He leaned in, and she felt his lips grazing her hair. “This is a big deal,” she muttered into the warm flesh of his shoulder, still slightly tacky from their kitchen encounter.
“Of course it’s a big deal,” he said. “It’s the beginning.”
She squirmed away from him and examined herself in the mirror over the fireplace: Curls were already springing free from her hair clips and there was a smudge of dust across the front of her skirt. The girl in the mirror was all soft cheeks and wide doe eyes, the features of an overgrown baby, someone you might want to cuddle with but not someone you would take seriously as a gimlet-eyed auteur. She stared hard, trying to spy this woman. Instead, she saw a sporty, anxious elf.
“You look great,” Jeremy said, behind her. “Don’t-fuck-with-the-director great.”
She turned back to Jeremy. “Wear the suit,” she said. “And hurry.”
They followed klieg lights across the city, their excitement growing as they drove toward the beams, only to discover, once they drew closer, that the lights were actually parked in front of a new sushi restaurant where a string of valets attended to a parade of luxury SUVs. Claudia’s premiere, located at an aging movie theater a few blocks farther west, merited no light display, no tabloid television reporters, no screaming fans lined up for autographs, no limousines triple-parked in the street. Still, there was a red carpet flung across the sidewalk and a cluster of photographers standing by a logo wall; a table of pretty young publicists was handing out will-call tickets to a line of guests. Someone had arranged a brace of groomed shrubs at the foot of the carpet, and metal crowd-control barriers had been set up to keep out the desultory riffraff. A cluster of anonymous industry insider types, mostly in jeans or suits fresh from work, stood schmoozing outside the theater entrance. The atmosphere outside the theater crackled with anticipation and possibility, and the traffic on Wilshire Boulevard clotted as passing drivers slowed in the hopes of spotting Someone Significant.
Frankly, Claudia was grateful that there was a premiere at all. These days, with Hollywood still reverberating from last winter’s strike, the lavish parties were limited strictly to lent–pole films with hundred-million-dollar marketing budgets. Claudia’s was a low-budget movie with a small distributor—no Angelina or Jennifer or Will in a lead role, just an ensemble cast of semirecognizable indie-cinema stalwarts and television actresses. But her distributors, buoyed by advance reviews and a handful of Sundance awards and smelling the possibility of a breakout hit (“The next Juno,” Claudia had heard them say more than once, in recent weeks, occasionally swapping in Lost in Translation or Garden State), had ponied up the money for the free cocktails and the Mediterranean buffet and the rented carpet, so here she was, at her very own Hollywood premiere. Having attended so many of these events as a guest, where officious publicists typically funneled her straight past the red carpet toward the “nobody of importance” entrance, she found it hard to accept that this time the press line was waiting for her.
They parked a few blocks away and walked back toward the theater. Claudia’s phone chimed persistently as congratulatory text messages and voice mails arrived from her parents and older sister back in Michigan, who had attended the Sundance festival in January but were forgoing the premiere. The evening air was soupy with late-July humidity; sweat dripped down the nape of her neck as they approached the red carpet. She reached out for Jeremy’s hand, and Jeremy gripped hers back with a damp palm. By now, she could see her investors waving at her, the publicists smiling toothily in her direction. For a brief moment, as she stepped into the turning crowd, she remembered the sensation of walking down the aisle at her wedding, of a hundred eyes turned in her direction and the realization that this one day was inviolably hers; then she and Jeremy were swallowed up by the heat-seeking crowd, which had pinpointed Claudia as tonight’s fuel source. There was her producer, grabbing her in a bear hug; and the stars of her film, doing interviews with a reporter from a film magazine; and a clutch of her friends, smiling from the sidelines as the flashes popped off around her. The rest was a blur, just as her wedding had been three years earlier: a series of high-voltage encounters, each spinning off from the