She sat rigid, eyes fixed on the screen. Her stomach tensed during an interview with a man who was moving his family east. In the background a minivan waited, full of children and clothes. Watching him, Emma’s heart started racing, and she began to feel the way she might if she were contemplating her own death — nauseated, overwhelmed, as if everything she had, or was, was only a dream.
She clicked off the television and paced, checking the bolts that held everything to the walls. She pushed against the TV, making sure it, too, was fixed in place.
In her dreams, the television was always the first thing to go. Usually, Dorothy was still a baby, crawling around in front of it, laying her little hands across the screen. As it came crashing down, Emma could do nothing but watch. She would wake up in a cold sweat, gasping for equilibrium, as if the world had flipped inside out.
In Dorothy’s room, Emma watched her daughter’s gentle breathing. Then she headed to the kitchen for another beer. On the table was a stack of bills.
Oh God, she thought, and sat to keep from falling. It was going to be a long night.
THURSDAY NIGHT, PART TWO
SOME FRIDAY MORNING, TAKE SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD to work and get a load of the cars in the Formosa’s parking lot. They don’t serve breakfast there, but you can bet they served a whole lot of booze the night before. The place is packed Thursday nights with twentysomethings who haven’t learned how to drink. Or maybe they’ve learned how to drink but not how to hold their drink. Maybe they have something to drink about, some sad thing, some loss. They can’t find work. They work too hard. Or they work and work but don’t make a dime. Then again, maybe they’re worried about the earthquake.
As the waitress approached, Grace thwapped back the spittle of her Amstel Light and ordered another round. She wasn’t worried about the earthquake, or anything else, because she knocked on Charlie’s door every other night, for the latest science, the latest anything, whatever. She wanted to be near him. Kiss him. But she couldn’t bring herself to make the first move. What if he’d never even considered it? It would kill her if Charlie got this shocked look on his face and suddenly stopped trusting her. She had chosen, as the object of her desire, the busiest and most preoccupied man in Southern California. Still, she imagined that, when the earthquake came, she could be in his arms. What a sap I am, Grace thought. What a romantic sap.
As far as she was concerned, Ian Marcus, former sponge, present swaggerer and future prick — who was, at the moment, sitting across the room from her — didn’t exist. He, on the other hand, glanced in Grace’s direction often, surreptitiously as a millionaire can, or a six-fifty-against-a-million-millionaire, anyway.
He was different now. He looked better. He smiled more, and when he did, he smiled more truly, because suddenly he didn’t need anything from anyone. He kissed the ass of nobody. And that can be a pretty important thing.
Ian sat talking to a guy he had once written a spec script with: a buddy comedy, set in a beach town, called The Cape of Great Hope. Ian had never thought much of his writing.
“Remember,” the guy asked Ian, “when we talked last Christmas?”
“Last Christmas?”
“Like around Christmas? I think it was Damiano’s.”
“When?”
“We had pizza, late,” the guy said. His name was Jon. Ian didn’t know what he was talking about. “And you got a stomachache. Yes, you got a stomachache.”
“I think I remember.”
“Do you remember what we talked about? That night you got a stomachache?”
“What?”
“We talked about Ear to the Ground.”
Ian took a nonchalant sip of beer. “So?”
“Do you remember specifically what we talked about in regard to Ear to the Ground?”
“What are you talking about, Jon?”
“Act two was basically constructed that night at Damiano’s.”
“What are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying. You had them meeting on like page eighty, and I told you if you moved that up …”
“That’s pretty simple stuff.”
“What about the scene, Ian? I gave you the whole fucking scene with the seismologist’s wife!”
Jon disgustedly got up, nodded to a few people on his way to the bar, and ordered a Maker’s Mark neat. He turned once toward Ian and shook his head. Then he leaned over to an attractive woman in an old-fashioned dress.
“Do you know that the guy sitting over there is like one of my closest friends? That he just sold a script for a million dollars? And that he took an idea, took part of an idea, took all of an idea for an important part of his script, that just sold for a million dollars, and he won’t even admit we discussed it? I say this to you not wanting any money from him. Even if he were to offer it to me. If he said, like, ‘Here’s a hundred thousand …’”
“… you wouldn’t take it.” The woman smiled a little.
“No, I wouldn’t.”
She smiled again. “Here it is, a hundred thousand.” She pantomimed holding a suitcase.
“Maybe I’d take fifty.” He gave her his hand. “My name’s Jon, by the way.”
Grace tooks the stairs to her apartment slowly. She wasn’t drunk but she had eaten too little. She was exhausted and, frankly, sad. It felt like the weekend on Thursday nights at the Formosa, but Grace knew she still had to get through Friday. Suddenly she felt old, as though the once-promising flame that was her life had dimmed. Just then, Charlie opened his door, and their eyes met through his screen.
“Hey,” she said, and blushed.
He pushed open the screen door. “You okay?”
She didn’t answer.
“You want to come in?”
“No,” she said, “let’s play this scene right out here on the balcony.” The minute the words came tumbling out of her mouth she couldn’t believe she’d spoken them.
His eyebrows rose. He came outside, and the screen door slammed behind him. “Is this a balcony?” he asked. And before she lost her nerve, she leaned in and kissed him. Then, without a word, she turned away, went inside her apartment, and went to bed.
THE CHILDREN’S HOUR
DOROTHY REMEMBERED BEING LOST SOMEWHERE BEFORE the gauzy filaments of sleep were rended by what felt like an explosion. She remembered a loud bang, and then what sounded like the thudding of horse hooves, coming closer. She remembered looking for the horses, but seeing only black; there had been a crash like thunder, and she remembered opening her eyes.
Dorothy remembered spinning, as if a tornado had picked up her entire house and cast it carelessly to the ground. She remembered how the walls seemed crooked against the black, star-swept sky. She’d wondered how the stars could be so close; how they had crept through the ceiling into her room. She remembered the pain in her arm, and not being able to move. The last thing she remembered was her mother’s face, hanging over her own — a face wild as the moon, her mouth a red gash, crying, “Oh God, my little girl!”
It all seemed like a dream twenty months later, except for a small scar above Dorothy’s right elbow and aches that came and went with the rain. Then, this afternoon, while she played a game called Prom, with her Barbies on the living room floor, she remembered it again. Henry had been stretched out on the couch in his pajamas, face flush with flu, when they interrupted Ricki Lake to announce a 5.5 near Barstow, somewhere called China Lake. Dorothy’s mother had been laughing, but as she watched the news flash, her face drained of color.