David Duchovny would like to play me a song. It is the song that Téa Leoni sang on the telephone to him during the three weeks of long-distance conversations that preceded their first date. "She was, I guess, explaining her world view, or her sense of humor," he says. "She thought if I didn't laugh, I was probably a loser." But he laughed and liked the song -- he sent someone to buy it the very next day -- and it drew them closer.

This might be a commonplace tale of romantic folk and of the sweet magnetic influence felt when love's precious music pulls two people together. And as such, it might tell us very little of interest about Duchovny and Leoni's particular attraction. Except...let us listen in for a moment as the CD spins: "I'm breaking my back doing the best that I can / She's got time for the dog and none for her man / And I'm no dope, but I can't cope / So hit the f---ing road and piss up a rope."

Perhaps these people are not quite as you imagine. The tune in question is Ween's irreverent country-music parody "Piss Up a Rope." The couple's favorite line, which Duchovny now sings to me (but not, you understand, to me) with admirable gusto, is "On your knees, you big-bootied bitch, start sucking..."

AN INTRODUCTION:
Underwear, Basketball, Demon Foliage

Oops," bluffs Duchovny, greeting me from the other end of a corridor on The X-Files' Vancouver, British Columbia, set. "You weren't supposed to see me like this." He is wearing only black underwear and a half-unbuttoned blue shirt. This episode, titled "Chinga," follows the strange happenings that surround Dana Scully on vacation. It is written by Stephen King, who, spookily, is the person who beat Duchovny on Celebrity Jeopardy! three years ago. ("Yeah," Duchovny says. "I choked, [but] it's obvious that he's afraid of me, because I'm not in this episode.") Fox Mulder does appear in "Chinga," in three brief scenes, which Duchovny must film today. "Whenever Mulder leaves Scully, she does something interesting, like has a baby," Duchovny complains. "Whenever Scully leaves Mulder, he just fiddles around in his underwear and dribbles a basketball."

It is about 10 in the morning. The previous episode was finished last night at 11:30. Less than 12 hours earlier, Duchovny explains, Mulder and Scully "were saving some young girl's life, trying to find a woman who had repressed her anger so deeply she had infected the soil and the plant life was wreaking havoc." He got up at 7 to try to memorize today's lines and arrived at 9. Now he reviews, on a monitor, various versions of a scene in which Mulder dribbles a basketball on his desk. He frowns. The acting's fine. "But it's obvious I don't have a very good left hand," Duchovny says sadly. "Nothing's changed since high school."

A CHILDHOOD:
Dinosaurs, Knitting, Inhaling

When Duchovny was 6, he told his father he wanted to be a bathtub. "I can't remember what I was thinking," he now reflects, "but it probably had something to do with the fact that I loved being in the bathtub." He would sit in the warm water, playing with his plastic dinosaurs. His favorite was the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Duchovny shared a room with his brother, who is four years older, and drilled a spy hole through the plasterboard partition that separated them. "My brother said to my father, 'Is there anything we can do to shut David up?' " Duchovny says. " 'Can we offer him money?' " (That was when Duchovny was 4. "It's not just my brother now," he says.) He was taught to knit by his Scottish grandmother. "We used to knit together," he says. "I remember I knitted a blanket for my dog, and I think I tried to knit a sock.

" When Duchovny watched The Brady Bunch, he would imagine being Peter, the middle child. "You would have been able to actually sleep with your beautiful stepsister; Marcia," he reasons. Their world looked so great: a big house, lots of kids, loving parents. "I lived in Manhattan in an apartment," he says, "and it wasn't like that at all." Duchovny's father was a would-be writer (responsible for, among other things, the quote collection The Wisdom of Spiro T. Agnew); his mother was a teacher. They split up when Duchovny was 12. His mother told him that she was going to Scotland for a couple of weeks and that his father was moving out. Duchovny stayed in the apartment with his brother. His mother's only instructions were not to smoke pot. At the time, she blamed everything on the fact that his brother smoked pot, and so it seemed as though it was marijuana that was destroying the family. "Rather than seeing it as a symptom," he says, "she saw it as a cause."

