Chapter One
Kelsey
Why don’t you start with Mr. Cuddles’s closet?” Kelsey suggested.
Jane knew who Mr. Cuddles was, but feigned ignorance, which shocked her client. “You’ve never heard of Mr. Cuddles? He has, like, two hundred thousand followers on Instagram. We do lots of events together, you know, animal rescue stuff, so he has a ton of outfits. And tons of doggy swag bags.”
It was always disconcerting to meet a celebrity in person. Sometimes they looked nothing like their images: they were smaller, they looked older, you could spot the tracks of their hair extensions. Surprisingly, Kelsey was actually prettier in person. All the makeup and hair she wore on camera was a kind of drag. Stripped of it, she looked more like a natural beauty and less like all the other actresses processed by the same Hollywood assembly line of makeup artists, hairdressers, and wardrobe stylists.
In a plaintive voice, Kelsey called out, “Mr. Cuddles, Mr. Cuddles! Come here, Mr. Cuddles!”
Summoned, Mr. Cuddles waddled into the kitchen. Yes, Jane knew who he was; in fact, she knew an obscene amount about Kelsey and all the creatures in her orbit because Kelsey was enshrined in the pantheon of pop culture, even if she was now a mere footnote. Before her cynical thirties, Jane had been an avid consumer of trashy celebrity ephemera. Now all this mental clutter, the curated and processed “facts” that had seeped into her brain, made her slightly ashamed.
Mr. Cuddles, some sort of pug mix, a tiny, ungainly, wheezing dog, was stuffed into a sweater, looking like the least appetizing sausage ever. Jane considered herself a dog lover but had never liked pugs. She thought it was inhumane to breed dogs for deformities—could you imagine if they did that for humans? Though sometimes, in her darker moments, Jane worried this could be exactly what humans were doing.
“He is adorable,” she offered tepidly. The gap between the thoughts constantly fomenting in her mind and the benign sentiments she actually uttered often made for a rather grand canyon.
Kelsey scooped Mr. Cuddles into her arms and kissed him. The little creature, knowing from whence his kibble came, kissed her back, with tongue and everything.
“I am so sorry it’s such a mess, but that’s why you’re here, right? I had to get the kids off to school this morning, and—well, you probably know this, but I am recently separated—and it’s been a lot. The kids are in that tween phase, except for Hailey, she’s five, and such a princess. I mean, when this is the tree”—she pointed to herself—“of course those are the apples you get.” Was she being self-deprecating, or self-laudatory? Or both at the same time? Jane grudgingly conceded that Kelsey might have at least one small talent.
“I understand you’re a mess. I’m going to do as much as I can today—”
“Wait, I didn’t sayIwas a mess, I said this place was!” Kelsey protested. Then, giggling, she added, “But yeah, I’m kind of a mess.”
“And who isn’t?” Jane hastened to smooth things over. “Don’t worry. We’ll do as much as we can today, and if you feel like we’ve made progress and you want to keep going, we can arrange for some more days. Sound good?”
“Amaaaaaazing. Okay, follow me!”
Kelsey stopped in front of what in a normal person’s house would have been a food pantry. Instead, there were shelves crammed with dog sweaters and sunglasses and bonnets and booties and leashes and collars and harnesses and all kinds of biscuits, bones, bully sticks. Jane knew bully sticks were actually dehydrated bull penises, which she found repellent, but at the same time could not help but admire the clever marketing and ingenious thrift.
“So this is Mr. Cuddles’s closet. Watch out for the pee-pee pads, he’s so lazy, he won’t use the dog door. Betty loves the dog door and being outside, but she’s a big dog, so, you know, she’s not going to get snatched by a hawk or something like that which supposedly is what happened to Katy Perry’s chihuahuadoodle.”
Jane scanned the pantry. If Kelsey would let her throw most of this crap away, organizing it would be very doable.
“Is this also Betty’s closet?”
Kelsey laughed. “Betty’s sort of a nudist! So she doesn’t really have a closet. But now I feel like—should she? Do you think she resents Mr. Cuddles?”
Jane offered a strained smile. “I don’t think dogs do resentment.”
Jane could be judgmental, and she knew this about herself. But was it wrong to be judgmental if your judgments were judicious?
Jane gestured to the pantry. “We need to sort this stuff. Do you want to go through it with me?”
“Oh no, I have so much to do, plus ADHD, plus—I have a really hard time letting go of things for some reason.”
“Everyone does.” Jane delivered this blandishment with empathy.
“I totally trust you. Just holler if you need me.”
As Kelsey exited, Jane’s professional smile faded and Betty, a doleful-looking pit bull mix, lumbered across the room and collapsed into her dog bed with a satisfied grunt. Jane bent over and scratched her gently behind the ears, taking a deep, calming breath.
Well over a decade ago, armed with her degree in literature from an East Coast college with an endowment larger than the gross domestic product of many developing nations, Jane Brown had moved to Los Angeles with the intention of working in the entertainment industry. Surely her knowledge of canonical literature, story structure, and semiotic theory would serve her well. She landed a job as an assistant at one of the top talent agencies, working for a bro-man who represented many successful film and television writers. Jane soon learned that he, like many of his colleagues, either didn’t want to take the time to read or, perhaps even more damning, simply wasn’t capable of the sustained attention reading required.
Jane moved on from the agency world to the “development”world. “Development” meant that executives, possessed of the same cognitive hurdles to reading the agents had, spent most of their working hours giving writers edicts about how to improve their work, which inevitably meant excising anything intelligent or original. Not that much of it was either of those; most of what Jane read was dreck, and she soon realized that if she liked something, it was doomed.
The Hollywood argot was consistently grating. She recoiled whenever someone passed on a piece of material by saying that they “didn’t respond to it.”Didn’t respond? Were they insensate? If you don’t like something, simply say so. Don’t try to evade accountability for your aesthetic verdicts. But no one wanted to be responsible, because everyone functioned in a miasma of fear and ignorance, terrorized by originality and afraid to have opinions, jockeying to position themselves so that in the event of failure, there was deniability, but in the unlikely event of success (which always seemed to happen accidentally), there was a pathway to taking credit. It was futile and exhausting. Working in development would soon destroy her capacity to take any pleasure in viewing film or television; the works she cherished as escapist entertainment would no longer be enjoyable, and watching the rare ones that pierced her soul, that were art, would become unbearable.
