by Paige Cooper
“But,” I continued, nodding vigorously to convey to Liz how much I agreed with her, “it occurs to me the last time we gave over an episode to Marietta it didn’t go over so well.”
“That was a B story,” said Liz. “And this is different. This is her farewell.”
“Right, yes,” I said, nodding harder.
“It’s just that I feel like Marietta never got her due, not really,” explained Liz.
“No, no, she hasn’t really,” I murmured, we all murmured.
“If it was up to me,” Liz went on, “I’d give her another season, really dig into that backstory, give her a brand new arc—like maybe the abusive mother shows up.”
We all nodded some more because Liz had been saying this ever since the Very Special B Story, after which the network had made it clear that a Season Three order of our female-forward spy-fi kick-ass odyssey was heavily contingent on whether or not we persisted in trying to jam this repellent character down the throats of our devoted yet increasingly exasperated viewers.
“She has so much potential that hasn’t even been realized,” insisted Liz. “We haven’t even begun to explore the possibilities. So that’s why having to do this makes me so sad.”
I looked up at Liz, grimacing. I didn’t want her to be sad. I’d been working for her for so long, was so psychologically and financially dependant on her good will and approval, that I couldn’t tell the difference between Liz’s happiness and my own anymore. If giving an entire episode over to Marietta was what it would take to dispose of her—if that’s how we make Liz feel less sad and our show less cancelled—we would all just have to get on board. And I would have to get the room on board, convince them that together we could make Marietta Dies, Praise Jesus and Pass the Biscuits an episode of television worthy of the splendid, nuanced, endlessly fascinating character Liz seemed to be carrying around in her head. This was the job.
But that was when I noticed Liz had sprung a leak.
I glanced around to see if anyone else had noticed. Everyone had noticed. I could tell, because they were all studiously looking away. Riva was staring into her laptop as if at some urgent anti-virus notification. The Bruces had both picked up their phones. And Ellen was looking at me, eyebrows up.
“Liz,” I said. She turned to me and widened her eyes—her go-to “I welcome your input” expression. I pointed at my neck. Then I pointed at her neck. Her neck was actually spurting, which alarmed me, slightly.
I’d seen people leak, but never spurt. My mom had issues with leaking all her life—especially during menopause, as with a lot of women. But my mom would merely teem for the most part, or sometimes drip discreetly when she’d been standing at the stove awhile, not even knowing she was doing it half the time, gradually soaking her clothes, leaving damp spots on the floor here and there. It was hard to say where the leaks were coming from at any given time because she’d only feel the moisture after it pooled, and cooled. With Mom it seemed to come from mostly her lower back and upper arms—never her buttocks, which of course is always the fear when it comes to leaks. In her later years she lived in dread of leaving a puddle on the seat of someone’s chair, having them think the worst.
Liz brought her hand up to her neck, and it got spurted on. “Oh, wow,” said Liz, looking at her hand. She wiped it on her jeans and stood up. I reached for a bunch of napkins left over from lunch but Riva was ahead of me—she had lurched for the box of Kleenex in the middle of the table and now she offered a handful to Liz.
“Thanks,” said Liz. “Sorry about this, guys.” The Bruces had put away their phones and now just sat with eyes downcast, either being squeamish or respectful. I’ve noticed that on the rare conspicuous occasions that men leak, they’ll laugh and josh each other, like when one of them gets a bad haircut. But when women do it, men become sombre and awkward.
Liz excused herself to go to the bathroom. After a respectful few moments I went to check on her. She was standing in front of a mirror, holding a towel-wad against the leak.
