The First Assistant (3 page)

terrible truth, now that I’d shattered his illusions and proved that I wasn’t the nice, girl-next-door type he’d imagined me to be. Now that my cover was blown.

“I was just wondering what fish lips are. And I was thinking that they might be kind of interesting. . . .” He shrugged. “You know what I mean?”

I looked at him.

“I’m having a dark night of the soul and you’re wondering what it would be like to get a blow job from a woman with trout pout?” I shouted loudly enough to entertain the whole Canyon.

“Yeah, I guess,” Luke said, and headed for the car. “So do you want to be a kept woman for one more night, before I cut up your credit card, make sure never to slip up and pay for dinner again, and take back the diamond ring I bought you from Harry Winston?” He didn’t look back. “I’m so sorry, Luke, I didn’t mean it to come out like that, but I just had to tell you how I feel, and if you still want to pay for dinner then that’s great, but sometimes you have to come to Koo Koo Roo on me. And . . .” I stopped. “You were kidding about Harry Winston, right?” I double-checked. Having a boyfriend with a sense of humor was usually something you’d give eye teeth for in this town, but right now it just exacerbated my dilemma.

“Maybe,” Luke said as he held open the car door for me. I ducked under his arm and got in.

“You were?”

“Like I said, maybe.” He shut the door and strolled around to the driver’s side.

“You were joking,” I decided.

“Honey, I’m completely in love with you so as far as I’m concerned, whatever you want you get. And if you don’t want diamonds and fancy schmancy stuff then I respect that.”

“Why do you keep talking about diamonds?” I asked.

“Because, like I said, I have one in my pocket. But you don’t want to be a trophy girlfriend, so I’m taking it back.”

“You do not.” I laughed nervously.

“Do too,” he sung as we drove down the hill toward the Four Seasons. “Show me then,” I challenged him.

“No point now.” He smiled with equanimous aplomb.

“Of course there’s a point.” I laughed sweetly, better to trap him with honey. “Were you really going to?”

“Yup,” Luke said, as if nothing could matter less now. “I was going to propose to you with it. In the garden tonight. But your electricity protest kind of made that impossible. So I thought, aha, Four Seasons. Then you said you didn’t want to be a kept woman. So I thought, okay, we’ll drive down to the ocean. And then you hit me with your fear of having fancy stuff bought for you . . . so I guess I’ll have to take it back.” Luke shrugged, not moderating his usual, easy-going manner.

“You wanted to marry me?”

“Yeah, I did.” He kept on driving, nodding at the road. “But.. .”

“You probably have moral objections to diamonds, too. I should have thought of that. And you were right. I was only thinking about what was conventionally romantic and not what you, Lizzie Miller, might like. So why don’t we wait awhile and I’ll think a little harder about it ... you know? I’ll return the diamond, buy an American Indian–friendly aqua-marine ring or something. Propose at Souplantation. If you can forgive me for being such a selfish pig, of course.” Obviously nobody had ever told him that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit. Because he thought he was being hilarious.

I decided that this was simply a brilliantly twisted fabrication designed to punish. But I was smarter than that. I would not rise. I would not give him the satisfaction of watching me humiliate myself by begging for a ring that didn’t exist. Instead I took the high road. I let it go, acting like even if he had the Hope diamond in his pocket, I wouldn’t be interested. And I obviously did a very good job because he dropped the subject immediately and turned up the radio.

Later, at the Four Seasons, while Luke was brushing his teeth, I just happened to pick his jeans up from the floor and just happened to no-tice an unnaturally large lump in the pocket.

“Are you coming to bed, sweetheart?” I called out, just to make sure he was still foaming at the mouth in there.

“Shhhure,” he spluttered. Which I knew gave me at least enough time to delve into his pockets. Which I did shamelessly. And what did I find? The biggest, most sparkling, perfect ring I’d ever seen in my life.

Well, it wasn’t the biggest I’d ever seen, really, but it was the most perfect. For me. Because I’m not the amazing, moral, unmaterialistic, sweet girl that Luke took me for tonight when he vowed to return my ring to Harry Winston. And as I gazed at it I didn’t think it was vulgar or immoral or anything of the kind. And as it twinkled at me from its navy blue velvet box, I knew that I wanted that ring on my finger so badly I could have cried. Which I suppose proves one thing, anyway—that, as girlfriends go—I am completely normal.

