CHAPTER 9
Stephanie
The doorbell rings, and I try not to panic. I’m upstairs in my bedroom, putting on my face for Lauren’s sexy slumber party. I have a strict policy against being filmed waking up or getting ready. I am not comfortable appearing on national television looking anything other than my absolute best. For this, Lisa and Jesse would lock me up and throw away the key. Confident women are cool women and evidently I am neither.
“Vince?” I call, when the doorbell brays a second time. He doesn’t respond fast enough and so I have to raise my voice. “Vince?”
I listen to him plod to the front door with heavy footsteps—oh, the inconvenience of having to answer the door in the middle of a Top Gear rerun. There is low murmuring that I strain to make out but cannot. “Who is it?” I shout, batting away my makeup artist’s hand. If it’s anyone with a camera, I’ll lock myself in the bathroom. They’re not allowed to follow you into the bathroom. The bathroom is like the U.N.—generally accepted as off-limits, even in wartime.
Whoever was at the door is now on the stairs. I spring out of my seat just as Jen appears in the doorway with a pinched look on her small face. “It’s Greenberg!” Vince announces, on a delay. “And she’s wearing a flannel Snuggie!”
Jen and I are facing each other in a way that feels like we are squaring off. Her enduring scowl morphs into something worse as she takes in my face. It’s the expression of a person who has just walked in on her boss going to the bathroom—mortified, pitying. Jason, my makeup artist, has only just finished “prepping” my face. Which means that my skin is bare, blotchy, and greasy with various serums and primers. I’m without my fake eyelashes, which means I’m without eyelashes entirely. In my twenties, I had my eyelash extensions replaced monthly at a small second-floor salon in Herald Square, until one day, the technician turned me away, declaring: There’s none left. She refused to continue our treatments until I allowed my real eyelashes to grow back, no matter how much I offered to pay her. That was six years ago, and I’m still waiting.
Jen is not wearing a flannel Snuggie exactly, but rather a deep red and green plaid pajama set in silk. To a guy, it’s a flannel Snuggie. To Jen Greenberg, this is stepping up her game. I suppress a sigh. I have no patience for people who refuse to help themselves. I don’t care how cool the Fug Girls say she looks, she must know that she’s not going to win back that guy—or girl—dressed like a little boy on Christmas Eve.
“Sorry,” Jen says, twisting her Standing Sisters ring around her index finger. She’s fidgety; nervous for some reason. “Didn’t mean to barge in on you like this, but I need to talk to you before we go and I didn’t want to put this in a text.” We learned from Hayley to keep our digital footprints clean and our face-to-faces dirty.
“Ohhh.” Vince leans against the doorframe, licking his heart-shaped lips. “Scandal at the sorority house?”
Jason snorts because my husband is hot.
“Vince,” I say sweetly, “will you go downstairs and get us something to drink?”
Vince clasps his hands behind his back. “Red or white, ma chéri?”
“Water,” I say, at the same time Jen does white. She grins wide, not because it’s funny, but because she doesn’t want to show up to Lauren’s party and film with purple teeth when she prefers to sell herself as a garden-fed teetotaler.
“I’ve got a trick for that,” Jason says, smearing my face with foundation.
“Actually,” I change my mind, “I’ll take a . . . white . . . too.” Why not? My ongoing battle with depression (Why do they say “battle” when it’s always a massacre?) has been at a cease-fire long enough that there is no reason to continue slandering an innocent glass of wine in my mind. And not to borrow a problematic line of thinking from Lauren Fun, but tonight is a special occasion. It’s the first group event of the season, a banner evening, and Brett won’t be there. I just received word from my publisher that I am the first female author to hold four consecutive spots on the New York Times bestseller list. In just a few weeks, I’m flying to L.A. to have dinner with the Oscar-Nominated Female Director. I should celebrate when there are things to celebrate.
Vince turns from a waiter to a soldier with an official salute. At least he’s inconsistent. “Hup-two-three-four,” he chants, as he descends the stairs to complete his assignment.
“I don’t know how you live with that,” Jen says, in a shocking moment of insubordination. She pushes aside a pile of coffee table books from an ottoman and takes a seat without being asked.
“I do.” Jason flutters his eyelashes, and I decide it’s time to give Jason a raise.
“You’d have some competition,” I tell him, trying not to move my mouth as he paints it nude. Smoky eye tonight. Neutral lip. “The gays love Vince.”
Jen emits a doubting laugh, drawing her knees to her chest. Jen is always rearranging limbs, fixing herself into impossible entanglements, as if to say, Look at me! I’m such an unconventional free spirit that I can’t even sit normally! I dare you to find one photograph of Jen Greenberg on the Internet where she isn’t wound like a five-year-old in need of a bathroom. “Do you want to hear this or not?” she asks. “It’s about Brett.”
