The Second Assistant (21 page)

The shit certainly hit the fan when I reported to Scott what I’d walked in on that morning. But Scott didn’t respond as I’d expected him to. I was certain that the second the news of Ryan’s attempted break-in slipped from my lips, Scott would have raced in a rage from the office and demanded of Daniel that he fire the little weasel thief. But instead Scott smiled and motioned for me to shut the door.

“Lizzie, did you mention to Ryan that you were going to tell me?”

I blinked a few times. This wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting. “No. It wasn’t my immediate instinct. But I’m not afraid to admit to him that I turned him in, if that’s what you mean.”

“Do you think he would ever imagine that you wouldn’t tell me? I mean, does he think perhaps that you’re in awe of him or afraid of him?” Scott looked graver than I’d ever seen him. I thought hard so as to do his interest in the subject some justice.

“Unfortunately, I think he could easily believe that I’m afraid of him. He’s been a jerk to me from day one. He works for Daniel, who hired me in the first place, and he delights in bullying me whenever he has the opportunity. So it’s perfectly plausible that I wouldn’t tell you in order to gain his favor,” I told Scott.

“My guess is, Lizzie, that Ryan won’t leave this matter alone. So if he asks whether you told me about this, I want you to tell him that you haven’t mentioned it. Not a word. Try to sound genuine. Practice it in the mirror if you have to. I’m not going to say anything to Daniel.”

“But shouldn’t Daniel know? Maybe Ryan’s a thief and is stealing from him, too.”

“Lizzie, he’s not a thief. That’s all you need to know. Okay? What happened this morning was that you arrived at the office at nine and didn’t see a thing out of the ordinary.”

I shook my head in passive consent and walked out of the office.

I spent the rest of the day nervously jumping at my own shadow. I kept expecting to turn around and find the snake Ryan slithering near my shoulder in an attempt to save his ass. I really had no qualms about lying to Ryan and didn’t even need to practice my fibbing skills on this occasion. Though I’d have much preferred it if I could call him up and tell him to get his slimy ass down here because Scott and the LAPD wanted to arrest him for trespassing and attempted theft. That would have given me a much greater sense of well-being than an hour of yoga.

But whatever Scott was up to, I was pretty certain that Ryan would never escape unscathed. What did bother me was the victory grin that I knew would be plastered across his smug face when I told him that I hadn’t mentioned a word to Scott. Though it would be a bald-faced lie, he’d never guess that, assuming instead that his intimidation tactics had worked and that his exalted position as Daniel’s chief ass licker had prevented me from filling my boss in. He’d immediately see it as a trump card just sitting in his hand. But if I could spin it correctly, I could make it seem like a favor I was doing him, instead of a knee-jerk fear reaction. Then at least I’d get to save face and do my boss’s bidding at the same time.

Yes, I said to myself as I washed my hands in the bathroom, that’s exactly what I needed to do. I had to go up and see Ryan before he found me and tell him I was saving his ass. Then at least I could forge a momentary truce between us, no matter how false the base, and buy myself a little peace and quiet. And as my mother always said, you catch more flies with honey. But I guess my mother couldn’t have envisaged any human being as repellent as Ryan.

As I walked back down the hallway to my office, I pondered exactly what to say to Ryan, and I realized that I’d never really left politics after all. Perhaps I was reliving the Iran-Contra affair, Hollywood style. But then who was Reagan? More important, who was Poindexter, or Ollie North? I chewed on my pen intently and decided that the analysis was best saved for my next meeting with Dr. Vance. What I really needed to do now was escape the office for my lunch break so I could build up my strength before I made the long ride up to Daniel’s office and assumed my role in whatever drama I was too unimportant to know that I was involved in.

I’m going up and up and up, and nobody’s gonna pull me down.

—Lana Turner as Lora Meredith
Imitation of Life

I
launched myself from bed on Sunday morning with the speed of a decrepit ocean liner setting sail from harbor. I did not want to hike in Fryman Canyon. I wanted to sleep in my bed.

