Show Me Everything
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Galatea
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She's 34 days from prison and has promised total transparency. He's the documentarian who came to expose her. Every room, every night, every angle on camera. Then she asks him to swim.
Total Access
ELLIOT
The first rule of documentary filmmaking is that people perform for the camera until they get bored of performing. It usually takes three days.
I suspected someone like Margot Vance never got bored.
Her fiancé met us at the door of the rented house in Malibu, a glass box on stilts above the Pacific, wearing linen and a smile I’d seen before on men who sell timeshares.
“Grant Whitlock,” he said, gripping my hand like we’d already closed on something. “You must be Elliot. Huge fan. Huge. That episode where you made the professional clown rehearse his own divorce? Genius.”
“Thank you,” I said, trying to drop his hand. “He’s remarried now.”
“See? Healing.” Grant clapped Theo, my cinematographer, on the shoulder. Theo looked at the hand the way you look at a seagull on your sandwich. “Here’s our philosophy. Thirty-four days until Margot has to turn herself in. The world thinks it knows who she is. It doesn’t. The best way for people to see who she really is—” he spread his arms toward the ocean, “—is total access.”
“Total,” I said.
“Total. Bedroom, bathroom, therapy, whatever you need. We have nothing to hide.”
In my experience, “we have nothing to hide” is what people say once the hiding’s done, the bodies are buried, and they’re certain they’ve gotten away with it.
“Where is she?” I asked.
Grant pointed at the water.
Dawn was coming up gray-gold over the swells, and a hundred yards out a single figure was swimming laps parallel to the shore. Stroke after methodical stroke, she cut through the surf with precision. Her trademark blonde hair stark against the blue sea.
I’d prepped for this. I’d watched every keynote. I’d read the book and listened to half a dozen podcasts.
I’d studied the TV show where the famous blonde-haired, blue-eyed actress danced awkwardly to Lil Wayne. The black turtleneck. The Pilates-and-cold-plunge morning routine she’d posted before the indictment. The voice, pitched half an octave lower than nature intended, explaining how the Lumen Ring would “read a woman’s hormones through light.”
Ninety-two billion dollars from investors. A device that, according to the federal government, could read approximately nothing.
That woman did not swim in the ocean. Not at six in the morning, not ever. That woman had a cryotherapy pod. She did not swim in salt water that would damage her trademark hair and get kelp stuck to her bathing suit. The ocean is for the natural, the relaxed, the carefree. Not sociopathic snake oil saleswomen. I hadn’t even spoken to her yet, and already my perception of her was being challenged. And for some reason, that excited me.
“Get this,” I told Theo.
“I’m getting it.”
She turned at the end of a lap, saw the lens, and stopped. Treaded water for a long moment. Then she swam straight in.
***
The house had eleven rooms and we put cameras in nine of them. Theo also locked off a camera on the bluff above the beach to shoot timelapse B-roll of the sunset every night. Nobody, including me, ever thought about it again.
“Why not the other two?” Margot asked, padding behind me barefoot in a white robe as I walked the space with Theo.
“Those are closets.”
“Put cameras in the closets.”
I stopped and looked at her. She looked back without blinking. Her eyes were wide and intense. Margot Vance had famously never been photographed blinking. There were entire Reddit threads dedicated exclusively to this fact.
“Why,” I said, “would you want a camera in your closet?”
“Radical transparency. That’s the whole point, Elliot. Everything was taken out of context. My words were taken out of context. My semantics. If you can see everything, there’s no context left to take things out of.”
“That’s not how context works.”
“Then you’ll teach me. And if I get it wrong, you’ll punish me.” She turned and walked into the master bedroom. “Come set up the one in here.”
The bedroom was all white linen and sea light. A king bed faced floor-to-ceiling glass. I stood at the foot of the bed with a tripod like a man holding a very tall excuse.
“Grant usually sleeps on the left,” she said. She climbed onto the bed, robe and all, and lay down on the right side. “Is this in frame?”
I looked through the monitor. She was lying on her side, one knee bent, the robe parted just above it. Her wet hair was soaking the pillow.
“You’re in frame,” I said.
“Is it a good frame?”
“It’s a functional frame.”
“Elliot.” She propped her head on her hand. “I’ve been on the cover of Forbes. I know what a good frame is. Come look and tell me honestly.”
“I’m looking.”
“From here.” She patted the mattress.
