The Whore's Child

what the fuck it’s like. You can write this son of a bitch from the inside.”
    He was referring not just to my half dozen mid-list novels and two unproduced screenplays, but to my blue-collar background in a mill town. The tough-guy profanity was meant to suggest that he was hip to guys like me who could write from the inside. “How about the author?” I suggested for the sake of argument. “It’s his book. I bet he could write it from the inside.”
    â€œHe’s twenty
-eight,
” the producer groaned. “Twenty-fucking-eight.”
    â€œOkay,” I conceded. There wasn’t much point in arguing that an author mature enough to write a good novel might also be able to draft a good screenplay. And besides, I’d just be talking myself out of the job.
    â€œBesides,” he added, “you’re perfect. You’d be
absolutely
fucking perfect if you were Italian.”
    â€œI
am,
” I told him, “on my mother’s side.” This happened to be the truth.
    â€œNo
shit,
” he said, stunned by this revelation, this unanticipated good fortune. “Like I say”—he slipped into Hollywood black dialect here—“you the
man.
”
    As it turned out, I was and I wasn’t. My first draft was hailed as brilliant. What it needed—and only this—was a sharpening of focus. Too many characters. Where had all those characters come from? Well, I said, from the novel. In fact, there were even more of them than I’d used. “Let’s see if we can’t lose the mother,” the producer advised. “She’s in the fucking way. She can die of cancer before the story begins. In fact, the movie opens with her funeral. Bingo bango, we’re there, right in the credits. That works.”
    â€œIt might,” I said, “if we didn’t care about her son’s motivation.”
    The more focused second draft was even more brilliant, and all it needed now was a little doctoring, and the producer said he even had a studio guy in mind to handle that purely cosmetic stuff. Smooth. You had to admire it. It didn’t occur to me until after I hung up that I’d been shit-canned, that I was no longer the only man in America who could do this job. As it happened, the script doctor wasn’t up to the task either, and six months later the project was in turnaround. Everybody involved was out on his ass, including the producer, who apparently wasn’t the man either, at least not in the eyes of the studio’s new head. A funny place, Hollywood. Here I’d worked on the project for almost a year and didn’t have a thing to show for my participation, except for a third of a million dollars. More than I’d made on my six novels combined.
    The house Mr. Plumly wanted us to buy with all that money was a three-story contemporary on the southern tip of the island, left unfinished when the real estate market slipped into recession and the builder went belly-up, leaving the house’s innards—plumbing, electric, drywall—exposed. “Visualize it,” Mr. Plumly advised us, the impressive sweep of his hand taking in all the exposed plumbing and electrical conduits. We were surveying the shell of a house from the uppermost of its three wrap-around decks, the ocean a stone’s throw below. Kicking a dead bird under a sheet of plywood, he then guided us through the house’s twelve cavernous rooms. “You can lowball him and get the property for two hundred, spend another two finishing the house, and when the market rebounds you sell it for a million and put over half a million in your pocket.”
    It was momentarily tempting, the way things sometimes can be when viewed through eyes not your own. But we opted instead for a two-bedroom, gray-shingled Cape out-island, secluded at the end of a narrow, rutted dirt lane, among rolling hills and orchards that sloped down toward the ocean. Clare and I agree about most important things, and this, clearly, was what we wanted. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine the huge contemporary finished, I told her, “just that I can’t imagine myself living in it.”
    Clare had given me one of her wry smiles when I said this. “I know what you can’t imagine,” she said knowingly. “And what you really can’t imagine,” she said, “is Gene visiting us there.”
    There is a cool midafternoon breeze out on