“There she is,” I said. “The human sprinkler.” This was a lame joke, but jokes—lame or otherwise—were part of my job. When I was hired, the producers spoke privately to me in my capacity as Liz-whisperer. They took me to lunch, so I knew whatever they were about to say was something I could not dismiss. We love Liz, they kept saying over and over again. But she can get bogged down. Things can get heavy very quickly with Liz. She cares about her characters so much! And that’s why her shows are such hits! But sometimes, as you know, she goes dark. Of course we want that Liz sensibility, that aesthetic—that’s what we love about Liz! But at the same time—
Light, not dark, I interrupted, nodding. Light, not heavy. Bright, light. I am the light-bringer. Got it. Everyone smiled. They were so happy not to have to say anything else that might be construed as critical of Liz.
“This is just what I need,” said Liz, looking into the mirror and meeting the reflection of my eyes. “Three weeks to prep and I start dribbling everywhere.”
I threw my hands into the air, as if in celebration. “Womanhood!”
“I don’t have time,” said Liz.
“Has it been happening a lot?”
“Started on the weekend. Almost short-circuited my computer.”
“Maybe you should try one of those spas,” I suggested. Although I knew the spas were bullshit. They gave you treatments that were supposed to promote leaking exudation, as the spas called it—so that you could get it over with if you had a big meeting or a hot date coming up and wanted to avoid any awkward puddles. All sorts of physical and psychological benefits supposedly followed—your skin cleared up, your chakras aligned and so forth. But I’d read an article in the New York Times months ago debunking exudation therapy and I was pretty sure Liz had read the same one. The article said there was no scientific evidence whatsoever that exudation therapy actually gave rise to exudation. Leaking is neither healthy nor unhealthy, the article scoffed. It’s just one of those pointless, annoying things our bodies do, like foot cramps or sneezing five times in a row for no good reason.
“The spas are bullshit,” said Liz.
“I know,” I admitted.
We stood there for a while staring into the mirror at the reflection of Liz’s soaked wad of paper towel being held against the reflection of Liz’s neck.
“Why is it always just one thing after another?” said Liz.
*
We went in circles, in the room, for days. Our other scripts were more or less ready, but Episode Nine was getting nowhere. I kept thinking that if it had been up to me, I would have written Marietta into gentle oblivion right around the time we gave her the motorcycle. The motorcycle was the perfect opportunity. Such thoughts were mutinous, considering Liz was my captain, so I tamped them down. My job, after all, was to help facilitate her vision. While bringing light. The problem was, Liz’s vision was divorced from reality—the reality of the girl-power fantasy that was our show. The reality of that fantasy, whether Liz could see it or not, was that Marietta did not fit and the audience needed her to die. They did not want a big send off. They did not want long, poignant scenes showcasing Annie’s Shakespeare-trained talent for reciting massive blocks of dialogue. They did not want lingering close ups on her pale, suffering, face. They wanted her to stop showing up.
But Liz, her ears being permanently shut to the clamour of social media, could not hear this. So she’d come to work and plunk her coffee on the table and say things like: “Last night I was thinking that Marietta might actually be one of the most complex characters I’ve ever created. I was looking over my notes. I filled notebooks on that girl! More than I filled for Tamlyn, even!” Tamlyn being our beloved, mysterious spy-ninja female lead.
“It could be that’s the problem?” suggested Riva, whose thing in the room was to make all her statements sound like questions.
“What’s the problem?” said
Liz, turning to her. Riva didn’t understand that there were ways of expressing such thoughts without using a word like “problem.”
“Could it be we’ve overthought Marietta?” queried Riva. “Somewhat? I mean given her secondary status? On the show?”
“I honestly don’t know how you can overthink character,” said Liz.
“Right,” said Riva, nodding. “But—?”
I would’ve kicked Riva under the table if my legs had reached that far. Riva’s uptalk had turned Liz frosty. What saved Riva in that moment was Wanda, popping her distracted, bird-like head in through a crack in the door. “Liz? Got a sec?” She’d been doing this with more and more frequency lately, popping in, blinking rapidly, the tendons in her neck straining, both wanting and not wanting to speak to Liz about the latest network concern or looming production disaster.
