“If you hadn’t had your epic meltdown at the Cougars, I wouldn’t be in this mess,” Jack roared.
“Oh, and how was I supposed to know some Russian double agent was going to video me, post it on Instagram, and that your paramour had face ID’d you in your sleep and was tracking your every move?”
Jack blew hot air out his nostrils like an exhausted bull in an arena of his own devising. He kept checking the rearview mirror with anxious regularity. I glanced in mine and shook my head in abhorrence. On our tail was the Honda Ridgeline pickup and the Marlin Cruiser trailer that no doubt expanded into a mini manor estate replete with a long drop and a bed overhanging a bluff to set the perfect outdoor romantic scene. I convulsed at the thought.
“When’s the documentary crew showing up?” I asked, suppressing my anger.
“Soon.”
“How compromised are you?” I asked the windshield, Max curled up in my lap, fortunate to be a cat and not a fucking human.
“She’s producing the reboot of Washed-Up Celebrities,” he reminded me for the third time.
“I know. You told me. And she got to Dan O’Neill to buy the film rights to my book?”
“Yep. She’s a mover and a shaker.”
“So,” I started, in a rising tone, “if you fuck things up with her, you fuck yourself, then you fuck me, and we’re fucked twice?”
“If you’re thinking negatively.”
“I’m always thinking negatively because it keeps me sane, it keeps me from having my expectations dashed.”
“I’ve got it under control,” Jack declared with conviction, his jaw jutting forward over the wheel, his words specious as fuck.
“I hope you’ve explained to your sugar mommy I can’t be captaining the Beast on my own?”
“I told her.” The lies were pouring out like lava over the rim of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano. This is where the rift between Jack and me always started: the lies. The lies he had learned acting in, directing, and producing small films and cable TV shows in Hollywood. The pathological dissembling required to climb up the rungs of the ladder to the brass ring in Hollywood. The lies you had to wantonly strew to stay one step ahead of the game of lying in order not to get blindsided by even cleverer lies. The world Jack and I once moved in ran on the fuel of lies. I thought I had escaped it for good when I decamped for New Zealand. Apparently not. Only Max’s purring and warm body suggested there was another way to live your life.
“And then there’s Hana,” I spluttered, emerging out of my cynical reverie. “She didn’t bargain for this.”
“She’s a publicist, Miles. Their every waking moment is a shitstorm.”
“She’s a first-time publicist, and she doesn’t know that,” I snapped. “And a Kiwi one at that in a quaint country. Was not annealed in the shark-infested waters of Hollywood.”
Jack looked at me aghast. “A first-time publicist. I should have guessed. Jesus! I thought you were famous.”
“I am. Only the books got small,” I lamely joked. My eyes and upset being traveled out the window to the hoped-for peace of twenty-five million sheep in harmony with nature’s perfection of photosynthesis. We were lumbering along the Pacific in a camper van instead of a Stagecoach bus. Miles and miles of undeveloped beachfront property fled by, prime oceanfront property that venal real estate developers in California would slit their spouses’ throats for.
“Well, the good news,” I said to Jack as I emerged out of my bleak reverie, “Amanda’s the one who’s going to have to endure your snoring.”
Jack shot me a quick, puzzled look. “Snoring?”
“Camper van was shuddering. I thought it was the wind, or maybe a wounded sea lion.”
Jack laughed. “I’ve never heard that complaint before.”
“It’s thunderous. Window rattling. And unrelenting.”
“Okay. Okay. I get it, Miles. I snore. It’s probably the change in diet since we started this book tour.”
“Oh, blame it on my book tour. Maybe women haven’t wanted to tell you for fear you would leave them?”
“Not Amanda. She speaks her mind.”
“That’s what worries me.”
I let that thought hang in the air and turned to the window. The hills were furred with green. Dotting them were the ubiquitous dun-colored sheep. They never seemed to move, as if forever fixed in a postcard. With one breathtaking view in New Zealand you can see a canvas of windswept ocean, snowcapped mountains, and verdant green pasture. I didn’t know of any place like this in all of America. It’s why my heart sank into this country when I came two years ago and why leaving would be traumatic. Particularly since it appeared if I did decide to leave, I wouldn’t be able to return. I feared America, but what was pulling me back was such a powerful magnet, and a surreal one to boot, I was still wrestling with it in my emotionally repressed way. Unbidden, it would thrust up in my mind, a geyser through a fissure in the earth, paralyzing me. Jack now knew, but he was cold comfort. I needed the analytical attention of a therapist, the deeper feeling of a woman, or the speechless sagacity and the one-way-current empathy of a cat.
We cruised along stunning, empty black sand beaches that contrasted with the blue and gray of the storm-mirrored ocean. The protean, chiaroscuro skies remained dramatic; the weather was dramatic; our caravan of three now was approaching the dramatic! Growing up in Southern California, I had come to detest the absence of seasons and the monochromatic skies. It softened the brain, pounded it like abalone into something ostensibly palatable, but in reality made it amorphous. I longed for dramatic weather. I had a theory that Southern California could never have given the world a James Joyce or a Virginia Woolf precisely because the weather doesn’t test their limits, doesn’t push their creative beings to the extremes they need to go to in order to dredge up the profoundly unique stuff. Maybe that’s another reason why I had fled to New Zealand. I wanted to be tested in the maw of its dramatic meteorology. I needed a new lens through which to view the world for fear I would lapse into repeating myself, ending up an epigone version of myself, the writer I once was when I wrote my supposed legacy work a decade and a half ago.
