The Chrysanthemum Palace

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THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WERE a blur of work, and I was glad.

HBO wanted to move forward with Holmby Hills. They had notes; Dan and I took the requisite conference calls. I did my bible thumping (and tweaking) at night, days occupied by the new Starwatch shoot. No one heard boo from our wayward couple. With an increasing sense of dread, I resorted to Al-Anon meetings, reminding myself I was powerless over Clea — powerless over her drug intake and her romantic life, if there was any difference between the two.

I spoke to Miriam constantly. I missed her but admittedly was confused. It’d been months since I’d slept with anyone else so I longed for her, physically. Besides, the whole Thad/Clea shitstorm had left me stressed out and lonelier than hell. I guess I still wanted her to come to L.A. on my own terms. I was a walking male cliché—obsessed with getting Meerkat into bed but still ambivalent about the relationship thing. I hadn’t discussed my feelings (another male cliché) and psychotic as it might sound it just may be I was operating off the echo and reverb of my last conversation with Thad — the one where he casually implied Miriam wanted to begin some major nest building.

My inner life was crazed. I hung around newsstands, poring over health magazine articles about male hormones, male menopause, male ticking clocks. (Not to mention cutting-edge cancer-screening tests.) When Miriam finally said she was flying out, I felt instantly better. We could have the baby-thing talk—after we fucked. Might even pop the question. When I shared as much at an AA meeting, some smart-ass said, “The question is: ‘Can we have an open marriage?’ ”

A week and a half after Clea split, I got a second message on my machine. (If she really wanted to talk, she’d have called my cell.) She sounded stoned and vaguely distraught. They were all right but “in the middle of moving.” She’d “be in touch.” Around that time, someone on the crew said he saw them over the weekend, at the Palms in Vegas. The gaffer didn’t approach but said they looked “seriously fucked up.” When I called the hotel, no one was registered under either name.

Miriam arrived on Friday and stayed with me in Venice. It was comforting to play house, even under somewhat surreal circumstances. The sex was good. We used it as an anchor — and painkiller. The TV news played nonstop coverage of devastation wrought by a series of tornadoes in the Midwest. Somehow that was a comfort too: happy-to-be-alive faces smeared with dirt and tears, possessions and personal histories flung to the wind. Whenever we saw the foundations of vanished houses and the shattered vertebrae of modest Main Streets, we conjured Thad and Clea as flying Dutchmen unable to dock in whatever harbor they’d been pharmaceutically listing toward. Then came the usual stories of buried house pets found miraculously alive among the rubble. We wished as much for our friends but knew the odds were against them.

The odds were always against everything.