CHAPTER 2
Stephanie
The general who wins the battle makes many calculations. I myself am down to two, side by side in my rift-sawn white oak custom closet: the Saint Laurent boots or the platform sneakers that everyone is wearing these days. I am not much for the sprezzatura pox that’s claimed most of the women in New York. When I moved here, twelve years ago, women wore ballet flats on the subway, work heels hooked over the lip of their monogrammed Goyard totes. Sneakers were exclusively aerobic in purpose, never for cocktail dresses and Chanel, New York Fashion Week, and martinis at Bemelmans. Sometimes, even on Madison—even in the eighties—I feel like the last of my kind. Nobody gets dressed anymore.
I consider the boots, worried they say I’m doing too well, which I am. When your memoir about your abusive teenaged boyfriend has been top three on the bestseller list for the last four months with no sign of slowing down, an Oprah’s Book Club pick, and an Oscar-nominated director’s next passion project, there is never more of a right time to bow your head. People prefer acutely successful women to have no idea how we got here, to call ourselves lucky, blessed, grateful. I hook a finger through the sneaker’s ornamental laces, considering their message on a spin. The sneakers literally level me. And people respond to approachable women, don’t they? It’s part of what the audience loved about Brett, part of what I loved about her, at least in the beginning. I pluck the other sneaker from its custom perch. Show, don’t tell. The bedrock of what I do.
The Rangers’ game goes mute as I descend the stairs to our living room. We have stairs in our prewar brownstone on the Upper East Side. This is not just architectural fact, it’s consolatory, something Brett pointed out to lift my spirits two years ago, when my third book came out and bombed. You have stairs in your apartment, Brett said. Fuck it. Not everything you do can be a win. I thrill every time I upset these stairs. Vince is always threatening to fix them—rather, use my money to pay someone to fix them—but I savor their squeaks and grunts, audible reminders of my earning power. It is one of the few times I allow myself to dissociate, to think about how I will never be at the mercy of Lynn from Creative and Marketing Staffing Pros again, creak, because I started writing the blog on my lunch break, and, creak, through the 3:00 P.M. slump too, and it became popular enough to net me a mid-six-figures book deal. I will never have to deposit seven dollars into my bank account, creak, just to be able to make the minimum withdrawal of twenty, creak. Because I have sold over three million copies of my first two books and am on track to surpass that with my memoir, which the Sunday Review embraced, breathlessly. (Finally.) Then there is the million Warner Bros. paid for my life rights, and the half I’m getting to adapt my memoir for film. Creak. Creak. The last two stairs sound absurdist, like a witch opening a door to a haunted house that you will tour, scream-laughing. Vince is watching me from his favorite navy club chair. Navy is the only color I’ve allowed on this floor.
Vince looks confused when he sees me. “You’re not going?”
It’s the sneakers. My mother wore heels in her bathrobe and that’s what I was taught. “I’m going,” I say, sinking into his lap. “Do I look like a slob?”
“Oof!” He grimaces, squirming a bit. “Wait. Wait.” He shifts me around on top of him. “That’s better.” He breathes a sigh of relief.
“Thanks,” I crack, digging my knuckle into his bicep, still far from solid though I’m paying Hugh Jackman’s trainer three times a week.
“Hey-ayy!” He clutches his shoulder, his lips an astonished o. How could anyone want to hurt Vince?
“You never answered me.”
“What?”
“Do I look like a slob?”
Vince pushes his hair out of his eyes. Between him and Brett, sometimes I just want to superglue their hands to their sides. “But a sexy slob.”
“Really?” I frown at my feet. “I just wanted to be comfortable.”
“You look cool, babe,” Vince says to the TV screen, lifting his glass of wine from the marble-topped side table. I can smell the vintage.
“Is that the 2005?” I ask, an edge creeping into my voice. I don’t know much about wine, but I know I had to put a hold on Vince’s credit card last year after a Christie’s online auction for Fine and Rare Vintages ended in obscenity.
Vince quickly sets the glass back on the table and his hand gets lost in his hair again. “Nah. 2011 or something lame like that.” He squeezes my side, and in a suggestive voice says, “You could stay, though.” His hand moves lower. Squeezes there too. “And we could open that one.”
I swat him away with a giggle. “I can’t. I need to see them.”
Vince holds up his hands. He tried. “I’ll be waiting up.” He purses his stained lips.
It’s a chaste kiss—it always is, these days—but when I lean in, I get a whiff of his old Rutgers tee and can’t help but feel pleased. BO is the scent of devotion in our marriage. Vince is not getting up to anything smelling like that. He means it when he says he will be waiting up. My husband is never more faithful than when he has to crane his neck to look up at me.
