Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  Norman looks at these old movies, piped in on Ted Turner’s cable empire or pulled from the worn DVD and video sleeves in his haphazard collection, and in his father’s eyes he sees the future about to happen and slip away. It’s like he knew. All along. Like he was just waiting.

  And so he’s left with the mundane, the temporal fuel that fed his father’s private life. Elaine. Pet. His mother. Money. Houses. Some cars. Microsoft. Woodman was in at the beginning. The story Norman heard was he’d met Bill Gates at some party, although he could never imagine Terence Wood and Bill Gates at the same party. The young Gates made an impression on Woodman, although Norman could never imagine his father leaving an inverse imprint other than by reputation. However it happened, the stock split itself a dozen ways like a fucking Breck commercial, and, in the end, Wood was holding approximately three hundred thousand shares.

  Norman chokes on the math.

  “Sid put me into it,” the actor says to his not-really-dead-drunk son—or, at least, this is what his not-really-dead-drunk son wants to hear. It is a voice from another dimension and a reference to one in a long line of money managers who, with this great exception, succeeded mostly in mismanaging Terence Wood’s funds. What Norman guesses he is after with this line of communication is a fix on how it was that his father ended his life with the taint of money troubles when he owned approximately thirty million dollars in Microsoft stock.

  “It was pure profit,” Wood spirits back to his son. “I couldn’t touch it without giving it all back in taxes. You know that.”

  Yes, of course, he does. It is an argument Norman had heard a dozen times before his father’s death and another dozen since. (He’s counted and rounded off.) “But you didn’t have to go making those piece of shit pictures!” he rails. “You could have borrowed against it on margin. Something. You didn’t have to go taking your teeth out on screen!”

  “No, but—”

  “Like a fucking character actor!”

  “What can I tell you, son?”

  A lot, Norman wants to say. Everything. Like, for starters, what the hell is he supposed to do about Pet? Tell him that. He likes her and all, Norman does, they’re connected, always have been, but she’s been all weird around him since Woodman died, a little too . . . what? Here: she’s been a little too wetly affectionate. He can’t think how else to put it, but that about cuts it, and anyway, there, it’s out, they can finally talk about it. She’s always eyeing him, rubbing up against him, finding reasons to be left alone with him in otherwise empty houses. She calls late at night—like really late at night, like three or four, too late, even, for the coast—and then has nothing to say. Poor Norman’s got no idea how to be around her, what’s expected, what’s going on. Once, back in L.A.—this was pretty extreme, even for Pet—she walked naked into the media room, where Norman was just in from some club and winding down in front of Conan O’Brien, and she sat next to him like nothing at all and said, “You think he’s funny? I’m not so sure I think he’s funny.” Like sitting around naked was the most natural thing in the world. She sat and watched David Cassidy do a number from Shenandoah, which he’d just mounted in some dinner theater somewhere, and then suffer the predictable late night taunts on his fallen teen idolhood.

  “I used to love him,” Pet said. “God, look what happened to him. That hair!” Then she leaned back against the cushions, set her legs Indian-style like Sharon Stone auditioning for Disney’s live-action remake of Pocahontas, dipped into the potato chip canister she found at her hip, and, for a while, said nothing. When she tired of this and the nonresponsiveness of her stepson at the other end of the couch, she quietly stood and left the room—carrying, the nonresponsive Norman couldn’t help noticing, a couple Pringle crumbs with her on her pubes.

  Okay, Woodman, what’s the deal with that? And with the way people have been looking at him since Maine? Like he’s contagious. Like he, all of a sudden, has this ominous background music announcing his coming and going, as if his life had been scored recently by that drummer from the Police, alerting perfect strangers to his now-troubled presence. If music isn’t the tell, it must be something else, because he can’t go anywhere these days without someone picking up on something. Before, he lived in the once-removed glow of his father’s fame. He didn’t advertise it, but it tailed him like one of those fucking bowls of oatmeal from those old commercials. (Maypo, he thinks.) People knew. And now they know. This. It’s all around him, what’s happened. It’s a part of him. It’s in the air, and on his shoes, and no one wants to get too close for fear it’ll rub off.

  And the giant question: how the hell is he, Norman, supposed to make a place for himself in his father’s wake? This is one for a team of psychologists—assisted, perhaps, by a bunch of brown-nosing graduate students—but, as long as he’s on it, he might as well throw it out there. It’s like when he was a kid, staying with Woodman, and, in the morning, he’d bounceflounce into that great big bed with him. In the grand landscape of sleeped-in sheets and too many pillows, he’d start to feel misplaced and alone and incapable of filling the spaces his father left behind. On the man’s chest alone there were, like, a couple acres of uncharted territory. He was like a climbing apparatus. There was just too much of him and not nearly enough of Norman, who’d eventually roughhouse the covers to the floor, where he could make his own room.

  “I thought you were just goofing around,” Norman hears. “Horseplay.”

  “No,” Norman says. “I was hiding.”

  “From what?”

