Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

“Of course,” said Tess, feeling a pang for the long braid she had worn most of her life. Her hair fell to her shoulders now, and she kept it loose most of the time, or pulled back in a ponytail when rowing. She realized these styles were more suitable, perhaps even more flattering, to a woman in her thirties. But she missed her braid. “Only this isn’t a part, and I’m not going to lose weight for it, or wear a uniform, or do my hair a certain way. I’m going to be working for you, and I take my work seriously.”

“As do I,” Selene said, a little heatedly.

“Then you both should get along great,” Flip said. “No fights, no feuds, no egos.”

“Amigos!” Selene sang, although Tess was pretty sure that Flip had slightly mangled the lyrics to the old show tune. “I was Baby June at summer camp, which is funny that I then became Baby Jane. I wanted to be Louise, though. Stupid old June, she disappears by act two.”

Now that was more what Tess expected in an actress.

“Well, Betsy has plenty to do in our production, more than we planned,” Flip said, buttering a piece of bread and actually trying to press it into Selene’s hand, as if he were her mother. Or nanny. “You know we’ve been rewriting the last three episodes of the season, because that was the only note the network gave us – more Selene, keep her story open-ended. More, more, more. They love you, and they’re willing to spend extra money to keep you safe.”

Flip might seem overly solicitous of Selene, Tess realized, but he was smooth, too, steering her toward what he wanted. Was he manipulating Tess in the same way? But no, she had decided to take the job only for Lloyd’s sake, and Flip couldn’t have foreseen that. She was calling her own shots.

The main courses arrived and Tess dug in, happy for the cover of chewing. Selene sliced and cut her steak into ever smaller pieces, spread pâté on the saltines provided, and twirled her frites in the mayonnaise she had demanded that the waiter bring, much to his barely concealed disgust. But Tess never observed a morsel of food going in .

Meanwhile, Flip was studying Tess, and less covertly.

“I’ve never seen a woman eat like that,” he said, caught staring at her quickly cleaned plate. “It’s…impressive.”

“I eat like that,” Selene said. “I have a really high metabolism.”

“Of course you do,” Flip said, buttering another roll and handing it to the young woman, who placed it on the bread plate with the other roll she had ignored.

What kind of weird family am I joining? Tess decided to focus on the money she was going to be paid, twice her usual rate. In the fine tradition of private detectives, she told herself that she would believe the money, not the story.

She then spent the rest of lunch trying to forget the kind of terms used for those who did things just for the money.

“You a midget?” the homeless man asked Lottie MacKenzie. Or maybe he was a vagrant. She couldn’t know that he was homeless, just that he was dirty. Lottie MacKenzie always tried to stick to the facts, things that could be quantified, even in her private thoughts.

“No,” she said. “I’m not a midget.”

“Then you a dwarf? There’s a difference, ain’t there? Whatever you are, you probably prefer to be called a little person, right?”

“What I am,” Lottie said, “is short . That’s all. Just short. If you must put a word to it, that’s the one.”

“Sheeeeeeeeeeeit. Short don’t cover it. You pocket-size.”

“Depends on the pocket, I suppose.”

He laughed and used her rejoinder as a cue to pull his own pocket inside out, showing that it was empty – and filthy.

Although she usually stiffed panhandlers, especially those who so much as alluded to her height, Lottie gave the man a dollar, rationalizing that it balanced her indulgence in a three-dollar latte from the Daily Grind, not to mention the five-dollar éclair from Bonaparte Bread across the street. Lottie had grown up listening to a lot of people lay a proprietary claim to guilt – Jews, Catholics – but she couldn’t imagine that anyone felt the clutch of anxiety she did at the thought of her Scottish father finding out that she had spent three dollars on coffee and milk.

But such extravagance was preferable to making the production pay for every goddamn beverage she bought herself during the course of a working day. That would make her no different from Ben, the moocher, the schnorrer – a word she had embraced since learning it from Flip, although he laughed at how it sounded in her mouth. Her family had arrived in California when Lottie was five, and she didn’t have anything resembling a Scottish accent. But there was something clipped about her voice, an inability to wrap her mouth around the Yiddish terms so common to Hollywood and movie-making. Schnorrer. Ben was such a rip-off artist that he had tried to submit receipts for the music he downloaded from iTunes, claiming he listened to music while he wrote, so it was a production-related expense. “Try that shit on the tax man, not me,” Lottie had snapped at him.

In Lottie’s experience – and she had almost twenty years of working in television, far more than the Wonder Boys; she was second generation like Flip, although her father had been a propmaster – there were two ways of looking at a production. You could treat it like carrion and pick its bones clean, or you could give it the respect of a small but solid nest egg that would keep producing income as long as people didn’t get greedy. Movies were carrion. Mann of Steel had the potential to be a nest egg production, something that could provide them all steady work for three or four years if people didn’t lose their heads. She had lectured Ben on this concept just last week, thinking she might actually convert him to being a team player.

“Jesus, Lottie,” he had said. “Why do you think so small?” There was an awkward pause, and he had apologized, but with a smirk that made it clear his words had been chosen in order to create that awkwardness. Here she was, going on forty, and still dealing with stupid jokes about her height. Four feet ten, she should have told the homeless man, singing the words out loud and clear. Four feet fucking ten, which is not a midget or a dwarf or a little person, just short, according to the clinical definition . Four feet ten, a full foot shorter than her father, and almost six inches shorter than her mother, for no reason that anyone had ever discerned. Her mother blamed the postwar shortages, but how could her father’s poor nutrition have stunted Lottie’s growth when it hadn’t affected his? And her mother, an American studying abroad when she met Lottie’s father, had never known any dietary lack greater than decent peanut butter. Certainly, food had been abundant for all of Lottie’s life, especially after they moved to Los Angeles. Her new schoolmates, incapable of understanding the difference between Scotland and Ireland, had called her Lottie the leprechaun, mocked her size and her vowel sounds. The accent was vanquished quickly, but her small stature was one of the few things that remained beyond her control.

Behind the wheel of her car – a midsize rental, because a small car made her feel doll-like and an SUV would seem so compensatory – she fastened on her headset and began running through her calls with furious efficiency. A long lunch in the middle of a brutal day, what was Flip thinking? He would be logy and cranky for much of the afternoon. Ben wasn’t answering his phone, per usual. They may have been hailed as geniuses, but Flip had trouble seeing the bigger picture outside the script, while Ben… Ben ! He was simply one of the most undisciplined men she had ever worked with, and she had known some real fuckups in her time. He procrastinated, got behind, ended up with too much on his plate, and then went into hiding, like a little kid late on his homework. So many people mistook speed for urgency. Lottie was slow and methodical in her movements and her speech, but she almost never had to redo anything. She got things right the first time.