This new lifestyle hadn’t been so bad, had it? Clean living! Or mostly clean. Carter had started drinking a smoothie in the mornings—two raw eggs cracked into a blender with a frozen banana and a scoop of wheat germ. It would have been vastly improved by a float of dark rum, but there was no more alcohol in the house: Jennifer had emptied the place out after the intervention, dumping even the vanilla extract and the Listerine.
Carter drank the smoothie in three lusty gulps.
Eight half-hearted pull-ups on the bar in his closet doorway. More like six, actually, but good enough.
Twenty strokes of the boar-bristle hairbrush: he was a handsome man. He shot himself a toothpaste grin in the mirror.
Ding, the grin said. Carter smiled wider.
Michelle had called the house the night before—Jennifer had been in the shower, which was a fucking blessing. Carter’s whole body had seized unpleasantly at the sound of Michelle’s voice.
“Hello,” she said, confidently. She was always self-possessed, unsettlingly so, which is why her call was surprising, the melodrama of the gesture.
“You know not to call here,” Carter said, the words strangled.
Before Michelle could respond, he hung up the phone.
And then unplugged it. Why not be safe?
The memory of Michelle’s call made Carter touch the crucifix around his neck (14K—subtle, though, tasteful).
Was this a test, Lord?
Maybe.
To be decided.
He tried to open the shades in the living room. More than a few of the vertical plastic slats were bent. He struggled until they shuddered to the side, revealing a view that ended with a sharp drop into the canyon. The smog made the city beyond the patio look pleasingly indistinct, not yet fully formed. Somewhere out there, not too far away, was Disney’s old house. Carter had been parking cars in Reseda the year Disneyland opened—a basic, level-one LA loser. He and his burnout buddies had dropped a few tabs and made the trek out to Anaheim, achieving a secondary high from the soothing chemical warmth that rose up from the artificial river. Disney—another creator, like Carter, god of his own domain.
Every morning, the studio car picked up Carter at five thirty. When he looked at the clock, it was nearly five forty. Michelle’s call must have gotten in his head, knocked him off his game. Carter was the director, the writer, the star, the sun around which everything else revolved—lateness didn’t fly.
A kiss goodbye for his sleeping wife, still in picturesque repose on the pillow. Judging by the condition of the pages on her nightstand, Jennifer must have stayed up late finishing the latest draft of his movie script. She’d always believed that Carter could make movies. She believed in a lot of things, like maintaining cheerful, regular attendance at a weekly lunch with her parents (eggplant timbale, Hancock Park), and the necessity of knowing one’s most flattering clothing colors (apricot, ivory, and coral). Lately, she had unflagging faith in Carter’s potential as a formidable tennis player, if he could just commit to lessons (and a composite racket, Victor Imperial strings). Each day, for Jennifer, was an invitation to improve in some way. It hadn’t been unpleasant to travel through life in the wake of her convictions—marrying her had been like catching a strong headwind, an unexpected and welcome boost toward a better version of himself. Though certainly he had fallen short. In some arenas. Ever since the intervention, he sometimes caught her looking at him a beat too long, like she was assessing whether a piece of furniture really worked in a room.
When the show first went on the air, back when Carter still attended the weekly lunches, Jennifer’s mother had cleared her throat in the lull after the crab salad. “So,” she said brightly, turning to Carter. “Did the men really dress like that? Back then?” She made a vague gesture in the region of her navel. “Their shirts all unbuttoned like that?”
Jennifer must have shot her a look.
“I’m really asking!” the mother bleated. “It’s a real question!”
A silence followed. The father squirmed.
“It’s a TV show,” Carter said, mildly. He had meant this as a conversational stepping-stone; they all reacted as if it were an apology. He hadn’t considered that there was anything to apologize for, though he noticed, after that, that Jennifer rarely brought up Pleasant Glen. She had probably never made it through a whole episode.
Carter had tried for years to write the movie that would launch him out of the network-TV ghetto, plugging away at various concepts, none of which survived past a few labored pages.
Jennifer had offered Carter perfunctory encouragement for these efforts, but with this new idea, her tone changed. This one was different: it was good. Actually good. Carter knew it from the moment he’d come across the inspiration in rehab. At one of the meetings, a grizzled actor Carter recognized from a mob picture had taken his turn at the podium for that Stations of the Cross monologue that everyone trotted out, only this guy’s was
