“I’m going to go talk to him,” Brett said.

  “No! You can’t do that. Don’t talk to him,” I said. I didn’t want him to see me while I was drunk, tired, slightly depressed.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know . . . it’s just . . . it’s not supposed to happen this way. I want to meet him when I’m at my best.”

  “I’m just going to say hello. I’ll find out if he’s single or not.”

  Brett made his way across the room, not an easy feat at a party this crowded. He seemed to have gotten stuck, though, because he was soon talking with another group of people. I saw Subway Boy go to the bedroom, retrieve his coat, and move toward the entrance with his friends. Was he with any of them? Was one of them his boyfriend?

  I knew I shouldn’t speculate, that I shouldn’t impose a personality on a guy I didn’t even know.

  Subway Boy left and my eyes darted over to Brett. He shrugged to me, mouthing the word “Sorry.”

  I didn’t feel like going to any of the other parties on the evening’s roster, so I decided to make my way home. Once I was safely in my apartment, I stripped off my clothes and rolled into bed.

  I caught a few hours of sleep and then woke up as the sun was rising. I dressed quickly in a pair of jeans and a sweater and went downstairs to sit on my stoop and watch the sun come up as the early morning stragglers trudged through the snow. I was alone and it was okay. I embraced the feeling, though it cut me like ice.

  9

  A few days later, Lola called me. I had finished a draft of her screenplay, and was about to send it to her.

  “Toby?” she asked in her signature breathy voice, as if someone else might have answered my phone. “I need to talk to you.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I spoke to my agents about your working on the project. They want to package someone with the project, a screenwriter. I forget his name, Something Something. He wrote that movie that came out last summer about the Hamptons?”

  “What does this mean for me?”

  “They said there’s only room for one screenwriter to do the adaptation. I’m sorry, Toby.”

  “I spent all this time working on your material and now you’re kicking me off the project?”

  “Toby, you know I don’t have any control over this. It’s the agents. I know it’s unfair.”

  “Alright,” I said, wondering if I had any recourse. “You can come pick up your stuff whenever you want.” I hung up on her.

  I was furious at myself for taking on the project without getting something in writing. I took Lola’s files and threw them back in their box, taking the copies I had made and stuffing them in a drawer. I had just wasted several weeks writing 110 pages about a transsexual from Miami. I could mention it to Sherry Merrill, but I felt stupid for getting into a situation like this without a contract. I finally decided to keep the whole thing to myself.

  A week later, I got a call from Sherry.

  “Toby, let me start by saying I think your work is very strong. I’ve been getting lots of interest, lots of very respectable passes. The coverage you’re getting is positive, but everyone I’ve spoken to feels it just isn’t right for them.”

  “Do you still have other leads out that haven’t responded yet?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. I’m going to keep pushing this, because I believe in it. I think it’s a great film that needs to be made.”

  It was hard for me to hear her words.

  I called Elizabeth at her office. She seemed distracted.

  I explained what Sherry had told me.

  “Hmm,” she said, “that’s very odd.”

  “Do you think there’s anyone else we can send it to?”

  I heard her take a deep breath. “You know, Toby, I can’t just keep mining my Rolodex for you.”

  “Elizabeth, I’m not expecting you to do that. I thought you were interested in the project.”

  I was shaking. What was this about?

  “I got you an agent. Isn’t that enough?”

  “I’m very grateful to you for that,” I said.

  I didn’t know whether to be angry or penitent at her sudden change of attitude. I felt a little of both.

  “Toby, every time you call me, you want something. To show around your screenplay. Drinks with your friend. Job advice. I’m tapped out. This isn’t a friendship anymore; this is like career counseling.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Elizabeth, that’s ridiculous,” I stammered. “Of course this is still a friendship. I can’t believe you think of me that way. Does this have anything to do with Chad?”

  “You, Chad, everybody—everyone wants a piece of what I have.” Now she was being arrogant.

  I knew what this was about.

  “This is about Donovan.”

  “That’s none of your business,” she snapped.

  “I don’t understand. What prompted this?”

  “I’ve decided to clear out my life of everyone who’s using me. I need to start living my life just for me.”

  “Did your therapist tell you to do this?”

  “I took a seminar over the weekend. It really opened my eyes to all the toxic relationships I’ve been maintaining.”

  “You’re mad at me because of a seminar?”

  “I don’t think we can be friends anymore. I need some space.”

  “You have plenty of space,” I said. “You’re on another coast.”

  “I think you would really benefit from a seminar like this. They offer them in New York, too.”

  I laughed. “I’m going to take a seminar that’s going to tell me to dump my friends?”

  “You’re exhibiting classic resistance,” she said.

  “If you were mad at me, you should have warned me while it was happening. You wanted to read my screenplay, remember?”

  “I can’t talk to you now,” she said. “I’m very busy at work.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Oh, and another thing,” she said, before hanging up. “I don’t think there’s much of a market for serious gay science fiction.”

