The First Assistant (8 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said before I could help myself, then laughed. “Oops.” “You’re the worst tennis player I’ve seen in years.” Zac shook his head. “Am I really?” I looked around to see if the people on the next court,

who’d been gaping in disbelief as I flailed around after the balls, were listening in. “I’m sorry,” I reiterated.

Zac grabbed hold of my hand and shook it in congratulations. “I haven’t been so excited to help somebody in a long time. It’ll be a challenge for me. Not only are you pathetically bad at tennis but your self-esteem is in the toilet.”

“I can really stay?” I asked.

“Yes,” Zac said, “so let’s start with the serve.” He stood next to me with his racket and what seemed like hundreds of balls stuffed discon-certingly in his shorts, and showed me how to reach and throw. I copied him again and again. And I stopped apologizing, even when my arm swooped around and bashed his kneecap.

“If you’re calm inside, your serve will reflect that,” Zac explained as I bashed away ball after ball.

“I’m not very calm,” I told him. “I think my boyfriend’s cheating on me.”

“And if he is, is that his problem or your problem?” Zac asked in his wizened croak.

“Well, it’s kind of mine because . . .” I began as I sent a ball sailing over the fifty-foot-high perimeter fence.

“Wrong,” Zac barked, and I wasn’t sure whether he meant my serve or my answer. Then I realized that it was both. The inner game
was
the outer game.

“If your boyfriend wants to live his life as a cheating bastard, that’s his problem. Tell me this, Elizabeth, if someone gives you a gift and you choose not to accept it, to whom does that gift belong?”

“To... uhm.. .” I was never any good at the sound of one-hand- clapping stuff even when I was sitting in the lotus position with my yogi-friend, Alexa; now that I was all out of breath in the evening sunshine, I found it impossible. So I took a guess. “To the person who gave me the gift?”

“Correct,” Zac said as he took my arm and described a large circle with my racket. “If you don’t accept his shit, it’s still his shit and not yours.”

“You’re so right,” I said, and as the words came out of my mouth, I executed the most impeccable serve of my life.

“See?” Zac stood back and grinned at me. It was like the parable of the prodigal son—there is more joy for Zac at the successful serve of a tennis-spaz than ninety-nine naturals who win all their league games— or something like that.

“Thank you.” I wanted to hug Zac but I was dripping with sweat by now. “Can we talk about my job, too? I really need to work out whether I should leave to pursue my own projects or stay and climb the ladder.” “We’ll do a few minutes of backhand,” Zac promised as he turned on

the ball machine at the other end of the court.

“Now go,” he instructed as the balls came gaily pinging toward me. “Too fast!” I yelled as he adjusted the machine.

“Is it now?” he asked. “Or is it just you who are too slow?”

“A bit of both?” I smiled as he made his way back toward me.

“Now sweep and follow through. Don’t let the ball leave your racket until you’re ready for it to leave,” he said as I tried to obey his orders but ended up being brutalized by a trinity of stray balls that came at me while I was nurturing the last ball and sending it off to college with a hug.

“You’re holding on too long,” Zac said. “Let go sooner.” “Are you telling me to leave my job?” I asked.

“No, I’m telling you to let the ball leave your racket at the precise

moment it’s ready. Now feel for that moment. Okay? Go. Feel for the moment. There it is, you feel it?”

“Yes. I do.” I smiled. And I did. I turned off my whirring and thinking and deliberating and fretting and focused on the ball and how it felt against the strings. I paid attention to when it was ready to go.

“I’m not leaving yet,” I told Zac as I guided a second ball lovingly over the net.

“Exactly.” Zac stood back and watched as I fired shot after shot across the court until I was a crimson-faced Bride of Shrek. “Enough, enough,” he finally said and silenced the machine.

“Thanks, Zac.” I shook his hand, even though I secretly wanted to marry him. “You’ve been such a help.”

“The bliss is within, you know.” He patted me and sent me on my way. “Same time next week.”

“I’ll be here,” I promised as I made a mental list of all the things we could work on next time.