I’m dying to hear it. My rib cage feels like it’s suffocating my stomach, but I don’t want Jen to know that Brett still holds that power over me. “Who?” I quip. Jason snickers.
“You know she hired my ex to do her hair this season,” Jason says, slipping a folded tissue between my lips. “Blot.”
“She’s such a scam artist,” I seethe as Jason crumples the stamp of my kiss. Brett took great pride in anointing herself the air-dried one of seasons past.
“She’s engaged,” Jen blurts out, made impatient by my attempt to prove that whatever news there is about Brett, it can’t be worth begging to hear it.
Jason speaks with his powder brush, thinking I’m still in the mood to kid around, “That bitch is even thirstier than I thought.”
Brett is engaged? The last eight months flash before my eyes. Brett and me in the lingerie department at Bloomingdale’s, because she had just moved back in and I couldn’t believe she was still wearing that moth-eaten XL Dartmouth T-shirt to bed. Rihanna had taken a class at her studio. Vogue had profiled her. Time for a grown-up pair of pajamas.
Brett, accompanying me to a colposcopy at my gynocologist’s office, because my body hadn’t cleared HPV on its own and they needed to make sure I hadn’t contracted a cancerous strain of the STD. I was sick with nerves, and Brett actually managed to sweet-talk the receptionist, and then the nurse, and finally the doctor herself, into allowing her to stay in the room with me while I underwent the excruciatingly uncomfortable procedure. She clutched my sweaty, cold hand while the doctor scraped tissue from my cervix, cracking jokes about how you weren’t cool unless you had HPV. Women who have HPV are the women who have lived.
Brett and me, rewatching the first season of the show in my bed, hands in the same bowl of Skinny Pop, marveling at what apple-cheeked babies we had been just three years ago, how soft-spoken we all were. We must have just been nervous, Brett theorized, and I had agreed, but now I think differently. I think we were all just softer then.
The timehop of our friendship has caused the saliva on my tongue to thin and sour. I feel ill. I feel as though I might cry. I am painfully aware that I am sitting here with a greasy face and fewer lashes than a four-month-old fetus, that the person I loved the most in my life turned out to be a stranger, and a cruel one at that, that people are starting to openly question how I live with the annoying man downstairs. I swallow and try, desperately, to sound jaded and impersonal. “So none of us would film with her and she knew she needed a storyline.” I nod. “Got it.”
Jen shrugs, flatly. What a shoddy imitation of a friend—of Brett—she turned out to be. “According to Yvette, it’s not staged. They’re soul mates.” Her voice is a gauzy impression of her mother’s.
“Right.” My laugh is rough. Brett wants to be married about as much as I want a child: which is a lot if a TV crew is willing to capture it. “I’m surprised I’m hearing it from you and not Page Six.”
“Yvette says she’s waiting until they tell Arch’s parents before they go public.”
“And yet,” I say, rottenly, “Yvette knows. And now you. And me.” I give Jen a long look, allowing the facts to speak for themselves. “How long have they even been together?”
“Long enough,” Jen says, folding her heel into her plaid crotch. I’m suddenly furious with her for what she’s chosen to wear to Lauren’s sleepover-themed party. That is the sexiest you could come up with? I want to jeer. No wonder there are cobwebs growing between your legs.
“Not really,” I say, lightly. I will not let Jen see that this news has gutted me. “Like three months.”
“More like six.”
“Jen,” I say, an edge to my voice I can no longer smooth out, “six months ago I was in Miami, trying to help her get over her breakup with Sarah.”
“Okay, so, three months. Whatever.” Jen shivers, like the details of Brett’s romantic life are icky. “I don’t care.”
There is a creak and we both look to the doorway. It’s Vince, ascending the stairs.
“So how long until she’s pitching a spinoff to the network, Brett Buys the Cow?”
Jen’s face tightens. “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
It’s shameful, but hearing Jen disparage Brett for something as high school as her weight settles me ever so slightly. She’s still on your side. She still despises the same person who you despise.
“You two actually hate each other, huh?” Jason says, taking a step away from me and examining his work on my eyes. “I wasn’t sure if it was just for the show.”
I give him a sharp, stunned look. “You thought we made it up?”
“Who hates each other?” Vince wants to know, appearing in the doorway balancing three glasses of wine in his hands, mine with a straw because, lipstick. Vince is never more the doting husband than during filming season. Forget crotchless underwear or piping my nipples with whipped cream, filming is the aphrodisiac of our marriage. Somewhere along the way, Vince decided that holding my handbag on the red carpet was still the red carpet, and that was good enough for him.
“Who else?” I say, as he sets my drink in front of me. I see that he chose the glasses that his friends bought us for our wedding, monogrammed VDS: Vince and Stephanie DeMarco, assuming, naturally, that I couldn’t wait to take my deadbeat husband’s last name.
