The Best Friend

by Adam Mitzner

  His eyes were wet, and I was losing the battle to hold back my own tears.

  “You’re wrong about one thing, Clint.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “You’re very good at reading my mind.”

  Within the week, I started to feel the fatigue that Dr. Goldman had warned would be the marker that my life would be measured in weeks. Just like he said, I lost my appetite and slept most of the day. I took solace that I didn’t lose interest in my family. The last decision I made was for their protection: I asked Clint to transfer me to hospice.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable here at home?”

  “I might be, but it’s not good for you or the girls to see me like that. To just wake up one day and find that I’m dead.”

  Everyone in my family disagreed. But as with many other decisions I had made for my family through the years, I knew what was best. So on May 1, I entered hospice. Mother’s Day was the following week, and I wondered if I’d still be alive by then.

  My room was nice enough, with more flowers than I was accustomed to being around. Seemingly everyone I had ever encountered in life had sent flowers when news spread that I was entering hospice. During the day the sun streamed in, making the place seem like something other than what it was. But at night, after Clint and the girls left, I felt lonelier than I could ever remember.

  It’s a strange thing to imagine making your case for entry to heaven. I had never really believed in an afterlife, and even if there were one, I couldn’t imagine that admission rested on your advocacy skills. Nor did I think of it as a ledger of sins and good deeds that were tallied. I imagined it more like college admissions, with no single factor being dispositive, but instead a weighing of different strengths and weaknesses.

  On that scale, did I merit entry to the good place? I had tried my best to be a good person, although that effort had not always been successful. But I felt that, on balance, I had done as well as most, maybe better. Sometimes I was reminded of something Clint said about criminal law—how a lie, no matter how small, could poison the entire defense. Did infidelity do that in a marriage? Do you give up your right to say that you were a good spouse, or even a good person, if you committed that single sin?

  The last thing I remember was the girls beside me. Someone must have told them that it was the end, because Clint suggested that they each spend some time alone with me.

  Charlotte went first. Almost at once, she climbed onto my hospital bed and nestled next to me, the way she did on Sunday mornings. It pained me that I lacked the strength to move my hand atop hers. She cried the entire time we were together. I have no recollection of how long we lay like that, Charlotte sobbing, but at some point, Clint came in to get her, finally lifting her off the bed, as if she too lacked the strength to move.

  When it was her turn, Ella cried as well, but she was able to rein in her emotions. She talked to me for a few minutes, but I didn’t say anything in response, unable to engage on any level that she could discern.

  Finally, she said, “I thought that you’d like it if I sang something, Mom.”

  I don’t know if I smiled or cried at the thought of it, but inside me it felt as if I was doing both. For a moment, Ella was still, and I felt a shooting fear that she’d thought better of the gesture. It turned out, however, that her pause was to consider which song to sing.

  She started slowly, almost in a whisper, but soon enough I realized that she had selected “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. As I listened, I knew beyond any doubt that I was in heaven.

  PART THREE

  * * *

  NICHOLAS ZAMORA

  July 2020

  28.

  “Liars are like criminals. Only the bad ones get caught. The good ones ply their trade without consequence. The very good ones, like me, can make millions from it.” After a dramatic beat, I added, “Of course, I’m only confessing that I’m a liar.”

  At that point, I’d laugh to make sure that everyone in the audience knew I was joking. “As a novelist, I have to own the fact that I lie for a living—and that I’m well paid to do so.”

  It was part of the presentation I made at book-signing events. It never ceased to be an applause line.

  If I had been born twenty years later, reaching adulthood in the internet era, when my entire life was available for review at the other end of a Google search, I’m quite certain Precipice would never have been published. Even if by some act of God it had been, there’s no way that Hollywood would have adapted it, or that my Oscar wouldn’t have launched a thousand protests and boycotts, effectively ending my career. Lucky for me, I enjoyed these successes and the many others that followed before my life story was available for public consumption. By the time my Wikipedia page went up, complete with an entire section about my trial for Carolyn’s murder, my reputation as a perennial bestseller and Hollywood go-to script doctor was solid enough that I could weather the decades-old whiff of scandal. If anything, my clouded past burnished my image as a literary bad boy.

  In the years that followed the publication of Precipice, my professional fortunes knew no bounds. Everything I wrote almost immediately shot to the top of the bestseller list, and I was often short-listed for one prestigious prize or another. I didn’t win another Oscar, but Hollywood paid me a boatload of money for my work.

  My personal life was less successful, which was not to say that I lived like a monk. There were many women through the years, but none of them made me rethink my commitment to bachelorhood, the tragic end of my first marriage having caused me to swear off the institution.

  Until I met Samantha Remsen.

  Like many of the women I’d dated since finding success, Samantha was in the “business,” and younger than I. Young enough that when we met—on a movie based on one of my less successful novels—she’d been cast as the love interest, while I was closing in on eligibility for social security.

  Despite our thirty-year age difference, we clicked from day one. It was a connection that I’d felt only once before. Not with Carolyn, but with Anne.

