Monday at work felt like hell. I’d packed my gym bag and my breakfast: the yogurt and the low-calorie muffin, though it all seemed futile now. My pants were tight on my ass and dug into my butt crack. They rubbed a pink ring around my stomach. I craved an alternate universe, to be some other Rachel who only wore clothing with elastic waistbands, sweatpants and parachute pants. In that world, I could inhale and exhale freely. In that world, I would cut my hair short, wear red Air Jordans and custom gold Air Force 1s, hooded sweatshirts, blazers and skinny ties, backward baseball caps. I would reflect casual confidence and power, a bit of nastiness, still Jewy. I’d be like a Beastie Boy circa 1989.
At noon, I looked up from an Internet image search of King Ad-Rock and was surprised to see Jace Evans walking toward my desk.
“What are you doing?” asked Jace, touching the floof part of his hair and then scratching the skinhead part, a one-two aesthetic check.
“Working,” I said. “You?”
“I need to talk to Ofer about some problems I’m having with the writers of the show. They want to put Liam in a coma.”
“Oh,” I said.
Across from me, NPR Andrew was pretending to code Ofer’s client newsletter—this week’s topic: Auditions and Toxic Masculinity. I could see him peeping out from behind his computer. Jace was too commercial for NPR Andrew’s tastes, but fame was fame. Jace’s attention had to make me more intriguing in Andrew’s eyes.
I still disliked NPR Andrew and his eyes. But they were eyes. Any gaze that increased in its esteem of me made me feel validated: like I was earning my existence. What I didn’t want was for Ofer to see Jace and me talking.
“I had a burger the other day at Cassell’s,” said Jace. “Best one I’ve had in LA. It’s a definite must for late night after This Show Sucks.”
Did Jace want to be my pal? I didn’t need a pal. Maybe he just felt sorry for me, seeing me once again in my inferior position, the assistant, “the help.” Our power differential was fucking with his Ohio value system. He had to pretend we were on equal footing, that we really had something in common. And it seemed the thing he thought we had in common was beef.
“I found it rather intriguing that he came to your desk,” said Ana at teatime. “It’s interested behavior.”
I couldn’t tell if she was fucking with me. Her words had become confusing. She’d started gossiping to me again, but I felt paranoid that the things she said had a double edge—as though they were also directed at me. When she called Kayla “fat and blundering,” I wasn’t sure if she was really talking about Kayla or about me. Sometimes I felt like she was laughing at me right to my face, like she and herself had become the “us” and I was the “them,” and the joke was that I didn’t know who was who. I figured that her comment was some kind of setup. She was trying to get me excited so she could deflate me again.
“He’s an actor,” I said. “He always looks interested.”
“Well, why wouldn’t he be interested in you?” she asked, giving me a gentle knock on my shoulder and giggling. “You’re interesting.”
The giggle was ambiguous. She could just as easily be showing girly camaraderie as making fun of me. But the shoulder knock was sportsmanlike: celebratory and chummy. It made me feel like we were on the same team. She seemed to earnestly be commending me. But for what exactly?
Ana always made it appear like she looked down on actors, the whole Hollywood scene. She earned money working in the industry, but otherwise declared that she was far above it intellectually. She may have been idealistic long ago, but when her husband left her, she’d abandoned any investment in Hollywood mythology so she could write the whole thing off as “stupid.”
I hadn’t considered that underneath her bravado was a feeling of weakness, loss, the fear that she was less than. I never imagined she might still be secretly smitten with celebrity. She was rejecting that world before it rejected her again. But that didn’t mean she didn’t secretly want to live there.