“So what is it that upsets you exactly?” asked Aunt Agnes, seeing straight to the heart of the matter. “The fact that Scarlett might be endangering herself? Or the fact that she chooses not to take your advice?”
Jake closed his eyes and rubbed his temples hard, as if searching for the answer in the deepest recesses of his mind. “God, I dunno,” he sighed. “Both, I suppose. It does piss me off that she doesn’t need me. She’s so fucking independent.”
“You know, young man, you really must make more of an effort with your language,” chided Aunt Agnes.
“Sorry,” said Jake again. “But at the same time, I love her, you know? I don’t want to wake up one morning and get a call from Cedar Sinai telling me Scar’s in the ICU with a Russian bullet lodged in her skull.”
“Indeed not.” Aunt Agnes shivered.
“And I don’t want Flawless to go under either. Scarlett acts like I’ve no say in the matter, but I’m a partner in that store. Brogan could put us out of business like that if he wanted to.” He clicked his fingers for emphasis. “He’s already decimated my and Danny’s business. Wiped us out on the East Coast like a couple of fucking…like a couple of bugs,” he corrected himself.
“I see,” said Aunt Agnes, nodding quietly to herself.
She hadn’t known what to expect of Jake. Hugo and Caroline both spoke of him in the most disparaging terms, but then they’d always been crashing snobs; quite apart from which she knew from Scarlett that neither of them had in fact met the man, which she couldn’t help but feel detracted somewhat fatally from their credibility as witnesses. Scarlett’s evidence—that Jake was simultaneously the most wonderful and the most infuriating man on the face of the earth—was also not to be trusted. The girl was plainly head over heels in love and couldn’t be expected to know her own mind, let alone anyone else’s. When Jake had called tonight, she’d seized the unexpected opportunity to size him up for herself.
Overall, she liked what she saw. He was blunt and, it seemed to her, honest, despite having what was clearly a well-earned reputation as a bit of a Lothario. More importantly, he seemed to be genuinely in love with Scarlett. Agnes was excessively fond of her niece and, unlike her brother and sister-in-law, viewed deep, passionate love as a prerequisite for a happy marriage. Jake could give her that, even if right now it was all he could give her, with his business on the ropes. That in itself need not be a problem. Agnes was a wealthy woman with no children of her own. She’d be quite prepared to help out financially, should Scarlett and her husband ever need it. Besides, Jake was obviously rampantly ambitious, not to mention a natural salesman. Men like that had a habit of bouncing back from adversity, in her experience. They also had a habit of clinging pathetically to their macho pride. For such a smart boy, Jake seemed to be doing a first-class job of screwing up his relationship. Had she been forty years younger she’d have reached across the table and throttled him until he saw sense. As it was, she decided to treat him to a few choice words of elderly aunt advice.
“You’re a fool, Mr. Meyer. A first-class fool,” she said bluntly.
Jake looked thoroughly miserable but didn’t contradict this assessment.
“The truth is, Aunt Agnes, I’m not really cut out for relationships. I’m not the man Scarlett needs, and she’s started to figure that out for herself.”
“Nonsense.” The old woman put her knife and fork together and pushed her plate away crossly. “Everyone’s cut out for relationships. Relationships are life, for heavens’ sake. What else is there?”
Jake shrugged. “Random shagging?”
“Unsatisfying,” said Aunt Agnes firmly, “as you well know.”
In her certainty, she reminded him of an older Doctor Katenge. Both were strong women, moral forces to be reckoned with. Scarlett had a streak of that in her, but she also had a vulnerability that her aunt entirely lacked. Agnes Headington was about as vulnerable as a prop forward on steroids.
“So what do you suggest?” he asked meekly. “I can’t force Scarlett to listen to me.”
“Exactly,” said Aunt Agnes, “so stop trying. Brogan O’Donnell is a thoroughly unpleasant little man. I’m proud my niece has the courage to stand up to him, and so should you be. You want to control her behavior because that’s what you’re used to doing with women—”
“Hold on,” said Jake defensively. “You don’t know that.”
“And because you feel threatened by Scarlett’s success.”
“I’m not threatened!” said Jake indignantly, and entirely unconvincingly.