As it happens, Duchovny did smoke pot then. One day, he was playing a board game -- Oscar Robertson's Pro Basketball Strategy -- and wanted an opponent. His brother didn't want to play but said he would if Duchovny would smoke pot with him. Duchovny tried to fink out -- "No, no, I can't, Mom told me not to" - so his brother chased him around the house with a hash pipe. "The way I tell this story it can't be true," Duchovny says, "because the way I tell it is that he put his knees on my shoulders on the ground and put the pipe in my mouth and made me inhale. Now, that's not possible -- it's not possible to make someone inhale, as Bill Clinton would tell you, right! There was a point at which I gave in. Or I wanted to give in all along. Who knows! He says that I smoked some and then I watched TV for six hours and complained of a headache."

Duchovny's parents' parting hurt hard. "I think it must have broken my heart," he says, "and that's something that is a great sorrow and a great gift. The gift being, I think, it turned me into an artist, or whatever it is I am. It turned me into somebody who needs to figure things out or express something. Who has a pain that I want to express or assuage or whatever."

As time passed, Duchovny would see his father less and less. "My mother, she did the hard, hard work," he says. A smile. "She'd be the first to tell you." He was good at sports, and he was good at school. "My mother made it very important," he says. "I was to get the best education possible. It felt like, this is how I'm keeping my mother alive. The question was which Ivy League school was I going to go to, not was I going to go to college."

A SURPRISE:
Unpublished Writing, Samuel Beckett, Theophany

If the man who would become Fox Mulder had done some writing earlier in his life, one might imagine what it would be like: packed with dark surprises, suspense and melodrama, perhaps; full of sentences like "Whatever it touches, it turns maroon."

Duchovny did do some writing earlier in his life, but it was not like that. I do not have a copy of his unpublished novel, Wherever There Are Two, which details the dissolute '80s life of a bartender, a job Duchovny had around the time he wrote it. Nor do I have a copy of his unfinished Yale Ph.D. dissertation, "Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction and Poetry." But I do have a copy of his 1982 Princeton senior thesis, "The Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett's Early Novels."

Here is a random passage:

In Murphy's theology, undifferentiated chaos confronts God with its unnameable yawn. Like a sculptor with flawed stone, God does his best with what he is given and puns on the word to create the world. It is not a great pun and certainly not one of Murphy's favorites. The only evidence of theophany appears as the verbal transformation of the lowly neurotic into the holy psychotic schizophrenic.

There will be a right time to mention the thesis. But not yet.

A SHIPMENT:
Acting Bravery, New Underwear, Old Underwear

On the wall of Duchovny's trailer is a photo of a billboard outside a Vancouver strip club, taken after he was to his mortification - thought to be insulting Vancouver by suggesting that The X-Files move to Los Angeles. It says: "David Duchovny is barred. Go home." I watch him change his clothes.

Duchovny tells me that this is not the first time Mulder has shown his underwear; he was similarly undressed, waking up in Scully's bed, at the end of the second season. Because it seems an important question, I ask Duchovny how he decides which underclothes are suitable for Agent Mulder. "I wear whatever underwear I think he should be wearing," he says. "They don't really argue with me on that. This is actually the first time I've worn this underwear. How risky of me. What a brave actor. To actually go out and wear something you've never worn before, untested."

Did you buy the underwear for Mulder or for Duchovny?
I bought it for me. I just happened to get a shipment of underwear yesterday.

[Incredulous] A shipment?
Look. This is it: My underwear disappeared this year. I don't know where it went. So I had to order a shipment.

What do you mean, your underwear disappeared?
I don't know. It's because I have more than one residence. My underwear supply here in Vancouver was mighty thin. I know I have plenty of underwear, so I felt a little wasteful ordering another shipment. But I can't wait any longer for my underwear to show up. Because I kept thinking that the next load of laundry from the woman who cleans my house is going to show up. But it never did.

Still, I'm fascinated by this notion of a shipment.
You saw those tankers out in the bay. They're all carrying underwear. I order from a catalog. It's not, like, expensive or anything. It's in between boxers and briefs. It's J. Crew. I like their underwear.

How many pairs are in a shipment?
I think 12.

[Indignant] That's not a shipment! I thought you meant 40.
[Firmly] To me, 12 is a shipment. You can't possibly need more than five pairs of underwear. I think you need one pair for every day of the week. You thought a shipment was 40? That would be very Elvis-like, wouldn't it? "Underwear for me and all my posse!" [Getting into the notion] See, everybody that works for me wears the same underwear. That's something I demand. And when they quit, they turn in their underwear.

That's such an ugly thought. I'm also haunted by the thought of your previous underwear being out there somewhere.
If you think you're haunted by it, think about me. You know, I sew my name into them.