Two

It’s somehow symbolic of Hollywood that Tara was

just a façade with no rooms inside.

—David Selznick

“Hi there. Do you want to take off my undies?” I arrived at work the next morning in no mood to hear Scott being propositioned by an actress through the office walls. By eight o’clock this morning when I left the Four Seasons, Luke still hadn’t proposed to me, and now he’d gone back to Prague for another six-week spell. Naturally I had managed to convince myself that the “Harry,” as I’d come to know the diamond, was now destined for the more delicate, less agriculturally-capable-looking third finger of Emanuelle’s left hand.

“Who’s Scott got in his office?” I asked Amber as I took off my jacket. “I don’t know. But I’ve been here since seven and he hasn’t emerged,” she said smugly, just to let me know how much earlier than me she’d

gotten in.

I rolled my eyes. Amber was Scott’s new Second Assistant, whom I’d painstakingly hired to be fabulous at all the things I was no good at, so that between us we might be a perfect team and best serve our mutual boss. However, what I hadn’t realized was that the word “team” was not in Amber’s vocabulary. In fact, her job advertisement should have read:

wanted

Self-involved, scheming, malevolent Judas for junior position at talent agency. No morals needed. Must have an unhealthy interest in rich and powerful men and a desire to succeed at any cost.

Lara, Scott’s former First Assistant and now his Second Wife, had pleaded with me not to hire anyone truly beautiful to work alongside her weak-willed husband. Because although she and I both knew that he loved her and their new baby, Lachlan, to the ends of the earth, when something was offered to Scott on a plate, he invariably wanted a nibble.

So I’d assumed that Amber Bingham-Fox was a safe bet. She had a history degree from Cambridge, was fluent in French, and was as plain as it is possible to be. In fact when Lara quizzed me about her looks af-ter I’d interviewed her, I could hardly remember.

“I don’t know. Her hair was brown, she had eyes, a nose, lips, I as-sume, but whether they were thin or luscious I have no clue.”

“Does she have a good body?” Lara had asked with the desperation of a woman who has gained sixty pounds with the birth of her baby and now did little but bob in the pool all day in order to avoid contact with the cookie jar.

“I don’t know. She just is.. .” “Is what?” Lara persisted.

“Is. She just is. She’s plain. What can I say? She wears okay clothes. She may have some freckles. But if she does that’s as interesting as it gets,” I reassured Lara.

“You promise?”

“I swear to God.” And I was telling the truth to Lara. Amber seemed to be the most innocuous girl I’d ever met. With all that modesty and reserve and self-deprecation that Jane Austen led us to expect from English chicks. But neither I nor Lara nor Jane Austen could have anticipated what a complete piece of work Amber Bingham-Fox would turn out to be. Her plainness made her unthreatening to women in power, whom she befriended as if they were going out of fashion; it made her tantalizing to men in some perverse way.

Lara’s theory was that if a girl as plain as Amber acted in the overtly sexual way she did—i.e., forever discussing her threesomes and bikini waxes with them—then she had to be a rocket in the sack. And everyone but everyone mistook her English accent for class. Except Lara, who thought it just sounded like she was continually sucking someone’s cock. Either way Amber was not the girl you want sitting six

feet away from you all day long, gasping to get her hands on your job, your best friend’s husband, and your previously well-hidden Su Doku secret.

“Where’s the letter from Tom Cruise’s attorney of the fifteenth of May?” she asked as I turned on my computer.

“In the file,” I said confidently, wondering whether I’d burned it last week when the filing had all become too much for me. The choice had not been hard—either trip over the pile of filing every time I leave my desk for the rest of eternity or burn it all on a small office pyre and instead enjoy a Fiendish Su Doku before I left the office for the day.

“No it’s not,” she said briskly, as if she were on to me but just biding her time before she worked out how she could best ruin my career with the information. Thankfully we were interrupted by the woman in Scott’s office again.

“How would you like me, baby?” she asked.

“Poor Lara.” Amber sighed without a hint of sincerity, as she continued to hunt through the files for the probably-charred letter.

“Poor Lara’s fine.” I felt compelled to defend my friend. “He loves her madly. He just has a problem with addiction. That woman in there’s no more to him than a game of blackjack or a line of coke.”

“It wouldn’t work for me, that’s all I’m saying,” Amber snapped.

