It was a text from a number she didn’t recognize. She leaned over—she was trying this thing where she put her phone out of reach while she ate—and read the notification without putting down her fork.
I’m sorry for what I said about you in The New Yorker.
Huh?
Blair tried to think of who might talk toThe New Yorkerabout her. Reggie, even though she suspected him of being “sources close to Kellermoon”—why else all the stuff in thatPeoplearticle from a couple of weeks ago about how many fucking bedrooms everyone had? He had ten in his McMansion/used car lot, and poor Blair only had three—didn’t have those kinds of connections. Anyway, Blair wasn’tNew Yorkermaterial. They reviewed her movies and TV shows sometimes, but that was the extent of it. She entertained a momentary hope that perhaps some critic or other was writing a twenty-thousand-word manifesto about Hollywood’s inability to make something not based on existing IP and/or starring a grown man in a superhero outfit, but what good would that do her at this point?Green Lightwas dead as a doornail.
She blew out a breath. It was still hard to admit that. And she wasn’t, not publicly, anyway. Her official stance was that she was letting the project rest.
This is Jack Branksome, by the way.
Well. Goodness. Gracious. Blair had had her assistant pass her number on to Jack after that ill-fated Zoom call, in case he changed his mind about Books with Blair.
She stopped pretending she wasn’t a slave to her phone and picked it up. Her hands were shaking.
Blair wasn’t the kind of person who let herself be intimidated. They—and bytheyshe meantmen—tried. She was petite and blond. She had a Southern accent. She’d made her name starring in rom-coms. She was aware that all that added up to some people dismissing her as unserious. She even understood. She was operating in atown that prized a certain kind of intelligence, a certain kind of persuasiveness, a certain kind of leadership. Not to mention a certain kind of story. She and Tiffany had started their company with an agreement that they would calmly sidestep the sort of men who made those assumptions. They would make opportunities for themselves and in turn make opportunities for other creatives, many of them women. They would tell the stories they wanted to tell.
More to the point, Blair was no longer a teenager who could be shamed by anyone, not the men of Hollywood, not her mother, not Pastor Glen.
So she wasn’t sure why she had let—and was continuing to let, judging by her shaky hands and the pit that had opened in her stomach—Jack Branksome get to her.
Blair:What did you say about me in The New Yorker?
There. Cool. Mildly but not overly interested. Not betraying the fact that she was, even now, heading outside to see if the mail had arrived.
Jack:I made an observation that sounded reasonable when it came out of my mouth but when committed to paper and stripped of context sounded less than ideal.
No mail. Blair went back to the kitchen island to consider her next move. She was pretty sure the reason she was letting Jack Branksome get to her was that she respected him, or at least she had before that Zoom call. When studio dudes and billionaire tech bros in search of vanity producing credits dismissed her,shedismissedthemand moved on. When they tried to humiliate her, she didn’t let them. Humiliation, she’d told Cal once when he was eleven and in a nail-polish phase, was not something inflicted upon you. It wasa state of mind. An attitude. Blair didn’t allow herself to be humiliated these days.
Usually.
There was a first time for everything.
She considered why she was giving Jack Branksome the power to humiliate her. She considered the pit that had opened in her stomach just now.
The other thing that had opened a pit in Blair’s stomach was Jack’s book. She hadn’t been blowing smoke, or exaggerating, when she’d told Jack’s editor what a fan she was ofIn Time. The book was, on the surface of things, about three generations of a family embarking on a holiday at an unnamed seashore in order to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the patriarch and matriarch. But it was really about how our attempts to control each other can backfire. Or how they can succeed, but at a cost. It was about a family coming undone.
Blair loved reading. Had since she was a kid perched in the sycamore tree on the far corner of her family’s estate. A book was a way to pass a summer afternoon, or, tucked into a Bible, a long Sunday morning at church. A book was a way to get out of your own head, and Blair could admit—to herself, anyway—that she needed that, more than ever these days.
And sometimes, a book was a window to the world. It could make you think about stuff. It could make yourethink stuff.
Even less often, like once every couple of years if you were lucky, a book could brush up against a truth you didn’t know was inside you. It could open a pit in your stomach, turn your guts out into the sunshine in a way that was painful but somehow, also, overdue.
That kind of stomach pit wasn’t bad, exactly. It was unsettling but also galvanizing. It had the potential to change who you were.
Jack’s book had done that. Opened that kind of pit.
AndthenJack had layered a humiliation on top, dug the holeinside her a little deeper, opened the bad kind of stomach pit using a different tool, a sharper one.
She eyed his text. She wanted the last word, but she knew such a wanting was futile, with Jack Branksome at least. To say that Jack had a way with words was an understatement. Blair wasn’t a writer. She had been told that in exactly those words by her college creative writing professor (I believe literary criticism is more your forte) and by screenwriting legend Seth Sider (Stick to acting), and while the feedback had stung at the time, she was grateful for it in retrospect. She wouldn’t have become a producer otherwise.
Blair:Well, lucky for you I don’t read The New Yorker.
It wasn’t even a lie. She subscribed toThe New Yorker, but that didn’t mean she readThe New Yorker. She would need to clone herself for that to happen.
Jack:You don’t read The New Yorker?
Blair:I’m not the kind of person who reads The New Yorker.
