by Paige Cooper
“Slow down,” said Liz. “We shouldn’t rush this. I wanna pin down this idea of sacrifice first.”
And that’s how we spent the entire morning, pinning down Liz’s idea of sacrifice. I could see, by the movement of Ellen’s shoulders, that she was taking long, deliberate breaths throughout the entire conversation. Whereas Riva looked ready to shatter her computer over someone’s head.
The week went on like that. We would pitch ideas and Liz would tell us to slow down. Slow down. And consider every possible implication. One after the other. By Thursday we had still accomplished next to nothing and I could feel my stomach lining disintegrating within me. The problem wasn’t that we couldn’t decide about Marietta. We were so ready to decide. We yearned to decide. The problem was that Liz wouldn’t let us.
Over lunch on Friday, as I was rounding the block sipping another slime mold special, I received a call from Mackie. She and a couple other execs would love it, she said, if I would meet them for breakfast bright and early Monday morning—before work.
*
“We love Liz,” said Mackie.
“I know,” I enthused, “I love Liz too.” This exchange of pro-Liz enthusiasm was, I observed, turning into a kind of ritualized greeting between myself and the execs whenever we met, like Japanese business types bowing excessively and exchanging cards.
“She’s the best,” said Mackie.
“Totally,” I said. “I always feel so lucky to be working with her.”
“And we feel so lucky too,” said Mackie.
“Oh my god, so lucky,” chimed someone else further down the table, whose name I hadn’t caught.
“She’s an extraordinary talent,” said Armelle, and I stiffened a bit, because I wasn’t used to being in Armelle’s presence. I hadn’t known or expected Armelle would be at this meeting. Armelle attended almost no meetings as far as I could tell. Armelle’s thing was that sometimes she would have dinner one-on-one with Liz. They would go somewhere with white tablecloths and have long, warm, sisterly conversations and drink a great deal of wine. They would talk about their husbands (or, dog in the case of Liz, who adopted a bullmastiff named Roger not long after her divorce). Then move on to their kids, the schools they’d applied to, the pros and cons of each. Hug and kiss goodbye. And then, presumably, Armelle would tell Mackie and the rest of her colleagues the best way to do their jobs vis-à-vis Liz and Liz would come to work and tell us all about how supportive and on our side the network was. That was always the relationship as I had understood it.
But now Armelle asked me, “How do you think Liz is doing?”
“Well, she’s leaking quite a bit,” I said. Armelle blinked at this a great many times but her face didn’t change.
This was pure panic on my part. This was me desperate to get across the trouble we were in without betraying or undermining Liz’s leadership. So instead I had betrayed her confidence. I was flailing, stuck there like a pinned butterfly under Armelle’s gaze. I had always been the Liz-whisperer. I was the go-between, the interpreter, the unruffler of feathers on both sides. I got Liz—that was my value, to both her and the execs. But I did not get this. I did not get Marietta. And so, what was my role here? What exactly was the point of me?
I couldn’t say, She’s making bad decisions, or, She’s holding everything up with a kind of insane obsession with a minor character, or, Everyone in the room is starting to feel like a hostage. I couldn’t say, Help, oh please help! So I told them about the leaks.
“Leaking,” repeated Mackie. “You mean exudation?”
“Ugh, I hate that word, but yes.”
“Apparently it ramps up during menopause for some women,” reflected Armelle.
“Right,” I said. “Well—it’s just—giving her some trouble these days.”
I couldn’t look up from my plate. I’d blathered Liz’s business and now I had all the executives thinking about her body, her exudations, as if this was the problem, as if it could have anything to do with her talent, or ability to pull off another season of the wildly successful show that had made the careers of everyone at this table. I felt sick with the shame of disloyalty.
“Stress can be a factor, too,” said Mackie.
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “I think the Times debunked that last year.” I wasn’t sure it had, but I just wanted to shut this entire avenue of conversation down. “Look, look, look,” I said. “It’s not even an issue. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s just one more thing she has to deal with lately.”
