CHAPTER 20
Stephanie
I thought I would lie awake all night, charged with loathing and second-guessing, but my sleep was straight out of a fairy tale, replete with a wake-up call from chirping birds and soft sunlight on my inarguably lovely face. Perhaps I slept so well thanks to the memory foam mattress in the downstairs guest bedroom—Brett’s room, which I claimed from her like a birthright when we got home. I punch my fists into the air with a gratifying yawn, the kind that distorts your face with pleasure, like sex. Good sex. Not Vince sex. Vince. Why am I thinking about Vince on this morning of all mornings? I swing upright and then go very still, listening. It’s after eight and the house is already smug with doing things, and that is Vince I hear in the living room.
I get up and follow his voice without washing my face or brushing my teeth, which is not how the day was supposed to start. The day was supposed to start with Jason and my team here at the crack of dawn (where are they?), my Starbucks order hot and my hair in rollers. I wasn’t to leave my bedroom until I was spit and polished, my wits properly caffeinated. Leave it to a man to fuck up this day, the day I plan to cement my legacy.
In the living room, Kelly and Lauren are sitting on the couch, drinking coffee across from Vince, who sits in one of the hairy white chairs, a plastic Duane Reade bag at his feet. Outside, Jen is holding a warrior pose in the shade. The puddles on the porch are evaporating and the sky is a tragic, September 11 blue. What a beautiful day to ruin these bitches.
Lauren raises her mug in greeting. Her hair (what’s left) is stiff and her face is red and shiny, like she just had surgery. I’m not even hungover, I realize. It’s like a clear seventy-degree day—the temperature so optimal for the human condition that you don’t even notice the air around you. I feel alive and fresh and happy, but not so alive and fresh and happy that I’m thinking about taking up yoga and cutting out caffeine and spending less time on social media or whatever it is people do when they decide to self-improve.
“How was Talk house?” Kelly says the name of the bar as if it were two distinct words. Like Burger King. Or Nordstrom Rack, which is probably where she got that dreadful cold-shoulder maxi dress she is wearing at the moment. God, she is embarrassing.
I ignore her and address Vince. “Why are you here?”
“I mean, Steph. Everyone is calling me. My mom is a mess.”
“A mess about what?”
“You seriously don’t know?” Lauren asks, her voice froggy and hungover. She must have knocked herself out last night through some combination of booze and pills, because she did not stir when Brett and I got home. No one did. God bless all these highly functioning addicts.
“Someone tell me what the fuck is going on before I lose it.” I hear myself and smile, demurely, softening my tone. “I mean—please?”
Kelly reaches for her phone. She calls up something and tosses it my way. I have to wait a second for the screen to right itself, but when it does, I realize I’m looking at a video post from TMZ: Drunken Stephanie Simmons does not hold back on her soon to be ex-husband. I hit play. In case it isn’t clear what I’m saying, they’ve taken the helpful liberty of adding subtitles: They’re going to try to make it look like Vince fucks Brett’s sister this season. But that’s not who he—boom. Brett plows into me, her huge hips eclipsing the frame. The video cuts off right before I jump offstage. Thank God. I already had monsoon hair. I didn’t need everyone to see me land like an American gymnast with weak ankles.
I face my firing squad. “That’s all?”
Vince folds his hands behind his head and tilts his face to the ceiling. “Great.” He laughs, sarcastically. “There was more?”
“I’m keeping your name alive in the press, babe,” I say to him, sweet as candy. Vince turns away from me, his jaw clenched. Across from him, Kelly is gripping her mug of coffee so hard I’m waiting for it to shatter. She knew. She had to have known from the beginning. That’s why Vince found any opportunity he could to corner her. He wasn’t trying to fuck her; he was trying to get information out of her.
“What are you all so upset about?” I say. “I said Vince didn’t fuck you, Kelly. I did you a favor for when they try to make it look like he did. Which they will do.”
“Steph,” Vince says evenly. He clears his throat, glancing at Lauren and Kelly for their little nods of confidence—You can do this, Vince! “I think we should head back to the city together. I called Jason and the whole glam team and told them not to come.”
I feel like a troubled teen who has come downstairs to find two former Navy SEALs in her living room, about to be shipped off to one of those Wilderness Therapy Camps where they sodomize you with a flashlight for cursing. I cannot go with Vince.
I head into the kitchen to pour myself some coffee while I land on a strategy: Be agreeable. “I wouldn’t mind heading back with you after brunch.” I stir steamed almond milk—my only option—into my mug. It immediately clots, forming a puke-textured scum on the surface. I don’t care who or what has had to suffer to provide real milk for my coffee all these years, their sacrifice has been worth it. “Beat the afternoon crush.”
Vince skims a hand through his hair, slowly, sensually exposing the belly of his bicep and a few underarm sprigs that have escaped the sleeve of his thin white tee. Ugh, it truly is a sight to behold, that hair move, something every girl needs to see before she dies. It makes Vince seem so troubled, so brooding. It makes women willing to do anything to make him smile. Isn’t that the secret sauce of seduction? First the snare of mystery, then the distinctly female instinct to rehabilitate.
“Stephanie,” Vince says, more patiently than he would if not for Lauren and Kelly’s presence, “I think you should head back now. Just quit while you’re ahead.”
I curl up in the armchair next to him, bringing my mug to my mouth. Panic is streaking through me—No, no, no, don’t make me go—but I have to remain calm. “We have a scene at Jesse’s today,” I remind him in a forgiving tone, like it is perfectly understandable that he could have forgotten given everything else that’s going on in our world.
