Temptation

by Douglas Kennedy

‘I know, if I call Caitlin, I’m going to turn a catastrophic situation into an Armageddon situation.’

  ‘Bingo. Also: I’m going to talk to your accountant guy . . . and get a complete up-to-date position on your tax liability and other fun stuff. And tomorrow, before the six pm deadline, I’ll get all your stuff out of the apartment and into storage, and I’ll deal with Sally on little things like your share of the deposit, the furniture you bought together, etc.’

  ‘Let her have everything.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I blew it with her. I blew it with everybody and everything. And now . . . ’

  ‘Now you’re going to spend at least a week doing nothing but taking long walks, reading in the hammock, reducing your daily booze intake to a glass or two of decent Napa wine, and trying to sleep well. Are we clear about all that?’

  ‘Aye, aye, doctor.’

  ‘Speaking of doctors, one final thing . . . and don’t scream about this . . . a therapist named Matthew Sims is going to be phoning you around eleven tomorrow morning. I’ve booked him for fifty minutes, and if you like him, he’ll do a daily session with you on the phone. Take it from me: as therapists go, he’s no bullshit . . . ’

  ‘He’s your therapist?’

  ‘Don’t act so surprised.’

  ‘It’s just . . . I didn’t realize . . . ’

  ‘Honey, I’m a Hollywood agent. Of course I have a therapist. And this guy gives good phone, and I think you know that you need to be talking to someone right now . . . ’

  ‘All right, I’ll take the call.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Alison . . . ’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You didn’t have to do all this.’

  ‘Yeah, I think I did. Now I’m afraid I’ve got to turn around and head back to town. I’ve got a heavy date tonight.’

  ‘Anyone exciting?’

  ‘He’s a sixty-three-year-old retired Chief Financial Officer for one of the studios. He’s probably just had a triple bypass and is also in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. But hey, I’m not going to say no to a little action.’

  ‘Jesus, Alison . . . ’

  ‘Listen to you, Mr Prude. I may be fifty-seven years old, but I am not your mother. Which means I am allowed to have sex . . . ’

  ‘I’m saying nothing.’

  ‘Damn right you’re not,’ she said, fixing me with a skewed smile. Then she reached out and took each of my hands. ‘I want you to be all right.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘And remember – whatever the hell happens professionally – one way or another you will live. Amazingly enough, life does go on. Try to keep that in mind.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Now go get into that hammock.’

  As soon as Alison drove off, I did as ordered, grabbing a copy of Hammett’s The Thin Man off Willard Stevens’s shelf and collapsing in the hammock. Although it was one of my favorite crime novels, the jumbled pressure and exhaustion of the past few days suddenly mowed me down, and I passed out after a page. When I woke there was a distinct chill in the air, and the sun was bowing out into the Pacific. I felt cold and disorientated . . . and within seconds, the entire appalling scenario came rushing back to occupy my brain. My initial urge was to run to the phone, call Lucy, tell her she was playing the vilest sort of hardball, then demand to speak to Caitlin. But I talked myself down from that furious position, reminding myself what happened when I decided to confront Theo McCall (and also realizing how the world would come tumbling down upon me if I did violate the court order). So I got out of the hammock and went inside and threw some water on my face and found a sweater. Then, realizing that the cupboard was bare, I jumped in the car and headed to the local grocery shop.

  It wasn’t just a grocery – it was also a general store-cum-delicatessen. Like everything I spied on the main street in Meredith (the bookstore, the shops that sold scented candles and upscale bath salts, the clothing store with Ralph Lauren shirts in the window) it suggested that this was a well-heeled weekend retreat for well-heeled Angelinos . . . albeit, I sensed, one of those places where everyone maintained a certain polite detachment from each other.

