October 19
The Present
9:00 P.M.
Todd downed the rest of his drink and kept his gaze upon the strange man in their backyard. Ellie swore she had no idea who he was, but Todd had learned not to believe everything his wife said. Oh, not that she was lying per se, but she often didn’t want him to know exactly what she was up to, and he had a strong feeling that Ellie wasn’t telling him the entire truth. Not about that guy, nor how much the party cost, nor exactly how much money she had borrowed from the bank. He knew they were deeply in debt, and buying this house two months ago hadn’t helped, but it wasn’t as if he could stop her either, it wasn’t as if she ever listened to him. Her label was floundering, that much he knew, since she was always complaining about their weak social media presence and how they couldn’t compete with all the new internet-based clothing companies with no overhead and brick-and-mortar expenses.
He was vaguely aware that their entire enterprise was a literal house of cards that could crash down at any moment, but he didn’t know exactly how bad it was, and he wished he did. He wished she would lean on him a little more, let him in, but they’d been estranged for so long and they’d gotten used to living with the tension. He’d been depressed and withdrawn, and she’d thrown herself headfirst into saving her company, so there was little time for intimacy, let alone decent conversation.
“Todd!” came a honeyed, patrician voice that could only belong to his wife’s ex-husband.
Lord Fauntleroy! he’d almost said, but bit it back. “Archer!” he said, slapping the tall, red-faced Brit on the back. “How are you, man? Good to see you!” he said, without an ounce of sincerity. He wasn’t jealous of Archer, who was old and graying and had a paunch and, honestly, was a bit pathetic with all the skirt chasing at his age. But the fact that the old coot had known Ellie first, yeah, that still grated.
“Everything good?” he said, hoping he could get rid of him as soon as possible.
“Good, good,” said Archer affably. “You?”
“Can’t complain,” said Todd, who had a lot to complain about, including the end of his television career, the twenty pounds he’d gained from the stress (not fifty; Ellie always exaggerated), his wife’s manic overspending, and the mystery of why his eldest daughter had suddenly come home from college. “Did you and Giggy have a nice weekend?”
“Lovely,” said Archer.
Whenever Archer blew into town, they had to force his daughter to spend time with him, which she hated. It gave Todd a certain satisfaction. Giggy had reluctantly spent the weekend with Archer at his hotel with his newest girlfriend, and had returned home with more complaints.
“He’s embarrassing!” Giggy had told him while they ate ice cream in the kitchen together. “He doesn’t know how to work the TV remote in the hotel, so he’s always calling for someone to do it, even at three in the morning, which wakes me up even in the other room because the walls in the suite are so thin. He’s a child,” said their ten-year-old child.
She detailed the rest of her grievances: Archer couldn’t find his eyeglasses and so had to have someone from the hotel read the selections to him, which took so long that he decided he wasn’t hungry after all, so Giggy didn’t get breakfast; Archer invited a few of his girlfriend’s friends over and they had a loud party in the suite and she couldn’t sleep.
“At least we’re not in LA,” said Giggy.
“Why? What happens in LA?”
“He can’t drive, so he takes me to school in an Uber, which isn’t allowed on campus, and the guard always stops us at the gate, which makes everyone beep,” she whined.
Privately, Todd wished that Ellie would put her foot down with Archer and tell Giggy she didn’t have to see him. Giggy didn’t even like to be called Giggy anymore—she preferred Imogen, barely. “What kind of stupid name did I get?” she’d say, scowling.
“It’s British,” Ellie would explain. “You’re British.”
Giggy refused to believe it.
After eating her ice cream, Giggy was back to running around the party with her little friend Zoe, ignoring the mean triumvirate this time. The twins were once more causing havoc in the playroom, now that the lesser DJ had absconded. But where was Samantha? Where was his eldest child? Why was she home all of a sudden?
Oh, wait. He knew why she was home, didn’t he? Didn’t she mention something when she’d texted him a week or so ago—some kind of thing at school? But he had been too busy to pay attention, and it was Sam after all—she’d never gotten into any kind of trouble before, had been the model child, so well behaved, studious, and diligent, so he hadn’t even really believed it. What was it? There was a scandal of some sort, with a professor of hers, about a paper she’d plagiarized. Wait, what? How could their perfect eldest child be accused of plagiarism of all the insane things? Was he remembering correctly?
“Hey, Otis,” he said, spying the younger twin (even if he was only two minutes younger, he would always be the “younger twin” for the rest of his life) barreling out of the game room, holding a Super Soaker. Oh boy. Todd had to give the twins props; they never gave up on causing mayhem.
“Have you seen your sister?”
Otis grinned, his mouth red from the Popsicles Todd had allowed them earlier, and pointed at Giggy, who was now blowing bubbles by the pool.
“No, not that one. Sam? Have you seen Sam?”
“Sam’s here?” Otis asked, jumping up in excitement. “Where’s Sam?”
“That’s what I was asking you—oh, forget it,” said Todd. “And give me that! Don’t wet the guests!” He grabbed the water pistol from his boy’s hands and handed it to the party planner, denying the child for the first time that evening. “Put that somewhere he can’t find it, will you?”
“Of course,” said Madison Lexington (Todd joked she was an intersection until Ellie corrected him and said those two avenues actually didn’t meet). The poor woman had two distinct lines on her otherwise frozen forehead, probably because she couldn’t satisfy any of Ellie’s demands quickly enough.
Todd looked over the party to see if he could find his eldest daughter and instead found the couple Ellie had wanted kicked out.
Had Melvin really brought a hooker? And, if so, how much did she cost? He was merely curious, not interested. When they’d first gotten married, Ellie had been wary, if not downright paranoid, that Todd would remain faithful to her, given the parade of actresses and wannabe actresses throwing themselves at him, Mr. Network President.
