How to End a Love Story(17)
He resolves that starting Monday, he will course correct.
He will be pleasant.
He will be perfect.
Helen Zhang won’t be able to say a goddamn thing about him.
Six
“Fuck me, I love a good sandwich,” Grant says as he tears off greedy bites from the lunch the writers’ PA delivered.
It’s their third week in the writers room and it’s his turn to pick their lunch spot today. Helen registers that his pick is a hit with everyone in the room.
How annoying.
“It’s pornographic, the way you enjoy things,” Suraya says with comic disgust as she throws a tin of mints at Grant.
“I think you’re sexy too, Suraya,” Grant says, deftly catching the tin and popping Altoids into his mouth with a wink.
Flirting with their gay, married boss is something of a favorite sport in this room, Helen has discovered. Suraya rewards it with laughs, and those laughs turn into joke pitches that end up on the ideas board. Unsurprisingly, Grant is the best at it.
He doesn’t have the decency to quit there.
Grant asks after Tom and Eve’s weekend trips he’s seen on Instagram, he brings DVDs and books for Suraya’s kids “for their pop culture education,” he laughs over gossipy internet feuds with Owen and Nicole, and she’s pretty sure Saskia has a crush on him (traitor) because the chatty girl turns beet red and shuts up the second he enters the room.
The only person he doesn’t spend his efforts on is her. To her, he is perfectly, infallibly polite. Never interesting enough to be charming or aggravating or anything.
“That could be something,” he says, whenever she pitches an idea, waiting for someone else to boost or kill it.
“I could see that,” he says, when she expresses concern over a stupid subplot that’s growing like a weed.
“I hear you,” he says, when she gets frustrated at something. “But . . .”
But, but, but. He couches his slings and arrows in politeness, then shoots down all her ideas one after another. She has a doodle of his face with butts all around it that Saskia drew her after one particularly frustrating day.
She can’t understand how this happened, how she went from being the celebrated author who created the series this show is based on—to being the least important voice in the room, all in a matter of weeks.
Is this because she didn’t go to Owen’s drunken bacchanal of a birthday/early Halloween party when she was invited?
Helen hadn’t thought much of declining—she was old enough to know herself, to know she didn’t like parties with strangers and anyway it’d be a better use of her time to seriously contemplate her next novel. (She ended up marathoning a reality show about luxury real estate agents in Hollywood and falling asleep on the couch.)
Still, she’d thought she had saved everyone from some unnecessary, obligation-motivated awkwardness. But listening to Owen and Nicole recount the messy party the following Monday (even married-with-kids Tom and Eve had made an appearance!), Helen can’t help but feel she’s fucked up somehow and trapped herself in an old holding pattern that she thought she’d shaken long, long ago.
She feels like her presence here isn’t necessary. She can sense it in the way everyone avoids eye contact when she talks, the way Owen and Nicole look to Grant like, Was she this annoying in high school too?
She hates how she can feel herself becoming a needy teenager again, looking to Suraya for approval, huddling with Saskia after class and bonding over how everyone else is probably in a group chat without us. She wonders what Michelle would say, then clicks off the thought like a forgotten porch light.
“I get where you’re coming from,” Grant is hedging now, “but I think, in the context of our show, Saskia’s right: this opens up more story area for us down the road.”
Saskia flushes and looks at Helen apologetically.
“I think we’ve done enough work for today,” Suraya says briskly. “Helen, can you stay and chat about some casting stuff?”
Helen nods as everyone files out.
“You have a problem with Grant,” Suraya says, when they’re alone.
“No. I mean, I don’t hate him or anything.” Helen is flustered. “It’s just every time I open my mouth, every time, he’s there to shoot down my ideas.”
“Hm,” Suraya says, frowning.
“Am I doing something wrong?” Helen asks. “Am I being annoying, or talking too much, or not talking enough, or . . .”
“No, you’re just—nervous,” Suraya says. “Everyone can sense it. Saskia’s a nervous baby writer herself, and she can sense it. And you being nervous makes everyone else nervous. They’re thinking, ‘What if we’re wrong? What if she’s smarter than us, and we’re fucking everything up? What if this show tanks and we all go down with the ship and we never work again?’”
“They’re not thinking that,” Helen says. “Are they?”
Suraya shrugs. “What can we do to make you less nervous?”
Helen thinks. Nervous. She sees her performance in the room over the last few weeks with sudden, embarrassing new clarity.
“Probably nothing,” she says finally with a laugh. “It’s my baby, and this is the biggest thing it’s ever done. It’s like I followed it to college when I should have let it grow up without me. Maybe you should just fire me.”