The wind had strengthened when we arrived back at the Freedom Campground, and that was saying something. Storm clouds raced across the empyrean, backlit by a traveling moon. Rain had begun to fall in heavy droplets, obscuring the view.
I fed Max and held him in the back of the camper van, missing Hana, when there was a rap on the door.
“Come on in,” I called out.
An already tipsy Jack and Amanda clambered in. Amanda took a seat across from me in the lounge and promptly uncorked a bottle of champagne, amateurishly letting foam spew out of the top. In the crowded space, Jack stood in the passageway in front of the cockpit where the two of us had begun this journey. We had managed to make it to the North Island and were on the home stretch. Jack produced champagne flutes from an overhead compartment. The wind pitched the camper van back and forth. Amanda poured three glasses of Esses champagne I had been gifted in Kaikōura and raised hers in a toast.
“Here’s to our two shows. May they go on for season after season.”
“Hear, hear,” cried a smiling Jack, having resolved all improprieties with Amanda, and sensing he might have a future, that there would be security in his dotage. I wasn’t as convinced, but I was too drained from the event to protest.
“Hear, hear,” I said.
We clinked glasses all around.
“TV One loved the footage of you on the toilet.” Amanda beamed, seeking congratulations for her Hana-riffing event production, me the one who would have to endure its images on the internet for all eternity.
“No doubt,” I said. “There is no bottom to where culture will go for the media’s venal chasing of ratings. I’m a victim of my times. Imagine F. Scott reading from Gatsby on a toilet?”
“It’s going to sell books,” Amanda said.
“On the back of humiliation or merit?”
“Does it matter? As long as you get a deal to write the next one, and the one after that.”
I stroked Max, grew introspective, my eyes fixed on his fur, but looking through it to an ignominy I hadn’t envisioned when I started writing A Year of Pure Feeling, my creative fires aflame for the first time in years, the world having passed me by and by the time I had surfaced I had awakened to a shithole of superficiality.
“You talk about truth,” Amanda said in a belligerent tone. “Well, isn’t this the truth of where books are today?”
“Sadly, yeah.”
Jack, wanting to be closer to the conversation in case it erupted into a full-blown argument, eased onto the cushion next to Amanda. They were in a giddily exultant mood, my morosity over the mortifying event evoking scant sympathy in them.
“In the end you hope the money will come from the merit of the work and not the performative abasement of yourself,” I said matter-of-factly, without rancor.
“You’re going to make more money off this show than you would ever make off your book,” argued Amanda, dollar signs locking in the slot machine of her eyes.
“I preferred the humiliation, but the documenting of it takes it out of memory and stamps it with certification for the few inglorious years I have remaining on this foundering planet.”
“It’s promotional gold. Your publicist didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Maybe she had a different plan for me,” I said, growing testy.
“Miles,” Jack said, “they’re going crazy over the footage.”
I raised my eyes from Max’s fur and his calm purring in the face of the many storms, inside and outside, battering me. There was something so pure about Max and the current of feeling that poured from him, but when I looked into the ruddy faces of well-meaning cash-grabbers Amanda and Jack, I glimpsed a side of Jack I hadn’t wanted to believe or witness realized. He could be the most fun person on the planet. To go through the wars with him could be a cathartic laugh riot, as it was years ago in the Santa Ynez Valley wine region, as it was recently at the Cougars of Christchurch Book Club. But there was another side to Jack, as there was to almost everybody I had ever met in Hollywood: he was, at the end of the day, a two-bit hustler for whom the prospect of fame and fortune, however realized, outflanked true friendship. With Jack’s thigh pressed to Amanda’s and their twin grins in treacherous concert, it was the corruptible Jack I was seeing, and it soured me on everything about our relationship.