“Aw, you guys,” Vince chastises, “give Brett a break.”
One nice thing I will say about the cad I married is that he stays out of our scraps. We’ve had significant others who try to get involved when Diggers butt heads, evangelizing the more forgiving politics of brotherhood, who are viciously edited into mansplaining donkeys when the time comes. Diggers have lost their places for less, and I’ve made it very clear to Vince, his opinion doesn’t matter but it counts, it could cost us everything.
“Then you can be the one to congratulate her on her engagement when you see her tonight,” Jen says, and I realize how artfully she’s buried the lede. Because Jen didn’t come here to tell me that Brett is getting married. She came here to tell me that Brett has been invited to Lauren’s event. That the alliance is off.
Vince fumbles the pass, slopping some of Jen’s wine onto the silk rug. “She’s engaged?” He sets the glass down on my vanity and goes in search of a towel. “No shit,” he says from the bathroom. “To that . . . that same woman? What’s her name?”
“Arch,” Jen says.
“Arch?” Vince repeats, rudely, appearing in the bathroom doorway with a roll of toilet paper in his hands.
“Use a hand towel,” I snap at him, and direct my chin at the glass he’s left on my vanity. “And put a coaster under that!”
“Welcome to New York, Vince,” Jen cracks, as he disappears into the bathroom again, “we have people from lots of different cultures here. And obviously the white savior of African girls wasn’t going to marry some corn-fed blonde from Ohio.”
“You should have told me she was coming sooner,” I say to Jen, waving off Jason’s attempt to apply mascara to the falsies he’s glued to my eyelids. “I just wasted a fifty-dollar strip of lashes.”
“You’re not coming now?” Jen spits, incredulous.
“Babe,” Vince implores of me, standing in the bathroom doorway with a hurt puppy-dog look on his face. He ordered a satin Hugh Hefner playsuit for this night weeks ago, monogrammed for seventy-five dollars extra.
“I agreed not to film with her,” I remind Jen, icily. “And unlike some people, my word means something.”
Jason returns the mascara wand to its bottle in consensus.
“Fine, Steph.” Jen sets her wine on the vanity—Put down a coaster, you animal! I almost shriek. “She’s going to get the good edit, you know that, right? She’s going to Morocco to help little illiterate rape victims and she’s planning a wedding to Amal lesbian Clooney. Yvette wanted us to know so we have the opportunity to make things right with her before she tells us. Otherwise, you know what it’s going to look like? Like we’re a bunch of calculating mean girls who changed our tune when it became clear Brett was going to be everyone’s favorite this season because she’s getting married, and guess what? Suckers like to see fat chicks get married. It gives their little artery-clogged hearts hope.”
Vince sucks in a horrified breath. “Jesus, Jen.”
Jen shoots him an eviscerating look, but her face is a shameful red.
“She’s always the favorite,” I mutter, sounding so petulant I can’t stand myself.
“Listen to yourself,” Jen says, and I am shocked when her voice nearly cracks. Is she close to tears? I stare at her in wordless disbelief as she swipes the heel of her hand across her face. What is up with her tonight? “Jesse’s going to be pissed if you don’t go. Do you know what they’ll do to you in the edit room?”
Jen is not wrong about any of this, unfortunately, as it is a much more reliable characteristic of humanity that we’re happier for people in love than we are for people in the highest tax bracket. Perhaps because we need to see ourselves in our heroines, and the modest accomplishment of finding a spouse and having babies is achievable by most of the general population, Green Menace notwithstanding. Our audience in particular likes nothing more than to see unconventional people getting to partake in conventional traditions. It’s why Vince and I were so popular at first, it’s why Jesse is taking a chance on Kelly and her mixed-race, non-nuclear family, hoping for a Cheerios commercial backlash, promptly followed by a Cheerios commercial defense.
“Guys, relax,” Vince says, daringly. It takes a set of steel to chance on the r-word around two women with a combined net worth of not in your lifetime, bud, but my husband does not exactly conduct himself in a risk-averse fashion. “You’re getting way too worked up about this. Just go and tell Brett you’re happy for her and get on with it.” Not waiting for my answer, Vince peels off his T-shirt and locates the top of his pajama set. The tier-three trainer at Equinox is doing an abysmal job of taming Vince’s baby potbelly, I see. Jason pretends not to look anyway; those heart-shaped lips and that strong, scruffy jaw make up for that much.
