teacher making good. I was thirty-three, and I had finally arrived.
Never Give Up, they say.
Follow Your Dreams.
Another adage, perhaps, would have been more apt.
Careful What You Wish For.
Chapter 3
Even before the footage of me showed up in my morning newspaper, privacy had been hard to come by. My one haven--an upholstered interior, six feet by four-and-change--still required six windows. A mobile aquarium. A floating jail cell. The only space left in my life where someone couldn't walk in and catch me covering the tail end of a crying jag or convincing myself I'd make it through another workday. The car was pretty banged up, the dashboard in particular. Dented plastic, cracked faceplate over the odometer, air-conditioner dial barely holding on.
I slotted the Camry into a space in front of Bel Air Foods. Walking the aisles, I gathered up a banana, a bag of trail mix, and a SoBe black iced tea, which came loaded with ginkgo, ginseng, and a handful of other supplements designed to kick-start the bleary-eyed. As I neared the checkout lane, my eye caught on Keith Conner, gazing from a Vanity Fair cover. He reclined in a bathtub filled not with water but with leaves, and the headline read CONNER TRADES GREEN FOR GREEN.
'How's Ariana?' Bill asked, cuing me to move along. A flustered mother with her kid was waiting behind me, grinning impatiently.
A plastic smile flashed onto my face, instinctive as a nervous laugh. 'Okay, thanks.'
I set my items down, the belt whirred, and Bill rang me up, saying, 'You got one of the last good ones, that's for sure.'
I smiled; Flustered Mom smiled; Bill smiled. We were all so happy.
In the car I pinched the metal post where the button used to be and twisted on the radio: Distract me, please. Down the hill I veered around the turn onto lurch-and-go Sunset Boulevard, and the sun came on bright and angry. Lowering the visor, I confronted the photo rubber-banded into place. About six months ago, Ariana had discovered an online photo site and had tortured me for a few weeks by reprinting flashes-from-the-past and hiding them various places. I still found new pictures now and then, vestiges of playfulness. Of course, this one I'd discovered immediately. Me and Ariana at some intolerable college formal, me wearing a shoulder-padded blazer with, alas, cuffed sleeves, her in a poofy taffeta contraption that resembled a life-saving device. We looked uncomfortable and amused, painfully aware that we were playacting, that we didn't belong, that we didn't really fit in like everyone else. But we loved that. That's how we were best.
You got one of the last good ones, that's for sure.
I hit the dashboard to feel the sting in my knuckles. And kept hitting. The scab cracked; my wrist stung; the air-conditioner dial split. With smarting eyes, my chest heaving, I looked out one of my six windows. An older blonde in a red Mustang studied me from one lane over.
I cranked that plastic smile onto my face. She looked away. The light changed, and we drifted back off into our private lives.
Chapter 4
After I sold my screenplay, Ariana was even more elated for me than I was. The production got fast-tracked. Dealing with studio executives, producers, and the director, I was intimidated but determined. And Ariana pep- talked me every day. I quit my job. That gave me plenty of time to obsess on the project's almost daily ups and downs--interpreting the nuances of each two-line e-mail, having meetings about meetings, taking a cell-phone call on a sidewalk while my entree went cold and Ariana ate hers alone. Mr. Davis, tenth-grade American lit teacher, was out of his depth. I had to choose roles, and I chose wrong.
Follow Your Dreams, they say. But no one ever tells you what you have to give up in the process. The sacrifices. The thousand ways your life can go to hell while you keep your eyes on the horizon, waiting for that sun to rise.
I was too distracted to write--or at least to write well. As They're Watching progressed through development, my agent reviewed what I was putting out now, and it didn't catch her fancy any more than the scripts that had been moldering in my desk drawers. I sensed a slow leak in my aspirations, like a tire with a nail through it, and my agent, too, seemed to be running out of steam. My lack of focus built to full-blown writer's block, and still I couldn't seem to find the time to pay proper attention to the people around me. I was lost in the typhoon of possibilities, unsure if the movie was actually going to move forward, if I had what it would take, if I was, at bottom, a fraud.
Ariana and I never quite found our footing again after the shift our relationship took following the script deal. We harbored silent resentments, misread the currents of each other's emotions. Sex grew awkward. We were too far in for lust, and falling out of love. We'd lost the connection, the heightened awareness. We couldn't get it started, and so we stopped trying. We buried ourselves in routine.
Ariana had forged a friendship of commiseration with Don Miller, our next-door neighbor--coffee twice a week, the occasional walk. I told her she was naive to think he didn't have a thing for her and that this wouldn't affect her relationship with his wife, Martinique. Ariana and I had never been controlling with each other, so I didn't press her on it, but that reflected my own naivete--not about Ariana, but in how far she and I could let things slide.
Hard as it was to admit, I checked out on everyone but myself for the better part of that year. I lost sight of everything but the movie, which finally entered preproduction, and then production.
Shipped to frigid mid-December Manhattan to fulfill my obligation for production rewrites, I had a kind of time-release panic attack. The director's cell-phone ban on set made things worse, since I was way too timid to use the lines wired to the important people's trailers to talk to my wife. Even though Ariana was worried about me, I managed to return her calls only a few times, and even those conversations were cursory.
On the set, it rapidly became apparent that I'd been hired not as a production rewriter but to take dictation from the twenty-five-year-old lead, Keith Conner. Sprawled on his couch in his trailer, slurping a lumpy green health drink and yakking half the day on the sole ban-exempt cell phone, Keith offered endless notes and dialogue changes, interrupting them only to show off photos of naked, sleeping girls he'd snapped on his Motorola RAZR. The high weekly rate they were paying me was not for ideas. It was for baby-sitting. Tenth-graders were a lot less work.
After a little more than a week of eighteen-hour days, Keith summoned me into his trailer to say, 'I just don't think my character's dog would have a squeaky toy. I think he'd have, like, a knotted rope or something, you know?' To which I'd wearily replied, 'The dog didn't complain, and he actually has talent.'
The friction that had built up between us gave way like a crumbling of tectonic plates. Jabbing a finger at me, Keith lost his footing on the rewrite pages he'd thrown on the floor and banged the counter with his well-defined jaw. When his handlers rushed in, he lied and said I'd hit him. There were major contusions. Having the star's face in that condition would mean shutting down the shoot for at least a few days. Given the Manhattan location, that would cost about a half a million per day.
After realizing my lifelong dream, it had taken me just nine days to get fired.
As I waited for the taxi to arrive to take me to the airport, Sasha Saranova empathized with me in her trailer. A sometime model from Bulgaria, she had a knee-weakening accent and natural eyelashes longer than most Hollywood prenups. Playing opposite Keith, she'd endured his personality in close-up. Her visit was motivated more out of self-concern than genuine friendship, but I was shaken and didn't mind the company.
It was just then when Ariana called the set. I had been off the radar with her, not returning phone calls for three days, worried that if I heard her voice, I might just crumble under all the pressure. And Keith happened to be on hand to grab the phone from the production assistant. Still icing his swollen jaw, he told Ariana that Sasha and I had withdrawn to her trailer, as we did every evening after wrap, and our standing instructions were that we were not to be interrupted. 'For anything.' It may have been his best performance.
Ironically, I left Ariana a message on her cell at almost the same time, breaking the news and reciting my flight information. Little did I know that Don Miller had dropped by with the enrollment paperwork from the Writers Guild, accidentally messengered to his doorstep. I'd imagined her many times in the sweaty, regretful aftermath, listening to the voice mail from me and putting my miserable explanation together with Keith's little ruse. A stomach-turning moment.
