The Agency

by Ally O'Brien

  I squinted at the magazine and saw another young woman, in her early twenties, doing what wannabe actresses do—flashing cleavage for hungry photographers. She had pageboy blond hair, a toothpick physique like a 1960s model, cheekbones cut with a circular saw, and a red designer dress that was long on sequins and short on fabric. I had to admit that she was beautiful, but beauty only buys you a ticket to the cheap seats in the film world.

  “She’s a stunner,” I said with appropriate enthusiasm for Emma’s benefit.

  “Isn’t she?”

  “Looks a little like Sienna,” I said.

  “Yes, I thought so, too!”

  Welcome to Emma’s crush of the week.

  “How did the two of you hook up?” I asked.

  The red of Jane Parmenter’s dress bloomed in Emma’s freckled cheeks. “It’s so crazy. I was sitting on the toilet, sending texts. I mean, I wasn’t doing anything, but you can’t find places to sit down in those clubs. Jane really needed to go, and she just sort of waltzed in and closed the door with us both inside. We talked while she did what she had to do and then we got friendly.”

  “Apparently.”

  “It was very sexy.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  No, it really didn’t, but a male model has never followed me into a toilet stall, so who am I to judge?

  “We wound up at my place. She spent the night and most of the day. She’s amazing.”

  “Why not her place?” I asked. “I’ve seen your place, Emmy—it’s not exactly the Ritz.”

  “Jane still lives with her mum, if you can believe it.”

  If a man told me that, I’d say he was married, but I wasn’t going to throw cold water on a horny assistant.

  “Have you ever worked with Godfrey Kahn?” Emma asked me.

  “The film director? Sure, I’ve placed a couple of projects with his company. I’ve never met him personally. Why?”

  “Jane’s up for a big part in his latest movie. It’s her and two other actresses, but the others are bigger names. Jane’s wondering what she can do to get in good with Kahn.”

  “Take her clothes off,” I said.

  “Short of that.”

  “Kahn mostly does teen comedies. They’re brainless. Any actress in one of his flicks is going to have to lose her top. Maybe her bottom, too.”

  “Oh, sure, Jane knows she’ll have to do nude, but she doesn’t want to sleep with him.”

  “Then she’s already behind the eight ball.”

  “She thought some publicity would help. Get some more photos in the tabloids. Make sure people know who she is.”

  “That’s a good thought,” I said. “The trouble is that the tabloids don’t have much room for wannabes, after they’ve crammed fifty pages with Brangelina, Paris, Britney, Becks, and Posh.”

  “Well, if you think of anything, can you let me know? I’d love to see Jane get the part. It would be a big break for her. Maybe you could make a couple of calls? You said you knew some people in Kahn’s production company.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Emmy,” I assured her.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Her snaggly smile lit up the room. “That’s brilliant! Thank you so much!”

  I knew that Emma was going to be scattered all day. I’d come out of my office and find her staring into space and chewing on a pencil. It’s that way whenever she meets someone new.

  Emma lowered her voice. “Have you heard from Darcy?”

  I frowned. “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m afraid I screwed things up.”

  “All you did was tell him how you feel.”

  Exactly. The one thing you never do when you’re having an affair is allow yourself to be honest with your partner. The silence from Darcy came through loud and clear: We’re through.

  “I’m not sure that’s what he wanted to hear,” I said.

  “Maybe he’ll send a message through me today,” Emma told me.

  I shrugged. I wasn’t optimistic. Rather than dwell on it, I dug in my purse and pulled out a miniature flash drive, which I handed to Emma. “Oliver Howard’s editor said no to Duopoly, so we need to make a wider pitch,” I said. “I did a letter and put together a list of eight other editors I want to target. Let’s get packages out today with copies of Singularity and the synopsis and first ten thousand words of the new book. Okay?”

  Emma nodded.

  “Sally tells me I should pull the plug on Oliver,” I said, mostly to myself.

  “Except he’s brilliant.”

