They jokingly called theirs the Fuck Atkins Diet. All carbs all the time for the recovering junkie! Guaranteed to put color on a drug-ashened face! And how beautiful it felt to be mildly bloated, slicing heirloom tomatoes in a modular kitchen with sliding windows that gave way to Pacific infinity, smog pink sky.
Broder picked parsley and she taught him how to chop it correctly, knife like a seesaw. He picked basil for pesto, and she taught him how to crush it with a mortar and pestle. Broder liked her long, elegant nose with its flat bridge and nostril flare. The nose gave her just a hint of the non-California-native, a hint that she wasn’t born bronzed in a two-piece, shoulders to sunshine. Because all else about her appearance conformed to type: perennial tan, dirty blond hair that hung to her waist. The nose said to Broder that she was imperfect, not a goddess but a demigod. The nose said to Broder that this wasn’t a dream. The nose and the teeth.
A gardener named Jorge came twice a week and he called Broder Maestro for reasons unknown. And one morning, Broder watched Jorge gulp from a sweating can of Coors as he circled the lawn on the riding mower, and Broder imagined just licking the can, those musty-sweet drops saturating his tongue. He thought of kindly explaining that he was an addict, and she was an addict, and Jorge was working, so if Jorge didn’t mind, but instead he snipped flowers—lily of the Nile, African irises, big pink daisies that looked like windmills—and arranged them in bouquets for the kitchen island. He learned the names of the flowers from a gardening book, and he found it satisfying to repeat them aloud. It occurred to Broder that a florist was a bit like a DJ: a provider of context, a steward of taste. And he thought that in the fall, when they’d moved, as they’d discussed, to her place in Los Feliz, he could get himself a job at a small flower shop. He could be happy in that life.
22.
The shoot’s at Le Bain, the roof bar at the Standard, a favorite during Wendy’s brief nightlife phase, when there was no thrill so great as lingering among the digerati after industry events, sipping sprig-garnished cocktails and allowing men to lightly flirt before they noticed her ring, which she would wave, pretending to fan air from her face. The bar’s no longer the epicenter of Meatpacking chic, but it’s close to the office, and the Gansevoort was booked, and the Zone was ruled out for obvious reasons. Besides, you can’t argue its view of the High Line and vista of Hudson, velvet and sun-glossed, an ad unto itself.
She’s being sentimental. Wendy hasn’t spent time on set in forever, and she’d forgotten how lively these scenes can be with their walkie hum and buzzing PAs, their overall sense of cooperative urgency. In the early years of Communitiv.ly, Lillian sent Wendy to shoots as a company stooge to make sure their freelancers stayed under budget and didn’t do anything that might get them sued. Wendy wasn’t good at it—too young and timid to manifest the authority required—but she loved being there beneath the towering light rigs, among the bustling crew.
As the years passed, Wendy’s role changed, and the company’s focus shifted from TV and print to the digital sphere. These days, even when there are large-scale shoots for a project of this nature, she oversees from afar. Today’s an exception. The concept was Wendy’s idea, and Lucas insisted that her presence was important, that she must make sure her vision is accurately captured. How she might go about this remains to be seen.
Wendy swirls her coffee like it’s wine and watches the models emerge from Makeup with contoured cheekbones and halos of hairspray, musk rising off the men who cross in silent formation like hunky monks or spa-bound angels wearing robes that shine white against tan and brown skin. It feels godly to know that she’s conjured all this, these cameras and yards of electrical cable; these humans who rose before sunrise and rode in from outer boroughs for the purpose of constructing something born in Wendy’s head.
She looks for Lucas, who doesn’t appear to have arrived. Lillian, she knows, is manning the office, and she hasn’t heard from Greg since yesterday. She wants someone to talk to and share in this moment, someone like Michael who’d swoon and be impressed. She ends up back at craft service, pouring hot coffee into another cup of ice cubes. She loves this minor alchemy, watching the cubes pop and disappear, like a school science project gone inexplicably right. She’s less hungover than she worried she would be, but her head still pounds, and her legs feel heavy, and she hopes that another caffeine infusion will alleviate these symptoms.
The craft service guy says, “Round two already?”
He wears a khaki vest adorned with fishhooks, and sits in a rainbow beach chair. If Michael were here he’d suss this man’s story—dead wife, daughter with cystic fibrosis, Ninth Ward apartment destroyed in Katrina—and offer a series of compassionate nods. Michael would mention a summer spent gallivanting NOLA, and what a beautiful city it was and still is. Not a lie