The sound of Wanda’s voice, however, was anything but bird-like. Even after she and Liz stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind them, we could hear her rasping indistinctly through the walls. Her voice had a grinding, aggressive quality that seemed to achieve a higher register, I’d noticed, with every passing week. Lately the sound of it made my eyes water, as if Wanda’s head in the doorway brought with it a waft of pepper spray.
I took advantage of the Liz-free moment to glower around at everyone. “Guys,” I said, “this is happening. We’re not going to talk her out of it at this point.”
Riva went limp and turned into the person she became when Liz wasn’t in the room. “Fucking fuck,” she said.
“No more questioning it. We just need to be fully on board at this point.”
“But if we’re going to make it work,” said Ellen slowly.
“—We need to talk about why Marietta sucks so much!” finished Riva. Ellen was the most reflective person in the room, and it could be frustrating, because people like Riva were always jumping into her reflective gaps and cutting her off.
“Well let’s do that when Liz is out of the room, if we feel the need to do that,” I said. “Because right now it’s just getting on her tits.”
“She hired us to be straight with her,” said Ellen. Every once in awhile Ellen would bowl me over with a statement like this—a statement that would make you think she’d just wandered into the studio with a sprig of hay between her teeth as opposed to a decade’s worth of TV experience under her belt.
”It doesn’t matter why Marietta sucks,” I said, pretending Ellen hadn’t spoken. “And Liz doesn’t need to hear that from us. She’s been hearing it all year from the entire world.”
“She hasn’t been hearing it, that’s the problem,” muttered one of the Bruces. I didn’t bother looking over to see which one.
“The problem is,” said Riva, “she hears it secondhand, from the execs. They think they’re bolstering their case by talking about the backlash online, but as soon as she hears the word Twitter, she dismisses it. They might as well be telling her the criticism’s coming from Narnia.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I repeated. “Did you guys not see Wanda? She’s a human forehead vein—because we’re running out of time. I know Liz, guys—she’s not going to come around on this. We need to just forget about the Marietta that sucks. And believe in the awesome Marietta Liz believes in.”
“I guess it’s like faith,” considered Ellen. “Religious fai—.”
“More like believing in fairies,” said Riva. “So Marietta’s basically Tinkerbell. Asshole Tinkerbell.” One of the Bruces snorted at this and Riva looked gratified.
Then Liz returned, looking beleaguered, as she often did post-Wanda. She dropped into her chair like a sack of rocks.
“Long story short,” she said, “we need to figure out Nine today. No more fucking around. Let’s go.”
We began, but got sidetracked when Liz started talking about the network’s notes and how they could be “invasive” like weeds in a garden, or fungus. Then someone made a joke about slime molds, but a Bruce took exception to that, claiming slime molds did not actually qualify as fungi. It had something to do with the way slime molds took in nourishment, apparently. Then Riva had to look this up to confirm if it was true (it was). Then the other Bruce pulled up some online clips for us to watch. They were fascinating and repulsive—time lapse videos of a seething, toxic mucus expanding in all directions, taking over the landscape, eating everything in its path.
“Well—let’s take lunch,” said Liz. “We’ll nail it down this afternoon.”
The whiteboard glared. I went outside and bought a green smoothie because solid food wasn’t doing me any favours these days. Plus, my metabolism was operating at the speed of a particularly indolent slime mold as the result of sitting motionless in a room for seven hours every day. I speed-walked around the block, sucking up my smoothie, the colour and consistency of which also reminded me of the slime molds. I couldn’t taste it. I meditated on Marietta. I needed to get on the same page as Liz. As Liz-whisperer, I had always prided myself on being able to anticipate my boss’s creative flights of fancy before they could even take wing, but this Marietta thing had completely blindsided me. It made me anxious, off my game. I love Marietta, I tried telling myself. Slime mold, my self replied. Listen, I said. Just try and feel this, ok? I love her. I love Marietta so much.