The first time Vince ever had that effect on me, he was the bartender at a promotional event for a women’s razor blade. My friend from college worked for the PR company that represented Gillette, and she brought me as her plus-one. The event was held at a windowless warehouse in the theater district, and I remember exactly what I wore: a DVF wrap dress and a pair of nude, patent leather Manolo Blahniks. I was twenty-six and he was twenty-four, a two-year infinity. He was an aspiring actor whose biggest break to date was biting into a BLT in a Hellman’s commercial. His dark hair fell into his light eyes each time he looked down to mix up a fresh batch of the event’s signature cocktail (a Hairy Navel—haha), and every woman in the room was imagining what he would look like on top of her, with that hair in those eyes. I still get weak in the knees remembering how, at the end of the night, he beckoned for me to come closer so that he could shout into my ear (the acoustics were poor in the windowless warehouse), “Your boyfriend is an idiot.”
I made a dubious expression in an effort to play along. “But he graduated from Harvard Law top of his class.” My boyfriend didn’t graduate from Harvard Law top of his class. I didn’t have a boyfriend.
“There’s no way,” Vince said, buffing a wet wineglass dry with a dish towel. “Because no one that smart would be so dumb to let you out of his sight for even a minute.”
I rolled my eyes with brute force, but inside, I was jumping up and down, screaming, Don’t stop! Keep trying!
“Seriously,” Vince said, flinging the dishrag over his shoulder and going very still, so that he could be sure to take in every inch of me. “You are incredibly beautiful.”
Do you know what I felt like saying in that moment? I felt like saying I know. All my life, people have complimented my looks, but nothing they said ever rang true to me. She has a nice smile, I overheard a friend of my mom’s say when I was eleven. What does it even mean to have a nice smile? Hitler had a nice smile. Sometimes the girls at school would express an appreciation for my skin that they would never actually want to trade me for—about how lucky I was that I didn’t have to worry about my “tan” fading in the winter. Then there were the guys who fetishized me, declaring, You’re hot, with such lascivious fervor that I’d want to go home and take a shower. I’d look at myself in the mirror, perplexed no one else could see it. I don’t just have a nice smile or nice skin. I’m not hot. I’m beautiful. Incredibly beautiful.
The fact that I believe myself to be beautiful—and talented, I might add—does not run counter to my deep-seated insecurities. If anything, it is salt on the ever-open wound that is going through life unseen. But for five minutes on a Tuesday night in a windowless warehouse in the theater district, I felt seen by someone who happened to be incredibly beautiful himself, and that part mattered. Because when we walked down the street holding hands, Vince acted as my conduit. Oh, people thought, making the jump after taking in Vince’s good looks without needing to parse and qualify them first. He’s with her. She must be beautiful too Come to think of it—wow—she is so beautiful. And that’s why Vince.
It must be said that we were good in the beginning. There is a picture of us on New Year’s Eve, caught mid-kiss in the drunken crowd, unaware the lens was turned on us (those were the days, huh?). Vince had his hands on either side of my face, my lower lip pierced between his teeth. Passion had distorted our faces, made us appear tormented and deprived of some basic human need. Oh, God! I cried, slapping my laptop shut and covering my face in mortification when I saw the photo on Facebook. Something so private and primal should never be for public viewing.
The sex was no frills, constant, and torrid. Which makes the reality that we don’t have any now—at least not with each other—all the more gutting. You know how couples rarely make it if they have a child who dies? It’s simply too awful a reminder of the life that was lost to stay with the person who helped create it. Sex is the dead baby in my marriage. It rips my heart in two to look at Vince and be reminded of what has been lost. We will not escape the reality TV marital curse. The only question that remains is when. When?
“You’re a good friend for coming over here and telling us this, Greenberg,” Vince says, stepping in front of me and working some of my pomade through his thick, wavy hair. For a few moments, with Vince’s flat ass in my face, I’m at least spared the replica of my grief in the mirror.
No matter what anybody says, I know that Vince loved me once, before I was rich and famous. I will go to the grave knowing somebody saw me for who I really am, and he didn’t turn away in revulsion. I don’t think Brett could say the same.
The doors to the lower terrace of the penthouse are flung open, June at night like a bath you wake up in, lucky you didn’t drown. Outside, lanterns illuminate wisteria-wrapped pergolas and Franny’s hand-stretched dough chars in the wood-burning fireplace. Well, that would have been the scene, had the Greenwich Hotel been willing to sign the release form and had Franny’s not pulled out as the caterers once they discovered they would have to cook their pizzas in a conventional oven. As a result, we are in a very gold bar at a four-star hotel in midtown, trays of oversalted tuna tartar shoved in our faces every seven steps.
Jen and I trade stiff compliments about the décor because we’ve been mic’d, and the cameras will pick up our audio even though they’re not turned on us yet. This is nice, Jen says, with a half grimace, half smile. My contribution: I never really get to this part of town.