  “Yeah, so why can’t I sell him?”

  “That’s not your fault.”

  “I’m his agent, so I don’t know who else I can blame,” I said.

  The fact is, when you’re an agent, you have no control over people saying no. You can lobby and cajole and bluff and threaten and beg, but in the end, the editor will decide what he or she likes and that’s that. It doesn’t matter if you know damn well they’re making a pigheaded mistake. I’ve had crappy material that sells like chocolate biscuits and winds up with a seven-figure film option. I’ve had really great material that doesn’t make it out of the starting gate. Go figure. It’s not my call to make, but I still get infuriated when I swing and miss, and I scream at the editors, and I blame myself, and it doesn’t change a thing.

  Oliver isn’t the first client I’ve failed. He won’t be the last. I just feel like he’s a symbol of my frustrations. And I worry that, in the real world, my failure will kill him. Literally.

  “Get me Felicia Castro on the phone,” I told Emma quietly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. Maybe if I eat a little crow, she’ll pass Singularity to Cruise.” Eat a little crow. Swallow a little pride. I don’t do that well, but if you believe in something, you have to screw your ego. It also occurred to me that I have more enemies than friends, and maybe that’s not such a good thing.

  “Okay,” Emma said. She got out of the chair, looking all gangly and tall, with her long legs, a perfect hourglass shape, and those breasts that defy gravity. Damn, I hate being envious of another woman’s body, but what can you do? Tempus fuck it.

  “Oh, one other thing,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “Dorothy is on board for the new agency. She’s with us.”

  Emma beamed. “Congratulations!”

  Yes, I should be feeling good, shouldn’t I? With Dorothy in my camp, I’m nearly free. I should be on top of the world right now. So why do I feel like a fly on the window right before the swatter makes me into a little smear of goo?

  “Sally says there are some odd rumors out there about Dorothy, but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” I said, trying to reassure myself.

  “When do you drop the bomb on Cosima?” Emma asked.

  “Next Monday.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  I smiled at her. “It occurs to me that there’s something I really need to say to you, Emma. I mean, I’ve been sort of assuming all along that you would be with me, but I guess I shouldn’t assume that. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t want to give up a job here, where you’ve got stability and benefits and upward mobility. You know I want to train you as an agent, but there will be lots of grunt work, and I don’t know how much I can pay you, and it will probably be a struggle while we get started. Sally says I’m nuts. She thinks small shops face an uphill battle these days. So what I’m saying is that I really want you to join me in the agency, but if you don’t think you can do it, I’ll understand. Just because I’m willing to throw away everything on a huge gamble doesn’t mean I expect you to do the same.”

  “That’s sweet,” Emma said. “But I’m with you.”

  “You don’t have to decide right away—” I began.

  “I already did, Tess.”

  I had been waiting to exhale. “That’s brilliant, Emma, thank you.”

  There’s something about having someone put her fait
h in you that makes you want to come through for her. Emma. Oliver. Dorothy. I realized that I had been using the Bardwright Agency as a safety net all these years, so I didn’t have to face my fears. After all, it’s easy to pretend you are bulletproof when no one is shooting at you. Now I was about to shuck off my security. Put a target on my chest. Strap a parachute to my back and jump and hope the damn thing opens.

  What if I wasn’t good enough?

  What if I lost everything?

  For a girl who never spent much time doubting herself, I was scared to death.

  14

  THE CONVERSATION with Felicia Castro did not begin well.

  “My assistant told me the cunt was calling,” Felicia said by way of introduction, “but I didn’t believe even you would have the fucking gall to call me.”

  Felicia sounded pleased with herself. The old Tess would have taken the bait, given her a snarky riposte, and slammed down the phone. But this is the new and improved Tess. The patient, charming Tess. The graduate of the school of how to win friends and influence people.

