Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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She is clearly ’Ms. Diana’ or ’Her Highness,’ Aunt Nancy. When did she suddenly become just ’Diana’ to you? Are you two really that close already?’ Marvin muttered to himself, shaking his head at the sheer power of female bonding.

However, Marvin didn’t seem to care at all about the fact that the powerful music producer shared a first name with his father.

In the world, the repetition rate of personal names was staggeringly high. It was a statistical inevitability. If you stood in a crowded plaza in England and yelled ”John!”, twenty men would turn around. Call out ”Hans” in Germany, ”Enrique” in Spain, or ”Charles” in France, and you would get the same result. In the Middle East, simply say ”Mohammed” and a countless sea of people would respond. There were even wealthy legacy cases in America where three generations of a family used the exact same name, only distinguished by a Roman numeral or a ”Junior” slapped on the end.

”It’s just a name, Aunt Nancy,” Marvin said, standing up and stretching his arms. ”The only thing that matters is if this Grant Brook has the authority to press my records and distribute them globally.”

”Oh, he has the authority,” Nancy said, her Hollywood producer instincts finally overriding her fangirl euphoria as she tapped the card against her chin. ”If Diana personally recommended him, he is top-tier. EMI is a massive label.”

Nancy looked at the shooting schedule pinned to the corkboard near the door.

”Alright, Marvin. Here is the plan,” Nancy declared, her eyes narrowing with professional determination. ”We will push the crew to the absolute limit. We finish filming your Baker, James scenes here in London in four days at the absolute most. As soon as the director calls ’wrap,’ you and I are going to visit this Grant Brook, and we are going to secure your first music deal.”

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Amy had not cried when she left Chanhassen.

She had thought she might. She had lived in Minnesota for the better part of a year—long enough to know the particular, inescapable smell of the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres on a Saturday night, a heavy mixture of prime rib au jus, stale aerosol hairspray, and floor wax. It was long enough to have a favorite cracked vinyl stool at the twenty-four-hour diner two blocks from her apartment, and long enough that leaving felt like something rather than nothing.

But when the yellow cab crunched over the icy driveway at four-thirty in the morning to take her to Minneapolis–Saint Paul International, she had simply locked her door, slid the brass key through the landlord’s mail slot with a soft clatter, and gotten into the backseat without looking back. Looking back was a thing you did when you weren’t sure you were making the right decision.

Amy, at twenty-two years old, was absolutely sure.

She was also, she was now discovering, completely unprepared for London in January.

Not unprepared in the logistical sense—she had meticulously packed her one good winter coat, the sensible water-resistant boots, and the thick leather gloves she’d bought at a Chanhassen thrift store for four dollars and fifty cents. Those items had been perfectly adequate for surviving a brutal, sub-zero Minnesota winter. But they were proving, in the specific, committed, bone-damp cold of a Surrey morning, entirely insufficient. The moisture here didn’t freeze; it just seeped through the seams of your clothing and settled directly into your joints.

But the thing nobody had mentioned in the travel brochures—the thing that had genuinely caught her off guard—was the light. Or rather, the absolute, suffocating quality of its absence.

The January sky over England sat low, resolute, and comprehensively grey. It was not threatening. It was not dramatic or stormy. It was simply permanent. It felt like a concrete ceiling installed by a municipal architect who had made a considered, bureaucratic decision that people simply needed less sky than they thought, and had never been persuaded to revisit the issue.

Colorado, where she had grown up, had big, sweeping, optimistic sky. Minnesota had honest, punishing, brilliant blue sky. London had a sky that had apparently signed a strict legal contract to provide ambient light in the minimum functional quantity, and it was honoring that contract to the letter.

She had been in London for exactly seven days. She had officially gotten this job eleven days ago.

That math meant the four days in between had been spent in a controlled, slightly surreal, caffeine-fueled frenzy of ending one entire life and beginning another. It was a blur of giving notice at the theater (where the manager had stared at her in disbelief), packing her entire existence into two heavy canvas duffel bags, buying a bulky travel adapter at a Minneapolis electronics store, and calling her mother from the airport payphone to explain, as calmly as humanly possible, that she was moving to England to be the personal assistant to an eleven-year-old boy.

Her mother, a grounded woman who had raised seven children in a pragmatic, tight-knit household, had been quiet for a long, heavy moment over the crackling long-distance line.

”Is it safe, Amy?” she had finally asked, her voice laced with the specific, terrifying anxiety of a mother watching her bird fly completely off the map.

”It’s Disney, Mom,” Amy had insisted, gripping the plastic phone receiver tightly. ”It’s a massive studio production. They have lawyers and accountants and HR departments.”

”That’s not what I asked,” her mother replied gently. ”I’m asking if you are going to be safe with these people. billionaires operate by different rules.”

It was safe. It was more than safe—it was, Amy had understood from the exact moment she sat across from Linda Meyers in that Los Angeles living room, one of the most deliberately, carefully organized professional environments she had ever encountered in her life.