Natural Selection, the production company employed by the network, allocates three crews that rotate between the five of us for garden-variety home shoots, but for an all-cast event, the whole unit is deployed. Out on the small, cement terrace, catty-corner to a third open bar, two crews have staked out a space. Between the camera operator and the gaffer and the grip and Lisa, they appear like one big roving alien, stalking its target in a square of spotlight. Lisa notices me and raises her arm, wiping the air in short, frenetic waves.
I pause before our showrunner and she squints at me, yanking the tail of a Canal Street pashmina worn by a production assistant. “Can we maybe . . . ?” She goes to dab at my lips with the scarf, still leashed to a pop-eyed PA. I duck out of her way before she can touch me. Lisa and Jesse hate how much makeup I wear.
“What am I walking into?” I peer behind her and am relieved to see that it’s only Lauren in the shot.
“Lauren trying in vain to convince us that she’s not drinking,” Lisa says. Next to me, blotting his forehead with oil absorbing papers, Vince snorts.
“How many glasses of prosecco have you snuck her in the bathroom?” Lisa asks the PA, who is carefully turning her scarf around her neck again.
“Four?” she guesses.
Lisa punches four fingers inches from my face. I gently lower her hand. “Four glasses of prosecco. I get it.”
“Don’t be shy about blowing up her spot.” She reaches around me and pats my back, finding my mic pack between my shoulder blades. “Good.”
“Is Brett . . . ?” I remove a piece of imaginary fuzz from Vince’s shoulder. As if to say, I’m asking about Brett but more concerned about getting my husband camera ready. In a perverse way, I’m dying to see my former best friend. It’s like a criminal who finds reasons to revisit the scene of the crime. I don’t know the psychology behind that, and I’m not the criminal here, but I can tell you what I’m hoping to get out of an encounter with Brett is acknowledgment. I want to hear Brett say that I had every right to try to turn the cast against her. She’s figured out a way to keep herself relevant by proposing to some woman she’s known five minutes, and I get it, it’s self-preservation. But since I’m stuck with her, I deserve, at the very least, to hear her own it. She knows what she did.
Lisa gives me a witchy grin. “Oh, Brett’s around.” She gives me a gentle push. “Don’t worry, we’ll find you,” she adds in my ear. Vince goes to take a step forward as well, but Lisa’s arm lowers in front of his chest like a safety bar on an amusement park ride. “Not right now, my Hungry Hippo.”
Vince’s pretty little mouth drops open. He’s missed a greasy patch between his eyebrows with those blotting papers. “Whatever, Lisa,” he mutters. He surveys the room, trying to decide his next move. “I’m getting a drink,” he tells me, unpinning another button on his pajama top for all the women here to meet other women.
“I’ll take a vodka soda!” Lisa cackles after him. “Go,” she whispers into my ear, with a firm push this time. “Four glasses of prosecco. Thank me later.”
Lauren is kitted out in a lace bustier and sweatpants rolled several times at her hips, pink furry mules, serving up terminally cool. She sighs when she sees Jen’s chastity plaid. “Oh, Greenberg.”
“I’m comfortable,” Jen retorts.
“Comfortable doesn’t get you fucked,” Lauren says, with the vigor of someone who has drunk too much to enjoy sex anyway. “Comfortable doesn’t get you over that dickwad.” Her anger is abrupt and embarrassing. Lauren realizes it and laughs, pretending she was joking. My adrenaline rouses, a static rustling the fine hair on my forearms. Between Brett’s engagement and Jen’s sudden willingness to film with her, Lisa’s comment that I can thank her later, it doesn’t take a veteran reality star to predict that things are about to go down.
“Phewwww,” Jen says to Lauren, releasing a long, cleansing breath and gesturing for Lauren to do the same. “Big breath. Your energy is too powerful to waste it on anger.”
Your energy is too powerful to waste it on anger—sigh. I couldn’t admit this before, because I was so desperate to see the good in Jen after I lost Brett, but Jen actually patents certain phrases before the season, then has coffee mugs and sweatshirts made with her inspirational sayings so that she can sell them from her Instagram page when the episode airs. I find myself wishing I had a drink in my hand to take the edge off her etheric drivel. This is a new sensation for me. I could never relate to those people who declare I need a drink! after a long week. I’d rather some stinky cheese, or a massage at the Mandarin. The desire for a cocktail stiff enough to make my eyes water should be a sign—get out while you still can!—but I’m not one to believe in signs.
Lauren pushes out a short, peppery breath for Jen’s benefit, before staking a toe to swivel in my direction, nearly losing her balance in the process. “You look hot,” she says, assessing me up and down. “I like your nightie thing.”
“Thanks, it’s Stella—”
“You know, I really admire what you’ve done. Telling your story. Helping women.” Lauren yawns, flitting her hand around as if to say, yada, yada. “But it doesn’t make you a saint.”
I force myself to respond calmly. “I never claimed to be a saint.”
