The Player (6 page)

Kahane looked up and saw him. He lurched away from the table and walked out the other door. Griffin followed. Kahane crossed the street to the theater and entered a narrow passage in the direction of a sign that pointed to
ALWAYS FREE PARKING IN THE REAR.
Griffin had to run hard to keep up. He called after Kahane, “David, stop!”

Kahane turned and waited for Griffin to catch up.

“What do you want?”

“You sing very well.”

“Great, the studio has a record label, let's put out an album.”

“Why are you so mad at me?”

“I'm not mad at you. I'm just an asshole, okay? It's just my nature. It's the way I am.”

“I guess I must look pretty silly to you. I mean, driving out here to deliver a message you already got.”

“It makes you almost human.”

“Why are you so hostile to me?”

“If I am, I'm sorry.”

“Have you ever sent me a postcard?” He had to ask. He had to know.

“What kind of postcard?” Kahane, who had been fiddling with his keys, using the noise as a sign of his impatience, put them back into his pocket. He was curious.

“You don't like me, do you?”

“I have no strong feelings about you, one way or the other.”

“The truth, David.”

“I told you the truth. I don't really care about you. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about you.”

“But you're mad at me for not getting back to you, aren't you?”

“I told you, I don't expect anything different.”

“So you do have a low opinion of me.”

“You want me to say I hate you?”

“Of course not.”

“I think you do. And I didn't come here tonight to make you happy.” Kahane took the keys out of his pocket and shook them once, this time to announce that the audience was over. He started to walk away.

“One more thing,” said Griffin, who stayed in the alley as Kahane squeezed between two cars in the parking lot. Kahane kept walking. Griffin followed him. It was harder for Griffin to move between the cars, and he was aware that Kahane was slim. Griffin tried to convince himself that Kahane was, after all, the postcard Writer. This
would explain the bad behavior. Griffin had made a perfect guess, as brilliant in its own way as the selection of a screenplay for a production that goes on to earn a hundred and fifty million dollars. A psychic beam had locked him into his secret tormentor. Kahane was the postcard Writer, and his reactions to Griffin—the mean answers to friendly questions, the humiliating display of talent, the indifference—were all dramatizations of Griffin's behavior toward him. Griffin wanted to tell Kahane that they were even now, there was no need to play this game of bully boy.

Kahane stopped at a new black Saab; the dealer's sticker was still glued inside the window. Griffin wondered where an unknown writer earned the money for such a car. He expected an old Datsun, a first car, not a reward. Maybe it was June Mercator's car. Griffin caught up with him.

“New car,” said Griffin.

“Surprised? You wonder where I get the money?”

“I guess you'll tell everyone.”

“Tell them what? What's going on, Griffin? You didn't come here to say something about my story, you forgot it as soon as I was out the door. What is going on?”

Griffin didn't answer. He couldn't speak. He dragged his foot along the ground, sideways, and then he knelt down, beside the rear tire. He toyed with the plastic cap to the air valve and began, slowly, to unscrew it. When it came off in his hand, he pressed the tiny pin with the edge of his thumbnail, and he thought about telling Kahane the truth.

“What are you doing?” said Kahane.

How would Kahane take the answer, that he had come to appease someone who was sending him angry postcards, and that he had felt that the simple act of offering a second chance to one person he had ignored might, in some cosmic way, get back to that
offended man, that Writer of awful hate mail. As the air hissed out of the tire, smelling of gas stations and rubber, Griffin looked up at Kahane, who looked down with the confused expression of someone trying to understand something being screamed at him in a language he doesn't understand. Kahane bent down to look Griffin in the face. Griffin wanted to smile, to let Kahane see the irony of the moment, now that they were equal.

“Griffin, what's going on?”