Jen and Lauren are already seated by the time I arrive at L’Artusi, which is an unremarkable observation unless you are dining in New York City, where no restaurant will seat you until your entire party is present. A rule designed to keep your own illusions about yourself in check, I imagine. You’ve seen the original Hamilton—with Leslie Odom Jr.!—and you’re wearing the Gucci loafers that are on back-order until next fall? Please let us know when your entire party has arrived.
Celebrity doesn’t help. I’ve seen Larry David pacing the corridor of Fred’s and Julianne Moore told it will be an hour-and-fifteen-minute wait at the original Meatball Shop, before the Upper East Side expansion robbed it of its kitsch mystique. So it’s genuinely remarkable that when I arrive Jen and Lauren are seated, and it’s genuinely a shame that it has nothing to do with the show, and everything to do with Jen Greenberg’s mother. Yvette Greenberg isn’t a celebrity, she’s a cause.
I am self-conscious about the sneakers as I tail the hostess through the restaurant. I’m used to turning heads at this point, but before, I was half-defensive about it, feeling like people were gawking for the wrong reasons. No woman in New York would admit to reading my books before this year. Opening Didion or Wallace on the subway is as much a part of the dernier cri as the bedhead hair and the jeans that asexualize your butt. What are those about, anyway?
Up the stairs we go, to a table in the corner, where Lauren Bunn and Jen Greenberg are sitting shoulder to shoulder, facing me as though schoolgirls on a school bus. I am breathless to discover that they’ve left me the outside seat. It’s customary for celebrities to sit with their backs to a restaurant, so that no one can snap a picture while they’re sipping wine with one eye closed and sell it to In Touch to be strung up with the headline Rehab for Reality Star! When the Diggers dine out together, it’s always a passive-aggressive tango for the outside chair, and it almost always ends up sagging beneath the weight of Brett’s big butt. To have it reserved for me will go down as a flash point in our history. That isn’t a chair; it’s a throne.
Lauren rises when she sees me. “Rock star!” she cries, the way townsfolk would charge witch in seventeenth-century Salem. Witch! Witch! She flings her arms around my neck and I note the empty martini glass over her shoulder. Jen holds up two fingers. It’s her second. We need to move fast.
She pulls away and holds me by the shoulders. “You are a rock star!” Her $250 micro-bladed eyebrows come together as she studies me up close. “You even look different.” She pats me down, her hands finishing on my rear end, which she pumps and jiggles, her platonic expression that of a doctor performing a routine checkup. “You feel different.”
“All right, all right.” I laugh, removing her hands. Blond and oversexualized is Lauren’s beat. She’s like the poor man’s Samantha Jones—too drunk to enjoy all the sex she has. “And what’s different is these.” I kick up the septuagenarian sole of my sneaker.
Lauren expands a hand over her breast and becomes momentarily Southern. “As I live and breathe.”
Jen does not get up and fawn all over me, but she does provide me an excuse for my tardiness. “Traffic?” she asks, as I take my seat and spread a dinner linen over my lap.
“FDR was a mess,” I tell her, even though it wasn’t. Late is just another outside chair. Late is a muscle, flexing.
The waiter appears, one arm folded behind his back.
“The Monfalletto Barolo,” Lauren says, before he can greet us.
“Excellent choice,” he says, giving Lauren a little bow. She appraises his backside as he walks away.
“He’s not even cute,” Jen complains. Her brown eyes don’t narrow, they just are narrow. Jen looks like the angry stepsister of a Disney princess, a TV critic once described her perfectly on Twitter.
“I don’t like the cute ones.” Lauren closes her lips around the toothpick in her drink, removing an olive with her front teeth. “You don’t have to worry about me around your husband, Steph.”
“Nice,” Jen quips.
Lauren’s mouth pops open. “I said Vince is too good-looking for me. It’s a compliment!” She reassures me, the tiniest bit of fear in her eyes. “It’s a compliment.”
I don’t smile but I do make a joke. “Where’s the option on SADIE for women who like uggos?” Lauren is the creator but no longer the CEO of a dating website that is, depending on whom you’re speaking to, a bold challenge to the status quo or a rich girl’s vanity project. If you are told the latter, you’re speaking to Brett.
A clever phrase materializes. “Hots and nots,” I suggest, feeling funny when Lauren’s boisterous laugh stops the conversation at the table next to us. Funny was always Brett’s thing. Now, all it takes is the palest attempt at humor, a small miracle given the fact that I was at the end of the couch at the last reunion.
