All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (6 page)

But then she sees Josephine, Claire, and Alexis seated at a table near the back, waving frantically to catch her attention, and locates the necessary stamina required to pin a grin on her face and shove her way through the crowd. Josephine—the queen of the evening, the beloved birthday girl, the celebrated screenwriter—sits at the head of the table, slurping at a crab leg with eyes closed in pleasure. There is a pile of presents by her feet—oh God, Margaret forgot a present! A bottle of expensive-looking champagne is cooling in an ice bucket, and a heaping platter of raw seafood dominates the center of the table. It looks like the entire Pacific Ocean has been emptied onto the plate.

“Happy thirtieth,” Margaret says, reaching down to bestow a parched air kiss on Josephine’s moisturized cheek. “Sorry I’m late, but, you know. Traffic.” From across the table Claire kisses her fingers and waves them through the air, magic fairy pixie dust of love sprinkled from her tiny hands, the pale fingers still carelessly crested with blue specks of paint from her art studio. Alexis merely grunts, too busy dismantling a lobster claw with a pair of stainless steel pliers and scattering bits of its flesh across her lap.

“This really is so barbaric,” Alexis complains, throwing down the shell. “Why did we order this, again? I’m not sure I like to be so hands-on with my dinner’s demise.”

“Oh, don’t be such a grump,” says Josephine, who—God bless her—is blithely wearing an African-print headwrap with her black cocktail dress and doesn’t look the least bit ridiculous. Margaret’s old grad school friend radiates Pan-Ethnic Urban Goddess: Her toffee skin shiny and plump, she oozes comfort and well-being and for a half second Margaret hates her for that. Josephine pushes a dish of green liquid toward Alexis as she scoots over to make room for Margaret. “Try the wasabi dipping sauce.”

“I’m allowed to be a grump,” says Alexis. Her thick black bangs fall over her eyes, which are makeup-free and puffy from lack of sleep: Alexis thrives on a state of near exhaustion and grows jumpy and even more irritable when not under extreme stress. “I had a dismal day on set. My DP got sent to rehab and the record label slashed the budget in half and now the singer refuses to wear the pink Victorian wig she said she wanted to wear just last week. Remind me why I haven’t quit directing music videos yet?”

Margaret struggles to sympathize but can only muster a small shake of her head. “Because you get paid ten thousand dollars a day to do it,” she says, hoping that this doesn’t come across quite as bitter as it feels rolling off her tongue. When she met Alexis, three years ago, after Alexis directed the no-budget independent film Josephine had written (the film that had, in fact, ended up going to Sundance and jump-starting both their careers), Alexis and her then roommate Claire were so broke they’d been sharing a
studio
apartment. How had things changed so quickly?

“Ouch,” says Alexis. “And yet. So true.”

Josephine pushes the tray of seafood toward Margaret. “Oyster?” she asks. “Japanese.”

“Oh, no,” Margaret says, sizing up the seafood pile and doing some mental addition about its cost. “I’m not that hungry. I’m just going to have a salad.” She eyeballs the bottle of champagne as Claire pours her a glass; a bottle of Dom Pérignon’s got to be, what, eighty dollars? A hundred? Surely they won’t expect her to share the bill for that since, after all, she didn’t order it. But just one teensy glass would really hit the spot.

A waiter materializes behind her and silently hands her a menu. It lists only three salads; the cheapest, microgreens with anchovy foam, is $18. Dismayed, Margaret scans the menu, but the only item any cheaper is a side dish of mashed potatoes for $13, which, regardless of its ludicrous price ($13 for potatoes?), she would simply look silly ordering as her main course.

“The microgreens, please,” she tells the waiter. “And that’s it.” Margaret sees him glance at her, size her up, and write her off as just another anorexic actress picking at lettuce. Margaret wants to explain to him,
I don’t have an eating disorder, really; I’m just on a budget!
but he’s already turned on his heel and vanished. The smell of roasting salmon from the kitchen makes Margaret’s stomach gurgle loudly—the only thing she’s eaten today is mac-n-cheese from a box—and she resists the urge to gobble down the forbidden lobster tails. Instead, she takes a dinner roll and slathers it thickly with butter.

