CHAPTER 10
Brett
It was last year. Steph’s thirty-fourth birthday. I had moved back in with her for the second time, after breaking up with my very needy ex-girlfriend. Sarah and I had lived in a newly constructed high-rise on North End and Murray that cost us forty-five hundred a month. The apartment had one hundred and fifty more square feet than my first place on York and Sixty-seventh, with a dishwasher and a view of a better high-rise across the street and nary a rodent nor a kitchen drawer wide enough to accommodate a utensils divider, and in New York City, that is the height of luxury living. No rats and no room. It was the nicest place I had ever paid to live in, almost nice enough for me to pretend like the relationship was working, but in the end, I couldn’t take one more drunken accusation that I wasn’t all in. The process of breaking a lease on a New York City apartment is more soul crushing than lunch hour at the DMV, so Sarah and I worked out a deal where if I moved out, I only had to pay a quarter of the rent until our lease was up in the fall, just a few months away. Sarah wasn’t totally wrong about me not being all in, and I felt I owed it to her to let her stay in an apartment neither of us could have afforded on our own, at least for a few more months. Meanwhile, like a Pew Research statistic come to life, I was forced for financial reasons to move back in with my surrogate parents at twenty-six years old.
Steph had declared that for her thirty-fourth birthday, all she wanted was a quiet night in and Vince’s killer coq au vin, which was very unlike Steph. But later, over dessert, she admitted the truth, which was that she didn’t want proof of a birthday celebration on anyone’s social media or in the press. She was afraid to remind Jesse that she was another year older.
“You are . . . ridiculous,” I said, catching myself in time. I wanted to call her insane.
“You’re too young to understand,” Steph said, hysterically, toppling her untouched slice of Milk Bar Birthday Cake onto its side with her fork. She told me once that her medication makes anything sweet taste like cardboard.
“Try me,” I said, thinking about reaching for her plate, but I didn’t want to look like a pig, having already cleaned my own. Why can’t you just be normal came my mother’s voice. I’m not saying to not eat dessert, I’m saying don’t eat your dessert plus everyone else’s. I’d sneak down here later tonight and eat it straight from the box, I decided. If I polished it off, which was likely, I’d just tell them I noticed roaches in the kitchen and I threw the cake out before it could attract more. The plan had soothed me at the time.
“So,” Steph said, resting her fork, tongs down, on her plate, “there’s this German word, torschlusspanik. It literally translates to ‘gate-shut-panic.’ Are you familiar with this?”
I pushed a pair of imaginary Coke bottle glasses farther up the bridge of my nose. “Intimately.”
On the other side of the table, Vince dropped his head with a soundless laugh.
“Forget it.” Stephanie’s shoulders tightened, and she clutched her water glass to her chest defensively. There was wine, but only Vince and I were drinking it. Alcoholism runs in my family, she has said to me enough times that I’ve started to suspect there is more to it than that. Like maybe Stephanie is someone who lubricates life’s edges by staying in control at all times.
“Aw, babe. Come on.” Vince reached for the hand that was pinned beneath his wife’s armpit and settled on holding her wrist when she wouldn’t give it to him. Stephanie never could laugh at herself. People say that I’m quick to make others the butt of my jokes, but I am the first one to recognize when I’m being too Brett-y. Stephanie doesn’t have that ability, and I never realized before I moved in how delicately Vince had to tread around her. He seemed to not mind it, but later I learned he was exhausted.
“Please,” I begged. “Tell us. I didn’t graduate from college. How else am I supposed to learn about . . . tushy . . . spank?” I glanced from Stephanie to Vince with big bimbo eyes, my palm flipped up by my shoulder—is that right? Vince tried not to laugh again, but even Stephanie couldn’t hold a straight face.
“I hate you.” She laughed, despite herself.
“But in direct proportion to how much you love me, right?” I stole one forkful of her dessert and immediately regretted it. It only made me want to pick up the piece of cake in both hands and bite into it like a sandwich.
