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Alan moaned, sounding food-poisoned.

“God, I hate this fucking place.”

“You always say ‘fucking’ a lot when you’re tense, dear.” She calmly rubbed Coppertone on his face, as if preparing a death mask. He peeked up at her knowing she was right for him. Smart. Pretty. Quick. No pressure to marry. No pressure to get too close; put her before his work. No pressure to love or be loved. The fully accommodating, stimulating dead end.

Last time he asked, anyway.

“It’s the fucking pits.”

“Honey, we’re in Hawaii. Hawaii is not the fucking pits. Hollywood is the fucking pits. If you’ll recall, that’s why we came.”

“To escape its purgatorial nature?” The trauma of Hector was a lodged bullet fragment.

“Correct. Now relax.” She always sounded too much like a lawyer, even though she was. And when she smiled, the gums were a bit too evident. But she made him laugh. After the last thirty days, it was penicillin.

He sighed through a nervous stomach, wishing he hadn’t eaten the Continental breakfast. “Y’know, I never used to say things like ‘fucking.’ Show business has made me a cheap person.” He shifted. “I think my spine is melting. Is that possible? From the stress? I mean … seriously.”

She turned onto her stomach, as if on an invisible rotisserie. Her back was creviced in puffy red and white where the towel had crinkled and softly carved her. Alan watched the indentations fade away, semifascinated, actually counting the seconds it took, hoping it would extract the hatchet splitting his head.

“I keep thinking maybe there’s something I forgot to do. Some detail. A piece of business in a scene I should’ve covered better. Performances. Dialogue I should’ve punched up a little. More inserts. I don’t know. I didn’t have much time to step into the directing … maybe I fucked it up. Maybe I should’ve handed the reins to somebody else. Damn …”

He was rambling.

Erica listened, took his hand. “How about a drink? Something that’ll take your mind off waiting to hear.” She meant the overnight ratings but didn’t say it, to avoid upsetting him.

Alan checked his watch. “God, someone should’ve called me with the numbers by now. Marty, Jordan, Andy, Crosby, Stills, Nash … somebody.” He drummed fingers in sand. “… Jordan is probably out robbing twenty-four-hour markets with his Crips to release tension. Shit.”

She was looking at him, waiting.

“Okay, okay … I’ll take a drink. I’m actually thirsty. My entire system has dried up from stress. Tell you what
 … see what they have in an arsenic. You know, something with a cute little parasol so I can shade my nose as I slip away …”

She looked at him, square-on. A glint of amusement.

He looked at her, deadpan. “It’s a pressure being festive.”

She kissed his fingertips, strolled off toward the outdoor cabana bar that rose from the beach like a big, square palm tree. Alan watched her go and got a little harder as she hitched up her bikini bottoms, tossing permed, blond hair. She disappeared into the crowd like some Daryl Hannah mirage.

Cute, he thought. Unless you cared.

Ask those three ex-husbands. Casualties, all.
Something
pissed them off. But it was subtle; nearly invisible. She was one of those great women you always hear some other guy landed. Charming, self-effacing, beautiful. She had good taste in nearly everything including witty asides, astute silences, and expressions of empathy.

But beyond the three perfectly punched holes that bound her, Alan found her essentially selfish. She showered him with adoration and happy mischief, but it seemed suspiciously like a means to measure herself; keep track of how she was doing.

After a couple of months around her, Alan realized her jokes weren’t intrinsically for others’ benefit. They were to remind herself how amusing she was. Her praise and support assured her how giving she was. Her kindness was evidence of wisdom. Even her orgasms were movie-perfect; humid, Kabuki storms that made a man feel he was the best.

It was her proof she was.

Alan figured it was that basic behavioral distortion that her three former husbands detected, somewhere in their confused reaction.

Though they could never point to anything she’d ever done that didn’t qualify as loving, it all felt somehow specious. And it enraged them, and they went out and bought guns, or froze into bugshit stares, or came to find Dianetics fascinating.

Alan looked around at the sea of prone bodies who wore sunglasses and nursed drinks that resembled primary paints with straws. He realized Maui was assembly-line relaxation at maxi-tweak when you stayed at these chain places. Sort of like McDonald’s; over fifty million tanned and blitzed. He sneezed as some furry, Quarter-Pounder in trunks walked by in the sand, singing “Muskrat Love” in a Greek accent.