Armelle cocked her head. “Do you feel Liz might be overwhelmed?”
“She’s just extremely focused,” I said, “on getting the final two episodes right.”
“But if she’s being distracted by all this leaking—”
“She’s not,” I insisted loudly. “She’s totally rolling with it. She’s improvising. She’s sticking maxi-pads down her bra. It’s amazing.”
The table went silent.
“You know Liz,” I said, my voice becoming even louder in an effort to dispel the image I’d just planted in the minds of the execs, not to mention the busboy who was currently pouring our water. “She’s an innovator! She thrives on stress! She gets shit done no matter what!”
“We would like to know,” said Armelle, “if there’s something we can be doing on our end. To help things along.”
“Production should’ve had those scripts weeks ago,” said Mackie.
“I’m very curious to see them myself,” murmured Armelle.
Ridiculous, unhelpful directives rose up in my mind. Pray for her, I wanted to say. Light a candle. Sacrifice a goat.
Armelle took an unhurried sip of coffee. “What do you feel the hold up is exactly? Is there some kind of roadblock? I’ve asked Liz if she’d like to bounce any ideas off me, but she’s keeping mum.”
Armelle shouldn’t have told me that last part, because I had been all set, eager even, to answer her question. Killing Marietta. The hold up is killing Marietta. Armelle was Liz’s bestie, after all—or so I thought. If anyone could nudge Liz around this mental roadblock—the thing that was preventing her, preventing all of us, from imagining an honourable death for Marietta—it was Armelle. But if Liz had “kept mum,” if Armelle had been nosing around previous to this, making her delicate inquiries, and getting nothing, getting shut down, getting stonewalled to the point where Armelle had to resort to a breakfast with me, then it was clear Armelle’s opinion on the Marietta question was not remotely something Liz was interested in. Tears of frustration blurred my eyes. It would’ve been so good to unburden myself to Armelle, and Mackie, and whoever the hell these other blinking, smiling people I was having breakfast with were. But I couldn’t without betraying Liz more than I already had.
I felt handcuffed. I couldn’t tell them about Liz’s Marietta hang-up because I didn’t understand it. And because I didn’t understand it, I could not explain it. And if I could not explain it, telling the execs about it would make Liz seem irrational. And if I, Liz’s lieutenant going back a decade, were to make my captain sound irrational, well then, questions would arise, wouldn’t they? Questions and insinuations—of the cold-blooded, show-business variety, when everybody turns their minds from the glorious nobility of the story-telling impulse to exactly how much money is at stake. There’d be no need to say an ugly thing like “washed up,” but key people would wonder innocently to each other if Liz hadn’t been doing this job a little too long.
So I blinked the tears back into my head and repeated to Armelle, “She just really wants to get those episodes right.”
Armelle sighed. “Look at the time,” she said after a moment—but she was looking at me. Not her watch, or her phone. Look at this pile of garbage sitting in a chair like a person, she might as well have said. Beside her, Mackie dutifully waved her tanned, toned arms at our server, bracelets a-jangle, a human alarm bell.
*
Liz showed up wearing thin running gloves with bulges in the palms where she had stuffed them full of tissues.
“It’s like stigmata this morning,” she told me as we stood at the coffee machine. “Spurting palms.”
“Pretty soon we’ll just wrap you in gauze head to toe, like a mummy,” I said. “And you can just . . . seep into your gauze all day long and not have to worry about it.”
“That sounds cozy,” said Liz. “I think I’d be okay with that.”
It struck me I’d be okay with that too. To be swaddled, secure. Free to seep.
*
I contemplated her as we settled around the table, opening our computers, silencing our phones. Her face was poreless and glowing, which made me reconsider all the claims I’d dismissed about exudation being good for the skin. The glow of her face complemented her expression, which was serene. She looked faintly holy, like a lady saint in a renaissance painting.