Yeah. I interviewed the man who makes your name tags.
[Looking worried] What name tags? [Realizing I'm joking] Oh. I lost my sense of humor for a second. I turned. I apologize.

Now I know what a delicate balance it is.
It is. Don't f--- with me. [Musing] I look forward to the arrival of the boxes. This is why I like ordering from catalogs, because it feels like a gift.

Is this a routine you learned in your lonely bachelor days?
I didn't have enough money to order out then, so no. I wish I had. There's something exciting about ordering something, forgetting you ever ordered, and then all of a sudden this box shows up carrying just a cornucopia of undergarments.

It does require both a rather poor memory and a low threshold of pleasure to really enjoy that.
That would sum me up, if you wanted a lead for your piece. That was very well put. I wish I'd said that. I have no idea what you said, but I liked it.

A CONVERSATION:
Lies, Marriage, Walrus Standards

Though he is far too smart, and far too cynical, to I imagine that a life can be described by hammy, hokey clichés, Duchovny often talks as though his was a messy, ungrounded existence that has only recently been redeemed by the wonder of love. He explains how, particularly in his 20s, his failure to commit, both romantically and professionally, allowed him to imagine that anything was possible. "I guess the lie to myself was it's death to be in one role too long, either as an actor or as a person," he says. "That's the lie that I told myself, that I'm free. And what I find now is that by limiting myself this way, it's much more freeing. I feel freer than I ever did." (Gillian Anderson attests to the change: "Something shifted in his makeup and his energy since he married. He seems more relaxed and at peace with himself, and he seems much happier. It was like he was searching and now he's found that little puzzle piece that he was missing.")

It was only three and a half months after Duchovny and Leoni met that they married.

That was unbelievably quick.
Not by walrus standards, I guess, where you only have that one chance to mate before swimming off to colder waters.

Is there a specific moment When you knew?
Well, I remember a first moment. It wasn't the moment where I thought, gee, I could spend the rest of my life with this person, but we started talking on the phone first before we went out on our first dates. We spoke on the phone for about three weeks before actually going out to dinner. And midway through the second week, I was at work and I had this thought: Gee, I can't wait to go home and call Téa. And then I checked myself, and I thought, you're excited about going home to call somebody that you haven't really met.

So, there was an acknowledgment that you were already having a relationship?
Yeah. It was unusual. I guess we were just going on instinct, and we were right in this case. My fear was either I'm falling in love with this person I barely know or this person is a psychotic and knows exactly what I want and is giving it to me. And I think she had a similar thought.

Didn't a part of you think, this is crazy?
No, I didn't think, this is crazy. I thought, this must be the way I do it, because I'd never done it before, and I've been in a five-year relationship, and I've been in a two-, three-, four-year relationship, and I just thought, I guess this is the way I do it. What I'm saying by getting married is I mean it.

Had you been scared that maybe you were the kind of guy who never did do it?
Yeah, because I guess I felt like I wanted to be married at some point, and I felt like I wasn't going to be. It was, am I ever going to be known truly by another person! Am I ever going to feel comfortable, warts and all, with somebody? Am I ever going to take the responsibility of someone else's heart seriously enough? And then after that it was, am I going to be a father?

So, given that you jumped into the first part of the equation...
Yeah, we're going to have children soon. The next two years, I think. My fear is I want to wait till I'm ready. But then again, it's the same thing: You're ready when your wife is pregnant.

AN INTERVENTION:
Porn, 'Sex Files,' Bad jokes

Duchovny rehearses a scene in which Mulder is watching TV in his office when Scully phones. In the finished episode you will be able to tell, from the background noise, that he is watching a porn film. On the phone, Scully asks Mulder what he is watching. He pauses and says, "The World's Deadliest Swarms." He tries to switch the TV off, but the remote doesn't work (a Duchovny elaboration), so he has to get up and do it by hand.

We head for the trailer with Duchovny's beloved dog, Blue, while the lighting is adjusted. I like to think that with this next exchange, I trigger my own tiny influence on the world of The X-Files.

