The Clasp (16 page)

I
t was the driver's first day on the job. The guy took forever to find Nathaniel's house, then they hit traffic, and then, for some reason Nathaniel could not fathom, he absolutely refused to turn into the Soho House parking garage. Instead, he let Nathaniel off outside an office complex across the street. Nathaniel checked his phone. No time to argue. By the time he made his way up the marble stairs of the club, trying to play down his panic in front of the maître d', Lauren was waiting, seated by a shallow lake of lily pads.

“I'm sorry.” He was sweating.

“No biggie.” She jovially lifted her phone as proof.

She ordered the salmon with quinoa, an unsweetened iced tea, and the check.

“I'm the one who's sorry,” she explained. “I would stay here all afternoon but I have to be back at the office by two.”

As if that was something Nathaniel would have wanted, to burn away the afternoon like it was haze over the valley. Pilot season, a debutante ball for pitches, had just begun. Lauren was a
gatekeeper, a junior development executive that led to a studio that led to a network that led to fame and fortune. He didn't like her assuming he had no other obligations.

“Okay.” Nathaniel inhaled. “So basically the show would go like this: Instead of there being one thing off-balance, where the cop is a psychic, the lawyer is a serial killer, or the teacher is, like, totally unqualified to teach . . . Instead of that, everything's off. No one is special. Everyone's a mess. The series would be called
Pretenders
. Like
Heroes
. But good.”

He waited for a reaction greater than a nod.

“It's interesting,” said Lauren, the jury still out on her sincerity. No, it wasn't, not really. But good for him if she thought so. Lauren was about eight years older than him. No small part of him wondered if she took this meeting because she might like to sleep with him. Near-forty single women in Los Angeles could be terrifying creatures.

“I like the idea of fake superheroes,” she mused, “but you'd have to find a way to propel it through the arc of a series.”

“Totally.” He laughed, hard.

The laughing was a real problem. He had no idea this much fake laughter was going to be required to get by in Los Angeles. Someone really should have said something. The thing was Nathaniel was normally so
good
at it. But he had been thrown by a weekend of seeing those who once knew him best, of letting his vocabulary out of its cage (penitentiary, immurement, hoosegow). He was off his game.

His phone buzzed, another cheerful text waiting to be unlocked. Today was his birthday. He was born at 12:47 p.m., information readily available to him because a girl he used to sleep with made him find out so she could “do his chart.” He would become thirty over the course of this very lunch. Maybe if Lauren knew this, she would just give him a pilot. Everyone else and
their mother had one. Literally. He knew a guy who had just sold a “moving back in with mom” show cowritten
with his mother
.

What could he do tonight that wouldn't be lame? He was too old to care about this stuff. Recently he had spotted a patch of white whiskers along his jaw—weeds in need of daily whacking. The other week, worried about his heart and unable to sleep, he bought an electric tension-reducing pillow shaped like a banana. But he could tell from the way he woke up, head-butting the pillow, that he wasn't using it correctly.

“What kind of pillow is so complicated you're not using it right?” Percy laughed.

His phone buzzed again.

Nathaniel left it in the shadow of an untouched basket of flatbread. That way Lauren might think he was professionally in demand. He would use any prop he could to get what he wanted, especially now that he was too old to be granted the “genius” label just for completing a project.

“Do you need to get that?” she asked.

Nathaniel pretended to scan for a professional emergency.

“No.” He dismissed the screen. “It can wait.”

“Mr. Popular.” She grinned. “You're blowing up.”

She had a good, wide smile. Los Angeles had its faults, metaphorical and geophysical, but it was not a malicious place. People were
nice
here. Hollywood was the grade school teacher who started you off with an “A” until you failed. New York was the one who gave you an “F” until you proved you deserved better.

“The girl version of your show is ‘secret royalty.'” Lauren leaned back in her chair. “It's how we women view princesses.”

We women
. The People's Republic of Labia.

“According to the movies,” she continued, “there's always some valid reason to hide being heir to the throne of a small country.
That's our secret power, that men can't tell what we look like when our hair is in a ponytail.”

“Surely that's not your only secret power.”

“Sorry?”

“I think ponytails are hot.”

Lauren smiled into her plate, twisting her hair back behind her ears.

“Ponytails are like mug handles,” he kept going, “you gotta have something to hold on to. Like reins.”

She stopped touching her hair.

“I don't mean that in a rapey way.”

“I know.”

“Because I don't think rape jokes are funny.”

“You're safe. I didn't think you were making a rape joke.”

“Except that now we're both thinking about rape.”

“Are we?”

She put her hands in her lap.

“I do like the idea of a show with a female empowerment element guiding it.” She was practically talking to herself now.

“There would be an element to be guided, for sure. Not, like, forcefully.”

Was he incapable of going five minutes without making a rape reference?

“You need to think about the week-to-week engine. Think about what they want. Do they want to be normal? Do they want to help one another or destroy one another?”

“Well, they don't want the same thing each week. That's part of the realism.”