As I drove home I knew that Zac was right, the bliss was within and it was all up to me. I’d decided in the zen moment of my backhand that I would stay at The Agency until I found a project that really appealed to me, that would be worth pursuing. I’d signed the contract for
Sex Addicts in Love
this morning and whatever happened I had a producer credit to my name now, which was incredibly valuable, no matter how the movie fared at the box office. I’d just wait until I found another project that I was passionate about and then maybe I’d quit The Agency to produce it properly this time, rather than doing it during coffee breaks as I had with
Sex Addicts.
I also decided that I’d give Luke a break. Even though he may be pandering to Emanuelle’s every whim, I knew in my heart that it was me whom he loved, and that sometimes a producer had to bend his own rules a little to keep his movie together. If that meant lying to Emanuelle about who he was on the phone with, then so be it. My backhand and I were bigger than that. We understood. So it was with a smile on my face and a very sore right arm that I got in my car and drove home to call Luke and tell him I loved him.

Five

Hollywood gives a young girl the aura of a giant,

self-contained orgy farm, its inhabitants dedicated to crawling into every pair of pants they can find.

—Veronica Lake

It must have been a blue moon because Lara and I were having a night out. Not just Lachlan’s leftover macaroni and cheese and a bottle of red wine at her kitchen table, which was our usual, but a party for which we were required to wear something other than Nuala yoga pants. Nathalie Cook was a former president of the Lit Department at The Agency and she’d left her enormous job to launch her own line.

“What is it that she makes again?” Lara asked as we sped up the PCH. Lara had spent the afternoon wrapped in seaweed in Santa Mon-ica in a bid to lose weight for tonight’s party. But the undesirable pounds still clung mercilessly to her hips, so she had simply draped herself in her trademark black pants. I did understand what a drag it must be for her facing a bunch of women who were so educated about good fats, bad fats, trans fats, and fat asses that they could have advised the World Health Organization on any dietetic matter on the face of the planet. Poor Lara, there was no way she was leaving this party without at least seventeen phone numbers for personal trainers and four new diets that she “had to try.”

“I can’t remember what they’re launching.” I rummaged in my purse for the invitation. “Is it handbags? Jewelry?”

“She was always pretty stylish. It’s bound to be some line of fabulous clothes,” I said, and Lara and I looked at each other and groaned. “Here it is.” I fished a piece of cardboard out of my bag. “She’s launching LovelyLab.”

“Is it a spa?”

“I have no clue,” I said as we veered off the street to park alongside at least forty Porsche Cayennes and twenty Mercedes.

“Do you know that this party alone has probably guzzled more gas than the Chinese use in a year?”

“You might want to keep your thoughts on that to yourself,” Lara said as we climbed down from her SUV. “These are the most powerful divorcées in Hollywood. You don’t want to alienate them.”

Lara was right. If their cars alone could eradicate the need for the Kyoto summit, their combined divorce settlements could run an entire Third World country for several decades. And this was no exaggeration. Their influence was like an invisible web that wove its way through the lives of almost anyone you cared to think of in this town. They were the young and beautiful ex-wives of the studio presidents, the producers, and the most powerful agents. A few had been married to Talent— actors or directors—but only those divorced from the AAA list were permitted here. And even more intimidatingly, most of them lived here, in this ludicriously chic Malibu apartment building. They counseled one another on all matters alimonious, their nannies competed over their charges, and they passed as friends in a world where to copy the same dinner table arrangement was to be frozen out of the set.

“Are you sure they won’t mind me coming?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Lara whispered as we walked up the path toward the floodlit white façade of the building. “Anyway, you’re one of them now.” “What do you mean?” I scowled. I couldn’t see how I was like them

in any way.

“You’re with Luke,” she informed me. “They know you’re safe, now.” “Good God in heaven.”

“I know. Don’t take it so seriously. They’re not ogres.” She smiled as the elevator doors closed behind us. “Just really intelligent women with too much time and money on their hands.”

The door was opened by an efficient blond with a clipboard. “Welcome. And you are?”

“Lara Wagner and Elizabeth Miller,” Lara said.

“Right,” she said and stared at me a moment too long before checking me off the list. “Go on through. Have fun!” she said in a jaunty way that didn’t sit easily with her.

“Lara.” A woman whom I assumed was Nathalie stepped forward. She was like the prettiest movie star you’ve ever seen—petite and fine-boned and exquisitely dressed. “So glad you could make it.”