“I'm sorry,” said Griffin. “I wish I could explain.” Griffin pushed Kahane down from his unsteady balance on the balls of his feet. Kahane reached out to grab something on the car, but the door handles were recessed and there was nothing to hold. With his arms out, he fell over, and Griffin stood up and then dropped on his knees to Kahane's chest, like a TV wrestler, and Kahane grunted and swore. Griffin felt the strength of that legendary mother who pulled the car off her child; the power of the universe was in his hands. He sat on Kahane's chest and held his throat in those hands, and he saw what it was to choke a man to death.

Kahane tried to throw Griffin off with a few thrusts of his legs, but Griffin had never felt such focus before. Nothing could move him. Kahane was gagging, throwing spit on Griffin's pants, but it was too late for him to yell. The surprise of the attack had taken his breath away. He died with his eyes closed.

Griffin took Kahane's wallet and watch. He considered putting the body in the car and driving it away from the lot, but then he would have to take a taxi back to his own car. He would just leave him and walk away. He rolled the body under the car. No one would see it at night. He put the cap back on the valve; the action of threading it was a comfort, he was sorry when he let it go. He crawled away, hiding below window level of three cars before standing up. He went the long way around the parking lot to the street.

When he got to the main boulevard, he looked behind him. Nothing. No one. As he drove past the theater on the way to the freeway, the audience was leaving the final show.

All right, he said to himself, suppose you're in court and they're asking you how you felt, what would you say? Honestly? Detached, maybe. There was a sensation of terrific exhaustion, but that was from the physical strain of wrestling. It was not impossible to kill.

He pulled off the freeway in Hollywood and dropped the wallet and watch in a gas station dumpster. At the next red light, on Sunset Boulevard, his right foot started to shake on the brake pedal. He asked himself if this was fear or guilt, and he couldn't answer. He took Sunset to Beverly Glen and drove into the canyon.

His house was quiet and fresh, pleasantly unfamiliar, the way it was when he came home from long trips. Night-blooming jasmine cast its scent into his bedroom.

After a shower he took a bottle of tranquilizers from his medicine cabinet. He tapped two pills into his hand but thought, no, and threw the two pills into the toilet. He dropped the rest of the pills in the water and flushed them away. It had been two years since he had taken any, his system was clean, he didn't really drink more than a few beers or glasses of wine a week, no drugs anymore, this was no time to start. As he watched them drown, he knew he had made the right decision, even the brave decision. He didn't think of it as a protective maneuver, against a sudden urge to kill himself, but instead it was a renunciation, an exercise in discipline. Sedation inhibits dreaming. If he was going to suffer nightmares, better to let them come as they wanted, as they needed, and not try to scare them away with little pills; all the small, bad dreams would collect in an ugly hive, waiting for him, and he couldn't keep them away forever, not even with addiction. What else would he suffer? He expected the name David to bother him. He hoped it wouldn't show up in scripts.
Yes, and for a while he would be nervous every time he saw a cop, but this, too, would pass.

He slipped into bed and felt high excitement. He was tempted to get up and drink a glass of chamomile tea, but the thought of all that effort—get up, turn on lights, walk downstairs, step on the cold tile, open up cabinet, open up box of tea, remove tea bag, turn on flame, lean against counter, wait for water to boil, wait for tea to steep, look at clock, come back upstairs—was overwhelming. He lowered himself into his exhaustion, which welcomed him. He looked through the darkness to the Writer and searched his heart for all the sincerity he could squeeze from it and tried to adjust for the interference of pride. He said aloud, “I hope you understand what I've done.” Then he fell asleep.

In the morning he found a postcard attached to his newspaper. It was the kind of all-occasion card that little gift shops sell, an airbrush collage of a slice of cherry pie, a 1957 Buick, red lips, fried eggs, bacon, and a half of a kiwifruit. All of these images floated over a Rocky Mountain backdrop, a forest receding to a snowcapped range. He turned it over. The writing was dense, almost impenetrable.

Griffin—

You said you'd get back to me.

