The First Assistant (29 page)

“Yeah. I have an appointment. I confirmed it with that English girl. I don’t know her, but I don’t like her already. There’s just something so dis-tasteful about that fake British accent. I could do a better one than that.” “It’s real,” I said. Annoyed that I felt the need to set the record

straight for Amber.

“She may be from England, Lizzie, but that cut glass thing is so affected. Trust me.” Emerald was teaching her grandmother to suck eggs here.

“So what are you coming to see Scott about?” I asked, changing the subject. I wanted to forget about Amber for at least fifteen minutes.

“Well, he’s got this really interesting proposition.” “Go on,” I said, intrigued.

Emerald leaned in close to me with an excited look on her face, her teen skin glowing and her pretty eyes filled with a vitality I hadn’t seen before. “Well, you know that I can’t even get arrested in this town at the moment, right?” she said without rancor. I looked at her blankly not wanting to make her feel bad. Scott had been doing his best to get Emerald work, but the stripping photos were still flying around the Internet and nobody wanted to hire the sullied teen dream. But her banishment wouldn’t last long. Soon someone would take pity on her and cast her in a brilliant indie flick that would go to Sundance and win all sorts of awards, I was convinced of it. She’d fly back into public consciousness having moved from girl to woman and every director in town would want to work with her, seeing her little indiscretion as a sign of hidden depths. But for now she had to wait it out. Hence the AA, I imagined; at least it was something to do besides shop.

“You’ll find something, Emerald. You’re such a talented actress.

Those photos just need a little bit of time to blow over,” I said.

Emerald nodded in agreement.

“Well, Scott does actually have something for me.” And this time she really
did
whisper. “A proposal.”

“What kind of proposal?” I asked, worried that my unscrupulous boss might be offering her some seedy deal.

“A marriage proposal!”

“Scott proposed?” I said, completely confused now. Emerald smacked my arm.

“No. Silly. He’s married. A certain actor that he represents wants a wife. I’ll give you a few hints. He’s one of the biggest action heroes in the business, he’s in his forties, he has his own production company, he’s cute, and—”

“No!” I said as the lightbulb illuminated my sleepy brain. “Why would he need to go to such lengths to get a wife? And why you?”

“Well, he’s seen my photos, of course, and apparently we met once, but I don’t remember. My partying days, you know,” she said with a ca-sual wave. “And he saw me in
Innocence
and was blown away by my performance. So, he asked Scott to arrange something.”

“So he’s in love with you and wants to marry you? Em, isn’t that a lit-tle creepy?” I grimaced.

“I don’t think he’s in love with me, silly. But he thinks a wife will improve his image, and Scott said a white wedding will certainly improve mine. And check this out. He’ll pay me two million dollars just to show up at the wedding, fifteen million if we stay married for five years, and thirty million if we make it to our tenth anniversary. Now that’s incentive not to get divorced, huh?” She grinned. I had never heard something so completely twisted in my life. And Emerald seemed to be seriously considering it.

“But Emerald, there’s something wrong there. Why does he need to buy a wife? He’s one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. It doesn’t add up.”

“There is a little hitch.” She sighed. “I have to join his church.” “His church?” I repeated.

“Well, it’s not really a church, more of a cult. But it’s a religion. It’s called HOGD.”

“There’s a religion called HOGD?”

“It stands for . . .” Emerald opened her notebook and read from the pages, “‘The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.’”

“I’ve never heard of it. It doesn’t have anything to do with Manson does it?”

“No. It’s a cult you’d approve of. It’s for smart people. Educated people. Scott said it’s been around for hundreds of years. Everyone who joins seems to have huge careers. And it’s a nice name isn’t it? Golden Dawn? So why not? And the best part is, it’s a secret!”

“You mean a secret society?”

“Exactly. So don’t tell anyone. But I have to get initiated if we get married. If I sign the contract, I’ll start going to classes right away. So I want Valentino to design my wedding dress. Will you come to the fittings with me? Oh please, Lizzie?”

“Emerald, are you sure you want to do this?” I asked seriously. “You don’t need the money and you’re so young. Why get married to someone you don’t love?”

When I said this Emerald literally guffawed. “Lizzie, you’re so naïve for a girl your age. That’s why I love you so much. Just think about it for a second. One in three marriages ends in divorce and in Hollywood it’s more like three in three. So why not have an arranged marriage with realistic goals and expectations instead of going into something blind and deluded and coming out heartbroken and jaded?”

