He shook his head in disbelief, matching my anger with his own. He threw his hands up.
“Just stop it, Emily! That’s not what happened.” He sounded almost frantic. I breathed in the hot air and gritted my teeth
“No. I was walking behind you and two creeps grabbed me. And you didn’t fucking stop to look back and kept running over to Miley fucking Cyrus. I had to take pictures with these guys and they touched my back and I had asked you one thing. I asked you to just not fucking leave me.”
“You could’ve told them no pictures! I was three feet away from you, Emily. Jesus fucking Christ.”
“You weren’t three feet away. You were on the other side of the room saying hi to Miley Cyrus.”
“Yeah! And she was asking where you were! She wanted to say hi to you. You’re her friend!” His face was red.
S took a deep breath and put his hand on my shoulder. I could tell he was trying to calm down. He started to speak, but a voice interrupted him.
“You two, can I just say—” We turned to see S’s agent, Berg, holding a drink, his eyes heavy with alcohol.
I’d never seen Berg without a suit and didn’t know him very well, but I’d spent enough time in his company to have developed a dislike for him. He’d talk over me, looking only at S. Sometimes I’d tell myself I was just being a bitch, that Berg was focused on S because he was his client. Other times, I thought he didn’t particularly like women. At the least, I was sure he didn’t think much of me. Once, he’d told me I should “be grateful for my fame while it lasts.”
A few months before, at a different party, Berg came up to a group of people I was standing with.
“Okay, I just need to say this,” he announced to the group, his eyes unfocused and looking past me. “I just said to someone, ‘Don’t rape me on this deal,’ right?” He paused and ran a hand through his hair, his eyes shifting. “And they said, ‘Can you not say that?’” He shook his head and took a sip of his drink. “This shit is getting ridiculous. Fucking ridiculous. Like what, I can’t say rape now?”
Now Berg stood before us, clearly drunk, looking greasy. S and I stopped our fight. I tasted my drink, trying to put my frustration aside.
“You two, let me just say,” he began again. “I mean, S, I’ve only seen heat like this five times in my career before. Five fucking times. And it’s not just heat,” he paused, “because you’re fucking good.” The ice cubes clinked against the side of his glass.
“Everyone knows you’re famous, Emily, but I always say, S is the one, S is the one who…” He trailed off, taking a swig of his drink, his nose disappearing into the glass.
“Come on, Berg,” I said, forcing a smile. “You think I don’t know how special this guy is? I married him.” I felt S’s hand touch my back and I wrapped my arm around him in return. “We don’t care what people say.” I paused. “That’s all just noise.”
Berg began again. “And Emily, I mean you’re really fucking famous, but—”
“She is really fucking famous,” S said in a soft voice, almost to himself. I knew he was trying to signal that he was sorry for leaving me alone with the creepy selfie guys.
“Yeah, I mean, listen, I’m not even on social media, and I know how fucking famous she is. I’m like…” He cocked his head to one side. “She’s like Pamela Anderson before the hep C.”
My body stiffened and my chest tightened as if someone had poured ice down my spine, so cold it burned. Although S didn’t move an inch, I sensed him straighten up and grow larger beside me. His face was blank, flat, the lines of warmth around his eyes gone in an instant.
“You need to shut the fuck up now,” he said, his voice stern and his body still. This was the kind of thing he’d said countless times before to Berg, on calls when they were joking around, but now his face was frozen and Berg wasn’t laughing.
I wanted to say, You’re a sexist piece of shit, Berg. Pamela Anderson was an actor with a sex tape that had been stolen from her home and distributed against her will. Hollywood didn’t take her seriously. The industry had used her as a sex object and then turned her into a joke, an insult directed at other women. Pamela represented the idea that women have an expiration date on their usability. And the hep C? Was my fate so clear?
I wanted to make this dweeb of a man feel like the tiny, insignificant person he was. I wanted to say, You don’t know me at all, you’ve never tried to know me, and the fact that you think my fame and status as a desirable woman are all I have to offer says more about you than it does about me. But this was S’s night, and this was the agent who’d been working with him since the beginning of his career. Their relationship dated back further than our marriage. S talked to him nearly every day. That very morning, I’d heard them discussing a dream deal with HBO that Berg was facilitating. In that way, Berg was a powerful, important man.