She tilted her head, indicating a thin scab across the knuckles of my left hand. 'What happened there, Patrick?'
'Caught it in the car door.'
'Treacherous door lately.' She set the tray down on the coffee table. Poached eggs, toast, orange juice. I paused to take her in. Caramel skin, the mane of almost-black hair, those big dark eyes. At thirty-five, she had a year on me, but her genes kept her looking at least a few younger. Despite her upbringing in the Valley, she was a Mediterranean mutt--Greek, Italian, Spanish, even a little Turkish thrown in the mix. The best parts of each ethnicity had been distilled into her features. At least that's how I'd always seen her. When I looked at her, my mind drifted to how things used to be between us--my hand on her knee as we ate, the warmth of her cheek when she awakened, her head resting in the crook of my arm at the movies. My anger toward her started to weaken, so I focused on the blank screen.
'Thanks,' I said, nodding at the breakfast tray. My low-grade detective work had already put me ten minutes behind schedule. The edginess I was feeling must have been evident, because she gave a frown before withdrawing.
Leaving the food untouched, I got up from the couch and stepped out the front door again. I circled the house to the side facing the Millers'. Of course the wet grass beneath the window showed no marks or matting, and the perp had forgotten to drop a helpful matchbook, cigarette butt, or too-small glove. I sidestepped until I got the perspective right. A sense of foreboding overtook me, and I glanced over one shoulder, then the other, unable to settle my nerves. Gazing back through the slats, I felt a surreal spasm and half expected to watch myself enter the bathroom again, a time warp in striped boxers.
Instead Ariana appeared in the bathroom doorframe, looking out at me. What are you doing? she mouthed.
The ache in my bruised knuckles told me my hands were clenched. I exhaled, relaxed them. 'Just checking the fence. It's sagging.' I pointed at it like an idiot. See, there. Fence.
Smirking, she palmed the slats closed as she set down the toilet seat.
I walked back into the house, returned to the couch, and watched the DVD through a third time. Then I removed the disc and stared at the etched logo. It was the same cheap kind I used to burn shows from TiVo when I wanted to watch them downstairs. Purposefully nondescript.
Ariana passed through, regarded the untouched food on the tray. 'I promise I didn't poison it.'
Grudgingly, I smiled. When I looked up, she'd already headed for the stairs.
I tossed the DVD into the passenger seat of my beater Camry and stood by the open door, listening to the quiet of the garage.
I used to love this house. It was at the summit of Roscomare Road near Mulholland, barely affordable and only because it shared the block with those cracked-stucco apartments and a neighborhood shopping strip. Our side of the street was all houses, and we liked to pretend we lived in a neighborhood rather than on a thoroughfare between neighborhoods. I'd had so much pride in the place when we'd moved in. I'd bought new address numbers, repaired the porch light, torn out the spinsterly rosebushes. Everything done with such care, such optimism.
The sound of steadily passing cars filtered into the dark space around me. I clicked the button to open the garage door and sneaked under it as it went up. Then I circled back through the side gate and past the trash cans. The window overlooking the kitchen sink gave a clear view of the family room, and of Ariana sitting on the arm of the couch. Steam wisped from the coffee mug resting on her pajamaed knee. She held it dutifully, but I knew she wouldn't drink it. She'd cry until it got cold, and then she'd pour it down the sink. I stood nailed to the ground as always, knowing I ought to go in to her but blocked by what little remaining pride I had left. My wife of eleven years, inside, crying. And me out here, lost in a haze of silent devastation. After a moment I eased away from the window. The bizarre DVD had pushed my vulnerability up another notch. I didn't have it in me to punish myself by watching her, not this morning.
Chapter 2
For me, growing up, there was nothing like the movies. A dilapidated theater within biking distance had second-run matinees for $2.25. As an eight-year-old, I paid in quarters I earned collecting soda cans for recycling. Saturdays the theater was my classroom, Sundays my temple. Tron, Young Guns, Lethal Weapon--through the years those movies were my playmates, my baby-sitters, my mentors. Sitting in the flickering dark, I could be any character I wanted, anyone other than Patrick Davis, a boring kid from the suburbs of Boston. Every time I watched the credits roll, I couldn't believe that those names belonged to real people. How lucky they were.
