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good recently.’
    I tried to heed her advice but Sally and I were playing the ‘power couple’ game. We were ‘the perfect exemplars of the New Hollywood’: the sort of Ivy League, literate folk who also happened to thrive in the combustible world of television. Well-heeled, but trying to look like we abhorred all ostentation. Our loft was minimalist in design; my Porsche and Sally’s Range Rover were symbolically astute vehicles – ‘upscale, but smart’ cars driven by ‘upscale, but smart’ people who have obviously achieved a significant level of professional success. We got invited to the right parties, the right premieres. But whenever I was interviewed, I spoke about how we weren’t seduced by the lure of celebrity or the need to maintain a high public profile. Anyway, we were both far too busy to crave the fast lane. Los Angeles is largely an early-to-bed city. So – with Sally planning on the new comedy slate for the autumn, and with the second season of
Selling You
now deep into production – we hardly had time for social pursuits, let alone each other. And Sally, as I discovered, lived her life as if it was a perpetual time-and-motion schedule: to the point where, though she never said it, I knew that she had even silently scheduled three ‘love-making windows’ per week. Even those random moments when she suddenly jumped my bones started to feel curiously pre-meditated – as if she had almost calculated that, on a rare morning when she wasn’t doing breakfast withsomeone, we could just about find the ten or so minutes required to reach mutual orgasm before she started her workout.
    Still, I wasn’t complaining. Because – bar the constant twinge of regret I felt about Lucy and Caitlin – everything was going my way.
    ‘We all should have your problems,’ my new friend Bobby Barra told me on a rare late night (well, it was a Friday) when I drank one martini too many, and confided in him that I was still being nagged with silent guilt about busting up my marriage.
    Bobby Barra loved the fact that I was using him as Father Confessor. Because that meant we were tight. And Bobby Barra liked the idea of being tight with me. Because I was now a name, a personage; one of the few true winners in a city of desperate aspiration and pervasive failure.
    ‘Look at it this way. Your marriage belongs to that segment of your life when nothing you did really worked. So naturally, you had to jettison it once you crossed over to the charmed side of the street.’
    ‘I guess you’re right,’ I said, sounding unconvinced.
    ‘Of course I’m right. A new life means new everything.’
    Including new friends like Bobby Barra.

Two
    BOBBY BARRA WAS rich. Seriously rich. But not ‘fuck you’ rich.
    ‘What do you mean by “fuck you” rich?’ I once asked him.
    ‘You talking attitude or numbers?’ he said.
    ‘The attitude I can figure out. Give me the numbers.’
    ‘Hundred mil.’
    ‘That much?’
    ‘It’s not that much.’
    ‘Sounds like enough to me.’
    ‘How many millions in a billion?’
    ‘Actually I don’t know.’
    ‘One thousand.’
    ‘One thousand million makes a billion?’
    ‘You’ve got the math.’
    ‘So a billion’s “fuck you” rich?’
    ‘Not just “fuck you” rich – “fuck you and ten generations of your family” rich.’
    ‘That’s pretty rich. But if you’ve only got one hundred mil . . . ?’
    ‘You can still say “fuck you” but you’ve got to choose your audience more carefully.’
    ‘You must be “fuck you” rich by now, Bobby.’
    ‘“Fuck you” adjacent.’
    ‘That sounds pretty good to me.’
    ‘It’s still not “fuck you”. I tell you – you start hanging with the really big boys – Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Phil Fleck– and a hundred mil is kids’ stuff. A tenth of a billion. What’s that to guys who are worth thirty, forty, fifty bil?’
    ‘Chump change?’
    ‘Bingo. Chump-fucking-change. Nickel-and-dime productions.’
    I