshire Boulevard.
“So
are
you?” I asked again.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She started walking, long strides now, her heels clicking on the cement sidewalk.
“Don’t let me keep you from doing whatever you were going to do. I’ll just walk alongside.”
She gave me a sideways glance. “I was going to Chipotle.”
“Me, too!” I said with glee. “Don’t you love the bowls? I prefer barbacoa myself, so was quite disappointed when the whole thing happened with the pig farmers.” I could see in her face that she thought I was nuts. It was fun.
“Ahh, I usually get the salad.”
“The salads are good, too, but I find they’re really just like the bowls except with more lettuce.”
Enough with the mundanities
. “How did you get the pictures?”
Again she gave me the vacant,
“Whaaa...t?”
“You know ‘what.’ The pictures,” I said again. “And just in case you send pictures to a lot of people, I’m talking about the ones you sent to Jamie.”
She stopped for a second, me a beat later, and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then she started off again.
Of course she’s going to say that.
I knew she was going to say that but stupidly held out a misplaced hope she’d own up to sending them.
“Are you denying you sent Jamie pictures?”
“Ahhh… ”
“So you
admit
it?”
“What pictures are we talking about?”
“The pictures of me.”
That seemed to get her. “Where would I have gotten these pictures of you that you think I sent to Jamie?” Now she was defiant.
You’re not handling this right, Quinn. She should be cowering by now.
Let me just say, I don’t like conflict. For all my snarking, I generally avoid ever having to directly confront the source of my snarkiness. But this was my career on the line, and I really didn’t want to be—nor was I qualified to do—anything other than a talent agent. If I was to hold on to my job, that meant conflict. Muff Maddie the Mediator told me just to keep my voice steady and take long, slow breaths, just as I do when I say my aphorisms.
Yes, yes, yes
...
“That’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said calmly.
“I did not send any pictures of you because I did not have any pictures of you to send,” she said in a clipped voice.
“But you’re saying you
did
send pictures to Jamie.”
“Yes, but… ”
“Ah-ha!” I said victoriously, remembering too late that was precisely how Maddie told me
not
to behave.
“The pictures I sent to Jamie were not of
you
!”
“So you had someone else send those pictures,” I said.
Very clever.
“What pictures?” She appeared now to think I was certifiably insane.
“Of course you can’t admit it; I get it.”
A cute guy with a nice build entered my field of vision. “Hi, Titania,” he said, pulling his Don Draper shades low onto his nose and smiling appraisingly. Though I was not on a first name basis with him, I recognized him as one of ours; I’d seen him at the last company barbecue. But to him, I wasn’t even there. Such are the young and beautiful.
“Oh, hello, Sam!” said Titania, sounding very girly and sexy all of a sudden, in contrast to how she was talking to me. I could tell just how much of Titania was put on and artificial; it seemed like a rather large percentage.
“Are you really gay?” I asked her once Sam was out of earshot.
She swung around to face me and I recognized an expression of—horror, maybe?
“I mean, it’s just that you don’t really seem gay to me,” I continued, “what with all the men and everything.”
“Sam and I are just friends.” She resumed her march to Chipotle.
“That’s good, because otherwise, the guy you perform regular body locks with might get upset.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” This time she said these words with more vocal power than I’d heard up to this point.
“You seem more ‘bi’ to me,” I said. “No judgment, of course; just sayin’… ”
She stopped again and turned on me. “Who told you this?”
“An itty bitty birdie. I don’t know what kind.”
“You’re making up lies because Jamie is going to fire you.”
Oops
. I do not believe she meant to say that.
So...Jamie had let it slip; a faux pas, to be sure, but it probably wasn’t actionable. Meanwhile, I could see a noticeable frisson developing in her girlfriend’s demeanor—tiny glimmers of fear were detectable in Titania’s eyes and voice, but she hadn’t yet cracked.
She looked away from me. Then, as if suddenly realizing where she was, she led us into the closest open building, through a glass door. Once again, I found myself in the make-up department at Barney’s.
Excellent.
I needed lip liner and had more than enough room on credit after returning the Natacha Marros.
“You have no proof,” she whispered, as we approached the currently unattended Jo Malone display.
How presumptuous to think I’d make any accusation without the ability to back it up.
She stared at me in horror as I picked up a bottle of Mimosa & Cardamom and sprayed some on my neck. “Actually, that’s inaccurate,” I said, sotto voce, continuing to spray the cologne the length of my forearm. “
We
do have proof.
Mmmm
, that smells good. Doesn’t that smell good?” I said, offering my wrist.
“We?” Her face went blank—an expression I hadn’t seen in all the sucking up she did around the office. She appeared to be suffering from incomprehension disorder, and the puzzling thing was, it seemed real. Did she really not know what I was talking about?
“It doesn’t matter who
we
are,” I said. “We just want to know what it is you want.”
The thing about being around actors as long as I have is you learn to spot the real from the fake pretty quickly. In the business of show business, the real and the fake are on display, side by side, all the time. So if Titania was acting, it was an Oscar-worthy performance.
“Please don’t tell Jamie,” she implored. “I
need
this job.”
“Funny you say that, Titania, because I need my job, too, and I’m not going to let you take it from me.” Maddie probably would not have recommended that I said that, either.
Too sarcastic; too argumentative
. I put the cologne down.
“You’re not going to tell Jamie, are you? Please don’t, please—” She was really scared now.
“I don’t have to tell her if
you
tell her that sending those pictures was just a joke.”
“But I didn’t send her any pictures!” she protested. “Can I ask what they were of? I mean, what you were doing in them?”
“It’s not important,” I said. “Let’s do this—I won’t say anything to Jamie about your boyfriend and you somehow get her to believe those pictures will never hit the Internet.”
“But I don’t know… ” She took a big gulp of air—a sort of pre-sob. Now she was in Jennifer Lawrence territory with the acting chops. Tears were forming at the corners of her perfectly made up eyes. Hopefully that mascara was waterproof. “I’ll do anything; I’ll do whatever you say,” she begged.