Not that movies were all I thought about. I played baseball, too, which made my father proud, and I read a lot, which pleased my mom. But most of my childhood daydreams were celluloid-induced. Whether I was shagging fly balls and thinking of The Natural or pedaling my Schwinn ten-speed and praying I'd lift off like in E.T., I owe the movies for imbuing my rather ordinary childhood with a sense of wide-eyed wonder.
Follow Your Dreams. I heard it first from my high-school guidance counselor as I sat on her couch gazing down at a glossy admissions pamphlet from UCLA. Follow Your Dreams. It's scrawled on every celebrity-signed eight-by-ten, regurgitated by every Oprah success story, flop-sweating valedictorian, and for-a-fee guru. Follow Your Dreams. And I did, all the way across the country, a carpet cleaner's kid, trading one puzzling culture for another, rocky shorelines for smooth ones, buttoned-up Brahmin lockjaw for surfer drawl, ski sweaters for tank tops.
Like every other wannabe, I started typing a screenplay within the first week of my move, hammering away on a Mac Classic before I bothered to unpack into my dorm room. As much as I loved it at UCLA, I was an outsider from the start, nose up against the glass, a window-shopper. It took years for me to realize that in L.A. everybody is an outsider. Some are just better at nodding along to the music we're supposed to be hearing. Follow Your Dreams. Never Give Up.
My first stroke of luck came early, but like most priceless things it was entirely unexpected and not at all what I was looking for. A freshman-orientation party, lots of too-loud laughter and teenage posturing, and there she was, slumped against the wall by the exit, her disaffected posture betrayed by lively, clever eyes. She was, impossibly, alone. Steeled with a cup of warm keg beer, I approached. 'You look bored.'
Those dark eyes ticked over to me, took my measure. 'Is that a proposition?'
'Proposition?' I repeated lamely, stalling.
'An offer to unbore me?'
She was worth getting nervous over, but still, I hoped it didn't show. I said, 'Seems like that could be the challenge of a lifetime.'
'Are you up to it?' she asked.
Ariana and I got married right out of college. There was never really any question that we wouldn't. We were the first to get hitched. Rented tuxes, three-tiered frilly cake, everyone dewy-eyed and attentive, as if it were the first time in history a bride had step-pause-stepped down the aisle to Handel's Water Music. Ari was stunning. At the reception I looked over at her and got too choked up to finish my toast.
For ten years I taught high-school English, writing screenplays on the side. My schedule gave me ample time to indulge myself--out at 3:00 P.M., long holidays, summers--and every now and then I'd mail a script out to friends of friends in the industry and hear nothing back. Ariana not only never complained about my time at the keyboard but was happy for the satisfaction I generally got out of it, just as I loved her devotion to her plants and design sketches. Ever since we'd fled that orientation party together, we'd always kept a balance--not too clingy, not too aloof. Neither of us had an interest in being famous, or all that rich. Mundane as it sounds, we wanted to do things we cared about, things that made us happy.
But I kept hearing that nagging voice. I couldn't stop California dreaming. Less often about red carpets and Cannes than about being on a set watching a couple of actors mouthing stuff I'd devised for better actors to say. Just a low-budget flick to limp onto the sixteenth screen at the multiplex. It wasn't that much to ask.
A little more than a year ago, I met an agent at a picnic, and she enthused about my script for a conspiracy thing called They're Watching, about an investment banker whose life comes apart after he improbably switches laptops on the subway during a blackout. Mob heavies and CIA agents start dismantling his life like a NASCAR pit crew. He loses his perspective and then his wife but of course wins her back in the end. He returns to his life battered, wiser, and more appreciative. Not the most original plot, certainly, but the right people found it convincing. I wound up getting a good chunk of change for the script, and a decent rewrite fee on top of that. I even got a nice write-up in the trades--my picture beneath the fold in Variety and two column inches about a high-school
