lorne michaels is a petty little bitch but the biggest mistake he ever made was forgetting that there is only one bitch more petty, vindictive and determined, and her name is deborah fucking vance. so for forty years, every time one of those writers came sniffing, marcus would send a cease and desist - the only one who ever came close was tina fey and that was only because marcus had just re-watched mean girls and wanted to ask about lindsay lohan's breakdown.
but they haven't talked. it's been a year and they haven't talked. there were texts at first, a voicemail or two, but deborah likes a clean slate and she cut ava loose for a reason (it didn't matter anymore if the longer they went without talking, the less it made sense) -- she only answers the damn phone because the picture that pops up is of ava stuffing her face with a hot dog that gave her food poisoning and she accidentally hits the green button.
what do you want me to say? that you fired me and ignored me for so long? or that i can’t fucking write anything funny because my life is going to shit around me? and now i have to beg you- literally beg you to help me for once?
what can one do in the face of tragic desperation? it makes her nauseas. so she says yes. and much to her chagrin, the show kills. it's funny and fresh (and they spent the better part of every second together for a full week) and she can already tell the reviews are going to be incredible when the entire cast and writing team flood the stage for the wave offs. deb makes a point of it, actually, thank you to everyone here at saturday night live, lorne, colin, ava daniel, i have had the tim eof my life. that's our show, goodnight!
but ava isn't on stage and when deb looks around in the thank yous and draws a blank, she has to go searching after curtain call.
"hey, a few of us are gonna go to a place down the street if you want to join us? no pressure!" some guy with a jawline like celine dion says to her as she walks out an access door after spotting the back of ava's head disappear into an alley. she doesn't catch much of the conversation but the side she does hear isn't great.
"well somebody's not being crowned homecoming queen are they?"
they are nominated for a primetime emmy for outstanding variety special - and she does mean they because ava put as much of herself into this as deborah did and even if she refuses to take the writing credit, she is getting dragged to every accolade and dinner deb can find. they are a few weeks into the midst of the ruse jimmy had put together, their shared appearances creating somewhat of a buzz online but nothing much more yet - much to ava’s consternation at breakfast the other morning, highly offended at being referred to as a gal pal do they not think i could land a milfionnaire because i totally could - so he sees it as an opportunity to make a splash.
ava wears a tuxedo - a real one, a tailored, satin lapelled honest to god classic tux, with a much more modern bow tie that complements her jawline, and deep blue piping which complements the colour of deborahs dress. damien must have helped with the coordination because the overall effect when they come stand next to one another in the hotel is outstanding; they look like a couple. a good one, at that.
“you look handsome,” she says, brushing lint off ava’s shoulder before heading down to the car waiting outside. (she misses the violent red blush and the look damien sends.)
the red carpet is a blur as it always is, but they stay close and it feels less and less like a ruse the longer the night goes on. by the time they’re sitting down, it feels much more like a date - if you can imagine 200 other people on the same date - and deborah is shocked to find it’s probably one of the best she’s been on; they laugh and gossip and make quiet jokes to one another about the people passing by, peppered by occasional observations or drinks, introductions and small talk. it’s fucking fun, something so rare these days.
so wrapped up in making ava laugh, she almost forgets to be nervous about her category. when steve carrell is talking about sid caeser and mel brooks, ava takes her hand and leans over. you can kiss me if you want, you know.
(they don’t acknowledge this sort of thing - they haven’t done that - it feels as though it would be taking the next step past the point of pretend. a kiss, a real one, means going over a boundary deborah isnt sure she can just yet.)
and the emmy goes to…deborah vance, my bad!
she kisses ava — she leans back into her because her arm has spent the majority of the night over the back of debs chair, and presses a kiss to very corner of her mouth because the angle doesn’t lend itself to anything more scandalous. and when she gets up to make her speech, she shakily manages to say and to my partner, ava daniels, i am so lucky to have you in my life.
it is a vacation of sorts. which is to mean she does not go for work - there is no reporter hanging off her hip, no damien chasing after her or jimmy on the phone talking about itineraries - but that doesn't mean work stays behind as much as she intends. toronto is cold this time of year so deb keeps herself busy by touring the city; she goes to a baseball game, eats lunch at a sports bar and chats to some girls from new york who have no idea who she is but recommend a place past chinatown.
