She could have taken on the project herself, getting her assistant Josh to find someone to take over, but with Shane, she always held back. She didn’t want to make him feel as if he’d failed again, and she always made an effort not to rub her authority (so granted because she made all the money) in his face. And so, inconvenient as it was, the apartment had remained the same. She justified it by telling herself that it was okay; even better, this way she wouldn’t be undermining Shane with her obvious (and for him, unreachable) success. He could keep his illusion that her level of success was still within his own grasp—at the very least, if he did start to make money, it might allow him to think that he could actually afford their apartment.
Well, apparently none of her stratagems were clever enough to outsmart Shane Healy, she thought bitterly. Everyone always said there were plusses to change, but what? She supposed that now that Shane was gone, she would no longer have to kowtow to the petty grievances of his ego. She could let herself shine. The first thing she’d do was fix the apartment up properly. Build real walls; hire a decorator to do the place in her taste. Maybe she’d have an all-white bedroom. As a kid, she’d fantasized about living in a house that was white and clean with fluttering gauze drapes. She’d squelched that fantasy, knowing Shane wouldn’t like it.
But now, she thought cautiously, she was free. Her spirit rose a little, tentatively, like a newborn pup testing the air with its snout. Perhaps Shane’s exit wasn’t all bad. It could turn out to be an opportunity, a second chance to become all the things she’d set aside for the sake of being with Shane.
With new resolve, she picked up the screenplay written by the young woman named Shasta, prepared to give her a second chance. Wendy’s rule was that she didn’t reject a screenplay until she’d read twenty-five pages (some executives stopped at ten, but she figured if someone made the effort to write a complete screenplay, she could make a little more effort to discover its possible merits), and now was not the time to lower her standards, but to raise them. She opened the screenplay, prepared to read, and as she turned the page, her eye happened to spot a mound of envelopes that had been piled up under the script.
She sighed and put down the script. It was all mail, probably from the past month. She had put Shane in charge of the mail and of paying the bills, and now that he was gone, the maid had probably just dumped all the mail on the desk. She decided to sort through it quickly, separating the bills to be dealt with later.
There were several envelopes from American Express. At first she was confused. That couldn’t be right. She had only two American Express cards—one corporate black card account (under which Shane was a secondary cardholder for emergency situations), and a platinum personal account. There was one fat envelope and four flat ones. It was the flat ones that concerned her: They were the threatening type issued when your account was overdue. But that couldn’t be possible, she thought, and frowning, she ripped one of the envelopes open.
The bill was for her Centurion account, and skimming down to the amount owed, she suddenly felt dizzy. This had to be a mistake. The number read $214,087.53.
Her hand started shaking. This couldn’t be right. Some accountant must have made a mistake with the zeroes. She picked up the fat bill and tore it open, her mouth widening into a silent scream as she checked the bill.
There were charges for $14,087.53, which was normal. But on top of that was a line of credit for $200,000 charged to Shane’s account.
She stood up, dropping the bill onto the desk and pacing back and forth with her fingers pressed to the sides of her head as if attempting to prevent her brain from exploding. How could he do this? But technically, he could do it—he had his own card, and the only thing that kept him from racking up a huge bill every month was the fact that she trusted him not to. But she should have known better, and with a sinking feeling, she realized that she’d been expecting this. It was inevitable. Deep down, she’d always suspected that Shane would pull something like this on her someday.
It was the ultimate fuck you. The final nail in the coffin of their marriage. If she’d had any ideas of them getting back together, Shane had guaranteed that it could never happen.
And then everything turned black and rage took over. Two hundred thousand dollars was really $400,000 before taxes. Four hundred thousand hard-earned dollars. Did Shane have any idea how much effort it took to make that much money?
She was going to kill him. She would insist that he pay it back, every penny, even if it took him twenty years . . .
She picked up the phone and dialed his cell. She didn’t care how early it was—for once she was going to read him the riot act and she’d make sure he never forgot it. Naturally, it went to voice mail.
She hung up. She wouldn’t leave a message—she would go to his apartment and confront him. She would go right now, in her fuzzy old pajamas. Her fury carried her into the bedroom, where she jammed her bare feet into the pair of old Converse sneakers she wore around the house.
Then she stopped. She couldn’t leave. She had three children in the house.
A terrible thought occurred to her. They were sound asleep. She could run out, scream at Shane, and be back within thirty minutes. The children would never know.
She paused and looked down at her feet, the black canvas sneakers sticking out incongruously from the bottoms of her blue flannel pajamas. Shane was making her crazy. Leaving small children alone in the house was what poor people did. Poor people who felt they had no choice or were so beaten down by the ruthless pointlessness of life that they didn’t care. You read about them all the time in the New York Post. They left the children alone and something happened and the children died. It was usually the men who were responsible. The mothers were off working and the fathers decided they needed to get a beer with their buddies.
She checked her watch. It was nearly six o’clock. Mrs. Minniver would arrive in an hour. She could wait to confront Shane until then.