  Certainly this was the case in Fuller’s Grocery. After buying basic supplies for the house – as well as some fancyassed pasta and pesto for dinner – the fiftysomething woman behind the counter (handsome, grey-haired, blue denim shirt – the archetypal upscale owner of an upscale grocers like this) didn’t ask me if I was new in town, or just up for the weekend, or any of that other nosey neighbor stuff. Instead she quietly checked me out, and said, ‘The pesto’s a good choice. I made it myself.’

  The pesto was a good choice. So too was the bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir. I restricted myself to two glasses. I was in bed by ten, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and watched a video of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (one of my all-time favorite films). Even though I’d seen it a half-dozen times before, I still cried shamelessly when Shirley MacLaine ran through the Manhattan streets to profess her love for Jack Lemmon at the end. And when I couldn’t sleep after that, I sat up some more and gawked at a great forgotten Cagney comedy of the thirties, Jimmy the Gent. By the time that was finished, it was nearly three. I staggered into bed and passed out.

  I woke to a phone call – from Matthew Sims, the therapist with whom Alison had set me up. His voice sounded reasonable, calm: the standard issue therapeutic voice. He asked me if he’d woken me. When I confirmed this, he said that, given it was a Sunday, he wasn’t exactly block booked, and would be happy to call back in twenty minutes. I thanked him and headed out to the kitchen to make a quick pot of coffee, and to get two cups into me before the phone rang again.

  Alison was right: Matthew Sims was good news. No touchy-feely crap. No inner child nonsense. He got me talking about the last week, about how I felt like I was in free fall, and feared never being able to recover from all this professional calamity, and still felt appalling guilt for breaking up my family, and now wondered whether or not I had somehow set myself up for this disaster. Naturally enough, Sims immediately fastened on to this comment, asking me, ‘Are you saying that you believe you consciously or subconsciously willed yourself all this trouble?’

  ‘Subconsciously, yeah.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Why else did all those borrowed lines appear in my scripts?’

  ‘Maybe you just accidentally borrowed them, David. That kind of assimilation of other people’s jokes does happen sometimes, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Or maybe I wanted to be found out.’

  ‘What is it that you wanted found out about yourself?’

  ‘The fact . . . ’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The fact . . . that I’m a fraud.’

  ‘Do you really think that, especially given all the success you’ve had up until recently?’

  ‘I think that now.’

  And then our time was up, and we agreed to talk again at eleven the next day.

  I spent much of the day in the hammock or walking the beach, thinking, thinking. And having all those silent mental arguments, in which I said all the things I wanted to say to Lucy; in which I convinced Sally to give me – us – another chance; and in which I was interviewed by Charlie Rose on PBS and gave such an intelligent, searing rebuttal to McCall’s charges that Brad Bruce called me the next day and said: ‘Dave, we made a big mistake. Get on down here and let’s start working on the third season.’

  Sure. In my dreams. Because there was no way that anything would be restored to me. I’d blown it . . . allowing an unintentional mistake to blossom into a personal conflagration. And so I started playing the If only . . . game. As in: if only I hadn’t responded so vehemently to McCall’s initial disclosure. If only I’d eaten humble pie and written McCall a letter thanking him for pointing out my little error. But I was both frightened and arrogant – just as I was around the time I started my affair with Sally Birmingham: frightened that all would be revealed and I
’d lose my family; yet flush enough with my new-found success to believe that I deserved this ‘prize’. And, of course, if only I’d stayed with Lucy, then I mightn’t have reacted in such an extreme way when McCall appeared on Today. Because he would never have made that comment about me leaving my wife and child – the comment which sent me hurtling towards that ignominious scene in the NBC parking lot . . .

  Enough, enough. To quote that famous needlepoint motto: you can’t undo what’s been done. Which, in turn, brings one to the blunt realization: when you’re fucked, you’re fucked.

  But what was even more unnerving was the thought: was this the situation I really wanted? Did I so distrust my success that I somehow needed to fail. Was I – as Sally had said – the architect of my own ruinous denouement?

  I brought this matter up with Matthew Sims when we spoke again on Monday morning.