“Oh, God, no,” I moaned through a mouthful of pillow as I buried my face deeper. Should I just call Jason, yell at him for making such an indecent proposal to me in the first place, and arrange to see him at a sensible hour? Yes, that’s exactly what I should do. I stuck an exploratory hand out from beneath my sheet and felt for my cell phone on the bedside table next to me. Hello, phone? But it wasn’t there. My phone was in my purse, which was on the back of a chair in the kitchen, which was a whole room away. I pulled my hand back in and groaned like a wounded animal.

Eventually guilt got the better of me, and I dragged myself across the floorboards to the bathroom, with my knuckles practically dusting the earth in an early
Homo sapiens
manner. And unlike the girls in the commercials on television, half a bottle of grapefruit shower gel did not do it for me. Neither did standing beneath needles of hot water. What finally woke me up and persuaded me to live another day was that age-old spur, revenge. Or perhaps just residual anger from Friday, which I was obviously still harboring as it had invaded my dreams, infusing
them with such violence that I had to check for bruises as I pulled off my pajamas.

As I made an impoverished attempt at dry-skin brushing with a wet washcloth, I remembered the look on Ryan’s face when I’d told him my lie. He had smiled in such a smug, supercilious way that I’d longed to smack him and willingly cover my white cuff in his orange makeup. What I thought would be a moment of victory for me, and a temporary truce between us, had been a moment of sheer degradation. Instead of seeing it as an olive branch I was handing him and showing some appreciation like a normal human, he’d seen it only as a feather in his cap. I’d been dying to spill my guts and reveal the Machiavellian plan that I was a pawn in, but then I’d end up losing my job. Scott’s instructions had been very clear, and I’d agreed to follow them. If only I’d guessed how ego-bruising it would be to allow Ryan to think he pulled my strings like a master puppeteer. I seethed and longed to ask him if he used Bobbi Brown liquid foundation or preferred Chantecaille Real Skin. I wanted to bust him in the salon on a Saturday morning getting his nails buffed. I wanted to tell everyone that I’d once caught him checking out his own ass approvingly in the elevator mirror. I wanted to discover documentary evidence that proved beyond reasonable doubt that he subscribed to
InStyle
magazine. I wanted to kill him.

In reality, the only way I was ever going to wipe that smile off his face permanently was to rise above my current gutter-level status or get him fired, which for whatever unknown reason wasn’t in the immediate cards. My only choice was to soar above him and then look down and pour scorn—since it was unlikely that I’d be able to lay my hands on any boiling tar and feathers. In that moment in the shower, it became clear to me that, in the absence of medieval torture paraphernalia, I was going to have to torment Ryan by signing a deal for
Sex Addicts
. The kind of deal that made headlines. The kind of deal that would see me swiftly elevated from shakily situated second assistant to Scott Wagner to full-fledged producer with an office of my own, a deal at a studio, and Ryan’s having to order congratulatory flowers for me from Daniel. Not to mention a proud father-daughter type of relationship with Daniel Rosen who’d want, of course, to schedule lunch, which would cause Ryan to gnash his teeth in the night and then have to spend a fortune on a gum guard.

“Oh, yes.” I stepped from the shower and no longer felt like three
miles of bad road, even though I realized quickly that I was towelless. I owned only one towel, and it was growing its very own rain forest in the corner. It hadn’t been washed since my arrival in L.A., due to the fact that it was white and would have to occupy its very own load. Yet despite this setback, I flicked myself dry with the backs of my hands and felt hope surge within me. “Oh, yes,” I repeated. Jason and I were going to make this happen. And if I had to hike for it, then I’d hike for it. If I had to climb Kilimanjaro, then I would. Bring on Everest. I was going to stride my way to success in oatmeal socks if need be.