I hated it when Emerald managed to turn the most ludicrous idea into a sensible or may I even say, wise, approach to life.

“But what about sex?” I said, cringing at the thought.

“I don’t have to sleep with him if I don’t want to. It’s in the contract. But it also stipulates that if either one of us gets caught screwing around, the deal is null and void. But I think I’d really
like
to sleep with him. I had a poster of him hanging inside my closet door since he did
Spy Mission
in ninety-five. And apparently he’s already bought me the most incredible Fred Leighton yellow diamond. It’s romantic, isn’t it?”

Well, “romantic” wasn’t what sprung to
my
mind. But maybe a little stability was exactly what Emerald needed. She had no family to speak of. Since her mother’s tell-all had come out, she’d pretty much disowned her entire family. And if the rumors were to be believed, her fiancé was

a pretty decent guy. I thought about her new approach to relationships and I realized I might benefit from taking a page from her book. Not the arranged marriage to a movie star page but the more practical approach to romance page. If I were brutally honest with myself, I’d have to admit that I hadn’t quite been feeling the enthusiasm I’d hoped to feel about my budding relationship with Jason. The sex had been fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but our everyday interaction just seemed so pedestrian. So familiar. Which obviously came from being such good friends with nothing left to discover about each other. So everything was nice and safe. The usual insecurity of a new relationship didn’t exist. Hence the fire felt a little bit more like a spark. But listening to Emerald I realized that nice and cozy in Hollywood was the exception, not the norm, and I should try to appreciate it. What I had with Jason was special. I just had to get used to a different kind of special.

“So, Emerald, do you ever find that the first time you sleep with a guy it’s great, but you maybe don’t fall in love?” I quizzed my new and unlikely relationship guru. Emerald drifted into deep contemplation, as a guru should, then shook her head violently.

“Nope. I always fall in love when I have sex. I just get over it when I come.” She sucked her raspberry Tazo.

“I see.” I nodded while trying desperately to wipe the look of mortification off my face. But as my blush faded I realized I was secretly pleased that some things never did change. Emerald still had the unerring ability to shock me into yesterday.

Seventeen

Hollywood has always been a cage . . . a cage to catch our dreams.

—John Huston

I took a deep breath and inhaled the cool, slightly salty air. The sun was glinting off the Pacific and I felt warmed from head to toe. It was only eight in the morning, but I’d been out of the guesthouse for an hour already. Scott had called and woken me up bright and early so that I could retrace his morning run with a pedometer. There were certainly some disadvantages in living a few hundred yards from your boss. He was training for a charity triathalon and had become obsessed by his speeds and distances. This morning he’d taken a new route by accident. And instead of getting in his car to retrace his steps himself, he’d spent half an hour on the phone explaining his route so that I could walk it to let him know the exact distance. I actually would have told him to fuck off, but I’d already offered to take Lachlan on a godmother outing so I figured that getting a little exercise with the jogging stroller wasn’t a bad thing.

Lately Lachlan and I had been spending Saturday mornings in each other’s company. Saturday was Scott and Lara’s one day a week without Fernanda, their Mexican nanny. This was on purpose because Lara felt if she didn’t schedule some Lachlan/Scott quality time, Scott might just stick his head into the nursery one day and realize Lachlan had gotten married and that he’d missed the wedding. But after a few weeks, Lara realized that if she didn’t schedule some Scott/Lara quality time, she’d pop her head into his study one day and find he’d married someone else. So I had taken over Saturday mornings, and I loved it. My maternal cravings were satisfied in one weekly dose, and Lara and Scott both spent all of Saturday with enormous grins on their faces.

Lara was starting to see that though she’d had a child, she couldn’t forget her other child, Scott. So she’d been shifting more of the respon-sibility of Lachlan’s everyday care onto Fernanda and stepping out with Scott more frequently. Not to say that they were bad parents. Both Lara and Scott had just slipped into the classic overprivileged parent model. Lachlan was fed a fully organic diet, attended all the best music lessons, and had the best sign language teacher money could buy. And no, he wasn’t deaf, but Lara read that teaching infants sign language allowed them a method by which to communicate before they learned to speak. A practice made risible by
Meet the Fockers,
but that only seemed to encourage Hollywood in its latest child-development crush.