The waiter returns, holding three gorgeous air-blown wineglasses. I do not stop him before he can place one in front of me, and Lauren notices, elated. “She’s drinking!” she exclaims to Jen, with the momentous pride of a lesser woman who has just called up her family members to share that the baby is walking, something every baby ever has done since the dawn of time. I don’t drink much or like children. I have my reasons for both.
“Unlike you,” Jen says crisply to Lauren, “she has something to celebrate.”
That was not said with love, but Lauren giggles anyway.
The server appears again, splashing Lauren’s glass with a taste of the wine. He places the cork next to her fork for her consideration, a little blood-bottomed thumb.
“Excellent,” Lauren concludes, tossing the whole thing back without really seeming to taste it.
“That’s about all I can handle,” I tell the server with self-effacing cheer midway through his pour. He rights the bottle and wipes its neck with a white dinner napkin.
“To season four,” Lauren says, raising a glass. “And to the Oscar-Nominated Female fucking Director.”
“Keep your voice down, crazy woman,” I say, clinking Jen’s glass lightly and waiting for someone to wag their finger at me, only no one does. Rule number two of Goal Diggers of New York City, no one is ever nuts, batshit, insane, sensitive, or emotional. No one overreacts. “Crazy” and its derivatives are words that have been used to shame women into compliance for centuries. The outside chair and a Chinese ducket on the word “crazy.” Toto, I’m not at the end of the reunion couch anymore, which is where they stick you right before they fire you.
I make eye contact with Jen first, then Lauren. “I just need to say something.”
“Speech.” Lauren thumps a fist on the table. “Speech.”
“No, seriously,” I say, not laughing, and the smile vanishes from Lauren’s face in a swift show of obedience. I rest my hands flat on the table, taking a moment to gather my thoughts. “I need to say that I’m indelibly touched by your support. Especially because I know the three of us have never been particularly close.” My expression is full of remorse. I let Brett turn me against you, and I see the error of my allegiance now—forgive me. “The last few months have been equal parts exhausting and exhilarating. I never thought I would open up about my past in this way, and I continue to be surprised not only by the people who have shown up for me, but by those who have not.”
I pause, and that’s when I notice that Jen’s nails are painted. Jen’s nails are painted and she has traded her heavy-framed Moscot Mensch glasses for contacts and very possibly, Jen has gotten a boob job. The sexier styling seems an obvious message to the person who broke her heart last season: This is what you’re missing. We have no idea who he is, if he even is a he. Jen refused to get into details at the reunion, telling us only that there had been someone “special” in the picture but insisting that it had ended, amicably, with agonized tears in her small eyes. In the three years I’ve known her, Jen has been notoriously tight-lipped about her love life, which infuriates Brett, perennial oversharer. But I always thought it wasn’t so much Jen holding back as Jen not having much to tell. I have wondered, more than a few times, if Jen might have been a virgin before this “special” person came along. There is something about her that is inherently untouchable but prepared to be, in case anyone comes along who is up to the task. The gruffness is an obvious defense mechanism, allowing her to reject you first.
Of course, the viewers would be surprised to hear me describe our resident earth goddess as gruff. Jen presents much differently on camera, speaking in spiritual platitudes and extolling the virtues of veganism and plant-based alchemy, a lifestyle that has turned into her livelihood. Packets of super-herbs and adaptogens sell for seventeen dollars in her downtown juice bars that are frequent props in the Instagram stories of Gwyneth Paltrow and Busy Philipps. Last year, she opened a vegan restaurant on the corner of Broome and Orchard that has so many beautiful people willing to wait an hour for her air-baked sweet potato fries that plans are in the works to open locations on the Upper West Side and in Venice, for a cookbook and a national delivery service. No matter, her mother wishes she were more like Brett.
Lauren tsks. “I cannot believe Brett still hasn’t reached out to you.”
Jen shoots me a look.
“What?” Lauren asks, noticing. Jen gets very busy, straightening her silverware and ignoring the question. “What?” Lauren repeats.
“I have not heard from Brett,” I say. “But I spoke to Lisa recently.” I exhale, like what I’m about to say won’t be easy for her to hear. “She told me they’re going in a different direction with the new Digger.”
“Okay . . . and?” Lauren looks as if there is a weight attached to her jaw, pulling everything in her expression down, down.
“They’re bringing in Brett’s sister and her niece to replace Hayley.”
Lauren looks like she might short-circuit. “Brett’s sister and Brett’s niece?”
I nod.
“But . . .” Lauren brings her fingers to her temples with a soft moan, as though processing this new information is a painful endeavor. “How old is the niece?”
“Twelve,” Jen says, stonily.
