Created By by Richard Matheson

they got around each other. But the kids were gorgeous. They made beautiful children together.
    “Yeah, I don’t talk to them too much. Owe them a call I think.” Had to be four months. Alan and Marie had little in common. He’d tried. She’d tried. They just couldn’t get the horizontal and vertical right.
    Father and son nodded in a way that moated off further discussion. Alan’s sister wasn’t an area for pleasant conversation. Burt and Marie were as different as there and gone and the future dimmed when you considered the stuff that comprised their basic cores. Forget it, thought Alan. That relationship just washed up on shore one day and headed off onto the island of life in two separate directions.
    “Just too independent for her own good. Never did get with her outlook.” Burt looked over the retreating Springs. “But one hell of a cute card. Real sweet. Hey, you still living in that house at the beach? That murder place? Why don’t you move?”
    “It was a great deal. Told you. And it’s an incredible spot.”
    “I couldn’t live there.”
    “You don’t have to.”
    “Violent death clings to things.”
    “Nice phrase. Junior college?”
    A competing smile.
    “Anyway, I never think about what happened.” It was a lie.
    “I think it’s very weird you don’t think it’s weird. I couldn’t live there. Upset me too much.”
    “What’re you talking about? Palm Springs is fuckingdeath row. Everybody listening to their Grecian Formula dry. Waiting to kick.”
    “Oh, that’s a nice thought …”
    Alan felt his colon trapeze as the tram car hitched over one of the towers that guided it up the mountain. He gripped the handrail. Burt noticed.
    “Afraid of heights? Shoulda told me.”
    Alan managed a smile. “Falling. Afraid of falling. Different.”
    Burt laughed, silver, Sinatra hair shimmering. He steadied Alan, wanted to talk about a film Warner’s was thinking about offering him to direct. He told Alan it would be a joint production between a French financier and Warner’s and would star Julie Naughton.
    “She’s still alive?” Alan remembered Julie from when he was a kid and his dad almost killed her with his bare hands.
    Julie had been an impossibly gifted, anorexic nightingale, and basic renaissance loon, with so much scar tissue on her wrists, her hands seemed attached by skin-zippers. She was egotistical and demanding; a
Bell Jar
Mary Martin.
    Eight years back, when Alan was still at 20th, executive story editing a
G.Q.
cop show, and his dad was between musicals, Burt had directed Julie and Dru Simone, an annoyingly moody ex-model and recovered heroin addict, in a two-woman
Grand Guignol
three-act for a Central Park summer festival. The play was about two sarcastic lesbians who shared clitoral intimacy up to the moment one, armed with scissors she’d been using to snip tampon coupons, reduced the other to entrails, then committed suicide, gulping a Smith and Wesson.
    The play, titled
East Infection
, had been written by a bitter but witty androgyne who later put his/her head in an oven and died as a slightly confused roast. Opening night, it had sickened theater critic Frank Rich, who closed the show.
    Burt had been cited in all major criticisms, and
Newsweek
had referred to him as a former footlight wunderkind whose every good instinct had simply “dropped dead.”
    One thankfully brief
Esquire
blurb had said the play was a “drill with no bit which still managed to bore. No one was sorry when the lesbian murder-suicide was over and the single regret was the play hadn’t opened with it.”
    Still, Burt and Julie had mostly gotten along and always sworn they’d find a project, up the line, to do together. Mademoiselle Simone had retired from performing altogether, after two badly received, excessively cheery films she’d done in Australia lost huge money. She eventually opened a chain of croissant-themed sandwich places which sprang up all over America like poppies.
    “Howard