I couldn’t figure it out. Was Liz being a trooper? Putting on a brave face for us, her team, but secretly miserable? Was just she bravely sucking it up every day—the intolerable professional stress in combination with the sodden inconvenience of her body—then going home and sobbing into the neck of Roger the bullmastiff for the rest of the night? As a tiny lake took shape around her? I didn’t think so. I knew I would be, but Liz seemed fine. Which was craziest of all, in its way. She was practically melting in front of us but she sat at the head of the table shoving tissues into her gloves with nonchalance.
The word cozy came back to me as I watched her tucking tissues away.
“I think the best thing we can do today,” said Liz. “Is talk about what Marietta’s death is going to mean to the rest of the ensemble individually. Let’s go through them one by one. We need to think about how they’ll be situated with respect to—”
“WE NEED TO KILL HER,” said a loud male voice I’d never heard before.
It was the white Bruce, speaking above a mutter for the first time any of us had ever heard. Liz raised her eyebrows at him. All of us did. Except for the other Bruce, who looked away as if to distance himself, even though they sat, as usual, side by side.
“We are killing her,” said Liz, not in the frosty tone I was expecting. She spoke to the Bruce almost soothingly, as if to a spikey-furred cat. “This is the process we’re engaged in, Bruce. At this very moment. We’re killing her as we speak. It may not feel like it, because we’re being mindful. And loving. But killing Marietta is very much what we are doing.”
I could see Riva vibrating in her chair and I knew the Bruce’s outburst had emboldened her.
“But Liz, we need to figure out the basic beats. How she dies. What actually happens in the episode. We only have a couple days left.” I was astounded. Riva wasn’t even using uptalk. On the opposite side of the table, Ellen started nodding. Uh-oh, I thought.
“Guys,” said Liz. “I know the process is arduous. But this is a woman’s life. Okay? This is someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Someone’s mother. A fully realized . . . human . . . child of this earth. Seen, felt, and beloved by the people she’s encountered along the way.”
“Wait,” I said. “Marietta has a kid?”
Liz nodded and stuffed some more tissue into one of her gloves. “It occurred to me last week. When she was seventeen. She had to give him up for adoption. She’s never gotten over it. Her mother told her she—”
“IT DOESN’T MATTER,” said the insurgent Bruce in his new voice. “IT DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER THAT SHE HAD A BABY.”
Liz blinked at Bruce for what felt like a good half hour. But she wasn’t angry. She looked stymied, and sad. Let down. If Liz ever looked at me like that, I felt I would’ve hurled myself out the nearest window. But all the Bruce did was look down at his keyboard.
Ellen leaned forward, “I think what Bruce means to say is that the time for delving into character is past. What we need to do now—” here Ellen made the fatal mistake of slowing down to consider her words, so Riva jumped in.
“—What we need to do now is break the episodes. We just gotta break ‘em, Liz. Now. We don’t have any time left.”
“We still have the weekend.” Liz turned to me. “How long will you need to write Episode Nine?”
I’d been avoiding thinking about the fact that whenever—if ever—we finished breaking the Marietta episode, I was the one appointed to go off and actually write it. Me, with my non-functioning digestive system, my recent flirtation with cardiac dysrhythmia and my three hours (on a good night) of sleep. I closed my eyes as if to think, saw a creeping river of bright, pulsating slime-green mold, felt like vomiting, and opened them again.
“However long you want to give me,” I told her. “You need it in two days? I can do it in two days.”
“YOU ARE JUST ENABLING HER,” said white Bruce. “THAT IS ALL YOU DO IN THIS ROOM.”
“AND YOU NEED TO SHUT UP, WHITE BRUCE,” I said. At which point both Bruces reared back in their chairs.
“I apologize,” I said in my normal voice. I realized I was standing, so sat back down. “I apologize to both of you for that.” But really I was apologizing to the Bruce who was black and I tried to make sure with my eyes that he knew it. But that Bruce wasn’t meeting my eyes.
“Guys,” said Liz again, in a voice so calm it was madness. “I’m begging you to have faith in this process.”
With that, white Bruce got up and left. After he shut the door we all sat there.
“Well I guess we know where that Bruce stands,” said Liz.
Then the other Bruce got up and left too.
