Captain of Industry

by Karin Kallmaker

  The worst ear worm ever, she decided, was “Here Comes the Bride.” But the version in her head went, “You’re wearing pajamas, you’re wearing pajamas. You’re wearing paJAMas, and everyone saw your boobs.”

  If she’d been properly attired, she probably wouldn’t feel as awkward as she did. But she’d still be out of place. Politics weren’t her thing, so while she recognized many of the other women, she couldn’t reel off that many names. Toni Blanchard and her winemaking wife were chatting across the next table with Leah Beck and her partner, both of whom Jennifer had met at a gallery opening in San Francisco. Jennifer would have rather been seated near them. She didn’t want to be catching hints of Suzanne’s cologne and watching her fingers tap idly on the table.

  It wasn’t fair, Suzanne and her hands. Nothing about Suzanne was fair. Not the brain wattage and confident ambition. Not the shape of her head or the angle of her jaw, not the soft lips Jennifer knew could reduce her to a whimper. From that creepy photographer onward, far too many people thought buying her time meant they’d also bought her body. The only thing she looked forward to as she got older was an end to the relentless propositions. She said no constantly.

  It wasn’t fair that Suzanne was automatically yes. Not that she would ever ask again.

  Suzanne was chuckling at the story Helen Baynor was telling about meeting her wife. Something about an amusement park and fear of heights. Jennifer’s attention wandered and she added more faces to her growing list of “I should probably know who that is.”

  Gail Welles’ unmistakable laugh from somewhere behind her was full of good humor. Unlike her response to any news she encountered about Suzanne’s dating life, Jennifer ultimately had been pleased to see Lena happy. Even if it was with someone who acted circles around, well, everyone. At least Lena’s heart was no longer on her conscience.

  That she had a conscience would surprise a lot of people.

  Tonight, however, their marital bliss stung. Lena had been the only woman to come close to Suzanne in allure. That they had met just a few weeks after the last time she’d been with Suzanne might have had something to do with how easily she’d succumbed to Lena’s attraction, not that Jennifer would ever admit it out loud. She certainly hadn’t told Lena she was on the rebound from a relationship that had never gotten beyond the flare of hot sex.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, picturing Lena in the rainstorm that had driven them, laughing, into Lena’s car for shelter. Lena’s reluctance to get involved with one of her hired players might have been part of the attraction. When she’d been seen with the private but definitely lesbian Selena Ryan even after production had ended, the bottom-feeding, blood-leeching gossip bloggers had made their usual sly insinuations.

  Almost simultaneously she’d landed her star-making break, a leading role in an action blockbuster. Its director had thought dating her would cover his own huge personal issues. She knew Lena thought events had happened the other way around, but it made little difference. She’d pretended poor Corey was her new beau and tossed Lena aside, as Suzanne had said, like a broken pair of shoes. Corey had also been discarded. Every year since anything like a personal life had been discarded. There was work. There was resting from work. There was room for nothing else.

  She decided to stop drinking the wine. It would only make her morose. The lies piled on by gossip sites about her seducing and abandoning someone on every project she’d ever worked on didn’t usually bother her. The truth produced enough angst to keep her from worrying about lies. She stared into the red depths and knew if she finished it she’d be seeing the faces of all the people she’d wounded floating up at her.

  That her publicist and social media contractors loved to splash around photos of Jennifer accompanied by Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors was, she supposed, a continuation of the same career-salvaging lies. People didn’t question what they expected to see. The formal comment was always that while La Lamont enjoyed the nightlife, she was married to her career, and you only had to look at her IMDb filmography to see the truth of the statement.

  She surreptitiously checked the trending feed again. Buzztastic was tweeting a stream of comments, including an extreme blowup with arrows.

  Hey @realJenniferLamont Are those tuck and lift scars we see? #Boobarella

  Bombshell @realJenniferLamont Trying out for aging Playboy bunny biopic? #Boobarella

  Look @realJenniferLamont Thanks! Love watching you flaunt it for the ladies! #Boobarella

  Wow @realJenniferLamont Is it time to check in for a rehab refresh—

  She blocked the site again. It had been a mistake to even look. She would just leave it to the publicist and crew to deal with online issues. Her agent would come up with a way to exploit it because BeBe LaTour was very good at what she did.