the cameron house is dinky and split into a main stage for musicians and a back bar for the stand ups. there is graffiti up and down the walls of the bathrooms, signatures of past debutantes (she thinks she spots one from that tatiana girl in the droll, confusing show ava made her watch years ago). deborah can't help herself. with a blue jays cap pulled low dressed in an oversized carhartt jacket which had wormed its way into her closet, she sits near the bar watching amateur after amateur bomb their way through a mediocre set. some of it has potential. there's a chuckle here and there.
what she doesn't expect is the mc coming up and saying the words somebody trying something new - ava daniels, everybody.
and just like that, the clock rolls back three years. they used to text. ava sent her little moving pictures - gifs, she reminds herself - but for months they would watch svu on fridays with the sound off, subtitles on to speculate if mariska would agree to a blind date if deb called and tried to set her up with ava. the answer was always no, but it was funny to think about. after six months, they didn't call. after a year, there was a showrunner thing and then it was a netflix deal and then it was something else, until... well.
it's years on and here ava is, leaning on a mic stand and spinning a riff about a pizza eating contest that is actually really funny and deb has to laugh (quietly, obviously). it's fine. it's a fine set and it's about ten tight minutes; but around minute eleven, ava the freeweight comic looks out at the crowd and scans then --
it looks like the air has been kicked out of her. the universal gut punch heard around the world. name things in the room: headlight, table, candle, curtain, bottle of tequila -- ava smiles and runs a hand through her hair and launches into a story that deborah quickly realises is about them.
when ava nexts clocks eyes with her, she shrugs and gets the biggest laugh of the night: it's only libel if it isn't true right?
"well, i mean sure," deborah says with air of confidence belonging to a woman who has never met a man that didn't want to screw her over. it started the moment she was born, continuously disappointed in a father too drunk to pay much attention to anything she ever did, to a husband who felt slighted by the fact his wife was more talented than he was, even when he actively sabotaged her. there have been a string of them in the fifty years since, but it always circles back to the same point: they just aren't good enough for her.
"but where's the fun in just taking it at face value? marty is still putting himself out there, still in love with falling in love. and i respect that, you know, i think there is truly something wonderful about embracing the challenges of life as it comes at you. learning a new skill, starting a new job --" she looks over at ava, pointedly at the notebook on the bedside table full of material for a show ava has tentatively titled ghost writer.
the invite comes out of the blue and fills an evening; the conversation is easy, a breaking of the surface tension of the palmetto, her last show, and marty's smug fucking face as he spews endlessly about his wedding. it's him and a handful of executives from here, there and everywhere, but the food is good and she's got a follow up with jimmy for a gig with dior - she won't take it without marcus' casting an eye over the contract, but it will fill the time before she makes a decision on the tour.
it isn't wildly late by the time she gets home. ava is not in the bedroom or the kitchen, but she does see a fuzzy dark shape sitting at the edge of the dock by the lake, so deb wanders down.
"don't swim in there. it gets refiled periodically, but the last time there was a dead alligator at the bottom."
debbie gets to class five minutes early. the back rows - ever coveted - fill up fast but she has a system, she moves quickly from class to class and bypasses the clumps of students as they chatter in the hallways. some wave to her and she pivots on her heel to wave back, walking backwards at full tilt. she never raises her hands; the teachers do not call on her. they notices the aced tests and try at first to coax her into giving spoken answers, but by the middle of the first term they have given up. and that's the way she likes it.
debbie reads in class. sometimes openly and sometimes furtively; in today's class, mrs lansing, it is furtively, hidden under the desk and covering the pages turning with a surreptitious cough. today, she's snagged a d.h. lawrence off her mother's bookshelf, and she is already regretting it. apparently, no one ever told this bozo to show, not tell... the book is boring, and preachy, and although she usually makes herself finish books like this just to make sure she understood what the big deal was, she's pretty sure this one's going back on the bookshelf tonight.
unfortunately, she is not the only one bored out of her mind by mrs lansing's lecture on geography, because georgie fuller - quarterback, handsome in a shovel-hit-him-early sort of way - kicks the back of her chair and the book goes flying. mrs lansing snaps around quickly and sees what debbie is doing and stomps over, oversized heels clip clopping the whole way up the aisle. she holds up the book as if it's on fire.
filth, she spits. where did you get this?
debbie answers my mother-- and mrs lansing gapes. your mother let you read this disgusting sex book.