Stephanie drummed her fingers on her forearm, taking her time being convinced to share. “Torschlusspanik,” she said finally, resting her water glass on a white marble coaster, “is the sensation—the fear—that time is running out.” She jabbed at her heart with a finger. “I have that. With this birthday. Thirty-three was my last something birthday. The last year your success is special. It’s the last age anyone can call you a wunderkind, if we’re sticking to the German theme.”
I cleared my throat and chose my words carefully. “Um. Okay. Go on.” I raised my eyebrows at Vince, who sighed wearily.
“It gets better,” he said, gesturing at his chin, meaning I had frosting on mine. I wiped my face with their lattice-woven linens. Japanese, sixty bucks, Stephanie had told me when I said they were pretty, which is something Stephanie always does, volunteer a brand name or a price when you pay her a compliment, as though you don’t even know the half of how nice her things are.
Stephanie bowed her head, as if summoning the patience to explain a very advanced concept to very advanced imbeciles. “After the obvious markers—sweet sixteen, you can drive, eighteen, you can vote, twenty-one you can drink, there is a whole chunk of time where you are presumably getting your ducks in order as a young adult. If you’re going to do something exceptional with your life, it takes until twenty-seven to get society to notice. Unless”—she silenced me with a hand before I could object—“you are Brett Courtney, girl wonder of the boutique fitness world.”
“Damn right,” Vince said, topping off my wine.
“Damn right,” I agreed, raising my glass in what turned out to be a solitary toast.
Stephanie waited for me to set my glass on the table before continuing. “So that brings us to the twenty-seven club, of which icons like Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse are members. The club romanticizes the very idea of the young virtuoso, taken from us too soon. Next we have the thirtieth birthday, your dirty thirty, which is an overtly sexy birthday that doesn’t need much explaining. That’s when all the lists start, the thirty under thirty most powerful, most influential, wealthiest, yada, yada. And everyone gets to say, oh my God, she’s only thirty? You don’t believe me now but you’re such a baby at thirty. You are,” she said off my skeptical look. “And then thirty-one is the year women peak in their beauty and then thirty-three is your Jesus year. Your next special birthday after that is thirty-five, when the medical community categorizes your pregnancy as geriatric.”
“I’m sorry,” I sputtered, “a Jesus year?”
Vince tossed his napkin onto his plate. “Talk some sense into her, Brett,” he started, collecting our dirty dishes, “because I’ve tried.”
“Leave it, Vince,” Steph said.
“It’s your birthday, babe.” Vince came around to Steph’s side of the table and kissed the top of her head. “Sit with your friend.”
“I gotta find myself someone who cooks and cleans,” I said, in a blatant attempt to get Stephanie to warm to her own husband, to recognize how much he’d done for her today, to appreciate it. Some days I was Vince’s publicist and some days I was Stephanie’s, depending on who was the one who needed to be pitched to the other more.
“I’m a man of the millennium, Brett!” Vince said from the kitchen, turning on the faucet and running his fingers under the water, waiting for it to warm. “You should come over to our side. We cook and clean and fold your thongs into adorable triangles.”
I emptied the bottle of wine into my glass. “Great! I need more rosé, millennium man!” I drew a knee to my chest and addressed Steph. “Okay, so, Jesus year . . .”
Steph paused long enough for me to stop smiling. “The Jesus year,” Stephanie said, with such reverence I cleared my throat to cover my laugh, “is a year of great historical precedence, given that it’s the age God decided his son had accomplished everything he needed to accomplish on this earth. Your Jesus year is the year you realize it’s now or never. You cash in your 401(k) to open an ice-cream shop in Costa Rica. It’s the last year you’re ever young enough to make a major career change, and it’s the last year anyone can fawn over how young you are if it hits.”
“Steph,” I said, giving in to the urge to laugh, “you’re a New York Times bestselling author with a major Hollywood studio paying you a lot of money to turn your books into movies. You’re on a TV show with two million viewers. You have stairs in your New York City apartment and three Chanel bags—”
“And bae is ridiculously good-looking,” Vince said, appearing tableside with a fresh bottle of rosé, so chilled his thumbs left translucent prints on the fogged bottle.