  ‘Are you saying you can’t trust yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Can anybody ever really trust themselves?’

  ‘By which you mean . . . ?’

  ‘Don’t we all have our fingers on the self-destruct button?’

  ‘Possibly – but most of us don’t push it.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You keep coming back to that, David. Do you really think that everything which has happened to you was self-inflicted?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Over the next few days, this became our central topic of conversation: had I set myself up for this spectacular fall? Matthew Sims kept encouraging me to believe that, sometimes, bad shit simply happened.

  ‘And remember,’ Sims said, ‘we all do out-of-character stuff when we’re under severe strain. I mean, you didn’t physically harm the man . . . ’

  ‘But I did do enormous harm to my situation . . . ’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You made a bad mistake. What now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Sims’s phone calls were the central point of my day. I spent the rest of the time walking and reading, and watching old movies, and resisting the temptation to make certain phone calls or to go online. I didn’t even bother buying a newspaper. When Alison called every night at six, I didn’t ask her if my name was still in the papers. Instead, I let her fill me in on the day’s events. On Monday, she told me that all my belongings had been packed up and shipped to storage. On Tuesday, she said that she’d hired a well-considered divorce lawyer named Walter Dickerson to act on my behalf, and that the $5,000 she squeezed out of Sally for my portion of the deposit and the furniture we’d bought together would cover his work on the case.

  ‘What did Sally say?’

  ‘There was a lot of invective at first. A lot of “How dare you?” To which I replied, “How dare you break up a guy’s marriage and then dump him when he hits hard times?”’

  ‘Jesus Christ, you actually said that to her?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘How did she react?’

  ‘More of the “how dare you” shit. So I pointed out that it wasn’t just me who thought that . . . but all of Hollywood. Of course, I was simply talking out of my ass, but it made her sit up and write the check. We had to argue the price a bit – especially as I asked for $7,500 to begin with – but eventually she came around.’

  ‘Well . . . thanks, I guess.’

  ‘Hey, it’s all part of the service. Anyway, now that she’s given you the bullet, I’m going to speak the truth: I always thought she was Little Miss Ruthless. To her, you were just one rung on the ladder.’

  ‘Now you tell me.’

  ‘You knew that all along, David.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said quietly. ‘I guess I did.’

  On Wednesday, Alison told me that my accountant, Sandy Meyer, was preparing a complete statement of my financial wherewithal, but had been unable to get in contact with Bobby Barra . . . who, according to his assistant, was on business in China. No doubt, selling them their own Great Wall.

  On Thursday, Alison told me that Walter Dickerson was in serious negotiation with Alexander McHenry, and should have some sort of news by the start of next week.

  ‘Why the hell hasn’t Dickerson called me?’

  ‘Because I told him not to. I briefed him thoroughly on the situation and said you wanted to have proper access to your daughter again. Then I gave him McHenry’s number and told him to rough him up. Would you have said anything more to him?’

  ‘I guess not. It’s just . . . ?’

  ‘How are you sleeping?’

  ‘Not badly, actually.’

  ‘That’s an improvement. And you’re talking things through with Sims every day.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Making progress?’

  ‘You know what therapy’s like: you keep saying the same old crap over and over again until you’re so sick of it yourself, you think: I’m cured.’

  ‘Are you feeling cured?’

  ‘Hardly. Humpty Dumpty has not been put back together again.’

  ‘But, at least, you’re better than you were last week.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then why not spend another week up there?’

  ‘Why not? I have nowhere else to go.’

  Nor did I have much to do during my second weekend, except continue working my way through Willard’s extensive film library, read, listen to music, hike along the shoreline, eat light meals, stick to two glasses of wine a day, and try to keep all the demons at bay.

  Then Monday came. Shortly after I finished my telephonic confessional session with Matthew Sims, the phone rang. It was my lawyer, Walter Dickerson. He spoke smoothly.