Lauren looks like she’s about to cry. She sits there, her face growing hot, her breathing short and frantic, waiting desperately for one of us to say something that’s going to make her feel better. “I don’t understand,” she says, finally. “She’s going to be a cast member?”
“She’s like a friend of the cast. It’s the sister who is the cast member.”
“And she has a twelve-year-old?” Lauren crows. “How old is she?”
“Our age,” I say.
“Thirty-one,” Jen clarifies, ruthlessly. I haven’t been thirty-one for a few years now.
“Is she married?” Lauren asks, eyes shut, like she can’t bear to look until she knows it’s safe.
“No,” I say. “Not married.” Lauren opens her eyes with a sad, resigned sigh. The news is not great, but it is tolerable. Lauren would probably like to be married with a baby and two ugly nannies, but our master and commander doesn’t want kids; henceforth, none of us are allowed to want them either. A few years ago I started to notice that mothers and not-mothers are equally fixated on childless women in their thirties, and in particular childless, married women in their thirties. How fun for me. It is a little like living in a swing state and being registered as an Independent. Both parties campaign fastidiously to get me on their side. The mothers make me promises like, I’m not that maternal either, but you love them when they are your own. The not-mothers rage against therapists and doctors who try to pathologize your reluctance for children. Neither party thinks they have anything in common with the other, which makes it all the more hilarious how much they do. It’s human nature to want your decisions validated. You feel better about yourself and your life when others make the same choices as you do. Luckily for me, I have no problem validating this particular decision of Jesse’s. Pathologize my contempt for kids all you want, I’ll never have them.
“But she doesn’t even live in the city,” I continue. “I heard they’re setting her up in Brett’s apartment and Brett’s going to move in with the new girlfriend.”
“Like it’s a storyline?”
“No, like . . . they’re going to make it look like the sister has always lived here. No one’s seen the apartment Brett is in right now so there won’t be any confusion.”
“Who is she?” Lauren demands. “Do you know her?”
“I’ve only met her here and there. But she basically handles all the day-to-day at SPOKE so that Brett can do the hard work of cohosting the fourth hour of the Today show when Hoda goes on vacation.”
There is a moment of bitter silence. None of us are over the fact that we weren’t asked to do it.
“Fine,” Lauren concedes. “I get the sister. I guess. But why are they making the niece a part of the show?”
“Well, now you’re asking the right question,” I tell her. A bread basket is delivered to the table and out of habit, everyone reaches for a piece. Rule number three of Goal Diggers, we eat carbs. We are emancipated from diets, and we exercise for health, not weight loss. Even if you starve yourself between takes like Lauren or suffer from orthorexia like Jen, you play your gourmandism for the cameras (or always, if you’re Brett and you found a way to commoditize your thunder thighs). Jesse thinks we have seen too many white, straight women hawking flat tummy tea on Instagram. Women who refuse to eat processed food are passé.
“The niece is black,” I say.
Lauren’s jaw goes slack. “Is the sister black?”
My mouth full, I shake my head no.
“Then what? The niece is adopted?”
I shake my head again, unable to elucidate while chewing. I’m the only one who actually took a piece of bread in the end. Jen and Lauren remembered the cameras weren’t around and returned their empty hands to their laps to be sniffed later.
“Stop making me dig, for Chrissakes!”
I swallow my food and tell her what I know. The data I’ve gathered from the field producer whose Net-a-Porter habit I shamelessly indulge every Christmas: that come season four, I will no longer be the onliest POC on the show. I felt both completely helpless and like I had to do something after I found out. Something that would make me better, stronger, irreplaceable. But beyond the plans I’d already put into place, there was nothing I could think to do, and so I called Sally Hershberger and arranged a last-minute blowout, even though my hair is always perfect and I didn’t have anywhere to go. Some of us eat our feelings; others turn a hot air stream and a round brush on them. I sat in the leather swivel chair with the junior stylist, the only one available at the last minute, and searched Layla Courtney on Instagram.
