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seepage of self-reproach. If she had been all bad, it would have been easier. But putting the car in my name raised doubts about the completeness of her coldheartedness and, by extension, any justification I might unearth for my violence.
    I tried to force something more definable out of myself, a few tears or a sob. The best I could manage was an anemic self-pity just before the pills kicked in and made manufacturing emotion redundant.
    Next morning I woke in a post-Valium languor and found that I was changed. I’d had to hit the pill jar a second time around ten P.M. , but that had seen me through. One whole day gone AWOL, twenty-four hours that had been unable to find purchase upon me. Time during which my head had finally let go of those ideas that had been steadily bleeding themselves dry through all my time in Los Angeles—the notion of what ought to be done, what ought to be felt.
    I hadn’t pulled the blinds and the sun lay across the room like a brand. Cali sunshine—envy of the world, a go-get-’em flux of ocean, brand-new cars, money, and a channeled energy generated by millions of western seaboarders who were so damn sure they were going to make it. I felt like rolling around in it like a dog, trying to rub it into my coat so I smelled the same way.
    I lit a cigarette and went to the fridge. Out back, across the street, a girl was sitting on a balcony. I was naked and she could see me through the kitchen window, but I didn’t care. I looked at her sitting there in her high-cut swimsuit and sunglasses. She had arms and legs and a face, and her pussy was probably getting a little sticky in the heat. But trying to invest that collection with anything approaching personality or significance seemed like the biggest waste of time. After a moment it became impossible to distinguish her from the bricks and the peeling iron railing that surrounded her.
    I went back to bed with a couple of beers. Outside, people would be blading along the edge of the beach, sitting in open cafes drinking juice and fresh coffee, sunning up and hanging out. Fuck ’em. This morning California and all its manic enthusiasms could slide into the ocean for all I cared.
    At one time I’d bought full-scale into that same sunny optimism. I’d figured as long as you got a job, worked hard at it, and didn’t cross the police, you had a chance at some sort of a life. A chance at a decent relationship, a house in a nice place, a car, the occasional holiday … Not a big life, perhaps, nothing of movie-star incandescence, but one that at least offered a measure of protection against the world’s cold winds—an entry-level prize for playing inside the rules.
    An idiot’s evaluation. But what else did I have? Certainly not the liberation of wealth or fame. So I clung to it, hung on grimly with both hands as though it were a magic cloak that could insulate me from the erosion of failure, imagining it wrapped close about me even as my time with Karen pulled it steadily from my grasp.
    But that was gone forever now. Last night, while my drugged blood went endlessly round and round, the last reactionary part of me had finally accepted a truth that had been screaming itself hoarse all my adult life: that chances didn’t exist, that they’d all been used up by people who made it into movies or onto TV.
    I fired up the VCR and loaded one of my perfume commercial tapes. Ads for high-quality cosmetics are some of the best pointers to a proper life. The people in them are perfect—you can tell just by looking at them. Their bodies are desirable, they wear the most expensive clothes, and they don’t even think about money. They live in a world where problems are dealt with by other people, where it is impossible to doubt yourself, and where no one can see you without loving you and wanting to be like you.
    The Obsession series was very good, but my favorite on this tape was a Sun and Moon and Stars clip with Daryl Hannah—dreamy soft-focus, floating