I was fifteen and Stephanie twenty-three when she published the first book in her fiction trilogy. I remember stealing my mother’s copy from her nightstand while she was out of the house, memorizing the page number after each reading because if I folded a corner, Mom would know I had been reading a book with a lot of sex in it and ew, ew, ew. Stephanie’s author picture was a stunningly perfect glamour shot, with lipstick, honking diamond studs in her ears, and a dazzling smile. Her bio was terrifically cosmopolitan: Stephanie Simmons lives on the Upper East Side (Not in New York! Not in Manhattan! On the Upper East Side.) with her dearly beloved collection of Jimmy Choos. The wit of her! The beauty! Stephanie Simmons is when I found my vagina, I once joked to a reporter who asked me how it felt to have her take me under her wing. Stephanie tweeted a link to the interview twice. She loved how much I adored her, and that turned out to be the root of all our problems.
Living with Steph and Vince, I couldn’t help but notice I played a role for Stephanie not unlike the one Vince had taken on. She had a tendency to gravitate toward people who were below her station in life, to build you up to a certain point but never too high. She did not react well as I started to close the gap between us. She became needy, suffocating, jealous. Why couldn’t she host the fourth hour of the Today show with me? Why couldn’t I bring her as my date to the Glamour Women of the Year Awards? She could keep Vince under her thumb to a certain extent, but she didn’t have the same jurisdiction over me, and she started to resent me for it.
Steph clings to the fact that Vince chose her before the show was even a twinkle in Jesse’s eye, but she had two books published before she got married, and one movie based on the novel by Stephanie Simmons already made. She may not have been movie-star recognizable when she met Vince, but clearly, he took in her clothes, her jewelry, and her doorman apartment on the Upper East Side and fell in love with her lifestyle. I do believe he fell in love with her next. But marrying someone who falls for what you have first and who you are after does not a healthy marriage make.
So, yeah, Vince is sort of scummy for that. But Stephanie isn’t off the hook either. She knew what she was getting herself into when she married a guy like Vince, and she still registered for all the crystal stemware from Scully & Scully anyway, because she liked the idea of a trophy husband. And Vince is the quintessential trophy husband—a little skinny-fat—but this is New York, not L.A., and it is nothing those eyes won’t make you forget. Had he been too ripped, a certain grassroots rumor might have picked up more steam, which is that Vince and Stephanie are covering for each other in a Will and Jada Pinkett Smith–esque arrangement, if you know what I mean.
It’s hard to feel bad for either one of them and it’s hard not to feel bad for both of them. It depends on the day. Throughout that day, leading up to Stephanie’s birthday dinner, I had been firmly in Vince’s camp. He had waited on us hand and foot from the moment we woke up, starting with a heavenly batch of homemade blueberry ricotta pancakes served to us in bed, but nothing could lift Stephanie’s spirits. Stephanie suffers from a sort of dysmorphia when it comes to her success, and good luck to anyone who attempts to convince her that her talent and tenacity have been recognized. Clearly, Vince sensed my exasperation with her, and that’s why he felt emboldened to make that gesture, to break the cardinal rule of Goal Diggers by mouthing Crazy. I crossed party lines again in that moment, over to Stephanie’s side, as I watched Vince wash his white Le Creuset pans that his wife bought him in the beautiful kitchen his wife paid for. I may be engaged to a woman but I know this much to be true about hetero relationships, and that is that men who call women crazy are always the men who have first pushed them to the brink.
“I’m listening,” I told Steph, and the gratitude in her smile made me look away in secondhand embarrassment. The worst part about getting old has to be asking people younger than you for their help. God, I pray that will never be me.
“Do you know the highest-rated episode of reality TV of all time?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Talk shows don’t count, right?”
“Don’t count.”
“What about that WWE shit?”
“This tied WWE Raw.”
“Holy shit.” I laughed, genuinely intrigued. “What was it?”
“The Hills. Season three premiere. ‘You Know What You Did.’?”
I instantly saw Lauren Conrad in my mind, cast red by West Hollywood lights, berating Heidi Montag, You know why I’m mad at you. You know what you did! “I remember it,” I said.
“Of course you do. Show me a woman under the age of thirty-five who doesn’t remember the Lauren and Heidi feud. The Lauren and Heidi feud was a thing of beauty. So was the rivalry between Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Female aggression is curtailed, and therefore taboo, and therefore ratings gold. Did you know that toddler girls are just as inclined to roughhouse as boys, but we teach them to blunt those instincts?” She sees the recognition on my face and says, “Yeah.” I was thinking about Kelly and me: biting, scratching, strands of her hair in my hand, from root to split end.
“We learn to channel our aggression passively from a young age,” she shrugged, as though this were old news, “and that’s why woman-to-woman combat is spectator sport. Women have to get creative when we fight. We’re professionals. No wonder people line up to see us do our thing.”
“Jen and I fight,” I point out.
“But you’ve always fought. There’s no room for treachery when you’ve never gotten along. Viewers don’t want a fight, they want a betrayal.”
“And how do we give them that?”
“We pull a Lauren and Heidi.” She stole my glass of wine and took a walloping gulp. “I’ll even let you be Lauren Conrad. I’ll be the heel,” she said through that puckering face we all make when we drink something too cold too fast. Stars, they’re just like us.
The fight, Stephanie said, had to be serious enough that viewers wouldn’t accuse us of being petty, wouldn’t tell us in the comments on our Instagram posts to put our big girl panties on and sort it out. (If birth control doesn’t give her a stroke at thirty-five, it will be a grown woman in Minnesota telling Stephanie how to conduct herself using the language of a kiddie diddler.) The fight also couldn’t be so irreparable that we wouldn’t reconcile in time for the Morocco trip. We would end the season in Morocco, she promised. Nothing we were doing was ever meant to be permanent.
The heart of this serious-but-not-irreparable fight would be this: that Stephanie had come to me and asked me to push her book on Rihanna, with the thought that she was perfect to play her in the film adaptation should the rights be optioned. She was working on a new book about her childhood, opening up about some things she’d wanted to talk about for a long time. What things? I had asked, intrigued, but also feeling a little queasy. I could tell by the look on her face she was not talking about happy childhood memories.
“Just some stuff I went through when I was young,” she’d said, glancing at Vince furtively. “But when I ask you to push it on your new star client, you say you aren’t comfortable doing that, and I flip out. I claim you owe me.” Stephanie lowered her eyes sadly. “I’m going to look crazy. But,” she raised her shoulders and thinned her lips, “if Jesse finds out we’re fighting, she’ll have to ask me back next season to see it all play out. And I’d rather be hated for a few months than fast-forwarded.”
“Fuck that guy,” I said, meaning the writer at New York mag who had taken to calling Stephanie Sleptanie in his recaps of season three. But suddenly, as if her fear were an app with a share feature, I felt it too. There was a very strong likelihood that my closest ally on the show would not be asked back. She had been a bore to film last season. Marc had made that crack about timing his Ritalin dosage to Stephanie scenes, and Lisa was always coming at Stephanie’s face with a Starbucks napkin in hand, calling her Miss New York, not kindly.