I have, of course, met Layla Courtney on a few occasions. A quiet, tall girl with wet hair in a high bun who unimpressed me greatly. What did Lisa see in her? What did Jesse? There were no Layla Courtneys on Instagram, and so I tried the mother. I turned up a scroll of Kelly Courtney variations, but only one with SPOKE in the handle and a light-skinned black girl in the profile picture. I felt like I was breathing fire ants as I thumbed her feed. Kelly and Layla at the Jersey Shore, Kelly and Layla at sixth-grade graduation last year, Kelly’s big “announcement” with all of ninety-six likes that you should follow Layla over @souk_SPOKE, where she would be hawking the gimcrack rugs and pottery and clothing handcrafted by Imazighen women, who now have the opportunity to learn a skill and earn a living thanks to SPOKE. A quick Google of the word “souk” told me that it is Berber for market. A terrible name for an Instagram handle, nothing catchy about it, but still I felt light-headed when I clicked on Kelly’s tag and saw that Layla’s account already had 11K followers, and that nearly every picture of Layla, modeling the goods with her baby afro, was riddled with comments like gorgeous girl, natural beauty, @ICManagement she on your radar??? I glanced at myself in the mirror, never one more honest than a hairdresser’s. My hair was smooth and straight, a little bit of movement at the ends, the way I’ve worn it for twenty years. Even with the straightening treatments, no one ever called me gorgeous when I was the same age as this mouseburger, and I was.
So why am I up in arms? How could I possibly feel threatened by a twelve-year-old black girl with natural curls? Diversity is one of the pillars of our show. But Jesse, the empress regnant of reality television, never would have opened that door if there wasn’t any green behind it. Advertisers desperately want to capture young viewers, and diversity (Or are we calling it inclusivity now? Better question: Which expression is more lucrative?) is of paramount importance to millennials. To us, I guess I could say. I did make the millennial cutoff by the skin of my teeth, and that was also part of the reason I didn’t think I was coming back after the last reunion. No one survives the show past thirty-four.
I’ve managed to delay the inevitable for another year, and now I can’t help but feel my replacement is being groomed. Because Jesse didn’t open the door for underrepresented women in the media as much as she did crack it. Just enough to allow Brett and me through for a short window of time. On a show with four to five players, any more than one gay woman and it becomes a lesbian show, any more than one woman of color and it becomes an ethnic show, and then advertisers start to worry about alienating the audience. That’s not diversity; it’s token-ism, and that’s why it felt like a kick in the stomach when I found out that not only was my choice out of the running for Hayley’s spot (we all hustle hard to replace outgoing Diggers with our friends), but that the new Digger satisfied a requirement that up until now only I could fulfill. Think of each of us as a pendant on a charm bracelet. I am the lock and Brett is the heart and Jen is the ballet slipper and Lauren is the ladybug. What we needed was a transgendered woman, not another lock.
“Aren’t you pissed?” Lauren hisses, reaching for her wine and realizing it’s empty. She pretends like she was really going for the bread, tearing off a small piece and docking it on her plate. “I would be so pissed if I were you.”
I experience a flicker of appreciation for the woman I’d written off as a boy-crazy boozehound. I’ve never spoken to any of the Diggers about feeling like a box Jesse had to check to escape an evisceration from Jezebel, because Brett, the one who should get it, is utterly beguiled by Jesse, and Lauren and Jen could never even begin to empathize. Jen came to the attention of the producers by way of her mother and Lauren shouldn’t be on the show at all. She’s one of those Hitchcock blondes, from a family with its own crest. But she has mastered hi-lo style and drinks too much and talks about sex too loudly and you’d be hard pressed to find a single woman in the city who doesn’t have her dating app hanging in the gallery of her mobile screen. Her name is Lauren Bunn and viewers call her Lauren Fun, and that has kept her safe, as has her willingness to go in for the kill when Lisa blows the whistle. She’s the show’s lovable hatchet man; indispensable, really.
But then Lauren clucks, “Your friend must be so disappointed,” and I realize she meant I’m probably pissed that my hire was passed over, and that a small part of her is pleased by that.
There are precisely two seasons in a Goal Digger’s life: shooting season and killing season. Not even a week after we wrap, months before we film the reunion, it’s customary for producers to approach each Digger and ask if we have any friends we would like to nominate for the next season of the show. We have no idea who is coming back and who is on the chopping block, though the position on the couch at the reunion some weeks later is normally a clue. The closer you are seated to Jesse, the better your odds. At this most recent reunion, filmed a month before my memoir came out and put me back in the game, I was on the end of the couch for the first time ever. The last book in my fiction series had flopped and I was growing long in the tooth. I nearly accepted my fate. The only Digger who has ever been where I was at and asked to return is Lauren, and I’m not willing to have my vagina steamed on camera or pose naked in a valiant effort to save the minks, high jinks Lauren has gotten up to in a single episode.
But. There is another option besides humiliating yourself for laughs. The producers are always looking to shake up the troupe, which is why the casting process starts anew the moment the mic packs come off. It’s an unwritten rule that if you bring a woman to prod’s attention and they like her and they cast her, you can buy yourself a stay of execution. The producers are not going to introduce a new Digger unless she has some sort of connection to the group. This isn’t Big Brother, throw a bunch of strangers together and hope for pregnancy scares and cold-cocks. The show runs best when the group has history, allegiances, grudges. The moment filming ends, a Digger is campaigning for her hire for the next season, nary a modicum of concern that it may be at a current castmate’s expense. If you’re lucky enough to see your person cast, you enjoy one more benefit, which is that she provides you with her eternal loyalty. You never betray the Digger who brought you in.