But a whole hour! She was consumed with rage again. She wasn’t going to be able to think about anything else. She didn’t need this. She had to work. She had to concentrate. Now, on top of it all, she was going to have to go to the bank at nine a.m. and take Shane’s name off of all their accounts.
And this was the man she had chosen to be the father of her children.
She stood up and marched into the bathroom. Shane would pay. If he was going to take her money, she would take his children away. She would hire a lawyer today, and she would spend whatever it took to make sure he was out of her life permanently. Let him see what it was like out there in the real world, the world of work. Let Shane understand what it was really like to be a man.
She stepped into the shower, and as the hot water hit her face, she suddenly remembered: It was Saturday. Mrs. Minniver wasn’t coming. And Shane had said that he was going away for the weekend and was “unreachable.”
There was no relief.
And then a cry burst out of her like an alien life force, a huge heave of emotion that felt as if her stomach was going to break in half, and caused her to grab on to the shower curtain for support. She lowered herself down into the tub, sitting cross-legged under the beating water, and rocking back and forth like a crazy person. One part of her was pure animal, sobbing and sobbing. But another part of her was detached, as if she were outside her body. So this was why they called it heartbreak, the detached part thought. Funny how clichéd emotional descriptions were so apt on the few occasions when you were actually experiencing them. Her heart was literally breaking. Everything her heart had believed in, counted on, and trusted, was being wrenched from her. Years of what she thought were irrefutable emotional truths were being snapped like spindly wooden twigs. She would never be able to go back to believing what she had before.
But what the hell was she supposed to believe in instead?
* * *
WENDY’S PHONE IN HER office at Parador Pictures had five lines, and currently, all five were lit up.
&nbs
p; It had been that way all morning. All week, in fact. Indeed, it was pretty much like that all the time.
She looked at the digital clock on her desk that had a readout that recorded not only minutes and seconds, but tenths of seconds. She had now been on this conference call for fifteen minutes, thirty-two and four-tenths seconds. If she was going to keep to her schedule, she would have to end it in three minutes, twenty-seven and something seconds. Her math wasn’t quite up to calculating tenths of seconds.
“You still need more story, boys. More plot,” Wendy said into the receiver. It was Thursday morning. Thursday morning was the time allotted for conference calls to discuss the progress of various screenplays Parador had under development. At any time, this number might range from forty to sixty, and out of those sixty, she would greenlight thirty to be put into production, and out of those thirty, probably fifteen would be hits, meaning they would make money. Most studios could count on ten hits per year. Her numbers had always been a little better than average.
But only because she put more time into her screenplays!
“The story is this kid’s existential discovery. Of life. Like, what is the meaning of life?” one of the screenwriters, Wally, interjected.
Good question, Wendy thought. She sighed. What the hell did two twenty-seven-year-old guys know about life? “What do you mean by existential? Exactly?” she asked. Why oh why had she bought this screenplay on a pitch? she wondered. Because she’d had to. Wally and his partner, Rowen, were considered the hot screenwriting team of the moment. They’d actually written two hit movies, which Wendy was now beginning to think was a fluke. Either that, or success had gotten to them and they were smoking pot all the time, probably driving around L.A. in Porsches and Hummers, and thinking they had all the answers.
“That’s the question, you know?” Rowen said. He and Wally droned on in this vein for another minute. Wendy motioned through the open door to where her third assistant, Xenia, was sitting, listening in on the call. Reading her mind, Xenia grabbed a small copy of Webster’s Dictionary and rushed in, holding the page open to the “E’s.”
“Existentialism,” Wendy read aloud, interrupting either Wally or Rowen, she couldn’t tell which, “is a philosophy centered on individual existence and personal responsibility for acts of free will in the absence of certain knowledge of what is right and wrong.” She paused. Somehow this seemed to be a perfect summation of her own life right now. She had no idea what was right or wrong, and she was responsible for everything. Including Wally and Rowen’s mess of a screenplay. “It’s an admirable idea, but unfortunately, no one in the audience knows what existentialism is. Nor do they go to movies to find out. People go to movies to see a story. To identify with a story that somehow connects to their own emotional thoughts and feelings.” She paused. Christ, she was as full of shit as they were. No one really knew why audiences embraced certain movies and not others. No one really knew anything. But you had to pretend.
“I think you boys”—she secretly relished calling them “boys”—“need to go back to the beginning and work out a beat sheet.”
Silence from the other end. They were probably fuming, Wendy thought, not trusting themselves to respond.
Three and two-tenths seconds ticked by. They wouldn’t dare contradict her, Wendy thought. The movie business was like the court of Louis XIV—talking back to a superior meant imprisonment or death. There was no way Wally and Rowen would challenge the president of Parador Pictures. But they would probably hang up the phone and call her a bitch.
She didn’t care. She was right—or at least more right than they were—and that’s why she was the head of Parador and they weren’t.
“We’ll get that beat sheet to you right away,” Wally said.
“Thank you so much,” Rowen said, all charm and acquiescence. “We really appreciate it.”
“Wendy?” Her first assistant, Josh, broke into the line. “I’ve got your next call.”
