Paradise Pretenders: The Million-Dollar Masquerade

We do not cast the beautiful. We cast the hungry, and then we simply wait. There is a theory, popular among people who have never produced television, that you cannot manufacture chemistry. Lena Marsh had built a nine-season career on proving them wrong, and she had done it the way she did everything, which was with a spreadsheet, a glass of something cold, and a deep and cheerful contempt for the notion that human beings could be trusted to misbehave on their own. “Run me the marrieds again,” she said. Bashir scrolled. The control room under the spa was dark and arctic, the way Lena liked her control rooms and her martinis, and on the wall a hundred monitors showed an empty resort waiting to be filled with sin. “Ten couples,” he said. “All briefed, all signed, all of them tucked in tonight believing they’re the only fakes in the cast.” “God, I love that lie. It is the finest thing we have ever built.” She put her heels up on the console. “Ten married couples, Bashir, each one strolling onto my island convinced that everybody else is single and starving. And every night the draw sends them to bed with a stranger. Not two prim little singles tucked under separate duvets, mind you. One bed. I give them one bed, a single wide beautiful thing dressed in white, no sofa, no daybed, not one polite inch of floor to martyr themselves onto, so a man lies in the dark a hand’s width from a gym-fed wolf he believes is free, while his wife lies in an identical bed across the resort doing the very same arithmetic. The jealousy is genuine because the danger is genuine, and genuine jealousy, my darling, is the only thing in this fallen world that out-rates a royal wedding.” “And the ones who aren’t jealous?” “Then we have a different flavor of fun.” Lena smiled, and it was not a warm thing, and it was not entirely a cold one either, which was what made her dangerous. “Some couples will claw each other to ribbons. Adorable, very Tuesday. Some will swear they don’t care and then catch themselves caring, which is better, because nothing on earth is funnier than a smug person discovering they have a heart. And one couple, if I have cast it correctly, will turn out to be far filthier than they look on paper, and they will find each other all over again somewhere in the middle of the buffet, and the whole country will weep into its phone, and we will be renewed before the finale even airs.” She tapped a name on the glass and two headshots bloomed across the monitor wall, ten feet tall and lit like saints. The man first. Olive skin, a heavy fall of near-black hair pushed straight back off a calm, unbothered face, dark heavy-lidded eyes that would lower the blood pressure of an entire waiting room. The kind of handsome that does not appear to be trying, and is therefore far more dangerous than the kind that does. Then the wife. Platinum waves, a mouth painted the precise red of a stop sign, eyes the cool blue of pool tile, the sort of beauty that walks into a frame and quietly fires everyone else in it. “Qureshi,” Bashir read. “Hassan and Mary. He’s a hospitalist, she’s in marketing. Their background check came back clean. Honestly, a little too clean. Pillars of the community.” “Pillars of the community,” Lena repeated, the way a cat repeats a phrase it has decided to swat off a high shelf. “Darling. Nobody signs up for a television program about cheating because the marriage is going beautifully. The boring ones are never boring. The boring ones arrive dragging a steamer trunk of secrets and a smile they rehearsed in the bathroom mirror until it stopped looking like fear.” She rolled the glass against her cheek. “Dig on both of them. Quietly. The doctor first. No man gets that calm by behaving. Calm like that is a man sitting very still on top of a great deal of appetite, praying nobody asks him to stand up.” “And the wife?” “The wife,” Lena said, studying the blonde a moment longer, the angle of the chin, the eyes that were already, in a still photograph, measuring the lens that took it, “knows precisely how a camera works. Which means somewhere back down the road, a camera worked for her. Find out where. Find out by Friday. We air the first envelope Friday, and I want it to land like a chandelier coming down.” Bashir wrote it all down, because writing it down was easier than thinking about it. “One more thing they don’t know,” Lena said, almost kindly. “We told each of them to keep the marriage a secret, yes? So none of them can walk in as a husband or a wife. Every single one of those poor lambs has to invent a single self the moment the launch hits the dock. A cover story. And there is nothing, nothing, more revealing than the lie a person reaches for when you tell them to pretend they’re free.” She laughed, low and delighted. “The doctor will invent something noble and tragic. The blonde will invent something armored. The big one with the arms will invent a playboy he has never once managed to be. And the moment we blow the whole thing open at the first elimination, every cover story drops at the same time, and we get to watch sixteen people realize they performed their own secret hearts for a national audience without being asked.” “You enjoy this too much,” Bashir said. “I enjoy it exactly the correct amount.” She stood, smoothed her dress, and surveyed the empty paradise she was about to ruin for profit with the fond, proprietary eye of a woman looking over her own garden the night before a party. “Point Damien at the blonde. Slow. Let her think the running is her idea, she’ll respect it more. Put the new girl, Zoe, anywhere within breathing distance of the doctor, she used to wear scrubs and she has a nose for men with double lives. And the draws.” She glanced at the spreadsheet where the word random appeared precisely nowhere. “The draws are mine. Fate is a service we provide.” “Thirty days,” Bashir said. “Ten couples, six wolves, one million dollars. What’s the rule, boss?” Lena paused at the door, and for one unguarded second something almost human crossed her face, the look of an artist who knows the work is going to be good. “The rule is the house always wins,” she said. “But every so often, once in a very great while, a marriage turns out to be the real thing, and it walks through all of this, all the wolves and the lies and the lovely terrible cameras, and it makes the house pay out anyway.” She killed the lights. “Those are my favorites. They cost me a fortune and they’re the only ones I believe in. Lights up, Bashir. Let’s go corrupt some nice people.”