Mike made the call from his office the next day. The drive to work seemed to confirm his decision. It always felt good driving through that elaborate studio gate, chatting with the guard and then cruising into the urgent hurrying activity of the big lot. It was like a small city, a miniature New York; it had all the speed and intensity the rest of Los Angeles lacked. And he was at home in the middle of it. This was his town, too.

It was eleven in the morning before he got around to the phone call, and he found himself hoping to get Jim’s answering machine. People griped about using one machine to talk to another machine, but Mike suspected that most of the time people preferred to just leave a message. At best, combined with caller ID on your own phone, it allowed you to avoid confrontation altogether, without appearing to: you made the call, having no idea if the person was home or not, so you were obviously willing to have a real conversation. Taking that risk, playing telephone roulette, along with some sense of urgency about the actual message, justified you leaving your voice to fend for itself in that little box on their desk. Even if you wound up talking after playing phone tag for a while, the machine at least slowed the pace of the conversation. It gave you time to think. Mike jabbed in the numbers and heard the phone ring three times on Jim’s end. He really was dreading this call. A tiny skip in the last ring told him the machine was going to pick up. Mike exhaled and waited for the outgoing message.

“Hi, this is Jim’s answering machine and today it has the classic Hollywood answer: ‘I loved it. But my partner hated it.’ Leave a message at the beep.”

Mike smiled, took breath and began.

“Jim, this is Mike. I’ve decided … I’ve been thinking about your offer and I have to say no. I’m sure you’ll find someone else, someone better qualified, who’s free to … Look, I have a great job and I don’t want to lose it. That’s it, right there. I have a future here. Not that there’s no future at Filmwerk. But those little production companies are a high risk deal and Paramount … it’s – it’s Paramount, Jim. It’s a real movie studio, it’s been around since the twenties. It’s not going to go under if it puts out a couple of flops. I know I’m playing it safe, but that’s not as bad as it sounds. Danger sounds cool until you’re in it. Then it sucks. Anyway … thanks for the offer. It’s good to know you’re still willing to work with me. Maybe we can do it someday. But this isn’t the right time. We’ll talk soon. Good luck and thanks again.”

He hung up the phone. It wasn’t great but it was finished; awkward but painless. His words were in limbo, spoken but unheard. They might never be heard; messages got erased, answering machines broke. Nothing was final yet. But that was idiotic: he might as well imagine a stick of dynamite wasn’t final because the fuse was still burning.

The explosion came ten minutes later.

Jim called back.

“Here’s what you say when you get the answering machine,” he said. ‘We need to talk. Call me at the office.’ You don’t hide behind the answering machine. That’s kid stuff. Like having your Mom get on the phone and say you’re sick so you can go to the movies with the cool group instead of playing softball with the losers.”

Mike had done that. He had told Jim about it. That was a mistake; Jim never forgot anything. He was rolling on:

“We all went to the funeral so we know your Mom isn’t available anymore. That’s Janet’s job now. I’m surprised she didn’t do the dirty work for you.”

“Jim - ”

“Look, I understand that she’s running things. But she needs to take one of those management classes. The first thing they teach you is - morale goes up when the boss pitches in.”

“Hey, come on - ”

“What? She had nothing to do with this?”

“We discussed it – “

“And she laid down the law. Which is fine. Do what you like, do what she likes, whatever. But you need to think about what’s really happening, Mike. Why do you think she cares so much?”

“She cares about me. She wants me to have a stable job. She wants me to build a career.”

Jim made a harsh buzzing noise: ‘time’s up’ on a quiz show. “Wrong. Totally wrong. So wrong it’s funny. Except it’s not politically correct to laugh at cripples any more.”

“Hold on a second - ”

“No. You hold on. You have to listen to this because everybody knows it but you. The same way everybody but me knew that Carol was wrecking my life. Even my fucking chiropractor knew! She said to me “These vertebral subluxations would be far less frequent and severe if you had less stress at home.” And she was right. My back hasn’t gone out once since Carol left me. Coincidence? I don’t think so. The point is, no one was surprised when we broke up. Everybody was ecstatic. They were like: finally, thank God. You said to me, ‘I thought you’d never do it,’ and I pointed out that I didn’t do anything. I would have hung on forever trying to make things right. I’d still be married to that fucking shrew and my friends would have given up on me years ago.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“I know that, Mike. And I’m not giving up on you either. So let me tell you the hard truth about your wife. She wants to kill your dream. She’s bitter and jealous and angry. She has good reason to be, all right? Her dream is never going to come true. It’s not going to happen for her – or it already would have. She’d be decades into a successful career by now. Music is brutal that way. Thirty year old pianists don’t make their debuts at the Carnegie recital hall. Ten year old pianists do. It’s a fact and she knows it. She failed, Mike. She didn’t have the talent. She didn’t have what it takes. But you do. You could actually make it in this town and that’s killing her. Your success would be like … punching a bruise. Like hot water on a burn, like … I don’t know, I’m out of metaphors. Just bad. She’s going to make your life as bad as she can until you’re as miserable as she is. Until you give up, until she wipes that hopeful Pollyanna smile off your face for good. She knows what this opportunity means to you. That’s why she can’t let it happen.”