“Perro!”
Lachlan squealed with delight as a man jogged by with his schnauzer. The other by-product of Lara and Scott’s renaissance was that Lachlan’s first words were in Spanish. Lara tried to assuage her guilt by saying how many people longed to be bilingual. I hated to tell her that her son wasn’t bilingual, just Mexican.

I bounced Lachlan’s stroller down the steps and crossed the road, heading toward the beach. We both loved to lie in the warm sand and roll around together until we were both completely covered in the stuff. So there I was rolling around in the sand laughing like a lunatic with a one-year-old when Jake Hudson walked up. He had perfect timing— always managing to catch me at the worst moment.

“Lizzie, congratulations! That is quite something!” he said glancing down at the sand-covered Lachlan. I was trying to pick shells and sand out of my hair when Lachlan decided that if I wasn’t going to roll in it, he’d throw it at me instead.

“Oh, he’s not mine. I’m just borrowing him,” I explained. Jake looked confused and then looked again at Lachlan.

“It actually didn’t occur to me that you might have a kid. I know you’re not that together. The congratulations are for your nomination.” “What nomination?” I said, truly perplexed. I wracked my brains.

Had I entered some contest unwittingly? Amber had probably sent my application to
Survivor
in order to get everyone to laugh at me on national television. Jake was shaking his head in disbelief, and I was getting more uncomfortable by the second. At that moment Lachlan decided he didn’t like Jake and started to scream his head off.

“Your Oscar nomination!” Jake snarled impatiently. But Lachlan was screaming so loudly I was sure I’d misunderstood Jake.

“My what?” I yelled over Lachlan.

“Lizzie, you’ve been nominated for an Oscar,” he said, as if to an id-iot. I started to laugh. Jake was such a joker.

“Lizzie,” Jake said patiently as he sat down in the sand next to me. “
Sex Addicts in Love
has been nominated for an Oscar in the best-picture category. Since you’re executive producer, that means that you, Elizabeth Miller, have been nominated for an Oscar.” I blinked a few times unable to comprehend what Jake had just said. I watched his lips continue to move but there was an odd rushing sound in my head. An Oscar? There was just no way that I could be nominated for an Academy Award. Then suddenly everything went black.

I opened my eyes to Lachlan’s laughing as he shoved sand down my shirt and Jake’s pouring a cup of cold, salty water on my face. I blinked up at Jake Hudson and had a flashback to the first time I’d met him. “What happened?” I said, dazed. “I think the sun must be too strong. Or maybe I haven’t eaten enough.”

“I looked around for a hockey puck, but I think you passed out spon-taneously this time,” he said.

“Did you say I was nominated for an Oscar?” I repeated dumbly. Jake started to laugh.

“Yes. Did you really not know? The nominations were released at seven this morning.”

“I’ve been out of the house since six-thirty and my cell phone died,” I said as I scrambled in my bag for my pointless cell.

“Welcome to the big time, baby.” Jake laughed and gave me a pat. A girl in a thong bikini walked by and Jake’s eyes followed her cheeks as they swayed down the beach.

“Lizzie, feel free to call me anytime. You know, if you need some advice on how things work or anything like that. But I’ve got to run. I’ve just seen lunch.” He winked as he nodded his head toward the thong bikini, chucked Lachlan under the chin, and jogged off after the perfect behind. I picked Lachlan up and swung him around in a circle, suddenly unable to stop giggling. It was just too weird to be true. I was an Oscar nominee? I’d never imagined in my wildest dreams that befriending Jason two years ago in the Coffee Bean would lead to an invitation to the Academy Awards. Actually, not just an invitation but a nomination, with my very own seat and ticket. I was going on my own merit, not as anyone’s date. It was too good to be true. I needed someone to confirm this information. It did cross my mind that maybe I’d just imagined the entire thing. Was it possible that I had drifted off for a second as I lay in the sand? I looked down the beach to see if I could see Jake, but there was no sign. It was just too much to take in. I unceremoniously dumped Lachlan in his stroller and then sprinted as fast as possible back to the Wagners’ house. I was barely breathing by the time I arrived at their front door. I was sublimely unfit. Though, like most of the world, I’d planned to turn over a new leaf for the new year, I had yet to really institute it. And I certainly regretted it now. I tried to ring the doorbell but was hyperventilating so badly I had to just bend over and catch my breath. Luckily