FALLEN ANGELS

 

CHAPTER TWO: FORGIVE ME FATHER FOR I HAVE SINNED

Jack Quest had the kind of face that made people want to confess things. Danielle had the kind that never would, though she’d make you feel, somehow, that she already had, that you were both in on something delicious and slightly forbidden and wasn’t it wonderful to be the kind of people who could handle that.

She settled into the armchair the way she settled into everything, like the decision to be there had been made long before anyone else arrived and now that she was here she was generously allowing the room to catch up with her. Quest shuffled his notes. A light was adjusted somewhere behind the cameras. Danielle waited, one leg crossed over the other, perfectly at ease, and when the camera found her shoe she acknowledged it with the smallest smile, the kind that says yes I know, isn’t it wonderful, and somehow makes the camera feel appreciated for noticing.

“There are rumors,” Quest began. “About certain affiliations. Powerful ones.”

Danielle tilted her head, warmth spreading across her face like the opening of something. “Jack. There are always rumors about powerful women. You know that better than anyone.” She said it like they went way back, like this was a continuation of a conversation they’d been having for years over very good wine.

“And are they true?”

She looked at him for a moment with something that felt remarkably like fondness, the way you look at someone who has just asked you a question so perfectly obvious you find it charming. “I’m here aren’t I.”

Quest let that sit. “Heaven calls you an empty imposter. Spiritually void.”

“Oh, Heaven.” The way she said it you would think she was talking about a beloved and slightly exasperating child, someone whose dramatics she had learned to receive with patience and a full heart. She reached for her water, unhurried, the ice shifting in the glass. “Heaven calls me a lot of things. Her darkness is palpable, I will say that much. But I wouldn’t presume to diagnose her publicly.” She smiled. “I have too much respect for her.”

“Do you see her as a rival?”

She laughed, and the laugh filled the studio the way laughter does when it is completely unself conscious, or performing that quality so precisely the difference becomes irrelevant. “Heaven? God, no.” Something moved across her face, genuine and brief, before the warmth settled back in like it had never left. “She’s family, Jack. Complicated, infuriating, occasionally delusional family, but family nonetheless. And that exposé.” She shook her head slowly, the way you shake it at something that hurt you more than you’re willing to fully say. “I won’t pretend that didn’t sting. Coming from her of all people. But that’s love isn’t it. The people who can really get to you are always the ones who know exactly where to look.”

“She says you destroyed Jewel.”

Danielle set her water down. When she looked at Quest her eyes were very clear and very steady and the warmth was still there but underneath it something else was very still. “That exposé had nothing to do with Jewel. I want that on record. Whatever else you want to say about me, and I’m sure we’ll get to absolutely all of it,” she gestured warmly at his notepad, almost encouraging, “not that.”

Quest nodded. “Tell me about Crystal.”

Danielle uncrossed and recrossed her legs and when she spoke it was with the particular patience of someone who has told a story so many times it has stopped feeling like a story and started feeling like simple fact that the universe has been slow to catch up with. “When I came to the States and saw what Heaven had built I was genuinely proud of her. I want to say that clearly because people love to make this into something it isn’t. Heaven was always the underdog. The runt, if I’m being honest, and I say that with love because some of the most extraordinary things that have ever happened in this industry came from people who had everything to prove. I saw that in her. I believed in her before she believed in herself and I stand by that even now, even after everything, even after all of this.” She gestured vaguely at the studio, at the cameras, at the general situation of being interviewed about her best friend’s destruction, with the air of someone who finds it all slightly unfortunate but not entirely surprising.

Quest said nothing, which was its own kind of question.

“But believing in someone and agreeing with every decision they make are two entirely different things,” Danielle continued, “and what Heaven was doing with Crystal, this beautiful, potentially enormous platform, was playing small. Deliberately. Almost proudly. As if ambition were something to be ashamed of. She had this vision, consciousness of a nation, which is lovely, genuinely lovely as a concept, very moving actually, but concepts don’t pay salaries and they don’t keep the lights on and they certainly don’t build empires. I saw what Crystal could become and I shared that with her as a friend, which apparently was the wrong thing to do because Heaven doesn’t receive ideas, she receives threats, and anything that challenges her particular vision of the world becomes a personal attack.”

“She told you to stay in your lane,” Quest said.

“She told me I was a trophy wife who should stick to charity work.” The smile stayed but something behind it shifted, briefly, like a light changing in a room across the street. Then it was gone and the warmth was back and she was almost laughing. “Which was fine. Truly. Because what that told me was that I needed my own table. Not a seat at hers.”

“So you built one.”