Linda had made that abundantly clear during the interview. The meeting had not taken place in a sterile corporate office, but rather in the Meyers family estate in San Marino. It was a house that communicated its vast, unimaginable wealth the same way the family communicated everything: through impeccable quality, architectural understatement, and the absolute absence of the need to prove anything to anyone.

There was no gold leaf, no gaudy statues. Just original modern art, centuries-old Persian rugs, and an acoustic silence that only millions of dollars could buy.

Amy had arrived exactly seven minutes early to that interview. She had stood on the pristine pavement outside the wrought-iron gates, smoothing the skirt of her best (and only) professional suit, and breathed carefully in through her nose and out through her mouth for approximately ninety seconds. Then, she had pressed the brass bell.

She had met Linda. She had been offered the job before the afternoon tea was over, signed an iron-clad Non-Disclosure Agreement three days later in a mahogany-paneled lawyer’s office on Wilshire Boulevard, and was on a first-class flight to Heathrow inside a week.

And now she was here.

Mrs. Meyers had answered the heavy oak door herself.

Linda—she had insisted Amy call her Linda immediately, with the warm, unshakeable directness of a woman who had already decided what kind of egalitarian household this was going to be and was communicating it by example—was a professor’s person. She was precise, genuinely interested, and possessed of the specific, terrifying quality of attention that academics developed after years of determining, within minutes, whether a student was genuinely engaging with a complex idea or merely performing engagement to pass a class.

Linda’s gaze had a clarity to it. Amy had recognized it instantly, with a slight internal rearrangement of her nerves, as a form of predatory intelligence. It was the kind of intellect that would notice absolutely everything, process it instantly, and say only exactly what it intended to say.

The interview had lasted an hour and forty minutes. It had been thorough, exhaustive, and surprisingly intimate. It covered her background, which Amy had given with brutal, Midwestern honesty. She detailed the dinner theater in Boulder and Chanhassen. She talked about the grueling hours of waitressing at Hooters just to pay the rent. She freely admitted the fact that she had no completed college degree and absolutely no formal administrative or corporate experience beyond wrangling drunk actors as an unofficial stage manager.

Then, they covered her ambitions. Amy had delivered her answers with the particular, careful calibration of someone who understood that the person she was talking to was far too intelligent to tolerate corporate buzzwords, and experienced enough not to be deterred by raw honesty.

”I want to act,” Amy had said, her hands folded neatly in her lap when Linda finally asked the direct question about her five-year plan. ”That’s the absolute truth, Linda, and I don’t think it’s fair to you or your family to pretend otherwise. I’m not looking to be a career executive assistant until I retire.”

She took a breath, holding the older woman’s gaze. ”But I also genuinely need steady work to survive. I am highly organized, I am exceptionally reliable, and I can promise you that I work harder than most people I know. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive. I can be an excellent, dedicated personal assistant to your son, manage his schedule flawlessly, and still be pursuing my own career on my own time. I just need you to know from day one that both are true.”

Linda had looked at her for a long, silent moment. The ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway seemed to echo loudly.

Then, Linda had smiled. It wasn’t the polite, plastic smile of a corporate interview, but something much smaller, warmer, and far more genuine. It was the smile of someone who had just been told a rare, true thing in a city built entirely on beautiful lies.

”I appreciate that, Amy,” Linda had said, her voice rich with approval. ”We don’t want sycophants in this family. We want competent, driven people. And I suspect you will find that my son is... highly appreciative of efficiency.”

Amy had told her the absolute truth, and Linda Meyers had listened to that truth without so much as a flinch. That was, Amy had thought at the time, a profoundly good sign about the household. In the entertainment industry, honesty was usually treated as a strategic vulnerability. Here, it was treated as a baseline requirement.

”Alright, Amy, things look good for now,” Linda had said, her perfectly manicured hands resting on the polished mahogany of the dining table. ”So here is exactly what we will do. I will purchase a first-class ticket to London for you, and we will hire you provisionally for a trial period of one month.

If we like your work, and you adapt to the pacing, you can continue. Otherwise, I will book you a ticket back to Minnesota with a glowing letter of recommendation. For this first month, your base compensation will be ten thousand dollars. We will discuss your fixed salary, health benefits, afterward. How does that sound?”

Ten thousand dollars. Amy’s heart had momentarily stopped beating in her chest. She had maintained a perfectly neutral, professional expression, but internally, her mind was reeling.

That was more money than she had made in an entire year of waiting tables in tight orange shorts at Hooters and performing regional theater in Boulder and Chanhassen combined.

”Perfect,” Amy agreed immediately.

It was more than perfect; it was an absolute lifeline. She didn’t have a better job offer waiting in the wings. She would have vastly preferred to be working as an actress—standing in front of the camera rather than holding a clipboard behind it—but sometimes, you just don’t have the luxury of forcing the universe’s hand. It certainly helped that the pay was good just for trial.

Strangely, Marvin had not appeared for the duration of the entire meeting. ”He’s on set,” Linda had said near the end of the interview, casually responding to a question Amy hadn’t even dared to ask. ”You’ll meet him when you get to London. On the ground. On set.”

*****

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