  I was stunned. Had a two-day self-help seminar caused her to go crazy? Was this my fault? Had I been using her, or had I simply become the scapegoat for her seminar-induced delusions? And was my screenplay really no good, or was Elizabeth just jealous that I had finished something?

  I couldn’t believe that after everything I had done for Elizabeth in the past, this was how she repaid me. After all the lunches, the dinners, the movies, the boyfriend counseling, she was ready to throw out our friendship like a dirty paper plate. We had trusted each other, helped each other, supported each other through everything. Had I asked too much of her as a friend? She had always been the one to offer first. I hated it when people did that, offering something and then slapping my hand for taking it.

  Maybe Elizabeth and I had shared the kind of friendship that only thrived in college, the kind that couldn’t survive in the real world.

  I asked Donovan if he had any explanation, but he said he didn’t understand it.

  I left several messages for Elizabeth at her home over the next few days, but none were returned. I finally wrote her a long email explaining my position, saying I always valued her as a friend above anything else, and I had never intended to use her.

  I couldn’t help thinking, though, as I considered the loss of our friendship, about what a bitch she had become. All I really would miss were her film industry connections.

  I took the calls from Lola, Sherry, and Elizabeth as a sign. If I wanted to be in the film business, I needed to get on the inside. I needed to work for someone who was doing things in the industry, doing the kind of projects I would want to be part of.

  I needed to work for Cameron Cole.

  Cameron had never returned my original call. While I was annoyed, I knew I couldn’t afford to hold it against the guy. I composed myself and called Ariana.

  Calling ARPR involved a complicated voice mail system that belied its company owner’s own casual nature. I finally got through to her personal assistant, who remembered me. To my surprise, she put me right through.

  “Yeah?” Ariana, like Sherry, had the habit of taking her calls on speaker phone.

  I explained what I wanted.

  “Cam did tell me he’s looking for a personal assistant. The guy he had before decided to join the circus or something.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “Do you think you could ask him?” I said.

  “Sure, I’d be happy to,” she said. “Hey, did I read that your mother’s company was sold? Who can I talk to about getting some dresses for my clients?”

  “I can have someone call you,” I said.

  I called my mother and she agreed to look into it, though she seemed resigned about it, as if she had no choice in the matter. I felt sorry for her. She had always wanted to maintain control over her product, over who wore her dresses, how her image was presented. Now she was at the mercy of publicists who were half her age.

  Though Cameron’s company was called Eastside Pictures, his office was in a brick factory building in Tribeca, which was most definitely on the West Side. I was ushered in by Margaret, his director of development. A serious woman with black-framed cat’s eye glasses and bright red lips, she was surely a lesbian, and I felt more solidarity with her than with Cameron. She scrutinized the resume I had faxed over the previous week. Cameron barely looked at it.

  I was wearing a threadbare Dolce suit I had bought at Century 21 several years ago. To my embarrassment, Cameron was in jeans and a tight designer T-shirt.

  Cameron was one of those good-looking guys I would never talk to in a bar; handsome, but older than his twenty-six years, he gave off the sense that he had been around the block one too many times. He had the close-cropped haircut of the moment, and he clearly went to the gym every day. His office, which had a gorgeous view of the Hudson River, was a complete mess: framed movie posters that needed hanging, papers and files in stacks on the floor, an overflowing ashtray on his desk.

  Directly across from his desk, there was a large mirror on the wall. I noticed him checking himself out several times during the interview.

  I had prepared myself for the meeting, refreshing my memory on the film classes I had taken in college, coming up with informed opinions about recent movies, and doing research on all the films Cameron and his mother had produced. I was terrified that Cameron was going to ask me if I had any real experience working in the industry; the truth was that I had none. Still, I had prepared a few answers to show how well-versed I was in office protocol from my various internships.

  Though I was armed with all this information, it was useless; instead of interviewing me, Cameron lectured for half an hour.

  He moved around his spacious office with a manic energy that was infectious.

  “When I started in this business, I was still in college,” he said, waving around a burning cigarette with a perilously long ash. “I had no idea what I was doing. I was a business major, but I liked movies, and I knew the gay market could be exploited. My goal is to broaden the spectrum of gay imagery on film. What about an action hero? What about a light romantic comedy? There have been a few, but there’s so much more that can be done.”

  I could buy into this. It wasn’t exactly high art, but it would sell.

  “The important thing,” he said, “is that you understand this company’s mission. I ask everyone who works for me to come up with a definition that works for them.”

  I nodded in understanding, even though it sounded like a load of shit.

  “Did you have any questions?”

  The ash on his cigarette broke off and dropped on the floor.

  “Why do so many of your films feature straight actors playing gay roles? Aren’t there enough gay actors out there?”

  “Oh, sure, there are plenty,” he said. “But we have to do what’s popular. Mainstream audiences can relate better to the main character if they know he’s not really a faggot.”

  I was too stunned by his last statement to say anything.

  “Anyway,” Cameron continued, “when can you start?”

  I had never had an interview during which so little interest had been taken in me.

