The hours were irregular and insane. Sometimes she was out all night and other times she needed to be on set at five in the morning. She had to work out enough to keep her stomach flat but not so much that her breasts got smaller. Some days she barely saw Diane, or else she was at home all afternoon lounging on the couch, doing her nails, while Diane, annoyed, tried to work on her script. When Anne tried to get back on her good side — sex being her strategy — Diane would push her away and sigh, saying, “It’s not always about that, Annie. I need you to support me on this.”
“Support you how?”
“Read the draft. Tell me what you think.”
“But I don’t know anything about character arcs and whatever,” Anne said. “I’m just a puppet.” She mimed as if her arms were held up by invisible strings. “I’m a marionette.”
“You just think it’s too much work,” Diane said.
Anne started to protest, but they both knew it was true. “I’m not much of a reader,” she said.
“It’s a script. You’re an actor. Come on.”
So Anne read it, and it was terrible. Diane, so sophisticated and well educated, turned out to be a clumsy, fumbling, primitive writer. Without a doubt, producing was exactly the right job for her, not writing. Her script was corny, the dialogue boring, and the characters unsympathetic, with nothing redeemable or exciting about them. It had all the flaws of a commercial movie and none of its virtues.
Of course, Diane walked into the room right as Anne turned the final page. Sidling up to the fridge, not making eye contact as she poured herself some iced jasmine tea, she was so transparent, so endearing.
Without thinking, Anne said, “I love you.”
Diane came over, set her glass down, and put her arms around Anne. “But not the script.”
“God, no.”
Diane snorted. “I can’t believe you won’t even pretend to like it.”
Anne was surprised. How could she? Didn’t somebody this smart know when a script was bad? She felt wetness on her shoulder, and realized Diane was crying. “Do you like it?”
“That’s not the point,” Diane said, wiping her nose on the sleeve of Anne’s T-shirt. “The point is, if you love me, you should support me.”
“By saying the script’s good when it isn’t? What would that accomplish?”
“When you love someone,” Diane said, her lips trembling, “you don’t tell them their script sucks. You give them some notes. You point to a particular detail that you do like. You say, I think it’s got potential but it’s not quite there yet. That’s what you say if you aren’t some robot or a person who was raised in a barn.”
“I’m sorry,” Anne said, taking her hand, but Diane left the house and didn’t come back that night and this was their first fight, ever.
It upset her more than she would’ve anticipated. She felt off-balance, almost nauseated, and couldn’t sleep, and the next day the makeup girl tutted and shook her head at the dark circles under her eyes. This made her mad at Diane, so instead of going back to her place after they stopped shooting, she went back to her own. She had been spending so much time at Diane’s that she’d practically forgotten she still had the little cottage. She had no stuff there anymore, not even a toothbrush, and compared to Diane’s house it was barren. The hulking villa loomed over her cottage, its emptiness both sterile and ominous. There was life in Los Feliz, people walking their dogs, crowding the parking lot at Trader Joe’s, chatting and drinking tea under the umbrellas at the Alcove Café. Anne missed all of this, and Diane most of all, and in the cottage she felt shabby and exiled.
They made up two days later. Anne invented some positive comments on the script, and Diane admitted that she was better at cajoling work out of others than doing it herself. They drank a bottle of wine, then went to bed and found each other again, newly tender. The fight had given texture to their relationship: they had admitted how much they cared, and now things were deeper, stranger, stronger.
Giving up on the script, Diane got a job at an independent production company, and they took a weekend trip to Palm Springs to celebrate. At a restaurant one night, a woman who knew Diane approached their table to say hello, and Diane said, “This is my girlfriend,” and Anne realized that it was true. She was surprised — not about being with a woman, or even about being a girlfriend. The surprising part was how much she liked it.
Shooting wrapped a week later, and now the long pause began as the pilot was edited and presented to the network. In the meantime, Anne became what Diane called “a kept woman.” She had signed a contract that forbade her from working elsewhere until a decision was reached on the show. She worked, instead, on being Diane’s girlfriend. Every day she asked her about her job, the minor details and ongoing disputes. Diane’s work stories were the world’s most boring soap opera, but Anne never let on how she felt. As always, once she started playing a part, she started being the part, finding aspects of herself that she hadn’t known were there. She could grow into it, even things that were really a stretch, like knowing which of Diane’s two bosses she was talking about; they were both named Jim, and Diane never mentioned their last names, differentiating between them only by tone — one Jim she liked, the other she despised.
Anne was good at this, and Diane responded like a plant to careful tending. She almost immediately got a promotion and gave her the credit for it, though Anne couldn’t remember giving her any advice; in fact she rarely did, instead just parroting back Diane’s own opinions.
In the middle of all this, on a Tuesday night, Adam called and invited her out to dinner. “Just you,” he said. “Tell Di it’s a work thing.”
Diane said, “Is he going to feel your tits again?”
“Hopefully not at the restaurant.”
“At least be discreet.”
“Hey,” Anne said, “whatever it takes to get ahead.”
Diane punched her arm lightly, then held her close. “Be careful,” she said.
At an expensive Italian restaurant on Melrose, Adam ordered champagne, poured it, sniffed it, so obviously and pathetically milking the suspense that Anne could barely keep from rolling her eyes. Obviously the pilot had been picked up.
He raised his glass and nodded for her to do the same. “Congratulations, beautiful,” he said. “They chose us.”
They chose me, she wanted to say, but didn’t. “That’s amazing,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
Adam narrowed his eyes. “I expected more squealing, maybe a mad dash around the restaurant, shots at the bar. What’s wrong with you?”
Anne played the dumbfounded ingénue. “I think it hasn’t sunk in yet,” she said. “I can’t even believe it. When will it run?”
“Well, hold on,” he said. “There are still more hoops to get through.”
This discussion took them through appetizers and the first bottle of champagne. By the second, they were both drunk. When Adam ordered dessert, she knew another announcement was coming.
“I’m sure you know what’s next,” he said over flourless chocolate cake. “It’s time for you to get out of your thing with Diane.”
“What? Why should I do that?”
“Until the pilot got picked up, nobody cared, but once you’re on the air, they’re going to be taking pictures of you at the grocery store. I know what you’re thinking, this is the twenty-first century, but trust me on this. I don’t want to see ‘Anne Hardwick and gal pal at Starbucks’ in Life & Style magazine. You’re a sex symbol on this show. A straight sex symbol. Also, any embarrassing trips you need to take, any doctor’s appointments, any purchases you don’t want people to know about, now is the time.”