Claire, who needs a booster seat to see over the pile of discarded oyster shells, says something no one can hear over the blaring electronica sound track. She has cropped her blond hair into a Mia Farrow pixie, exposing tiny shell-like ears hung with oversized gold chandelier earrings, which Margaret knows were purchased from the proceeds of Claire’s last solo art show; she’d sold one of her photographs—a full-sized self-portrait of herself naked except for leather chaps, titled
Hairless Claire
—to the pop star Bobby Masterston. Margaret tries not to stare at the earrings, or at Josephine’s Balenciaga purse or Alexis’s cashmere hoodie. She tries not to care—she knows perfectly well that she shouldn’t care, that doing so is just succumbing to an advertising-driven culture of consumption, and why should it really matter whether the dress she’s wearing has a designer label or whether the car she’s driving has leather seats, as long as she’s attired and gets where she needs to be? Isn’t that the whole
point
of everything she’s been writing? But the bitter realization is that Margaret
does
care. She cares when she’s invited over to Alexis’s new house, a gorgeous midcentury oasis with an ovoid swimming pool and views all the way to Santa Monica, whereas her own home is a sweltering studio apartment in a concrete-block building that smells of mold and cat urine. She cares when her friends go on two-week vacations at four-star yoga retreats in Bali, while she can’t even scrape up enough cash to make it across the border to Rosarito Beach. She cares about her friends’ increasingly expensive wardrobes, their automobiles, their furniture, their stereo systems, and, most of all, their enviable professional successes.

It was easy, initially, to pretend that all the people in their social group were equals. Struggling artists, writers, filmmakers, actors, everyone in their mid-twenties: creative talents with big goals and small budgets. Margaret, as the impoverished editor of her own magazine, had felt that she was among peers. But at some point their paths diverged, and as they came up against their thirties her friends had started to make real money—selling screenplays, directing films and music videos, holding art openings—whereas she was still on a yard-sale budget. It was easier, when she was with Bart, to ignore the financial gap between them: Bart was also starting to make money, lots of money, and he insisted on paying for Margaret on those occasions when she balked at $15 martinis, and on anteing up more than his half (specifically, his 85 percent) for the charming little Spanish bungalow they were renting in Los Feliz. But now he’s gone, and so is the bungalow and so are the martinis, and what has replaced them in the last four months is the credit card debt that compounds daily. And though Margaret had thought she was just paces behind her friends, about to catch up any day, now she knows that she is miles behind. Maybe not even in the race.

Claire is still speaking in her soft little feather voice, but Margaret can’t understand a word she’s saying. Josephine cups her hand to her own plump lobe. “We can’t hear you, honey,” she shouts. “Speak up.”

Claire cranes her neck and speaks louder. A few of her words drift over the music “…Margaret know…celebrating…news about Josephine’s mppffh…?”

Margaret turns to Josephine for translation, but Josephine is looking down at her plate, waving her hand vaguely. “It’s nothing,” Josephine says. “Nothing’s signed yet. It’s all hot air.” Her elusiveness is alarming; Margaret does not like to be the only person at the table who doesn’t know what everyone is talking about.

Across the table, Alexis leans over and shouts, “Josephine’s new screenplay was bought by Disney. They see it as a vehicle for Ysabelle van Lumis. Impressive, right?”

Claire, gingerly pinching a limp pink shrimp by its tail as it drips cocktail sauce, looks up with a horrified expression on her face and stares bullets at Alexis. Josephine coughs, and under the table Margaret feels a shoe graze her shin en route to Alexis’s. “Ouch,” Alexis says. “That hurt.”

“What?” says Margaret, growing increasingly concerned.

“Nothing,” says Josephine.

“Oh, come on,” says Margaret, looking around the table and trying to interpret the stricken looks on her friends’ faces. “You know that I already know Ysabelle van Lumis is going to be in
Thruster
with Bart. You don’t have to avoid mentioning his name with me. I’m not
that
fragile.”

There is an awkward silence, and no one looks directly at Margaret. She peers at Alexis, the most likely person to give it to her straight. “Is he dating her? Ysabelle van fucking Lumis?”

Alexis leans in, her brows crumpled, and sighs. “Well, they were seen holding hands during dinner at the Ivy last week. ‘Canoodling,’ according to, well, a certain celebrity magazine whose name we shall not speak for your sake. So read into that what you will.”