Lauren burps silently, sending a whiff of hunger my way. “You claim to tell the truth, though, and you almost never do.”
Welcome to reality TV, where duplicity is not just encouraged, but a survival skill. The last time I saw Lauren, she was my yessum woman. The last time I saw Jen, she was abusing an abused rescue dog. Now Lauren is an adversary and Jen is peace, love, and light.
“Why don’t we discuss this at another time when you’re more clearheaded,” I say to Lauren in an undertone. It’s both an offer to protect my skin (I’ve lied about so many things, I’d rather discuss when I’m prepared to address which lie) and her own (you’re telling everyone you’re not drinking, but I know how many proseccos you’ve had tonight).
“I’m completely clearheaded.” Lauren makes her eyes wide and alert, as though this is undeniable proof that she is fit to operate a moving vehicle. “And I want to know why you told me Brett was the one who sent the video of me to Page Six when it wasn’t her.”
If I weren’t on camera, I would sigh with relief. Telling Lauren that Brett was responsible for that item in the press is the least of it all. “I didn’t tell you it was Brett. I said I suspected it was Brett because I know she has a line in to one of the editors there.”
“So do you!” Lauren trills.
“And so do you!”
A few lesbians in imported polyester passing as satin sleepwear stop speaking to stare at us. It will make for some great B-roll.
“Why don’t we go into the hallway to discuss this so we don’t ruin Lauren’s event?” Jen suggests, and I’ve been at this long enough to be able to translate that to Brett is waiting for us in the hallway.
I square my shoulders. I thought I was ready to have it out with Brett, but now that the opportunity has been presented, I realize I’m not, and that I don’t think I’ll ever be. I should not be the one who has to apologize to her, which I’ll have to do if I see her tonight. “I’m fine right here.”
“Of course,” Lauren mutters. “It’s not your event you’re ruining.”
I release a tinny, exasperated laugh. “You started with me!”
“Let’s just . . .” Jen puts a palm in the middle of our backs and takes a step toward the doors, our Buddha bellwether, forcing us to follow her. I’m resistant at first, but as we step inside I notice something in the far corner that makes me a willing participant of the cavalcade. It’s my husband, sitting on a love seat by the fireplace, too close to another woman.
I narrow my eyes and realize the woman is Kelly, wearing a white negligee that looks like it came with the sexy nurse costume from the Halloween store. Vince dips his head and murmurs something into her ear. Kelly plants her hand in the middle of his chest, restraining him with a kind smile. My heart is battering in my ears as I glance back at Lisa, fearful she will have Marc turn his lens on my scoundrel husband, but everyone is too focused on the impending confrontation between Brett and me to have noticed. One less thing to worry about, I think, momentarily relieved, but then I catch Jen’s eye and realize she saw what I saw. Great. Just great.
Brett is standing by the elevators, wearing the silk pajamas I bought for her last year. This is no happenstance. The pants are wrinkled and if I get close enough to smell her, I’m sure I will discover that they’re in desperate need of a dry cleaning, which is also strategic. She wants me to know she’s been wearing these, that she’s been thinking about me. The crew rings us and waits to see which one of us will speak first.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” Brett starts, which is a riot. That is exactly what she is here to do.
I laugh crudely in her face. “Why else would you be here, Brett?”
“I asked her to come,” Lauren pipes up with glee. How thrilled she is to be the wounded bird at the center of this drama. “It’s my event. I’m allowed to ask anyone I’d like to come. I don’t need your permission, Steph.”
Jen reaches for Lauren’s hand and clutches it close to her heart. “Laur,” she says, her voice deep and husky. “Remember what we talked about. Speak from a place of vulnerability, not vengeance.”
“Christ on a gluten-free vegan cracker,” Brett says, making eyes at the camera. When we were filming the first season, we were told to ignore the cameras. It was drilled into us. Then season one aired and we discovered that not only had Brett completely disregarded that rule, but that the viewers loved it, ordaining her the Jim Halpert of the show. Brett is incapable of seeing that private communication for what it is, which is a betrayal of her cast. Staring into the camera at moments like this is analogous to a laugh track. It’s saying to the audience—yeah, I’m laughing at them with you.
“Do you want me to mediate or not?” Jen says to Brett, dropping the Dalai Lama inflection. Something passes between them, indiscernible to anyone who is not us. They’ve seen each other since I was at Jen’s apartment, I realize. They’ve agreed on something. I am the one on the ropes tonight. I take a moment to gather my bearings—do they have something on me? Have they agreed to their own alliance? I decide, whip fast, that my best course of action is to show remorse.