I made a gesture of support toward Vince. “Who also talks very cool! How much better can you do?”
“I can’t do any better—that’s the point!” She slid a coaster under the rosé bottle and with her Japanese linens mopped its wet ring from the oiled oak table. Vince responded Sorry, as though a verbal exchange had taken place. “I’ve already peaked. Thirty-four is a nothing year. It’s your done year. I’m not getting asked back for next season. No one has survived the show past thirty-four.”
Vince and I shared an incredulous look across the table. But then I actually thought about it. “That’s not true, is it?”
Stephanie readied her fingers to be counted. “Let’s examine the evidence, shall we?” Tapping finger number one, “Allison Greene, season one, thirty-two.” Tapping her middle finger she continued, “Carolyn Ebelbaum, seasons two and three, aged thirty-two. Hayley Peterson, seasons one, two, and three, aged thirty-three.” She set all her counted fingers on the table, as if to rest her case.
I shook my head, refusing to believe any of this was purposeful. “It’s a coincidence. It’s not, like, a height cutoff at an amusement park ride. You don’t have to get off this ride at thirty-four.”
“Well maybe I don’t want to take that chance,” Steph said, folding her dinner napkin into a prim square. “I need to make sure I’m asked back for season four. The last book came and went with a whimper. I can’t go out like that.”
Oh, god. The desperation on her face. It will never not break my heart to remember it.
“Get ready,” Vince said, back in the kitchen now, exfoliating a soaked pan with a Brillo Pad, the sound of steel on iron making my teeth ache.
Her voice smaller than I’d ever heard it, Steph said to me, “Don’t say no until I’m finished, okay?”
Across the room, Vince worked his finger around his ear, as though he were spinning cotton candy onto a yarn, mouthing, Crazy. In that moment, I hated him.
During those weeks I lived with Steph and Vince, my empathy was like a transferable property right, something I leased out, depending on who was shitting harder on whom. I had heard the rumors about Vince before I moved in, of course—everyone had—but I chose to believe Stephanie when she said they were just that, rumors, and that she and Vince were still madly in love. I’ve thought a lot about the difference between believing her and in choosing to believe her, and why I was so gung ho to participate in such an obvious sham, and it must have been because I idolized her. I couldn’t reconcile my fangirl image of her with the clichéd reality that she was just another little wife at home, waiting up for her husband past midnight.
I was fifteen and Stephanie twenty-three when she published the first book in her fiction trilogy. I remember stealing my mother’s copy from her nightstand while she was out of the house, memorizing the page number after each reading because if I folded a corner, Mom would know I had been reading a book with a lot of sex in it and ew, ew, ew. Stephanie’s author picture was a stunningly perfect glamour shot, with lipstick, honking diamond studs in her ears, and a dazzling smile. Her bio was terrifically cosmopolitan: Stephanie Simmons lives on the Upper East Side (Not in New York! Not in Manhattan! On the Upper East Side.) with her dearly beloved collection of Jimmy Choos. The wit of her! The beauty! Stephanie Simmons is when I found my vagina, I once joked to a reporter who asked me how it felt to have her take me under her wing. Stephanie tweeted a link to the interview twice. She loved how much I adored her, and that turned out to be the root of all our problems.
Living with Steph and Vince, I couldn’t help but notice I played a role for Stephanie not unlike the one Vince had taken on. She had a tendency to gravitate toward people who were below her station in life, to build you up to a certain point but never too high. She did not react well as I started to close the gap between us. She became needy, suffocating, jealous. Why couldn’t she host the fourth hour of the Today show with me? Why couldn’t I bring her as my date to the Glamour Women of the Year Awards? She could keep Vince under her thumb to a certain extent, but she didn’t have the same jurisdiction over me, and she started to resent me for it.
Steph clings to the fact that Vince chose her before the show was even a twinkle in Jesse’s eye, but she had two books published before she got married, and one movie based on the novel by Stephanie Simmons already made. She may not have been movie-star recognizable when she met Vince, but clearly, he took in her clothes, her jewelry, and her doorman apartment on the Upper East Side and fell in love with her lifestyle. I do believe he fell in love with her next. But marrying someone who falls for what you have first and who you are after does not a healthy marriage make.