I didn’t move. I let the silence sit. This is the thing I do, the thing I’m known for. The thing people want from me. I wait. People can’t stand silence. They fill it. Sometimes with lies, but after a few of these instances, they often start filling these moments with the truth.
Margot didn’t fill it. Why wasn’t she filling it? People always fill it. People always bend to me when I apply this pressure. Why won’t she bend to me?
She lay there and waited with me, and the robe slipped another half inch down her shoulder, exposing softly freckled skin, and somewhere around the forty-second mark I realized that I was the one who wanted to say something.
“Mic pack,” I said, and held one up. Theo had left them on the dresser. “You’ll wear this during waking hours.”
“Put it on me.”
“Theo usually—”
“Theo has cold hands. I think yours will feel better.” She sat up and turned her back to me and let the robe fall to her waist.
She was still wearing the swimsuit underneath. It didn’t help as much as it should have. I clipped the transmitter to the back strap, ran the lav wire under the fabric, up between her shoulder blades, over her collarbone.
She didn’t move. I heard her breath catch, very quietly, and then I heard it again through my own headphones a half-second later, because the mic was live.
“Testing,” she murmured, and the word went straight into my ears.
“You’re good,” I said, and stepped back like the bed was on fire.
Grant was standing in the doorway, smiling. I didn’t know how long he’d been there.
“Look at you two,” he said. “Already a team.”
***
Over the next three days, I learned what Margot Vance did with total access.
She showered with the door open. “There’s a camera in there anyway.” She did her Pilates in a sports bra on the deck at sunset, directly in front of Theo’s B-cam, and asked me to “check her form” while she held a plank, which I did, from six feet away, until she said “closer” and I stayed exactly where I was.
She made breakfast and pretended not to be annoyed when Grant told her she was beating the eggs wrong, and when I asked a question about the 2017 board meeting, she licked yolk off her thumb and said, “I don’t remember the board meeting, but I remember that I felt very aligned.”
What she did not do, ever, was give me a straight answer.
“Did you know the Ring didn’t work?” I asked her on day two, in the sit-down interview.
“I knew it would work,” she said, those non-blinking eyes staring right at me.
“That’s a different sentence.”
“Is it?” She tilted her head. “I think people heard works when I said will work. Language is very imprecise, Elliot. That’s what this whole thing was. A semantics problem.”
“Ninety-two billion dollars is more than a semantics problem.”
“Ninety-one point four,” she said. “Semantics.”
Meanwhile, Grant took calls on the deck. Always the deck. Always walking, always pacing, always with his back to the house, with words drifting in through the slider—Lumen 2.0, second generation, clean data, new cap table. Investors. A month before his fiancée went to federal prison for defrauding investors, he was pitching investors.
“He believes in me,” Margot said, when I asked her about it. “He’s the only one who ever did.”
***
On the fourth night, I couldn’t sleep.
The crew was set up in the guest cottage below the main house, and I’d been in the edit room until two, logging footage of Margot doing things. Margot lying on the living room floor staring at the ceiling for eleven minutes, saying nothing, on what Grant later told me was “a mindfulness protocol.” Margot asleep, the bedroom camera catching her in infrared, her hand curled under her cheek like a kid.
It was the sleeping footage that got me. The only footage where I suspected she wasn’t performing. Or the only footage where I couldn’t tell.
I went up to the house for water. The kitchen lights were off. The camera in the corner blinked red.
She was sitting on the counter. “Hi,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I stood in the doorway and let the silence go to work.
She slid off the counter. Walked toward me. Bare feet on tile, Grant’s shirt to mid-thigh, hair loose. She stopped close. Then closer. I could smell salt and her shampoo, something expensive with fig in it.
“You do this thing,” she whispered. “With the quiet. You think it makes people tell you the truth.”
“You’re giving me too much credit. I’m just socially inept.”
“No, you’re being calculating. Weaponizing the silence. Forcing people to be real with you.”
She stepped closer until there was nothing between us but the tiny red dot of the camera reflected in her eyes. Her face was inches from mine. I could have counted her eyelashes. I could feel her breath, warm, on my mouth.
She still didn’t blink.
“Are you being real right now?” I asked her.
The corner of her mouth curved.
“Are you?”
Behind her, out on the deck, a phone screen lit up. Grant, pacing in the dark, at three in the morning, murmuring to someone.
Margot didn’t look at him. She was still looking at me.