“This is Elizabeth,” Lara said as she unwrapped herself from what must have been an unevenly matched hug—Nathalie couldn’t weigh much more now than she had as a fourteen-year-old cheerleader.

“Elizabeth Miller?” I swear she scrutinized me. Maybe they were going to ask me to join some sort of Masonic fellowship and get me to marry and divorce Luke very quickly before I joined. Fat chance, I thought—even our conversation last night, when I’d only called to be nice to him and not nag about the Emanuelle dinner party, had ended with a frost worthy of Eastern Europe when he’d told me that he could only talk for five minutes because he had to play chess with the director. “Great to meet you.”

“So, I can’t wait to see your new line,” Lara said vaguely.

“Oh, you’re going to love it.” Nathalie touched her arm conspiratorially. “Now come on through and we’ll get you girls some cocktails.”

The room was teeming with women dressed in the kind of clothes you had to preorder straight from the designer at the beginning of each season. The waiting-list boots by Stella McCartney, the only-fifty-in-existence handbags by Alexander McQueen. I looked down at my party outfit and it suddenly felt very tired. If only I was less proud, I would take Luke’s credit card and exercise it a little in Chanel, but I’m not sure that I could ever justify five thousand dollars of anyone’s money on a blouse.

“Champagne, ladies?” a waitress offered. Lara and I each took a glass and, as we sipped away, took in our surroundings. The apartment was a tasteful blend of olive greens and ice-cream pinks; the saccharine edge had been taken off with the shelves and shelves of books—most of them vast books with Arabic on their spines. The artwork, too, had a Middle Eastern feel.

A woman appeared at our side. “Doesn’t Nathalie have great taste?” “She certainly does,” Lara said. “Didn’t she do some art history

course or something after she left The Agency?”

“She did a master’s in Oriental Studies,” the woman told us as we

looked out over the white sand of the beach, which glowed ghostly in the dark, and listened to the foaming waves breaking a mere fifty feet from the balcony. “I’m Jessica, by the way,” she said, and smiled.

“Lara Wagner.” “Hi, Lara.”

“I’m Elizabeth Miller.”

“Good. To. Meet. You,” Jessica said, and looked at me for a moment too long. Only the third person to do that tonight. Or maybe I was be-ing paranoid? Maybe this was just the way of the Malibu divorcée.

“So what do you do, Jessica?” I smiled and relaxed into my new role as, if not “one of them,” at least a person with a name. It was the first time I’d ever been at a soiree like this and not had to serve drinks or make sure the party magician didn’t get Emerald Everhart pregnant. Her reputation for having sex with strangers in bathroom stalls was not merely the invention of the tabloid press, I’d discovered at the last Agency party. But here I was a fully fledged guest for once.

“What do I do?” Jessica took half a step backward and looked at me as if my mental illness hadn’t quite been diagnosed accurately yet, but she was determined to figure out what it was. I sensed I’d made a faux pas but couldn’t tell what.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, suddenly realizing my mistake. “So how old are your children?”

“I don’t have children,” Jessica said warily, as if she’d suddenly diagnosed my illness and had decided that it might be contagious.

“Oh, I see.” I smiled.

“How’s the charity work going?” Lara chimed in casually.

“Charity?” Jessica finally dragged her uncomprehending eyes off me and turned her focus on Lara. “Great, really well in fact. I’m going to have a lunch for land mine victims at Ivy on the Shore next month. You have to come.”

“I’d love to.” Lara nodded and as Jessica went on about the popcorn shrimp she was going to serve, Lara winked at me. She had my back, thank God. Well, how was I to know that even the women without children didn’t have jobs? I thought the days of the housewife had gone out with the ark. Especially if you didn’t have a husband. Clearly I had a lot to learn about the Malibu divorcée.

As Lara valiantly received the details of the first miracle diet of the evening, I slid off to check out LovelyLab. There was an entire table in the corner covered with little white bottles and potions and shiny packets. And there was a woman standing behind the table looking very professional.

“Hello, madam, would you like to sample LovelyLab?” She smiled. “Sure,” I said as she handed me a small bottle. I squirted a bit on the

back of my hand and sniffed.

“We’re not very big on fragrance in our line, madam,” she told me. “We believe ladies should smell as nature intended.”