Ear to the Ground. David L. Ulin

Get something funky, a convertible, at least. This is L.A.”

      “I don’t know …”

      “Come on. Hondas are boring. You’re not a Honda kind of guy.”

      Charlie looked down at the table, tracing a circle with his finger on the wood.

      “Listen,” Ian said. “I’ll go with you. Just let me get dressed.”

      When he was alone, Charlie reached for the snapshots. In each, Grace stared directly into the lens, as if she knew something he would never know.

      There was one Charlie couldn’t get past, a close-up of her face. She wasn’t smiling, and her eyes flashed with sparks that could have been excitement, or anger, or both. Charlie looked at her for a long time.

      Then he heard the bedroom door open, and, almost as a reflex, he slipped the picture into his pocket. Before he could reconsider, Ian appeared.

      “All right, man,” he said. “Let’s go buy you a car.”

      Grace raced home at lunch to pick up a script she’d forgotten. As usual, Navaro was sitting on the front steps.

      “You’re looking lovely today,” he said as Grace came up the path. She smiled, but made sure not to meet his eyes.

      “Hey. What’s your hurry?”

      “I want to say hello to Ian.”

      Navaro shook his head. “I don’t know what you see in that guy. Hangs around here all day while you work. Doesn’t even own a decent pair of pants.”

      Grace continued to smile.

      “Anyways, he ain’t up there. Took off with Charlie hours ago.”

      “Charlie?”

      “The scientist. Went to buy a car. ‘Course, I’ve been telling him ever since he moved in …”

      But Grace was no longer listening. Charlie? With Ian? Weird. She brushed past the landlord, and went on up the stairs.

       A GOOD BOSS IS HARD TO FIND

      “WHY THE FUCK DID PARAMOUNT BID ON THAT SCRIPT before we did?”

      “I thought we …”

      “Don’t think, please.”

      “But …”

      “This office stays on top of everything! Do you understand?”

      Grace had lost the jump on Paramount. That much was true. But Ethan was such an asshole. He was proud of it, and known for it. His shirts were so starched she hoped one day his collar would slice through the tender skin of his neck. He’d bleed to death, maybe be decapitated, while the office danced around him and sang “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.” Every day he trundled through those hallways, jiggling the change in his pockets, making sure his under-paid-lings did their jobs.

      He’d hired Grace because he was wildly attracted to her. And not just to her sweet smile or her bouncy blonde hair. Grace was tough, and he liked tough. She was dating a screenwriter, he knew, and he’d wondered how long it would take her to bring the guy in for an assignment. It always happened, and Grace’s predecessor—an unfortunate, freckled girl named Jessica—had waited only three weeks to recommend her lay-buddy, some dolt who wouldn’t have known a plot-reversal if it slammed him in the face.

      Everything Ethan had picked up at Harvard he took the wrong way. He became a prick where he might have been an authority, a cutthroat instead of a competitor, snobbish rather than stylish. He’d worked hard and done well, but even his mother didn’t like him. Once she’d brushed the hair from his boyish face and told him she loved him. “What does that mean?” Ethan had queried. “You have to.”

      The first time he masturbated he’d used the image of his eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Templeton. But what appealed to him wasn’t the deep curve of her breast underneath those silky Qiana shirts, nor her long legs, which bloomed into a perfect skirt-clad ass. No, his first orgasm was accompanied by the quiet repetition of what he wanted from the deal: “A’s and recommendations, A’s and recommendations …” He derived no pleasure from the present, and had little respect for the past. After college he’d changed his name from Cohen to Carson, because he preferred how it rolled off the tongue.

      Grace picked up the telephone at her desk and dialed the writer of the screenplay she had lost. She did her best to woo him to Tailspin Pictures, stating the company’s successes, omitting its failures—raising her skirt verbally, so to speak. The conversation lasted only about ten minutes, but before she hung up, she’d managed to wrangle the script away from Paramount. She then called the writer’s agent, a cold man with a lisp. When he found out she’d spoken directly to his client, he gave her a hard time, but Grace persisted. “I’d lay down on train tracks for this script. The fact is we love it. Ethan just got finished reading it and came in here, crying.”

      “Ethan Carson crying? Don’t make me laugh.”

      But the agent came around when Grace went ahead and offered another ten thousand. As she hung up, they were even laughing about the latest O. J. Simpson joke.

      She took a short stroll on the Warner lot. A feature was shooting in the soundstage around the corner, and she peeked inside a makeup trailer where she watched a young woman suddenly grow old. Grace loved movies because, like life, when you added up all the artifice, you ended up with a kind of reality. Ian could rewrite this particular script, she thought, and might not do a bad job of it. If she brought it up to Ethan at the right moment, he’d be sure to listen.

      The worst thing about assholes concerns the vain hope their victims unceasingly maintain, that someday the asshole will smile. In a town of bullshitters and ass-kissers, of fair-weather fans and fly-by-night friends, only the assholes provide a true read. You expect the worst from them because the worst is the standard. And yet, thought Grace, once every blue moon when you do something right, what a reward it is to hear “Good job,” or “Nicely done,” or even “Not bad.”

      Such wasn’t the case, today. When Grace peered into Ethan’s office, and told him about her two telephone calls, her boss said to come in and close the door.

      “Paramount’s bid kicked out,” he hissed. “Nobody wants that stupid script.” Grace couldn’t even muster the energy to blink. That explains why the writer listened so attentively, she thought, and why the agent was cordial. She decided not to tell him about the extra ten thousand.

      “But, Ethan, I bought it! We bought it!”

      There was a pause.

      “Well, go back to your office, pick up the phone, and unbuy it.”

       SATURDAY NIGHT

      IAN DIDN’T HAVE AN AGENT EXACTLY, BUT HE DID HAVE a go-getter with a lot of energy and a car phone. Michael Lipman was his name, but sometimes he called himself “CC” (for Chutzpah-Chutzpah), and, though he had few legitimate industry concerns, the air of intrigue seemed to surround him.

      When they met for the first time at his closet on Hollywood Boulevard, Michael attempted, straight away, to reach Quentin Tarantino over the speaker phone. He got as far as a personal assistant, jabbering with the woman about Pulp and how it saved the cinema, and what characters, what situations, what vision. What an idiot, Ian thought. What an exercise in humiliation. Tarantino? You don’t just call Tarantino.

      But then a man’s screechy voice rose from the speaker. “Hiya, Michael,” it said.

      “Quentin. You don’t write. You don’t call.” Then he sang: “You don’t send me faxes anymore …”

      The conversation lasted a couple of minutes, during