Orchard Grove (8 page)

As I rolled over on the floor, pressing my back up against the wall beside the foot of the empty bed, I could only pretend that they never saw me, and that the glare from the almost high-noon sun would have prevented their seeing my face through the glass.

I sat there listening, but hearing nothing.

After some long tense beats, I used the crutches to pick myself back up. From there I went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, found a cold beer, and popped it open. I drank it right there, propped up on the aluminum crutches while standing inside the open refrigerator door, feeling the cold mechanical insides cooling down overheated skin. Like I said, it had to be noon somewhere on God’s earth. What was this? My fourth drink of the day? Who the hell was I to judge John Cattivo?

For a brief moment, I considered drinking a second beer, but I knew it would lead to a third and a fourth and then more whiskey chasers. What I really wanted was to head back over to Lana’s as soon as John went back to work. But that would be one hell of a bad idea. And of course, the more I drank, the more my inhibitions would melt away like an ice cube left out on the blacktop. It was important to stay in control.

Cattivo might have been a gun-carrying cop who’d made a vow to serve and protect, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me if he caught me in the act with his woman. Shoot me, then make it appear to be self-defense. Who would a judge believe in the end? A cop with a stellar record or a loser of a scriptwriter who drank too much and maintained a pot patch in his backyard?

Then came the sound of the Suburban starting up. Shutting the refrigerator door, I quickly hobbled back into the master bedroom, went to the window. Standing a few feet away from the glass pane, I shifted my line of sight to the front of the Cattivo property and saw Carl backing out of the driveway, so that the only vehicle left parked on the macadam was Lana’s convertible. I had to strain my neck to see it, but when the unmarked Suburban was fully backed out onto the street, Carl thrust the transmission into drive and peeled out, burning rubber. It was an unusual sound for sleepy Orchard Grove, but then, John and Lana were not the usual Orchard Grove couple. Not by a long shot.

As time went on over the course of the next couple of days, I would discover just how dangerously unusual they truly were.

F
or the moment anyway, Orchard Grove was cop free. I made my way back out onto the deck, past the robin’s nest, and then out the west-side fence gate. Following the wooden fence all the way down to the woods, I bushwhacked the short distance to my pot patch. While balancing myself with my crutches, I squatted and harvested several fistfuls of fresh bud. Maybe it would be a bad idea to drink my day away, but a little smoke might be just the right medicine for calming both my nerves and tempering my ever growing obsession for Lana. And what the hell, there had been times in the past where smoking a little bud stirred up my creative juices. Was it possible I might actually write something today?

Time would tell.

Transporting it back to the house, I rolled a thin joint of the green weed then set the rest out onto the counter beside the sink to dry. When it was ready, Susan could sell it to some of the student teachers at her preschool for a thousand bucks or so, providing us with enough under-the-table cash to keep the bank at bay for the time being.

Firing up the joint I took a careful toke and prepared for the throat burn that always accompanied smoking green pot. But this was powerful stuff, and after this morning’s adventure, I needed something to calm me down before I tried to write.

After a few short minutes, I felt the pot going to work on my nervous system and, for the time being anyway, I felt all the little creative creatures form front and center inside my brain. A writer far more famous than me once said, we are all we are ever going to be at the present moment in time. At present, I was a scriptwriter who was not writing because a woman had moved in next door. And that woman was dominating not only all my attention, but also all my emotions. My life had become worthless. I was a slave, locked inside a cell that contained three bedrooms plus one and a half baths. Lana made me feel special again. Alive. Young. Virile. But then, maybe after meeting her husband and the danger he posed, the obsession would take a back seat to my writing, even if for only a little while.

Sitting myself down at the typewriter, I leaned the crutches against the table beside me, easy access, and then I placed a fresh sheet of white paper into the spool. For a beat, I stared at the white paper hoping that suddenly, I would somehow hear the familiar clickety-clack of typewriter keys and magically see words appear on the page.

But today my luck was bad. Thus far anyway.

The muse wasn’t there for me or, at the very least, she was being stubborn. I felt empty inside. I had no story to tell at a time when I was desperate for one. As I sat there staring at the stark whiteness of the page, I not only felt like the words wouldn’t come, I felt exhausted at the thought of writing anything.

Back when Susan and I first met, nothing could have been further from the truth. I was newly divorced from my then wife of ten years and had just moved from Hollywood to upstate New York and a one bedroom apartment in the north end of downtown Albany. Up to that point in my life, I’d been lucky. I’d moved to LA fresh out of writing school to stake my claim and at thirty-four years old, managed to nab some gross deals on a few big budget films right out of the gate. I was making more money in a single month than my dad was making in a single year running his dry cleaning business. But it all went bad in the worst kind of clichéd way possible when my wife started sleeping with her personal trainer… a situation that was so common in West Hollywood as to be considered an almost right of passage.

Naturally we divorced, but when it comes to right-is-right in the California divorce courts, it doesn’t really matter who beds down with whom since it’s usually the one who has the most money who pays. In my case anyway, my wife’s lawyer was able to prove she gave up her best years to support her down and out scriptwriter husband while he struggled through writing school, full-time. When I showed up in court drunk as a skunk and, at the same time, threatened to kick said lawyer in the nuts (that is, when they weren’t stuffed in her mouth), the female judge saw fit to award my ex not the standard fifty percent of my estate but seventy-five, plus ninety-percent of the gross points I retained for the perpetual video sales of my films. She then ordered me behind bars for ninety days on behalf of making a mockery of her court.