Hollywood is a magnet for all kinds of aspirants, but, in my experience, it seemed to, inevitably, reduce people to a kind of low common denominator of greed, despite their at-times exalted claims of wanting to make art, move people’s souls. But to maintain that homeostasis, one had to always have access to the blackest regions of their debased hearts. And if it took an aggressive, overachieving money whore like Amanda to educe it and, even better, make it happen, then the dark heart follows the dark path, and the besmirched legacy that dishonorably trails it. Hollywood doesn’t draw the degenerate and the corrupt to LA, but when the dust settles, it seems that’s all who is left standing in its perfidious center of power. Jack and Amanda, swilling expensive champagne, on the brink of success, needing only one last dowel to finish assembling the Ikea desk at the liminal edge of usurping my soul, what tattered ribbons in the void remained of it.
“I haven’t signed on the dotted line,” I reminded them.
Amanda threw Jack a troubled look.
With a nod and a wink, Jack mouthed, I’ll talk to him and it’ll be okay.
“It’s a celebration of you, Miles,” Amanda reassured me.
I nodded up and down, having made my point. “Where’s Dan O’Neill?” I said, clapping my hands together, shifting the conversation, pretending to brighten.
We trooped outside into the lashing winds and slanting rain pelting us unmercifully. Gusts of wind were so powerful we had to widen our stances, tilt into the teeth of it, and shout to hear one another, mariners on an ill-fated voyage to intercept a galleon weighed down with gold.
Amanda pointed an extended index finger to a nearby knoll where a lone camper trailer was parked, aglow from inside. “He’s up there,” she yelled. “Don’t talk about the book option. He’s going through a divorce,” she confided.
Jack hooked an arm around his windblown girlfriend, helmet of hair now a riot on her head. I hoped for Jack’s sake it wasn’t a wig. “Come on, honey, let’s celebrate,” Jack said, flashing a profane grin that ate his face whole.
I watched the two of them, bent forward against the wind gusting in off the harbor, trudge up the steep incline to their Marlin Cruiser stationed in its primo-view location.
With nothing to do except read Julian Barnes out loud to Max, I took off on foot in the direction of Dan O’Neill’s trailer. As I drew near, I could hear wailful weeping issuing from inside. It rose and fell with an alarming amplitude. Normally I would have turned to go back, but I was emboldened by all the tequila and wine coursing through my bloodstream and clouding my sense of reason.
I banged on Dan O’Neill’s camper-van door. “Dan? Dan! Are you in there?”
The door flung open and I jolted backward. Dan O’Neill had the large, craggy, handsome good looks of almost every male movie actor I had ever met. But instead of beaming a greeting—because we’re accustomed to seeing famous actors either smiling or spuriously laughing—an aggrieved look furrowed his face.
“Who are you?”
“Miles.”
“Who?”
“Miles Raymond, the author.” I pointed over my shoulder. “Friend of Amanda Robinson’s.”
He peered over my shoulder into the dark with squinting eyes, tenting his forehead from the torrential rain with both hands.
“Are you okay? I heard crying.”
“I’m fine,” he roared. “I’m researching a character. I’m an actor.”
“I know.”
“I’m playing a Catholic priest who has been indicted on charges of pedophilia.”
“Oh.”
“Come on in. What did you say your name was?”
“Miles.”
“Miles who?”
“Miles Raymond.”
Dan’s camper van was twice the size of mine, but the disconcerting squalor of clutter inside made it seem smaller. No doubt he was rehearsing a difficult new dramatic TV role, but it looked more like the digs of a newly minted bachelor who was accustomed to having someone cook and clean for him.
“Sit down.” He beckoned. “Would you like a drink?”
“Sure.”
“What’s your poison?”
“Wine.”
“You’re in luck. I own a winery.”
“I heard. And you make some awesome Pinots and Chards.”
Dan, teetering in place, unscrewed a cap on a bottle of his Schist Soils Vineyards Pinot Noir. I glanced around the capacious interior of his camper. In a cubbyhole repurposed as a bookshelf, I noticed a copy of both of my books, the legacy one and the latest, and I smiled to myself.
“Miles Raymond? Miles Raymond?” He snapped his fingers a few times. A flare went off in his head and his ruddy face brightened. “You’re the bloody bloke who made Pinot famous,” he said in his gravelly voice, setting a glass in front of me.
