Plus One

Advance Praise

“A smart and funny novel about Hollywood, but where it truly shines is in Christopher Noxon's stunning and painfully accurate depiction of the complex rhythms and growing pains of a marriage.”

— Jonathan Tropper, author of
This Is Where I Leave You
and
One Last Thing Before I Go

“Behind every great man there's a great woman… and in Noxon's telling, behind every great woman there's a charming, deeply conflicted guy (sometimes holding a very expensive handbag). Hilarious and unflinching,
Plus One
is a funny, sharply observed, heartbreaking look at love, power, and happily-ever-after in Hollywood.”

— Jennifer Weiner, author of
All Fall Down, The Next Best Thing
, and
Good in Bed

“A funny, sharply observed novel about a guy with a first-world problem—a wife who's a hugely successful TV writer and producer—and the identity crisis that goes along with it. Noxon has reimagined the Hollywood novel from a whole new perspective.”

— Tom Perrotta, author of
Election, Little Children
, and
The Leftovers

“Well observed, honest, and laugh-out-loud funny,
Plus One
deftly tells a story from the inside of show business about being on the outside.”

— Matthew Weiner, creator of
Mad Men

“Hilarious and whip-smart, with a big beating heart at its center. I love this book, and so will you.”

— Dana Reinhardt, author of
We Are the Goldens

“A page-turning peek into the world of TV and families and money, this is Hollywood L.A. as seen from a newcomer's ambivalent perspective. I found it both fun and fascinating and unsettling to delve into this world, built convincingly by Noxon's gift with scenes and voices.”

— Aimee Bender, author of
The Color Master
and
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Juicy, fun, and the ultimate ‘inside-baseball' look at Hollywood,
Plus One
is rich with pitch-perfect details and social satire that sings. You'll laugh, you'll cringe, and you'll never look at a man on the red carpet holding a Judith Leiber bag in the same way.”

— Lian Dolan, author of
Elizabeth the First Wife
and
Helen of Pasadena

“The emotional and socio-demographic details are so rich and hilarious, it's almost as if Christopher Noxon himself had some kind of incredibly successful Hollywood wife.”

— Joel Stein,
Time
columnist and author of
Man Made

“In this sweet, savvy domestic comedy wrapped in Hollywood tinsel, Noxon captures, with humor and pathos, the plight of the ultimate red-carpet orphan.”

— Gigi Levangie, author of
The Starter Wife
and
The After Wife

“Noxon puts the fiercely comic roman(ce) in roman à clef.”

— Mark Ebner, author of
Hollywood, Interrupted

“After this smart, very funny and painfully honest novel, Christopher Noxon's wife should be proud to be his Plus One.”

— Rick Marin, author of
Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor

“Welcome to the New Hollywood, where the women are in charge and their spouses are on the guest list. Noxon knows this world first-hand, and his novel is warm, funny, and, most importantly, honest.”

— Neal Pollack, author of
Alternadad

Copyright © 2015 by Christopher Noxon

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Prospect Park Books

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Noxon, Christopher, author.

Plus One : a novel / by Christopher Noxon.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-938849-43-5

1.
  
Marriage--Fiction. 2.
  
Marketing executives--Fiction. 3.
  
Women television writers--Fiction. 4.
  
Success--Fiction. 5.
  
Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)--Fiction.
  
I. Title.

PS3614.O97P58 2015

813'.6--dc23

2014013282

Cover design by Robert Russell.

Illustrations by Christopher Noxon.

Book layout and design by Amy Inouye & Renee Nakagawa.

For Jenji

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Acknowledgments

One

A
lex pulled the invitation out of his breast pocket and laid it on his lap, admiring once again how the lettering danced across the creamy cardstock, the gold metallic script bunched up tightly to fit in the allotted space: FIGGY SHERMAN-ZICKLIN. How the in-laws had harrumphed when he and Figgy had announced, way back when, their plans to hyphenate—and to further flout custom by putting her last name in the showy cleanup spot. Because who said they couldn't? Everything was up for grabs, and SHERMAN-ZICKLIN had a better ring to it than ZICKLIN-SHERMAN. Okay, it was a mouthful. And sure, it did kind of sound like a pharmaceutical conglomerate. But no, the kids would not get hand cramps every time they wrote their name on a school worksheet.

No one was harrumphing now, were they? Here she was, FIGGY SHERMAN-ZICKLIN, nominated for Best Comedy in the roman-numeral-whatever Primetime Emmy Awards. And here he was, the soft shaygetz SHERMAN at the center of all those hard,
glottal, zingy, Semitic consonants, gliding along in a chauffeured Town Car through a camera-ready L.A. afternoon.

It was crazy, all of it, more than Alex could begin to get any sort of reasonable handle on. The Emmys weren't
real
; they came from inside the TV. He was pretty sure they were animated—they occurred in a make-believe world of fictional, distant-realm characters, ladies with shiny shoulders and men with faces three sizes too big for their heads. The Emmys may not have been quite as fictional as, say, the Oscars, but they were still plenty pretend, best viewed at home with wine and pizza and a gay or two for color commentary.

Barely fourteen months ago, Alex was the sensible one with a real job and Figgy was a fingernail-chewing, sporadically employed comedy writer who spent her days in a Cuban bakery drinking carrot juice until her teeth turned orange while banging out pilot scripts everyone liked but no one ever made. Until, miraculously, someone did. Her eleventh pilot, a dark and dirty dramedy about a housewife who runs a prostitution ring out of a scrapbooking shop, was picked up by a premium-cable network looking to “make some noise.” Now she was in Valentino and he was arm candy.

“Have I got lipstick on my teeth?” Figgy said, peering into a compact. “Oh God—I'm terrifying. I'm a sea cow. Or a manatee. Whichever one. I'm a pre-op transsexual. I'm a fucking tranny sea cow. God!”

“Fig, stop,” said Alex, scooting over and giving her thigh a squeeze, feeling the silver silk rub against her Spanx with a synthetic squeak. “You're gorgeous. Great looking. And you said it yourself—nobody looks at the writers anyway.”

“True,” she sighed, snapping the mirror shut. “We're the bathroom break. Fuck it. Why are we bothering with this at all? Why are we wasting the babysitter? Let's commandeer this bad boy and go for burritos!”

Was she serious? Would she really rather spackle the interior of a Town Car with carne asada than go to the actual Emmys? He wasn't entirely sure. She was wildly impulsive—she delighted in abandoning full shopping carts, dashing off on interstate road trips, and otherwise zigging off course at the last possible minute. It was Figgy who decided to call off the big formal wedding in favor of a civil ceremony that had all the pomp and romance of a driver's license renewal. Alex didn't regret it for a second—he'd had no desire to stand under a chuppah with three hundred of her family's temple friends and his crazy goy relatives—but for the Emmys, he wanted the full experience.

The truth was, Alex wouldn't miss this for anything. Figgy grew up on the funky, lower-rent peripheries of show business—her mom was a once-fabulous, now-cranky Hollywood party girl who'd married four times, twice to agents and currently to a Bronx-born hustler who made a mint in the seventies selling videotape supplies; Figgy had been to the Emmys herself when she was nine, famously falling asleep in Cloris Leachman's lap. But for Alex, all this was new. He'd grown up two hours and many worlds away in a mountain hippie hamlet near the Ojai Valley. He got comic mileage out of his upbringing now—people loved hearing about his Birkenstock lesbian mom, the llama who lived on their land, and the Indian shaman who shacked up on the back porch. But the reality was a lot lonelier and more chaotic than he let on. He didn't like to talk about it. Anyway, he'd gotten out, left all that behind, worked though his issues.