Liz brought her hand up to her neck, and it got spurted on. “Oh, wow,” said Liz, looking at her hand. She wiped it on her jeans and stood up. I reached for a bunch of napkins left over from lunch but Riva was ahead of me—she had lurched for the box of Kleenex in the middle of the table and now she offered a handful to Liz.
“Thanks,” said Liz. “Sorry about this, guys.” The Bruces had put away their phones and now just sat with eyes downcast, either being squeamish or respectful. I’ve noticed that on the rare conspicuous occasions that men leak, they’ll laugh and josh each other, like when one of them gets a bad haircut. But when women do it, men become sombre and awkward.
Liz excused herself to go to the bathroom. After a respectful few moments I went to check on her. She was standing in front of a mirror, holding a towel-wad against the leak.
“There she is,” I said. “The human sprinkler.” This was a lame joke, but jokes—lame or otherwise—were part of my job. When I was hired, the producers spoke privately to me in my capacity as Liz-whisperer. They took me to lunch, so I knew whatever they were about to say was something I could not dismiss. We love Liz, they kept saying over and over again. But she can get bogged down. Things can get heavy very quickly with Liz. She cares about her characters so much! And that’s why her shows are such hits! But sometimes, as you know, she goes dark. Of course we want that Liz sensibility, that aesthetic—that’s what we love about Liz! But at the same time—
Light, not dark, I interrupted, nodding. Light, not heavy. Bright, light. I am the light-bringer. Got it. Everyone smiled. They were so happy not to have to say anything else that might be construed as critical of Liz.
“This is just what I need,” said Liz, looking into the mirror and meeting the reflection of my eyes. “Three weeks to prep and I start dribbling everywhere.”
I threw my hands into the air, as if in celebration. “Womanhood!”
“I don’t have time,” said Liz.
“Has it been happening a lot?”
“Started on the weekend. Almost short-circuited my computer.”
“Maybe you should try one of those spas,” I suggested. Although I knew the spas were bullshit. They gave you treatments that were supposed to promote leaking exudation, as the spas called it—so that you could get it over with if you had a big meeting or a hot date coming up and wanted to avoid any awkward puddles. All sorts of physical and psychological benefits supposedly followed—your skin cleared up, your chakras aligned and so forth. But I’d read an article in the New York Times months ago debunking exudation therapy and I was pretty sure Liz had read the same one. The article said there was no scientific evidence whatsoever that exudation therapy actually gave rise to exudation. Leaking is neither healthy nor unhealthy, the article scoffed. It’s just one of those pointless, annoying things our bodies do, like foot cramps or sneezing five times in a row for no good reason.
“The spas are bullshit,” said Liz.
“I know,” I admitted.
We stood there for a while staring into the mirror at the reflection of Liz’s soaked wad of paper towel being held against the reflection of Liz’s neck.
“Why is it always just one thing after another?” said Liz.
We went in circles, in the room, for days. Our other scripts were more or less ready, but Episode Nine was getting nowhere. I kept thinking that if it had been up to me, I would have written Marietta into gentle oblivion right around the time we gave her the motorcycle. The motorcycle was the perfect opportunity. Such thoughts were mutinous, considering Liz was my captain, so I tamped them down. My job, after all, was to help facilitate her vision. While bringing light. The problem was, Liz’s vision was divorced from reality—the reality of the girl-power fantasy that was our show. The reality of that fantasy, whether Liz could see it or not, was that Marietta did not fit and the audience needed her to die. They did not want a big send off. They did not want long, poignant scenes showcasing Annie’s Shakespeare-trained talent for reciting massive blocks of dialogue. They did not want lingering close ups on her pale, suffering, face. They wanted her to stop showing up.
But Liz, her ears being permanently shut to the clamour of social media, could not hear this. So she’d come to work and plunk her coffee on the table and say things like: “Last night I was thinking that Marietta might actually be one of the most complex characters I’ve ever created. I was looking over my notes. I filled notebooks on that girl! More than I filled for Tamlyn, even!” Tamlyn being our beloved, mysterious spy-ninja female lead.
“It could be that’s the problem?” suggested Riva, whose thing in the room was to make all her statements sound like questions.
“What’s the problem?” said Liz, turning to her. Riva didn’t understand that there were ways of expressing such thoughts without using a word like “problem.”
“Could it be we’ve overthought Marietta?” queried Riva. “Somewhat? I mean given her secondary status? On the show?”
“I honestly don’t know how you can overthink character,” said Liz.
“Right,” said Riva, nodding. “But—?”
I would’ve kicked Riva under the table if my legs had reached that far. Riva’s uptalk had turned Liz frosty. What saved Riva in that moment was Wanda, popping her distracted, bird-like head in through a crack in the door. “Liz? Got a sec?” She’d been doing this with more and more frequency lately, popping in, blinking rapidly, the tendons in her neck straining, both wanting and not wanting to speak to Liz about the latest network concern or looming production disaster.
The sound of Wanda’s voice, however, was anything but bird-like. Even after she and Liz stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind them, we could hear her rasping indistinctly through the walls. Her voice had a grinding, aggressive quality that seemed to achieve a higher register, I’d noticed, with every passing week. Lately the sound of it made my eyes water, as if Wanda’s head in the doorway brought with it a waft of pepper spray.
I took advantage of the Liz-free moment to glower around at everyone. “Guys,” I said, “this is happening. We’re not going to talk her out of it at this point.”
Riva went limp and turned into the person she became when Liz wasn’t in the room. “Fucking fuck,” she said.
“No more questioning it. We just need to be fully on board at this point.”
“But if we’re going to make it work,” said Ellen slowly.
“—We need to talk about why Marietta sucks so much!” finished Riva. Ellen was the most reflective person in the room, and it could be frustrating, because people like Riva were always jumping into her reflective gaps and cutting her off.
“Well let’s do that when Liz is out of the room, if we feel the need to do that,” I said. “Because right now it’s just getting on her tits.”
“She hired us to be straight with her,” said Ellen. Every once in awhile Ellen would bowl me over with a statement like this—a statement that would make you think she’d just wandered into the studio with a sprig of hay between her teeth as opposed to a decade’s worth of TV experience under her belt.