“Lauren,” I say, turning to her with my hands steepled in prayer. “I genuinely thought Brett was behind the Page Six article. That wasn’t a lie. If Brett says it wasn’t her, then it wasn’t her, and I’m sorry to have created such confusion. Now, can we just go back in there and celebrate this important and necessary new chapter of SADIE?” Important. Necessary. These are the things every Digger would like to believe about herself.
Lauren runs a hand through her sunny hair, pluming herself. She’s going to work this conflict to the bone, I realize with a slump. How could the tide have turned against me so quickly? How am I the one on the outs here? “I don’t believe you thought that,” Lauren persists. “I think you told me that to get me on your side and fight your battles for you.”
I attempt to disarm her with a smile. “Laur, come on, you know me. I can fight my own battles.”
“Or maybe you did it to try to distract everyone from your marriage issues.” She cocks an eyebrow, lazily, but the trick does very little to assuage the regret on her face. She knows she’s taken it too far by bringing up Vince.
“Laur,” Brett gasps, disapprovingly, and the eyebrow falls completely. It’s official. Brett is our new puppet master.
Thank you, Lisa, I think, as I remember what she told me earlier. “You’re not making any sense,” I say to Lauren. “Maybe it was the four glasses of prosecco you’ve smuggled tonight when you’re telling everyone you’re sober?”
Lauren thinks she lunges at me, but in reality, it’s more of a slow, sad lean. She bumps her shin on the bench between the elevators, doubling over and yowling. Jen grabs her by her upper arm, helping to right her, and that’s when I notice it. The bruising. The puncture wounds. Lauren has gotten her vaccinations for Morocco.
“Grow up,” Lauren says, clutching her shin with her hand. “You’re too old to be a mean girl.”
Over Brett’s shoulder, Lisa’s lips form a grotesque o.
“Steph!” Brett begs after me as I hurry away, crew number two stalking me down the hallway. I’m done. I can’t. I’m done.
Vince has disappeared, and with the camera crew unrelenting at my back, I don’t risk looking for Kelly in case she might lead me to him. The last thing I need is a storyline that my husband is schtupping the new Digger. The second to last thing I need is for my husband to actually schtup the new Digger. I head for the bathroom, where at least I can sit on the edge of the toilet and not worry what my face is or is not doing in this new reality where I have somehow found myself the villain in the story.
The door to the bathroom is locked. I rattle the knob to let whomever is inside know there is a line, and then again a few seconds later, and then again. I can’t get my face away from this camera fast enough. The door blows open with a Jesus, though the woman giggles an apology when she sees the cameras and realizes who I am. I step past her, pulling the door shut behind me, but it catches on something before I can get it to latch. I look down and find the dirty toe of a Golden Goose sneaker.
Brett turns sideways and fits her body inside, closing the door on the long snout of the camera. This has happened before—Marc stuck outside filming a slammed door, while our mics pick up a “private” conversation. Brett seizes me by the shoulders, pulling me toward her with her lips puckered. I can’t tell if she’s going to kiss me or spit on me. “I won’t let you do this, Steph!” She shakes me, with dramatic effect but very little actual force. “You don’t get to walk out like that. You don’t get to decide when we talk and when we don’t. I’m not your fucking subordinate.” She releases me to bring two fists to her mouth, her shoulders quivering with silent church laughter. She jabs a finger at me, mouthing, Go! You go!
I stare at Brett for a few long, hard seconds. Give me something, I plead with her inwardly. Give me anything. Brett blinks back at me, the smile dropping away from her face. It seems like she might say something—something real—but instead she starts to cough, abruptly and violently. She coughs so hard she chokes. She coughs so hard tears stream down her face. “Wrong pipe,” she croaks, clutching her throat with one hand, jabbing at the faucet behind me with the other. She means for me to turn it on so she can get some water. The most I’m willing to do is step aside so that she can see to her survival herself.
Brett folds at the waist, splashing water into her mouth with her hands, getting as much of it down as she can while coughing and sputtering, her nose running, her face a pleasing and unbecoming shade of red. Doubled over as she is, I have full access to my image in the mirror. I lean in, closer, scrutinizing Jason’s work tonight. My skin is a flawless, even canvas, allowing my dark eyes to really pop. But still, I am thirty-four, ache in my heart.
It is not my age that stings, it is that my age decided to make itself known with very little warning. I have always looked so young. Then somewhere, midway through thirty-three, I looked into the mirror and saw that I was older. Ever since then, I’ve felt apologetic and guilty, exposed as a fraud, like a prominent evangelist pastor busted in a tawdry sex scandal. I deeply regret my last birthday and beg for your forgiveness. I’ve been skulking around the Forbes thirty under thirty crowd, aged out for a while now, but at least looking the part. Then thirty-three-and-a-half kicked in the door, seeming to bring with it the decade’s full wallop overnight.
