“What do you want to do for lunch?” Xenia said, peeking into her office. Wendy was staring down blindly at that morning’s copy of the Hollywood Reporter. Stories were circled with highlighter in order of importance: red for articles having to do with Parador and any of their projects, yellow for articles about competing projects, and green for anything else that might be of interest.
Wendy jumped. “Lunch?” she said.
“Charles Hanson canceled. So I was wondering if you wanted to order in?”
“Oh,” Wendy said. “Give me a minute.” She absentmindedly picked up the Hollywood Reporter, slowly regaining her bearings. Every time she did four hours of business like that, juggling one call after another, she always went into a kind of trance. It took her a few minutes afterward to come back down to earth. Now she did, with a thump.
She suddenly remembered Shane’s phone call.
Christ. She really had been a bitch.
Damn him, she thought, picking up her yellow pad and standing up. How dare he? Well, at least he was starting to get the message. She had been so angry about him ripping her off, she had planned to get a divorce lawyer first thing Monday morning. But then the day had started and she’d been going flat-out with work, and all she’d managed to do was to transfer all of the money out of their joint account and into her personal account. She was surprised Shane hadn’t thought of it first and done it to her. “Two hundred thousand dollars is not such a big deal,” Shane said on Monday morning when he’d finally decided to call her back.
“Excuse me?” she’d said.
“You make over three million dollars a year, Wendy,” he said, as if this were some sort of crime. “The money is a tax deduction, anyway.”
“That’s right, Shane. But I earned it!” she almost cried. “It’s up to me to decide what I want to do with it.”
Shane obviously couldn’t think of a good response, because all he said was “Fuck you,” and hung up.
The realization th
at their relationship had deteriorated to the point where they couldn’t even be civil to each other made her sick.
“Maria?” she said. Maria scurried in. “I need to find out if Charles Hanson has another deal pending somewhere. Can you call some of your assistant friends and find out?”
Maria, who was tall and willowy and sharp as a tack, nodded. In six months or so, Wendy might be able to promote her and get rid of Josh. She basically envisioned getting rid of all men at the moment. “I’d try Disney first.”
“I know just who to call,” Maria said. “Lunch?”
“Oh, I . . .” Wendy began. The phone rang.
“Shane!” Josh called, from the outer office.
Wendy felt her stomach jolt in a spasm of rage. She began to reach for the phone, but thought better of it. These arguments could not continue to go on in front of her staff. They were already getting an inkling that something was seriously wrong. They would talk, and within days, all of Splatch-Verner would know she was getting divorced.
“I’ll call him back,” she said loudly.
She stood up and grabbed her bag, walking through the outer office into the hall. “I’m going to grab a bite in the executive dining room,” she said casually. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes. If you need me, I’m on the cell.”
“You should get some fresh air,” Maria nodded.
Wendy smiled. There was no fresh air anywhere in the building. That was the problem.
She walked out to the elevators, thinking she would call Shane from her cell phone. But that was too risky as well—someone might come along and overhear what was sure to be a vicious, though short, argument. Without thinking, she got into the elevator and pressed the button for the thirty-ninth floor, the home of not only the executive dining room but the executive gym as well, which no one ever used. The elevator announced its arrival on the thirty-ninth floor with a ding, and Wendy got out.
Almost immediately, she thought about getting back into the elevator, but the doors closed quickly behind her. What was she doing? She hated the executive dining room. The thinking behind it was that it would foster casual camaraderie among Splatch-Verner executives, but Wendy always found it as terrifying as a high school cafeteria, with its not-so-subtle distinctions of rank and sex. You could insist that people were equal, but left to their own devices, human beings regressed to the cliquishness of teenagers.
The elevator door opened and two executives from the advertising department got out. They nodded at Wendy and she nodded back. Now she really was acting like a teenager. She couldn’t just stand there indecisively. She was going to have to go in.
You can do this, she said, following the two executives down the hallway. From now on, your life is going to be about taking on all kinds of new challenges.
Like eating alone, she thought bitterly. She wished she’d at least brought a script. Then she wouldn’t have to sit there by herself like a geek.
The dining room was supposed to resemble a bistro in Paris. The walls were of dark-paneled wood, the tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths. You could order salad and drinks from a waiter, but otherwise you had to go through a cafeteria line for the hot buffet, which featured some kind of chicken, a fish (usually salmon), and a roast. Wendy put her bag on an empty table in the corner by the window, and, feeling as if everyone were watching her, got into the line.
No one was watching her, of course, and the dining room wasn’t even very crowded. She picked up a wooden tray, and putting a plate on top of it, suddenly found herself indulging in one of her favorite new fantasies. What if, one of these days, she found Shane in his new, run-down walk-up apartment (which, she suspected, she was somehow paying for, although he hadn’t actually asked her for the rent money—yet) and discovered him in bed with another woman? She wouldn’t kill Shane herself, she would hire someone to do it. There was a mafia guy who had been a consultant on one of her movies two years ago, and she could easily look up his phone number without arousing suspicion. She would call the guy from a pay phone in Penn Station, and ask him to meet her at the Sbarro’s. She would also wear a wig, but it would have to be a really good wig—bad wigs stuck out. People always remembered someone in a bad wig. But what color? Blond, she thought. But not white blond. It would have to be something natural. A brownish blond, maybe . . .