Lauren was Jen’s hire, in season two, and so for as long as she and Jen are on the show together, she will have to like who Jen likes and feud with who she doesn’t. She’s tiring of it, and I know she was pushing for her fellow Yalie, inventress of period-proof underwear, to replace Hayley so that she could boss someone around for a change. Better luck next season, Lauren.
The server reappears to ask us if we are ready to order.
Lauren and I sit in supportive silence as Jen explains to him that she’s a friend of the chef’s and she’s called ahead about some dairy-free butternut squash soup.
“God, no.” Lauren laughs, when the server asks us if we also have any dietary restrictions. “Let’s do the fluke, the hamachi, the mushrooms, and the bucatini.”
“Two orders of mushrooms,” I say.
The server smiles, pleased with us and with himself. “My all-time favorite dish on the menu.”
“She’s married,” Lauren growls, saucily.
“And you?” the server asks her.
Lauren waves her naked finger at him.
“Jesus God,” Jen mutters. However long it’s been since Jen has had sex, it’s in dog years.
The waiter picks up the bottle to refill my glass and realizes it’s empty. “Did we want to stick to this bottle?” Lauren circles her finger in the air, pantomiming a mini tornado: another round. Jen pokes me under the table. Now, before she gets too drunk to remember.
I reach for another piece of bread. “So, Laur, I’m not trying to blow your fuse here but there’s more.”
“Don’t tell me,” she says, pushing her plate away. “Brett is skinnier than me now.”
Jen endorses the bon mot with a guffaw. She’s always bristled at being grouped into the “wellness industry” with a woman who considers baked goods one of the major food groups. Likewise, Brett has taken Jen to task for her narrow and elitist definition of health, which contains but a single word—“thin.” There is nothing healthy about a woman weighing the same as she did in the fifth grade, about a woman who rarely eats solid foods and who is so malnourished she cannot grow her hair past her ears. These are Brett’s words, not mine, though I do wonder what she would say if she could see Jen now, with her shiny new lob and lusher-looking figure. There is nothing healthy about a woman who changes her appearance to please a man, probably.
“It’s about the trip,” I say to Lauren.
The Trip. Every season, the producers carve out a benchmark week to bring all the women together, no matter where we are in our cycle of loving and loathing each other. First season was quiet and cost effective: Jen’s Hamptons house, to celebrate the opening of her pop-up juice truck in the parking lot of Ditch Plains. Second season, we were a bona fide sleeper hit thanks to the network’s incessant Sunday afternoon marathons, and we could afford to go bigger: Paris, for the launch of the third book in my fiction series. (The Parisians have never called my books smut.) Last season, it was Los Angeles for the GLAAD awards. The show was up for Outstanding Reality Program—which we all understood to be Brett’s nomination—and there was also a nomination in the Outstanding Talk Show category, for the episode of 60 Minutes featuring Brett and all she was doing to help pave the way for other young, gay entrepreneurs.
As it’s gone, the Digger who is at the heart of the trip is the Digger who gets the most flattering pass by the editor’s hand and the most screen time for her product. And as it’s gone, every woman gets her turn. Lauren isn’t an original like Jen, Brett, and me, she doesn’t wear the signet ring inscribed SS, but she’s been with us since season two. This season we all assumed it would be her turn.
With as much compassion as I can muster, I say, “Lisa told me they want to calendar Morocco for some time in June.”
“Morocco?” Lauren whispers in quiet defeat.
“Apparently SPOKE is releasing a line of electric bikes,” Jen says. Her elfin face pinches in disgust. “Because what women like Brett need is a piece of exercise equipment to reduce the amount of movement in their day.”
In all fairness, the e-bikes aren’t for women like Brett. They’re for women who have too much movement in their day to attend school and to earn a living. I hate that even a silent part of me is still sticking up for Brett, after what happened between us. “The good news is that they haven’t booked the travel yet,” I say, putting the devastating memory out of my mind. “If we make our concerns known, we can sway them. But we have to move fast and we have to show a united front. Lisa said Jesse feels very strongly that in the first season since the election we present women as magnanimously as possible.”
“I see,” Lauren sniffs, “and reversing sexist dating roles isn’t magnanimous?”
“Not as magnanimous as keeping twelve-year-old African girls from getting raped,” Jen replies.
