But I heard it. That little quaver of fear in his voice. He thinks I might have told Leon. Oh yes, cue the thunder. He was afraid of Leon. So that’s what this was all about: power. Who had power, and who didn’t. At this moment I did—fleetingly, yes, I wasn’t so stupid as to think I could maintain it—but I let the silence linger for a moment to let him break a sweat. “I quit, Irv. You’ll never humiliate me again. I know that you hired me so that you could tell your clients you had Roxanne Granville fetching and carrying for you, bowing and scraping, ‘Of course, sir. Sugar? Cream?’ And you must have thought that little escapade this morning would shame me so much that I’d be in your power—well, you can go to hell, and the next girl you press your dick against, I hope she turns around and knees you in the balls.” I hung up and looked over at Eudonna, who was shaking her head and chopping her onions. I turned up the volume on her radio, and left.

I got in the MG and drove straight to the LA River, possibly the ugliest spot in all of Los Angeles, possibly the ugliest spot in the whole world, and parked near a stunted palm. I picked up the scripts from the passenger seat and, holding them in my arms, I made my way to the chain-link fence separating the city from the gray moonscape that lay before me. The LA River is not a river at all; it’s nothing more than a gray-brown rivulet trickling between gray concrete banks. The sky overhead was a blue-bronze bowl, and the parched earth beneath my feet cracked, so dry no dust raised up. A razor-sharp wind cut through my short hair and along my stained cheek. I pulled the scripts from their envelopes and, one by one, I grabbed handfuls of pages, ripped them from their little pronged paper holders, lifted them high, and flung them over the chain-link fence, snagging my wrist now and then, the sharp points tearing at my flesh, my skin bleeding. The pages blew and danced in the wind, falling down the concrete slopes to the bottom of the channel, where they rolled beside the brown seam of dirty water. I felt a fresh crack of energy with each handful I tossed aloft, delighting in the destruction as the wind snatched them. Hundreds of them blew along the concrete alley, where they twitched and desiccated. I felt a small thrill of vindication or vengeance, or some emotion I did not quite recognize, to think of all these words that no one would ever read. All these lines no one would ever speak. All these scenes that would never see film. All that gone with the wind. As they say.

Chapter Seven