Not my finest hour.

In the end, no studios would touch me after that incident and what money I had left, I wasted on lawyers, booze, and a plane ticket back east so that by the time I met Susan at a local west-end gin mill called Ralphs, my fortune had dwindled to a fraction of its former glory. But what I did still possess was relative youth and ambition, and no one… not my ex, not a black-robed judge, not the money changers at the big Hollywood studios… were going to prevent me from pulling myself back up from my bootstraps and making another three or four million.

That’s pretty much the way I put it to Susan not long after I slipped onto the stool beside her at the otherwise empty bar. She was a few years younger than me, not yet thirty. She had shoulder-length black hair and a tall, but not skinny build that I found sexy and attractive. Her jeans had tears in the knees and fit her snuggly, accentuating a perfect heart-shaped bottom. She wore a white V-neck T-shirt that showed off enough of her breasts to keep me interested long after the first couple of drinks were history. Although she was still in grad school to become a certified kindergarten teacher, she told me she’d always been fascinated with screenwriting and, of course she loved the movies. Would I perhaps be interested in giving her some writing lessons?

“I’ll pay,” she said, shooting me a smile and a wink.

“How?” I said, winking back at her.

“Money of course, silly.”

That’s when I suggested she pay me in another way.

Her face beamed with big brown eyes and perfect luscious lips.

Checking the time on her wristwatch, she said, “I have to get up early for school tomorrow. No slack for the teacher’s aide.”

“I’m hot for teacher,” I said.

She laughed and placed her hand on my forearm, giving it a squeeze.

With that, I paid the tab, and we took off for my downtown Albany writing studio.

We weren’t through the door before we were undressing one another. We barely made it to the bed where we spent the next couple of late night hours rocking and rolling and loving one another’s bodies even though we barely knew one another’s first names.

By the time the clock struck midnight, she was getting dressed again. I signed a copy of
Break Up
, my one and only published novel for her, inscribing it, “With love.” Four months later we were married by a Justice of the Peace in the white-marbled city hall on State Street in downtown Albany. Susan finished grad school and continued to teach pre-school while I kept up my daily writing routine like a man possessed, but only managing to sell my scripts to indie studios while the major outfits continued to shut me out. Oh well, I knew the situation wouldn’t last forever. That as long as I was swinging the bat, eventually I’d nail a homerun again.

What all this meant of course, was that I wasn’t making nearly the money I had been in LA, but what the hell, this was Albany and living in this city of less than one hundred thousand souls wasn’t nearly as expensive, or sunny, or glamorous. Christ, you couldn’t even find a decent restaurant in Albany. But what was important was that Susan and I were building a life for ourselves, having slapped some of the indie movie cash I’d managed to hoard away down on a ranch home in the sleepy, but oh so stable suburb of Orchard Grove in North Albany. Humble beginnings for sure, but it was also an idyllic time too when you really thought about it.

But the idyllic turned out to be a flash in the pan. Or perhaps not a flash but a slow roast.

After nine years of marriage, nothing bad had penetrated the invisible fortress we’d managed to build around ourselves. Trust ruled the day, meaning we didn’t go around seeking extra-circular affairs, unless of course, getting together with some friends for a little wine, dancing, and swapping counts which it most definitely does not (swapping is consensual
and
sensual). We did not argue over money since we had enough coming in to pay the bills plus more than enough left over for some vacation time in New York City, Cape Cod, Miami, and even a two week trip through Italy and France as a belated honeymoon five years back. We drank responsibly, and did not do drugs other than the occasional recreational weekend stuff when the friends popped by or we visited them. We did not suffer from depression, or food addictions, or even allergies. No boredom, no sad pillow talk of
shoulda-coulda-woulda
. Not even sickness had managed to snake its way into our lives. We also did not get pregnant even though we did not consciously try to prevent a child from coming into our lives. It simply didn’t happen, and on the occasions I tried to talk with Susan about it, she shrugged the whole idea off as something that would happen if it was meant to happen. Case closed.

In a word, Susan and I were happy with our lives… Happier than most anyway.

Until recently… over the past year… when even the contracts with my indie film companies began to dry up and we had no choice but to turn to selling pot to make ends meet. Unless, of course, I was willing to give up my writing for a proper job. I had always run as a man who wrote scripts, and I was convinced that I was just going through a sales slump was all. That eventually it would pick up. I was writing, and that’s what counted.

But then the Cavittos moved in next door, even the writing stopped.

From the looks of it, whatever was left of Susan’s and my impenetrable wall was about to crumble into so much dust and charred rock, just like Sodom and Gomorrah, when God destroyed the lust-infested city with brimstone and fire, sending the inhabitants straight to hell.

I sat at a dining room table that contained only a wood bowl filled with store bought apples and my typewriter, a sea-green Olivetti/Underwood Lettera 32. I sat as still as a stone, my eyes glued to the white paper and waited for my muse to speak to me the way she always had, until Lana arrived and my concentration became entirely focused on her. For a time, it seemed like my muse would no longer come to me. That she was jealous of my affair with Lana. Perhaps more jealous than Susan could ever be. But then you have to still be in love with someone in order to be jealous.

But then something began to happen inside me. A series of words didn’t fill my head, but a face did. Let me correct myself… In my head I saw a series of faces flash by, like I was sitting all alone in a four-walled room with the shades drawn and projected one-by-one on a big white screen before me, were the still faces of the people who now dominated my time and my thoughts.