They're Watching (2010) Read Free Page A

feel the sting in my knuckles. And kept hitting. The scab cracked; my wrist stung; the air-conditioner dial split. With smarting eyes, my chest heaving, I looked out one of my six windows. An older blonde in a red Mustang studied me from one lane over.
    I cranked that plastic smile onto my face. She looked away. The light changed, and we drifted back off into our private lives.

    Chapter 4
    After I sold my screenplay, Ariana was even more elated for me than I was. The production got fast-tracked. Dealing with studio executives, producers, and the director, I was intimidated but determined. And Ariana pep-talked me every day. I quit my job. That gave me plenty of time to obsess on the project's almost daily ups and downs--interpreting the nuances of each two-line e-mail, having meetings about meetings, taking a cell-phone call on a sidewalk while my entree went cold and Ariana ate hers alone. Mr. Davis, tenth-grade American lit teacher, was out of his depth. I had to choose roles, and I chose wrong.
    Follow Your Dreams, they say. But no one ever tells you what you have to give up in the process. The sacrifices. The thousand ways your life can go to hell while you keep your eyes on the horizon, waiting for that sun to rise.
    I was too distracted to write--or at least to write well. As They're Watching progressed through development, my agent reviewed what I was putting out now, and it didn't catch her fancy any more than the scripts that had been moldering in my desk drawers. I sensed a slow leak in my aspirations, like a tire with a nail through it, and my agent, too, seemed to be running out of steam. My lack of focus built to full-blown writer's block, and still I couldn't seem to find the time to pay proper attention to the people around me. I was lost in the typhoon of possibilities, unsure if the movie was actually going to move forward, if I had what it would take, if I was, at bottom, a fraud.
    Ariana and I never quite found our footing again after the shift our relationship took following the script deal. We harbored silent resentments, misread the currents of each other's emotions. Sex grew awkward. We were too far in for lust, and falling out of love. We'd lost the connection, the heightened awareness. We couldn't get it started, and so we stopped trying. We buried ourselves in routine.
    Ariana had forged a friendship of commiseration with Don Miller, our next-door neighbor--coffee twice a week, the occasional walk. I told her she was naive to think he didn't have a thing for her and that this wouldn't affect her relationship with his wife, Martinique. Ariana and I had never been controlling with each other, so I didn't press her on it, but that reflected my own naivete--not about Ariana, but in how far she and I could let things slide.
    Hard as it was to admit, I checked out on everyone but myself for the better part of that year. I lost sight of everything but the movie, which finally entered preproduction, and then production.
    Shipped to frigid mid-December Manhattan to fulfill my obligation for production rewrites, I had a kind of time-release panic attack. The director's cell-phone ban on set made things worse, since I was way too timid to use the lines wired to the important people's trailers to talk to my wife. Even though Ariana was worried about me, I managed to return her calls only a few times, and even those conversations were cursory.
    On the set, it rapidly became apparent that I'd been hired not as a production rewriter but to take dictation from the twenty-five-year-old lead, Keith Conner. Sprawled on his couch in his trailer, slurping a lumpy green health drink and yakking half the day on the sole ban-exempt cell phone, Keith offered endless notes and dialogue changes, interrupting them only to show off photos of naked, sleeping girls he'd snapped on his Motorola RAZR. The high weekly rate they were paying me was not for ideas. It was for baby-sitting. Tenth-graders were a lot less work.
    After a