  I was long over whirlwind romances, though, so things proceeded slowly. Glacially, by Hollywood standards. We dated for the better part of a year before she agreed to give up her LA apartment and move into my house in Malibu. A year after that, we got married.

  I’d written a lot about love in my life, usually mining my feelings for Anne as the basis for my characters’ emotions. But being married to Samantha showed me that whatever it was that Anne and I had shared—lust, loneliness, fear of never being happy—it wasn’t truly love. With Samantha I experienced for the first time the pure bliss of being with another person and desiring nothing else but more of the same.

  Like any modern woman, Samantha had googled me early on, which led her to ask about the death of my first wife. At the time, I gave her my standard response: It was a tragedy, compounded by my being falsely accused. She really did die in the bathtub. Sometimes these things happen.

  That was the one and only time we discussed it until, one night, shortly after we became engaged, I told Samantha things I had never shared with anyone—about my affair with my best friend’s wife, about my love for Anne, about how it had led me foolishly to marry Carolyn, as if she were some spirit that would ward off my impure thoughts.

  Of course, I left out the one thing she wanted to know.

  “Did you kill her?” Samantha asked, nervousness in her voice suggesting she was afraid to hear the answer.

  “No,” I said. “But I wasn’t there to save her, so yes.”

  “Everything makes so much more sense now.”

  “What does?”

  “Precipice, Redemption. Everything you’ve written, actually. They’re all, at their core, stories about guilt.”

  “Like they say, you write what you know, I guess.”

  “You know other things too, Nick. Maybe you should write about them.”

  From time to time, the same thought had occurred
to me. I had always come at it from a different angle, though. Not that I should write about different things, but whether I would have written anything in the first place had it not been for my sins.

  For the first few years of our marriage, I was happier than I’d ever been. But somewhere around the three-year mark, I began to fear that Samantha was pulling away from me. At first, I attributed her distance to career troubles. She was now on the wrong end of thirty for lead roles and had stubbornly refused to give up that persona when her agent pitched her the young-mom parts that were the normal progression for an actress of her age. As a result, she didn’t work for nearly a year.

  It was therefore something of a godsend when Samantha was offered the female lead in a new thriller that was being directed by Tyree Jefferson. Although my wife was over the moon about it, I had reservations. Tyree had a well-known reputation for bedding his leading ladies, and I did not want to be the cuckold in a Hollywood scandal. When I mentioned this to Samantha, she said, “If I turned down parts because the director was known to stick it in the talent, my IMDB page would be blank.”

  So she booked the job, and only afterward told me that she’d be on location in the Hamptons all summer. When I expressed displeasure with the arrangement, she suggested I come to New York with her.

  “The studio rented me this house on the beach. You can write looking out on the Atlantic just as easily as you do overlooking the Pacific.”

  She sounded sincere, but she was well aware of my aversion to being on the East Coast. I’d been back to Manhattan many times since Carolyn’s death, as it was necessary to meet with my agents and publisher from time to time, but I felt claustrophobic every minute I spent on the island. Just being in the same time zone as Carolyn’s grave, as Clinton, as Anne while she was alive, as the memories of a life I’d left behind long ago, made me deeply uneasy.

  Had I felt more secure in my marriage, I’m certain I would have declined the offer. The last six months, however, had not been Samantha’s and my best. The age difference, which we had thought of as other people’s problem, had finally caught up with us. Samantha was showing every indication that she had become disenchanted with being married to someone she saw more as a mentor than an equal partner. Besides which, she wanted children. She knew going in that I felt too old for fatherhood. I assumed we had reached an understanding on that point, but as her fertility window began to close, the issue clearly remained a live one for her. Last, but certainly not least, I was experiencing the insecurity inevitable when a man in his sixties marries a beautiful woman half his age. It manifested in needy and controlling behavior that, not surprisingly, served only to push Samantha further away.

  So against my better judgment, or perhaps because I was more afraid of losing Samantha than I was of confronting the ghosts of my past life, I followed my wife to East Hampton.

  29.

  The house that the studio had rented for Samantha was the quintessential one-percenter summer home—five bedrooms, as many baths, double-height living room, statement staircase, and a towering deck overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. We quickly fell into a routine. Samantha went to the set in the morning, and I wrote at a bay window with an oceanfront view. Sometimes the shoot would run late, but Samantha assured me that Tyree was behaving like a professional, and I took comfort that my wife seemed happy to see me when she came home each night.

  In mid-July, Tyree had a dinner party for the leading actors of the cast, including plus-ones. Although there were few things I could imagine enjoying less than listening to Tyree go on about how Fellini and Scorsese were profound influences on him, I told my wife that I was looking forward to meeting her coworkers after hearing so much about them, not to mention admiring their work for years.

  The guest list included our host, who was presently unattached and didn’t have a plus-one at dinner; Samantha and me; Jaydon Lennox, the male lead in the movie, and his wife, Paige Anderson-Lennox, an Oscar-nominated actress in her own right; Chloe Lassiter, the film’s ingenue, who I was hoping would be the conquest Tyree fixated on instead of my wife, and her boyfriend, a rapper I’d never heard of who went by the stage name T-Rex. I was told to refer to him as either T or Rex, but not both.