  “Felicia, when you talk like that, you get me hot,” I replied through gritted teeth. “Really, you do. I’m fanning myself right now. I’m going to swear off men from now on, because there’s nothing like a Spanish girl cursing at me to turn me on.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “See? If I were wearing panties, I’d be taking them off.”

  “What do you want, Tess?”

  Okay, charm wasn’t working. Once upon a time, Felicia and I had traded dirty jokes and sex stories over drinks every month. No more. Time to try another approach.

  “I want to grovel in abject submission, Felicia. I want to take out a full-page ad in Variety to say you were right, and I was wrong. I want to give you a tongue bath. Frankly, I want to know what it will take for me to get back on your good side, because I will happily do anything. Nothing is too degrading, and I say that as someone with a generous view of degradation.”

  Felicia laughed. It wasn’t a kind laugh. “I told you that you’d come crawling back to me someday.”

  “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. This is me on my knees. I’m really sorry about that mess two years ago.”

  “You sold me out to fucking HBO. We had a deal.”

  Let me interrupt for a moment. First, I seriously considered teaching a parrot to say, “We had a deal,” and sending it to Felicia as a Christmas present. Emma talked me out of it. Second, Felicia and I did not have a deal. What we had was a general discussion of price. We had no agreement, no handshake, no air kiss, no contract, no signature. Felicia wanted to get her hands on the movie rights for a bestselling mystery set in Las Vegas that featured a transsexual detective. She was thinking breakout role for one of her up-and-coming clients, who had been a supporting actress in a couple of midsized hits. So far, so good. Then HBO came calling with a series buy. The cable networks in America do shows about lesbians, polygamists, morticians, serial killers, and gangsters, so making a hero out of a Vegas chick cop with a penis doesn’t seem like a stretch. So to speak. Anyway, HBO doubled the offer, and, I admit, I didn’t go back to Felicia to tell her she had lost out before I went ahead and signed the contract.

  In retrospect, big mistake.

  Not that signing with HBO was a blunder. I’d do it again in a minute. But I should have handled Felicia with kid gloves. Back then, I really didn’t care about having enemies.

  “I should have called you,” I admitted. “That was completely inappropriate. I should have let you match the offer.”

  “Fuck that. I didn’t have to match anything. We had already nailed down the price.”

  The only thing we had nailed down that evening was a bottle of cabernet that cost more than my television, which Felicia was happy to swig down at my expense. However, I figured this wasn’t the time to remind her of that.

  “I know you feel that way. I do. We just came away from that dinner with two different ideas of where we were. If I had thought back then that we had finalized the deal, I never would have taken HBO’s call.” I heard myself say that and sighed. “Okay, who am I kidding, that’s a lie. We both know I would still have signed with HBO. If you were in my shoes, you would have done the same thing. We’re both out to get the best deal for our clients, and that was the best deal. You wouldn’t believe me if I said anything else, so all I can say is, I never meant to piss you off. I apologize. I was insensitive. I deserved the frozen treatment from you, and I should have had this conversation with you a long time ago.”

  I was hoping she wouldn’t have anywhere else to go if I voluntarily took all the blame she could possibly hurl at me. Throw myself on the sword. After all, it’s not like I slept with her fiancé (see Saleema) or her husband (see Cosima). This was one of the rare moments when my sex life had nothing to do with the disintegration of one of my relationships. This was business, pure and simple.

  However, women cling to grudges like barnacles to the belly of a ship.

  Maybe it’s Felicia’s Catalonian temperament. When she was thirty, she moved to London from Barcelona, which is a move that most Londoners would find impossible to fathom. Give up sun and shore for rain and fog? Not so much. Most of us would retire to Barcelona if we had the chance. Felicia is forty now, still skinny the way Spanish women always seem to be. She has streaky brown hair and a petite mole on her upper lip that counts as a beauty mark. She smokes thirty packs a day. No, not really, but I have never seen her without a cigarette as dark as molasses dangling from her mouth. Felicia gets a bad rap for nepotism, because she is where she is in the industry thanks to her father, who became a power broker in Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s before retiring to his native village in Spain. She used his contacts to make inroads in Hollywood, Bollywood, Cannes, and New York and to party her way to the inner circle of marquee celebs. On any given day, she can be anywhere in the world. Make no mistake, though. Felicia is good at what she does. Cruise works only with the best.