“I built several.” She reached for her wine now, a small upgrade from the water, easy and natural, the gesture of a woman completely at home in herself and in this moment and in this particular leather armchair. “My husband’s company, Lilith Enterprise, had a small cosmetics arm that nobody was taking seriously. I took it seriously. I expanded into broadband when people were still laughing at the idea. I acquired VCCUniversal when the industry said I was overreaching. I mortgaged real estate, liquidated stock, made decisions that kept me up at night and made them anyway because that is what building something actually looks like from the inside. It is not a highlight reel. It is not a vision board. It is unglamorous, relentless, sometimes ruthless decision making and Heaven has simply never had the stomach for it. Bless her heart.” She said the last three words with such genuine tenderness you almost missed what they meant.

“When my husband died,” she said, and her voice shifted register, softening in a way that felt unguarded and therefore somehow more convincing than anything else she’d said, “I inherited his shares in Crystal and I took that responsibility seriously the way I take all my responsibilities. Heaven was struggling. The network was deteriorating. We were behind ABC, behind NBC, losing ground every quarter, and Heaven was in there commissioning art films and psychological dramas for an audience of twelve people who all wrote very long think pieces about them and none of whom were keeping the business alive. I tried again to help. She refused again.” She opened her hands, a small helpless gesture, almost sweet, the gesture of a woman who has done everything she could. “So I did what I had to do.”

“The Great Blindside,” Quest said. “Thirty percent of Crystal’s public shares. The most aggressive consolidation move this industry has seen in a decade.”

“I prefer thorough,” Danielle said warmly, like he had paid her a compliment she was too modest to fully accept.

“And now there are rumors about the remaining private shareholders.”

The smile stayed exactly where it was. “There are always rumors, Jack. Powerful people attract them the way light attracts moths. What I will say is that I take my responsibilities at Crystal very seriously and I intend to continue doing so.”

“That sounds like a non-denial.”

“It sounds like a woman who chooses her words carefully.” She tilted her head at him, almost playful, like he was doing very well for a beginner. “Which is more than I can say for the people spreading rumors.”

“But some would say,” Quest continued, “that what you’ve done with Crystal’s programming is the real story. That you took something that stood for something and emptied it out.”

“Oh darling.” The endearment arrived so naturally Quest almost didn’t notice it had arrived. “Those same people would also tell you that Crystal under Heaven was winning awards nobody had heard of and losing audiences by the quarter. She was making beautiful, serious work. Unconventional. Deeply symbolic. The kind of thing that makes critics weep and shareholders drink heavily.” She paused here, appearing to consider something. “Three academy award nominations for a cable network. Genuinely not nothing. I give her that completely.” She paused again, generous, letting the compliment breathe before she continued. “But you cannot build a sustainable business on critical darlings and good intentions. You simply cannot. And I refuse to apologize for understanding that.”

“So you changed everything.”

“I expanded the conversation.” She set her wine down and leaned forward and when she spoke next it was with the energy of someone who has been waiting a very long time to say something out loud on national television and has chosen the perfect outfit for the occasion. “And let me tell you something, Jack, that nobody in this industry wants to say out loud. Why should my worldview not be heard? Heaven gets a network. Heaven gets to decide that the consciousness of a nation needs raising, that her particular version of what is meaningful and what is worthy is the correct one, that she gets to stand at the altar of Crystal and tell millions of people what they should want from their lives and from their stories and from themselves. And that is called vision. That is called purpose. That is called meaningful television.” She smiled, slow and wide and thoroughly entertained by what she was about to say. “I come along and say, you know what, sex is interesting. Greed is interesting. Power is interesting. Desire is interesting. The full catastrophe of being human and wanting things and not always being noble about it is interesting. And suddenly I am the devil.” She laughed, delighted. “Why should sex not be celebrated? Why should ambition not be praised? Why should my worldview be demonized while Heaven’s is called art? Because it makes people uncomfortable? Darling, Heaven makes me uncomfortable. You don’t see me filing a complaint.”

Quest laughed before he could stop himself.

“Trophy Wives. Sex With God. Growing Weeds.” She counted them on her fingers with the satisfaction of a woman reading her own greatest hits. “These are not lowbrow provocations. These are honest conversations with an audience that has been talked down to for decades by people who believed their job was to improve them rather than entertain them. And why can’t sex be a spiritual experience? Why can’t weeds expand one’s perspective? Heaven would have you believe the sacred and the carnal are opposites. I think that is a very frightened way to understand both and I think she should perhaps examine why she finds the body so threatening but that,” she waved a hand, “is between her and her therapist.”

Quest was suppressing something. “Crystal’s original audience. The people who found something there they couldn’t find anywhere else.”