“Stop focusing on Scarlett’s behavior and change your own,” said Aunt Agnes. “If your brother’s side of the business has suffered because of this Brogan chap, work doubly hard on the West Coast market. You clearly hate the fact that you’re being ‘carried’ by Flawless, as you put it. So pull your finger out and start turning your own business around.”
“Yes, well, I’d love to, but I’m afraid it’s not that easy,” said Jake petulantly. He was starting to feel cross himself now.
“Nothing worth achieving ever is,” said Aunt Agnes, “and that goes for romance as well as your career. Now, listen.” She clapped her hands imperiously to get his attention, which seemed to be focused somewhere in the region of his shoelaces. “What you do from here is up to you.”
“Thanks very much,” he said wryly.
“But I think it would be best if you ‘forgot’ to tell Scarlett about this evening, our meeting like this.”
“Why?” Jake quipped. “You think she might be jealous?”
“Don’t be cheeky,” snapped Aunt Agnes. Once again Jake found himself blushing like a naughty little boy. “It’s you I’m thinking of, young man, not myself. Scarlett loves me dearly, but she wouldn’t appreciate my meddling in her affairs any more than she appreciates it from you.”
“Ah, but you still do it, don’t you?” said Jake, thrilled to have found a break in the old bat’s logic at last. “You meddle because you love her. Like me.”
Aunt Agnes smiled, her earlier good humor apparently completely restored.
“My dear boy, I’m nothing like you. The secret of a good meddler is not to get caught. Now.” Fixing her glasses more firmly in place, she scanned the room for their waiter. “I suggest you get the bill. It’s getting late.”
“You suggest I get the bill,” muttered Jake under his breath. “Un-fucking-believable!” But the truth was he was more than happy to pay. Despite her rudeness, or perhaps because of it, he liked her a lot. This evening, on many levels, had been a learning experience, and education rarely came cheap.
Driving home along Beverly twenty minutes later beneath a perfect full moon, he thought over Aunt Agnes’s advice and contemplated calling Scarlett then and there, to apologize for his childishness before. But realizing he was drunk and would almost certainly fuck it up, he thought better of it and decided to wait until morning. She wasn’t going anywhere after all, at least, not tonight.
Tomorrow he’d make a fresh start.
CHAPTER TWENTY
AT AROUND NINE in the morning on Oscars day, the strip of Hollywood Boulevard extending a quarter of a mile on either side of the Dolby Theatre was closed to the public. By nine thirty, trucks full of metal crash barriers were being unloaded onto the sidewalk by overweight black men with sunglasses and earpieces. Roll after roll of red carpet was laid along the sidewalk next to the three hundred feet of road set aside for the stars’ limos, and a separate area was fenced off for the press.
No Angelino with a modicum of sense tried to get to, through, or around Hollywood Boulevard on Oscars night unless they happened to be one of the favored few attending the ceremony. And even the favored few had been known to feel less than favored when, with less than a half hour to go until doors closed, they found themselves stuck in a line of limos as long as the Great Wall of China, with everybody beeping at everybody else and nobody moving so much as millimeter farther toward the “drop zone.”
This year, Jake a
nd Scarlett fell into the latter category.
“This is just complete bollocks,” said Jake, for the third time in as many minutes. “It’s worse than last year. They have twelve months to prepare, and this clusterfuck is the best they can do?”
“How much further to the theater?” asked Scarlett, looking anxiously at her watch, a rose-gold-and-diamond evening piece she’d designed herself. “Could we get out and walk, do you think?”
“I could,” said Jake, glancing across at her sky-high heels and skintight, gunmetal-gray dress, a vintage Hérve Léger. “But you won’t go far in that getup. Not unless I give you a fireman’s lift.”
He smiled, and Scarlett smiled back, relieved at this tiny flicker of camaraderie between them. Things had been desperately tense since he’d gotten back from New York. Jake had apologized after that awful first night, when she’d been stuck in that stupid dinner with the E! people—the exec producer turned out to be a lecherous old goat with permanently open, wet lips like Gordon Brown, and had spent the entire evening trying to goose her—and the next day they’d had truly fabulous makeup sex. But the thawing of relations proved to be short-lived. Two days ago, the NPR program on the O’Donnell miners in Yakutia finally aired, and all Jake’s good resolutions seemed to evaporate.
