“Slow down,” said Liz. “We shouldn’t rush this. I wanna pin down this idea of sacrifice first.”
And that’s how we spent the entire morning, pinning down Liz’s idea of sacrifice. I could see, by the movement of Ellen’s shoulders, that she was taking long, deliberate breaths throughout the entire conversation. Whereas Riva looked ready to shatter her computer over someone’s head.
The week went on like that. We would pitch ideas and Liz would tell us to slow down. Slow down. And consider every possible implication. One after the other. By Thursday we had still accomplished next to nothing and I could feel my stomach lining disintegrating within me. The problem wasn’t that we couldn’t decide about Marietta. We were so ready to decide. We yearned to decide. The problem was that Liz wouldn’t let us.
Over lunch on Friday, as I was rounding the block sipping another slime mold special, I received a call from Mackie. She and a couple other execs would love it, she said, if I would meet them for breakfast bright and early Monday morning—before work.
“We love Liz,” said Mackie.
“I know,” I enthused, “I love Liz too.” This exchange of pro-Liz enthusiasm was, I observed, turning into a kind of ritualized greeting between myself and the execs whenever we met, like Japanese business types bowing excessively and exchanging cards.
“She’s the best,” said Mackie.
“Totally,” I said. “I always feel so lucky to be working with her.”
“And we feel so lucky too,” said Mackie.
“Oh my god, so lucky,” chimed someone else further down the table, whose name I hadn’t caught.
“She’s an extraordinary talent,” said Armelle, and I stiffened a bit, because I wasn’t used to being in Armelle’s presence. I hadn’t known or expected Armelle would be at this meeting. Armelle attended almost no meetings as far as I could tell. Armelle’s thing was that sometimes she would have dinner one-on-one with Liz. They would go somewhere with white tablecloths and have long, warm, sisterly conversations and drink a great deal of wine. They would talk about their husbands (or, dog in the case of Liz, who adopted a bullmastiff named Roger not long after her divorce). Then move on to their kids, the schools they’d applied to, the pros and cons of each. Hug and kiss goodbye. And then, presumably, Armelle would tell Mackie and the rest of her colleagues the best way to do their jobs vis-à-vis Liz and Liz would come to work and tell us all about how supportive and on our side the network was. That was always the relationship as I had understood it.
But now Armelle asked me, “How do you think Liz is doing?”
“Well, she’s leaking quite a bit,” I said. Armelle blinked at this a great many times but her face didn’t change.
This was pure panic on my part. This was me desperate to get across the trouble we were in without betraying or undermining Liz’s leadership. So instead I had betrayed her confidence. I was flailing, stuck there like a pinned butterfly under Armelle’s gaze. I had always been the Liz-whisperer. I was the go-between, the interpreter, the unruffler of feathers on both sides. I got Liz—that was my value, to both her and the execs. But I did not get this. I did not get Marietta. And so, what was my role here? What exactly was the point of me?
I couldn’t say, She’s making bad decisions, or, She’s holding everything up with a kind of insane obsession with a minor character, or, Everyone in the room is starting to feel like a hostage. I couldn’t say, Help, oh please help! So I told them about the leaks.
“Leaking,” repeated Mackie. “You mean exudation?”
“Ugh, I hate that word, but yes.”
“Apparently it ramps up during menopause for some women,” reflected Armelle.
“Right,” I said. “Well—it’s just—giving her some trouble these days.”
I couldn’t look up from my plate. I’d blathered Liz’s business and now I had all the executives thinking about her body, her exudations, as if this was the problem, as if it could have anything to do with her talent, or ability to pull off another season of the wildly successful show that had made the careers of everyone at this table. I felt sick with the shame of disloyalty.
“Stress can be a factor, too,” said Mackie.
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “I think the Times debunked that last year.” I wasn’t sure it had, but I just wanted to shut this entire avenue of conversation down. “Look, look, look,” I said. “It’s not even an issue. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s just one more thing she has to deal with lately.”
Armelle cocked her head. “Do you feel Liz might be overwhelmed?”
“She’s just extremely focused,” I said, “on getting the final two episodes right.”
“But if she’s being distracted by all this leaking—”
“She’s not,” I insisted loudly. “She’s totally rolling with it. She’s improvising. She’s sticking maxi-pads down her bra. It’s amazing.”
The table went silent.
“You know Liz,” I said, my voice becoming even louder in an effort to dispel the image I’d just planted in the minds of the execs, not to mention the busboy who was currently pouring our water. “She’s an innovator! She thrives on stress! She gets shit done no matter what!”
“We would like to know,” said Armelle, “if there’s something we can be doing on our end. To help things along.”
“Production should’ve had those scripts weeks ago,” said Mackie.
“I’m very curious to see them myself,” murmured Armelle.
Ridiculous, unhelpful directives rose up in my mind. Pray for her, I wanted to say. Light a candle. Sacrifice a goat.
Armelle took an unhurried sip of coffee. “What do you feel the hold up is exactly? Is there some kind of roadblock? I’ve asked Liz if she’d like to bounce any ideas off me, but she’s keeping mum.”
Armelle shouldn’t have told me that last part, because I had been all set, eager even, to answer her question. Killing Marietta. The hold up is killing Marietta. Armelle was Liz’s bestie, after all—or so I thought. If anyone could nudge Liz around this mental roadblock—the thing that was preventing her, preventing all of us, from imagining an honourable death for Marietta—it was Armelle. But if Liz had “kept mum,” if Armelle had been nosing around previous to this, making her delicate inquiries, and getting nothing, getting shut down, getting stonewalled to the point where Armelle had to resort to a breakfast with me, then it was clear Armelle’s opinion on the Marietta question was not remotely something Liz was interested in. Tears of frustration blurred my eyes. It would’ve been so good to unburden myself to Armelle, and Mackie, and whoever the hell these other blinking, smiling people I was having breakfast with were. But I couldn’t without betraying Liz more than I already had.
I felt handcuffed. I couldn’t tell them about Liz’s Marietta hang-up because I didn’t understand it. And because I didn’t understand it, I could not explain it. And if I could not explain it, telling the execs about it would make Liz seem irrational. And if I, Liz’s lieutenant going back a decade, were to make my captain sound irrational, well then, questions would arise, wouldn’t they? Questions and insinuations—of the cold-blooded, show-business variety, when everybody turns their minds from the glorious nobility of the story-telling impulse to exactly how much money is at stake. There’d be no need to say an ugly thing like “washed up,” but key people would wonder innocently to each other if Liz hadn’t been doing this job a little too long.