  ‘I’m going to give it to you straight, David,’ he said. ‘For reasons best known to herself, your ex-wife has decided to really go to town on this one. Her own lawyer admitted to me that he felt she was way overstepping the mark on the barring order, considering that there’s no previous history of domestic violence, and also that, with the exception of one missed weekend, you’ve been very conscientious about your access to Caitlin. But though McHale explained all this to your ex, she is really determined to punish you . . . which means we have what’s known in the trade as “a situation”. And it comes down to this: in my experience, when someone is that angry, they will go even more ballistic if you try to throw a writ back in their face. In other words, we could go to court and do an entire song and dance about how you simply lost it with the guy who was trying to destroy your career, but didn’t do the clown any harm . . . so how in the hell could you be of any danger to your ex-wife and child? But I promise you: once we do this, she’ll just up the ante and start throwing all sorts of accusations at you – from Satanic abuse to keeping a voodoo doll under your bed . . . ’

  ‘She’s not that crazy . . . ’

  ‘Maybe not – but she’s awfully damn angry at you. If we fuel her anger, it’s going to cost you – both financially and emotionally. So here’s what I’ve discussed with McHenry – and though it may not be ideal, it’s better than nothing. He thinks he can convince your ex-wife to initially allow you a daily phone call with Caitlin . . . ’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Look, considering that she wants to deny you contact completely, getting her to agree to a phone call would be a step forward.’

  ‘But will I ever see my daughter again?’

  ‘Of that I have no doubt . . . but it might take a couple of months . . . ’

  ‘A couple of months. Come on, Mr Dickerson . . . ’

  ‘I’m not a miracle worker, David. And I have to listen to what my opposite number is saying about his client’s intentions. And what he’s saying to me is that, right now, a daily phone call with your daughter should be considered a gift. As I said, there is the litigation option . . . but it’s going to cost you a cool twenty-five grand minimum. It’ll also generate some publicity. From what Alison was telling me – and also from what I’ve been reading in the papers recently – the last thing you need is publicity.’

  ‘Okay, okay, get me the daily phone ca
ll.’

  ‘Smart guy,’ Dickerson said, adding: ‘I’ll be back to you as soon as I have an answer from the other side. And by the way, I’m a big fan of Selling You.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said weakly.

  Sandy Meyer also called me on Monday, to tell me that the $250k owing to the IRS was due in three weeks, and that he was rather worried about my cash flow position.

  ‘Now I checked with BankAmerica, and you’ve got about twenty-eight thousand in your checking account . . . which should cover the next two months’ alimony and child support payments. After that . . . ’

  ‘All my other money is tied up with Bobby Barra.’

  ‘I looked at his most recent account statement, which is for the last quarter. He’s done pretty well by you, as your total balance as of two months ago was $533,245. The problem is, David – you have no other cash bar this investment portfolio.’

  ‘I was supposed to be earning nearly $2 million this year, before this curve ball took off my head. Now . . . now, there’s nothing else coming in. And you know what happened to most of my big first year earnings . . . ’

  ‘I know: your ex-wife and the IRS.’

  ‘God bless them both.’

  ‘So it looks like you’re going to have to liquidate half your portfolio to meet that IRS demand. But Alison also said that FRT and Warners want around half a million back in writer’s fees. If that demand becomes reality . . . ’

  ‘I know: the math doesn’t work. But my hope is that Alison will be able to negotiate them down to about half of that.’

  ‘Which means that your investment portfolio will essentially be wiped out. Is there any other money coming in?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then how are you going to find the eleven grand per month for Lucy and Caitlin?’

  ‘Shine shoes?’

  ‘Surely Alison can find you some work.’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? I’m supposed to be a plagiarist. And nobody hires plagiarists.’

  ‘You have no other assets I don’t know about?’

  ‘Just my car.’

  I could hear him shuffling more papers. ‘It’s a Porsche, right? Worth probably around $40k right now.’

  ‘That sounds about right.’