Alan sat crossed-legged and stared out at the ocean, watching surfers hook waves, wondering how “The Mercenary” had done. The other two networks and FOX had thrown their best against it and with the volcanic reviews he was getting, if he’d been creamed it wouldn’t shock him. The show had tons going against it. Exploding flesh. Explicit suffering. Alan as a first-time director. And whatever negative press had leaked about Hector’s currently missing head wasn’t going to help. The overall violence and nudity were a harrowing cerviche that might rivet the whole world. Then again, the world might pop in an Eddie Murphy cassette.

Weirder shit had happened.

Look at “The A-Team.” Nobody believed that one. It just took off and kept going to number one, nearly every country in the world. No one could’ve called it. Rumor
was even NBC hated it, when they first saw the pilot. Thought Mr. T looked like a moody toilet brush. And it was their idea. None of it made any sense. You just hoped it took off for you.

Alan scratched a small scab off his knee and watched it bleed. Dug his feet in the sand, leaning back, trying to relax; take his mind off the show. The fuzzy swelter was pressing tighter and he began to sweat; drift.

He shut his eyes more tightly, getting that vein-trance as the fainting waves crashed wet hypnosis. He felt himself walking into a spinning, entreating time tunnel as hang gliders turned radiant circles, far overhead; sunbirds.

College …

It’s where everything had fallen apart. Or collected into an acceptable puddle. All those aspirations to do something serious and make what his fraternity brothers called a “dent.” The problem with making dents was that they could be pounded out, Alan had always told them. And they had always laughed and called him a caustic bastard who was destined for big success. Caustic in college meant success in life. That was the cosmic algebra. But no one predicted he’d choose writing. Despite his high grades and amusing, running commentaries about everything.

It had caught him off-guard, most of all.

He’d always been aware of his own unique intellect, the way you experience your body weight, as another person picks you up off the ground, and struggles, having to replace you on earth; exhausted. That was how having a twelve-cylinder head always felt to Alan. You could sense people around you sprinting to keep up. To maintain balance. To hold on.

And when Alan had combined his mind with creative fantasizing like some Technicolor logician’s braid, there was no stopping him. He’d discovered that whatever he believed, he generally made happen. His imagination was like Federal Express. When he saw it on the brain screen it got there. Any weather, any distance. He’d always been able to concentrate. Obsess. Visualize. It was his gift. He’d been told a million times it would make him rich.

But writing had come late. And as rather a surprise.

In college, he’d submitted film reviews to the campus paper and stirred livid opinion. He courted it; created it. Knew what would piss the readers off. In a similar, yet reverse fashion, he’d bullshitted term papers at the last second through his ability to know what the profs wanted. What would affirm their tweedy myopia. It was the overall secret to his mind. He sensed need. Sensed how ideas, correctly dressed, could mollify and soothe. How truth could outrage. Sensed exactly the right subtext that would make people feel, exactly the right verbal pratfall that would make them laugh. Exactly the dissonant view that would make their heads burn.

Yet he’d never considered writing as a career; not even once.

When he and Laurie had made it that first night in Cabin C at that ditzy motel in Ithaca, during his sophomore year, he thought he knew exactly what he wanted. And it sure wasn’t being a writer. Alan remembered the two of them making love with frantic explorations, drinking tepid cans of Coke from the machine and talking plans; dreams.

They were nineteen and it had all seemed somehow profound, like Columbus spotting land.

“I think teaching’s the way I’m figuring to go,” he could remember himself saying to her dumbly as she lay against him, face to his chest, snuggling into the protective cove of hair.

“You’d make a wonderful teacher,” she’d whispered with sweet hesitation; in love. “But all those first-year girls would kill to get you, so I think it’s a lousy idea.”

And then, she’d laughed and tickled him and he could remember the damp warmth of the sheets and the incredible female odor of her. The dewy thickness which crept down his nostrils and settled in the base of his penis. Then, reviewing their hopes, she told him Kierkegaard had said “each of us is an exception.”

Then, the snow began, covering up Ithaca.

He remembered getting out of the squeaking bed, naked, shivering. With feet numb on cold wooden floor, he walked to the window, parted the drapes, and stared out, breath staining glass.

