So 5 Minutes Ago (28 page)

I hear from the Phoenix. Or rather I hear from Tracy, who tells me I’m “on her call sheet” but that, due to the late night last night, “she will be getting to her calls later than usual.”

I get an e-mail from Troy, who’s on his way to some shoot somewhere. Some film offer he got at the last minute.
Daddy Madden would be proud. I am 2.

Finally, Rachel weighs in.

“So you did it,” she says.

“G did it to himself.”

“If it were that simple, only the good guys would be running Hollywood.”

“If it were that simple, this would be the smallest town in the world.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“You mean, other than go to Disneyland?”

“I mean, I heard his final act was to fire you.”

“Yeah, I guess I technically have thirty days.”

“Seriously, what are you going to do?”

I sigh. “I haven’t thought that far ahead. We still have the rest of award season to get through.”

“I meant with your life. You were so Jean-Paul Sartre the other night.”

“What do you mean, ‘the other night’?”

“You’re right, you’re always hung up about your life. Like it hasn’t even started and the rest of us have it all figured out.”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

“Well, in that case,” I say, “I guess I’m right where I should be.”

We make plans to meet later. For a drink. To celebrate. Or commiserate, depending on our moods. “By the way,” Rachel says, “I heard G hired a publicist. Some crisis-management firm. I also heard that Sony is interested in the rights to his story. Apparently they think that with a few changes, it makes a good little thriller.”

As for G, who knows if the rumor is true? He never even shows. The office is strangely muted. Lots of whispering behind closed doors. But then, what do you expect from publicists? They’ll deny news even when they make it.

Finally, the blandest of press releases goes out: “regrettable actions,” “resignation effective immediately.” Suzanne sends a mass e-mail announcing an all-office meeting first thing tomorrow, but meanwhile keep our mouths shut and stay the course. We are still in the midst of award season. Everyone seems relieved to go back to work.

Except me. I’ve been here since eight, since time began, and all I want to do is go home and sleep. For about three years. Or at least until award season is over. But I still have a ton of e-mails to return and a meeting tomorrow morning about some client’s movie I should prepare for. I check my watch. Coming up on seven. Everyone in the office has bailed. Even Steven. God knows why I’m still here. Maybe I know that if I leave, I might never come back.

I decide to give it another half hour. Tops. But even that’s going to require some stimulants. One of the muffins in that basket somebody sent over for something earlier today. I head down the hall to the kitchen. The kitchen that is its usual charming self. A pile of dirty coffee cups in the sink, napkins, and crumbs all over the counter. A spilled, empty container of vanilla soy milk. And the looted muffin basket. Just another one of our messes for the cleaning crew.

I wipe up the worst of it, root around the basket of muffin remains, and find a whole one. Or most of a whole one. Poppy seed, I think. Oh well. I hop up on the counter and start tearing the top off, bit by bit. You never want to rush this. I’m just pondering the idea of a second muffin, when the kitchen door flies open. Suzanne with an armload of flowers—lilies, irises, and roses. I’m so startled I immediately hop down.

“Alex, I didn’t know you were still here,” she says. “I was just looking for a vase.”

“Nice,” I say, nodding at the flowers. “Who sent them?”

I expect her to rattle off the name of a client’s manager. Or a studio publicist. The usual post-awards graft.

“My parents, actually,” she says, sounding embarrassed.

“Your
parents
sent you flowers?” Somehow it had never crossed my mind that Suzanne had parents. Not now. Not ever. She didn’t seem to need them.

“Is it your birthday?”

“No,” she says, turning toward the cupboards, looking for a vase. “They wanted to congratulate me.”

“For our Globe winners?”

“No.” She turns to look at me. “For keeping my job. For hanging on to my company.”

“They knew about that?” I say, stunned. Who tells their parents about their job? Who tells their parents about anything?

“Yes, they did,” she says, still looking at me.

“Wow.” I nod. “Lucky you.”

She looks at me for another long second. “You know, it is okay to trust people once in a while.”