  “Today, if you want,” I said. I realized I was coming off as a bit too eager.

  “Well, that’s settled,” Margaret said, standing up abruptly, as if we were keeping her from her lunch hour.

  Cameron introduced me to the other people in the office. There was Keith, the division’s president, Stephanie, a creative executive who would soon be going on maternity leave, and Eric, Margaret’s aloof assistant. Since there were only six of us in the office, we relied heavily on Katherine’s larger staff and management, but in ethos and purpose, we were a unit unto ourselves.

  What surprised me most was that of the six of us, Cameron and I were the only employees who were gay men.

  Cameron, I soon realized, had always known success. He had been catapulted directly from summer intern to running his own division, where he was being groomed to take over his mother’s job when she retired. His dad was an agent who represented writers and directors and funneled the appropriate talent Cameron’s way. Cameron and his mother took a car to the office every day, he had a personal trainer, and his mother’s maid cleaned his apartment three times a week. He had grown up among the Manhattan prep school set, with people like Ariana who had always known privilege.

  I hated Cameron, because I wanted to be him.

  I didn’t want to be exactly like him. I wanted to be a smarter version of him. He never read books, and would often ask me to read bestsellers for him and then give him a synopsis. He didn’t even read the newspaper, instead relying on me to tell him what was important. The only thing he read religiously were marketing reports and the trades; every morning he had his mother’s Beverly Hills office fax him reams of daily movie grosses and tracking statistics.

  Cameron was also completely disorganized. In my first two weeks, I helped streamline his operation. I cleaned up his office, hung the framed posters on the wall (Jules et Jim and The 400 Blows, both films he admitted to having never seen), arranged his phone list in a database, and set up a filing system. My cubicle was directly across from his office, and I controlled who got to see him and who didn’t. I was supposed to listen in on phone calls and take notes on any action that needed to happen. Sometimes he would ask me not to monitor a call, but for the most part, he made very little distinction between his public and private life. He would ask me to fetch his dry cleaning, go to his apartment to meet the cable repairman, and pick up his car from the shop after he got into a fender bender. I had to make regular trips to replace his cell phone, which he had a habit of throwing against the wall when a call didn’t agree with him. I arranged dates for him with a rotating roster of gay and mainstream celebrities, though I never got to meet any of them. He also asked me to make a few romantic dates for him, since he found chatting with potential boyfriends during the workday too time-consuming. I was even in charge of picking the restaurant.

  Cameron’s dietary needs were my responsibility as well; I would bring him breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner. Aside from his Marlboro Lights and the occasional line of coke he did at parties, he was a health junkie. In an effort to cancel out the tar in his lungs by eating only organic food, he was a strict vegetarian who subsisted on a diet of salads, bottled water, and the protein shakes I made for him in the office kitchen. At night, he might switch from water to vodka, but he would be back on the health kick by eight the next morning.

  The only person Cameron was afraid of was his mother. A bottle blonde who, thanks to the wonders of plastic surgery, existed in that nebulous chasm between forty and sixty, Katherine ruled the company like a South American dictator. While she was always pleasant to me, I got the sense that she regarded me as an annoying, albeit necessary, appendage to her son’s life.

  I soon felt like as much of an insider as Elizabeth or any of my other friends who had gone into the film business. During the day, I handled administrative tasks and the minutiae of Cameron’s life. I spoke to fifty people a day on the phone, though I had no idea what they looked like; often, my goal was to leave word for people without actually speaking with them, insuring that Cameron would stay on their call list without actually having to make any decisions.

  While the job had solved my financial woes, I wasn’t writing or doing anything remotely creative. When I read scripts, I gave thoughtful and informed coverage, but then decisions were mysteriously made from above. Scripts I loved lingered on the shelves for months; projects I thought were doomed to fail were swiftly greenlighted and moved into production. When I got home at night, I found myself too tired to think, let alone write. If I skipped dinner with the boys, I would tinker with a few pages at home, only to succumb to the more appealing prospect of an early bedtime or a DVD. I had turned into an avid film buff, even more so than I was in college, taking home stacks of titles from the office and watching five or six each week. In the first month, Cameron told me over lunch that he “would love” to see my writing, so I brought him a fresh copy of Breeders the next day. Weeks passed, however, and as his reading load got heavier and heavier, he never got to it, despite my several friendly reminders. Eventually, I just stopped asking him.

  One day late in January, Donovan asked me if he could stay over at my place. His landlord was having the floors refinished in his apartment that week, and the dust was irritating his sinuses. He had been staying with a different friend each evening, and tonight was my turn.

  The last few weeks had been busy for him; he had gotten the job at Gourmet as an editorial assistant, and was working long hours. The two of us met at my place at nine. He had a bag of groceries with him.

  “I thought I would cook dinner for us,” he explained. “I figured your kitchen should get some use.”

  He had bought a small chicken to roast. I found him a pan and he expertly seasoned the bird with olive oil, oregano, basil, and paprika.

 

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