JAKE:I get it, Jane, thanks for being straight up. I think you are sexy and you crack me up, so here’s my number. If things change, hit me up, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
Jane realized this was essentially a perfect response, yet for some reason it still made her feel bad. Why? Too nonchalant? Was she hoping that he would try to change her mind?
She responded, with a breeziness she hoped didn’t sound affected (though really how much nuance was there on any digital communication?).
JANE:Thank you for being such a gentleman. I will hang on to your number!
She made a contact for Jake on her phone, with the note, “cute preppy jocky lawyer.”
After almost three weeks in St. Louis, Teddy was back, and they’d seen each other a few times. While it was nice and familiar, he seemed distracted. He too was caught up in the New Year/New Decade story. He wanted to get his career “firing on all cylinders,” and seemed energetic and vague at the same time. Jane wanted to enjoy the sex more than she did, but with their relationship status so tenuous, it was impossible not to wonder what this intimacy meant, or if it was even truly intimate, since Teddy didn’t want to spend the night because of “all the stuff” he had to do. Jane toggled between wanting to give him a reassuring hug and wanting to distance herself from him. She thought of herself as a decisive person, so this vacillation could be maddening if she didn’t manage it.
Anyway, she had plenty keeping her busy. In a New Year, clients were especially eager to organize. It was analogous to the crush of people joining gyms in January: frenzied optimism fed delusions of becoming an entirely new person, of metamorphosis. A new year inspired a reckless amount of hope. Jane herself was dabbling in hope, but only in the most judicious, rational way.
She dressed carefully this morning: tailored jeans, black flats,crisp white shirt, cashmere sweater. Looking at herself in the mirror, she wondered if she looked too schoolmarmish, too librarian, but she decided that even if she did, it was appropriate. This was the right look for working in the home of Lauren Baker, an “A-list” celebrity.
Jane was irked by the way Hollywood, so ostentatiously liberal and democratic, was in reality rigidly stratified—assigning everyone to lists, roping off VIP areas. There was an A-list, a B-list—even a Z-list. Lauren Baker was a bona fide A-lister who had starred in a series of successful romantic comedies in the aughts, movies that teenage Jane thought were “lame” but secretly enjoyed. Lauren played a series of women who were ditsy yet smart, beleaguered yet effervescent, inevitably interested in the wrong guy when the right guy was right in front of her. Lauren had a million-dollar smile—or more precisely, a ten-million-dollar smile, since her fee in the aughts was ten million dollars a picture—and a bubbly personality. She was accessibly beautiful, so men could lust after her while women could relate to her. She was one of those stars who had been crowned America’s Sweetheart, a title that had belonged to the likes of Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and Jennifer Aniston, and then a younger generation, Reese Witherspoon, Anne Hathaway, and Kate Hudson.
Reese, Anne, and Kate were Lauren’s peers, the generation of actresses that caught the last gasp of the romantic comedy genre before online dating obliterated it. The romantic comedy conventions no longer made sense now that dating was a volume business and people were the commodity. It was the gamification of dating. “Gamification,” another word that had become ubiquitous. As if everything needed to be gamified to engage all the voracious consumers afflicted with chronic distractibility.
Jane was over being starstruck, but part of her was excited tosee Lauren Baker up close. She had a soft spot for Lauren, whose movieSlap Happywas one of her favorite guilty pleasures.Slap Happywas an improbable riff on Jane Austen’sNorthanger Abbey, and even more improbably, Jane had loved it.
Jane had worked with a few of those elites designated as A-listers. Some were surprisingly unassuming and down to earth, others were wary and cold. Some projected innate intelligence, others projected vapid narcissism. Some seemed really simple, others seemed impossibly complicated. Which, of course, made perfect sense, because after all, they were just people.
Jane did one last check in the mirror before heading out and decided to swap her strand of pearls (which were reading over-the-top priss) for one of her favorite Hermès scarves. Purple and green, it added a splash of color and a hint of chicness.
The deceptively casual Pacific Palisades were ostentatious in subtler ways than other Los Angeles neighborhoods. Many of the houses were ranch style, low slung and unassuming. The most extravagant homes were on big lots, hidden behind high hedges and gates. Apart from the eponymous palisades, the topography was rather flat, so the homes weren’t overlooking one another, checking each other out. It was the obverse of Hidden Hills, which was full of exhibitionists who wanted to be seen: here, the desire for privacy seemed genuine.