“Really? I guess that’s something I haven’t learned yet,” I say, matching her gaze. I’ve worked alongside her for three years, put my own job on the line to protect hers, but I realize I don’t know her at all.

She pulls a vase from one of the cupboards, turns to the sink, drops in the flowers, and starts filling it with water. Over the rush of the tap, she says something I can’t hear.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I said, you could learn,” she says, turning back to me. “And you can start here.” She hands me the vase.

“No, no,” I say, shaking my head. “They’re yours. Why should I—”

“Take them. I want you to have them. You deserve them. You’re the reason I’m still here. Why we’re all still here. Besides, I owe you a thank-you and I’m sorry I didn’t say so before. I guess I was just so shocked to find out what had been happening here that it took me a minute to sort through it all.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Trust me,” she says, thrusting the vase, heavy and slippery with water, into my hands. “These belong to you.”

I take the flowers, breathing in their cold, damp fragrance. “Thanks,” I say, giving her a smile. “Thanks.” We’re just heading out into the hall, so quiet now you can hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead, when there’s a noise from the direction of G’s office. “Oh my God, did he come in?” I whisper.

“Probably his assistant cleaning out the crypt. Come on,” she says, heading down the corridor. Still carrying the flowers like some overburdened flower girl, I follow her.

Suzanne all but kicks in the door. G, in a pair of jeans and a sweater and glasses—glasses!—rummaging through his drawers. He looks up, startled. Nobody says anything for a minute.

“Doug—” is all Suzanne gets out.

“Ah, the good-bye girls,” he says, shutting drawers. “You know, I had my doubts about you, about this agency, right from the start.”

“Doug, I think it’s a little late for that kind of—”

“Do me one favor,” he says, looking up. “Don’t ‘Doug’ me. Not now. Not,” he says, nodding at the flowers, “in your little moment of triumph.”

I’m tempted to back out of the room. Let them have their showdown in private. They started this without me. They can finish it.

“I don’t know,” Suzanne says, turning to me. “I don’t think it’s so ‘little,’ do you, Alex? Seems to me it’s a pretty damn big moment of triumph.”

“Oh, you would,” Doug says, coming around the desk toward us. “You would think hanging on to this stupid agency is worth celebrating. Never made a dime. Never dreamed of making a dime until I came along with an idea how to turn this has-been into a cash cow. You just couldn’t see it.”

“Oh, she saw it,” I say suddenly. “She just saw it happening with her here.”

“I actually saw it happening for all of us,” Suzanne says. “I’m only sorry you didn’t.”

Down the hall, the sounds of the cleaning crew, their laughter, voices, hit the office. A vacuum cleaner roars to life.

“Spare me,” G says with a wave, turning back to his desk. “This is a small town. And as everybody knows, you only fail upward in Hollywood.”

The vacuuming grows louder. It sounds like the end of the world.

“You know, it’s really too bad you’re giving up on publicity,” I say, raising my voice over the noise. “Because you really can spin anything. You did what you did, nearly destroyed this place, and you still act like you’re the winner. That’s a real skill, lying like that,” I’m all but shouting now. “I can’t do it.”

Suddenly, the office door bursts open. A cleaning-crew guy pushing the roaring vacuum noses in. “Oh, sorry,” he says, looking up, startled to find us here. He reaches down and fumbles with the switch. Silence settles over the room. I look down at the flowers. “I can’t do it,” I say again, handing them back to Suzanne. “I don’t ever want to do it.”

And then it’s finally over. Just a half-burnt broom and a smoldering witch’s hat. And the requisite mopping-up by the lawyers.

Or it would have been if the day had ended there. With me staring out my window at the last of the rush-hour traffic on Wilshire, the sea of lights in the growing dusk, feeling more sad than anything. We had done it. G was dispatched. Suzanne had been spared. I had been spared. We had restored the universe to rights. We’d even had our final showdown at the OK Corral. So why did it feel like an ending, not a beginning?

“Hey,” I hear behind me.