Every year, I have looked back on my last birthday and yearned to turn that year again. Twenty-eight was so young, twenty-nine was still so young, thirty was a baby! But thirty-four felt different. There will never be a time when I look back and think I was young at thirty-four. Young was left on the doorstep of thirty-three. I am sure of it.
Sometimes I think Jesse sniffed out my fear of aging, the way abusive men have a nose for women who grew up feeling undeserving of love. What did I say in my memoir? Feeling less than was wet wood for a termite like A.J. That was a good line. Jesse, like A.J., must have sensed my expiring sense of self-worth and thought to herself, That one That one won’t think more of herself when I subject her to my mind games, that one will just take it. All of the Diggers are damaged in some way. We must be. Why else would anybody sign up to be tossed out? Reality TV is like driving drunk. You know it might kill you, but there is something rakishly sexy about tempting the fates.
Brett straightens, gasping still, thumping her chest with a fist. “Wow,” she rasps. “Wow. I don’t know where that came from.”
I know exactly where that came from. It came from Brett’s subconscious, from the latent desire to come clean, to get something off her chest. The ego quashed it in her throat, strangling her, really, but knowing it resides within her—guilt—gives me the conviction I need to move forward with our original plan, hatched eight months ago in my kitchen on my thirty-fourth birthday.
I turn my back on the mirror, hoisting my butt onto the sink’s ledge. I need to sit down for this. “I never thought of you as a subordinate,” I say. “I thought of you as my friend. And me?” I tent my fingers lightly over my heart. “I go to the ends of the earth to support my friends. I took you in when you had nowhere else to go, and I guess I thought it was a given, that if ever an opportunity presented itself to return the favor, that you would take it. But you didn’t. You had an opportunity to get my book into the hands of a major celebrity, whose support would have been huge, and you flat-out refused to help me. You wanted to keep that relationship all to yourself.”
Brett’s breathing is still labored, but I manage to detect a sigh of relief in the pattern. So far, I’m on script. I’ve said exactly what we always planned for me to say. “That’s so not fair, Steph,” she says, with a dopey, upward tug at the corners of her mouth. “You didn’t lose anything by allowing me to stay at your house.” She seems to realize that this line, which we practiced months and months ago, no longer applies, because her lips straighten once again. “I don’t know,” she says, eyes downcast. “Maybe I could have found a way to bring it to her attention. I could have at least tried.” She looks up at me, her big eyes bigger. “I’m sorry, Steph. I’m so, so sorry.”
I raise my eyebrows, and a valve in my heart thinks about opening. Because Brett is the one who is off script now. The plan had always been for me to apologize to her. Brett was to have come out of this scuffle smelling like roses.
“I miss you,” Brett says, thickly. She might mean it. “It’s killed me not to be able to congratulate you on all your success, which is so so well-deserved. And it’s killed me not to be able to share with you what’s going on with my life. Can we just—I don’t know. Meet for a drink? Coffee? Catch up. I miss you,” she repeats. “Every single day.”
I am silent. Brett prompts me with a slow roll of her finger. It’s my turn. “I miss you too,” I force myself to say.
Brett hops up on the counter, so that we are thigh-to-thigh, shoulder-to-shoulder, conjoined twins. She covers my hand in her own, and I feel the cold metal on two fingers, instead of one. “Oh yeah,” she says, holding up her hand with a wry smile. “I got engaged.”
The band is plain, gold, and a little too thick. The signet I bought for her has so much more style.
“I’m happy for you, Brett,” I say, with feeling, but everything in my body language is rigid. This does not deter Brett from draping an arm around my shoulders, from the assault of her warm touch. Does she actually believe me? If she does, she is so far down this rabbit hole of our perceived reality I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.
“We can make this right, can’t we?” Brett pleads. “Come on. You know I always support you. Real queens fix each other’s crowns.”
My disdain takes my breath away. Real queens fix each other’s crowns? This is the equivocating claptrap that passes for feminism these days. An Instagram idiom that places the burdon on the less effective party. Men get to go about their lives, paying women less and black women even less than that, unencumbered by cutesy demands to fix a problem they created. Telling women to help other women in a society that places us in a systemic competition with one another is a fool’s errand. Two percent of the world’s CEOs are women, and yet we are expected to treat each other like sisters and not rabid hyenas thrown a carcass picked to the gristle by lions. Malnourish me, undervalue me, humiliate and harass me when I try to get my money anyway, but don’t you ever tell me to go about it nicely.
I say none of this because I am not here to be a truthsayer. I am here to capitulate. Brett isn’t the only one acting out of a sense of self-preservation. I lean into this changeling’s embrace, even though the stink of the French perfume I bought her tangled with the body odor in the pajama top I also bought her makes me queasy. “Yeah,” I say. “I think we can make this right.”
But touch my crown and you will lose a fucking finger. Put that on a coffee mug and hawk it.