had meant to say.
The game was particularly cruel, and James wasn’t up for it. Doug, especially, had his elbows out, and some kind of rabies bubbling up in him. James couldn’t get the puck, and after one ferocious futile burst down the ice, he lost his breath and had to stop, leaning over with his hands on his knees.
There were two women playing, Alice Mitchell, who ran a small catering company, and a tall woman James hadn’t seen before. Her blonde hair sprayed like a skirt from the bottom of her helmet.
Alice skated up to him and gave him a gentle whap on the butt with her stick.
“Doug’s an asshole tonight,” she shouted.
James nodded, touched and embarrassed by the sympathy. He skated away fast but only got to the puck a few times, once on a generous pass from Alice. Doug plucked it from him within moments.
After, they went for beer. James checked his cell phone for messages from Ana, but there were none. Six of them sat in the small bar, a converted diner with permanent white Christmas lights in the window and Dixie music on Sunday mornings. James had been going there for years, but this time he was acutely aware that Ana could not be with him. Someone had to be at home. He felt her out there, tethered to their house, to Finn’s sleeping body.
Doug leaned in, separating himself and James from the rest of the group.
“Where the hell have you been? Lee’s all: Where’s Ana? We never see you guys,” he said. Doug was an old friend, but possibly not a good one. They had worked together years ago. When Doug left for a private network, that might have been it. But somehow Doug had kept up the momentum, phone calls and birthdays and hockey. In the moments when Doug was at his most crass, James suspected he kept in touch only on the off chance that James would prove useful to him at some point. For all his hard drinking, and cultivated blue collar vulgarity, he was a ruthless independent producer with a rotating staff, constantly quitting because of his tantrums. In the burning desert in Jordan, working on a documentary, Doug had stayed in a broken, overheated truck while an unpaid assistant pushed. This incident had made him famous in TV circles. His name caused fear in the twenty-somethings who did his grunt work. He won an International Emmy for the Jordan documentary, which was about relics.
“I’ve been busy. The book’s coming along,” said James, quickly burying his face in the pint of beer.
“Who’s your publisher?” asked Doug.
“It’s early stages. Not sure yet.” James raised the glass again.
Doug recognized that pause and changed direction.
“We’re having a small dinner thing. You know Rachel Garland, right? She did that figure skating miniseries?” James knew them all and all of their accomplishments and failures, those who made weekly commutes to Los Angeles, taking meetings, selling themselves. James had been excused from that particular footrace. He had designed his life to be above it, in fact, by staying at the public broadcaster for fifteen years. But it gnawed at him, the mystery of the commercial world. He tried to imagine being inserted into a life where he had to buff and box and sell himself like Doug did every day. Making pitches at boardroom tables in Los Angeles; throwing out a hundred ideas and having one stick. James recoiled from such odds.
He couldn’t bear what he knew was coming, a litany of other people’s successes. Doug did this under the guise of catching up.
Off Doug went. Rachel was running a big international co-production cop show. Lee had a new gig adapting a children’s series involving turtles. Rachel’s second husband, Bill Waters, would be at the dinner. He was back from being director of photography on a feature in New York. Many of these people had passed through James’s show at one time or another, and then moved on. James had the sensation of being a high school teacher watching his most promising students in cap and gown turn around year after year, waving good-bye or giving him the finger. And now he wasn’t even the teacher. He was the janitor.
Did any of them have children? He looked around the table, which was filling up fast with empty beer bottles. Alice did, from a first marriage. There was a period when all the women they knew were pregnant, and then, at parties, babies appeared early and disappeared later.