I turn around. Charles. Looking the way one does after a cross-country flight, his tie loosened, a raincoat slung over one arm, and a look of utter exhaustion in his gray-green eyes.

“When did you get here?” I say, looking at my watch.

“Caught the first plane I could get this morning. Suzanne called me at home.”

“I guess that’s the beauty of flying east to west,” I say, turning back to the window. This is the first time I’ve seen him since our aborted flagrante delicto before Thanksgiving, and a lot has happened since. Maybe too much.

“Look, I think I owe you an apology.”

“Oh, let’s not go there,” I say. “I can’t remember that far back.”

“Okay, I suppose I deserve that,” he says, looking down. “But for the record, I am sorry. I’m sorry I pressured you about taking sides against Doug. And I’m sorry I didn’t respect your right to make your own decisions.”

“I don’t know,” I say, still gazing out the window. “How could you be expected to respect my decisions, when I didn’t?”

We stand there in silence for a minute. “But I’m mostly sorry about something else,” he finally says.

I look over at him.

“I’m sorry we never got to finish what we started here,” he says, running his hand through his hair, his silky forelock that I have touched only once.

I could say that I’m sorry as well. More than sorry. But it’s not about him. Or even us. “You know, last night I decided I was going to quit. That if G didn’t fire me, I was just going to quit. That I was finally finished with all this.”

“And what do you think now?” he asks, taking a step toward me.

“That I honestly don’t know.”

“You know, Suzanne and I have talked and there’s a much bigger role for you here now.”

I shake my head. “It’s not that. It’s really not. It’s just that so many people never know when to leave Hollywood. To just pack up and leave. I don’t want to be one of those people.”

“Look,” he says, coming up to me and fingering Steven’s tie. “Do you always wear this?”

I give a small laugh, shake my head, and reach up to undo the tie. In all the excitement, I’d forgotten I still had it on. But he catches my fingers in his fingers. “Look,” he says, pressing his forehead to mine and closing his eyes. “I want to hear all about it. I do. Why don’t we go to dinner tonight and talk about it. We can keep talking about it. Talking about it and everything else for as long as you want. As long as it takes.”

For a minute, I feel like I’m in that scene in
Bull Durham.
Toward the end where it’s raining and Kevin Costner tells Susan Sarandon he’s quitting, but that he wants to hear all her theories about life and baseball. For as long as it takes. That’s how I feel.

Except I’m not in a movie.

And I don’t want to be.

“Okay,” I say, closing my eyes and feeling the warmth of his head on mine. “We’ll keep talking.”

Acknowledgments

With particular thanks to Brian DeFiore, who first saw the light at the end of the tunnel—and figured out how to get there. Thanks, too, to Bruce Tracy and Ivan Held for their ardent enthusiasm, Tim Farrell for his unflagging and gracious stewardship, and Kate Garrick. Thanks also to Andrea and Dave de Vries, David Rensin, Lyman Leathers, the late Andre Dubus, Richard Sens, Nora Ephron, Leslie Peters, Stephanie Riseley, and, especially, as ever, to Michael Walker, who remains my best editor, for his inspiration and support. And finally, to my late mother, Gay de Vries, who taught me to always finish what I started.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

H
ILARY DE
V
RIES
is an award-winning journalist and author who has covered Hollywood for more than a decade. She is a regular contributor to
The New York Times
and has written for
Vogue, Rolling Stone, W, Vanity Fair,
and the
Los Angeles Times
. She lives in L.A. This is her first novel.

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life persons or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Hilary de Vries

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

V
ILLARD
and “V” C
IRCLED
Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

De Vries, Hilary.

So five minutes ago: a novel / Hilary de Vries.

p. cm.

1. Women public relations personnel—Fiction.
2. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. 3. Motion picture industry—Fiction. 4. Public relations firms—Fiction.
5. Celebrities—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3604.E89S6 2004

813′.6—dc22 2003059601

Villard Books website address:
www.villard.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-373-2

v3.0