I had a long and reflective flight home to L.A. Pale and shaken, Ariana was at the Terminal 4 baggage claim, waiting with even worse news. She never lied. At first I thought she was crying for me, but before I could talk, she said, 'I slept with someone.'
I couldn't speak for the ride home. My throat felt like it was filled with sand. I drove; Ariana cried some more.
The following afternoon I was served with my very first legal complaint, filed by Keith and the studio. Errors- and-omissions insurance, it turns out, doesn't cover tantrum-inflicted injuries, so someone had to be held accountable for the shutdown costs. Keith had sued me in order to back up his lie, and the studio, in turn, had jumped on board.
Keith's version of the story was leaked to the tabloids, and I was smeared with such cold proficiency that I never felt the guillotine drop. I was a has-been before I'd really been, and my agent recommended a pricey lawyer and dropped me like a sauna rock.
No matter how hard I tried, I could no longer find the interest to sit at the computer. My writer's block had become fixed and immobile, a boulder in the middle of that blank white page. I suppose I could no longer suspend disbelief.
Julianne, a friend since we'd met eight years ago at a small-time film festival in Santa Ynez, had thrown me a lifeline--a job teaching screenwriting at Northridge University. After long days spent avoiding my stagnant home office, I was thankful for the opportunity. The students were entitled and excited, and their energy and the occasional spark of talent made teaching more than just a relief. It felt worthwhile. I'd been at it only a month, but I was starting to recognize flashes of myself again.
And yet still, every night I went home to a house I no longer felt I belonged in, to a marriage I no longer recognized. And then came the legal bills, more listlessness, the mornings waking up on the downstairs couch. And that feeling of deadness. The feeling that nothing could cut through. And for a month and a half, nothing had.
Until that first DVD fell out of the morning paper.
Chapter 5
'Do it,' Julianne said, rising to refill her mug from the faculty lounge's machine. 'One time.'
Marcello riffled his blow-dried hair with a hand and refocused on the papers he was ostensibly grading. He wore tired brown trousers, a button-up and blazer, but no tie. This was, after all, the film department. 'I'm sorry, I'm just not feeling it.'
'You have a responsibility to your public.'
'For the love of Mary, relent.'
'C'mon. Please?'
'My instrument isn't prepared.'
Standing at the window, I was checking Variety since I'd gotten distracted from the Times' Entertainment section earlier. Sure enough, page three carried a fluff piece on They're Watching--production had just wrapped, and anticipation was through the roof.
I said, over a shoulder, 'Marcello, just do it so she shuts up already.'
He lowered the papers, letting them tap against his knee. 'IN A WORLD OF CONSTANT NAGGING, ONE MAN STANDS ALONE.'
The voice that launched a million movie trailers. When Marcello uncorks it, you feel it in your bones. Julianne clapped, one hand rising as the other fell to meet it, a hee-haw display of amusement. 'That is so fucking fantastic.'
'IN A TIME OF OVERDUE GRADES, ONE MAN MUST BE LEFT ALONE.'
'All right, all right.' Wounded, Julianne came over and stood next to me. I dropped Variety quickly to my side before she could see what I was reading, returning my gaze to the window. I should've been grading papers, too, but in the wake of the DVD I was having trouble focusing. At a few points in the morning, I'd caught myself studying passing faces, searching out signs of menace or masked glee. She followed my troubled stare. 'What are you looking at?'
Students poured out of the surrounding buildings and into the quad below. I said, 'Life in progress.'
'You're so philosophical,' Julianne said. 'You must be a teacher.'
The film department at Cal State Northridge draws mainly three kinds of faculty. There are those who teach, who love the process, turning young minds on to possibilities, all that. Marcello is such a teacher, despite his well- cultivated cynicism. Then there are the journalists like Julianne, wearers of black turtlenecks, always rushing from class, on to their next review or article or book on Zeffirelli. Next, the occasional Oscar winner enjoying the dusk of his career, basking in the not-so-quiet admiration of adoring hopefuls. And then there's me.
I watched the students below, writing on laptops and arguing excitedly, their whole disastrous lives in front of them.
Julianne pushed back from the window and said, 'I need a smoke.'
'IN AN AGE OF LUNG CANCER, ONE SHITHEAD MUST TAKE THE LEAD.'
'Yeah, yeah.'
After she left, I sat with some student scripts but found myself reading the same sentence over and over. I got up and stretched, then walked to the bulletin board and flipped through the pinned flyers. There I stood, perusing and humming a few notes: Patrick Davis, the picture of nonchalance. I was acting, I realized, more for my own sake than Marcello's; I didn't want to admit how much I was disquieted by the DVD. I'd been numbed for so long by dull-edged emotions--depression, lethargy, resentment--that I'd forgotten what it was like when sharp concern pricked the raw skin beneath the calluses. I'd had a rough run, sure, but this footage seemed to be signaling a fresh wave of . . . of what?
Marcello cocked an eyebrow but didn't glance up from his work. 'Seriously,' he said. 'Are you okay? The screws seem a little tight. Tighter than usual, I mean.'
He and I had forged an accelerated intimacy. We spent a good amount of downtime together here in the lounge, he'd been privy to plenty of my and Julianne's conversations about the state of my life, and I found him helpful in his sometimes brutal and always irreverent incisiveness. But still, I hesitated to answer.
Julianne came back in, cranked open a window irritably, and lit up. 'There's a parent tour. The judgmental stares wear on me.'
Marcello said, 'Patrick was just about to tell us why he's so distracted.'
'It's nothing. This stupid thing. I got a DVD delivered to my house, hidden in the morning paper. It kind of weirded me out.'
Marcello frowned, smoothing his neatly trimmed beard. 'A DVD of what?'
'Just me.'
'Doing what?'
'Brushing my teeth. In my underwear.'
Julianne said, 'That's fucked up.'
'Probably some kind of prank,' I said. 'I don't even know that it's personal. It could've been some kid skulking around the neighborhood, and I was the only jackass taking a leak with the shutters open.'
'Do you have the DVD?' Julianne's eyes were big, excited. 'Let's look at it.'
Minding the fresh divots on my knuckles, I removed the disc from my courier bag and slid it into the mounted media unit.
Marcello rested a slender finger on his cheek and watched. When it finished, he shrugged. 'A little creepy, but hardly chilling. The production quality sucks. Digital?'
'That's what I figure.'
'Any students you've pissed off?'
That hadn't occurred to me. 'No standouts.'
'Check if anyone's failing. And think if there are any faculty members who you may have rubbed the wrong way.'
'In my first month?'
'Your track record's hardly been exemplary this year,' Julianne reminded me, 'when it comes to . . . well, people.'
Marcello waved a hand to indicate the building. 'Department full of folks who make movies. Most of them just as accomplished as that one. Suspects abound. I'm sure it's nothing more than someone having a little mean-
