"I heard you threatened to beat the shit out of Marty Lanier and called him a Jew faggot."

"I never called him a Jew faggot." His stomach did a slow porpoise roll.

"Well, that's what they say. It's all over the lot." "You gotta call people, say it's not true."

"I already tried, but these things have a life of their own, Ryan."

Thirty minutes later, Elizabeth pulled the Ghia up in front of his condo north of Malibu. It was a Spanish complex with arched doors and red-tiled walks. He got out, and she started to back out of the drive, in a hurry to get home.

Ryan's condo was on Broad Beach, amid heavy sand dunes. Inside, the apartment was more to Linda's taste than his-lots of French floral prints on overstuffed chairs. Linda had taken the big house in Bel Air and he was out here. He preferred the beach. He couldn't bear the upstairs hall of the Bel Air house, with all those pictures of the three of them before Matt drowned. The faces stared at him from behind antique lacquer frames. What had they been thinking… smiling at the base of a ski lift… or on the back of the Linda, his fifty-foot sailboat named after his ex-wife? The pictures seemed to be of three strangers. So he'd left the house with its framed reminders and moved to the beach.

He saw his message light was on. He hit the playback.

His own voice, tired and lifeless: "Hi, this is Ryan. After the tone, leave your message."

Beep.

"Ryan, this is Jerry. What the fuck went wrong at NBC? I got six calls already. Call me. I can't deal with this shit."

His agent. Great! There were no other messages. It was as if he'd already been thrown off the Hollywood bus.

Why was this happening? Ryan looked out at the ocean… at the white foam, skipping playfully ahead of the green water. Then he picked up the channel changer and absently turned the TV on.