Perhaps she was stupid even to have hoped for his support. He’d made his feelings on the subject pretty plain since Christmas, after all. She could hardly claim to be surprised. But still, part of her had thought that when he actually heard it he might see things her way. Andy Gordon, her friend from the BBC, had done a spectacular job pulling together all the evidence and presenting it far more calmly and dispassionately than she would ever have been able to. In fact, she’d been worried when she heard her own interviews that she might have come across as too hysterical, too emotive. She’d been audibly close to tears at one point, recounting the story of a mother from Yakutsk who’d lost two of her sons to cancer in the past eighteen months, both of them O’Donnell miners. She’d written to Brogan O’Donnell directly to ask for help toward the funeral costs, but he hadn’t even bothered to reply.
“Oh God, I sound awful,” she winced, listening to her voice crack as she sat on Jake’s couch with a portable HD radio in her lap. “D’you think Andy’ll be furious? I promised to stay rational and detached.”
“Why’re you asking me?” growled Jake, without glancing up from his Nintendo DS Lite. “If you gave a crap about my opinion, you wouldn’t have done the show in the first place.”
He knew he was being childish. That he was throwing all Aunt Agnes’s good advice out the window, sabotaging things again. But it was like being in the throes of relationship Tourette’s. He couldn’t seem to control himself.
“Oh for God’s sake, grow up!” snapped Scarlett. She knew she shouldn’t rise to his moodiness, but she was running on empty after weeks of almost no sleep, and her self-control had deserted her. “Sitting there sulking like a little boy with your stupid computer game. Maybe if you listened to these people’s stories instead of wallowing in self-pity you’d understand why I can’t just let it go.”
“And maybe if you stopped lobbying so hard for your bloody sainthood,” he shot back at her, “you’d be a bit more fun to be around.”
“I’m trying to do some good,” said Scarlett. “Then again, why should I expect you to understand that?”
“Just because I don’t bang on about things on the radio doesn’t mean I don’t do my bit,” said Jake.
“Oh really? Like what?” demanded Scarlett.
Jake bit his lip. It would have been so easy to tell her about Dr. Katenge and the work he’d been doing behind the scenes with the orphans in Sierra Leone. But some perverse desire for control, a need to have one simple, good thing that he kept just for himself, held him back. Instead he jumped back on the offensive.
“Listen, Mother Theresa. You may think you’re doing good with this crap, but let’s just see what happens, shall we? You think the radio listeners of America are going to go to bat for these guys?” He gave a short, derisive laugh. “You’re the one who should grow up. And don’t come crying to me when Brogan and his thugs come knocking at our door again.”
“Don’t worry,” Scarlett yelled after him as he stormed out of the apartment, “I won’t. I can take care of myself, you know. Dickhead,” she added, under her breath.
But for all her fighting talk, the argument had left her deeply and lastingly depressed. Jake had come home a few hours later, bearing roses and apologies, both of which she’d accepted graciously. But she left for work the next morning with a heavy heart. There were only so many times you could paper over the cracks in a relationship. She and Jake were running out of chances, and they both knew it.
Thankfully, she’d spent the last forty-eight hours in such an all-consuming work frenzy she’d had little time to dwell on personal problems. Aware that the Oscars were her first big chance to establish herself as a serious player in the LA jewelry market, and that other people, such as Perry and Jake, were depending on her to succeed, she felt the weight of responsibility like a grand piano on her back.
Tonight, finally, was make-or-break time. If she could just get through her hour in front of the cameras—a billion people worldwide would be watching—everything else would be fine. She could enjoy the ceremony and the Elton John after-party with Jake…just as long as she didn’t fuck up in front of the entire world. Oh, God!
“Seriously, I think we should walk,” she said, looking anxiously at the solid line of cars in front of them. “If you carry me to Vine, I can probably hobble from there. The film crew were expecting us forty minutes ago.”
Jake looked at his own watch, a Patek Philippe he’d bought the day after selling that three-carat lump of GGG to Al Brookstein. Christ, that felt like a lifetime ago.
