One Fifth Avenue

Shortly before Lola arrived for her appointment, Philip got a call from his agent. “Oh, these people,” the agent said.

“What’s the problem?” Philip asked. Despite his trouble with the material, he’d managed to turn in a draft of Bridesmaids Revisited the day before.

“Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing,” the agent said. “I’m giving you a heads-up. The studio wants an emergency conference call this afternoon.”

“Fuck them,” Philip said. “Sounds like a power play.”

“It’s all a power play. If anyone knew how to make a good movie these days, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

His agent hung up, and an assistant from the studio called. Then he was on hold for ten minutes, waiting for the head of the studio to get on. She had graduate degrees in both business and law, degrees that should have been irrelevant when it came to understanding the creative process, but now seemed to be the equivalent of having won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. “Philip,” she said, not apologizing for keeping him waiting, “something happened between the last draft and the current one.”

“It’s called a rewrite,” Philip said.

“We’ve lost something with the main character. She isn’t likable anymore.”

“Really?” Philip replied.

“She has no personality,” said the studio head.

“That’s because you’ve insisted I take out anything that would give her personality,” Philip replied.

“We have to think about the audience. Women are very, very judgmental. As you know. They’re harsh critics of other women.”

“That’s too bad,” Philip said. “Maybe if they weren’t, women would rule the world.”

“I’ll need another draft in two weeks. Just fix it, Philip,” she said, and hung up.

Philip called his agent. “Can I quit this project?” he asked.

“Forget your ego and just give them what they want. Then it’s their problem.”

Philip put the phone down, wondering, as he often did these days, what had happened to his courage.

His intercom buzzed. “Miss Lola Fabrikant is downstairs,” the doorman Fritz said. “Shall I send her up?”

Damn, Philip thought. In the confrontation with the studio, he’d forgotten about his appointment with the girl who’d e-mailed him requesting an interview. He’d seen ten candidates for the job, and every one had been a disappointment. This girl would likely prove another waste of time, but she was already downstairs. He’d give her ten minutes just to be polite. “Send her up,” he said.

A few minutes later, Lola Fabrikant was perched on Philip’s couch, attempting to be on her very best behavior. Philip Oakland was no longer as young as his author photo on the back cover of her tattered copy of Summer Morning, but he wasn’t old, either, and he was certainly younger than her father, who would never wear a faded black T-shirt and Adidas tennis shoes and sport hair past his earlobes. Folded up in his chair, feet on his desk, Philip alternated between tapping a pen on a pile of papers and tucking his hair behind his ears. The girl who had given Lola his e-mail had been right—Philip Oakland was hot.

“Tell me about you,” Philip said. “I want to know everything.” He was no longer in a rush to get rid of Miss Lola Fabrikant, who was not what he’d been expecting and who, after his lousy day, was more than a welcome relief, almost like the answer to his prayers.

“Have you seen my Facebook page?” she asked.

“I haven’t.”

“I tried to look you up,” she said. “But you don’t have a page.”

“Should I?”

She frowned at him as if concerned for his welfare. “Everyone has a Facebook page. How else can your friends keep up with you?”

How else indeed, he thought, finding her charming. “Do you want to show me your Facebook page?”

She tapped quickly on her iPhone and held it out to him. “That’s me in Miami.” Philip stared at a photograph of a bikini-clad Lola standing on a small boat. Was he being seduced deliberately or inadvertently, he wondered. Did it matter?

“And then there’s my bio,” she said, coming up behind him to tap once again on the small machine. “See? My favorite color: yellow. My favorite quote: ‘My way or the Henry Hudson

Highway.’ My dream honeymoon: sailing on a yacht around the Greek Islands.” She swung her long hair, and a strand touched his face. She giggled. “Sorry.”