for more than six or seven months. Because he has not needed to work to eat, he has never felt the same urgency as his coworkers about keeping a job. He has wondered how much time people spend doing things they’d really rather not do, and he knows that there are two probable answers: (a) at least half of it, or, (b) most of it. But unlike him, they can claim that they are doing something with their lives every day. They are setting goals, and in some cases, achieving them. His parents and sister have all done this, whereas his main goal each day is to resist inertia.
“I was so tired earlier,” he says, not looking at his father, “that it slipped my mind. George and I went to Target, and I got sidetracked. I’m really sorry.”
His father emits a small, harsh laugh. “If this is going to work, you need to do everything I tell you as soon as I tell you to do it.”
“I’ll call Fran right now.”
“You can try,” he says gruffly. “She’s not going to like having to spend the evening making phone calls for me.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“I was going to say that we should go out for dinner, but you’ve got work to do now. Ask Fran if you can help her contact the journalists. You can call room service for your dinner. The food at the Omni is all right.”
George pulls up to the front of the hotel, and his father thrusts open the car door and doesn’t wait for Will to climb out before he strides into the lobby. From the car’s floor, Will grabs the bags of socks and cookies and T-shirts and follows his father, feeling like he has just shown him a report card filled with Ds and Fs.
On the elevator up to their rooms, Renn looks at him and says, “If you don’t want to work for me, I won’t be angry with you. If you do want to work for me, I can’t have you fucking up like this.”
“I’ll be better from now on. I didn’t sleep well last night,” he says, sheepish. “Who are you going to have dinner with?”
“Myself, probably. I don’t feel like making small talk tonight.”
Their rooms are on the same floor but at opposite ends of the hall. “Call me if you need anything,” his father says. “After I get something to eat, I’m going to look at the dailies in one of the conference rooms downstairs. I’d say you could join me, but maybe tomorrow would be better. Let me know when the interviews are set up.”
When they part ways outside the elevator, his father doesn’t say good-bye. “I’m sorry, Dad,” Will calls after him. “It won’t happen again.”
Renn doesn’t turn around. Instead, he raises his hand in a halfhearted wave.
Fran answers her phone on the second ring and sounds disappointed when she realizes it is the son, not the star, who has called her. It is only five in L.A., but he suspects that the work his father has for her will take a couple of hours. Even so, she doesn’t want his help. “It’s easier if I do it myself so there won’t be any overlap in the schedule,” she says briskly. “It’s fine, Will. I’ll get back to you as soon as everything’s firmed up. Because most of these people are in New York, I might not reach them until tomorrow. I wish you or your father had e-mailed me this list earlier. I don’t know why he’s so averse to computers.”
There is nothing more for him to do that evening, but he doesn’t dial his father’s room to say they could have dinner together after all, or that he wants to watch the dailies with him and the assistant director. He tries calling Danielle, but she doesn’t answer. He tries his sister next, and she doesn’t pick up either. She is probably working, making good use of her intelligence and energetic kindness. When they were kids, they used to play school, and because she was younger, he always made her be the student, but she sometimes had to remind him of the year of the first moon landing or the name of the man who had invented the lightbulb. The subtext to her corrections was always, “What are you doing at school each day if you’re not listening to the teacher?” Daydreaming, he supposed. Thinking about his toys that were sitting idle at home, or the after-school