she doesn't understand what is so disgusting about it, it was long and wordy and really wasn't at all that enticing. "it's a dirty sex book?" she asks, bewildered that anyone could enjoy whatever d.h. was trying to depict and gets sent to the principals office. they both shoot horrified glances at the book with weird little gleams in their eyes, as they were in a play trying to chew the wallpaper so the audience didn't miss their reactions. the lady doth protest too much suddenly makes intense sense to her in a way it never did before.
and now, because it is the principle of the thing, she immediately forgives d.h. lawrence and burns through whatever she can get her hands on; anais nin, henry miller, kate chopin, anything on the banned books list just for the hell of it. to say she damn well knows. at fourteen, deborah magnusson makes a bet with herself and she wins every time.
she does not tell her parents about the dirty sex book.
a few weeks later, her father is drunk when she gets home, her keds dirty from having kick rocks the entire way back, and has some old record on that he's dancing to in the living room. mom and kathy are gone for the evening for a piano recital thing of a cousin, but debbie hadn't wanted to go and her father could rarely stand to be around mom's side of the family for more than a few hours anyway.
she comes in quietly but gets spotted and has to sit on the ratty couch which has seen far better days. for now she watches him move barefoot on the wooden floors. dirty jeans, stained shirt where beer or perhaps whiskey if the glass held loosely in his hand is anything to go by has splashed back on the collar. from the smell, he might be stoned.
dance with me, he slurs and she shrugs it off. he rolls his eyes and tells her not to chat back, to get up and dance with him, and so she does. she's taller, even at thirteen, and awkwardly acquiesces, folded into his chunky enormous arms, hands resting on his shoulders. they sway. he smells like the boys in high school; cheap cologne and old sweat, powdery something underneath it all like mould dusted off a window ledge with no ventilation.
she is uncomfortable.
(he used to smell like clean sheets and motor oil.)
you got a boyfriend? he asks gruffly, looking over her shoulder at the wall. she shakes her head no. what would she ever want a boyfriend for? a girl your age should have a boyfriend. he pulls back and looks at her in a way she does not understand, saying quietly you've never really needed a father.
she wants to slap him. scream at him. she's always needed him, kathy needs him, they both do, she wants to tell him she misses the smell of motor oil and the big belly laugh when they watch carson instead of the quiet seethe he adopts now in the dark. she wants out of this one-way conversation, out of this room, out of this dance; there's a sudden but undeniable prickle of wrong that's seized her, something electric and uneasy. she has chores. she has homework. she doesn't want to be here, with him, in this house, not ever again --
he lets her go and stomps out of the house and it is only when she hears the sound of the car peeling out the driveway does she let out a breath.
he dies a year later and she feels relieved which only makes her feel guilty. she tries to go to the cabin to clear it, to take kathy, but it backfires and she cannot reconcile the man he was with the man he was that night; it burns like humiliation, it sticks like indignation.
when she meets frank, he smells like motor oil and she thinks a girl my age should have a boyfriend. she she lets him take her on a date and she lets him kiss her and she lets him do all the things boyfriends do when they are grown adults. (she still isn't sure how adult she feels at all, but he doesn't make her uneasy and he is sweet until he isn't.)
everything that happens, happens. there is no need for a rehash, except to say that deborah doesn't question her inherent search for something safer than what she knows; bad men gravitate towards her in a way she cannot explain or escape, even when she thinks marty might be the best of them, he still manages to ruin parts of her life she did not expect. there are affairs and flings, and it's fine. it's just fine.
unsatisfying. it is the dusty pages of a so called dirty sex book which did absolutely nothing for her except to whittle down what she considered classic literature. she wants to be thrilled and while the stage fulfils an aspect of it, it does not lead her to examine much of anything at all except a desire to be known.
except.
her name is ava.
gangly and graceless, red nosed, with regrettable eyebrows and nervous tendencies... eager, manic, and raw. her wit and intelligence are quick, dry, able to give and take in a measure deborah has never encountered. fingernails bitten to the quick and a mouth that curved at rest, one could be forgiven for debating whether she was inexplicably beautiful or incredibly plain.
she is like frank and so very much the anti-frank.
she does not smell like motor oil (even if she does dress like a mechanic).
