“Uh, and why couldn’t he?” Paul said when Pam, after a month of hard work, finally showed him Act I.
“Because she’s a big-titted dolt,” Pam answered. “You know, the kind of person you’d expect a guy to be drooling over, which is what makes Paula so paranoid, which is what makes Sam feel like he’s so busted, when in fact—”
“In fact what?”
“In fact, he’s embarrassed by how uninterested he is in Kimbo. You know, like, what’s wrong with him? All the other guys in Maui are drooling over this girl. And Sam is like, Am I gay? Am I less of a man for being monogamous? Because the idea here is that it’s hard, it’s comically awkward, to still be so in love with his wife after all these years, while there’s this huge cultural pressure for him to be hitting on little chicklets like Kimbo.”
After a pause, Paul nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, O.K. I get it. That’s interesting. But what if, then, in Act II—”
“No,” Pam said in a voice that made Paul wonder if she were quite as oblivious as he’d thought. “I’ve been thinking about this sixteen hours a day,” she said, “and no. That’s the totally obvious beat: she suspects him, her suspicion gives him ideas, he tries to act on these ideas, compromising positions, crisis in marriage, love reaffirmed, lesson learned, happy ending.”
“No, I agree, that’s stale,” Paul said. “It’s just, why does Kimbo (unfunny name, by the way) have to be so cartoonish? Why can’t she be like Paula, only younger? Kind of a thinking man’s beautiful twenty-year-old?”
“Well,” Pam said, “because that wouldn’t be funny. Apart from that one little problem, its total lack of funniness, it’s a great idea.”
Paul retreated to his own study to view the regrettably quite PG-rated Tracy Gill video for the fourth or fifth time and to reread his high-school scripts and imagine them as the basis for a “Monty Python” cum “Fractured Fairy Tales” type of cable comedy hit. It was the surprisingly durable brilliance of these scripts that gave him the courage finally, after painful hesitation, to pick up his phone and call Gill’s agent to arrange a private pre-meeting meeting with the potential star of his and Pam’s potential new hit series.
The meeting took place at a Starbucks in Westwood at two on a Tuesday afternoon. Paul’s only serious complaint with the lovely Gill, in person, was that she had brought along her mother.
Mrs. Gill reminded Paul of his own mother. Her first question was “What exactly does the phrase ‘pre-meeting meeting’ mean?” Her second question was “Where’s your wife?” Her third question was “Why aren’t we meeting at your office?” Her fourth question was “Why did you not want Tracy’s agent here?”
Paul’s answers to these questions were syntactically complex. To change the subject, he went ahead and pitched his idea for a cable show based on his high-school scripts. Tracy Gill averred, with a squeal, that she’d just read “The Bell Jar.” Mrs. Gill asked Paul what he thought was funny about a young mother putting her head inside an oven.
The meeting was over in thirty-five minutes. Back up in the mountains, after a high-speed drive that Paul spent picturing a hatchet buried in Mrs. Gill’s forehead, he found his overweight wife by the pool. He was breathless with wrongdoing. His wife asked him to guess who had just telephoned her, but Paul couldn’t. “Tracy Gill’s mother,” Pam said.
Paul stopped breathing altogether. “You and Tracy Gill’s mother have been talking on the phone?”
By way of reply, Pam gathered her robe around her and stood up. “Paul,” she said, “I want you to move out. Right away.”
Her words were so unexpected, and they made Paul feel so guilty and fearful, that even though he was basically sick to death of Pam he tried to defend himself and argue for their marriage: “You’re splitting up with me because I had coffee with Tracy Gill and her mother?”
Pam shook her head. “It’s just that, before I go any further with the script,” she said, “I want you at a different address.”
Paul said, “Are you out of your mind? You think I’d actually try to steal credit?”
“At this point, Paul, I’d consider you capable of almost anything.”
“Even, my God, the crime of drinking coffee at two in the afternoon!”
“You had your chance to sign on with this project,” Pam said. “I gave you weeks and weeks and weeks.”
“This project,” Paul cried, “is a fraudulent, wishful middle-aged woman’s fantasy!”
To which Pam simply shook her head and said, “You are such a disappointment to me.”
A month later, as part of their separation agreement, Paul signed an affidavit in which he renounced all claims to “Two’s Company.” Pam’s publicist confided to Variety, “He’s a really nice guy, but she’s been carrying him for years. It finally just got to be too much.” After “Two’s Company” grossed a hundred and ten million in theatres, and Pam was photographed looking twenty pounds thinner than Paul had ever seen her, even in college, and she hooked up with a boy so chiselled and pectoral that even if he wasn’t gay he should have been, and she went on to produce more comedies for an older female audience, each more profitable than the last, Paul came to see that what had looked to him like a wishful fantasy had been a fantasy only because he personally had not believed in it: because it offended his taste. Back in Pamland, the wish was still congruent with reality; and every ticket for a film of hers, every video rental and every rave review on AM radio, was like another vote to ratify her reality at the expense of his. The whole country was against him, and so he moved to New York City, where, well-insulated financially, he worked on recasting his comic literary vignettes as little formalist short stories that he mailed out to journals. You could see him at a certain kind of party, standing near open windows, wearing black, smoking cigarettes, and hoping to talk about his favorite subject, which was the badness of his ex-wife’s films.
3
How He Came to Be Nowhere
ROOM 471, THE FEDERAL BUILDING, Eighth Street, Philadelphia: a perfectly square room which for no obvious reason had an eye chart on the southern wall. A leak in the roof two floors up had spread damage across the ceiling and down two other walls — ricotta-like eruptions of plaster, arrested avalanches of softened latex paint. In one corner where the cracks were especially complex, the ceiling was actually sagging. The room gave the impression of a desperate beleaguerment, as if an immense weight of water, that enemy of paper documents and even more so of anything electrical, were bearing down from above. There was a yeasty, incontinent smell of damp plaster, and rustles of official business outside the door.
In the room: two white men. From the fingers and arm and thorax of one of them, Andy Aberant, half a dozen wires in elementary colors stretched down a cheap particle-board table to a partition behind which the other, Special Agent Barry Thewless, was adjusting levels. Aberant looked wired for a virtual-reality experience, but the signals were all outgoing — respiration rate, skin moisture and so forth. Thewless’s pants pockets were tumescent with Kleenex, his knobby face a bright pink from his morning shave. Watching over the table was a video camera with the sleek body and long legs of a shore bird.