So, yeah, Vince is sort of scummy for that. But Stephanie isn’t off the hook either. She knew what she was getting herself into when she married a guy like Vince, and she still registered for all the crystal stemware from Scully & Scully anyway, because she liked the idea of a trophy husband. And Vince is the quintessential trophy husband—a little skinny-fat—but this is New York, not L.A., and it is nothing those eyes won’t make you forget. Had he been too ripped, a certain grassroots rumor might have picked up more steam, which is that Vince and Stephanie are covering for each other in a Will and Jada Pinkett Smith–esque arrangement, if you know what I mean.
It’s hard to feel bad for either one of them and it’s hard not to feel bad for both of them. It depends on the day. Throughout that day, leading up to Stephanie’s birthday dinner, I had been firmly in Vince’s camp. He had waited on us hand and foot from the moment we woke up, starting with a heavenly batch of homemade blueberry ricotta pancakes served to us in bed, but nothing could lift Stephanie’s spirits. Stephanie suffers from a sort of dysmorphia when it comes to her success, and good luck to anyone who attempts to convince her that her talent and tenacity have been recognized. Clearly, Vince sensed my exasperation with her, and that’s why he felt emboldened to make that gesture, to break the cardinal rule of Goal Diggers by mouthing Crazy. I crossed party lines again in that moment, over to Stephanie’s side, as I watched Vince wash his white Le Creuset pans that his wife bought him in the beautiful kitchen his wife paid for. I may be engaged to a woman but I know this much to be true about hetero relationships, and that is that men who call women crazy are always the men who have first pushed them to the brink.
“I’m listening,” I told Steph, and the gratitude in her smile made me look away in secondhand embarrassment. The worst part about getting old has to be asking people younger than you for their help. God, I pray that will never be me.
“Do you know the highest-rated episode of reality TV of all time?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Talk shows don’t count, right?”
“Don’t count.”
“What about that WWE shit?”
“This tied WWE Raw.”
“Holy shit.” I laughed, genuinely intrigued. “What was it?”
“The Hills. Season three premiere. ‘You Know What You Did.’ ”
I instantly saw Lauren Conrad in my mind, cast red by West Hollywood lights, berating Heidi Montag, You know why I’m mad at you. You know what you did! “I remember it,” I said.
“Of course you do. Show me a woman under the age of thirty-five who doesn’t remember the Lauren and Heidi feud. The Lauren and Heidi feud was a thing of beauty. So was the rivalry between Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Female aggression is curtailed, and therefore taboo, and therefore ratings gold. Did you know that toddler girls are just as inclined to roughhouse as boys, but we teach them to blunt those instincts?” She sees the recognition on my face and says, “Yeah.” I was thinking about Kelly and me: biting, scratching, strands of her hair in my hand, from root to split end.
“We learn to channel our aggression passively from a young age,” she shrugged, as though this were old news, “and that’s why woman-to-woman combat is spectator sport. Women have to get creative when we fight. We’re professionals. No wonder people line up to see us do our thing.”
“Jen and I fight,” I point out.
“But you’ve always fought. There’s no room for treachery when you’ve never gotten along. Viewers don’t want a fight, they want a betrayal.”
“And how do we give them that?”
“We pull a Lauren and Heidi.” She stole my glass of wine and took a walloping gulp. “I’ll even let you be Lauren Conrad. I’ll be the heel,” she said through that puckering face we all make when we drink something too cold too fast. Stars, they’re just like us.
The fight, Stephanie said, had to be serious enough that viewers wouldn’t accuse us of being petty, wouldn’t tell us in the comments on our Instagram posts to put our big girl panties on and sort it out. (If birth control doesn’t give her a stroke at thirty-five, it will be a grown woman in Minnesota telling Stephanie how to conduct herself using the language of a kiddie diddler.) The fight also couldn’t be so irreparable that we wouldn’t reconcile in time for the Morocco trip. We would end the season in Morocco, she promised. Nothing we were doing was ever meant to be permanent.
