The Second Assistant

by Clare Naylor

  “Should I call his wife?” I asked, beginning to panic. I looked into Scott’s office once again, to check that he hadn’t face-planted on his keyboard, but he was still fixated on his screen.

  “Oh, yes, baby, give me an ace give me an ace! An ace on the flop, please, sweet Jesus!”

  “If she hasn’t noticed he’s missing, then I’d just assume she doesn’t care,” Courtney said.

  “Then what about his shrink? Should I call his shrink?” I really didn’t think that I could just leave him like this any longer.

  “Up to you.” Talitha lost interest as the cute guy from Accounts walked through the office, and she and Courtney turned fluffy and began talking to him.

  I went to the Coffee Bean and caught Jason in the middle of a rush.

  “Hey, Lizzie, any news?” he asked over the heads of a line of six people. I moved around to the side of his counter where we wouldn’t be heard by half The Agency staffers as they collected their midmorning pickups.

  “I’ve approached a few of the junior agents, but none of them have bitten yet. I suspect that they’ll read it this weekend,” I said. I’d actually sent it to six people and was feeling a little disappointed that I hadn’t had a single response yet. It had been over a week now, and as I’d cherry-picked them all and approached them individually, I’d hoped they might have been a little sprightlier off the mark. Still, I knew how long it could take to get around to reading a script, so it didn’t necessarily mean anything ominous that we hadn’t heard back yet. And it was only going to take one person to like the material and we’d be off the starting block.

  “Okay, well we’ll keep our fingers crossed. Did you want drinks?” he asked as he dropped a pile of waxed-paper cups all over the floor.

  “I was hoping for a triple espresso and a little something for me. But I’ll wait in line like everyone else. I don’t want to create any bad feelings.” Which I already seemed to be doing by engaging the coffeemaker in conversation, judging by the looks on some of the customers’ faces.

  “Might be wise,” Jason said, and I shifted to the back of the line and pondered Scott. My task today would be to keep him out of the ER, I figured, so I picked up three cheese-and-bacon ciabattas and two smoothies. He needed nutrients. “But shall we meet later on at my place to go over the latest draft? I’ll call you to arrange.”

  “Sure, sounds perfect,” I said. Jason and I had both agreed after our hike that we would read through the script again and see if there were any changes that would make it punchier, more emotionally hard-hitting, or just generally better. I had my notes ready, and, clearly, so did Jason. And I couldn’t wait to get down and dirty and work on the script. To really feel that I was flexing my producer’s muscles.

  I gathered up my emergency supplies and hurried back to the office with renewed enthusiasm. I was on a steep learning curve, and even in my low-grade office chair, I learned more about cutting a deal than I would if I’d gone to Stanford and done an M.B.A. Because one of the great things about Hollywood was that no matter where you worked or what you did for a living, you couldn’t avoid becoming competent in the business of moviemaking. Every coffee shop you sat in, you overheard the terms and the deal brokering; in the nail salon, you were as likely to pick up a copy of the Hollywood Reporter as a People magazine; and the woman in the dry cleaner’s stunned me one day by filling me in on the back of Michael Bay’s latest studio deal as she separated the skirts from the pants. Learning about the machinations of producing was osmotic, merely a by-product of showing up at work or the hairdresser’s. And the extra hours I put into my new career-to-be by watching old movies and reading about production values and struggling through Venice magazine only served to make me feel like a bona fide producer already. Which was just as well, because I was terrible at winging it.

  “Scott?” I tiptoed my way into his office with my wares. “Are you doing okay?”

  “Hmmmm” was the only response I got from him, so I moved in closer to his desk. Strangely enough, at close quarters, he didn’t look quite as bad as I had feared. A little partied out perhaps, but actually kind of bright-eyed and full of vitality.

  “So what goes on with this game?” I asked, attempting to gauge the extent of his cerebral decline. I stood behind him and looked over his shoulder.

  “I’m sitting second out of six hundred in a two-hundred-dollar buy-in tournament. I’m about to go all in on this hand,” he said in a reasoned monotone. “Bring it on, mister. I’m gonna whip your ass.”