“For Brett’s bachelorette, though, and Brett left.” Lauren rubs out the leftover mascara from underneath one eye. Her dark nails have chipped between last night and this morning.
“Brett left?” I say, with pretend surprise and genuine disappointment. The surprise is for Lauren, Vince, and Kelly’s benefit. They have no idea how the night ended, of course. But the disappointment is actually real. The plan had always been for Brett to be at Jesse’s house today, but, well, plans change. Successful people are the people who find a way to roll with life’s inevitable setbacks.
Kelly passes me her phone. Before the sun rose, Brett had texted her, Called a car to take me back to the city. Over this shit. I thought I had smashed the screen of her phone hard enough to destroy it, but turns out, it was still possible to send a text. Kelly wrote back early this morning, asking if she was okay. Thus far, there has been no response.
“I feel like I saw Brett last night,” Lauren says, not to us, but to herself. As though she is just remembering this herself. She visors her eyes against the sun spilling through the skylight and squints at me for a long moment. “Did you . . . were you with us?”
I arch an eyebrow at Vince as if to say—I’m the one who needs to quit while I’m ahead? “I think you maybe dreamt that, Laur,” I say.
Lauren’s gaze drifts over my shoulder. I turn to see what she’s looking at: Jen, balanced on one leg with a foot tucked into her crotch. “I guess so.” Thank goodness for pillheads, and their easy suggestibility.
Vince gets up abruptly and starts down the hallway, taking that Duane Reade bag with him.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m packing you up.”
“Vince,” I say, but he continues on his way. “Vince!” I yell, sharply, but he doesn’t stop like he used to. I jump up and follow him. Chasing after my estranged husband. Not the look I was going for this morning.
Vince is tossing my products into my toiletry bag in the downstairs guest bathroom, chucking glass bottles at glass bottles, like he is trying to break them.
“Vince,” I say, closing the door behind me. “Vince.” I put my hand on his arm. “Please listen to me for a moment.”
Vince stops with an anguished cry, reaching into the Duane Reade bag and producing a Jimmy Choo shoebox. For Gary, I’d written in black marker across the top before leaving it on my front stoop for—plot twist!—Gary, the photographer from the New York Times who has been staked outside my window for the last few weeks. Not only is Gary from the most reputable publication of the lot, but he’s the one who has so far displayed the highest degree of professionalism. No, he doesn’t work weekends. None of them do. I’m not that big of a story. (That’s about to change!) But he is always there, bright and early on Monday morning, before the rest of the pond scum trickle in for normal business hours. Monday served my purposes better, anyhow. I needed Gary to discover the package and watch the clip in question after I did what I am planning on doing today. If this got out before the brunch at Jesse’s, I don’t know if I’d ever be in the same room with these prostitutes again. The scene today would be canceled. What is on that tape is that much of a bombshell.
I can tell that Vince has watched the footage by the injured expression on his face. “I saw you leave on the Ring,” he says, referring to the security camera we have for our front door, “and I thought I’d try to get some more clothes out of the house while you were out. But then I found this and—” His voice breaks off, emotionally. How dare he. How dare he be hurt by me.
“You were going to let this get out?” Vince continues, woefully. “You were going to let my family see that? My mom?”
I eye the hot curling iron on the sink, which I forgot to unplug last night. Bring up that red-hat-wearing bitch one more time and I’ll—
“You know,” he goes on, “you were not an innocent bystander in this marriage either, and I’m not going around flapping my mouth about it onstage at Talkhouse. I’m not shilling videos of your affairs to the paparazzi.”
It’s the most honest thing he’s ever said to me. There is an honest thing to say back, in an iron, don’t fuck with me tone, but it is not time to be honest yet. I have to say whatever it takes to get me to Jesse’s house. I take a deep, fortifying sigh, steeling myself for the industrial load of bullshit about to come out of my mouth. “I know,” I say, making my voice as gravelly as his. It doesn’t take much. After my stage performance last night, my vocal cords are shot through. “You wouldn’t do that to me.” You would just fuck the one person who I thought was safe, and so I told her everything—about feeling so invisible and so unmistakable, about neurotransmitters, about how hard it was to be a daughter to my mother, about what Vince does when I’m not around and how I did it too but only to keep the deep and abiding feelings of inadequacy at bay. I showed that bitch my belly because I thought I never had to worry about losing her. I thought Vince couldn’t be attracted to that and even if he was, it wouldn’t matter because she wasn’t attracted to that.
“I miss our life together,” Vince whispers, wiping away a crocodile tear. He presses his back against the wall and sinks to the floor of the bathroom, hooking his arms around his shins and dropping his forehead to his knees with a contrite moan.
Well, of course you miss our life together, you dolt. You are a thirty-two-year-old failed actor living in a brownstone on the Upper East Side with a megababe. You hit the jackpot with me and you fucked it up something fierce.
Eyes on the prize, Steph. So I lower myself to the floor alongside Vince, slowly, as though I am settling into a hot bath. I rest my head on his shoulder, mostly so he can’t see my face, which is warped with revulsion for him. “I miss our life together too.” I eye the Jimmy Choo box in his lap, the GoPro still inside. How am I going to get that back from him? And who am I going to give it to now?
Vince lifts his chin, his face full of promise. “Then why are we doing this?”