“All right,” he said. “You’re on.”
Jumping out into the street, he ran around to the other side of the car, opened Scarlett’s door for her, and scooped her up into his arms. They’d shared a bed every night this week, but only when he picked her up did he fully appreciate how much weight she’d lost recently. The stress of work, plus all their arguments, must have affected her more than he’d realized. He’d lifted heavier eight-year-olds.
“You need to get some more meat on your bones, sweetheart,” he said guiltily. “Bloody sexy dress though.”
“Thanks.”
Scarlett positively glowed with happiness. It felt like eons since he’d complimented her. Pressed against his chest, breathing in his aftershave, her hands clasped around his neck like a fairy-tale damsel in distress, she felt a surge of desire for him gush through her body like a blood transfusion. His strength, his warmth, his confidence, all the things that had drawn her to him in the first place, were suddenly there again. Her nervousness about the night ahead began to melt. So what if she’d never presented before? How hard could it be, really? She was going to the Oscars—the Oscars!—on the arm of the sexiest man in the world. Jake Meyer loved her and she loved him back. In that instant, nothing else mattered.
Fifty yards from the red carpet line, Jake set her down on the sidewalk.
“Think you can make it from here?”
“Uh-huh,” she nodded. “Just don’t walk too fast. And hold on to me. These shoes are like stilts.”
After a brief flashing of paperwork at the various security checkpoints (Jake was also frisked, airport-style, for a weapon) they were ushered through banks of salivating paparazzi, all of whom ignored them utterly.
“Look at ’em. They’re like wolves that have just been fed,” whispered Jake, nodding at Will and Jada Smith, who’d arrived immediately ahead of them to a barrage of flash bulbs.
“I know,” Scarlett giggled. “I feel like I could strip naked and no one would lift a camera.”
“Don’t bet on it,” said Jake, patting her bottom.
Scarlett smiled as once again joy and relief washed over her. It was OK. They were going to be OK.
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Seconds later she saw Christian, the E! cameraman, signaling frantically for her to come over.
“Shit, that’s me. I’ve got to go,” she said, kissing Jake perfunctorily as he waved to another old friend. He seemed to know a lot more people here than she’d expected. “Wish me luck.” But he’d already wandered off toward his buddy, out of earshot above the din of partygoers, and Christian had the look of a man in no mood to wait.
“Where’ve you been?” he snapped, thrusting an earpiece and microphone into Scarlett’s hand. “Coverage started fifteen minutes ago. Brooke’s been winging it solo.”
“Sorry,” mumbled Scarlett, fiddling with the wires. “The traffic was insane. We couldn’t move.”
“OK, OK. To camera two,” yelled Christian. “Annette and Warren are coming over. Scarlett, ask her about the necklace.”
Talk about a baptism of fire. For the next twenty minutes, Scarlett wilted in the combined heat of the afternoon sun and the TV lights as she rattled off an on-camera commentary about various stars’ choice of jewelry.
“That’s Marcia Cross in a gorgeous black-pearl choker,” she heard herself saying, hoping she didn’t sound like quite as much of a QVC saleswoman as she feared. “I have no idea who made that, but the pearls are Tahitian, and it looks like her ring…yes, it’s vintage Cartier. Full marks, Marcia.”
“And here’s Emma Stone in Neil Lane. Wow. Those diamonds must weigh more than she does. Not my style, but she’s young enough to carry it off.”
“Goodness gracious, is that Clive Owen? He’s gone very Puff Daddy on the cuff links, hasn’t he? I dread to think who made those. We’ll have to ask him.”
The plan had been for her to do the interviews alongside Tamara Mellon, who’d pontificate about the shoes and clutches while Scarlett dealt with the diamonds. But Tamara must have still been stuck in the never-ending limo line, and Scarlett found herself acting as expert sidekick to Kevin Frazier instead, marveling at his ability not to sweat in a tuxedo and six-inch-thick makeup, not to mention the heat. She wanted to ask him if he still got nervous at these things, but their camera breaks were so short there was barely time to reapply powder and take a sip of water before being plunged back into the maelstrom.
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