Chapter 5
Jake was not a staple around the Carters’ property. After the engagement party and subsequent weekend with her fiancé, Claire returned to her family home, where she interspersed wedding planning with going to auditions and hanging out with her friends. As far as she was concerned, life was normal, and if she didn’t think about what happened at the party… bah. Who cared? A crazy story to put in her Hollywood memoir fifty years from now, long after Arthur – and maybe Jake – were dead.
Outside of wedding planning, the only time Claire thought about Arthur was when she came home to find a new bouquet of flowers in her room. The man sure knew how to pick a colorful bouquet, at least.
“I can’t believe I actually got a call back!” Claire traced her finger around an orchid petal while on the phone with her friend Alicia. “My agent assures me that there were only four women who got called back for the final round of auditions. Can you believe it? Me! In a romantic comedy!”
“The timing makes it sound like it’ll be released in January.” Claire could hear the disdain in Alicia’s unimpressed voice. “Sorry, but it’s destined to be a bomb.”
“Okay, pessimist Penny.” Claire rolled her eyes. “Right now, I’ll take whatever decent role I can get. You know that.”
“Pretty soon your biggest role will be as Mrs. Carter, so who cares?”
“I care.” Claire had no intention to drop her acting dreams because she was married. If anything, the marriage was supposed to help get her feet through doors, since her grandfather’s name wasn’t doing much for her anymore. I don’t have lofty Oscar aspirations. All I want is a fun career doing different things. Claire knew her limitations as an actress. She would never be Meryl Streep or Katherine Hepburn. Yet earning her legacy as a fun, flirty actress who didn’t take her roles too seriously but still did them professionally? There was a lot of honor in that. Claire wasn’t in it for millions of dollars or eternal fame. But she would live for the day when a fan wrote her, “Every time I see your name or face in a movie, I stop to watch it, because I know it will be good.”
This rom-com would be a good start. With any luck, Claire would be offered the lead role and not the Best Friend role yet again.
Someone knocked on her bedroom door as she hung up on Alicia. “What is it?”
Her mother Gloria poked her head in. “There’s a deliveryman here for you.”
“More flowers?” Claire asked with a sigh. “I thought I told Arthur that you’re allergic to the bouquets he’s been sending.”
“No. Not flowers, for once.” Gloria opened her daughter’s door all the way. “You might want to come down here to see it for yourself.”
Claire followed her mother downstairs, unsure of what to make of this proclamation. Don’t tell me Arthur’s sending me bigger presents I can’t use. At least flowers wilted, and brought color to a room before their untimely deaths. Oooor maybe it was a chocolate fountain? Now that could be something!
It was neither flowers nor a chocolate fountain. Claire stood at the bottom of the staircase, eyes wide and heart leaping up her throat.
“What… the…”
“It really is quite audacious, huh?” Gloria shrugged. “I better have it forwarded to Arthur’s house, because there’s no room for it here.”
The courier presented Claire with a tablet for electronic signing. She was hardly prepared to sign anything, however. For the ridiculous portrait before her screamed Carter Ostentatiousness like a woman would usually scream that such a present was beyond the pale.
“That’s so not your nose.” Gloria touched the gilded frame surrounding her daughter’s twenty-by-twenty portrait. This thing is the size of some rooms! “Maybe it’s the nose Arthur wishes to buy you, though. It’s cute. Very on-trend in plastic surgery these days. I think the one you get from my side is fine, though. Remember what I always taught you, Claire: don’t fix what isn’t broken.”
Claire handed the tablet back to the courier and approached her painted likeness. “I never posed for something like this!”
“It looks like a composite image. I know you’ve had photos of you sitting like this and looking in that direction. The artist must have taken images of you form the internet and created this. You also don’t have a dress like that, do you?”
“No.” It looked like a dress she would wear, however. Bold red, like her lipstick – like the roses and carnations she had received since the engagement party. The waviness of her blond hair was how she styled it for the Oscars earlier that year – except the artist had taken care to not include her dark roots. “Looks Dior.”
“It might be. Doesn’t sound like something Arthur would have a hand in.” Gloria chuckled. “Must’ve been the painter’s vision.”
“Who painted this?” Claire searched for a signature. All she found was a date from three days ago. “Damnit. Was hoping I might be able to investigate.”
“It’s a gift, Claire. Just accept it with the grace I reared you with. You should thank Arthur. Sooner, the better. This probably cost a few dollars.”
He could’ve pocketed those dollars! The painting wasn’t atrocious, but what was the point? Claire didn’t have any use for a giant, painted portrait of herself, especially if she never actually sat for it. What would she even do with this? Become the stereotype of the old, has-been actress who hung up portraits of herself in her hey-day so she could remember what it was like to be the biggest it-girl around? As if!
Claire soon realized why this unsettled her. This portrait was so much like the one of Carmen Carter hanging up in Arthur’s office. Gross! Could the man be any more transparent? Get paintings of his wives like they were trading cards. Would this one hang up on the other side of his office, so Claire and Carmen could wage war over their husband’s head? While he fucked other women and they both crumbled in misery?