I raise a hand for his benefit, I don’t know anymore. “I was angry, Vince. My ego was bruised. I guess I was just trying to hurt you like you hurt me.”
Vince reaches for my hand, stroking my palm in a gentle motion that makes me want to rip my skin right off. “Do you really want a divorce?”
I clench my toes and grit my teeth. “I want to make it right. All of it. Us. The book. The show. That’s why I came out here. This scene at Jesse’s—it’s my last chance to redeem myself. I have to go. And you should come too. We can tell everyone we’re calling it off. We’re going to stay together. Prove to everyone that we are stronger than the show.”
Vince hooks a finger beneath my chin, the way I did to what’s his name from last night. I learned that move from Vince, come to think of it. How sweet. “I would like that,” he says, right before he leans in and brushes his lips against mine, teasingly, as though to say—this is what you’ve been missing. My hangover makes itself fully known.
And then—like a very good gold digger, using sex to get what she wants—I do my husband on the bathroom floor, one last time. As I dutifully hump that little jalapeño pepper, I say a prayer that what’s his name gave me crabs, or something really nasty, like syphilis. Not that Vince would have long to suffer.
There is a funny standoff in the driveway. Jen is adamant that we not take her car to Jesse’s, and I am absolutely adamant that we do. Kelly’s car is a hunk of junk, and not in the intentional, nineties army green Defender way, the car Jesse bought off eBay and drives out here, her dyke hair not blowing in the wind. I need Jen’s emissions-free douche-mobile that goes from zero to sixty in four point two seconds, that starts without having to press a button or put a key into the ignition, but when Vince approaches the passenger-side door, Jen makes a lame excuse.
“It’s just.” Jen falls silent a moment. “I feel a little dizzy today. From the heat. I really don’t feel up to driving.” She clamps a hand to her forehead, overselling it.
“I’ll drive,” I volunteer, impatiently. While I was “showering,” I shared the GoPro footage to the app on my phone, then I hid the GoPro in the back of a closet in the guest room. A tasty treat for Jen to find one day! I smell like a party bus after the party and two different men’s loads. Not the aromatic memory I’d like to leave behind, but I couldn’t risk taking the camera with me and having Vince discover it on my person. He hasn’t been able to keep his hands off me since we consummated our “reconciliation.”
“It handles differently than what you’re used to,” Jen says to me. “We should really take Kelly’s car.”
“Ummm.” Kelly laughs. “I don’t think we want to do that. My car doesn’t have AC.”
“I’d rather go in Kelly’s car too,” Lauren says, slowly, staggering into the shade of a tree. The sunlight is relentless this morning, as if furious about its captivity yesterday. I say a little prayer it doesn’t blind the shot. That would be the real tragedy.
Vince leans onto the hood of Jen’s car, resting his palms on the curve of the trunk. “You look like you could use some AC,” he tells Lauren with a wry, empathetic smile, assuming she’s hurting from the night before. But I’ve seen Lauren hungover before, and this isn’t Lauren hungover. On another day, I’d think harder about why it is she’s acting so weird.
Lauren is wearing tiny round sunglasses, pushed low on the bridge of her nose, full-throttle nineties nostalgia. Above the thin wire rim of her shades, she stares at Vince’s hands on the trunk of Jen’s car, her lips parted in confusion. “I don’t want to take Jen’s car,” she says, again sounding as though she’s speaking to work out something for herself more than to any of us.
I toss up my hands—Fine, I can make this work even in Kelly’s car—and lead the charge, planting myself in the middle so as to avoid another tantrum from someone whose legs are too long or whose ego is too inflated to sit in the bitch seat. Lauren gets in to my right and Vince to my left, grumbling, This makes no sense. Jen takes the front-passenger seat next to Kelly. The car smells like chewy, fruit-flavored candy. I look up to see a Strawberries & Crème air freshener dangling from Kelly’s rearview mirror. But of course.
Kelly sticks the key in the ignition and turns. The engine bears down, wheezing, trying, before giving up with a woman’s cry. Kelly drapes her arm around the back of Jen’s chair and regards us over the brim of her neon blue sunglasses, the kind that everyone was wearing last summer. “Well,” she says solemnly, “she lived a good life.”
If that’s not God telling me to go for it, it’s Lucifer.
I could cartwheel to Jen’s car. But just as I’m about to climb into the back, I notice that Jen has stopped in the driveway. She’s examining her hand, holding it up to the sunlight. Something is caught in her Standing Sisters ring. A hair, it looks like, from the way she pinches it between her fingers and pulls—and pulls—flicking her index finger on her thumb, making that panicked face all women make when they find a bug crawling on them and they need to get it off but they don’t want to touch it. She watches the hair float slowly to the ground, her eyelids fluttering, woozily. She stumbles, leaning into the side of the house, swaying a little, then spins and vomits all over the base of the Japanese maple Yvette planted in memory of her late mother. Some of it even gets on the bronze plaque Yvette had made: For Betty “Battle Axe” Greenberg, who would rather die than rest in peace.
“Jen! Oh my God!” Kelly cries, rushing to her aid. Is Kelly the new Lauren? “Are you okay?”
Jen straightens enough to wave a hand over her shoulder—shoo, Kelly—before lurching over and retching again. Vince, concerned for the well-being of others as always, turns away, his face crinkling in disgust, like he might be next. For some strange reason, Lauren’s eyes fill with tears, though I doubt even she understands why.
