Emma gestures for us to sit down on the linen couch, having no choice but to find us genuine. “Can I get you anything to drink?”
“I am dying for a seltzer if you have.” I hate seltzer but I just know Emma’s got a whole case of it in the fridge, that it is as much a part of her personality as her winter tan.
“Yes!” Emma cries. “Grapefruit or lime?”
“Grapefruit.” Gross. “You are a godsend.”
“Henry?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Emma sweeps into the kitchen, reaches for two highball glasses, presses each into the ice maker (an ice maker!—the Wanikans must love that), then pours our drinks at the angle that kids pump beer from the keg into their party cups. She presents mine to me with a small bronze coaster underneath.
“Thank you.”
Emma sits down next to us in an oatmeal-colored boucle chair and watches me sip my seltzer like she has cooked an extravagant meal for me and now she has the pleasure of watching me savor my first bites.
“Crisp,” I say to her, and Emma beams with pride.
Last night, while I was tied up and probably bleeding from my brain, Henry came to see Emma to let her know that Campbell’s son, the quiet red-haired boy I met outside the chapel, had a severe asthma attack and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Corrine had called the caretaker, who lives a mile from the parking lot, and he rushed over and spotted Campbell’s boat docked outside the clubhouse. He’d gone inside and found Campbell and chauffeured him straight to the Yale New Haven emergency room. Campbell had left his car for Emma so she could drive herself to the train station in Albany and catch a ride back to the colleges. He’d told Corrine he was low on gas and he hadn’t wanted to waste any time stopping.
“Is Tookie okay?” Emma asks, her tone turned mothering and grave.
“I stopped by the clubhouse this morning to call Campbell and check in,” Henry says. “Tookie is going to be released later today.”
“ThankGod,” Emma says. She puts her hand over her heart, exhales hard. She waits just long enough to ask, “Did Campbell say anything else?” She slurps from her drink, her eyes trained eagerly on Henry. She’s wearing winged eyeliner, and one side is drawn longer than the other, like a lopsided Cleopatra.
“He said he loves you and thank you for understanding,” Henry says.
There is a blast of color to Emma’s cheeks. “Ofcourse,” she emphasizes. “I just feel so bad for him. And for Tookie. Corrine is, ugh, well…” Emma looks to me as though I might have the word for what Corrine is.
“He’s lucky to have Campbell for a father,” I say, and in that moment I remember how Tookie had slipped his hand into Campbell’s the day I met him outside the chapel and leaned into him shyly, hiding half his face behind Campbell’s leg. My heart beats slower, lower, thinking about his freckled face falling when he learns his father is gone.
“So lucky,” Emma agrees, but I can tell she’s bored of speaking about Campbell’s kid and ready to return to the subject of herself. She sets her glass on a coaster and crosses her legs, clasping her hands around her knees with a patient, expectant look. Last night Henry also told Emma to hang tight, that we’d come by to ferry her to the parking lot in the morning, and that I had something I wanted to talk to her about, writer to writer, a vomitous lie that Emma looks ready to lick up on her hands and knees.
“This is awkward,” I say to her, shrinking into myself and grimacing like I am embarrassed. “Because it’s going to come across like a quid pro quo, but you should know that quid pro quos happen all the time in my industry and you only make them with people whose contributions you value.”
Emma stares at me hungrily with her uneven eyes.
“I’m obviously mortified that you found out I was here with Henry—”
“I would never judge you,” Emma insists magnanimously.
“Unfortunately, you would be the only one, should this get out.”
Henry reaches for my hand in a show of support. I glance at him with gratitude, face Emma bravely, as though I have called a press conference to share some harrowing health update with the public.
“Women cannot win.”
“Mmmm,” I agree, though this is one of those sayings I detest coming from women like Emma, someone who has not yet lost anything, who does not understand it is this very consensus that has made it possible for me to win sometimes. If the world were fair to us, what would I have to write about? “I would like to offer you a role as a production assistant on my next project. We are in conversation with someone very exciting to star, and if she attaches, preproduction would begin this summer, likely in Los Angeles, though it could be Atlanta. In addition to your salary, I would cover your travel and living expenses for the entirety of the forty-seven-day shoot, which will shake out to about four months.”
Emma doesn’t say anything, and after a long moment, when it becomes clear that’s the offer, she releases her knees and eases back into the chair. “Oh,” she says, surprised and ever so slightly insulted.
Henry must feel that my hand has gone cold in his. He gives it two quick squeezes, like a defibrillator supplying an electrical current to my failing heart.Look alive. “A lot of very successful people got their start as PAs,” I add in a perky tone.
“Not you, though.” Emma’s wet lips curl into a rather sinister smile.
“I started as an assistant to Jonathan,” I say, my chest hot. “If you would prefer an opportunity like that, I can help to arrange it. It just means a much longer commitment, and you likely won’t get production experience for a while. It took me three years to step on set.”