do you ever wish we'd met each other sooner? / deb
in the distance, a motorcycle roars to life and peels off around a corner, the doppler effect fading out and out until deborah cannot hear it after a only a handful of moments; she is losing the highs and lows. call it fifty something years of clubs, parties, stages, the classic vegas ring of thrilling coins slamming into the metal catcher trays, the scream of victories and the yelling at security in the streets. it is harder to hear kayla than ava. harder to hear damien than marcus. she has almost lost the triumphant trill of her own ringtone; she has lost the low, steady thrum of heavy equipment in the green rooms and on stages where the spotlights overhead burn.
if asked, she might say it felt a little like being underwater sometimes. especially at night, and she wants to take it at face value when thinking too hard about it. imagines it akin to taking a deep lungful of fresh ocean air and dive deep, deeper than one could possibly imagine and explore a new perspective. a whole other world teeming with life if only one would look.
but sometimes, in the dark, when ava is breathing quietly beside her -- well, she wants to know. because she cannot hear it anymore and the soft huff-sigh is gone and she misses it more than she can really put into words (or can. how do you explain to your lover forty years younger what it's like to watch the edge of the world drop off?). the noise of the casinos has dropped from a harsh racket to something softer, muted, windchimes in the distance. it's peaceful and not.
it could be lovely. a world without pain, a world without people, a world where things are orderly and quiet and unsurprising, one in which she may have total control. lonely, sure, but... she's good at lonely. she's been lonely her entire life - except for perhaps these days.
they are sat by the pool in the dark, deborah with a cigarette that died a little while ago burnt down to the filter, and ava stretched out on a lounger blowing smoke rings from her blunt. (don't call it a doobie, willie nelson.) they haven't moved in a while except for ava to nip into the kitchen and come back with margaritas for some inexplicable reason, and they don't talk much except for when ava asks do you ever wish we'd met each other sooner?
at five, ava would have been the girl down the street who could ride a bike before she could but would probably teach her. at ten they might have had sleepovers (never in deb's house, of course) and swapped the cards in matchboxes. at fifteen maybe they would have gone to the mall together and watched a movie for the first time in a real theatre, they might have stayed up late and maybe (maybe) practiced kissing in a friends treehouse. at twenty, they could have driven across the country to some college or another and lied to everyone they met along the way. they could have gone to woodstock together (fuck, ava would have loved that - jimi hendrix and janis joplin, dropping acid in a tent owned by a guy named burley bill benson.)
deborah pictures cutting shapes at studio 54 and partying their way through the eighties, imagines a trendy pool and ava mowing the lawn and everything takes on a fried green tomatoes filter, until they can hold hands in the nineties and have matching kaftans post millennium.
maybe she never would have met frank.
maybe she could have been happy with ava her whole life.
deborah fishes another cigarette out from the pack and lights it, blowing the smoke as far as it'll go and struggling to hold onto the tones of the cicadas in the grass.
you know, i'm always amazed at the correlation between being beautiful and being a complete bitch / deb
they settled into a routine on the tour of ava watching her deconstruct the illusion piece by piece, chunky gold earring after thick bracelet, the makeup gone with precision and replaced with something lighter and easier to remove later, the ever present smell of black pashmina covering the softness of cold cream. their inevitable up and downs happen but they still manage to gravitate towards one another through forced proximity. stacey has disappeared for the evening (whether because she thought one or the other had already left, or she just simply had e-fucking-nough who is to say) so it leaves the two of them in the dressing room.
they workshop their way through some bits that worked and some that didn't, the set backdrop didn't show up well on the camera but it can be worked out by next show and the coordinator knows. most of it is a back and forth of one word answers, nothing too prodding or revealing, until deborah is herself once more.
(this used to be different. they used to workshop together like this with fast food congealing on the side, as they could never quite manage to eat a full meal without it going cold on the account of laughing too hard. there would always be a heavy pause as she peeled off the false lashes with a wincing ava over her shoulder saying something about modern beauty standards but how did she get them to stick for so long? it always reminded her of being on the cruise, the manicure, them sharing a warm beer in a hotel-motel on some interstate stretch of fucking nothing.
sometimes, deborah wishes they would fight like they used to: the soft bickering of two people who knew each other enough to get under the skin but never leave a scar.
i'm sorry. i wish it had been different.)
but that's not who they are anymore and the silence suffocates for long enough that deborah can't look her in the eye anymore. ava watches her in the mirror and closes her notebook. tilts her head. you know, i'm always amazed at the correlation between being beautiful and being a complete bitch.
deborah doesn't respond - she just watches her so-called head writer stand and slam the door behind her.