I watch Jen’s bony back expand and contract, expand and contract, as her equilibrium returns to her. She stands, wiping the side of her hand across her mouth. Is she hungover? Is she sick? Is it contagious? I have that visceral, germaphobe stay away from me reaction, before remembering with a dry chuckle to myself—Someone could stick me with an AIDS-coated needle right now and it wouldn’t matter.
“Jen,” Kelly says, as Jen heads for her car, “maybe you should stay home and—”
“I feel better now actually,” she says.
“At least let someone else drive if you aren’t—”
“I feel better now!” she cries, sounding fully hysterical as she climbs behind the wheel of the car and slams her door shut. This group is made up exclusively of whack jobs, but the Green Menace has always been the wackiest.
I’ve been to Jesse’s house only once before, as a guest of Brett’s, who is such a regular you could pick out her preferred lounge chair. Hint: It’s the one with the slightly sunken middle. We drank Casamigos by the pool (I got Jesse’s hydrangeas very drunk) and ate swordfish prepared for us on the grill by Hank, who Jesse refers to as her friend but everyone knows is her Jeeves. The Montauk community was sure Jesse Barnes would demolish the original Techbuilt home when she bought it in 2008, but she ingratiated herself when all she did was remodel the kitchen and add a pool.
We park in the dirt driveway, next to the white crew van and Jesse’s vintage Land Rover. Jen’s Tesla looks downright villainous on the humble property, the car of a collector come in from Gotham to repossess the land from farmer Ted, blithely unaware he’s sitting on a multimillion-dollar lot. Thanks to the New York Post’s steadfast reporting, I know that a rolling meadow used to separate the end of the drive from the seventy-foot drop to the sea, but that the bluffs have eroded, little by little some years, in honking wet chunks during others. Jesse has had to file an emergency application with the East Hampton Planning Department to have the home moved one hundred feet back from the abyss. Lucky for me it has yet to be granted.
The crew has moved the picnic table from the shallow end of the pool to the deep, in an attempt to game the sun’s position and mitigate the glare off the water. Marc is covering all of the cameras with beach blankets, keeping them out of direct sunlight so that they’re not too hot to handle. The PAs are setting the table with platters of food and Lisa is halfway through uncorking a dozen wine bottles so that we do not lose a moment to our drinking, which is a production trick to keep the cast from realizing they’ve had too much. The act of stopping to open a new bottle can make you take stock—How many have I had? Might be smart to drink a glass of water. Anything smart is bad, when it comes to production purposes.
Jesse does her part by reading A Little Life beneath an SPF-coated umbrella—clearly, she has been expecting me. It’s a dexterous insult, I’ll give her that. The same month The New Yorker called out the subversive brilliance of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, Kirkus likened the third book in my fiction series to a Lifetime movie-of-the-week, right down to the contrived dialogue.
Jesse notices us and bends the page. Her Bettie Page paleness and black jeans swan in the face of the beach babe aesthetic that rules out here, and I think we are all grateful for it. Imagining Jesse in a swimsuit is like imagining your parents having sex. Her bare feet are embarrassing enough.
She walks over to meet us, removing her sunglasses in a way that implies I should do the same, so that we can have a proper gal-to-gal chat. I leave my big black Pradas right where they are.
“I don’t know what you hoped to accomplish by coming here,” Jesse says.
Lisa sets down the wine opener and joins Jesse at her side, a punky yeah, what she said expression on her thin, jowly face. All that weight loss only to look ten years saggier in her eHarmony profile picture. Being a woman is like the lottery. Yes, some sad sack is destined to win it, but the odds are very against that sad sack being you. No matter, most of us will continue to try, and most of us will continue to hear someone else’s number called, year after year.
“You know you can’t be here,” Jesse says to me. “We were willing to let you try it last night but you’ve proven yourself to be untrustworthy and honestly, Steph? A little bit unstable. I hope you are getting the support you need for your mental health.”
From the person who has stomped all over my mental health in steel-toed Dr. Martens. How does she not hear herself?
Vince slips his hand into mine in an act of courageous spousal support. Even his hand feels like it’s been in another woman’s hand. I turn to him with a brave smile, though I can feel my contempt for him in my fingernails. “Vince?” I ask in a tiny brave voice. “Will you just give me a moment to speak to Jesse and Lisa in private?”
He doesn’t let go.
“I need to do this on my own. Please.” I give his hand a measured squeeze, stifling the urge to bend his fingers back until they snap.
Vince sizes up Jesse and Lisa like schoolyard bullies, with a look that says if they try anything, he will be right over there. He lets go of my hand and wanders off. Dumb fuck. Pretty fuck. But so, so dumb.
“I’m just asking for an opportunity to take ownership of what I did,” I appeal to them when it is just the three of us. “Please. Brett’s not here so I can tell you everything that really happened. Do you want to hear about that or do you want to hear whatever vanilla lie Kelly has come up with to protect her sister?”
I know Jesse has heard the whisperings—insulting, frankly—that my fight with Brett was really about the affair we had while she lived with me. Ha. Maybe if she lost thirty pounds. Didn’t seem to bother Vince.
Jesse stares me down, torn. She doesn’t want to see Brett hurt, but she also wants her money shot for the season. She turns to Lisa to recruit her ever-valuable second opinion.
