“You don’t have to explain it. It’s fine.”
He could see that Maddy needed him. Her relationship with his mother had become dysfunctional; as soon as a client began keeping secrets from her manager, it was over. She obviously had no particular loyalty to Nancy Watson-Eckstein, either, and he guessed that she had chosen her because Bridget told her to. He thought of the Frank Sinatra song “Nice ’n’ Easy.” You could learn a lot about agenting from Sinatra.
“You mean you’ll do it?” she said. “Even though I’m not a client?”
“Absolutely.”
“How come you haven’t called me since you moved to L.A.?”
“I thought you were happy with Bridget. I didn’t want to bother you.”
She thought about the night of Bridget’s party, when she’d had that long talk with Steven, and she remembered what she had seen upstairs in the room. It came back to her, how shocked she had been, how the sex had changed the way she saw Zack. “I have to tell you something. You know that dinner your mother threw in Utah? I saw something kind of weird that night.”
“My mother’s utter phoniness and ruthless championing of her own causes?”
“I saw you having sex. I couldn’t find the bathroom.”
She waited for him to apologize, or get embarrassed, but he just said, “Annabel? Too bad you didn’t get to meet her. She had a documentary in the festival on consent.”
“Why didn’t you lock the door?”
“I thought she did. I’m sorry you had to see it, but it doesn’t change anything about how I work. I still feel that I could do excellent things for your career.”
She thought back to how Bridget had encouraged her to leave Wilmington, when she could have defended her presence to Steven, made him understand why she had made the trip. Bridget was a woman but she hadn’t been on Maddy’s side. She remembered how, when she’d called to say she was uncomfortable with the idea of doing Faye, Bridget had sided with Steven immediately. She’d said Faye was comedic, wink-wink, her lines filled with wordplay and double entendre. She’d said “entendre” with a bad French accent. Maddy had allowed Bridget to convince her, because then she could tell herself it was good for her career, could tell herself she was doing it for her own good and not Steven’s. But Bridget probably wanted Maddy only because Neil Finneran did.
She had never been convinced that Bridget cared about her career. Even at the beginning, there were signs. Freda Jansons. But Maddy had been moony over Bridget because of her power, and she’d believed that Bridget was doing her a favor by representing her. It had been as though she worked for Bridget and not the other way around. This feeling had continued past the point when it made any sense.
The two had never really clicked. All the period dramas, it wasn’t just that Bridget didn’t get them. She didn’t like them. Lately all Bridget had been was a fifteen percent bill on top of the ten percent that went to Original Talent.
When Maddy had been sitting by the fountain earlier that day, it hadn’t occurred to her to call Bridget about Lane Cromwell’s life rights, or even about her story. Maddy had known that Bridget would be bored by it. It was too highbrow, and the adaptation would be way longer than eighty-five minutes. Zack had been the person who came to mind. Almost as though he already worked for her.
“Zack?” she said on the phone.
“I’m still here,” he said.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Bridget was in the car when the email came through: “Dear Bridget, I have decided to seek new management. I’ve been wanting to do this for some time. I never felt you had my best interests at heart. I have already notified Nancy Watson-Eckstein as well. From now on I’ll be working with Zack at BHA. Thank you for everything you have done for me. —Maddy.”
Bridget read it at a stoplight on Avenue of the Stars and cast her device on the passenger seat. What the fuck? Maddy owed her entire career to her. You built them up and then they forgot how it happened.
Maddy was making a mistake. Bridget had been a good representative to her, steered the most appropriate work her way. If clients knew half the things said about them behind their backs, the things good reps withheld, they would have to institutionalize themselves. Maddy didn’t realize that some producers saw her as strained. Inaccessible. Forced. Snobbish. Bridget had protected her from all of this.
If Maddy thought Bridget had been neglectful, she was wrong. She had introduced her to her husband, for one. Maddy didn’t know how many strings Bridget had pulled for her. The guest spot on Jen. The psychological thriller right after she moved to L.A., so Maddy would feel confident in her ability to book. She’d needed that, just before Husbandry.
And now Maddy was on top, but there was no gratitude. Bridget had believed The Hall Surprise would be good for Maddy. Maddy didn’t get that today’s brightest stars went from big-budget to indie and back dozens of times.
Clearly, she was falling apart. When entertainers began firing their representatives for no good reason, it was usually an indication of a precarious mental state. Bridget hoped Maddy wouldn’t do something stupid and leave the marriage, abandon everything she had built with Steven. Bridget hadn’t liked what she had seen in Wilmington, the desperation, all brought on by boredom because Maddy wasn’t working.
Bridget was furious that Zack had poached her. He’d been selling himself to Maddy from the start. It was personal for him. He had seen her first, he had said. So what? Bridget had a project for her. A lifetime’s worth of work. Zack had nothing.
She pressed the button on the phone and dialed. “Zack Ostrow’s office,” said Natalie. Bridget had met her once when she went to pick up Zack at the office, a pretty Jewish girl with Japanese-straightened hair.
“It’s Bridget,” she said.
“Hi, Bridget,” said Natalie, betraying nothing. A good assistant always acted in the dark. “Let me see if I can get him.”
The phone went silent for several long seconds, and Bridget prepared her speech. She would remind him of the sacrifices she had made so she could be a manager and a mother at the same time. The business dinners she’d skipped for those excruciatingly boring parent-teacher conferences, the trips she hadn’t gone on, the promotions that had taken years longer than they should have. As his mother, she wanted him to be aggressive, it would make him a good agent, but he had been wrong to pursue one of her clients.
“I couldn’t get him,” said Natalie. “Can he return?” Never before had the girl spoken these words to Bridget. He always took her calls.
“I know he’ll take this. Try again.”
“Just one moment,” Natalie said, and Bridget detected a hardening of tone.
She was driving faster now, conscious of the trees passing, the seconds going by. She had been the agent on the other side of this call hundreds of times and could see the scene playing out: Natalie was reporting to Zack that Bridget wanted her to ask again. And what was he saying to Natalie in response? What words were being spoken during the silence? Was he wrapping up another call and stalling for time?
He was challenging her now, not to lose her cool. She had taught him to play Scrabble when he was about eight, and on vacations they would take a travel set. Back then she could make up words, and because he was so young, all he could do was believe her. She would devise long, complicated combinations of vowels and consonants to score bingos again and again, but by the time he was twelve or so, he’d begun packing a dictionary. From then on, he’d challenged her. Half the time she was right but the other half she was wrong, and she could still see his desperate, hopeful face as he thumbed through the pages, and she could always tell the result by his expression. Sometimes he didn’t want to believe it; he would flip the page back and forth as though he had missed something, as though there was an entire colony of words between BI- and BIB-.