The heart of this serious-but-not-irreparable fight would be this: that Stephanie had come to me and asked me to push her book on Rihanna, with the thought that she was perfect to play her in the film adaptation should the rights be optioned. She was working on a new book about her childhood, opening up about some things she’d wanted to talk about for a long time. What things? I had asked, intrigued, but also feeling a little queasy. I could tell by the look on her face she was not talking about happy childhood memories.
“Just some stuff I went through when I was young,” she’d said, glancing at Vince furtively. “But when I ask you to push it on your new star client, you say you aren’t comfortable doing that, and I flip out. I claim you owe me.” Stephanie lowered her eyes sadly. “I’m going to look crazy. But,” she raised her shoulders and thinned her lips, “if Jesse finds out we’re fighting, she’ll have to ask me back next season to see it all play out. And I’d rather be hated for a few months than fast-forwarded.”
“Fuck that guy,” I said, meaning the writer at New York mag who had taken to calling Stephanie Sleptanie in his recaps of season three. But suddenly, as if her fear were an app with a share feature, I felt it too. There was a very strong likelihood that my closest ally on the show would not be asked back. She had been a bore to film last season. Marc had made that crack about timing his Ritalin dosage to Stephanie scenes, and Lisa was always coming at Stephanie’s face with a Starbucks napkin in hand, calling her Miss New York, not kindly.
And sometimes, when Stephanie stops smiling but the lines around her mouth remain, she does look like she’s starting to get old.
The fight was supposed to have happened off camera, between seasons, and, like method actors, we were to commit. As soon as my lease was up in the fall and I was through paying rent to Sarah, I could afford to move out, and that’s when we would cease all communication. We couldn’t put on a front to the media, to the other castmates, to Jesse, if at home, late at night, we were texting each other goofy emojis. We’d seen what happened to Hayley when she was hacked, and we couldn’t chance anyone figuring us out. It’s why I didn’t reach out to Steph to congratulate her when the book came out and caught fire, even though I was dying to. Even though I was actually hurt. She had been choked out, spit on, and raped, and she never told me? She was supposed to be my best friend.
It’s also why I was unable to give her a heads-up about the lunch with Jesse and my sister. Maybe I would have found a way to get in touch with her if I thought Kelly was anything more than a Green Party candidate. But I truly saw it as a mercy meeting for my sister, which was completely naive in retrospect. Of course Jesse would see my niece, nine-foot-tall mini mogul, with stars in her eyes. And of course Steph would read the decision to cast two of my family members as me trying to make a grab for the spotlight when we’d manipulated an arc that was meant to split it. I allowed myself to believe that was when the fight became real for her, though deep down I knew that wasn’t it. Deep down, I knew what it was really about.
It took me until the all-cast prod meeting to realize that the fight was no longer fake. Steph and I are the only castmates who keep in touch off camera. So it was normal that I hadn’t seen Lauren or Jen until the prod meeting. That Stephanie had seen them was not. And when the women simultaneously turned their backs on Morocco, I knew it had nothing to do with me “refusing” to slip the book to my celebrity rider.
I don’t know what would have happened if Yvette hadn’t taken pity on me and exposed Jen’s back-alley protein habit. Once I obliterated the alliance, I figured I had two choices. I could expose Steph’s scheme, but in doing so, I would have to admit to my role in it, and Jesse, whose nonnegotiables are no fashion bloggers except Leandra Medine and no fake storylines, would have been irate. Or, I could play dumb. Pretend like this was all a part of the plan, that Stephanie wasn’t trying to ice me off the show, that she didn’t sincerely despise me now, and proceed with the reconciliation as we had originally conceived, cumulating in the trip to Morocco. To my great relief, Steph played along when I cornered her in the bathroom at Lauren’s event.
Only now, it feels like instead of pretending to be in a fight, we’re pretending to be friends. In my wildest dreams I never would have imagined that the fight would become real and the friendship the charade.