“That's good, I like that.” She nodded and halved a piece of salmon.

No one in Lauren's position wanted to be shortsighted, the
one who couldn't spot potential. Lauren spent her days throwing half-cooked noodles at the studio wall, waiting to see what stuck. All Nathaniel wanted was to be a noodle.

“Actually, I suppose the most important question is: What's the love interest?”

“I'm not sure. These characters aren't manufacturing their talents to get laid.”

“Why not?”

“Because then you have to resolve it and once you scratch that itch, an audience loses interest. Guy A and Gal B finally get together and the series suffers. I'm not saying this as a writer, I'm saying this as a person who watched too much TV as a kid.”

Nathaniel put his hand on his heart. He looked as nonthreateningly into Lauren's eyes as possible. She laughed, fake-choking on her fish.

He could feel his authority bubble toward the surface. “Sexual tension is like putting a gun in the first act.”

“I can't stand that sex-and-violence mix.”

“It's Chekhov . . .”

“Oh!” Lauren corrected herself. “I didn't realize he wrote crime fiction.”

“He did a little,” he heard himself say.

This was the price of his life out here: have no balls now in the hopes of having the biggest swinging dick in the room later.

“I like it.” Lauren picked up her phone. “I'm sorry this is so rude but I just have to tell these people I'm running late.”

“No problem.”

Nathaniel gestured that he was going to the bathroom. Lauren nodded. He went inside, where a dark hall covered in Polaroids was, counterintuitively, home to the floor's only steps. Nathaniel nearly tripped on the way down. They had one of these photo booths at Caroline and Felix's wedding, too. Grey and Paul had
dragged him in against his will, made him wear Mardi Gras beads. He examined the Polaroids as if they were paintings in a museum. He dawdled as long as he could. By the time he returned to the table, he was prepared for her to dismiss his pitch as bearing a smidge too much of a resemblance to
Uncle Vanya
.

“Hey. Right. So I like it. I like how sweeping it is. And you clearly have the nuance down, which is the thing. But the thing is . . .”

Had they not just established that the role of The Thing would be played by The Nuance?

“It's all in the execution.”

Her noncommittal enthusiasm frightened him. And not in the “die by encouragement” sense but in the “on spec” sense. Were there two more dreaded words in the English language? Dear Lord in Heaven, just give him a blurb on
Deadline
and let him go. He was losing the pert feeling in his face.

“You know how it is.” Lauren shrugged, already getting her parking validated in her mind.

Lauren's last program to make it on the air had been the short-lived
Nailed It
, about a manicurist and a carpenter who date. He wasn't exactly applying to Harvard here. A fact that had zero bearing on how much he longed for her approval.

“I got this.” She threw her corporate card inside a padded envelope.

A waiter materialized and removed it.

Lauren did not want to fuck Nathaniel, not even for sport.

“Listen, you know we all adore your writing—”

What could she possibly have read of his?

“—but the best thing for you is to work on something on spec. Do you have a pen I can steal? They forgot a pen.”

She looked over her shoulder. Nathaniel dug in his pocket and gave her one. She signed like a doctor. He didn't think she meant
actually
steal the pen but then she dropped it in her bag, got up, and encouraged him to “stay up here as long as you'd like.” Again with the nothing-better-to-do implying.

“Thanks,” Nathaniel deadpanned, “I feel like the hooker you just left in your hotel room.”

Lauren laughed as hard as she had the whole lunch, throwing her head back.

“You are the best.” She looked like she might hurt herself.

Nathaniel circled around the balcony and sat in an upholstered chair, safe from view. He didn't feel like ordering a car yet. He turned off his phone for a moment of quiet birthday contemplation. He was surrounded by glass. Glass coffee table, glass partition, glass windshields, glass city. Thirty. Thirty and what had he accomplished? A few articles here and there, buried deep within websites read exclusively by people who didn't matter and couldn't help him.
Dude Move
. The headline of his obituary if he didn't get another gig. He leaned forward. It was a clear day and the city stretched for miles, buildings that ran straight into the mountains, interrupted by the occasional “for your consideration” billboard. Symmetrical rows of palm trees that resembled the rigor mortis tails of giant poodles, buried snout-first in the ground.

He wanted to go to a party tonight, yet he was sick of attending parties. Room after room filled with people for whom nothing in the world was a big deal, who only mustered enthusiasm for the retro joys of their own childhoods—board games, astronaut ice cream, middle school dance moves. It kept them safe from the slings of solipsism because hey—they weren't obsessed with themselves
now
, they were obsessed with themselves
then
. Totally different. All these fucking writers who were offered deals just for knowing the right people. Nathaniel was weary of the fight, of
convincing himself that writing thirty pages of dialogue was better than writing thirty pages of anything else, of being coaxed into that mind-set and rejected upon arrival. He was sick of being on the wrong part of the lawn or at the wrong party altogether when Jack Nicholson—Jack fucking Nicholson—showed up and lent his hat to Bean.

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