I was dying to ask what
did
work for Amber. Lara and I had become obsessed by the girl’s sex life after hearing that she was simultaneously dat-ing the heads of two major studios and a married actor. She had also been written about on Defamer after a naked-in-a-hot-tub-at-Sundance es-capade with an unidentified TV actress and a producer so antiquated he had passed from “legendary” to “immortal” in the Hollywood lexicon. Clearly Amber was prepared to do whatever it took to pole-vault her way up the echelons. But in true snake-in-the-grass tradition she played her cards very close to her chest. She had also befriended Katherine Watson, the copresident of The Agency, by asking her to mentor her. They now had a regular Wednesday-afternoon-in-Barney’s-shoe-department date. Their friendship was a thorn in my side—with Amber knowing exactly when to play the fawning acolyte and admire Katherine’s “extraordinary figure for Hermes” and when to drop in some tale from the Cambridge debating society to remind Katherine that she was also a viable compan—

ion for an intellectual woman of power. God, I was envious. Why didn’t I have the nerve or the nous to foster such a friendship? But before I could ponder that question I was dealt a swift, brutal reminder.

“That was Emerald Everhart on the phone.” Scott emerged from his office with ruffled hair and the unslept look that I knew so well, and that invariably preceded the arrival of a furious and half-dressed Lara in the office demanding to know where he’d spent the night. Usually Lachlan was slung under one arm and a brown bag from McDonald’s under the other. Lara’s reaction to motherhood was to eat all the food she’d deprived herself of since she was eighteen years old and first be-gun dieting. Sometimes she tried to eat it all in one afternoon. But Scott seemed to like her curves, and she’d forgotten how much she liked French fries. So for the time being everyone was happy. Fortunately neither Lara nor the actress from his office had made an appearance yet. They were probably waiting for the same moment.

“And?” I said to Scott. Emerald Everhart called an average of eight times a day. It didn’t usually warrant Scott having to leave his desk.

“She wants to borrow you.” He shrugged.

“Me?” I didn’t think that Emerald Everhart was aware of my existence, though I had patched her through to Scott more times than I’d had hot coffees since she joined The Agency a few months ago in one of Scott’s first big signings as copresident.

Emerald was the new teen starlet in town. You know her: she’s the cheesy little comet on the cover of
US Weekly
every week while she’s orbiting the celestial galaxy at the speed of light until she loses her baby fat, develops a relationship with food, and her star burns up and she vanishes, leaving room for another Tara or Lindsay or Britney. She’s gum-chewing, mentally unstable, and has the unerring ability to make all the haute couture garments she borrows look like Juicy Couture. She was born with her dark roots showing. Men love her because she looks like she’d fuck you in the bathroom right after she’s met you, and she has such an impact on the dance routines and vocabulary of eight-year-old girls that their parents want to move to Pennsylvania and be-come Amish.

Then I remembered my only other encounter with Emerald. Last

week she’d dropped by to see Scott and was fretting over a text message she was writing to a guy she was dating.

“How do you spell ‘absolutely’?” she’d asked me as she passed my desk. “A.B.S.—” I had barely begun when her hot pink cell phone was

thrust into my hand.

“Here, you do it,” she said. So I began to repair her “asbolutely.” “It’s to this guy. He’s been really mean to me but I really don’t care because he has such a great look and I really want to fuck him so badly that—”

“Then you asbolutely can’t write this.” I smiled at her.

“What?” she had asked, alarmed that I had an opinion, let alone that I had the courage/stupidity to express it to her.

“You can’t tell him that you want to do all these things. You’ll never see him again.” I scowled. I wasn’t usually so frank, but I’d just gotten back from lunch with Lara and her plain-speaking was infectious.

“I can’t?” Emerald had transformed from a knowing starlet into an ingenuous teenager.

“Let’s try this,” I said as I tapped a much more curt, ambiguous message to the mean date. And sure enough, before she’d left the building Emerald had a text back inviting her to the Solomon Islands for the weekend.

“What do you mean, borrow me?” I was always civil to Scott, but our relationship had long since progressed beyond the needlessly polite. I was friends with his wife—he ignored me when I was visiting and he came home and found me crying in his sitting room or playing with his baby in his swimming pool—I was part of the furniture, and if I was too nice to him he would simply be suspicious. I did my job, he took me for granted. It was a functional relationship.