  The studio had rented Tyree a house that was less than a ten-minute walk from ours. Whereas ours was a traditional colonial, his was all glass and steel and sharp angles. I recognized its exterior from a movie a few years back about a ruthless hedge-fund billionaire.

  Wardrobe must have outfitted Tyree for the evening. He was clad in white linen from head to toe. He was more than handsome enough to pull it off, still looking every inch like the model he had been in one of his previous incarnations. He had made the leap to behind the camera less than five years ago, first trying his hand at fashion photography, then short films, which led to his breakout indie effort that won the top prize at the Toronto Film Festival. Two bigger-budget features had followed, the latter of which was a box-office success, paving the way for a major studio to put up $50 million for his new thriller, the movie that had caused all of us to assemble in the Hamptons.

  Tyree greeted me with a firm handshake, and a “Good you could come, mate,” just in case I’d forgotten that he was British. Then he pulled Samantha into him and kissed her on the lips, which might have been the way he greeted all women, but I got the sense it was meant as a message to me.

  “Sam, looking gorgeous as ever,” Tyree said.

  No one called my wife Sam. She had told me during our initial introduction that she hated the diminutive of her name. Apparently, she had made an exception for Tyree.

  The others were on the patio, the rain forcing them to congregate under the protection of the awning. A spectacularly beautiful woman dressed in a revealing toga appeared, holding a tray. On it were a glass of scotch, a cotton-candy-colored mixed drink of some sort, and several white tablets slightly larger than an aspirin.

  “Tonight’s signature cocktail is a Suck, Bang, and Blow,” Tyree announced. “It’s a real drink. I did not name it. Google it, if you like. It’s got . . . a lot of stuff in it. Tequila, vodka, some peppermint schnapps, the list goes on and on. Nick, Sam told me that that you were a scotch man, so I broke into my private stock and opened up this little Glenfarclas forty-year-old. I think you’re going to like it.”

  The others were holding, or had already finished, the signature cocktail. I wasn’t going to turn down a hundred-dollar glass of scotch, even if I thought it the height of pomposity to serve it at a party.

  “And, of course, a little X to start the evening off right,” Tyree added.

  Samantha didn’t hesitate to reach for both the pill and the drink.

  “That’s my girl,” Tyree said. “Mine’s just kicking in, and this stuff is . . . Damn.”

  Chloe said, “I only took half. How long before I’m allowed to take another one?”

  T-Rex said, “No time like the present,” and scooped up two pills. One he popped in his mouth, and the second he inserted into Chloe’s.

  Jaydon Lennox was a good decade younger than I but still the closest thing I had to a contemporary among the group. Not to be outdone by the younger set, he summoned the server and took a tablet as well.

  “Look at you,” Paige said to her husband.

  “When in Rome,” Jaydon replied.

  Paige waved away the tray. “One is enough for me for now,” she said, making it clear that I was the odd man out in this crowd.

  Within an hour, the drug had done its work. While we ate dinner, Chloe intermittently made out with T-Rex, and I had the sense that something was definitely going on under the table between the Lennoxes. I was by now on my third scotch, but I could have consumed the entire bottle and still not achieved the others’ level of inebriation.

  After dinner, despite the downpour, Chloe and T-Rex went into the pool, sans clothing. I was pleased that the Lennoxes drew the line at nudity and dancing with their hands all over each other. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and wh
en I returned, Tyree and Samantha were beside the Lennoxes, swaying to the music, their bodies far closer than I—or any husband—would have deemed appropriate.

  I put my hand firmly on Tyree’s shoulder and pried him off my wife.

  “Relax, mate,” he said.

  “I think you’re maybe a little too relaxed, my friend.”

  “Well, it is a party. I don’t know what old men like to do, but I intend to have fun while I still can.”

  “Have all the fun you want, just not with my wife.”

  “Don’t you think that’s something for her to decide? I don’t hear Sam saying anything.”

  The smile that had prefaced his prior remarks was now nowhere to be seen. In its place was a stern look, like he was itching for a fight. If I’d been ten years younger, I might have answered him with a right cross; instead I turned to Samantha, expecting her to tell him off.

  To my surprise and embarrassment, she didn’t say a word. In fact, when we made eye contact, she looked away.

  “Samantha?” I said.

  “I don’t want to get into a thing with you here,” she said.

  “Then let’s get out of here.”

  Chloe and T-Rex were still splashing around naked in the pool, seemingly oblivious to the drama I was engaged in. The Lennoxes, however, had stopped their dancing and were taking in the scene in all its horror.

  “I know you told Sam not to do this picture,” Tyree said, his voice now at full argument level. “And I know you said that because of me. But I told her that her husband was a fucking twat. She’s doing the picture because she believes in my artistic vision, and because she knows you’re a fucking twat.”

  I shouted back: “She didn’t agree to be in your film because of your artistic vision, you asshole. She did it because the studio’s paying her a shitload of money.”