Page 2 of It's a Love Story

“Yes, big day,” I say and gesture to my dress. I don’t know why I’ve done this. This small gesture with my hand has opened up the door for me to tell him that I have a new script. I don’t want Dan anywhere near it, but I also want to rub it in his face. “I have a new project.”

“Another think piece?” I refuse to look his way, but I can feel a little smile off of him.

Now I’m rolling my eyes. “It’s going to be the film of the year.”

“I’m sure.” The elevator stops on the twelfth floor, and he steps forward and holds the door open for me. His navy blue eyes are disarming every time. All of his features are, as if a sixteenth-century sculptor with a too-sharp chisel arranged them on his face. But it’s the eyes, wide under his black brows, that have the intensity to match his arrogance. “No one wants to watch two people who they don’t care about fall in love for absolutely no reason.”

He’s just so superior with his omniscience about what everyone wants and doesn’t want. He was so casual about crushing my first real project like it was a gas station receipt. So I step out of the elevator, turn back to him, and spill it. “It’s funny and offbeat, with oddball characters. But more than that.” I don’t know why I’m selling this to him.

The elevator door starts to close and he stops it with his sneaker. “Wait.True Story?”

“No,” I say. If you could throw a word at a person, I would have shot-putted this one at his chest.

“No, it’s notTrue Story?”

“No. I mean yes. But not you.” My hands ball up, all on their own accord, as Dan steps off the elevator and lets the doors close behind him.

“Yes, me,” he says. “Jane, I’m meeting with Nathan about this at nine. He wants me as cinematographer, and I need it.”

“You need it,” I say, my voice has gone jagged. “This is about you now? Just trying to get all the facts straight.”

“We both probably need it. But I don’t hate this script. In fact, I can see it, in my mind, exactly how it should be.” The movie I’ve been imagining as I fall asleep is the same one he’s been imagining, but probably with weird lighting and subtitles and whatever arty stuff wins awards and sells absolutely no tickets. He presses the button and the doors open. “If you can just act like a normal person, we can make this movie.”

I am a normal person. In fact, I’m so normal that I don’t scream those words at him. There’s nothing that makes a person act more insane than trying to prove how sane they actually are. I have a little sweat beading up on my chest now and I really need to calm down. “This cannot be happening,” I say as the elevator doors close between us.

CHAPTER 2

ISIT UNDER MY DESK WHERE IT’S SAFE. THERE’S NOplace left to fall when I’m down here. It’s where you’d sit in an earthquake. My office door is closed, and I just need a minute in this small space to regroup. The hard plastic mat that my chair rolls around on feels cool under me. My knees are pulled up to my chest, and I look up at the underside of my desk drawer where I’ve written the word “please” six times since my promotion. I can’t say exactly why making it in this business means so much to me. Show business was a lifeline for my mom and me when I was a kid, and I mean that literally in the way a lifeline can be food and shelter. But it was also such a weird way to grow up, on television, always being a joke. I just want to be taken seriously for once, and preferably in the world I was raised in. I can’t bear the thought of being part of the next round of layoffs, sent home with a cardboard box and a pity smile. I want Hollywood to give me a hug or a gold star, or at least a better table at the Ivy.

My current office has a view of the very top of Pantheon Television and the soundstage wherePop Rockswas filmed. The show followed four middle schoolers, unlikely friends, who started an after-school band and became pop stars. If I get a film made, there’s a chance I will move to an office on the other side of the building, where I won’t have to look at it. Inside that studio was our fake high school classroom, fake recording studio, and fake auditorium where we were discovered and given our own fake record contract.

My character, Janey Jakes, is immortalized as a meme, the one you send your friends after they accidentally reply all or pull out of a parking lot with a bag of groceries on their car.Oof!I’m thirty-three now, and people seldom recognize me, but it happens. They see me at Starbucks making my famousoofface while trying to force open the cream container, and they sing the familiar show ender:“Poor Janey, do do do do do do”I smile politely at their joke and pose for their selfie, but honestly, it’s a nightmare.

Hailey Soul, the lead singer, went on to be a soap opera star and is now a Manhattan mom of three kids with a million Instagram followers (including me) who like to see what she’s wearing and harvesting in her urban garden. Hailey has long legs. She has a dad who used to surprise her on set and calls her Cricket. Hailey and her husband have a meet- cute story that involves a horse. Hailey is the haver of good things. Hailey is an eternal frontliner. Even in sweatpants plucking leaves off her basil plant for the camera, she is a star.

Like Jack Quinlan, Hailey is a measuring stick for me. It’s not healthy, but I scroll her Instagram and keep score. Me: one small house; Hailey: two large ones. Me: an awkward side hug after a third date with an orthodontist; Hailey: a surprise trip to Lake Como for her fifth wedding anniversary. My Manifest a Solid Partner project was born just after her third child, when she posted a photo of the baby in her arms, wrapped in cashmere and bathed in the soft light of her East Hampton firepit.

I reach on top of my desk for a pen and write “please” one more time on the bottom of the drawer before crawling out and standing up like a normal person.

I check my inbox, and Nathan’s secretary is confirming our nine a.m. appointment. She’s always very formal, like she works for the king. I pull my copy of the script out of my bag. “True Story,” it says in the typewriter font that still makes me think something exciting is about to happen.

“You look pretty in red.” Mandy, my assistant, is standing in my doorway with a pink smoothie.

“Thank you,” I say. “Big day.” I straighten up in my chair in case there’s any part of my posture that would suggest I’ve recently been crouched on the floor.

She plops down on the sofa across from my desk. “So, Nathan at nine. In his office. With the director he’s considering, some guy named Rodney Whistler.”

“Yeah, I knew about him. But what I didn’t know is that Nathan’s also brought in Dan Finnegan as cinematographer.” Besides this being a total disaster, it’s weird that he invited a cinematographer to this meeting. Nathan has a little man-crush on Dan’s last movie, which won some awards and which Dan probably calls a “film.” I try to push away the thought that Nathan is looking for his opinion on this script.

“Dan with the man-bun who ruins everything?”

“The very one. Well, I made up the man-bun part.” I don’t really like the look on Mandy’s face. There’s pity there, as if we just opened a window and watched my big break fly away. I fold my hands on my desk in a vaguely presidential way to suggest the sort of calm and focus associated with a person who’s got this.

“I’m sorry, this could have been a really good movie,” she says. When I don’t say anything, she goes on. “I mean, he might not shit all over it?”

I laugh a not-giving-up laugh.

When she’s left, I bury my face in my hands and press my fingers into my forehead. I can feel the cog in my brain that’s popped out and snagged my entire system. Dan is a giant loose cog in my life, out of nowhere. I have no idea why he has this effect on me. I have to go into this meeting calm and dignified. I have to reply to his criticisms with be- that-as-it-mays instead of shut-up-you-stupid-jerks. Dan gets under my skin. And honestly, the whole purpose of skin is to keep things out.

---