  I placed the triple espresso next to Scott, and some internal radar must have told him it was there, because he reached out without looking and downed it in one gulp.

  “Oh, yes, baby! Oh, yes! I’ve tripped fuckin’ aces on the fuckin’ flop!”

  I examined the carnage on his desk, the metallic glint of at least a dozen credit cards (thankfully, the black ones hadn’t been ransacked yet), an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a half-empty container of Ritalin.

  “Are you supposed to crush those things?” I asked quietly.

  “Holy fuckola!” Scott suddenly leaped up in his chair and high-fived me. Well, he tried to, but I wasn’t fast enough, and he just slapped my biceps instead. “Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy?” He crashed back into his seat and spun around a few times. “I just won a thirty-six-thousand-dollar tournament!” he said. “Now, what did you want, Lizzie?”

  “I wondered if you were meant to crush your pills up and snort them,” I said.

  “Oh, right. Well, yeah, actually you are. Thing is that pills that are fun to snort are easy to crush. Pharmacists make it this way to turn us into addicts, so who the fuck am I to argue?” Scott laid his finger on his mouse and exerted the merest pressure. A second later the cards fell—click-click-click on the electronic baize.

  “Really?” I said, wondering if I ought to call Daniel or maybe even Katherine Watson, somebody who might be able to enlighten me as to whether this was reasonable behavior. For an addict. I guess at least he’d just won something, so Mia would be happy.

  “Oh, yeah. Zoloft and Paxil and lithium are all coated and can’t be cut up, but they’d be no kick to sniff anyway. Vicodin and Percocet, on the other hand, are easy to crush and—surprise, surprise—habit-forming. See? It’s a conspiracy. I’m just going along with it.”

  “Scott, will you do me a favor and eat one of these sandwiches I’ve brought you?”

  “Sure thing, baby. Just leave it there, and I’ll get to it.”

  “I’ll come back and check on you in ten,” I said. But he didn’t hear me because he was making a loud protest about his latest opponent.

  “Oh, hey, you sucker from Oslo! You seal-eating, fjord-fucking fuck! You have no business being at this table.” He kicked his chair away from his desk in frustration, and I dodged out of the way. Then out of his office. He was still very much alive and seemed to be enjoying himself, so I decided to check out and write an overdue e-mail to my sister.

  It was Saturday, and, along with every other person in Los Angeles, I had decided to indulge in a little conspicuous consumption. Alexa had knocked on my door with an organic watermelon juice for me just after her 7:00 A.M. student left, and she asked whether I wanted to go to the Beverly Center with her. She had to buy some Australian Bush Essences and also wanted to drop by Old Navy because she’d heard they had some fantastic yoga pants on sale.

  “That’s a great idea,” I agreed as I swept the sleep from my eyes and tried to hide the worst of the holes in my brushed-cotton floral pajamas by sitting down. “I really need to get something to wear to this Halloween party tonight. Though I have no idea what I’m going as, and I can barely afford a Spider-Man mask. Do L.A. people actually get dressed up for these things?”

  “Oh, sure, they go all out. You live in a town full of unemployed actors, you’re going to see so many people dressed as train-wreck victims that you’ll never get on board a train again,” Alexa informed me. “I usually go to a pumpkin festival, but I
have a retreat tomorrow, so I’m sitting Halloween out this year.”

  “Shall I drive us?” I offered, obviously not getting many costume tips there.

  “Sure,” she said as she struck a few impossible poses that I took to be yoga.

  “It’s nice to have a friend in the building,” I said, trying not to sound like Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female. “Just to hang out with and do normal stuff.” Ha, ha. Like break into your apartment and wear your clothes and steal your boyfriend.

  “It sure is.” Alexa ran her finger around the rim of her glass and licked off the remains of her pink juice. “I need to stop by Polka Dots and Moonbeams. They’ve got great vintage—maybe you could go as a fifties housewife?” She smiled and did a few lunges in the direction of the door.

  “Good idea. I’ll get showered and swing by in about an hour,” I said, handing back her glass and praying we’d come up with something a bit sexier when we were out and about. “And thanks so much for the juice.”

