“Not as far as I know.” During the drive down to Gardena, Adam had wondered if the old man might have been trying to airbrush out his infidelities. That would have been a bizarre form of vanity, or hypocrisy, or some other sin the world didn’t have a name for yet, but it would still have been easier to forgive than a deliberate attempt to sabotage his successor.
“We met around two thousand and ten,” Auster continued. “When I first approached you about adapting Sadlands.”
“Okay.”
“You do remember Sadlands, don’t you?”
“My second novel,” Adam replied. For a moment nothing more came to him, then he said, “There’s an epidemic of suicides spreading across the country, apparently at random, affecting people equally regardless of demographics.”
“That sounds like the version a reviewer would write,” Auster teased him. “I spent six years, on and off, trying to make it happen.”
Adam dredged his mind for any trace of these events that might have merely been submerged for lack of currency, but he found nothing. “So should I be thanking you, or apologizing? Did I give you a hard time about the script?”
“Not at all. I showed you drafts now and then, and if you had a strong opinion you let me know, but you didn’t cross any lines.”
“The book itself didn’t do that well,” Adam recalled.
Auster didn’t argue. “Even the publishers stopped using the phrase ‘slow-burning cult hit,’ though I’m sure the studio would have put that in the press release, if it had ever gone ahead.”
Adam hesitated. “So, what else was going on?” The old man hadn’t published much in that decade; just a few pieces in magazines. His book sales had dried up, and he’d been working odd jobs to make ends meet. But at least back then there’d still been golden opportunities like valet parking. “Did we socialize much? Did I talk about things?”
Auster scrutinized him. “This isn’t just smoothing over the business at the funeral, is it? You’ve lost something that you think might be important, and now you’re going all Dashiell Hammett on yourself.”
“Yes,” Adam admitted.
Auster shrugged. “Okay, why not? That worked out so well in Angel Heart.” He thought for a while. “When we weren’t discussing Sadlands, you talked about your money problems, and you talked about Carlos.”
“What about Carlos?”
“His money problems.”
Adam laughed. “Sorry. I must have been fucking awful company.”
Auster said, “I think Carlos was working three or four jobs, all for minimum wage, and you were working two, with a few hours a week set aside for writing. I remember you sold a story to the New Yorker, but the celebration was pretty muted, because the whole fee was gone, instantly, to pay off debts.”
“Debts?” Adam had no memory of it ever being that bad. “Did I try to borrow money from you?”
“You wouldn’t have been so stupid; you knew I was almost as skint. Just before we gave up, I got twenty grand in development money to spend a year trying to whip Sadlands into something that Sundance or AMC might buy—and believe me, it all went on rent and food.”
“So what did I get out of that?” Adam asked, mock-jealously.
“Two grand, for the option. If it had gone to a pilot, I think you would have gotten twenty, and double that if the series was picked up.” Auster smiled. “That must sound like small change to you now, but at the time it would have been the difference between night and day—especially for Carlos’s sister.”
“Yeah, she could be a real hard-ass,” Adam sighed. Auster’s face drained, as if Adam had just maligned a woman that everyone else had judged worthy of beatification. “What did I say?”
“You don’t even remember that?”
“Remember what?”
“She was dying of cancer! Where did you think the money was going? You and Carlos weren’t living in the Ritz, or shooting it up.”
“Okay.” Adam recalled none of this. He’d known that Adelina had died long before Carlos, but he’d never even tried to summon up the details. “So Carlos and I were working eighty-hour weeks to pay her medical bills … and I was bitching and moaning to you about it, as if that might make the magic Hollywood money fall into my lap a little faster?”
“That’s putting it harshly,” Auster replied. “You needed someone to vent to, and I had enough distance from it that it didn’t weigh me down. I could commiserate and walk away.”
Adam thought for a while. “Do you know if I ever took it out on Carlos?”
“Not that you told me. Would you have stayed together if you had?”
“I don’t know,” Adam said numbly. Could this be the whole point of the occlusions? When their relationship was tested, the old man had buckled, and he was so ashamed of himself that he’d tried to erase every trace of the event? Whatever he’d done, Carlos must have forgiven him in the end, but maybe that just made his own weakness more painful to contemplate.
“So I never pulled the pin?” he asked. “I didn’t wash my hands of Adelina, and tell Carlos to fuck off and pay for it all himself?”
Auster said, “Not unless you were lying to me to save face. The version I heard was that every spare dollar you had was going to her, up until the day she died. Which is where forty grand might have made all the difference— bought her more time, or even a cure. I never got the medico-logistic details, but both of you took it hard when the Colman thing happened.”
Adam moved his half-empty plate aside and asked wearily, “So what was ‘the Colman thing’?”
Auster nodded apologetically. “I was getting to that. Sundance had shown a lot of interest in Sadlands, but then they heard that some Brit called Nathan Colman had sold a story to Netflix about, well … an epidemic of suicides spreading across the country, apparently at random, affecting people equally regardless of demographics.”
“And we didn’t sue the brazen fuck into penury?”
Auster snorted. “Who’s this ‘we’ with money for