  She’d survived her actual mistakes and she would survive whatever viral storm the boob accident stirred up. She’d sit here in pajamas and pretend everything was just peachy.

  You, she reminded herself, are the woman who acted opposite Hyde Butler in the against-type performance that had won the action movie star an Academy Award. While sex appeal was arguably still her strongest selling point, her consistent ability to provide strong, crafted performances that elevated the profile of productions kept her agent hopping with offers.

  Helping a man win an Oscar was a weird kind of job security. Viva Hollywood.

  She knew it could all go away in a heartbeat. The remake of Hitchcock’s Rope releasing this summer might flop, and she’d take the blame for botching a role originally written for a man.

  An attractive black woman in a classic forest green Dolce & Gabbana suit dropped a kiss on Helen Baynor’s cheek and slid into the chair next to her. Chef Izmani had freed herself from her duties. To Jennifer’s eye, she looked only a little frazzled.

  “Did you get to hear any of the speech?” Helen casually tweaked the other woman’s collar flat. “She was earlier than expected.”

  “I caught the last half.” To Jennifer she said, “I am such a huge fan. I don’t miss an episode of American Zombie Hunters.”

  “Thank you,” Jennifer said. “It’s the first time I’ve done a show like that and I simply can’t believe the fan base. It’s intense and really vocal.”

  “Laura’s not exaggerating,” Helen said. “When the DVR gets full my shows mysteriously are the ones that get deleted.”

  Laura shrugged. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Suzanne left off her conversation with the mathematician to say to Laura, “Dinner was fantastic. You are a magician.”

  Jennifer raised her glass. “Absolutely delicious.” She saw a flicker of speculation cross Laura’s face as her gaze went from Jennifer to Suzanne. Jennifer quickly added, “My date stood me up.”

  “What an idiot.”

  “I know, right?”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me if your character dies at the end of the season?”

  She grinned at Laura. “I can’t breathe a word.”

  “Well, can’t blame me for asking.” Laura glanced toward the house and got to her feet. “Sorry, dessert should have been on its way out by now.”

  “I knew she wouldn’t make it for five minutes.” Helen followed Laura’s departure with an open, intimate gaze.

  More marital bliss. Jennifer felt like an outsider with her nose pressed up against the glass of a world she couldn’t believe existed. When she’d been on Ellen to promote the first of the Bot franchise movies, she had tried to like the woman, but the echo of Suzanne’s “I think you’re a coward” had left her choking with bitterness. Ellen had made the leap, but she’d landed in a place that wasn’t open to Jennifer. Nobody, but nobody, believed Jennifer Lamont was nice.

  When the truth was ugly, the blogosphere increased the font size. When lies were juicier than truth, they put the headlines in red. Once upon a time she’d fed them anything they wanted to hear. A lesbian dalliance in the past was tolerated as long as she was
actually straight and only flirted with women where men could watch. Ironically, it had been another project with Selena, one she’d forced her way into, that had made her take stock of the deals she’d made with too many devils. Hyde Butler had tried to tell her she had a choice, that she could change. As if reinventing herself would be easy.

  Chef Izmani had lit a fire under someone because waiters bearing dessert plates were making their way to the tables. This excruciating evening would soon be over. You’re just here for the sculpture, Jennifer reminded herself. Thinking about the past isn’t going to get you anywhere. You burn it, then it doesn’t exist and there’s nothing but blue skies in your life.

  Fiddle-dee-dee. Right.

  “I can’t believe our luck,” Helen Baynor was saying. “I thought about moving to Illinois just to vote for Van Allen.”

  “I’ve never met her. Kind of glad I didn’t tonight.” Jennifer couldn’t help a mournful look down at her pajamas.

  “You look delectable. Very Dietrich.”

