People LIke Her(19)
It hadn’t, though, had it? It had happened on his watch. And just because I did not give Dan the dressing-down he deserved, that does not mean I am not furious with him about what happened—and as for what did happen, I can imagine it all too easily.
I’d be willing to bet you almost anything that he was thumbing some novel idea into his phone when she wandered off. Some plot point, some line of dialogue that had just occurred to him. I can picture the expression he would have had on his face as he did it too. The intense frown. The puckered mouth. The air of complete self-absorption.
Anyone who has two kids, and has been married for as long as Dan and I have, knows what it is like to seethe with righteous anger about something that might have happened, or to silently boil with resentment about what someone was probably doing when they should have been doing something else—especially when, as in this case, that something else was looking after our daughter. Which in the overall scheme of things is quite important, or so you might have thought.
Equally, I have no doubt that in his head Dan has found some way to make all this somehow my fault.
After yesterday’s panicked cancellation, I hoped I could get away with just a phone chat with Irene, but she was adamant we reschedule. Because Bear the grumpy milk guzzler can’t be away from my boobs for long, I bundled the tiny sling refusenik into his snowsuit and did the whole annoying journey for the second day in a row. I drew the line at lugging the Bugaboo up five flights of stairs, though, so there’s currently an intern walking him around the block to keep him asleep.
To be honest, I always try to avoid Irene’s office if I can. The clichéd neon art, the sketchy Tracey Emins, and the expensive mid-century modern furniture never fail to remind me how much her contracted 20 percent of my annual earnings adds up to. I would rather not know what Irene is worth, but as she is the owner of one of the most profitable influencer empires this side of the Atlantic, with a staff of forty, an office adjacent to Liberty, a mansion-block apartment in Bayswater, and a house in the South of France, it’s not inconsiderable.
My mood is not improved by having spent most of yesterday evening—once I had talked Dan down off the ceiling—slogging through what felt like even more DMs than usual, replying to every single one with enthusiasm, even if an unusually high proportion were from the creepier end of my follower contingent, knowing that if I don’t, they’ll complain in my comments or bitch on the gossip sites that I’m getting too big for my boots. So it’s a jolly response to the pensioner who has been following me ever since the Barefoot days and who asks insistently for pictures of my bare feet. Ha ha, sorry, Jimmy, my bunions are already swaddled in their M&S slippers! The man who sends me poems about childbirth. Thank you so much for this, Chris, can’t wait to get around to reading it properly. The woman who wants to paint Coco’s portrait in Victorian dress and keeps asking when she’s free to sit for her.
I should have known better than to expect much sympathy from Irene on this front.
“Emmy, you know this stuff is just an occupational hazard.” She laughs. “You’d get worse abuse, have to deal with creepier people, working at the council, or in a call center.”
She can be bracingly direct, my agent.
Whatever happened yesterday, whatever impact it may have had on Dan and me, on our relationship, Irene certainly doesn’t want to hear about it in any more detail—that’s why she insists on paying for me to see Dr. Fairs. A trained psychotherapist that Irene also represents, Dr. Fairs has carved out a niche treating anxious influencers and angry trolls, building up an online following of a hundred thousand herself, with daily #mindfulmantras and an eponymous line of #selfcaresupplements. It’s a stipulation of all Irene’s contracts that her clients spend at least an hour a month on the therapist’s couch.
She also makes all the talent take a personality test before she signs them.
“I like to know if my influencers are narcissists or sociopaths,” Irene once joked when I asked her why. “I won’t sign them otherwise.” At least, I presume it was a joke.
To be honest, the therapy arrangement probably works best for all of us. I’ve known Irene for years, and she’s always had the human warmth of a walk-in fridge—ambition is her defining characteristic. We met when I worked in magazines and she was the agent for every hot British actress you could name, feeding me a steady stream of them for shoots. That was always the best bit of my job—creating visual confections of pure fantasy with the most gorgeous women and the most beautiful clothes, every single month. Flying off to studios or locations in LA, Miami, Mustique, spending days with armfuls of couture and armies of photographers, makeup artists, and publicists, then seeing our handiwork stare back at me from the newsstands a few weeks later.
It never got old, the delight of seeing those images, of reading my name in print. Of knowing that I had created a real, permanent thing that people would see and touch and love and keep. I used to think of girls, like the teenage me, buying those magazines, taking them home to their suburban bedrooms and savoring every photograph, every word, just like I used to. Keeping them piled up by the bed and poring over the pages of beautiful people and places and things when they needed to escape their own suffocating, humdrum lives, just for a moment. But of course I know that no teenage girl does that anymore, which is why I no longer have that job.
Irene saw early on where it was all heading. She and I were tipsy together one night after a shoot when she told me about the new business she was starting. “I’ve seen the future, and it’s social media. I’ve had enough of actors. Too much talent. Too many opinions. Influencers are where the money’s at. And they’re so malleable. They’re like people, only in two dimensions.”