In your mind, do you know the title of the porn movie Mulder is watching?
[Pauses] I haven't thought of it but probably Alien Probe. [Perks up] Actually, that would be so...that is funny. To have a videocassette box on the table. [He picks UP his walkie-talkie, requesting the director, Kim Manners, and the production coordinator Tracey, for art audio rendezvous on channel 5. Meanwhile we try to think of alternative spooky porn titles. I think of nothing, and all Duchovny comes up with is the inferior 'ET: The Extra Testicle.' Then he talks into the walkie-talkie.] I want a videocassette box on the table with masking tape and lettering that says Alien Probe on it. You get it? [To me] There's an X-rated movie on us. It was called The Sex-Files.

Did you watch it?
Sure. I was flattered. I think I was called Smolder. Smolder and Skulky, something like that. It had nothing to do with the show, but they had a man and a woman, and the girl was a redhead.

How was the man?
He performed. He was OK. They didn't even dress like us. Or undress like us.

We walk back to the set. The Alien Probe cassette is now visible on Mulder's desk. Duchovny has a new idea. Should Mulder, who is wearing a suit, be revealed, when he stands up, to be wearing nothing but underwear? "Is that too much!" he asks.

Manners looks dubious. "I think it's a little too much," she replies.

Nonetheless there is a lighthearted mood on the set today. Perhaps it is because the lines the actors are shooting are funny. Perhaps it is because this is Duchovny's last day here before Christmas; starting tomorrow, he has 17 days off, his longest break in three years. "We've been together five years," he says, "and there's some days like this and some days where we all hate each other." (Later, I watch Duchovny and Anderson together, half joking, half ignoring each other. "We have a very complicated relationship that I don't think can be picked up by anybody who visits the set or imagines the atmosphere on the set," says Anderson. "It's one that has developed and changed and shifted and grown over five years, but it's certainly not one of discord or animosity or anything. I don't even know how to describe it. There's a lot of care there, I think." Occasionally, she says, a summit meeting has to be called by her: "When it seems like there's some kind of bubbling resentment underneath, and it no longer becomes comfortable to work together. But that hasn't happened many times. Three or four times.")

For this shot, Anderson's lines are read by someone else off camera. When Mulder suggests to Scully, over the telephone, that maybe she wouldn't know what to look for in a witchcraft case, she responds with a long list of telltale signs. Mulder pauses and then says, "Marry me." It's funny. People laugh after each take. On about the fifth run-through, Duchovny changes it to, "Scully, what are you wearing?" and everyone laughs louder.

Walking back through the set, we chance upon a forest from the previous episode. "Those are the killer trees," Duchovny says. "Their bark is worse than their bite."

I wince appropriately.

"Talk about putting down roots," he says.

I wince some more.

"See?" he says, self-mockingly. "I can be funny if I want."

AN ACCUSATION:
Hair Dye, Catfights, Sex Addiction

What are the oddest rumors you've heard about yourself recently?
My driver said somebody warned him not to drive me because I was bisexual. I assured him that I wasn't. Someone said I was going to be the next Batman, and I was going to be in the sequel to Men in Black. That my wife stopped dyeing her hair because she wants to get pregnant.

There's one this week in a tabloid that says that the two women in your life -- your wife and your co-star -- are fighting over you.
It doesn't even mention Blue?

Let me read you a little: "It's Hollywood's nastiest catfight! Wife and co-star bare their claws over 'X-Files' hunk!"
That'd be me.

"'X-Files' heartthrob David Duchovny --"
"Hunk" and "heartthrob" - so far, I like it!

" - is caught in the middle of Tinseltown's nastiest catfight, between his wife, Téa Leoni, and his co-star, Gillian Anderson. 'Naked Truth' cutie Téa -- "
"Cutie?" Nah. She's better than that.

" - is wildly jealous that her hunk hubby spends so much time with Gillian on the 'X-Files' set, and Gillian is furious that David has put his marriage before their hit TV show."
Oh, this is [about] me wanting to be in L.A.

"Téa is going head to head with Gillian --"
Well, that would be head to navel. [Pause] No, Gillian wants to move back to L.A., as well. So there's no tension about that at all. But that's a good angle.

Earlier this year the tabloids suggested that you and Gillian don't get on because you had a fling together when the series first started.
Well. [Chuckles] That's a good theory. That shows more imagination than the recent one. At least that shows some storytelling. Some back story. That was a good one, yeah.

And generally, people seemed to be convinced that you were addicted to sex. How did you enjoy your reputation as a sex addict?
Oh, God. I was embarrassed, and embarrassed for my family. Did I ever have sex without thinking, have sex compulsively! Yeah. Does that make me a sex addict? That makes everybody a sex addict. It hurt to be talked about that way even though it shouldn't have.