  “Namaste,” she said as she left. I had no idea what it meant, but I smiled anyway. I had a friend. An off-hours, let’s-go-to-the-Beverly-Center friend. Try stopping me from smiling.

  Any tour of duty in the Beverly Center begins at the Rexall Drug Store, where hours can pass in the contemplation of lime green diamanté hair clips and cocoa butter, and the shampoo conundrum can begin to feel as confusing as cracking the mysteries of the human genome. Then there’s Star Books, where compulsory paperbacks have to be purchased so that you can feel fully conversant on literary matters, even though your new acquisitions will simply top up your “unread” pile, which has Dickens somewhere at the bottom and the latest Salman Rushdie at the top. Also essential from Star Books are the latest copies of InStyle, People, and that other casualty of a too-busy life, the New Yorker. Unlike InStyle, with its delicious pages of tasteless weddings and red-carpet fiascos, which quickly becomes sun-bleached and waterlogged through excessive attention, the New Yorker remains pristine and important-looking on the coffee table until you realize that half the contributors have died and all the plays written up have ended their run.

  Then it’s on to Old Navy for more brushed-cotton items that will never, ever see the light of a love affair but will get you through dark days with the flu. And somewhere in between you have to find time for your Gap basics, a couple of DVDs, and a trip to Victoria’s Secret, where you buy small things in red and lace and, if you’re feeling daring, purple—or midnight, as they like to call it. These are things that will never see the light of a love affair either, because you don’t have that kind of life. Instead you just read about it in InStyle. Get it? Sometimes it feels so complicated it makes even my head spin.

  After Alexa and I had completed our full-scale assault on the Beverly Center and I’d acquired a dreadfully obvious French maid’s outfit out of sheer desperation, we were badly in need of a pit stop to refuel our engines.

  “Jamba Juice?” I asked, thinking that extra echinacea in a power shake would be exactly her thing. Oh, how nutritionally retarded I was.

  “Sweetie, you don’t seriously drink those things?” she asked as we headed back to the car laden with bags.

  “Are they bad?” I asked, avoiding her question. Personally, I lived for Jamba Juice. The head freeze was the closest I’d ever gotten to S&M, and I was always overwhelmed with delight whenever I contemplated a Peanut Butter Moo’d or a Mango A Go-Go. Not to mention the whirring of my mental cogs that was set in motion when I had to look up at the sprawling menu on the wall and decide between a Femme Boost or a Vibrant-C Boost. It was like a big waxed cup full of joy and possibilities, and it seemed to embody all that was best about L.A. as far as I was concerned.

  “We’ll go to Urth,” she said, giving me an understanding smile. “They do smoothies, and you can get your vitamins from real fruit.” Right, so fruit was the only thing that was acceptable when real in this town.

  “Okay.” I hoisted my bags into the back of the car. “Can we walk, or shall we drive?”

  “We’ll drive.” Alexa was a born-and-bred Angeleno, and though her disposition was as sunny as the weather, her attitude to walking anywhere but on a treadmill or in a Canyon was as frosty as a winter morning in D.C. “Then we’ll swing by Polka Dots and Moonbeams and try on a bunch of outfits for your party, if you like.”

  “I love,” I said, and we piled into my Honda and headed for Melrose.

  Urth Caffé is possibly one of my favorite places on . . . well, Urth, I suppose. It’s an enclave of all that’s organic and delicious, and its sunny patio is a show-ground for people who look as wholesome and healthy as low-fat raisin-bran-and-honey muffins. There you see Los Angeles indulging in the hybrid of work and play that it loves the most. Writers sit with pens and notepads and find inspiration in a freshly squeezed orange juice, and in the couple breaking up at the next table; actors peruse scripts while wearing fake eyeglasses to lend them an intellectual hue; producers brunch, and everyone stares at everyone with the unabashed curiosity of tourists in a safari park. This is another idiosyncrasy of L.A. that I’m only just beginning to get used to—everyone totally checks each other out. It could be the hot weather causing the sap to rise and everyone to look for a mate, or maybe it’s the population’s innate paranoia at not wanting to miss a single thing, in case it’s a big thing or, even better, a celebrity, I’m not sure. When you first arrive, it’s disconcerting to be so scrutinized, but then it just becomes license to stare at others, which is frankly heaven. And beneath the umbrellas at Urth Caffé, it’s open-season people watching.

