“Sweetie, let’s go talk, okay?”
Kelsey put her arm around Prudence, and they went off into the sprawling primary bedroom where Jane discretely observed them in a hushed conversation.
Jane was ambivalent about having kids. Her only sibling, a younger brother, was severely disabled. He had a progressive disease, and his needs became central to her household; that is, as much as her parents could factor the needs of others into theirlives. As her brother’s care became more demanding, her father went from being a specter to disappearing completely. Jane was scared of what all of this would portend for baby-making, which was a kind of genetic Russian roulette.
Now Prudence had her head in Kelsey’s lap while Kelsey gently traced the whorls of her ear, a soothing ritual. Jane watched them. Her own adolescent heart had been similarly broken by fickle friends; she remembered being overcome by a bone-deep fragility that made her feel as if she would literally crumble. Her mother had shrugged. “Girls can be really mean,” she said. “Don’t let it bother you.” This felt like a slap.
“Jane, really,” her mother had said. “You can’t worry about these things. Just get some new friends. You need to understand: there will always be girls prettier than you and smarter than you. But you can be the nicest. So, try to be nice.”
Jane had stormed off, a lesson learned about the consequences of vulnerability.
It was September, the dog days of summer, and even in the cocoon of her car, the dry heat felt oppressive as Jane ruminated some more on the drive home. When did she transition from hopeful dreamer to sardonic realist? What was the inflection point?
When she was a junior development executive, her boss Peter Miller invited her to a general meeting with a woman who was a very in-demand director (i.e., in demand for movies that male executives deemed appropriate for female directors, which meant romantic comedies, weepy dramas, and movies for children). “General meetings” were meet-and-greets, opportunities for executives to feel out creatives and suck up to them if they were “hot.”
This director was smart and passionate, and Jane’s boss was entirely out of his depth, asking banal questions like what sort of material appealed to her.
“Bildungsroman,” the director replied. Peter Miller’s idea of literature was Superman, Spiderman, and Batman; he clearly had no idea what the word meant. Jane, however, was delighted, and effused about her love of the genre and in particular her favorite novel, Charlotte Brontë’sVillette.
When it was assigned in college, she approached it indifferently, but the book ended up leaving an indelible impression. The stultifying world these nineteenth-century women lived in—Brontë as well as her fictional alter ego Lucy Snowe—was suffocating and rigid yet also paradoxically cozy and reassuring. If those women could find dignity and passion within those constraints, surely there was hope for Jane Brown.
BecauseVillettewas relatively obscure, overshadowed by the much more popularJane Eyre, Jane was astonished when the director said it was one of her favorite novels as well. What were the odds?
They went on to have a lively discussion while Jane’s boss tried, without much success, to mask his boredom. After the meeting, Jane was flushed with excitement. She asked Peter if he wanted her to get a copy of the book for him or, at a minimum, bring him coverage—a synopsis written by someone in the story department—because Jane knew there was no way he would actually read a nineteenth-century novel, or any novel, for that matter. He guffawed.
“Come on, Jane, we’re never doingViolet.”
“Villette.”
“It’sMasterpiece Theatreshit. Maybe PBS will do it.”
“That director is brilliant, and lots of Jane Austen adaptations have done really well—”
“Those movies were singles or doubles. I’m looking for home runs!” In point of fact, Peter kept a baseball bat in his office, which he would swing at imaginary balls while on calls and sometimes even in meetings. “Listen, Jane, there is a ceiling on what these women’s pictures will gross.”
Gross indeed.
Frustrated, Jane went out on a limb and wrote the director a passionate email, praising her talents and saying that she really hoped to work with her someday and that she would be looking for material for her. She fantasized that surely the director would recognize a kindred spirit and hire her away to work on developing projects that would be compelling and complicated.
But she never heard back. She tried to reason away her feelings of rejection. This was, after all, Hollywood. But she couldn’t. It hurt.
Was this the moment when she stopped aspiring to excellence and resigned herself to toggling between acceptance of mediocrity and an abject terror of total, humiliating failure? The evil of banality worried her so much more than the banality of evil.
Jane’s street was lined with small homes built in the forties and fifties intermingled with a few ugly two-story apartment buildings from the seventies and eighties, the result of a period of lax zoning laws. She pulled into the driveway of her rented house, a modest craftsman painted a reassuringly neutral slate gray. A tall cedar, its heavy branches always looking a little careworn, as if wilting from their own weight, dominated the front yard. Underneath it, a scrubby lawn was abutted by a small bed of rosesthat somehow thrived without much care. Hedges of towering junipers along the property line screened them from neighbors. The driveway on the left side of the house led to a detached garage that had been finished to serve as a guest house or home office. Jane parked in front of it.
How did she ever end up in North Hollywood, in the Valley? Jane and Teddy had found the house together. Given their budget and the escalating cost of rentals in Los Angeles, it was a great find. A house felt much more adult than an apartment, and they both wanted a yard. It was good enough, but Jane knew she would never love it.
What an exhausting day it had been. Kelsey had already texted to ask if Jane could come back next week. Jane said yes. What she didn’t say was that she was actually looking forward to it.
She grabbed her purse and a garment bag out of the trunk, hoping for a warm hug and scruffy kiss once she was inside. Instead, she found Teddy on the couch engrossed in a game ofFortnite, headphones clapped over his ears, tethered to that egregiously misnomered joystick.
With his round, boyish face, Teddy still looked like a college student, and dressed like one, too, usually in ratty T-shirts and jeans. His smile was invariably mischievous and there was always a sparkle in his green eyes—even when hazy and bloodshot from smoking weed. He wore his unruly tawny hair longish, mostly because it required minimal care that way. There was a cowlick at the base of his neck, and the errant lock of hair, which looked as if it had been styled by a curling iron for a flip hairdo, was improbably adorable to Jane. Low maintenance was also the regimen for his beard, which he would let grow until Jane complained. Then he would be clean-shaven—and adorably puppyish—until it grew back. His lack of vanity was refreshing.
Teddy spotted her out of the corner of his eye, gave a wave, and muttered something semi-intelligible about needing more time.
She needed to get a dog, she thought, as she walked into the cramped laundry room that abutted the kitchen. They were reliably affectionate.
She set down her purse, then unzipped the garment bag, revealing a Chanel suit, a matching jacket and skirt made from a beautiful tweed of pink, blue, and black. It was impeccably tailored and perfectly understated. Classic. Iconic. Kelsey didn’t like wearing it, but Jane would. Kelsey rescued dogs; Jane rescued garments. In its new home, the Chanel would be catalogued and cherished. Jane considered this assisted decluttering, nothing more. Kelsey wouldn’t miss the suit; in fact, Jane had done her a favor by relieving her of the burden of its negative associations. In any event, what Kelsey didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