“We’ve lost both Bruces,” I announced in a daze. “We’re Bruce-less!” Somehow I was still trying to make jokes and bring light, as I had been hired to do. I kept thinking, as I had been so uselessly all along, I just have to do my job. I am here to do a job and I just have to do my job.
That’s when Riva, chin wobbling, got up and left too.
Liz leaned forward in her chair and extended a hand each toward Ellen and I. We were seated directly across from one other—me to Liz’s right and Ellen to her left. I took Liz’s hand immediately. After a moment, Ellen did too. Liz squeezed. Ellen and I looked at each other.
The gloves were soaked completely through.
*
At some point, Liz said fuck it and went online and ordered multiple plush terry-cloth robes that she could change in and out of throughout the day. This struck me as ingenious—much better than my mummy-wrapped gauze idea. The robes even had hoods for when she was spurting from her cranium—on those occasions, Liz would take a belt from one of the surplus robes and wrap it around her head, sheik-like, to keep the hood secure against it. She had all sorts of little strategies now.
And speaking of strategies, that’s what we were supposedly doing—strategizing. For the first month of our unemployment, I’d show up at Liz’s a couple of afternoons a week and Liz would lounge, be-robed, on her ottoman, as we discussed how to get her show back. There was no real point to this exercise, but it made us both feel better—we were used to seeing each other every day, after all, talking things over, solving problems. We defaulted to the process we knew best, the process that had always worked for us in the past, even though it did nothing anymore but give us comfort.
Liz would gaze out the window at her boat launch—feet up, robe on, looking like a woman in a day-spa ad except for the occasional trickles of water meandering from various parts of her body. Over the first week, she spent much of our time together just marveling at Armelle’s betrayal. “I mean, I should have expected it,” said Liz. “I’ve been in this business long enough. But honestly, I thought it would be different with us. I thought that now that we were finally running things, we’d do it right. That’s what we always talked about, Armelle and I, in the early days. We’d banish the cynicism, the knives in the back. The bottom-li
ne mentality. We’d support one another. We’d give each other the space to . . . self-express.” Liz flicked a hand at the phrase “self-express” and a couple of tiny droplets flew from her fingers and landed on my glasses. I realized that by “us” Liz wasn’t just talking about herself and Armelle. She meant us—our entire side of the human equation. It seemed naive but at the same time, didn’t we all nurture that hope back when it seemed so impossible? The impossibility of it made it safe for us to dream crazily like that—to be innocent in our imaginings, open-hearted, bursting with moronic faith in one another.
Liz had at some point forgotten to close that door in her heart, it struck me. She’d been closing it throughout her career, every time it blew open, like any smart, professional woman would. But then one day along came Marietta. And Marietta, for no reason in particular that I had been able to discern, was where Liz finally drew the line.
When I finally did ask about Marietta point blank, Liz’s response didn’t offer much illumination. “It just felt like time,” she shrugged, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her robe. “After all the years I spent doing this job. It just felt like time for me to—” And here she interrupted herself with a sigh. “Stand firm.”
Eventually we abandoned the pretense of strategizing and just drank and lounged like ladies of leisure. For me, those were glorious, peaceful afternoons, not to mention a wonderful way to be unemployed—imbibing good wine in the splendidly appointed home of a wet, well-to-do woman. Liz would stroke Roger’s massive, snoring head, and we’d sip and gripe, gazing out over the lake. When the weather got warmer, Liz told me to bring a bathing suit and we could swim. We both knew there was nothing to be done, not really. The final episodes were in production, and who knew what they entailed, what kind of ignominious end had been devised for Marietta—certainly no one was telling Liz, or me. Ellen would sometimes text me minor updates with the eye-rolling emoji, but I never shared them with Liz. They mostly had to do with Riva and how much she sucked as a leader. Riva had been given the helm, something Ellen would not soon forget. It should have been Ellen, but Ellen’s slow way of talking had made everyone nervous, made her seem (as Mackie had explained apologetically) “too thinky”—eye-roll emoji—which was not “what is needed right now.”
