Night Film

1

A large chandelier showered golden light on the crowd as I surveyed the party in the bronze mirror over the mantel. I was startled to spot someone I barely recognized: myself. Blue button-down, sports jacket, third or fourth drink — I was losing count — leaning against the wall like I was holding it up. I looked like I wasn’t at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off.

Infinitely delayed.

Every time I planted myself at these charity soirees, lost scenes from my married life, I wondered why I kept coming.

Maybe I liked facing a firing squad.

“Scott McGrath, great to see you!”

Wish I could say the same, I thought.

“Working on anything cool these days?”

My abs.

“Still teaching that journalism class at the New School?”

They suggested I take a sabbatical. In other words? Cutbacks.

“Didn’t know you were still in the city.”

I never knew what to say to that one. Did they think I’d been exiled to Saint Helena, like Napoleon after Waterloo?

I was at this party thanks to one of my ex-wife Cynthia’s friends, a woman named Birdie. I found it both amusing and flattering that, long after my wife had divorced me, swimming on to bluer seas, a dense school of her girlfriends swirled around me as if I were an interesting shipwreck, looking for a piece of rubble to salvage and take home. Birdie was blond, forties, and hadn’t left my side for the better part of two hours. Every now and then, her hand squeezed my arm — a signal that her husband, some hedge-fund guy (hedge fungi) was out of town and her three kids Guantánamoed with a nanny. Only a summons from the hostess to show Birdie her newly renovated kitchen had pried the woman from my side.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Birdie had said.

I’d done precisely that. This wreckage wanted to stay submerged.

I drained the rest of my scotch, was about to head back to the bar, when I felt my BlackBerry buzzing.

I slipped through the door behind me onto the second-floor landing. It was a text from my old attorney, Stu Laughton. I hadn’t heard from Stu in at least six months.

Cordova’s daughter found dead.

Call me.

I closed the message and Googled Cordova, scrolling the returns.

It was true. And there was my goddamn name in quite a few articles.

“Disgraced journalist Scott McGrath …”

I’d be a marked man, peppered with questions, the moment this latest news circulated the party.

Suddenly, I was sober. I slipped through the crowd, down the spiral marble stairs. No one said a word as I grabbed my coat, walked past the bronze bust of the hostess (which, in a shameless use of artistic license, made her resemble Elizabeth Taylor), out the front door, and down the townhouse steps onto East Ninety-fourth Street. I headed to Fifth, breathing in the damp October night. I hailed a taxi and climbed in.

“West Fourth and Perry.”

As we took off, I unrolled the window and felt my stomach tighten as the reality of it settled in: Cordova’s daughter found dead. What was the unfiltered sound-bite I’d blurted on national television?

Cordova’s a predator — in the same league as Manson, Jim Jones, Colonel Kurtz. I have an inside source who worked for the family for years. Someone needs to terminate this guy with extreme prejudice.

That inspired tidbit cost me my career, my reputation — not to mention a quarter of a million dollars — but that didn’t make it any less true. Though I probably should have stopped talking after Charles Manson.

I couldn’t help but laugh at myself for feeling like a fugitive — or maybe the more apt comparison was a Most Wanted radical. Yet I had to admit there was something electrifying about seeing that name again—Cordova—in the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it was time to start running for my life again.