  She wasn’t crazy about accepting my apology.

  “Do you think I believe a word of this crap?” Felicia asked me. “The only reason you’re calling is because you want me to push Singularity. Like I’m going to put Tom in a Dungeons and Dragons movie.”

  “It’s not like that at all,” I said. “Have you read it? Singularity is a moral epic. It’s a classic.”

  “So why don’t we gather all the people who bought it and put them in a phone booth and talk about what a hit this movie is going to be.”

  Ouch. She was right about that.

  “Yes, okay, it was a bust. We’ve all had great books go south. The publisher didn’t know what to do with it. We didn’t get reviewed. All I’m telling you is that, as Cruise’s agent, you really ought to give him this book. He’s going to love it. He’s going to want to do it.”

  “Pass. Try Rowan Atkinson.”

  This was the point in the conversation when I would usually scream an obscenity and hang up. I took a deep breath. I counted to ten.

  “Look, Felicia, I may be the biggest bitch that ever walked the planet. You wouldn’t be the first to say so. I don’t really care. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about you. It’s not even about Oliver Howard. This is about a project that’s great for your client. I know you. You wouldn’t shortchange him because you hate me.”

  Actually, she would do exactly that.

  “I read Singularity,” she snapped. “It’s bullshit.”

  “You can’t possibly mean that.”

  “Like hell I can’t. The book reads like it was written by a drug addict. Which it was, right? It’s impossible to adapt. It’s too complex.”

  “The imagery is amazing. So are the characters. It’s made for film.”

  “Face it, you’re backing a loser.”

  “Did you give it to Tom? Has he read it?”

  “No way. I’m not wasting his time. I know him. I know what he likes. This isn’t the direction he’s going.”

  Okay, Felicia knows Tom,
and I’ve never met him, and I probably never will, but I believed in my heart that she was wrong. Or more to the point, I believed that this had nothing to do with the book. She didn’t want to pass it to Tom because I was the one making the pitch. Even so, I kept swinging.

  “Come on, we’re not talking about Ethan Hunt and Mission: Impossible. Singularity is Born on the Fourth of July. It’s Vanilla Sky. It’s Eyes Wide Shut. This is the stuff he wants to do because it’s good, not because it’s commercial. He can afford something that’s risky business.”

  “Funny,” she said coldly.

  “You know what I mean. At least ask him to read it. That’s all I’m looking for.”

  “Good-bye, Tess.”

  “If you ask him to read it, you’re my first call on my next six deals.”

  “You don’t have anything I want. Next you’ll tell me I should put Tom in a panda suit and let him do the sequel to Bamboo Garden.”

  “I’d put on a panda suit myself if I thought it would make a difference,” I said.

  “I told you two years ago that you were persona non grata. No deals. Ever. What part of that don’t you understand?”

  “Felicia, for what it’s worth, I meant what I said. I’m sorry.”

  Click. End of call.

  Okay, my first exercise in tact and humility did not go well. Actually, I was quite restrained, but it’s much more satisfying to savage someone with a biting retort rather than hold your tongue, if you’re not going to get what you want anyway. The chances of Felicia Castro passing Singularity to Cruise were less than zero, which I suppose I knew before I picked up the phone. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up. It just means the direct approach isn’t going to work, and I have no idea yet what the indirect approach would be.

  Emma hovered in my doorway.

  “How did it go?” she asked.

  “Send Felicia a cactus dildo, will you?” I said.

  “Not good, huh?”

  “Not good.”

  “Dorothy called,” Emma said.

  I looked up. “What?”

  “While you were on the phone, Dorothy called. She wants you to call her back. She said she’d wait by the phone.”