Damage Control

Margaux Leclerc had been famous for nineteen years, and she had learned, in that time, that there were exactly two kinds of meeting a publicist could call. There was the meeting where they told you something wonderful had happened and they wanted to make it more wonderful. And there was the meeting in a closed office, with the blinds drawn at eleven in the morning, with no coffee offered — because coffee implied leisure, and there was no leisure today — where they told you that your career was a building, and the building was on fire, and they had perhaps one idea about the water. This was the second kind. Margaux had known it from the drawn blinds. "It is not as bad as the press is making it," her publicist, Sylvie, said, which was the precise sentence people used when it was exactly as bad as the press was making it. "But it is bad. The studio is nervous. Two productions have gone quiet on you this week. Quiet, Margaux. Not no — quiet, which is worse, because no can be argued with and quiet just lets you starve politely." "It was a misunderstanding," Margaux said. "The whole story. You know it was." "I know it was. The misunderstanding does not matter. The story matters, and the story is that you are difficult, and unstable, and finished — and a story like that does not die because it is false. It dies because a louder, better story walks into the room and takes its chair." Sylvie sat down across the desk, and folded her hands, and Margaux's stomach dropped, because Sylvie only folded her hands before saying something Margaux was going to hate. "I have your louder story. You are not going to like it. I need you to let me finish before you walk out, because if you walk out, chérie, I am not certain there is a second idea." "Say it." "An engagement." Margaux laughed. It was not a happy laugh. "I am not engaged to anyone, Sylvie. I am barely speaking to anyone. That is rather the entire crisis." "You will be engaged by Friday." Sylvie slid a single photograph across the desk. "To him." Margaux looked at the photograph and felt her whole afternoon curdle. The man in the photograph was Daniel Brandt. American. Absurdly, internationally famous — the kind of leading man whose face sold films in countries that had no other knowledge of his existence. Margaux had met him exactly once, at a festival, three years ago, and the meeting had lasted eleven minutes and she could have recounted every one of them from memory because she had spent the eleven minutes actively disliking him. He had been charming at her. That was the phrase she had used afterward, to anyone who would listen. He had not been charming *with* her, in conversation, the way a person was charming with another person. He had aimed his charm at her like a man demonstrating a product, and she had stood there being demonstrated to, and she had thought: there is a famous man who has never once in his life had to be interesting, because being looked at has always been enough. "No," Margaux said. "Daniel Brandt," Sylvie continued, as though she had not heard, because not hearing was a core professional skill, "has his own building on fire. A quieter fire than yours, but real. His last two films underperformed and the industry has begun, very softly, to use the word *coasting*. His people called my people. They want exactly what we want — a louder, better story. A romance. Two beautiful, embattled actors who found each other in a hard year." She tapped the photograph. "The cameras will adore it, Margaux. A French star and an American star, engaged. It writes its own headlines. It buys you both six months, and in six months a career can be turned all the way around." "I disliked that man," Margaux said, "more thoroughly in eleven minutes than I have disliked most people I have known for years." "Bon," said Sylvie, and for the first time that morning she almost smiled. "Then at least no one will have to teach you how to argue with him convincingly. Tension reads as passion to a long lens, chérie. It always has." She stood, and went to the window, and lifted one slat of the drawn blind so that a single bar of bright Los Angeles morning fell across the desk and the photograph and Margaux's ruined week. "He is downstairs. He has been downstairs for twenty minutes, being just as horrified as you are, in a different office, with a different publicist saying the same things I am saying. The cars are arranged. The first photographs are arranged. All that is missing, Margaux, is the word yes — from you, today, in this room." Margaux Leclerc looked at the photograph of the man she had spent three years happily despising, and then at the bar of light, and then at the drawn blinds of the second kind of meeting. "Bring him up," she said. "If I am going to be engaged to him by Friday, I would at least like to dislike him in person first."