Lipstick Jungle

Myra glanced at Tony, rolled her eyes, and shrug

ged, a gesture that caused Sharline and Wendy to laugh.

“No, really,” Myra said. “It’s going great.”

“We saw that item in Page Six,” Sharline said. This item concerned Tony groping a famous starlet at an awards ceremony and getting his face slapped.

“I hate actors,” Wendy sighed.

“You,” Sharline said, pointing a finger at her, “love actors. You are known as the actor’s producer. They all adore you. And you adore them right back.”

“Sharline’s going to India,” Wendy said.

“God, I wish I could do something like that,” Myra moaned.

“You can,” Sharline said passionately. “I mean, what’s stopping you? I woke up a month ago, and I looked around, and I thought, what the hell is my life about? What am I doing? And I realized I need to live. Outside of all this. I need to get some perspective on life.”

“It’s all about that, isn’t it,” Wendy agreed. “Perspective.”

“You can come,” Sharline said.

“Oh, but she can’t. How can she, with the kids and everything?” Myra asked.

“I’ve been thinking about it, believe me,” Wendy said.

“Pretend you’re location scouting,” Sharline said.

Wendy smiled. She would never, she thought, be able to make a trip like that. But the idea of taking a trip like that . . . it was the kind of thing she’d always dreamed she’d do when she was a kid. See the world. Exotic locations . . . she quickly put the thought out of her mind.

She looked around the room, pushing her glasses back up on her nose.

“Who are we waiting for?” Myra asked.

“Victor Matrick,” Sharline said, giving Wendy a wink.

Wendy gave her a grim smile. She hated this part of her job. The agonizing moments before a screening started, when, no matter how good you thought the film was, you knew, in two hours, that you might be completely wrong, that what you thought was brilliant or funny or clear, failed, for whatever reason, to touch the audience. And then, no matter how many films you’d produced, no matter how many successes you’d had (and she’d had quite a few; possibly, she knew, more than her share), the failures hung over you like death. She knew better than to get emotionally involved with her films (that was what men insisted women did), but it was impossible to put that much work into a project unless you were emotional about it. And so, when a movie didn’t work, it was exactly as if a good friend had failed. The friend might be fucked up, they might be a complete mess and a loser, but that didn’t mean you didn’t love them and you didn’t want them to succeed.

And when they failed, when they died, for a few days afterward, she was always in a secret black hole of shame. It wasn’t the movie that had failed, it was she. She had let herself down, and all the other people involved . . .

“Oh, Wendy,” Shane always said, rolling his eyes with a disgusted sigh. “Why do you care so much? It’s only a stupid Hollywood movie.”

And she would always smile and say, “You’re right, babe.” But really, he was wrong. The key to life was that you had to care—really care—about something. You had to make a commitment to your passions . . .

Her cell phone rang. “Shane,” she whispered to the girls.

“Lucky.” Sharline nodded and smiled. Neither Sharline nor Myra had had a serious relationship in over five years, a reality that always seemed to be on the edge of their consciousness.

Wendy stood up to take the call out in the hall. The padded doors of the screening room closed silently behind her.

“Hi,” she said eagerly. It was the first time they’d spoken all day.

“Are you busy?” he asked, a little coldly, she thought. Didn’t he know she was about to start a screening? But maybe she hadn’t told him.

“Is everything okay, sweetheart?” she asked, warm and motherly.

“We have to talk,” he said.

“Are the kids okay? Nothing happened to Magda, did it?”