I think what was more widely believed was that you were a compulsive Lothario.
I think I had my share. All I would say: I'm sure I was searching for something, but it wasn't sexual. I was mistakenly trying to find something to make me feel better. And that wasn't it.

A CAREER:
Underplaying, Cross-dressing, Ass Flashing

After a strong role as a cheating boyfriend in the largely unseen New Year's Day, Duchovny's struggling early career was the usual flotsam and jetsam: a shared line - "Surprise!" -- as one of Melanie Griffith's party guests in Working Girl; an evil businessman thwarted by the dog in Beethoven; a jealous office worker thwarted by Christina Applegate in Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead. His first high-profile role was as Mimi Rogers' husband in 1991's underground success The Rapture, a strange tale of sexual experimentalists who are drawn into a religious cult. Already he was showing a talent for underplaying. Director Michael Tolkin gave Duchovny the latter role partly because of the way he read a part of the script about how he had once killed a man for money. "He said it with a flatness I really liked," says Tolkin. "I love deadpan American acting much more than I like method acting. In a sense it's as though he's got blinders on. He's a very undistracted actor. David's strength is not to play too broad but to stay focused on what's in front of him."

Duchovny had to learn how to act consistently under pressure. "He hadn't done a lot at that time," says co-star Rogers, "so, you know, he was sweet, he was insecure, he was scared, he was working hard."

Momentum gathered slowly. Duchovny was brought into the Twin Peaks TV series at 36 hours' notice to play a cross-dressing drug investigator after actor James Spader had suggested the part to the show's writers, then backed out of playing it. Duchovny was offered the pilot of the softporn cable series Zalman King's Red Shoe Diaries and consequently got the job filming the sequences at the beginning and end of each episode. He appeared alongside Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis in the whitetrash psychothriller Kalifornia. And then he was cast in a Fox TV science-fiction drama that few people gave much chance of lasting too long, first appearing -- in the very FBI office we have been sitting in today -- wearing glasses, looking at some slides and greeting his new partner, Dana Scully, with the disconsolate words, "Sorry, nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted."

Last autumn, Duchovny starred in the messy, confused and unsuccessful Playing God. Next summer, he will star in a safer proposition -- the X-Files movie, reportedly called Fight the Future. Details are necessarily sparse. Though the movie has a self-contained plot, its scenario somehow follows from the as-yet-unfilmed season-five finale. The only substantive detail that seems to be common knowledge, I point out to Duchovny, is that he bares his ass.

"I do." He nods. "But the reason I did is so good, because it's in a totally unsexual, asexual way. I bare my ass through a hospital gown. It was something that Chris [Carter] had written into the movie, and part of the fun of the movie was doing certain things that you can never do on TV: showing your ass, or saying 'f---.' I said 'f---) as much as I could."

Does Anderson say it?

"She says 'f---' once, that I remember," he says. "It's very pointed, though. She really means it when she says it."

A JOURNEY:
Prizes, True Love, Misunderstandings

Duchovny is given one return journey a month by Fox TV between Vancouver and Los Angeles in a private plane, a concession he was granted when he got married. This evening he is flying home to spend his first night in he and Leoni's new home. This flight will have four passengers: Duchovny, Carter, Blue and me. In the car to the airport, Carter and Duchovny discuss today's scenes, and Duchovny inquires about how much porn noise they will be able to use. Carter says they have to tone down the background sounds so that nothing sounds orgasmic. "The moral is," Duchovny concludes, "sex is OK as long as no one is coming. So, bad sex is fine."

The four of us board the tiny plane. As in real life, privilege brings its responsibilities. We have to find and pour our own drinks. Duchovny hands out Bacardi-and-Cokes. Up here seems the proper moment to bring up his tract on Samuel Beckett.

"You read my thesis on Samuel Beckett'" Duchovny says, clearly shocked. "Is it horribly pretentious!"

Naturally. It is, after all, a serious thesis about Samuel Beckett. But as far as I could understand it, it seemed pretty good.

"It won a prize," Duchovny says. "It won the English-thesis prize, whatever that is. I do remember one chapter is called 'Breaking Wind on the Aeolian Harp.'"

I fetch it from my bag. "It's horrible," Duchovny tells Carter. "It's like reading a manual about surgery."