“It could be a powerful moment,” Lisa says, to the complete surprise of nobody. Nothing would make Lisa happier than seeing me lay bare Brett’s lies on camera. She will be thrilled, then, to learn that Brett’s lie is so much worse than what she thinks it is. Just hand over my mic pack, I think, and everyone gets hurt.
Jesse sighs. Her decision is obvious, but she has to act a little bit pained so as not to look like a total turncoat to her very best vagina. She nods at Vince, over my shoulder. “And what is he doing here?”
“I thought we might address the rumors about him and Kelly,” I say. “That could be a powerful moment too, right?”
Lisa snorts, genuinely tickled. “Someone found her ballsack.”
Jesse returns her sunglasses to her face so that I can’t witness the childlike excitement in her eyes. Christmas morning has come early for Jesse Barnes. “Let’s just do it. We’re here. Why not? We don’t have to use it if it doesn’t work.”
As the kids are saying these days—yas, queen.
Everything settled, we wait by the car until Lisa gives us the cue to approach and greet Jesse.
“Oh, Jen!” I smack my idiot head. “Pass me the keys. I left my lip gloss in the cup holder.”
“Your lips look—”
“Pass me the fucking keys, Greenberg!”
Jen does so, begrudgingly, and I dive back into the car, climbing around on all fours and reaching under the seats in a one-woman search party for an unmissing tube of Rouge Pur Couture. I time it perfectly, waiting for Lisa to give us the go-ahead before I shut the door, so that Jen loses her opportunity to ask for her keys back. I am wearing a darling, tropical-printed Mara Hoffman wrap dress with deep pockets—I bought it for today, figuring pockets always come in handy—and I slip the keys inside. So far, everything is going off without a hitch. I do wish Brett could have been here, but just because things don’t go according to plan doesn’t mean they can’t work out for the best. Done is better than perfect is something my editor used to say to me when I needed more time with my manuscript but she wanted it now, so she could publish it now, so that she could make money now. Apparently, it’s a Sheryl Sandberg quote.
Jesse greets Jen first with a hug, commenting on how clammy her skin feels. Are you feeling okay? she asks her. Jen mumbles something about just needing to get in the shade.
Jesse doesn’t go on to hug everyone, but she makes contact in some form. Kelly gets a pat on the tush—groping your underlings is edgy when the groper is a woman!—and Lauren an arm around her shoulder while Jesse whispers something into her ear, probably about her not even noticing she burned off the back of her head because Lauren’s hand flies to her choppy ponytail. Vince and I are the only ones who don’t get any Jesse DNA on us, and I’m glad for it. Turn me away from the lunch table where the cheerleaders and football players feast. Sign your own death sentence.
“Where’s our girl?” Jesse asks. She’s thought for hours that “our girl” “went back to the city,” but we have to have the conversation on camera for the viewer. That’s one thing I won’t miss, having conversations two, three, sometimes four times. Each take was a turn in a maze, leading me further away from myself.
“Brett had some work to take care of back in the city,” Kelly says, making a beeline for the seat next to Jesse on the white picnic bench. The table has been set with natural cut wildflowers and purposefully wrinkled linens. On top of a mound of fresh-caught shrimp, a black fly sits like a king. Jen stares at him, turning green.
“Work?” Jesse is incensed. “I thought this was her bachelorette party. What happened?” She begins to pour wine for everyone, though she is drinking Casamigos on ice. For a long time, I assumed Casamigos was an actual spirit. Having taken a newfound interest in the drink, I’ve recently learned that Casamigos is tequila and that it is George Clooney’s.
I shove my glass in Jesse’s path. “I’d rather have what you’re having,” I tell her, and she sets the wine bottle down and obligingly starts me on my way to tequila-wasted while Kelly chews the inside corner of her mouth, undoubtedly sorting out her story for Jesse. For all Kelly knows, Brett went back to the city because the two of them nearly came to blows last night. She knows nothing of the blood shed on the floor of Lindy’s van.
“It’s such a bummer,” Kelly says, “but our manager at the Flatiron studio had a family emergency and so Brett went back to fill in for her today.”
Jesse peers at Kelly over the brim of her sunglasses, skeptically. “Why wouldn’t you have gone? It was supposed to be her weekend.” She serves me with a look that encourages me to jump in at any time.
I pull back my shoulders and run my tongue over my teeth to be sure I don’t have any gloss on them. My financials are in order, all my money going somewhere that gave me a good, wicked giggle. I wanted to make sure Vince didn’t see a cent, having no idea at the time that he would be able to join us here today. And though I haven’t showered or had a pass by the glam squad’s hand, I wrangled my hair into a pretty braid just before we left. I’m wearing my new dress and I will never be more ready than this. “Kelly doesn’t think Brett should marry Arch and they had a fight about it,” I say. On the other side of the table, Kelly bores a hole between my eyes, furious.
Jesse swivels her head in Kelly’s direction, pretending to be surprised by this information. “How could you not want Brett to marry Arch? Arch is bae goals!” Ugh—bae goals? Tell your twenty-two-year-old assistant to update your cheat sheet of hip young-people sayings, because no one under the age of thirty is saying “bae” anymore, you dumb pterodactyl.
Kelly uses her napkin to dab at a bead of sweat above her lip. “I think the world of Arch. Arch and I have a special connection,” she adds, defensively, in the manner of a raving racist telling you about her many black friends. “I just think that Brett is still young, and that there is no harm in taking a step back and making sure she’s ready for a commitment like marriage.”