“The movie did, yeah. It was years ago, Dan.”
“But your movie began with a book. And you wrote it.”
“True. It wasn’t the Immaculate Conception.”
Dan roared with laughter. “Cheers, mate,” he said, raising his glass. We clinked, then settled into broken, desultory conversation.
“I loved you in An Age of Uncertainty,” I said.
“That was a good one,” he croaked. “They don’t make them like they used to.”
“No, they don’t,” I said. “Those lovemaking scenes would never get past the intimacy coordinators.”
Dan threw back his head and laughed so hard I thought his head was going to explode. “No!” He leaned forward. “And guess what?”
“Don’t tell me. You made love in front of three remote-controlled cameras as per the gossip?”
“And Judy was amazing,” he said in a lowered voice. “Shh.” He looked around for paparazzi brandishing recording devices.
“She did it for the cameras?”
“No, mate, we were in love.” He gazed backward into the tunnel of years and the movies he had starred in, but here he was, Dan O’Neill, in a camper trailer parked at the Freedom Campground outside Wellington, no different than me, or any of the rest of us sad-sack souls braving this ferocious bomb cyclone. He held up his wineglass. “What do you think of my wine?”
“Ethereal. In ten years Central Otago will be the new Burgundy.”
“That’s what everyone’s predicting. I hope so. My soon-to-be ex is soaking me, Mike.”
“Miles.”
“Miles. Sorry.” He dropped his eyes to the Formica table and rested them there. “It’s been a rough year. I got one kid in rehab, another who wants to transition to a boy, wife is leaving me because she says I’m not around enough, I’m working my butt off to keep my lifestyle going, my damn winery”—he held up his wineglass—“is bankrupting me.” He swung an arm around his camper trailer. “This is my new home.” His booming voice reverberated in the small space.
“She’s getting your chalet in Queenstown?” I said, remembering something I’d read about Dan online.
“That’s merely the opening salvo.” He pointed a finger at my nose. His bleary, bloodshot eyes, nested in a face colored red and purple with burst capillaries, tried to focus on me. “Don’t get married, Giles.”
“Miles,” I corrected again, realizing he was too far gone to even remember the conversation.
“Should have just cohabitated,” he said, shaking his head, his curly locks that looked like they hadn’t been shampooed in a week tumbling onto his sun-weathered forehead and sticking where the sweat from frequent night terrors in the trailer had made them into a kind of human glue. “And the lawyers, they’ll kill you. They’ll bankrupt you before the kids.”
“You still have your career, Dan.”
“I don’t know. That could go next,” he said bitterly. “Not getting any younger.”
I forced a smile. “Well, we have our project,” I said.
He jerked his face up at me. “Huh?”
I stood in place, reached over him, and pulled down my book. “A Year of Pure Feeling.” I set it on the table separating us. “I’m fired up to begin the adaptation.”
He picked it up and leafed through my book with an absent look in his eyes that seemed to swim with mystery and confusion. Then, as if a memory had been disinterred deep in the geology of his mind, he boomed, “Oh, the book the producer Miranda wanted me to read!”
I fell into a funk. After trading a few depressing film industry anecdotes, I extricated myself from O’Neill’s blackout camper-trailer bender and plunged back out into the stormy night. Incensed, I trudged through the wiry fescue and blowing sand in the direction of the knoll where Jack and Amanda had pitched their Marlin Cruiser tent. I came to a halt when I grew close. Amanda’s orgasmic cries pierced the night, through the whistling wind, right through all her motherfucking blatant lies. The tent that had blossomed out of the Cruiser was in violent motion as Jack celebrated his twin successes by plundering her in their romantic overlook. The flimsy tent was swinging back and forth with alarmingly increasing periodicity, a foot this way, a foot that way, then two feet this way, two feet that way, Amanda’s shrieks rising histrionically in volume until my anger turned into horror as the Marlin Cruiser, catching a sudden gust of wind at precisely the wrong angle, toppled over the edge of the knoll and disappeared from view.
Then I heard different screams in the storming night.