under the same ownership. Marty Nussbaum, Poseidon’s driving force and CEO, held power over a vast entertainment universe, and liked to keep, as the saying about him went, “a finger in every eye.”
Poseidon owned publishing companies, radio networks, cable channels, theme parks, hotels, newspapers, magazines, Internet portals, and a satellite and distribution service that allowed it to broadcast its product into every reach of the globe. All entertainment short of daydreams. If they could figure out a way to sell ads during REM sleep, they would. Once they decided to publicize us, there was little chance of any person in the world not being aware of our show.
As I listened to Jonathan, I imagined telling him that while he was away, I had killed someone in a hit and run accident and not (yet) gotten caught. I pictured his expression. Horror, shock, revulsion. Anger, disappointment, helplessness. Would he remember that he loved me? Or only feel the loathing I now felt for myself?
“Marty has ideas about a new direction for the show. Just a few changes, a slightly different slant, which I assured him would be fine with you.”
“What kind of changes?”
I knew that once I came forward, our show would forever be branded with my crime. Even with Poseidon money behind us, I would go to jail. I should go to jail. It would be the end of everything Jonathan had worked towards. Telling him would break his heart. And if I told him and didn’t come forward? I’d burden him with a secret whose weight I was only beginning to fathom.
“Now, don’t get defensive. Just some ways to broaden the appeal. Bring up the ratings. I’d rather you hear it from him directly.”
How could I live with him and not tell him?
“Let me guess. He wants to find more ways of getting Jinx Magruder into a wet t-shirt.”
How could I live with him once he knew?
I could see Jonathan’s annoyance with me for not getting on board with his excitement.
“I wish you wouldn’t dismiss his ideas before you’ve even heard them. It’s just possible they might be good. You can’t deny his track record.”
Our conversation was interrupted by Julia bursting into the kitchen.
“You got the pick-up! That’s so awesome!” She sat on one of the stools and picked a peanut from a Styrofoam container of Pad Thai. “What are we going to do to celebrate?”
“What do you think we should do?” Jonathan’s face flushed with pleasure at our triumph and at the sight of his daughter, who, since his wife had died, had been the love center of his life.
“Whatever you guys decide. You’re the ones who sold the show.”
Jonathan went to a calendar we kept in the kitchen, which showed, in addition to play dates, doctor’s appointments, and family obligations, our production schedule, around which everything else needed to be arranged.
“Let’s see...we’re finished with post on the twenty-third, and we don’t have to start shooting until...” He flipped over two pages. “The fifteenth of July. Of course, it would be good to have two or three scripts ready before we start prepping...” He turned to me. “Could you write in Hawaii?”
A few months after Jonathan and I had begun working together, we’d all gone to Hawaii. Julia was eight. The two weeks we’d spent there as a family were among the happiest any of us had ever known. Julia’s delight at the Oz-like underwater wonders she saw while snorkeling was contagious; the world seemed wondrous through her eyes. I loved to tell her bedtime stories, her body snuggled next to mine as she thrilled to the adventures of Susie-Q, a character I made up. We ate meals together, saw sights together, played and ate and laughed together. After Julia fell asleep, Jonathan and I made long languorous love on crisp hotel sheets that were rumpled in the morning by the tumult of our desire. When we got back from that vacation, I’d moved in. In Hawaii, we’d become a family.
“Sure.” Julia squealed with delight. She high-fived Jonathan then me, while Jonathan’s eyes twinkled.
I knew I was never going to say a word.
* * *
In bed that night, Jonathan pulled me close.
One thing that had gotten Jonathan and me through everything and anything was sex. From the first day we met, it was as if we were pulled together by some cellular magnet, a tug of longing, for connection, possession. Hurt feelings, misunderstandings, all could be subsumed in our body’s need for one another. We could always turn to each other in bed and find something that made everything else less important.
Now, I recoiled from his touch. I felt dead inside; worse, detached and removed. I did not want to be reached at my deepest recess; I needed to keep that place hidden from now on. Even having a secret had to be kept a secret.
“What is it, babe?”
I reached for him, clasping him in my arms and legs, and tried to will myself to respond with the passion he’d come to expect. I tried to use the heat from our bodies to quell the images that came whenever I closed my eyes: a woman changing her tire by the side of the road as I struck her and careened past. I tried to respond as if there were only the two of us in bed, but Rosa Aguilar was there between us.
I wanted to go to the funeral but didn’t dare. I sent flowers instead and included some cash, in small bills.
Honestly, I didn’t think I’d get away with it. Every time the phone rang, every time a door opened, I thought it would be the police. But it never was. I was the only one who knew that there was an uncrossable barrier between me and the rest of the world; that everyone else was on one side, and I on the other.
CHAPTER 4
Cut to, exterior, beach, day. Tufts of white clouds billow in a bright blue winter sky. The sun is high and white, the ocean glassy and smooth. The tide unfurls carpets of foam as sandpipers scamper at its edge. A woman stands at the shoreline looking out to sea trying to work up the nerve to walk in.
I hadn’t had a drink yet that day, and it had been almost five hours since I’d awakened, or come to. But the craving was intense, and I knew that any minute now I would smoke a joint, or take a Xanax, and then think, oh, just one to take the edge off—and one more time I’d wake to find myself caked in vomit, or soaked in urine, or next to a man whose name I didn’t know, promising myself that today would be different.
I had long since lost house, home, and family. It took so many drugs in ever increasing quantities to blot out the memory of Rosa that I’d lost whatever ability I’d had to write scripts that made any sense. Jonathan had no choice but to replace me—on the show and, not long after, in his life. No longer fettered by the need to function, I hurtled into darkness. I spent days and nights in behavior so noxious that the only solace I could find was in removing myself from anyone or anything good.
And yet somehow, a few weeks ago, I’d run into Gerry Talbot, a director I’d once worked with. He was shooting a film in Toronto and needed someone to stay in his house and water his plants. God knows why he thought he could trust me, but he had, and I’d jumped at the chance. Gerry lived in a spectacular beachfront home in Malibu, and I was unemployable, $180,000 in debt, and sleeping on my dealer’s sofa. A show-runner who could no longer run the show. This gave me a place to stay and a car to drive—mine had been repossessed—but