I sneak a glance at Vince. His Adam’s apple is moving like a Boomerang video. He knows Kelly’s reservation has nothing to do with Brett being too young. She is twenty-seven years old. Can we stop talking about her like she’s some sort of child bride? “Vince?” I say. “You and Brett had a special connection. And I always love to hear a guy’s take on the silly matters of the heart. What say you? Should Brett marry Arch?” I smile at him, goadingly, showing as many of my movie star teeth as I can.
Vince turns to me in slow motion, seeming, finally, to catch on to what is happening. This is a setup. I came here to shred him. “I like Brett,” he says, woodenly. “But I really don’t know her well enough to say, babe.”
“We should text her,” I suggest, fairly. “Give her a chance to weigh in. We’re sitting around, talking smack about her relationship—are people still saying ‘smack,’ Jesse? I know you’re super jiggy with it.” I reach into my pocket and remove my phone, tapping the green messages icon with my thumb and sending a text to someone, though that someone is not Brett.
Almost immediately, Jesse sits up straighter. The zapped posture of a person whose phone has just mildly electrocuted her left ass cheek.
“You should really get that,” I tell her, in an undertone. I’ve always wanted to say that! You should really get that, like a murderer at the end of a genre novel, right before he confesses to his crimes in Scooby-Doo detail. He. Gosh, how sexist of me to assume that only men can be murderers.
Jesse keeps her eyes on me as she removes her phone from her back pocket and opens the text message. “It’s from you,” she says, unsmiling, but I can tell by the way her finger moves on the screen that she’s opened the file I’ve shared with her, and that she is now watching the GoPro footage I clipped last fall, right before I asked Brett to move out for good.
I thought I had a rat. I would walk into my pantry to find that bags of flour and brown sugar and hot chocolate packets had been tampered with, walk out leaving a trail of powdery footsteps. I had a GoPro that I had forgotten to return to prod last season, and so I set it on the low-light feature and positioned it on a top shelf, turned toward the pantry door, to see for myself. No sense vacating my apartment to have it fumigated if I didn’t have to.
The camera captured a little over three hours of footage before it ran out of space, and so the next day, I dragged my thumb along the slider at the bottom of the screen, keeping an eye out for any small moving shadows hurtling along the foot of the frame.
At the two hour and thirteen minute mark I removed my thumb. There was something, but it wasn’t a filthy, disease-ridden rodent. (Well . . .) It was Brett, slinking into the pantry, poking around, sticking her fingers into the bags of flour and sugar, licking them clean and crudely shoving them right back in. What is she doing? I wondered at first. But then I remembered something I learned at a live taping for a self-care podcast that Brett loved and dragged me to back when we were friends. Self-care—what will well-to-do white women come up with next?
At this taping, I learned that binge eating is a natural reaction to deprivation, and that children whose parents put them on diets and banned sweets from the house sometimes resorted to assembling strange pastes made of raw sugar and flour just to get their fix. It’s a coping mechanism that can follow them into adulthood. Vince and I never really kept sweets in the house. They left a burning sensation on my tongue because of my medication, and Vince was always more of a savory guy (is! I’m getting ahead of myself). That must be what Brett is doing, I realized, watching her scavenge, feeling a blooming sense of compassion remembering what Brett told me about her childhood. How everyone in the family ate a normal-sized dinner off a dinner-sized plate except Brett, who was given a weighed and calorie-totaled portion on a tea saucer. How her mother kept the cookies in a padlocked cabinet and only Kelly was given the code, because she could stop herself at just one or two. And then a second shadow appeared in the doorway and my compassion went up in a combust of flame and fury. I didn’t have a rat. I had two.
“Who else has seen this?” Kelly asks me, quietly, with a single pulse of the green vein in her temple. She’s just watched the clip in question over Jesse’s shoulder.
“What is it?” Lauren asks, weakly, from the far end of the table, like she actually doesn’t want to know.
“Why would you humiliate yourself like this, Steph?” Vince whispers next to me.
“People, people!” I admonish, cheerfully. “One at a time with the questions. Let’s start with you first, love of my life and light of my loins.” I turn to Vince. “I am doing this for equity’s sake. Either we are all punished for aggrandizing our backstories or none of us are. No exceptions. Brett does not get to be spared by virtue of the effect she has on Jesse’s granny panties.”
I face Kelly. “Next! Who else has seen this? I am happy to report, Kelly Courtney, that you are the first. It’s an exclusive! A scoop! A breaking-news bulletin interrupting our regularly scheduled programming!”
I lean around Vince to address Lauren’s question last: What is it? “It’s a homemade movie of Brett getting—”
“I don’t want to hear another word about this,” Jesse says, severely.
It is quiet. Not silent. Not with the rowdy ocean so close below, exchanging shorelines with Nantucket, ninety-eight nautical miles away. It’s so much more than a view. It’s the sound of power, always in your ears. That’s why Jesse spends all her time at this place.
Jesse. The garden-fresh betrayal that first appeared on her face as she watched the video of Brett getting drilled by my husband from behind is already receding, creating an illusion of composure. For a moment there, I actually felt bad for her, this middle-aged woman fleeced by her proudest protégée, like some blue-haired grandma in a nursing home wiring the entirety of her life savings to help a “relative in distress” in Guam. Jesse Barnes has been elder abused.
“Brett,” Vince sneers, defying Jesse’s mandate. “Brett is a fucking bitch and a fucking fat liar.” Cleverness tends to deteriorate the closer you get to the truth—not that Vince ever knew how to turn a phrase.
