“What’s this thing about?”
“Something about Cambodia or Cuba. It’s all very vague.”
“And I suppose they want me—the writer—to figure it out, huh?” I asked indignantly. “Jesus.”
“I’m just relaying the info, Bret.”
“As long as Keanu Reeves is not costarring I would be more than delighted to take a meeting with Harrison.” Then I remembered certain stories I’d heard. “But isn’t he supposed to be this giant blowhard?”
“That’s why I think it would be a perfect match.”
“Um, Binky, what does that mean?”
“Listen, I’ve gotta run. It’s the day from hell.” In the background I heard an assistant calling out. “I’ll tell them you’re interested, and you can start figuring out the dates you can be in L.A.”
“Well, thank you very much for the call. I love our mock formality.”
“Oh, by the way . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Happy Halloween.”
And as we hung up I suddenly realized what had been bothering me about the e-mails that were coming from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks. October 3. That was my father’s birthday. And that segued into another realization. 2:40 a.m. That was when, according to the coroner, he had died. I pondered this for about a minute—it was a disturbing connection. But I was hungover and exhausted and I needed to be on campus in thirty minutes so maybe it was just a coincidence and maybe I was giving it more significance than it deserved. When I got up to leave the office, I noted one more thing: the furniture had been rearranged. My desk was now facing the wall instead of the window, where the couch had been repositioned instead. A lamp had been moved to a different corner. Again, at that moment, I blamed it on the party, as I did everything else that day.
5. the college
Part of the town we lived in seemed dreamed up and fractured and modern: tilted buildings spaced widely apart, with facades that resembled cascading ribbons, and concrete slabs fluttering over one another, and electronic signs wrapped around the buildings, and there were gigantic liquid-crystal display screens, and zip strips quoting stock prices and delivering the day’s headlines, and neon decorated the courthouse, and a Jumbotron TV was perched above the Bloomingdale’s that took up four blocks of downtown. But beyond this district the town also boasted a 2000-acre nature preserve and horse farms and two golf courses, and there were more children’s bookstores than there were Barnes & Nobles. My route to the college ran past numerous playgrounds and a baseball field, and on Main Street (where I stopped to buy a Starbucks latte) there were a variety of gourmet food stores, a first-class cheese shop, a row of patisseries, a friendly pharmacist who filled my Klonopin and Xanax prescriptions, an understated cineplex and a family-run hardware store, and all the surrounding streets were lined with magnolia and dogwood and cherry trees. At a stoplight festooned with fresh flowers I watched a chipmunk climb a telephone pole while I sipped my nonfat latte. The latte revived me to the point where my hangover seemed like something that had happened last week. And I was suddenly, inexplicably content as I drove through the town’s shady streets. I passed a potato field. I passed horses grazing outside a barn. At the campus gates, the security guard tipped his hat to me as I raised my latte, acknowledging him.
The first time I spotted the cream-colored 450 SL was on that warm, clear Halloween afternoon. It sat at the curb just outside the faculty parking lot and I smiled as I passed it in recognition of the fact that it was the same make and color of the car my father had driven in the late seventies, a car I’d inherited when I turned sixteen. This one was a convertible as well, and the intriguing coincidence brought a brief rush of memories—a freeway, sun glinting off the hood, staring out the windshield at the twisting roads of Mulholland while the Go-Gos blared from the stereo, the top down and palm trees swaying above me. I made nothing of it at the time: there were plenty of rich kids at the college, and a car like that wasn’t necessarily out of place. So the memories vanished once I parked in my designated space, lifted the stack of paperbacks of my short story collection, The Informers, off the passenger seat and headed toward my office, which was in a small and charming red barn that overlooked the campus—the building was, in fact, called the Barn. Still smiling to myself, I realized that my sole reason for being here today was that my office was the only place Aimee Light would meet me now—under the auspices of a student-teacher counseling session, even though she wasn’t my student, I wasn’t her teacher and no counseling was planned. (We had attempted a single tryst at her off-campus apartment, but there was an obnoxious cat inhabiting it that I was deeply allergic to.)