The green neon sign that read PINE GROVE MOTEL had partially broken and now blinked its inaccuracy over the snow-crusted driveway: PINE ROVE MOTEL. Alan stared at that, then, farther below, Lake Cayuga, pewter-gloomy, somehow stunning. The pines all around the motel were burdened with snow and their boughs glistened like clumps of sequins. Ithaca was still asleep, cocooned under haunting blue dawn; a Christmas card.

Alan had turned to glance at Laurie, who said softly, “I love you. I’ll always love you.” She had thoughtlessly allowed the covers to fall and expose her college-girl body, its perfect contours and colors.

Alan smiled. Looked. Shivered more.

“Laurie, it says Roving Pines out there. That means
the pines are … moving.” The voice had been like Nicholson in
The Shining
when his neurons started bubbling. Or at least Alan remembered it that way. “Shhhh, I think I hear one moving. It’s saying someone’s name. A … woman’s name …”

Laurie had widened almond eyes, playing along perfectly, gasping, tugging at the covers, gathering them beneath her chin, fearfully. Alan remembered stepping ominously closer, saying the pines wanted to eat Laurie; he could hear them saying so outside the window. She’d shuddered properly at the low-voiced premonitions of their dread hunger. And Alan had stalked closer, finally pouncing into bed and gnawing on her arm like some voracious tree. He’d gotten so into it he’d accidentally drawn blood.

Laurie screamed and Alan remembered a small blood-red goatee he’d rushed to the mirror to see. He apologized, kissing her arm to make it better, and they ended up making love. But it had always disturbed him how far he took the joke. How it had gotten quietly out of control.

He turned on the hot sand, sighing. Staring sideways at people walking, sticking out of the earth at a ninety-degree angle.

It was funny in life how you grew out of things. That place in Ithaca would just look like a bad Bates Motel in a slushed-out college town to him now. And Laurie would probably look like Jack Lord.

But a million, trillion years ago, he had felt like a prince sleeping beside a beautiful princess in a palace of ice; eternal, poetic.

But everything melts eventually, thought Alan, smelling
coconut lotion somewhere nearby. And like Andy Singer had said, everything gets cancelled. And everything goes into syndication. That was simply the primal order. Alan figured God liked it that way or he would’ve put everybody on VHS.

“Alan, there’s a call for you!”

Erica was carrying a drink in each hand, crunching over sand with a big smile.

Alan jumped up. “What were the numbers?” He looked half-crazed.

“They didn’t say. But he wants you to call right away.” She handed him a shivering Chi-Chi, kneeled in the sand; a willowy sphinx.

“Marty? Jordan?”

“Neither. Feiffer’s office.”

Alan’s mouth opened a little. His voice rose, words slow, “No shit …?”

Waves broke in the background and breezes skated the midget dunes stealing his towel. But Alan was a million miles away, already jogging toward the bar.

“Yeah, Alan White returning his call.”

He was fingering a palmful of coins as the secretary vanished from the line for a moment. As he fidgeted, a nut-brown brunette with huge breasts and a tiny bikini leaned onto the bartop and ordered drinks. She was no more than five feet away from Alan, who stood at the giant-shell payphone, dusting Maui off his feet. She hummed and swayed, breasts moving under the macramé top. Then, she pulled her long hair from her face and looked over at him with amazing eyes.

“Hi,” she smiled again and walked away, escorting
twin Mai Tais. She looked back once and Alan watched her walk toward the blowtorch sun; a final shot from a bad “Magnum.” Suddenly, Feiffer was on the line.

“Alan! How the hell’s the tan coming?” He was loud, aggressive, and friendly. He had also destroyed or cinched the careers of at least six people Alan knew personally. Guys who ran networks could do that. They were like Nero with hundred-dollar haircuts.

Alan had heard from Jordan how Feiffer had sent one ex-wife into such a deep depression with his abusive personality, she’d committed herself after two suicide attempts and ultimately did succeed in wasting herself with a Gillette necklace. Feiffer had “kindly” footed the bill for the funeral. But the macabre scoop was he’d charged the ex-wife’s new husband on the installment plan for the burial. The guy had been creamed by her death as it was and Feiffer finished him off by having his accountant call the man and cherry bomb his soul.