“Not in my house,” Jesse says, because she can’t permit a man to call a woman fat in her presence, even if she is a fucking bitch and a fucking fat liar.
Vince grips my thigh under the table. “She wanted you to leave me,” he tells me desperately. “She hated that you had somebody and she didn’t. She was always threatened by me.”
I laugh. A cold, annihilating laugh that sends Vince’s hand slithering back between his thighs to check to make sure it’s still there. “Take a look around this table, Vince. You are not a threat. You are a drain on our resources. Your day has dawned. We should preserve your body and mount you in the Museum of Natural History. Unimpeachable Men: The Dinosaurs Among Us.”
Vince’s breath shortens and quickens, audible only on the exhale, like being ceremoniously emasculated in front of a group of millionairesses is a cardiac event. Fun fact: Spell check red-flags the word “millionairesses,” but not “millionaires.” There is no entry for “millionairesses” in the dictionary, which beautifully illustrates my point—the world will only permit one of us to make it. Is it any surprise then that women continue to be so horrible to each other? Supporting your kind is supporting your own fucking mediocrity. It’s unnatural.
Jesse slaps the table to get my attention, with a gentle but commanding thump. “Stephanie,” she says. My full name—uh-oh, Mom is mad. “You have been through a lot over the last few weeks and I am not unsympathetic to that. But I won’t sit here and listen to you drag Brett through the mud with lies and defamation when she isn’t around to defend herself and offer her side of the story.”
“When she isn’t around . . .” I trail off in befuddled helplessness. A story ceases to have “sides” when there is empirical proof of my husband screwing my best friend in my pantry, on my Scalamandre Le Tigre sofa, on my beloved, creaky stairs. You better believe I moved that camera around for the next couple of nights so that I did not have to hear that it was “just a one-time thing” should I ever confront Brett or Vince with what I saw. I don’t know when it started, but I know how. They must have met one of the nights Brett snuck downstairs to stuff her face. How did it start? Did Brett find Vince aglow by the light of a Narcos episode, halfway through an auction-house bottle of Brunello? Did he offer her a glass? Did he sigh sadly and say a distance had grown between us? Did he tell her he wished I could see the good in him, that way she could? Did he laugh and joke, If only you played for my team, Courtney? Did Brett kiss him? Did she think it wouldn’t hurt me, did she think I didn’t love him, did she even think? Did she tell Vince she wasn’t gay, or did she let him believe she was straight only for him? That there was something different about him, something special. Brett always did know how to make ordinary people feel special.
I couldn’t bring myself to confront either one of them. Going into the fourth season, I was still determined to hold my marriage together. But once Brett found out I had waged a cold war against her, she must have put two and two together and gotten Steph knows I rode Vince like a SPOKE bike around the first floor of her house and she’s trying to destroy me. And still, she didn’t apologize. Still, she chose to save her own skin over showing an ounce of humiliation or remorse. I do not blame her, but I do hate her.
“We are done here.” Jesse speaks directly to the lens, in effect speaking directly to Marc. “Shut the cameras off.” Marc removes the F55 from his shoulder, slowly, as though setting down a weapon. The assistant cameraman follows suit.
I want to laugh. I want to cry. Why didn’t I control for this? That Jesse wouldn’t do a thing about this? I thought the commander in chief of the queer world would tear into Brett for appropriating her community. I thought the same punitive action that has been taken against me would be taken against her. In all my reveries, I never considered that it would behoove Jesse to protect Brett, not for Brett’s sake, but for her own. If it comes out that Brett conned Jesse so close on the heels of me conning her, Jesse is just another example of why men make better bosses.
The relief that relaxes Kelly’s face would be enough to send me over the edge if I hadn’t already taken the plunge. She gets what Jesse is doing. She knows Brett’s secret will stay a secret. With cloying sympathy, she adds, “I know you have been under an inordinate amount of pressure since we got back from Morocco. With what happened”—she clears her throat cryptically—“there. But it was not your fault. We don’t blame you and we just want to see you get the help you need.”
The help I need? Oh, honey-bunny. Just like your leaky, weak-walled post-baby vagina, only surgical repair could restore me now.
“There should be an age requirement to ride those things,” I say to Kelly.
“But,” Jesse looks around the table, to confirm that everyone has heard what she has heard and that it doesn’t make any sense, “Kweller wasn’t riding.”
“No, I mean like for adults. Seniors. Spatial awareness declines sharply after age thirty-four, or so I’ve heard.”
“I’m sorry,” Jesse sighs, “but you’ve lost me.”
“There has never been a woman past the age of thirty-four on the show,” I say.
“Whoa,” Lauren breathes, her brow furrowed, taking inventory of our fallen soldiers, realizing I’m right. Jen raises a glass of water to her lips, taking a trembling sip. She has not said a word or even made a facial expression since we sat down, just sat there like a pasty statue. I had almost forgotten she was here.
Jesse fans her face. “Everyone is overheated and exhausted, Stephanie. Jen is clearly not feeling well and we should get her into the air-conditioning. We came out here and we did this for nothing. Just let it go. Go home. Get some rest. There will be a new chapter for you, but not until you take the time to step away and reflect.”
I am not going home, getting some rest, and reflecting. I am never going home again. I lean across the table, serving myself some salad from the large ceramic mixing bowl. These hypocrites have worked up my appetite. “Why has there never been a woman past the age of thirty-four on the show?” I persist.