“There are a dozen of them, Jack.” She said it with such gentle finality, like a doctor delivering news she wishes were different. “I say that without malice but I say it plainly. The audience Heaven was serving was never going to make Crystal viable. They were passionate, devoted, wonderfully articulate, and they have the internet and they have each other and they will be absolutely fine. Meanwhile Crystal now has nine of the top eleven shows on television.” She let that sit for a moment, just a moment, savoring it the way you savor something you earned. “Nine. That is not an accident. That is not luck. And it is not something Heaven could have achieved in a million years with her art films and her psychological gabbage and her very sincere belief that it was her job to raise the consciousness of a nation.” She said the last phrase the way you say something someone else believes, carefully, from a comfortable distance, as though the belief itself were a mildly exotic specimen she was regarding with affectionate curiosity.

“And the Crystal brand on all of it,” Quest said. “Some people find that sacrilegious.”

“Yes,” Danielle said simply.

Quest waited.

“It was deliberate,” she continued, and now her voice dropped to something quieter, and the comedy didn’t disappear exactly but it made room, just briefly, for something more honest, and Quest felt the shift the way you feel weather changing. “Heaven built Crystal to mean something. Everyone knew what it meant. That meaning had weight, had history, had the particular gravity of something people genuinely believed in. I wanted that gravity. I wanted to take something sacred and show it for what it really is beneath all the sanctimony. A business. A platform. A mirror. I wasn’t desecrating Crystal.” The smile returned, almost tender. “I was completing it.”

“Heaven’s early audience would call that vandalism.”

“Heaven’s early audience,” Danielle said, with the serenity of someone who has won and made peace with how, “can call it whatever they like from wherever they are. I run Crystal now. I am its glory and its honor and what I choose to do with it makes us all a great deal of money, Heaven included, whether she wants to acknowledge that or not.” A small pause, warm and precise as a scalpel. “She should be thanking me. She won’t. But she should.”

Quest smiled despite himself. “You enjoy this.”

“Enormously,” she said, and smiled back, and for a moment they were almost conspirators, two people in on the same joke at the end of a long evening.

“Being the villain in her story.”

“I enjoy being the author of my own.” She picked up her wine. “Heaven can cast me however she likes in hers. It doesn’t change my chapter.”

Quest looked at her for a long moment. Then, carefully, “She says that completely powerless people given enough power become the very thing they spent their powerless years resenting.”

Danielle was still. Not the performed stillness of earlier. Something genuinely different, lasting just a beat too long, and when the smile returned it was missing something the earlier ones had carried, some lightness, some performance, and what remained was just the woman underneath all of it looking at Quest with something that was almost frank.

“Heaven has never been completely powerless,” she said. “She has always had her goodness to hide behind. Her virtue. Her consciousness of a nation.” She set the wine down. “Do you know what completely powerless people do when they finally get power, Jack? Every single one of them does exactly what I’ve done. The only difference is I don’t pretend otherwise.” She looked directly into the camera, and it was the first time in the entire interview she had looked into it without the performance, without the charm working overtime, just looked, as though she could see through it to the specific living room she was really talking to. “Buffoons like Heaven would do far worse than me if they had the guts. The only thing standing between a good person and everything I’ve done is opportunity. And nerve.”

The mug was yellow. Heaven didn’t remember picking it up.

“Bitch,” she said, and it came out quieter than she expected, almost wondering, like a word she was hearing herself say for the first time in a language she had always known but never spoken, and then the mug was leaving her hand and crossing the living room with a kind of inevitability, the way things move in dreams, purposeful and slow and already decided, and then the television screen met it and the world became noise and light and the smell of something burning and her maid Ada in the doorway making a sound that Heaven heard from very far away.

The apartment settled back into silence. The kind that follows violence, even small violence, even the violence of a yellow mug against a television screen in a living room in a city that didn’t notice and didn’t care.

Heaven was on her knees by the fireplace. She didn’t remember moving there either. In her hand was the invitation to Danielle’s Divine Decadence ball, the card stock heavy and expensive between her fingers, and she was saying something, repeating it, the words coming out of her the way things come out when the mind has gone somewhere the body can’t follow.

Forgive me father for I have sinned. Forgive me father for I have sinned. Forgive me father for I have sinned.

Ada stood in the doorway watching her. Then, with the particular pragmatism of a woman who has seen things and has learned that the seeing of them does not require comment, she went to find the broom.

It was only while she was sweeping, her mind drifting the way minds do when the hands are occupied with something simple, that Ada thought about the barbecue set Heaven had given her last Christmas still sitting in its box in her bedroom. She hadn’t used it yet. Maybe next weekend. She could invite the new guy. The one who had come to fix the security system three weeks ago while Heaven was at her therapy appointment, who had spent four hours doing what should have taken one and had left Ada with a number saved in her phone under a name that wasn’t his real name. She smiled at the thought of it, at the particular warmth of it.

She looked up at the corner of the ceiling without meaning to. Then looked away.

Behind her, Heaven’s hand and the invite stayed in the fire as she kept muttering, forgive me father for I have sinned. Forgive me father for I have sinned. Forgive me father for I have sinned.