  Good gracious on steroids, she’d just pity pumped Helen Baynor for a compliment. Pathetic, just pathetic.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “Life is a banquet!” Helen Baynor’s empty cigarette holder traced an extravagant circle in the air. “Let the auction begin!”

  Suzanne was positively tingling with anticipation as the two women from Sotheby’s whisked the drape off the woman-sized sculpture. An initial shared gasp of pleasure deepened to match her own murmur of awe. She had seen it while it was being set up this afternoon, but the bay of filtered lights deepened the natural shadows of the work, showing off new angles of color and depth. A broken cocoon of highly polished chrome revealed an inner figure of light and dark blues, shot through with yellow and a pale green. The spotlight behind the piece amped up the color spectrum while showing off curves and fluted waves of crystal clarity. It might have been a woman’s hair, or her shoulders, or the sea, or all three at once.

  After Leah Beck had taken a bow and the applause died down, the auctioneer read the catalog listing, a copy of which had been placed at every seat. “On offer tonight to the highest bidder is a six-foot mixed media sculpture in chrome, silver, air, glass and acrylic. The piece is not part of a series. It is uniquely cast, carved, molded and worked by artist Leah Beck and completed within the last three months. This is the first time ‘Jackie Sunday Morning’ has been offered for acquisition.”

  “I think this is going to be too rich for my blood.” Helen Baynor put down the numbered paddle that had been next to her plate with a resigned air.

  “It’s stunning.” Suzanne risked a glance at Jennifer, who had a white-knuckle grip on her paddle.

  “I’ll have to be content with the vintage Wonder Woman print from earlier. Laura will love it.” Baynor shrugged. “For some reason I thought the Beck piece would be small. That beauty will start high and go up from there.”

  “Twenty,” a voice said from the back of the room.

  “Twenty plus one,” Suzanne said with a wave of her paddle.

  Jennifer lifted her paddle and called out, “Thirty.”

  “Thirty plus one.” Suzanne’s prompt response created a ripple of laughter.

  The voice from the back said, “Thirty-two.”

  Jennifer twirled her paddle in her fingertips. “Forty.”

  “Forty plus one.”

  “Forty-two.” Helen Baynor suddenly waved her paddle with a grin. “I can put it on loan to MOMA and visit it whenever I want.”

  Suzanne suspected that Helen was helping drive up the price. It was for a good cause, after all.

  Jennifer turned her head to dare Suzanne with a look. “Fifty.”

  “Fifty. Plus. One.”

  “Isn’t it bad form for the host to be bidding?”

  “I’m making sure it’s a fair price for something that will still be here long after we’ve reverted to star dust.”

  Jennifer gave her a narrow look. “Sixty.”

  Suzanne dipped her paddle and the auctioneer promptly said, “I have sixty plus one. That’s sixty-one thousand. Do I hear sixty-five?”

  “Seventy.”

  “Seventy plus one.”

  Jennifer snapped, “I can do this all night.”

  Suzanne’s smile was sunny and innocent. “If you can, I can.”

  A blush began in Jennifer’s cheeks while her eyes tried to carve open Suzanne’s skull. “Don’t go there.”

  After the amused burst of laughter died down, the voice from the back upped the price again and Jennifer set her paddle down with a regretful shrug of surrender and a very fake smile of acceptance.

  Suzanne and the other bidder got to their feet, each calmly counting upward in increments of five. She knew the other bidder was an art dealer that Leah Beck’s wife had pointed out early in the evening as someone who’d only be here if she had a serious, committed client backing her. The client was probably an Orange County mega-church pastor with backward views on equality for anyone who wasn’t a member of his flock. He collected art and had lately been picking up anything by artists over the age of fifty—speculating on their eventual demise and the rise in the price of their work. Jackie Frakes had called him a vulture, but seemed resigned to the prospect that the piece would end up in those hands. It would be a lot of money to a good cause, which was why her wife had donated the work to begin with.