Margaret feels a peculiar twisting somewhere around her esophagus. She’s not sure which is worse—the knowledge that her friends (and anyone else reading
Us Weekly
) now know more about Bart, the man she lived with for well over three years, than she does herself or the intimation that her ex-boyfriend appears to have bounced back from their breakup so quickly (and with a bona fide movie star, no less!), whereas she has yet to delete his picture from her computer’s screen saver.

“It’s just a rumor,” Josephine says soothingly. “I mean, come on. You know how full of shit those tabloids are. Hand-holding means nothing these days, anyway.”

Margaret knows that hand-holding is not, in fact, nothing, but right this moment she knows that she can decide between feeling even worse than she already does by imagining her ex-boyfriend mid-coitus with a cream-faced underaged starlet, or having another glass of champagne. She decides she would rather have the champagne. She swallows her doubts, tilts the glass back, and lets the last of the bubbles tickle their way along her throat. Josephine quickly refills her flute.

“Tell me what your screenplay is about,” Margaret says, changing the subject.

Josephine cocks her head, puts a finger to her chin, and strikes a pose. “Log line: High-concept teen romance. A modern adaptation of
Wuthering Heights
in the milieu of a Laguna Beach teen beauty pageant.” She looks at Margaret and wrinkles her nose. “Really, it’s the kind of trash you’re going to eviscerate in
Snatch.
”

The entrées arrive at this opportune moment, giving Margaret a chance to gather herself. She looks down at her plate, where a mountain of shrubbery floats on a fishy-smelling pool of foam. The aroma of her friend’s entrées—mounds of sea bass smothered in potato-olive puree, Madeira-soaked steaks still bleeding on the plate—makes her feel anemic.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that to you,” she mutters, feeling vaguely ashamed. This isn’t exactly true—she would do that. She’s done it before, much to the detriment of her relationship with Bart. Perhaps now she’ll be wise enough to think twice before she does a critical review of one of her friend’s projects. But, of course, she won’t have the opportunity anymore, will she?

Damn Stuart Gelkind. For more than a year he strung her along, promising her that
Snatch
was going to be the linchpin in the new alternative-publishing empire he was starting, the edgy female title that would sit on the magazine stands along with
Mother
(his planned eco-activism magazine) and
AMP
(his magazine devoted to unsigned indie bands) and
New Sprout
(the raw-foods title). He was going to purchase
Snatch
for a sum that seemed, to Margaret, breathtakingly large—$425,000, plus options! Together, they were going to turn
Snatch
into an even bigger, better magazine. Glossy covers. Full-color photos. Celebrity interviews (inspiring ones, of course, like indie-movie actresses and hip female politicians).
Paid contributors.
With Gelkind’s backing
Snatch
would be more than a struggling feminist zine run out of Margaret’s apartment; it would be a new kind of young women’s magazine, a twenty-first-century anticonsumerist
Sassy,
a real mainstream publication that inspired girls to think for themselves.

All Margaret had to do was keep
Snatch
afloat for a few more months (and then a few more, and just a few more, until more than a year had passed), build up circulation to make the publication more appealing to the investors Gelkind was lining up, and when the financing finally came through they would be ready to go. It was a sure thing, Stuart vowed, and she believed him. He was, after all, the son of conservative publishing magnate Maxwell Gelkind, and even if Stuart’s interest in this project sometimes seemed more about spiting his father than about his real commitment to independent publishing, certainly the kid had access to people with very deep pockets. The future looked very promising, and if Margaret found herself paying what otherwise would have seemed an extravagant sum for the lawyers to negotiate the acquisition agreement, and the FedEx bills for all those documents, and the direct-mail solicitations that Stuart had suggested would build up circulation, and the new copier and the glossy paper, it had seemed an unimpugnable investment.

And although Margaret had a momentary twinge about selling out, she told herself that this was a different form of capitalism than, say, her father’s predatory variety of business. She would take ads only from enlightened companies—organic food chains, indie-rock labels, cosmetics not tested on animals—and only ads that were empowering to women. She even splurged by hiring two freelance ad salespeople to focus on just that. And if, after six months, they hadn’t actually sold many ads, she consoled herself with the fact that setting a new paradigm always took time.