Griffin looked at the card:
IMAGES WITH AN APPETIZING DIFFERENCE
. How many stores in Los Angeles sold this card? The card reminded him of a Betty Boop cartoon in which Earth is for sale and is auctioned off to the planets. The lowest bidder, Saturn, wins. Somehow Earth's magnetic core, a horseshoe magnet on a string, is removed and put in Saturn's pocket. Gravity is reversed. Everything floats from the land. Finally the magnet is returned and order is restored.

Now he had killed a man, and what good had it done him? He looked through the newspaper. The body would have been found too late for the morning edition. There was nothing about it yet. The death would probably catch some attention, but was it brutal or ugly enough to be really newsworthy? What would the police think? A simple mugging. No one would know it was a sacrifice.

How long would it take this gesture of appeasement carried on the scent of that bloodless death to reach the Writer? Stuffing a body under a car in Pasadena to convince someone to leave you alone is a complicated message. The Writer was having fun with Griffin, so why should he stop and kill him?

Griffin drove to the studio, hoping he had addressed this message correctly. He had sent something by slow mail, but he was certain it would arrive. He was positive.

Nobody leaves my office until we agree on fifteen reasons for why we go to the movies.” Levison looked around the room. “Alison, when was the last time you bought a ticket to see a movie?”

Alison Kelly, his story editor, covered her face with her hands. “I am so embarrassed,” she said. “But I just hate to stand in lines. I think it's been two months. What can I say, I go to screenings.”

Levison stood up. “From now on, everyone in this room has to go to a movie theater and pay to see a movie, sneak previews don't count, at least once a month.” He turned to Griffin. “Griffin, when was the last time you bought a ticket to see a movie?”

“The Bicycle Thief,
last night.” As soon as he said it, he realized what he had done. He had confessed.

“Okay,” said Levison, “why did you go?”

“Because it's a classic and I've never seen it.”

“And why didn't you have it screened?”

“I wanted to feel the audience reaction.”

“What was the reaction?”

“They loved it.”

“Who were they?”

“People who hate the movies we make.” Better to go on the attack. Maybe not.

“Did you like it?”

“It's great. Of course.”

“No remake potential?”

“We'd have to give it a happy ending.”

“What if we set it in space, another planet.
The Rocket Thief
?” He was grinning. This was a joke.

“A poor planet?”

“There you go,” said Levison. “Right away we're talking about something we've never seen in a science-fiction film, and that's a poor planet. How come space is always rich?”

“Luke Skywalker's farm in
Star Wars
was pretty run-down.”

“Fine,” said Levison. “And it worked, and what I'm saying is, that's why we have these meetings, to come up with images, to come up with characters and story ideas, so we're not at the mercy of whoever comes through the door. So we can contribute, so our own ideas can get made. Now. Let's start at the beginning. Why do we go to the movies? Give me some reasons.”

Hands were raised. Levison ran to the always ready easel with its large tablet of clean poster paper and, with a marking pen, quickly scribbled one through fifteen.

“One,” he said. “Griffin went to see a classic. This list should not be in any special order of priority. You'll notice I don't want to start with the clichés, like escape or entertainment. So we'll say—and this is a legitimate reason to go to the movies—we'll say, ‘We go to see classics.'” He wrote
CLASSICS
on the paper. Then he wrote next to two,
ENTERTAINMENT
, and next to three,
ESCAPE.

“Mysteries,” someone said.
MYSTERIES
was added.

“Doesn't anyone go to the movies for sex?” asked Levison. “Don't guys choose movies that they hope will turn on their girlfriends?” Levison grinned and wrote
SEXUAL PROVOCATION
.

“New fashions?”

STYLE.

“I like driving fast after a James Bond film.”

ENERGY.

“What about movie stars?”

STARS.

“I'm always happy looking at Paris.”

TRAVEL.

“Comedy.”

LAUGHS.

“Horror films.”

SCREAMS.

“Songs.”

SONGS.

“Love stories.”

LOVE STORIES.

“Are we talking about types of movies or reasons that we go?” Drew asked.