  One of two things are going to happen, Suzanne thought as she raised to one-fifteen. She would either win and be extremely pleased to place the sculpture at the Getty alongside their small collection of Beck paintings, or the collector would win and the new owner’s conservative-values name would be listed as a prominent donor to Planned Parenthood of Southern California. Even if she lost it would feel like winning.

  There was a collective gasp when she took the bidding over two hundred thousand, then a spontaneous burst of applause when she yielded to the other bidder at two-sixty. Champagne began to circulate on trays and Suzanne sat down, very relieved. A speech from Reyna Putnam would cap off the evening and she could look back on the months of planning as a job well done.

  Jennifer gave her a cross look. “You needn’t look so pleased with yourself.”

  “But I am pleased.”

  “I didn’t stand a chance, and I sacrificed my poor Jimmy Choo’s.”

  “I hope the evening wasn’t a total waste.” Suzanne belatedly realized how that sounded. “I honestly did not mean anything else by that.”

  Jennifer gave her a tight nod but said nothing as Suzanne rose in response to the auctioneer’s wave. She shared a congenial handshake with the winner, took note of the name the auctioneer inked onto the work’s title of ownership and hid her inner mirth. It was indeed the conservative thrice-married family values pastor whose use of the church’s revenues to build an automobile and art collection he personally owned scandalized everyone but his own parishioners. Maybe he had no idea where his money was going. More likely he didn’t care. Integrity was not a value he embodied.

  She reminded herself to tell Carina about the scathingly brilliant idea she’d just had. Carina would laugh, quite a lot. So would Annemarie. Goodness, she really liked pushy women.

  The sculpture remained beautifully lit as she introduced their featured speaker. Reyna Putnam wasn’t the charismatic powerhouse that seemed the hallmark of politicians like Van Allen, but she had an intensity of focus and careful attention to the power of her words that showed in her investigative exposés. Yet as interested as she was in Putnam’s speech, she was once again distracted by the memory of catching Jennifer in her arms and the brush of Jennifer’s hair at her throat. Get a grip, she warned herself.

  She couldn’t stop herself from stealing a quick glance at Jennifer. She was studying her phone and put it back out of sight with a pained expression. Clearly, the auction over, she wanted to be elsewhere.

  She drew on all her cynicism as Jennifer ran her hands through her hair, apparently listening attentively to Putnam’s findings a
bout the link between race, income and access to health care. She needed to stop watching her. She was going to get caught.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Black SUVs arrived to whisk guests to the exclusive hotels in La Jolla’s downtown, only minutes away. Others were being ferried to the helipad at the nearby university, where Suzanne had arranged quick transfers to the San Diego airport before the final flights out for the evening. Laura Izmani and Helen Baynor had been among the first to depart, hoping to make a connection that would get them back to New York by morning.

  Jennifer kept checking the texts from her agent. BeBe was calling talk show producers to shop an interview while the picture was the talk of the web. As Lena had said, she should try to get ahead of it.

  She needed to get back to Los Angeles. The alarm clock would go off at five a.m., and they were in green screen for a couple of hours first thing after makeup. At least the traffic would be better than it had been driving down in the late afternoon.

  She surreptitiously hiked the pajama bottoms up one more time and did her best not to step on the hems as she circulated among the remaining guests. She thanked the lovely winemaker with the Sophia Loren eyes for the very much enjoyed vintages, and paused to shake hands with anyone who expressed interest in her work—it salved her bruised dignity to gather a few compliments.

  “I read that it’s really you with the sword.” A mid-forties woman in an intricately beaded dashiki was finishing a mini tart with minced fruit and chocolate. Jennifer had managed to stop herself at two. “Not a stunt double?”

  “Really me. The producers thought they’d have to hire me a coach for the sword play, but I was already proficient with several types of blades. Once they found me one with the right balance the zombie heads started to roll.” I should know who this is, Jennifer told herself. She didn’t think they’d met before, but they had been in the same places at the same time. Black women in the industry stood out in the sea of white at almost any gathering. Her mind refused to dredge up the setting that might have helped her remember the woman’s name. “Aren’t those tasty? I could have snarfed an entire tray.”