“More like six.”
“Jen,” I say, an edge to my voice I can no longer smooth out, “six months ago I was in Miami, trying to help her get over her breakup with Sarah.”
“Okay, so, three months. Whatever.” Jen shivers, like the details of Brett’s romantic life are icky. “I don’t care.”
There is a creak and we both look to the doorway. It’s Vince, ascending the stairs.
“So how long until she’s pitching a spinoff to the network, Brett Buys the Cow?”
Jen’s face tightens. “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
It’s shameful, but hearing Jen disparage Brett for something as high school as her weight settles me ever so slightly. She’s still on your side. She still despises the same person who you despise.
“You two actually hate each other, huh?” Jason says, taking a step away from me and examining his work on my eyes. “I wasn’t sure if it was just for the show.”
I give him a sharp, stunned look. “You thought we made it up?”
“Who hates each other?” Vince wants to know, appearing in the doorway balancing three glasses of wine in his hands, mine with a straw because, lipstick. Vince is never more the doting husband than during filming season. Forget crotchless underwear or piping my nipples with whipped cream, filming is the aphrodisiac of our marriage. Somewhere along the way, Vince decided that holding my handbag on the red carpet was still the red carpet, and that was good enough for him.
“Who else?” I say, as he sets my drink in front of me. I see that he chose the glasses that his friends bought us for our wedding, monogrammed VDS: Vince and Stephanie DeMarco, assuming, naturally, that I couldn’t wait to take my deadbeat husband’s last name.
“Aw, you guys,” Vince chastises, “give Brett a break.”
One nice thing I will say about the cad I married is that he stays out of our scraps. We’ve had significant others who try to get involved when Diggers butt heads, evangelizing the more forgiving politics of brotherhood, who are viciously edited into mansplaining donkeys when the time comes. Diggers have lost their places for less, and I’ve made it very clear to Vince, his opinion doesn’t matter but it counts, it could cost us everything.
“Then you can be the one to congratulate her on her engagement when you see her tonight,” Jen says, and I realize how artfully she’s buried the lede. Because Jen didn’t come here to tell me that Brett is getting married. She came here to tell me that Brett has been invited to Lauren’s event. That the alliance is off.
Vince fumbles the pass, slopping some of Jen’s wine onto the silk rug. “She’s engaged?” He sets the glass down on my vanity and goes in search of a towel. “No shit,” he says from the bathroom. “To that . . . that same woman? What’s her name?”
“Arch,” Jen says.
“Arch?” Vince repeats, rudely, appearing in the bathroom doorway with a roll of toilet paper in his hands.
“Use a hand towel,” I snap at him, and direct my chin at the glass he’s left on my vanity. “And put a coaster under that!”
“Welcome to New York, Vince,” Jen cracks, as he disappears into the bathroom again, “we have people from lots of different cultures here. And obviously the white savior of African girls wasn’t going to marry some corn-fed blonde from Ohio.”
“You should have told me she was coming sooner,” I say to Jen, waving off Jason’s attempt to apply mascara to the falsies he’s glued to my eyelids. “I just wasted a fifty-dollar strip of lashes.”
“You’re not coming now?” Jen spits, incredulous.
“Babe,” Vince implores of me, standing in the bathroom doorway with a hurt puppy-dog look on his face. He ordered a satin Hugh Hefner playsuit for this night weeks ago, monogrammed for seventy-five dollars extra.
“I agreed not to film with her,” I remind Jen, icily. “And unlike some people, my word means something.”
Jason returns the mascara wand to its bottle in consensus.
“Fine, Steph.” Jen sets her wine on the vanity—Put down a coaster, you animal! I almost shriek. “She’s going to get the good edit, you know that, right? She’s going to Morocco to help little illiterate rape victims and she’s planning a wedding to Amal lesbian Clooney. Yvette wanted us to know so we have the opportunity to make things right with her before she tells us. Otherwise, you know what it’s going to look like? Like we’re a bunch of calculating mean girls who changed our tune when it became clear Brett was going to be everyone’s favorite this season because she’s getting married, and guess what? Suckers like to see fat chicks get married. It gives their little artery-clogged hearts hope.”
Vince sucks in a horrified breath. “Jesus, Jen.”
Jen shoots him an eviscerating look, but her face is a shameful red.
“She’s always the favorite,” I mutter, sounding so petulant I can’t stand myself.
“Listen to yourself,” Jen says, and I am shocked when her voice nearly cracks. Is she close to tears? I stare at her in wordless disbelief as she swipes the heel of her hand across her face. What is up with her tonight? “Jesse’s going to be pissed if you don’t go. Do you know what they’ll do to you in the edit room?”
Jen is not wrong about any of this, unfortunately, as it is a much more reliable characteristic of humanity that we’re happier for people in love than we are for people in the highest tax bracket. Perhaps because we need to see ourselves in our heroines, and the modest accomplishment of finding a spouse and having babies is achievable by most of the general population, Green Menace notwithstanding. Our audience in particular likes nothing more than to see unconventional people getting to partake in conventional traditions. It’s why Vince and I were so popular at first, it’s why Jesse is taking a chance on Kelly and her mixed-race, non-nuclear family, hoping for a Cheerios commercial backlash, promptly followed by a Cheerios commercial defense.
“Guys, relax,” Vince says, daringly. It takes a set of steel to chance on the r-word around two women with a combined net worth of not in your lifetime, bud, but my husband does not exactly conduct himself in a risk-averse fashion. “You’re getting way too worked up about this. Just go and tell Brett you’re happy for her and get on with it.” Not waiting for my answer, Vince peels off his T-shirt and locates the top of his pajama set. The tier-three trainer at Equinox is doing an abysmal job of taming Vince’s baby potbelly, I see. Jason pretends not to look anyway; those heart-shaped lips and that strong, scruffy jaw make up for that much.
The first time Vince ever had that effect on me, he was the bartender at a promotional event for a women’s razor blade. My friend from college worked for the PR company that represented Gillette, and she brought me as her plus-one. The event was held at a windowless warehouse in the theater district, and I remember exactly what I wore: a DVF wrap dress and a pair of nude, patent leather Manolo Blahniks. I was twenty-six and he was twenty-four, a two-year infinity. He was an aspiring actor whose biggest break to date was biting into a BLT in a Hellman’s commercial. His dark hair fell into his light eyes each time he looked down to mix up a fresh batch of the event’s signature cocktail (a Hairy Navel—haha), and every woman in the room was imagining what he would look like on top of her, with that hair in those eyes. I still get weak in the knees remembering how, at the end of the night, he beckoned for me to come closer so that he could shout into my ear (the acoustics were poor in the windowless warehouse), “Your boyfriend is an idiot.”
I made a dubious expression in an effort to play along. “But he graduated from Harvard Law top of his class.” My boyfriend didn’t graduate from Harvard Law top of his class. I didn’t have a boyfriend.