“Who are these twelve-year-old African girls Brett is keeping from getting raped?” Lauren wants to know. “Honestly, does she have any hard data to prove this? Have we even talked to a single one of them? How do we even know it’s true?”
I nod, animatedly. I want her riled up before I get to the point.
“So the show is now The Brett Show,” Lauren says, her aggrieved voice crowd-surfing the din of the restaurant. “Or the SPOKE show or whatever it is. It’s her whole fucking family and her business and she gets the trip two years in a row.”
“It pays to play on the same team as your boss,” Jen says, which was a claim I used to defend Brett against before I realized that Brett has absolutely benefited from being the same kind of different as Jesse. In our ecosystem, Brett is undoubtedly the most privileged of the bunch, and her advantages extend beyond the good edit. Jesse has made it abundantly clear that the show functions as a by-product of our already existing success. It is wonderful if it can enhance what we have already built for ourselves, but it is not there to lay the groundwork. In other words, we attract the show; the show does not attract us. For that reason, Diggers take home the same paltry salary of five thousand dollars a year for roughly one hundred twenty days of labor—and that’s before taxes. We are not meant to need the money, and most of us don’t, but ever since Jesse banished me to the end of the couch, I can no longer stomach the hypocrisy of my boss lambasting the wage gap in the New York Times while paying her own less than minimum wage. Jesse moves up the corporate ladder at the network as the show grows in popularity, getting richer off our backs while we are expected to just be grateful for the continued exposure. Hayley finally had enough of it, especially once one of the production coordinators suggested that Brett took Jesse’s advice, asked for more money, and got it. I admired Hayley for going to bat for herself, but I also knew it was a suicide mission. Jesse would only see the attempt at a salary negotiation as ungrateful, and it would only end in her dismissal, which, of course, it did. Unless you are Brett Courtney, the show does not reward difficult women.
Brett is the teacher’s pet, and funnily enough, one of her top complaints about Jen was that she received preferential treatment because of her mother. Introducing two people who are so much alike that they ultimately repel one another. Both are exhaustively preachy when it comes to their brand of health. Both are smug know-it-alls, believing their approach is the right one and if you don’t do it their way then you are a moron who will probably get cancer soon. Something else they have in common, something I didn’t discover until recently, is that they are both totally different people off camera than they are when we are rolling, though this could be said of all of us. It’s not easy to maintain the dividing line between who we are on the show and who we actually are, to do the dirty, daily work of pulling up the weeds and clipping the undergrowth. But not all of us go around insisting Who I am in real life is who I am on camera, which Brett has said so often it should be her next hideous tattoo. The truth is that who Brett is on camera is who she has become in real life. TV-Brett metastasized. Brett-Brett is in there, somewhere—I’ve had a brush with her—but she is like the last, smallest Russian nesting doll of the set.
Lauren groans. “What are we going to do about her?”
I glance at Jen again. She nods: Go for it. “I sent Lisa my schedule for the next few months,” I say. “I have my book tour and Vince’s birthday and a few other things on the calendar, and I just made it clear I would invite you two, and perhaps whoever the new cast member is—not if it’s Kelly, obviously—but that was it.”
“You think we shouldn’t film with the darling one,” Lauren deduces with a snort. “That’ll go over well.”
“I just think we do our own thing and we let her do hers,” I say, trying to keep it light. This isn’t a blood pact. We don’t need to draw knives and weapons. The most effective way to destroy someone on the show is to disengage, to deprive her of the drama, of the meaningful connections, of the great and powerful storyline. In our world, your sharpest weapon is a polite smile.
I can tell Lauren is still not sold.
I’m contemplative for a moment. “I’ve debated whether or not to tell you this,” I say, and I have. I was hoping my case was solid without this.
Lauren says, at two martinis and two glasses of wine volume, “Just fucking tell me.”
I avoid her eyes. I am sure she will be able to tell I am lying if I don’t. “That thing in Page Six? The one about the—”
“I know which one you’re referring to,” Lauren says, and I look up to see that she’s reddened. There have been several items in the Post about Lauren’s drinking, but only one that cost her so much.
“Brett called that in,” I practically whisper.
Lauren blinks, stunned.
“I only found out after the reunion,” I rush to say. “I didn’t know what to do. Brett and I were still friends and I felt a sense of loyalty—”
Lauren holds up her hand. “Why are you telling me this now?”
I check in with Jen. Are we that obvious? “This affects your business, Laur. This affects your money.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” Lauren repeats, her voice softer this time.