As I crammed a piece of toast into my mouth, I began to create a collage of Inspirational Hollywood Women. I plucked a bunch of trades from the garbage and found the one I was looking for. Here it was, the
Hollywood Reporter
heralding its “Power 100 Women in Entertainment.” I refused to see the fact that it was draped in a slippery banana skin as any kind of portent at all and wiped the cover down with my sleeve. And there, in glorious Technicolor—well, lots of black suits with a pink shirt thrown in for good measure, actually—were eight of the most serious female players in town.

I imagined that when they’d shot this cover, they’d intended for it to be ten women, but two of them were simply too important to show up. When my turn came, I was going to be one of those two no-shows. While the black suits were in the studio, I was going to be on set in Prague, swathed in sheepskin, clutching a Styrofoam cup of Czech coffee and talking budgets with the director of
Crime and Punishment
. Ryan wasn’t even going to be able to draw a mustache on me when the copy plopped onto his desk with a thud as heavy as his heart would be when he read my blurb.

As I carefully cut out the pictures of these almighty creatures, almost all of whom mentioned how they juggled three children with running a studio or a broadcasting network, I decided that hiking wouldn’t be such a bad string to add to my bow after all. Nearly all the Power Women claimed to do yoga for two hours a day before dawn. Hiking would help fill up the space in the profile that asked for your Balancing Act:
“Oh, I get up at six every morning and go for a five-mile hike in Fryman Canyon. It’s so beautiful to see the world at that hour of the day. And besides keeping me fit and de-stressed, it injects some much-needed spirituality into my day.”

But as I daydreamed about sitting in fifth place on the Power
Women List, above the president of entertainment for Fox Broadcasting, I glanced at the clock and realized that I was late. My Success Secret, sadly, was going to have to wait until later. Possibly even until I’d actually achieved some success. Though that might have been like closing the stable door once the horse had bolted. Much better to have your strategy all worked out in advance. I pulled on the only piece of Gore-Tex I owned, which was a navy blue pac-a-mac, and decided to steal someone else’s Success Secret in the meantime. But they were all too long to remember, and I didn’t have time to jot one down on the back of my hand. So I simply picked Passion. Everyone had Passion somewhere in her Success Secret. And, thankfully, it wasn’t going to involve having to enroll at night school.

“Sorry I’m late. Only I had no idea that there’d be traffic in the Hills this time of the morning,” I said as I raced up to where Jason was perched on the wooden gate at the bottom of a steep path.

“I should have warned you. The breakfast crowd, the gym crowd, the dog-walking crowd.” Jason gave me a brief and friendly hug and didn’t seem as pissed off as I’d be if I’d been kept waiting for forty minutes.

“So what happens here, then?” I tried to be perky to make up for it.

“Well, we hike.”

“Hike. Right. Well, let’s hike away.” I said as Jason folded up the
L.A. Times
he’d been reading and stood up.

“Oh, my goodness,” I said in a surprised way, and stopped in my tracks as he got to his feet.

“What?” He opened the gate to let me through first, but I didn’t move.

“Well, it’s nothing. It’s just that you’re . . . tall.”

“I’m actually only five-eleven. But I have on hiking boots.” He looked a little embarrassed.

“No, I didn’t mean that. I just meant . . .” And I started to wish I’d never opened my mouth. This wasn’t a date, it was a business meeting. I didn’t want him to think that I did or didn’t like his physique, because it wasn’t an issue. Only he was blushing a brighter shade of ketchup right now, and I think he was probably worrying that I thought it
could
be a date. Oh, brother. “I just meant that I’ve never seen your legs before. Well, not properly.” Oh, Lizzie, how
could
you?

“Right, well . . .” Poor, poor guy.

“You see, you’re always cut off at the waist behind the counter of the coffee shop, and I suppose I have seen all of you like that before, but only in the coffee shop and only for a few seconds at a time, which doesn’t really count. And while you may not be exactly tall at five-eleven, you’re a darned sight bigger than the two feet I usually see of you.”

“I see.” He was mortified.

