Gabriel: A Name Synchro

– the Montauk lighthouse

Every time our daughter comes home, she introduces us to some riveting movie or new TV show we’ve never heard of. Over the Christmas holidays, it was a new TV series, Showtime’s The Affair.

 There were a couple of interesting synchros associated with this series. First, it takes place on Montauk, Long Island.

Given our interests and the weird stuff we write about, Montauk is up there with Roswell and Area 51. But instead of UFOs, time travel, and things that go bump in the night, the series focuses on what happens when two  individuals married to other people have an affair with each other.

From the official Showtime website: At once deeply observed and intriguingly elusive, THE AFFAIR explores the emotional effects of an extramarital relationship. Noah is a New York City schoolteacher and novelist who is happily married, but resents his dependence on his wealthy father-in-law. Alison is a young waitress trying to piece her life and marriage back together in the wake of a tragedy. The provocative drama unfolds when Alison and Noah meet in Montauk at the end of Long Island.

 What this summary doesn’t mention is that:

– Noah and his wife have four children,  he has published one novel that didn’t sell well, and that he and his family are spending the summer on Montauk with his in-laws, so that he can write his second novel.

– The father-in-law is also a writer, but one who has made it in a huge way – bestsellers, movies, etc. He’s an obnoxious and arrogant man  who lives with his wife on a sprawling estate on Long Island Sound, pays for the private school tuition for Noah’s kids, and lent him and his wife, Helen, the down payment for the Manhattan brownstone.

– Alison is married to Cole, whose family has lived in Montauk for seven generations and  two years ago, her four-year-old son drowned. Her son’s name was Gabriel and Cole has a massive tattoo on his back of the angel Gabriel.

This information is revealed in the first three episodes that Rob, Megan, and I watched. When I saw the tattoo on Cole’s back and learned that her son’s name was Gabriel, I thought: Cluster synchro! Here’s why:

During the five days or so that we watched these episodes, I finished a draft of a new novel in which the antagonist has an angel tattoo on the back of his right knee, communicates with a woman he believes is an angel, and whose name is Gabriel. I’m not sure what any of this means, not yet, anyway.

But I know that if I meet a Gabriel any time soon, my mind won’t rush to a fictional four-year-old boy who drowned. It  will leap to Gabriel the antagonist in my novel, a truly bad, sick dude, and I will spin around and race in the opposite direction.