Jesse turns her hands palms side up, as though I must be kidding her. “I guess not then. Sorry, ladies—and, well, I was going to say gentleman, but I’ll just say Vince instead—that Stephanie is dead set on making your Sunday so unpleasant.” Jesse focuses in on me, her tone that of a reasonable person tasked with subduing a madwoman. “The reason,” she continues, “that there has never been a woman on the show past the age of thirty-four is because it’s a show about female millennials who have accomplished amazing things without the financial support of a man.”
“Thirty-four-year-olds are millennials.” I smack her down. “In another year, thirty-five-year-olds will be millennials, and a year after that, thirty-six-year-olds will be and on and on and on. A generation’s ages are fluid, not stagnant.” I dazzle her with a smile. “Try again.”
Jesse decides to antagonize me further by matching my smile. “Forgive me. I misspoke. It’s a show about young women who have accomplished amazing things without the financial support of a man. Is that more to your liking?”
“It is extremely to my liking.” I spear my bed of lettuce with my fork. The leaves are fluffy in texture, young green in shade. Rich-people-who-mistreat-their-staff lettuce. “Closer to what I’m getting at. So after thirty-four, you’re no longer young?”
Jesse tilts her head at me, pityingly. “No, you’re not. I’m sorry if that’s a reality that scares you, but that says more about you than it does about me. I’m forty-six years old and I’m proud of my age.” Oh yeah, you celebrate it now that the cameras are off. “I’m proud to provide young women with a platform so that they too can find themselves where I find myself today. You should move into the next bracket with grace and pride. You should pass the torch generously.”
“I’m not passing anyone anything from where I stand today. I’m a fucking leper. No one would take anything that’s been touched by me.”
“I’m sorry,” Jesse says, and it only sounds like she means it. “But those are the consequences of your actions. Woman-up and deal with it.”
Oh, she wants me to woman-up and deal with it, does she? I spear a shrimp and jam the whole thing into my mouth, tail and all, feeling like Daryl Hannah in Splash. My fly friend does not scare off, only does a two-footed hop onto a lower tier of shrimp and rubs his fly-paws faster. I take this for anticipatory support: He can’t wait for me to woman-up. “And what about the consequences of your actions?” I snarl, spewing a pink shard of shrimp shell onto the table. Jen covers her mouth with a silent gag. “You sold us on a show about sisterhood, and then you flipped the script, but only on us. Everywhere else, you continue to pat yourself on the back for lifting women up. I cannot read one more breathless fucking profile about you and your commitment to empowering women in the New York Times. I cannot listen to one more viral fucking Ivy League commencement speech where you implore twenty-two-year-olds to negotiate their salary like a man, to wear the label Difficult with pride. To get that money, girl.” I snap my fingers in the way we’ve come to expect sassy black women to do. “Everyone sitting at this table knows the truth. You are manning the fucking Zamboni so that we can body slam one another on clean ice. Girl fight! Reconcile. Girl fight! Reconcile. Those are our marching orders, and you get richer and more self-righteous while we get bloodier and older. And then, when we have the audacity to follow your own Pollyanna advice and ask to be paid more than forty-one dollars and sixty-six cents a day, you cut us loose and blacklist us from the Cool Feminists Club. This show is not a platform. It’s a mass gravesite for thirty-four-year-old difficult women.”
I get up and head for Jen’s car with gamey underarms and clear eyes. I wish the cameras had captured my speech—I’ve been working on it for weeks—but I did the best I could do with what I had to work with, and for once, my best will have to be good enough.
I practiced this next part in my head, hundreds of times since I hatched my exit plan. Only I didn’t control for another factor, which was the jughead I married. I didn’t control for him being there, chasing after me, probably thinking I am about to drive straight to the New York Times offices and shove the video under Gary the Photographer’s nose myself. He grabs my arm, spinning me around, pinning me to his chest and trying to shove his hands into my pockets, grabbing for my phone. People are shouting behind us, screaming at Vince to let me go. Stupid gashes. They should be begging Vince to restrain me. I sink my teeth into his wrist and keep sinking until I feel the skin give way with a satisfying snap. Vince yowls like a cat with his tail caught in the door, his grip on me loosening enough that I am able to worm out of his grasp.
I throw myself behind the wheel of Jen’s Tesla. Did it lock? I didn’t hear it lock. In the second and a half it takes for me to wonder this, Vince has the passenger-side door open. Goddamn you, Elon Musk. I try to accelerate before Vince can dive inside, but he manages to throw his body lengthwise across the front seats, his elbows in my lap, his head between my chest and the steering wheel. The passenger-side door flaps like one good wing as I gun it for the picnic table, for the whole vomitous, infected girl squad, though it’s Jesse Barnes, patient zero, I’d most like to leave a pink smear on her eroding lawn.
“You’re fucking crazy!” Vince shrieks, and he seizes the wheel, his hands over mine, forcing me to turn, turn, turn—fuck, fuck, fuck—away from my squealing, scattering targets. He can control our direction but not our speed, so time for Plan D, E, F . . . ? I’ve lost count at this point. I pulverize the gas pedal, Vince unwittingly aiming us for the edge, for the peacocking sea. It wasn’t how I wanted it—I wanted an unholy slaughter—but as the wheels run out of ground I remind myself done is better than perfect Done is better than perfect. Done is better than . . .