The room was full of important-looking men and beautiful women, several of them well known. There were dazzling-looking women having breakfast with each other, in pairs or small groups. Men dining with each other, and a few men with women, usually years younger. She noticed Sharon Osbourne having breakfast in a quiet corner with a younger woman. Both were expensively dressed, and wore large diamonds on their hands and ears. Barbara Walters was at a table having breakfast with three men. There were men and women from the entertainment industry scattered throughout the room, and at most of the tables, there were men conducting business and having meetings. For the most part, it looked like ideas, contracts, and money were being exchanged and changing hands. The smell of power hung heavy in the room. The Polo Lounge looked like a hotbed of success, and as soon as Tanya saw it, she felt noticeably underdressed. Barbara Walters was wearing a beige linen Chanel suit and pearls. Sharon Osbourne was wearing low-cut black. Most of the women had had face-lifts, the rest of them looked like ads for collagen and Botox. Tanya felt as though she had the only natural face in the room. She kept reminding herself that she was there because of the way she wrote, not how she looked. But it was daunting anyway to be in the midst of so many beautiful, exquisitely groomed women. Tanya felt unable to compete with that, or even try. All she could do was be herself.
Tanya told the maître d' whom she was meeting, and without pause, he walked her to a corner table. She recognized Douglas Wayne immediately, and as soon as she saw him, she recognized Max Blum, the director. He had five Academy Awards to his credit. Tanya nearly choked when he told her it would be an honor to be working with her, and that he loved her work. She discovered after she sat down that he had read everything she'd ever published in The New Yorker, right back to the beginning. He'd read most of her essays, and her book of short stories, and he'd been reviewing tapes of most of what she'd done on the soaps. He wanted to know everything he could about her work, her range, her style, her timing, her sense of humor and drama, and her point of view. And so far, he said, he liked everything he'd seen. There was no question in Max's mind, Douglas had been absolutely right in choosing her to do their script. As far as he was concerned, it was a stroke of genius to have made a deal with her. Douglas thought so, too.
Max and Douglas looked like opposites in every way, as they both stood up to greet Tanya as she approached their table. Max was small, round, and jolly, somewhere in his mid-sixties, and had had an illustrious career in Hollywood for forty years. He was hardly taller than Tanya, and he had a face like a friar, or an elf in a fairy tale. He was warm, friendly, and informal. He was wearing running shoes, with a T-shirt and jeans. The word one would have used to describe him was cozy. He was the kind of person you wanted to sit next to, hold hands with, and tell all your secrets to.
Douglas was an entirely different breed. What sprang to mind immediately when she saw him was that he looked like Gary Cooper in his middle years. Tanya knew from all she'd read of him that he was fifty-four years old. He was tall, lean, spare, had an angular face, piercing blue eyes, and gray hair, and the word that would have best described him was cold. He had eyes like steel. Max had warm brown eyes, a bald head, and a beard. Douglas had a thick well-cut mane of silvery-gray hair, and was impeccably neat. He was wearing perfectly pressed gray slacks and a blue shirt with a cashmere sweater over his shoulders, and when she happened to look down, Tanya noticed that he was wearing brown alligator loafers. Everything about Douglas spoke of style and money, but what one noticed most about him was that he exuded power. There was no question in anyone's mind, as one glanced at him, that he was a very important person. He looked as though he could have bought and sold the entire room. And as he looked her over, his eyes bored right through her. She was far more comfortable making idle chitchat with Max, who went out of his way to make her feel welcome. Douglas looked as though he were taking her apart and putting her back together piece by piece. It was an acutely uncomfortable feeling.
“You have very small feet” was the first thing Douglas said to her after she sat down, and she had no idea how he could see them, unless he had X-ray vision and was looking through the table. It never occurred to her that he had carefully studied the questionnaire that his secretary had had filled out by her husband and agent, in order to buy her welcome gifts. He had noticed her shoe size on the list, before they bought her the Pratesi robe and slippers. He was the one who had decided they should be pink. Douglas Wayne made all final decisions, even about the most minute details and trivial things. Nothing was trivial to Douglas. He had approved the satin nightgown and robe, too, also in pink. He had told them to get her something beautiful but not sexy. He knew from her agent and scuttlebutt around town that she was married and had kids, and Walt had finally admitted to him that she had nearly passed on this opportunity, in order to stay home and take care of her twin daughters. Walt had told him that Peter had helped her make the right decision, but it had been far from easy. She wasn't the kind of woman you sent a sexy nightgown to. She was the kind of woman you treated with respect and grace.
“Thank you for all the beautiful gifts,” Tanya said, feeling timid. Both of them were such important men that she felt cowed and insignificant in their midst. “Everything fit,” she said with a cautious smile.
“I'm glad to hear it.” Heads would have rolled if it hadn't. But there was no way for Tanya to know that. It was hard to believe looking at Douglas that he was addicted to soaps, particularly the ones she wrote. She could far more easily imagine him hooked on more challenging fare. And she wondered how often people had told him he looked like Gary Cooper. She didn't know him well enough to comment on his looks, but the resemblance was striking. Max on the other hand was looking more and more to her like Happy in the Seven Dwarfs. And she was aware during their early moments of conversation that Douglas hadn't taken his eyes off her since she sat down. She felt as though she were being examined under a microscope, and in fact she was. Nothing escaped his sharp gaze, and it was only when they started to talk about the script that he relaxed and warmed up a little.
He suddenly became animated and excited, and as Tanya made comments about the script, and the changes she'd made, he laughed.
“I love it when you do funny, Tanya. I can always tell when you wrote the script on my favorite soap. If I start to laugh my head off, I know it had to be you.” The script they were currently working on, and the movie they were about to shoot, didn't have a lot of leeway for funny, but she had slipped some in anyway, and they all agreed that it worked. She had done it in just the right doses, to add spice and warmth, which was the trademark of her work. Even when it was funny, it never failed to strike a poignant chord, and exude her natural warmth.