Sure, he’d had his fun over the years before he met Ellie, had his share of girlfriends, hookups, one-night stands, but here was the thing that he kept telling her, kept trying to make her believe—actually, it was not that fun. It was not fun knowing they liked you only for what you could do for them. Yes, he’d been surrounded by pretty girls, the prettiest girls from all their small towns. They all ended up in Los Angeles, all vying for the same tiny number of roles, all desperate for stardom. All willing to do whatever it took to land the part, except he was never interested in the casting couch, never took anyone up on that kind of offer. He was not a transactional guy. His girlfriends were agents and executives, friends of friends from business school. Sure, the occasional actress, but he was careful never to date anyone employed by his studio. It was such a cliché, and all those pretty girls—not all of them could or would be stars—most of them ended up in real estate if they were lucky, and if they were not, porn. The Valley, after all, was only a few exits away from Hollywood, and it was just another studio.
He could have dated the hottie of the week, but he found the girls boring, vacuous to the point of stupid, and always working. Sure, he was a bit of a snob. He’d always been a smart, good-looking guy, not the kind of nerd who suddenly dated bombshells, even though he had his share of attention. Now that he was nobody, it was almost a relief at first. He remembered when people craned their necks to see him, when they hung on his every word, and it initially felt liberating to be free of the pressure. But now he was like a ghost; sometimes he wasn’t even sure if people noticed he was there. He’d mourned a little, but it wasn’t so much the attention he missed as much as his old identity.
He’d worked for the network for almost twenty years, working his way up from production assistant to line producer to executive producer to executive vice president to president of the whole shebang! He called the shots, decided on which shows to put on the air, and the town prostrated themselves at his feet. He hadn’t made it as an actor, but he still looked like one. He was proud and, like Ellie, he’d come from nothing—he too was a poor kid from a podunk town, but his route was through Harvard and Harvard Business School to the top of the ranks.
Then, disaster.
Streaming services grew in popularity and the network began to flail, loss of audience leading to loss of ad dollars and finally to loss of faith. His boss explained it was time for a change, new blood at the helm, someone who could get the eyeballs of those kids who spent more time on their phones and tablets than watching network television.
So Todd was out. And some young buck was in.
Whatever. He was done with TV anyway, and he certainly didn’t want his kids anywhere near the industry. None of the executives ever did; it was agreed among them that it was the absolute worst environment for a child. It wasn’t that the stories were true about Hollywood pedophile rings, at least not as far as he knew. Todd had no idea if it was truly as skeevy as the rumors said—the grotto parties and the rent boys and the abuse and the suicides. All he knew was that he had never seen it himself. He steered clear of those directors, those producers who wafted around with whispers about their clandestine behavior. He avoided them.
But he knew enough about how the industry worked to know he didn’t want his kids anywhere near it. He’d seen network executives make fun of kids’ looks, of their weight. He’d been one of those executives on the phone with the stage moms, berating them for their offspring’s tabloid antics. When a certain child star transitioned from moon-faced cherub to nearly naked cover star, he was the one who’d had to send the angry email to her parents. But he was also the one who okayed the tiny miniskirts on the show, clothes he’d never let his teenage daughter wear.
Hollywood was a caste system, with the wannabes on one side who would let their kids do anything to land a role, book a gig, while the insiders were on the other, and their children were special. Their children didn’t have to work to put food on the table, their children went to private schools and starred in school plays, and when they were good and ready, they could be cast in a film if they chose to pursue acting, but only after they’d graduated from high school and only if Steven was directing (Spielberg of course.) Otherwise, their kids went to Stanford, or Harvard, or Columbia, or USC, and if they worked in entertainment, they were producers or executives. There were exceptions of course—there always were, but the exceptions proved the rule.
They’d done all right with Sam, and he figured whatever was wrong, they’d be able to fix it. Sam was a good kid. They’d been lucky with all their kids. If only Ellie could see that, if only it was enough. They didn’t need all this and they certainly didn’t need this fancy party they couldn’t afford.
He circled the backyard, having lost sight of the strange man. Luckily, no one stopped to make small talk. Well, they were mostly Ellie’s friends, and he’d already had a dozen casual conversations with most of them all weekend. He was running out of chitchat. There were too many people he didn’t recognize. His head hurt.
What time was it? He saw Ellie by the bar and, without thinking, grabbed her phone out of her hand to check the time. She was deep in conversation with a friend from London, so didn’t notice a text had arrived on her home screen. Ellie tended to lose sight of anything in the presence of her old gay boyfriend, Blake Burberry. She swore nothing had ever happened between them, that Blake was gay, but Todd had his suspicions.
Todd looked down and read the text.
I’m not leaving. From a number he didn’t recognize. He went to the conversation and found the texts she’d sent, his heart sinking with every text bubble.
Don’t do this.
Don’t leave me.
I need you.
That was it. The rest of the conversation had been deleted, but she hadn’t had time to delete this.
His heart began to pound. So he was right. Ellie was having an affair. She had to be. She was gorgeous, and they hadn’t had sex in weeks—months even. And even before then, it had been sporadic. He blamed the network, the stress, the humiliation. He’d lost his mojo, his juice, his will. He’d lost everything. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t perfect, maybe he hadn’t been the perfect husband all these years, and now he was flawed and sad and depressed and he’d let her down, that was for sure. Guilt pricked his conscience and he tried to shake it away. He didn’t want to think about what he’d done.
But now his wife was fucking someone else.
Maybe she was fucking that strange man, the one circling the party on the sidelines, who acted as if he were looking for something—or someone.
Todd deleted the text in a fit of pique and crushed his napkin in his fist. He would find out. Call him out. Call them both out. He wouldn’t stand for this. Wouldn’t lose her without a fight.