She shook her head. 'If it was longer, maybe. But just overnight, it's a waste of money.'
'Money?' He grinned. 'I don't think that's really a problem anymore.'
'Don't spend it before you get it.'
'Spoken like a true accountant.'
Maureen glanced at the clock. 'You'd better get going. It's at least a two-hour drive to Salt Lake.'
Barry put his arms around her, held her close, and kissed her. 'I love you,' he said.
She smiled, kissed him back. 'I love you, too.'
The drive up to Salt Lake City seemed long. Once he got through the mountains and onto Interstate IS, the landscape remained unchanged for over a hundred miles: farmland to the left, foothills to the right.
Thank God for tapes. There were no decent radio stations, and he popped in a series of cassettes he'd made from various albums and CDs, keeping awake and alert by listening to tunes.
He found himself wondering if he could live off the royalties and resales of what he'd already written should it come down to that. He hadn't typed a single word on his new novel for the past two weeks, and he honestly did not see himself meeting the deadline. He wondered if he would be able to finish the book at all. It would be one thing if he was only stuck on this novel, but he had no other ideas either, and he had not even been able to crank out a short story.
This movie deal was a windfall, and if he could just sell one more book to Hollywood, they'd be able to pay off the house and live quite comfortably here in Utah for the next decade. Particularly if Maureen's client list kept growing.
The idea that he was dried up, that his creative life was over, scared the living hell out of him. He'd never wanted to do anything other than write, didn't know how to do anything other than write, and if that was taken away from him... He prayed this was just a temporary setback.
Salt Lake City was nothing like he'd expected. He'd never been there before, had only seen photos in magazines and on postcards, pictures of quaint Victorian homes and a modern downtown backed by snowcapped peaks, but the highway passed by mile after mile of rusty train yards and ugly industrial buildings. The sight depressed him, and he was grateful for the clean, generic modernity of the airport.
He barely had enough time to make the promised call to Maureen and buy some cheapo flight insurance before the boarding call for his flight.
He got on the plane, settled into his seat, and pulled out a book to read from his carryon bag. Reading made the time go by faster, kept him from worrying about crashes and accidents and the possibility of a fiery death, and it usually served to stave off unwanted conversations with his aisle mate. Maureen always suggested bringing one of his own books to read, hyping himself that way, but he couldn't bring himself to be so shameless. Besides, the last thing he wanted to do was reread one of his novels. After writing it, proofreading it, going over the typeset version, and checking the galleys, he was pretty well sick of a book by the time it hit the shelves.
The trip was uneventful, the young woman in the seat next to him seemed to be as loath to talk as he was, and before he knew it the plane was taxiing down the runway at LAX.
X.
He'd always wondered where the hell that had come from. The official name was Los Angeles International Airport. How the letter X had come to stand for the word International was a complete mystery to him. Of course, it also seemed to stand for Christ, since a lot of people abbreviated Christmas as Xmas. And the Christ connection held on the highway, where road signs shortened the word Crossing to Xing.
None of it made any sense.
The rental car he'd ordered was ready and waiting for him, and he gave Maureen a quick call to let her know he'd landed safely while someone brought the vehicle around. Five minutes later, he was out of the airport and on the street, driving. He cranked up the air-conditioning and turned the radio to his favorite station.
Despite the smoggy skies, despite the traffic from the airport, despite the homeless guys on the street corners, it felt good to be back, and he was surprised to discover that he actually missed southern California. Next to him at the stoplight, a short-haired blond man in a red convertible had his car stereo up so high that Barry could hear the thumping of bass over the sound of his own air conditioner and radio, the yuppie apparently attempting to impress the drivers around him by playing music loudly.
Ah, Los Angeles.
It felt as though he'd been gone for years, not months, and he took the 405 to Wilshire Boulevard, intending to drive surface streets to see what, if anything, had changed in his absence. There was still an hour and a half to go before he was supposed to meet his agent for an early dinner, and although he hadn't planned on it, he stopped off at his favorite used-record store. The vinyl section had shrunk a little, the CD section had grown, but there were aisles and aisles of both, and he happily sorted through the albums, picking up an armful before deciding that it was time to get going.
He headed east down Wilshire, tried to figure out how long it would take to get from L.A. to Brea. He'd only be here overnight, but he'd arranged to meet his friends for drinks. The dinner with his agent probably wouldn't take more than an hour or so, and there'd be plenty of time remaining to hang and catch up on gossip.
Lindsay White was waiting for him at Canter's on Fairfax, their traditional rendezvous point. As usual, there were tables full of old men from the neighborhood as well as assorted Hollywood wannabes and use tabes Lindsay was ensconced in a corner booth, and she waved him over as he crossed the room. He'd barely had time to sit down when, in her usual overassertive manner, she motioned for a waitress with an imperial flick of her wrist and snap of her fingers. 'The service here is still slow as molasses,' she said as the waitress walked up, 'so I
already ordered. Order what you want and then we'll talk.'
He hadn't had time to even look at the menu, but he ordered a pastrami sandwich and an iced tea--the same thing he'd had the last time they'd met here.
The waitress left and Lindsay leaned across the table, patting his hand. 'How are you, Barry? How've you been out there in the heartland?'
'Fine,' he said.
'That's great,' she told him before he could say another word.
She spent the next fifteen minutes or so trying to impress him, as she always did, and he gamely feigned interest in her newest trendy passion. She was what Maureen called a 'Miramax intellectual,' one of those people who wasn't particularly knowledgeable or well read but who followed the cultural trends generated by art-house films: reading Janet Frame after seeing An Angel at My Table, pretending to be an admirer of Pablo Neruda after viewing Il Postino , referencing Jane Austen in conversation after seeing the movies rather than reading the books. It was a tactic that worked well these days in polite society, this false familiarity with culture, although it never failed to set his teeth on edge, and it annoyed Maureen to the extent that she made a conscious effort to avoid casual conversation with Lindsay.
When the food came and they finally got around to business, the news was not good.
'I expected to have contracts for you to sign,' Lindsay admitted.
'But... there've been complications since we last spoke. To be honest, I think the deal might've fallen through. I haven't given up hope,'
she added quickly. 'We still might be able to pull this off. But there's been a changeover at the studio, and you know how these things work. Anything associated with the old regime, the previous administration, is automatically suspect. Right now, that means us.
But I hope to call a meeting with one of the development execs early next week and see if we can work something out. The Friend is a very salable property, a very shoo table property, and I have no doubt that once I can divorce it from the context in which it was rejected, I'll be able to make them see that.'
Lindsay tried to smile. 'Want any dessert?'
It was still light out when he emerged from the restaurant, and Barry hurried over to his car, driving straight down Fairfax to the freeway in an effort to beat the after work traffic out to Orange County.
He was ahead of the game for a while, but he got bogged down in rush-hour traffic on the Santa Ana Freeway, and he took surface streets from Santa Fe Springs on, avoiding the areas where he knew they were doing highway construction, the challenges of southern California driving serving to keep his mind off Lindsay's
