Lisa, our showrunner, is at her rightful place at the head of the table. When she sees me, she drops her phone and cuts off a speaking field producer. They say that in meetings, women are interrupted at five times the rate that men are. I wonder how that number increases with Lisa Griffin in the room. “There’s Miss My Time Is More Important Than Your Time. Twenty million in her bank account and she can’t afford a fucking Rolex.”
It’s 23.4 million and it’s in an LLC holding, but I don’t correct Lisa. Lisa could eat me for breakfast—that is, if she ate breakfast. Two years ago she started drinking Jen’s protein shakes and dancing with two-pound weights at Tracy Anderson. Now she wears mostly leather jeans and is smaller and meaner than ever. She resents my friendship with Jesse, and I’m sure she feels like I went around her to get Kelly on the show. If she only knew. “I am so, so sorry,” I say, lifting my cross-body bag over my head and crabwalking between the wall and the table to take a seat next to Kelly. “We had a major technical glitch at the studio this morning.”
“Thanks for being the one to deal with that,” Kelly says, like I’ve done her such a favor, tending to an issue within my own company. Something about her appearance makes me do a double take, and it’s not that she’s trying too hard in strappy ankle heels and an off-the-shoulder top while Lauren and Jen are across from her looking every bit like they woke up like this in weird jeans, drinking matching coconut La Croixs. Monsters. Who likes the coconut? I can’t decide if I’m embarrassed or vindicated by Kelly’s sexy third-date getup. (You’re out of your league. I told you.) If we should talk about hiring a stylist or if I should keep the float all to myself.
I’ll sort it out later, because more pressing is the realization that Stephanie is running even later than I am. I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t—but I bristle. Stephanie was notorious for holding up filming in the early seasons, whether it was because she didn’t like her hair or that the shoot started at ten and she just didn’t feel like getting there at ten. She shaped up last season, after acquiring the nickname “Sleptanie” from viewers who complained on Twitter and Instagram that she had gotten boring, that she felt too produced. Sleptanie employs a glam squad—hair, makeup, personal stylist—and together they actually generate a lookbook for her each season. It’s all in keeping with Sleptanie’s very manufactured image of a modern woman killing it on all fronts: life, love, and real estate. Meanwhile, Stephanie is contemptuous of the readers who enjoy her fluffy series, her marriage is riddled with infidelity, she’s been on and off antidepressants since she was a teenager, and her mother paid the down payment on the brownstone as a wedding gift. The audience wasn’t connecting with her because there’s not a hair out of place. You need a little bit of imperfection to make people feel like there’s a human being underneath it all, but she could never quite bring herself to expose her real warts. She even had her agent negotiate in her contract that production could not shoot the outside of her house—for “security” purposes. Really, she’s embarrassed she lives next to a dry cleaner’s. But that brownstone would have cost millions more if it wasn’t, millions more on top of that if it was even one more avenue west of First. Like I said, it’s hard to be rich in New York, even for Stephanie Simmons.
The fact that she’s back to her old ways means she’s feeling pretty confident about her contract. Did she get a two-season renewal? No one gets a two-season renewal, but you don’t show up late unless you can get away with being late, which is why I’m so mortified that I got held up this morning. I never want to look like I’m taking advantage of Jesse’s obvious favoritism. Yes, I know it’s there, but I will cut you if you suggest it’s because we’re both gay. How about Jesse and I are the only ones who can truly call ourselves self-made women? Jen may not come from the piles of money that Lauren and Steph do, but she was raised in Soho and has gotten by fine on her mother’s name.
Oh, and in case Stephanie sold you the rags-to-riches story about scraping by on minimum wage when she first moved to New York—because she loves that one—here’s the truth that she conveniently omits. Her mom was paying the rent on her one-bedroom on Seventy-sixth and Third and slipping her an allowance of two hundred and fifty a week. Stephanie may have run out of spending money from time to time, she may not have been able to go out to dinner as often as she would have liked or shopped on a whim, but she was far from fucking Fievel.
I take a seat and set my bag on the table, rummaging around for the everything bagel with vegetable cream cheese and tomato, my long-standing order at Pick A Bagel.
“Nice Chloé,” Lauren says, slyly. She turns to Jen with a triumphant smirk, as if I have proven something on her behalf.
Arch had been on me to “invest” in a “power bag,” and when I wouldn’t do it myself, she took matters into her own hands. What the fuck kind of messed-up financial advice do we instill in women that even my Harvard-educated girlfriend has internalized it? Invest means put your money into something that has a return. Unless the cost of this bag included some kind of pension plan, I’m pretty sure Arch didn’t invest in anything. She just bought something. “Thanks,” I say. “It was a gift from my girlfriend.”
“Nice girlfriend then.” Lauren gives me a naughty little wink.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say again, but specifically to Lauren and Jen this time. Clearly, they’re pissed. Though the Green Menace is usually pissed about something. “The entire booking system crashed just as I was heading out the door.”
“I know how that goes,” Lauren says, wearily, not to be generous but to reinforce the fiction that she is on the ground at SADIE too. Lauren had a great idea—a dating website where the woman is the one to establish contact—but she never would have gotten it off the ground if her father hadn’t provided her with a jumbo nest egg and a well-stocked corporate advisory board. Lauren has never been anything more than the face of SADIE. It’s a great face, but lately, it’s doing more harm than good.
I tip my head at Jen, who is going after my hairstyle now, I guess. “Liking the long hair, Greenberg.” It’s been three months since I’ve encountered the Green Menace in the wild, which isn’t unusual at all, and not because we “hate” each other. If anything, production prefers we keep our distance during the off-season. They want us fresh when we see each other; they don’t want alliances shifting when the cameras aren’t around to capture it. It helps streamline the narrative if we can pick up right where we left off in the previous season.
“And moi?” Lauren asks, pumping an upturned palm by her head, which is zipped up prettily with a crown braid. Did you know that every fourteen seconds a woman in New York City succumbs to a crown braid? It’s a braidemic. “I got carded at Gemma last night.”
“Adorable,” I tell her. “You look my age.” Lauren barks, Ha! Jen texts someone.
I generally like Lauren. She’s Lauren Fun! What’s not to like? We’ve always treated each other like friends of a mutual friend who get along exceptionally well whenever occasion brings us together, who have each other’s numbers but only so we can text logistics. What time is (enter mutual friend’s name) birthday dinner tonight again? I think it’s ridiculous that she’s been sentenced to indentured servitude just because Jen brought her on the show—they know each other from summers in Ohm-nah-gansett. Jerk me. But the truth is I’m not interested in taking on Lauren as a real friend. I get all itchy around people who aren’t honest with themselves, and Lauren crashes into that category headfirst double fisting tequila on the rocks and shouting Let’s do it again! You could argue Steph suffers from the same affliction, but Steph is honest with herself. It’s everyone else she’s lying to, which is not necessarily a criticism. I just think she could be more strategic about which lies she tells.