Honestly, I thought, what do you care if he drops dead tomorrow?
And I was pretty sure, from their blank stares at the floor, that the nannies were thinking exactly the same thing.
Jared was always trying new diets, as if there were some miracle fix to be accessed, when he knew perfectly well, from working with actors, that there was no substitute for lean protein and a hardcore personal trainer. His weight fluctuated wildly; he could come back from a weeklong business trip a stone heavier, fly to Canyon Ranch for a few days and starve himself back down again, then pile two stone back on when he got back to New York.
To me, it didn’t seem that big a deal. But I had very swiftly learned that rich Americans could be obsessive about their health. Sometimes I thought that they secretly believed they could live forever if they ate and took the right supplements and exercised compulsively. Besides, if Jared’s doctor fussed about the yo-yo dieting, kept calling him in for check-ups and tests, it spiked the bill; so wasn’t it in the doctor’s interest to take the strain on his kidneys more seriously than it warranted?
However, if the doctor’s concern turned out to be warranted, enough to worry Natalia van Stratten like this, I was guessing that her pre-nup wouldn’t fully pay out if she couldn’t keep her husband alive for another few years, and that the will might not be in her favour. New York had been quite the learning curve for me. Trophy wives regularly signed agreements that gave them bonuses per every five years of marriage, for instance; maybe Natalia came into a major lump sum at the end of her first decade with Jared.
The office door swung open, and the wing women emerged, sleek as always, quite as if nothing had been going on in there that shouldn’t have been. They acknowledged Natalia with deferential nods, gliding past her, their heads bowed like subservient swans. She ignored them completely in magnificent style.
“Jared!” she yelled, and one of the twins ran over to his nanny and drove his head against her waist in a primitive need for comfort. “You need to go to the doctor, now!”
“Fuck you!” her husband yelled back, appearing into view. “If I wanted some bitch who nagged me, I wouldn’t have married a Russian, would I? I’d have picked a Jew, or a Chinese, or an Italian!”
Natalia set her hands on her waist and threw her head back, ready for combat. The other twin took refuge with his nanny, who started stroking his curls. And as my employer and his wife continued screeching at each other, I did a Google search for branches of the New York Public Library in Harlem.
I lived in Brooklyn.
It took a fortnight. Michael, the British film director, flew to NYC so that he and Jared could started initial auditions with an enthusiasm that was marked even by their standards. Video clips of young women sobbing and pleading not to be raped by invisible monks accumulated in my in-box, self-taped by prospects who were unable to present themselves in person because they were working on another job. Appointments racked up for the young women available to sob and plead in person. One of them was Siobhan, who had been flown over by Parador from the UK, together with several other prospects, every one of whose agents knew exactly what her client was in for.
As did the female casting director. The only extenuating circumstance for her acquiescing to this was that, as I had learnt from office canteen chat, women blocked by the boys’ club from the opportunity to be editors, producers, directors, became agents or took casting jobs instead. Roles which were traditionally perceived as female, and which, not uncoincidentally, paid considerably less. And if they didn’t throw under women under the bus that was Jared, Michael and their ilk, they would have no jobs at all.
This afternoon, Siobhan was booked into the casting suite. We had our own, a large meeting room with cameras and lighting permanently set up; other production companies used rented space, but Jared loved auditions — technically called ‘meetings’, I had learned when I came to Parador — and he wanted to be on the spot for as many as possible. It was my job to meet the actors in reception, to calm their nerves, bring them up to the suite, reassure them with my lovely manners and my Mary Poppins voice. After all, what could be more calming than being escorted by Mary Poppins?
Jared was highly predictable. If an actress piqued his interest in the casting suite, he would bring them back to his office straight afterwards. And as soon as I saw her in person, I knew that was what would happen. She was even more beautiful in real life, which isn’t always the case. Her Irish colouring was very strong, the black hair, the light blue eyes, the milk-white skin so pale it almost had a bluish tinge, a delicate Milky Way of freckles across the bridge of her long straight nose.
She was dressed in the usual way for actors coming to meetings, like models for go-sees. Casual, functional, showing she was there to work. Faded jeans, a black roll-neck sweater, form-fitting enough to reassure everyone that she was as slim as leading actresses needed to be. A black leather jacket was slung over her shoulders, and her hair was pulled back from her face in an artfully messy twist.
“Oh, you’re English!” she said, smiling at me, holding out her hand. “Nice to hear a familiar accent over here.”
Mine shook as I took hers, but hopefully not enough for her to realise. It was cool and dry, a little too much so; she needed to moisturise more.
“Nice to have an Irish person be happy to meet an English one,” I said in response, and she grinned like an urchin.
“Hey,” she said, “I’ll take what I can get so far from home.”
“Is your hotel okay?” I asked, the standard question I asked everyone, as I turned to lead her through security. The big glass gate swung open for us.
“Oh yeah, thanks,” she said a little too casually.
They had put her up in the latest hip place on the Bowery, I knew. I had checked the travel department’s reservation for her. It had the usual complement of try-hard décor and gimmicks: single shots of gin, made in the hotel’s on-site distillery, served from a machine in the check-in area; an entirely gluten-free menu; a dedicated ballet barre studio in the gym. All charges to Parador’s card. Siobhan couldn’t fail to be impressed, but she was doing her best to act cool, for which I couldn’t blame her.
“I haven’t been there yet,” I said at random, trying not to babble. “Is it nice? How’s your room?”
Was that creepy? No, I decided. It sounded like small talk, not as if I were asking her for a photo of her bed so I could imagine her on it.
I didn’t need it. I already saw it on her Instagram a couple of hours ago.
“Small but perfectly formed,” she said with a lilt of amusement. “And some things I’ve never even heard of in the minibar.”
“They’ll be very healthy and taste a bit like seaweed,” I said, pressing the button for the lift. “Just don’t look at the ingredients.”
This was small talk at its finest, words intended merely to spackle and plaster over any awkward silences, pure filler. And yet it felt to me as if every word that dropped from her lips was a diamond, or a pearl, like a fairy tale I remembered, where the heroine was given that blessing in return for her sweet nature.
I led her into the casting suite, and I saw Jared and Michael’s expressions as they took her in, that particular toxic flicker in their eyes, the burning darkness inside them crawling out for a moment, a flash of feral red. And she thanked me for bringing her to them as sweetly as the girl in the fairy tale would have done.
I couldn’t access the video recording system from my computer to watch it live, not until the recording was finished and it streamed automatically to my database. I sat in my office in a pool of sweat for half an hour. It was the longest thirty minutes of my life. I took handfuls of antiseptic wipes and dabbed myself down under my blouse. They stung: I welcomed the sensation. I had seen some of the other auditions for Ave Maria. I knew what kinds of things she was having to do, the questions she was being asked.