Nonetheless, Duchovny grabs at it keenly. "Look at all those footnotes!" he says with pride. "I must say I'm tickled by seeing this." He leafs through, beginning to remember. The first sentence is "Beckett is misunderstood."

"You know," he says, "somehow, looking at this makes me feel like in the movies where somebody has returned from the insane asylum and they're showing you the work that you did while you were in there."

I want you to tell me what "unanalvigorously" means.
I have no idea. It's one of those things I used to know. It's shocking to think that you used to be smarter than yourself.

Overall, do you remember what your point was?
[Pause] Gosh. That's a really good question. [Long pause] No. I have no idea what my thesis was. What was I saying?

You don't often see the sentence "Escaping with the insane homunculus, Lemuel starts out on the Malone Styx."
[Nods] At least not from an actor on a prime-time television show. [Finding a quote of Beckett's] This is such a great quote. Read that.

[Reading] "She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member... but lent myself to it with a good grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so... Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn't tell you. But is it true love in the rectum?"
Isn't that funny? "Is it true love in the rectum!" That's like the theme of anyone's life. [To Carter] Look, I allude to Yeats here: "Taking ever so literally that love has pitched its tent in the place of excrement."

I don't think the phrase "in the place of excrement" has been in 'US' magazine before.
Excrement's a very interesting subject. There are only three really fascinating subjects to every person on the planet: sex, money and s---.

And for a man, they relate to the three most important orifices: the mouth, the anus and the pockets.
Oh, I wish I had said that. Will you make it so I had said that!

But you're in a successful TV series that manages to avoid all three subjects most of the time.
Well segued. It's true. But significantly, I think, in The X-Files, the intensity of the absence is such that it becomes a presence. The so-total lack of sex and so-total lack of any monetary discussion, the so-total lack of any bodily function encodes in it its presence. Which is why people go on about the sexual tension between Gillian and me. I think what is interesting is that there is so much penetration of bodies on our show, violent penetration: maggots crawling out of mouths, and knives and guns. Every kind of bodily penetration except for sexual. [Laughs] But Is It True Love in the Rectum: The Autobiography of David Duchovny. Do you think I could publish this! Like Paul Reiser published Babyhood' Do you think there's a market out there for a book on Beckett from a celebrity?

Duchovny is joking. I point this out only because, generally, along with Beckett, Duchovny is misunderstood.

A FAREWELL:
Sex, Billy Joel, Tinted Windows

High in the air above Northern California, a little drunk on Bacardi-and-Coke, Duchovny and I argue about Jethro Tull. It is an argument that is neither complicated nor sophisticated. Duchovny is for; I am against. "The memories are good," he says. "I seduced a girl at the age of 16 over 'Skating Away...' I explained the lyrics to her."

And that worked as a seduction technique?
Oh, God, better than anything.

So, let me get this straight. Before you had sex, you explained a Jethro Tull lyric to her, and she still slept with you?
Let me explain to you. It was a tripartite seduction. The first step was an explication of the lyrics to "Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day." The second part was writing out lyrics from Billy Joel's Piano Man. The third part was turning out the lights and flashing a Bic lighter and creating a strobe in which we eventually started to hold hands and then kiss. That's patented, by the way.

But: Billy Joel lyrics?
"Your sister's gone out, she's on a date / So you just sit at home and masturbate." That was heavy.

Can I make a short, simple observation? From Beckett to... Billy Joel?
That's the name of your article.

So, tell me: What would David Duchovny never do?
I don't think I'd ever be cruel to an animal. And I would never sing in public. Because I've got a horrible voice. It just sounds bad. I mean, Téa claims to like to hear me sing, and I think it's because I enjoy it so much. We sing in the car. She made me sing that song "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight." And I sing Bad Company's "Ready for Love" and "Feel Like Makin' Love."

So, basically you now specialize in bad "Hey, I'm ready for the sack, baby" '70s songs?
Yeah. And she air-drums. This is why we have tinted windows. A lot of people think it's because we don't want people to see us and follow us home, but it's really because we're making fools of ourselves.

Before we land, Duchovny briefly demonstrates his vocal skills. I say nothing. "You see?" he says. "You're not my wife. You don't love my singing."

Duchovny leaves me on the tarmac. I'm not his wife. He has a new house and 17 days off. And she is waiting.

Heath, Chris . March 1998. "David In Love." US Magazine.
Transcribed by someone at DDEB3