“Thanks, Josh,” she said. This call was with a director and screenwriter who were working on an action-adventure film that was in preproduction. Her basic instructions were that they needed more bangs in the third act. “First act, one bang,” she said. “Second act, three bangs. Third act, five big bangs, one right after another. Bang. We’re done, we’re out of the theater, and hopefully we’ve had a thirty-million-dollar opening weekend.”
The director and screenwriter giggled in anticipation of such loot.
While she was on the phone, her second assistant, Maria, came scuttling in with a note. “Charles Hanson has to cancel lunch,” it read. Wendy looked up curiously. “His plane was delayed from London,” Maria mouthed.
“Damn him!” Wendy wrote on the bottom of the note. “Reschedule ASAP,” she added. She went back to listening in on her phone conversation while thinking that the delayed plane was probably a ploy to give Charles Hanson another day to put off closing their deal. He was probably entertaining offers from another studio. “Investigate Hanson,” she wrote on a large yellow lined pad that was always on her desk.
She did two more conference calls. In the middle of one of them, Shane called. Maria rushed in with “SHANE?” written on the same type of yellow pad she had on her desk. Wendy nodded.
She kept Shane holding for four minutes, forty-five and three-tenths seconds.
“Yes?” she said coldly.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Working,” she said pointedly.
“I mean, to me,” he said.
This comment was so egregiously self-centered that Wendy didn’t know what to say.
“You took all the money out of our joint account,” Shane said accusingly.
“Yeah?” Wendy said. “Glad you noticed.”
“Don’t be a bitch, Wendy,” Shane said. “Magda’s twelfth birthday is coming up. I need to get our daughter a present.”
“Try getting a job,” Wendy said, and hung up.
She did three more calls. Then it was one o’clock.
“What do you want to do for lunch?” Xenia said, peeking into her office. Wendy was staring down blindly at that morning’s copy of the Hollywood Reporter. Stories were circled with highlighter in order of importance: red for articles having to do with Parador and any of their projects, yellow for articles about competing projects, and green for anything else that might be of interest.
Wendy jumped. “Lunch?” she said.
“Charles Hanson canceled. So I was wondering if you wanted to order in?”
“Oh,” Wendy said. “Give me a minute.” She absentmindedly picked up the Hollywood Reporter, slowly regaining her bearings. Every time she did four hours of business like that, juggling one call after another, she always went into a kind of trance. It took her a few minutes afterward to come back down to earth. Now she did, with a thump.
She suddenly remembered Shane’s phone call.
Christ. She really had been a bitch.
Damn him, she thought, picking up her yellow pad and standing up. How dare he? Well, at least he was starting to get the message. She had been so angry about him ripping her off, she had planned to get a divorce lawyer first thing Monday morning. But then the day had started and she’d been going flat-out with work, and all she’d managed to do was to transfer all of the money out of their joint account and into her personal account. She was surprised Shane hadn’t thought of it first and done it to her. “Two hundred thousand dollars is not such a big deal,” Shane said on Monday morning when he’d finally decided to call her back.
“Excuse me?” she’d said.
“You make over three million dollars a year, Wendy,” he said, as if this were some sort of crime. “The money is a tax deduction, anyway.”
“That’s right, Shane. But I earned it!” she almost cried. “It’s up to me to decide what I want to do with it.”
Shane obviously couldn’t think of a good response, because all he said was “Fuck you,” and hung up.
The realization th
at their relationship had deteriorated to the point where they couldn’t even be civil to each other made her sick.
“Maria?” she said. Maria scurried in. “I need to find out if Charles Hanson has another deal pending somewhere. Can you call some of your assistant friends and find out?”
Maria, who was tall and willowy and sharp as a tack, nodded. In six months or so, Wendy might be able to promote her and get rid of Josh. She basically envisioned getting rid of all men at the moment. “I’d try Disney first.”
“I know just who to call,” Maria said. “Lunch?”
“Oh, I . . .” Wendy began. The phone rang.
“Shane!” Josh called, from the outer office.
Wendy felt her stomach jolt in a spasm of rage. She began to reach for the phone, but thought better of it. These arguments could not continue to go on in front of her staff. They were already getting an inkling that something was seriously wrong. They would talk, and within days, all of Splatch-Verner would know she was getting divorced.
“I’ll call him back,” she said loudly.
She stood up and grabbed her bag, walking through the outer office into the hall. “I’m going to grab a bite in the executive dining room,” she said casually. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes. If you need me, I’m on the cell.”
“You should get some fresh air,” Maria nodded.
Wendy smiled. There was no fresh air anywhere in the building. That was the problem.
She walked out to the elevators, thinking she would call Shane from her cell phone. But that was too risky as well—someone might come along and overhear what was sure to be a vicious, though short, argument. Without thinking, she got into the elevator and pressed the button for the thirty-ninth floor, the home of not only the executive dining room but the executive gym as well, which no one ever used. The elevator announced its arrival on the thirty-ninth floor with a ding, and Wendy got out.