  I fended off a cell-phone-clutching studio executive (I could tell this because of the deafening mentions of his studio, his hectic premiere and star-fucking schedule, and his second-only-to–Brad Pitt salary) with a rapid-fire machine-gun voice and secured a three-foot-square piece of prime West Hollywood real estate of a table, while Alexa stood in line to order our soup and salad.

  As I stretched out my pale legs in the sun and pushed aside the left-behind napkins and foam-rimmed coffee cups of the newly departed from our table, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Elizabeth, I thought it was you.” I hastily re-covered my legs and turned around.

  “Hi.” I tried to stand up, but my knees crashed into the tabletop and the cups clattered, and so I sat back down and looked up at Luke Lloyd. Who was smiling down on me once again.

  “Oh, don’t get up,” he said. “You alone?”

  “No, actually, I’m with a friend,” I explained, knowing that I had some serious ground to make up from our last encounter in the dog park, when I’d been useless and rude. Yet my mind was so devoid of anything to say and any words to say it in that I wished for a waiter to spill a latte on him to give me time to think.

  “Cool, well, that’s nice.” He looked around, as if to find my friend and verify my story. “You managed to ditch the bitch, then?”

  “Alexa?” I asked, rubbing my bruised knee. “No, she’s inside getting soup and salad.”

  “The dog.” He looked quizzically at me, doubtless searching for a sign of life.

  “Oh, Anastasia.” I nodded. “No, I’m with a yoga teacher today.” I hated myself at this point.

  “Great. So how’s Scott?” He waded on valiantly, my Lancelot.

  “Scott? Scott’s great. You know, a little too much poker, and he’s discovered Ritalin, which has been interesting. But generally Scott’s Scott.” Did they give out Academy Awards for Most Scintillating Second Assistant? With a crush, I might add. A second assistant with a hopeless, burgeoning crush on a AAA-list producer. He was trying, God bless him, but I wished that he just wouldn’t. I wished that he’d just leave me alone with my empty brain so that I could cut out pictures of him from Entertainment Weekly looking ruffled and handsome on the set of his latest blockbuster. I wished he’d just go off and do what it is that types like him did in this town and not indulge his stupid southern good manners near me.

  And guess what? He did.


  “Hey, Lukey.” A girl who can’t have been more than eighteen years old, with the rangy legs of a foal and one of those broad, apple-biting smiles that can command love from babies and billionaires alike, appeared by his side with the idle countenance of someone who knows that the world will wait for her. And though I hate to sound 138 years old, she had on preshrunk clothes of such microscopic proportions that you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’d been a fire in her apartment building that morning and she’d had to leave in a hurry. Without dressing first.

  “Hi, honey.” Luke turned and looked at her with delight as she sucked noisily from a cup of orange juice. “Did you find us a table?”

  “Yeah, it’s, like, in the shade over there.” She gestured with her straw.

  “Cool. Well, it was good to see you, Elizabeth. Have a good one.”

  And that was all it took. A slip of jailbait whose gingham panties were peeking out above her denim skirtette to lure him away from me and my endlessly fascinating conversation.

  “Who was that?” Alexa returned and dropped her neat bottom into the seat next to me. She handed over my lemonade, into which I automatically dumped four packets of organic brown sugar for comfort.

  “Oh, that was Luke Lloyd.” I stirred my drink and refused to look behind me. “He’s one of those too-handsome, too-successful men who mess with your heart for kicks.”

  “Cute,” she said, and turned her chair so that she could watch him. “Clearly his girlfriend has a daddy complex, though.”

  “Do you really think that’s his girlfriend?” I asked, voicing my darkest concerns. “Isn’t she a little young for him?”

  “Are you kidding? She’s perfect. Look at her shoulders, though, very closed. She’s holding a lot of her energy in her Muladhara chakra and not releasing it. Which probably means she’s a tiger in bed but not able to be open in love.”

  “I think that’s what these boys like,” I said, and sank another sugar packet into my glass.