“Last night. He wanted to know if you’d turned your grades in yet. It sounded like he meant for you to drop everything, hop on a plane and drop into the Universal lot by parachute.”
Joy, since they moved to Connecticut, had little patience with Sid, whose ongoing, albeit sporadic presence in their lives she considered vestigial, an appendix that was liable one day to rupture. He was also one of those Angelenos who never took time zones into account when telephoning. Four in the afternoon-seven back East, about the time Griffin and Joy usually sat down to eat-was when he took the bottle out of his desk drawer, unscrewed the cap and poured, then started calling people. She might have been less peeved, Griffin thought, if Sid was calling with work, but mostly he just wanted to reminisce about old Hollywood-Bogart and Mitchum and Lancaster and Holden-until nostalgia morphed into anger that the town was now overrun by “bitches,” his term for the current generation of young male stars, action-movie pretty boys pretending, not very convincingly, to be tough guys. “Not a one of ’em could take Renée Zellweger in a fair fight,” he was fond of observing. “You did the right thing getting out when you did, kid. Who needs it?”
Who needed him? was the better question, according to Joy. Why couldn’t he understand that they’d moved on?
Toward the end of their conversations Griffin always reminded him that he was still a dues-paying member of the Guild and that if the right gig came along, especially in the summer… but before he could finish, Sid always interrupted. “My advice?” he said, as if he’d just extended such an offer. “Don’t lower yourself. You’ve got respectable, grown-up work now.” Joy had usually finished eating and was loading the dishwasher by the time Griffin managed to get off the phone.
This sounded different, though, and Griffin immediately felt the adrenaline rush, his mind racing in that old, calculating, savvy L.A. way he’d all but forgotten. If Sid was so worked up, it had to be a feature film, maybe one that had already gone into production with a horseshit script. Wouldn’t that be sweet. Some A-list actor had probably come on board at the last second and to accommodate this dickhead’s busy schedule they’d agreed to start shooting early. That would explain why they were coming to Griffin, who worked faster than anybody.
It took him about a second to invent this scenario and another to check it for holes, of which there were several. The most obvious was that nobody out there remembered whether he was fast or slow, because, face it, nobody remembered him. Still, it was a pretty entertaining sequence of events, sort of like imagining a woman totally out of your league falling in love with you. It could happen and, in fact, already had. Back when they met, every man he knew had been in love with Joy, who was not just beautiful but genuine, a quality in short supply everywhere and especially in Southern California.
Okay, so suppose for the moment that Griffin was right. Sid had found him something. A feature film. Everything would immediately go at warp speed. He’d have the fucked-up script in his hands by this evening, Sid would negotiate the deal over the weekend and Griffin would be on a plane to L.A. by Monday. Or to wherever they were shooting. It’d be a laptop gig. Late nights. Chinese (probably Thai, now) ordered in. Early wake-up calls. Pay commensurate. Just like the good old days.
“Universal?” Could that be right? Who did he know at Universal?
“No, I was just using Universal as an example.”
“But it’s a gig?”
“I don’t know, Jack,” Joy said, clearly impatient. “It sounded like work. You can find out when you call him back.”
“But what did he say, exactly?”
“We didn’t talk. He just left a message on the machine. I called back and left him a message to call your cell.”
“Then why didn’t he?” Not that he really needed Joy to explain. He hadn’t called back because he had a list of names in front of him and probably had already penciled through Griffin ’s. At this all-too-plausible explanation Griffin ’s heart sank, though it, too, was flawed. Why leave an urgent message to call back if you were already moving on?
“You’re asking me?”
“No, just thinking out loud.”
“Have you called Laura yet?”
“Joy. I will, okay? Right now, in fact.”
Hanging up, he scrolled down his phone’s contacts list, pausing at LAURA before continuing to SID. Half a dozen times over the last year he’d come close to deleting Sid’s entry, but he’d been right not to, he thought, smiling. After four rings his agent’s machine picked up, inviting him to leave a message. Strange. Even with the three-hour time difference, he should’ve been in the office by now, or if not Sid himself, then Darlice, his longtime assistant. Had business slowed to the point where he’d had to let her go? Sid’s speed dial had once been a who’s who of Hollywood royalty, but one by one, according to Tommy, his important clients had moved on. Still, Sid answering his own phone? Impossible. It then occurred to Griffin that Tommy might know what Sid was offering. His old writing partner always prided himself on knowing whatever was in play. He was tempted to give him a call, except that every time he did the first thing Tommy wanted to know was whether he’d given up on “going straight” yet. To his way of thinking, screenwriting was a lot like stealing, and he’d warned Griffin that moving to Connecticut would be like Butch Cassidy’s going to Bolivia. When Griffin argued that he could just as easily write screenplays in New England and deliver them by e-mail attachment, Tommy just laughed and said, “You just keep thinkin’, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.”
Before he could make up his mind, he received another incoming call, and MOM was the warning displayed on the screen. What in the world did she want now, he wondered, letting it go to voice mail. There was a roof over the porch where he sat, but he leaned forward and scanned the sky anyway.
Laura answered on the first ring, sounding groggy, though it was nearly one in the afternoon. “Hold on,” she said, and he could hear her telling Andy, her boyfriend, to go back to sleep. “There,” she said, coming back on the line. “I’m out on the balcony. Last night we all stayed up to watch the sun rise. Alcohol may have been involved.”
“You should take it easy,” he said, immediately regretting it. Why on earth should she? She and her friends were still in their twenties, an age when you could both work and play hard, before it all started catching up with you. It would be years, at least a decade or two, before any of them started greeting the sunrise for a whole different set of reasons. “How’s Andy?”
“Great. Wonderful.” As if the words had not yet been invented to describe just how great, how wonderful. But then her tone immediately became serious. “What’s up with you and Mom?”
Laura had spent much of her adolescence terrified that one day he and Joy would split up. Most of her friends’ parents had divorced, traumatizing their youth, so, she reasoned, what was to prevent the same thing from happening to her? He and Joy seldom argued, but when they did, the first thing they had to do afterward was console their daughter. Telling her they both loved her, loved her more than anything, wouldn’t do the trick. No, what she wanted to hear was how much they loved each other. Nor, at twenty-six, had she outgrown this old anxiety. Just last year she’d confessed to Joy that she still had the occasional nightmare about getting a phone call from one or the other of them to say they were calling it quits.