Somewhere where the region of Canterbury bled into Marlborough, Highway 1 peeled away from the heart-stoppingly picturesque ocean and angled in a northwesterly direction. The thoughts churning in my head stayed there, crisscrossing and intersecting one another like cars on freeway cloverleafs. Jack had command of the wheel and command of his own thoughts, no doubt chewing over the repercussions of the stage-four clinger now, well, living up to her sobriquet.
“You know,” I started, wanting to hear my voice over the roar of the diesel engine, “if you don’t want to be with this woman, and you’re just staying in it for me, whatever, don’t do me any favors.”
“I appreciate that, Miles.” Jack took a sip of a soda. “When I came to Australia, I was pretty tapped out. This was a second chance for me. Well, a fourth chance—”
“Or a ninth—”
“—Or a ninth, or whatever, but I’m not getting any younger. We’ve been out of touch, but I got pretty close to the gutter back there after you had your brush with fame.” He darted a glance at me. “And did I try to touch you up? No.”
“I would have fueled you up.”
“I know you would have, dude, but money ruins friendships. It ruins everything,” he said, uncharacteristically philosophical. “But Amanda has some serious coin, she loves me, or so she claims, and I’m not about to turn a gift horse in the mouth to grits and collards,” he said, the North Carolinian seeping out of him. He nodded. “Okay, so I risked it back in Christchurch and she busted my balls, but maybe that was a wake-up call.”
“Again!”
“Again.” He pursed his lips in defiance of life’s fate. “We have a nice place in Byron Bay—well, she does—a hip little place, a lot of celebrities—”
“Washed-up celebrities?”
“Oh yeah, but my kind of people,” he finished, winking at me.
“You need this to work is what you’re saying?”
“I need this to work.”
“Then why risk it?”
“I thought I was in the clear, but that fucking Tim Cook and his Share My Location feature. Fuck, man.”
“Look, Jack, I don’t honestly care.”
The walkie crackled and came to life with Hana’s voice: “Sending you the link to where we’re going.” I checked Messages on my phone, saw her text, then clicked on the link, and it routed me to Google Maps. I clicked to start directions.
“Where to?” asked Jack.
“The Coterie. It’s a wine collective. Should be a rollicking night.”
A horn blasted to Jack’s right, and he whipped his head. Amanda had pulled up alongside us, driving in the wrong lane (!), and was motioning for Jack to roll down his window. He did.
“I need to take a pee,” Amanda shouted.
At the next turnoff, Jack, Hana, and I stood outside in the cold, hugging our bodies, as Amanda emptied her bladder in the bathroom in the camper van. Hana had rolled a joint of chop, managed to get it lit with repeated—anxious?—match strikes, and was puffing on it fretfully. Jack and I stood next to each other in the pastoral barrenness, marveling at the wintry beauty of New Zealand.
“I see why you moved here,” Jack said.
“As long as I keep getting opportunities to write, I can be anywhere,” I said. “I don’t need people.” Jack threw me a look. “I’ve got Max, and he’s all I need.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Max won’t cheat on me. Besides, it’s over with Ella.”
Jack turned to me with that grooved face of empathetic concern. I wouldn’t meet his beseeching eyes. “Then move on, man. Let Amanda introduce you to her writer friend.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Well, let’s have a good time, because we don’t have a long time.”
I nodded at his rare moment of perspicacity. “You ever talk to your ex-wife?”
“Babs? Rarely,” he muttered.
“See your boy often?”
“Now and then. I’m not a part of his life. Sadly.”
“Maybe one day things will normalize.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said with a downcast look, laconic to the point where he wished I hadn’t recrudesced the scars of the past. He shot me a glance. “And you’ve got a daughter now. That makes us both dads.”
I nodded. “Yep.”
A moment later, in a whole other world, in a world that was now and brand new, Amanda came bounding out of the camper van. A solicitous Jack caught her a split second before she catapulted over the missing step and plunged into the muck. That’s all I needed. I’m sure Hana would have gotten an irrepressible stoner’s laugh out of that one. Instead we were witness to Jack with Amanda in his strong, gym-rat bulked-up arms swinging her around and kissing her passionately—though, as he’s an actor, one never can be quite sure of the divide between the performative and the genuinely passionate. He set her down and she turned to Hana and me.
“I’m treating everyone to dinner tonight,” she announced. “You mates look a little scrappy to me, look like you could use a gourmet meal.”
“I’ll get you set up at the Coterie and let you three enjoy yourselves,” said Hana, the threat of Amanda’s company palpable in her voice.
“Are you sure? Stay with us. I’d love to give you some beauty tips,” Amanda crassly offered.
Hana, quietly seething, manufactured a smile but didn’t say anything in reply, her nonresponse both a no and a repudiation of everything Amanda.
A traveling sun slipped behind a storm cloud as if a portent of things to come.