I hated her, however. Why did I hate her? Why did anyone hate her, was the question. She was good. She wasn’t TV-generic. You couldn’t call her bland—Annie had a lopsided and bashful smile that recalled a young Renée Zellweger.
I mentally addressed the viewing audience—Why do you hate her?
Because you want me to love her, the viewing audience replied. You want it so badly. You think you can throw anything at me and because it’s you, I’ll get on board. My internal viewing audience seemed to be addressing Liz, so I replied as Liz.
That’s not going to stop, said Liz. I’ve always done that and it’s always been fine.
Things change, said the viewing audience. You’ve changed. And you don’t even know it.
But I thought we were on the same side, fretted Liz. We always got along so well.
We liked what you did. We enjoyed it for a while. But we owe you nothing. Don’t start acting like we owe you something. We will hate you for it. We will punish you for it.
Shaken, I ducked into a Starbucks and ordered a grande cold brew to take back to work. I figured more caffeine couldn’t hurt, even though this thing had been happening to me at night where, as soon as I tried to sleep, my heart would start thrashing around in my chest like a creature in a panic to be released.
*
The following Monday Liz was an hour late, because, she confided to me in the ladies’ room, she was streaming water from between her breasts all morning. She had come out of the shower with water rolling off her and, she said, it just kept rolling. After checking the stalls to make sure we were alone, Liz lifted her shirt to show me how she had stuffed a maxi-pad down the middle of her bra to soak up the leak. She seemed pretty proud of this ingenuity. As I watched, she yanked the wet maxi-pad—an old-school, industrial-strength cotton slab—out of her bra and replaced it with dry one from her purse. Then she wrung the used one out into the sink to show me how full of liquid it had been.
“Kee-rist,” I said.
“Just call me Yellowstone,” said Liz.
“Have you talked to a doctor?”
“When would I do that? Anyway—it’s a natural process right? You always hear it ramps up around menopause.”
“How’ve you been feeling?” I laughed as I asked this because of course Liz had to be feeling like me, like the rest of us—desperate, frantic, under the gun.
“I feel fine,” said Liz. “Really good, actually. I’m really happy with the work we’re doing on Marietta.”
I laughed again, figuring this could only be irony.
“It’s so satisfying,” said Li
z, patting her fresh maxi-pad and pulling her down her shirt. “To be giving all this time to her—to be really digging in on her character and what she means to the show. You know, as pissed off as everyone is about it, I’m feeling very clear that it’s the right thing to do.”
I followed Liz back to the room in silence because what was there to say after I’m feeling very clear that it’s the right thing to do?
In the room, Liz explained that Wanda was shrieking at us all the time because she, Wanda, had lost sight of “what the show is” and “how the show works.” “This work we’re doing,” said Liz, “is fundamental. When you’ve got a TV show up and running and you’re into the third season, people tend to forget about the deep, foundational work that’s so essential. We can’t scrimp on this work, guys—we can’t just blow through it because it’s hard, because everyone’s behind schedule and the network hates us and Wanda hates us and the director hates us and the crew hates us. Everyone out there? They exist to serve us. Our vision. They think the kindest thing we can do for them right now is to hurry up—no. The kindest thing we can do—the only thing we can do, as storytellers, is to honour the truth of the story and go where that takes us.”
There was nothing to say to that either.
“So,” said Liz, leaning back in her chair. “Does the Syndicate murder Marietta because she’s been one of them this whole time and is about to blow the whistle? Or is it simply a matter of throwing herself in front of Tamlyn when the gun goes off kind of thing? One gives us a juicy reveal, but I like the potential emotional fallout of the latter. I feel like it’s important her death feel like a sacrifice—a completely selfless moment.”
So, this was easy. We just had to pick one. I suggested the room take a vote and we move forward on whatever option carried. But Liz looked over at me as if I had placed a finger over one nostril and exhaled the contents of my nose across the table.