Jane had been given specific instructions to announce herself at the call box at the gate and to park in the driveway. The gates slid open revealing an enormous courtyard in front of a sprawling cottage-style home. The twee, homey aesthetic of the house was paradoxical given its size and scale, but also very on brand for Lauren Baker.
It seemed like every A-list actress of her generation had been building a brand and selling products—yoga apparel, peasant dresses, cookware, cookbooks, bras, candles, makeup, and all kinds of naturopathic goods like essential oils and yoni eggs. It was aspirational in a way that Jane found borderline exploitative—more desperational. Inserting a seventy-dollar piece of jade into your vagina was not going to turn you into Gwyneth Paltrow; it was only going to be cold, hard, and very unpleasant.
Lauren was from New Orleans, so that ethos was threaded throughout her entrepreneurial endeavors: a line of flow “dance” dresses, simple shifts that could be “worn to a cocktail party or to a Mardi Gras blowout,” various foodstuffs, featuring her “signature beignet mix,” some home furnishings, basic low country pieces and lots of wrought iron tables and gewgaws.
As was the case with most actrepreneurs, these products were peddled with reassurances that a percentage of the profits would be allocated to a charitable donation made to a worthy cause. However, the specifics—how much money, and where exactly it was going—were never advertised.
Jane read that Lauren had sent a bunch of her flowy dance dresses to Afghanistan and Syria—possibly in an attempt to keep up with Reese Witherspoon, who was being aggressively “charitable” with her new clothing line. All these “charitable” acts generated an inordinate amount of publicity for the stars’ ventures. Did the end justify the means? If publicizing charitable endeavors moved product, was that okay, as long as a meaningful portion of the incoming profits were actually donated to charity? It seemed so cynical. But maybe Jane was the one who was being cynical.
Apart from her business ventures, Lauren was actually a remarkably talented and engaging actress. She had almost won anOscar for a prestige film she had done—a real departure from her America’s Sweetheart roles—in which she played a drug trafficker who rode hogs with the Hell’s Angels. She had gone on a liquid diet and lost twenty pounds to mimic the emaciated, hollowed out look of a meth addict and was the Oscar frontrunner until a dark horse competitor emerged at the eleventh hour in a grim indie film about a woman with trichotillomania: this actress, who’d shaved her head for the part, had a five-minute crying jag with rivulets of actual snot trickling from her nose. This was unimpeachable and won the prize.
Jane wondered why Lauren, who had accrued so much fame and fortune from her acting career, felt the need to launch all these businesses. Was it a way to get out in front of the inevitable, and possibly precipitous, decline in acting opportunities once she turned forty? Hadn’t she already made enough money for a lifetime? Lauren seemed smart and savvy, so more power to her. Also, her husband—her second husband, and the father of her youngest child—had no discernible career and was entirely dependent on her. Life didn’t seem to ever imitate art with the romantic comedy heroines: in real life, these demigoddesses usually ended up picking losers.
Jane scanned the half-dozen cars in the courtyard—probably a housekeeper, a cook, a trainer, an assistant—until she spotted Esmé sitting in the driver’s seat of her Prius. Jane hadn’t partnered with Esmé since she accused Jane of pilfering theSpellboundDVD box set, a claim that still irked her.
Spotting Esmé’s ponytail, which was aberrantly static, Jane resolved not to let any of this bother her.
“Hey, Jane!”
“Good morning, Esmé. That’s such a pretty top.”
Esmé was in her uniform of jeans and a mock turtleneck, butthe color of the turtleneck—a vibrant shade of orange—was a noticeable departure worthy of praise.
“Aw, thanks. I try to snazz it up a bit when I know I’ll be working with you, because you always look impeccable.”
Jane stifled the impulse to demur and reminded herself to accept the compliment. “Thank you.”
As they headed for the front door, a man strode out of the house. Jane stifled a gasp: he was Peter Miller, her repellent former boss, the one who’d derided the idea of a movie version ofVillette. He seemed tense and preoccupied.
Jane felt compelled to greet him.
