“Wow, Claire, diving right in.”
“Ask me to dinner first,” I say cornily, and everyone laughs. I let it die, tune my voice to the one I use when we get to the questions and comments portion of the pitch. I turn to Claire, who is the head of mid-budget indie development and wears the thick-framed reading glasses to prove it. “I’m not opposed to full frontal, but I also don’t want to get slapped with an NC-17 rating.”
“It’s the kiss of death,” she agrees, and I know which film she is thinking about when she says this.
“I want this to be as erotic as it can be while remaining extremely commercial.”
“What I love about female directors,” someone says, “is that they’re not afraid of that word.”
Then hire me, I think.Pay me a fraction of what you would pay a man. Save my career.
“Can you tell us a little bit about where this idea came from?” someone else asks carefully.
I am sitting at the head of a sterile conference table in the villainous glass headquarters of a global streamer, facing six executives of various rank and file. Each one, in their own way, stops what they are doing to hear my answer to this question. Phones turned over on their faces, Stanley cups down. Outside, strong, dry winds yank the palm trees west. This morning, when I woke, I was prepared to hear from my agent that today’s pitch would need to be rescheduled. But here I am, begging like a dog to write, direct, and star in my next film, red-flag warning be damned.
“Well,” I say. “The answer to that is kind of a two-parter.” I tell them that back in the spring, my beloved film professor passed away from a heart attack, and his nephew, a former classmate and friend of mine, asked if I would speak at his memorial.
“Campbell?”
I smile. “Yes. ‘Campbell.’?” It was the first time I had returned to campus since graduating twelve years ago. It was the first time I was going to see a lot of people I hadn’t seen since before I won an Emmy for the episode of television I wrote about my ex-boyfriend.
“I gasped when Campbell showed up at the lake,” says the content associate with the slicked-back ponytail.
“Don’t worry,” I assure her. “As we speak Campbell is safe in Connecticut, doing whatever it is annoyingly perfect husbands and fathers do there.”
“What about ‘Corrine’?”
“Ice-cold bitch, but not a murderer as far as I know.”
Some light laughter.
“But in regards to ‘Henry,’?” Claire says, all business. “What was real there? He was at the funeral, I assume?”
“With his wife and kids.”
Claire doesn’t take her eyes off me. “What happened?”
“Just like I said. We were briefly under the same roof. We saw each other in passing. Then one of his daughters had a tantrum during the slideshow. He left. We never even said hello.”
“I see. So everything after that. That’s where we leave reality.”
“Reality,” I repeat with a laugh. I gather myself to get into it. “Well. As you know. My husband and I have decided to end our marriage and dissolve our production company. Initially, people were shocked but generally supportive. They liked us as a couple, and we seemed so good together, what could have happened? Our goal was to separate amicably, but then we couldn’t work out who got ownership of our biggest piece of IP, and that’s when my husband hired a crisis PR team and the rumors began to circulate online. Obviously, I cannot prove who is behind them. But those are the verifiable facts.” I take a beat. Sip my sour water. “There’s no use sitting here pretending like it hasn’t affected me, both from a bottom-line perspective and on a deeply personal level. It hurts to be lied about, to be misunderstood, and the story of Faye and Henry—‘Henry’—and what happened at the lake is my response to that.”
“Absolutely,” someone agrees noncommittally.
“Let us have a chat, and we’ll get back to you,” says Claire, her poker face pleasant. I thank everyone for their time.
Chapter 36
The sirens start on my drive home. Home is like “Henry.” Like “reality.” Another thing in quotation marks. My husband took the house at my bidding. I was the one to file, and I thought it was the one mercy I could show him. I wanted to keep things amicable in the hopes my brother-in-law might not feel the need to retaliate on behalf of his little brother, whom everyone always called the nice one. If I’d known how mean nice guys can get, I would have changed the locks while he was at the gym. The other day, I drove by and saw a construction crew in the process of building out a wooden stud wall, and I had to pull over to catch my breath. He had demolished the original fireplace with the crack in the facade, the one that predated PT and postdated him too, and it felt like a war crime, like bombing Notre-Dame, an act the UN should condemn.
I rented a storybook Tudor in the treetops of Kenter Canyon with original tile that looks great in pictures and grungy in real life. It is quiet and peaceful and exhilarating and heartbreaking. If not for my divorce lawyers, I could go days without using my voice. My friends and colleagues are familiar with the ghoulish tactics of crisis PR teams; it’s not that they believe what’s being put out there about me, it’s that the public does. It’s that I carry a stink. They will keep their distance until a pop star gets arrested for drunk driving or an Oscar winner fails to endorse the correct politicalcandidate, until the tides begin to change online.Hey. Is it fucked up we all collectively turned on this woman for the crime of ending her marriage?Even if she cheated, even if she told him she wanted kids then reneged, even if she’s kind of getting old, even if she only won an Emmy because she’s white and passably pretty, though not nearly as pretty as everyone once believed, it’s not like she’s transphobic or anything.You’ll have your renaissance, my former agent and best friend kept promising me, but then I realized she removed me from her close friends list on Instagram. Her stories used to appear with a green ring, and usually I would watch them and know exactly where she was, because I was invited to all the same parties. That was when I picked up the phone and called her rival.
Some of my neighbors are on the street, packing up their cars. I slow to speak to the older couple with the three rescue dogs who have no idea who I am. I roll down my window, and I can smell that it’s bad.
“Are we under evacuation?” I ask the husband. I watch as a piece of ash floats into my car and lands on my lap.
“Ready, set, go,” he says. “Did you sign up for the alerts?”