Jen and I check in with each other across the table, telepathically negotiating who should be the one to answer her. Jen didn’t think it was necessary to tell Lauren that Brett was the one who sent the editors the video of a drunken Lauren fellating a baguette at Balthazar. I know Brett has a line into the editor of Page Six and I know I didn’t do it, and Jen and Lauren are in lockstep. Who else could it have been? Lauren had been next to hysterical at the reunion, demanding to know who shared the video that resulted in a lifetime ban from her favorite brunch place and her father bringing in a seasoned CEO, effectively rendering Lauren’s role at the company impotent.
Jen thinks telling Lauren not to film with Brett is enough to get Lauren not to film with Brett. She brought Lauren into the group and that buys unconditional servitude. But Lauren likes Brett, even though she is not supposed to, and I can’t pretend that I don’t understand. For a time, I didn’t just like Brett, I loved her.
I decide to be the one to say it.
“What if you didn’t drink this season?” I suggest to Lauren. “Make your sobriety a storyline. I think Jen and I, we could really support that. In a way Brett would never.” This is me, sweetening the pot for Lauren, because I need her to commit to the mutiny. I need Brett gone. We all do.
“Rehab my image,” Lauren says, her tone petulant.
“That’s right!” I say, brightly, as though I am a game show host and she is a player who has guessed the answer to a deciding trivia question correctly.
Lauren folds her arms across her chest, huffily. “Our viewers are so proletarian. This is how people drink in New York. It’s normal. I’m normal.” Her eyes flit to my unfinished glass of Barolo. She wouldn’t dare say it—You’re the one who’s not normal. At this age, in this world, she’s not just deflecting. The fact that I drink in thimble portions makes her far more average than me.
Lauren sighs, fluffing her hair at the roots in a way she thinks gives her Brigitte Bardot volume when really, it just makes her look like she rubbed a balloon against her head. “Fine. I’ll say I’m not drinking. Say it. I’m still going to, though.”
“We figured.” Jen shrugs.
“Fuck you, Greenberg,” Lauren says with a smile. She raises her glass, seeming to come around more positively to the idea. “To not drinking this season.”
I raise my own, laughing at the intended irony of the toast, relieved that everyone is so wholeheartedly on board. “To not drinking this season.”
What kind of narcissist signs up for a reality show? is a question lobbed at me on Twitter often. There are not enough characters to capture the magic of Jesse Barnes when she turns it on. And she did turn it on for me in the beginning. Dinners at Le Bernardin where she quoted from my novels. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar donation made in my name to my favorite charity that provides writing mentorship to underprivileged girls. SNL after-parties, box seats at the Yankees game for Vince, front-row tickets to a Madonna concert, and backstage passes where I got to meet Madonna. And all the while, Jesse was in my ear, promising me this was not my mother’s reality TV show. This was a show about women getting along, about women supporting one another, about women succeeding, about women who didn’t need men. I was absolutely fooled.
Jesse might have meant some of it. I think she believed, on some level, that she would be at the forefront of a new kind of reality TV, living as we were in a time of performed girl power. Beyoncé had recently dropped a golden microphone on stage at the VMAs, backlit by the word Feminist. It was no longer mainstream suicide to care about the equality of the sexes. And then season one aired and the ratings were so dismal that they briefly canceled us.
Season two felt different from the start. We got a new showrunner, Lisa, who found Machiavellian ways to pit us against one another. We fought. We aligned. We were a massive hit. There have been many times I have wanted to walk away, but I didn’t, and not because I am a narcissist.
It is because Diggers don’t survive the push off the couch. Jesse sees to it. The invitations to events that claim to support women stop coming, A-listers you were paired with on Jesse’s aftershow stop following you on Twitter, your businesses shutter, and the only magazine that wants to put you on the cover is The Learning Annex. It’s happening to Hayley right now. I made the mistake of texting to ask if I would see her at Jesse’s annual Halloween party, the one everyone who is anyone attends, and instead of saying yes, she hit me with a series of excuses so fraught my ulcers oozed. I’m having a problem receiving messages lately. Mercury is in retrograde. At least my assistant tells me so. I haven’t actually checked my email myself in a while. It’s probably in my inbox. Where is it just in case? When? Want to grab a drink together before? Ugh, I was nauseous for her. I knew that feeling. It’s like heartbreak, but not, the way cramps hurt differently than a stomach bug, though the pain is similarly located. There is no word for it, but there should be. It is the sting, it is the sickness—because it is also contagious—of your fellow woman turning on you.
I know my storyline must come to an end at some point, that I cannot reserve a prime spot on the reunion couch forever. But I will not—I cannot—allow a parasite like Brett Courtney to edge me out.