“Please, get it out of here. I’ll pay for the movers myself.” Claire turned her back on the portrait. “It’s giving me the creeps.”
“Didn’t Arthur have a portrait like this of his first wife?”
“If you mean the Carmen Carter, then yes. He does.”
“Interesting.”
“Please, Mom, I can’t stand looking at it. I feel like I’m gonna be sick.” Claire gripped the stairway banister. “I need to prepare for my callback, anyway. If Arthur stops by, you know what to do.”
She didn’t wait to hear her mother’s reaction. Claire wanted to get as far away from the portrait as possible. With any luck, Arthur would hang it up in his office, and she would officially have a reason to stay far, far away from that tainted room.
***
The gifts kept coming.
Every day, someone stopped by to deliver a new gift for Claire Finn. First, it was one bouquet after another. Then? Teddy bears. Chocolates. Pieces of jewelry and slinky cocktail dresses Claire had been eyeballing. Every day was Valentine’s Day in the Finn household.
A part of Claire felt guilty that she didn’t acknowledge them. Something was terribly off, anyway. It wasn’t abnormal for her fiancé to send her presents like this, but at this rate? Ridiculous. What was she supposed to do with this junk? The worst part? Claire’s allergies had gone more haywire than usual, as if she suddenly turned into her mother overnight. Stop. Sending. Me. Flowers! It got to the point that the servants in Claire’s house had to immediately do away with the flowers to keep the women of the home from dying of hay fever. Claire chalked this up to such an overdose of floral arrangements. It was also probably why she felt queasier with each passing day.
She threw herself into preparing for her final audition. Meetings with her agent, wedding planner, and stylist for the upcoming garden party season had her so stressed that she skipped a period. Not unusual, honestly. Claire’s body was so susceptible to stress that she had skipped four periods in the past three years. It was even worse when she was a teenager!
So, she upped the amount of yoga and meditation sessions she took. She changed her diet around, both to account for swimsuit season, and to help keep her stress in check. It kept her mind off things, anyway. It was one thing to stop thinking about her stressful audition to turn around and think about marrying Arthur Carter.
Because each day that went by meant she was one day closer to her wedding.
I should call it off. She thought that every night, when she tossed and turned, sweating, half-sleeping, and smacking her tongue against the dry roof of her mouth. She often awoke naked, because she had stripped her clothes off in the middle of the night and pitched them across the hot room.
The morning of her audition, she woke up wanting to hurl.
“No breakfast, thanks,” she said to her family’s cook. “I’m afraid I’ll vomit all over the casting directors if I even look at a cup of yogurt.”
“Oh, my,” the cook said. “You really don’t look good, Ms. Finn. You sure you’re all right? I hear the flu is going around.”
“I’m fine.” She had to be. This audition was too important to miss or fuck up. She would have to put on her big girl stockings and drive to the audition with a mind over matter attitude that kept her food – and bile – in her stomach.
She arrived fifteen minutes early. The producers and casting directors were still in session with the actress scheduled before her. Claire filled out the last of her paperwork and sat down in the waiting room, going over the lines one more time.
Nope. That rumble in her stomach had her storming down the bathroom door, in time for her to unleash last night’s dinner all over the porcelain throne.
“Ms. Finn?” the casting agency’s secretary called from the waiting room. “Are you all right? Should I call someone?”
“No!” Claire braced herself against the toilet as another wave of nausea controlled her nervous system. And digestive system. And probably the skeletal system, if given the chance. “I’m fine! Be right out!”
The nausea left as soon as she finished purging. Claire cleaned everything up before going back into the waiting room and touching up her makeup so she didn’t look like a wraith.
It was certainly a first. While Claire had her share of butterflies before auditions, throwing up was on another level of sad. Makes sense, I suppose. She had a lot on her mind. The wedding, her career, the strange familial dynamics about to clock her in the side of the head once she was legally related to Jake…
God, Jake…
The last person she should be thinking about right now! Talk about a renewed wave of nausea! Claire held her head between her hands and tried to block out the memory of Jake Carter kissing and touching her as if she were the sweetest morsel to cross his lips.
She popped a mint five seconds before she was called into the other room. The actress who had auditioned before her gave her a little wave and wished her luck. How old is she? Twenty? Is she even old enough to drink? That was the kind of body only twenty-year-olds could get away with. Claire had been fighting the battle of the twenty-five-year-old bulge for the past several months. Her personal trainer and nutritionist both told her she would be lucky to ever see another carb again.
“Ms. Finn?”
Scott Lee, the head casting director for the film, motioned for her to enter the room. Claire patted down her hair and straightened out her dress before entering.
More people here this time. The table was filled with people. Casting people, producers, the director of the film… half of them were people Claire had met during the first round of auditions. The others were newcomers.
Except for one.
There, sitting on the far end of the table with a label that said “SCREENWRITER,” was Jake.