My shoulders sagged despondently under my ugly Gore-Tex. “Jason, I’m sorry. I was just surprised. Good surprised. Not ‘Great, I now have a crush on you’ surprised, but just pleased for you that you have legs. And a whole body. You see.”

And I must have appeared so pathetic that he forced himself to understand. And then he patted me on the back, hard enough to convince me that this
was
a friendly work thing and not a date, and also to make my tongue fly forward in my head and briefly choke me. I wondered if there was any culture in which such misunderstandings might be perceived as an auspicious start to a business relationship. Apart from the backward world of satanism, and that was a cult.

As we walked up a sandy incline so steep that it might as well have been the north face of the Eiger as far as I was concerned, I wanted to tell Jason that I wasn’t what he might call fit. I wasn’t what anyone might call fit. But I thought better of it because what was undoubtedly called for now was for me to unveil my Success Secret. My stolen and abbreviated Success Secret, I grant you, but I had to salvage our working relationship before it even began.

“It’s about Passion,” I said as I panted around the bend and saw another hill, several thousand degrees steep, before me.

“Yup.” Jason waited without judgment, but perhaps not without a little trepidation, for me to continue.

“Passionate commitment to the project. And the thing is that I love this material,” I said, tripping to keep up with him.

“I’m so pleased. I mean, nobody else has read this, Elizabeth. And I’m not entirely sure why I gave it to you in the first place.” He looked at me with an earnest crease between his eyes. “But it felt right, and now I’m glad I did, because even though I don’t know a lot about your background, I think that the way you’ve handled that job at The Agency is pretty heroic. I also think it’s going to take the same qualities to make a great producer for this movie.”

“Cool,” I said. I was going to have to bone up on the vernacular used by successful people, too.

“So where do you think we should start?” Jason said as we reached the top of the hill and were rewarded with a breathtaking vista of Hollywood. It occurred to me then that perhaps the term “breathtaking” had been devised by an unfit person such as myself at a moment not dissimilar to this one, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years ago. As the unfit person climbed as far as he could manage up a hill, he suddenly seized an opportunity to stop and take a breath so he could pretend to be staggered by the beautiful view. Hence “breathtaking view.” I couldn’t be sure, of course, but with all the oxygen spiraling around my body and affecting my brain, it seemed a very legitimate theory. Anyway, regardless of the origins of the phrase, what lay before us was quite simply stunning. And, of course, an excuse for a pause.

On the one side was the Valley stretching all the way down to the ocean in Malibu. The sky was a milky morning blue, and I shielded my eyes from the sun with my hand. Though they were swathed in mist, I could just make out the low ranch houses that had been confirmed hippie enclaves until the eighties, when the rich and the groovy had moved in and sunk their swimming pools into the ground. On the other side were the Canyons, with what looked like Frank Lloyd Wright houses perched high on promontories. I imagined that 1930s movie stars and famous recluses had once wandered around these white-walled, glass-fronted buildings clutching at martinis and wondering if this was it. You lived in the highest house in Hollywood, and still you just felt farther from God than ever.

“I’ve got mine picked out,” Jason told me as I gazed out at these rarefied abodes. “It’s behind that hill. It used to belong to a silent-movie director, and every time he had another child, he added another annex to his house. So the house kind of swirls up the hillside, and it’s surrounded by sagebrush. It’s kind of run-down, but I once went there to a dinner party and fell in love with it. It has a great fireplace.” He pointed back toward Laurel Canyon.

“I think I’d like to live by the ocean,” I said, thinking of Jake Hudson’s house and the perfect evening I’d spent there. It still stung a little to think about how resoundingly I had been forgotten by Jake. But I couldn’t afford the luxury of dwelling on my fractured heart. “So let’s
get serious about this project,” I said, breaking away from the view and turning my attentions to the path ahead.

The air was still fresh, as the sun was barely above the horizon, and beneath our feet the sand had given way to a forest floor covered in splinters of bark, which smelled like the most exclusive bath products available in the little hip stores on Melrose. Well, this was L.A., after all. Even the air came expensively scented.