“This is way out of line. We’re out of touch for years, not even a phone call, then you breeze back into my life and just assume you can - ”

“But that’s the whole point! That’s what I’m saying! We didn’t see each other for almost three years and when we get back together, everything’s exactly the same. No, sorry, actually it’s much worse. You think you can change her, make her happy, but you can’t. That never happens. You can’t cheer her up. An overdose of Zoloft couldn’t cheer her up. Staging the Verdi Requiem for her in the fucking Grand Canyon couldn’t cheer her up. She’s not wired that way. When a basically happy person meets a basically unhappy person, the unhappy person never gets lifted up. Never. The happy person gets dragged down. That’s a fact of life. She doesn’t even want to be happy, Mike! She thinks being happy makes you superficial and shallow. Miserable means deep. You think you’re going to change that attitude? She’ll just wind up despising you even more than she does now. It’s a no-win situation.”

“She’s happy sometimes – “

“She’s cheerful sometimes. There’s a big difference.”

“She just hates L.A., that’s all.”

“That’s all? You spent half your childhood here. Your family goes back three generations here. You’re L.A. royalty, Mike. Your grandfather was Sidney Gersh! He wrote some great movies. He broke John Huston’s nose, he drank William Faulkner under the table at Romanoff’s. He survived the blacklist and won a goddamn Oscar for a movie he wrote with a front. He was a hero. Your Dad was a great producer. Your Mom was Cora Loftus, for Chrissake. Yeah, she loved New York, but she was L.A. She was Hollywood. Not just her movies, but her parties and her fund-raisers … if you got an invitation from her you’d arrived. This is your town, it’s in your bloodlines. You can’t be married to someone who hates L.A. She might as well say she hates you, or else she just doesn’t know you at all. But that’s the whole point. She doesn’t want what you want. She doesn’t love what you love. She doesn’t need what you need. She hates everything you care about and she always has. Think about it! Think back. Has she ever been on your side? Has she ever done anything to make it easier for you? It’s just the opposite! She’s undermining you every chance she gets. She’s an obstacle, Mike. You know it. Maybe that’s why you fell in love with someone else.”

“Don’t bring that up.”

“You brought it up, you told me the whole story.”

“So you could help me stay away from her.”

“Which was a bad mistake.”

“Look there’s no reason to drag her into – “

“Her? Who are we talking about?”

“Please, can’t we just - ”

“Say her name, Mike. Pronounce it for me, just once. I want to hear you say it.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“You can’t do it? You can’t even say her name?”

Mike inhaled sharply, pressed his tongue against the backs of his teeth, flexing the wet muscle against the sharp edge of pain. Jim said nothing.

Mike breathed out. “Rachel Scanlon.”

“Thank you.”

“I can’t deal with this right now. I can’t deal with any more chaos and conflict.”

“No, you prefer tidiness and dread. That’s a great way to live.”

“I’m sorry. I just need to see this through. I need to give us a chance and I can’t do that daydreaming about other women, or going off on another adventure with you.”

There was a long silence. Mike could hear phones ringing and the grumble of traffic beyond the sigh of the air-conditioning. Jim sounded tired when he spoke again.

“There’s one thing worse than beating a dead horse, Mike. Saddling it and putting it on the bit and trying to ride it. Entering it in some three day equestrian event. That kind of shit makes the dead horse beaters look normal.”

“Jim - ”

“The horse is dead, Mike. Bury it and walk away. Before it’s too late.”

Jim hung up. Mike held the phone for a few moments before he put it back down.

He still had a day’s work to do, at this secure studio job of his with the shiny future. He had a list; he would check the items off it and go home.

But his life at home was just as exhausting. His most recent capitulation hadn’t warmed things up between himself and Janet. It seemed as though his very existence had become a source of irritation to her. He had come to an impasse; he was out of ideas. He resigned himself to wait.

Weeks went by with little changed and he lost touch with the outside world. He stopped reading even the trade papers, the television was like a noisy roommate he was glad to silence. All the political noise and economic chatter and global unrest were just an ongoing murmur that defined the silence, the white noise of his unhappiness.

Even the changes in his friends’ lives didn’t mean much to him. Jim was going to marry Celia Reid. Mike listened to his jubilant friend and fought down the urge to point out the hazards involved. Jim knew them all; he’d been there before. But he was charging ahead anyway.

Mike envied him his optimism. His own life was like the inside of an unplugged refrigerator, spoiling slowly in the dark. The routines of his routine days made their quiet pronouncement: this is the way you’re going to live, until you get around to dying.

He woke up on one of those barren, early autumn mornings to the leaf blowers and the sirens, thinking that he couldn’t even imagine things changing any more. It was like walking through an endless suburban subdivision, week after week, lawn after lawn, house after house. He glanced at the calendar, thinking “Another prefabricated American day.”

He would remember the petty, disconnected absurdity of that thought for the rest of his life.

The date on the calendar was September 11^th, 2001.