  Norman shrugs. He thinks about this. “I don’t know. You, maybe?” He’s guessing, fishing. They never talked when his father was alive. Not like this. Like this is a revelation. Like this is the way a father is meant to talk to his son, right? Like this is how they do it in the rest of the world. (On television!) When they had it to do for real, it was long distance, through the gossip columns, passed along comments from hangers-on. There were some shared photo opportunities—at charity events, in airports, courtside at the Lakers—but there was nothing ever natural about their time together, not that Norman can now recall. For a stretch, late 1980s, maybe early 1990s, Wood communicated with his son only in one-word postcards: “Persevere.” “Agitate.” “Listen.” During another stretch, between Anita and Pet, there were, like, a dozen girlfriends, each introduced to Norman through the pages of some tabloid or other. (One of them, a redhead named Katrinka, was sent to the airport to meet Norman for a weekend visit with an introductory note from Woodman to prove she was legit.) Always, it was what was not said that mattered most. Or, what was said to someone else.

  In film school, Norman is making a movie about a father and son, only the father’s dead and the son has a little trouble dealing. The bone of the piece is the way the two of them still have this relationship going through these same kinds of late-night visits. Well, they’re not exactly the same, but sort of. There’s another movie he wants to do, not totally unrelated, about a father and son who fly all over the world to these different Planet Hollywood openings, but Norman doesn’t have the budget to pull it off. What he’s got is, like, no budget at all, and so he’s going with the smaller, more intimate story. In the script, which Norman’s calling Special Effects, he’s written it so the dead man’s ghost actually inhabits his scenes—he can move objects, occupy real space, you can see his reflection in the mirror—partly because it’s easier to tell it without any convoluted narrative tricks and to film it without any special effects (that’s where he gets the title), but mostly because that’s how it always seems to Norman.

  Here, now, late at night in his shitty little apartment, it is as if his father has pierced some fourth wall of his near-dreams to invade his senses of time and space and order. He’s drunk, a little, but that’s not it. This registers for Norman as a sobering thing. He’s got this image of his father, this fading memory, and it’s lit up on some big internal screen. Then the image steps from the screen and into the room like Woody Allen had it set up in
The Purple Rose of Cairo. When it happens, it is as if the Woodman, Norman’s Woodman, is truly here. When he leaves, if he’s been drinking, he leaves behind the glass; if he’s been sitting, the sofa cushions hold his shape.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got one of your freak film school friends lined up to play me,” Norman hears.

  “Actually, I was thinking of Brian Dennehy.”

  “Brian Dennehy?” The voice is insulted, incredulous.

  Norman does not respond.

  Again: “Brian Dennehy?”

  “I’ve got a way to get it to him,” Norman justifies. “He’s a friend of one of the professors here. He likes to help out on these student projects. He’s good at what he does.”

  “This is what you think of me? Brian Dennehy?”

  “Lighten up, Woodman. It’s just a movie. Like you used to say.”

  “Yeah, but Brian Dennehy?” The ghost of Terence Wood is seething. “He makes television movies! He couldn’t carry a cartoon!”

  Norman lets this hang in the still air of his shitty apartment alongside his father’s visage. What he wants to say is, yeah, well, at least he didn’t think to try, Weatherbee. At least he hasn’t sunk that far. Instead, what he says is, “What makes you think it’s about you?”

  “Yeah, like it’s about some other father and son. It’s about Kirk Douglas and one of his boys. It’s the Martin Sheen Family Christmas.” You could cut a wheel of hard cheese with his sarcasm.

  “No, I mean, it’s not like anything we ever had. Where the fuck were you all those years?”

  “Where the fuck am I now?”

  “My point exactly. It’s a fantasy. It’s not based on you and me. It’s not anything we ever shared.”

  “Fantasy is you thinking you can make a movie. Fantasy is you thinking that candy-ass school can teach you how to make pictures.” This stings, but Norman waits for the rest of it: “It looks easy to you, what I do.”

  “Did, Woodman. What you did. You don’t make movies anymore, not since long before you drove off that cliff, and even when you did you were just reading someone else’s lines.” He pauses to consider his point. “Making pictures. That’s such shit. Doesn’t take much to read someone else’s lines.”

  “Ouch,” the voice pretends at hurt. Then, almost in admiration: “Jesus, where’d you get that nasty streak? And to your old man.”

  “From you, you sonofabitch.” Norman takes a final swig from the flavored vodka bottle (peach) on the Pioneer speaker at his side.

  “Damn right, from me. Don’t go saying I never gave you anything.”

  Norman makes a note of this, thinks it’s something he might be able to use.

  The cabin where Pimletz has been holed up since forever has got this massive stone fireplace at its center, which seems, to Pimletz, bigger than his entire apartment. In the hearth alone, there’d be room for his dresser, his straight-backed chairs, and the crate he uses for a kitchen table. Here, for some reason, he’s set up his writing desk, run an extension cord for his laptop, piled his sorted and foldered notes, and put the remote phone to rest on its base. There’s a picture window with a great view of the woods and a sky-lit loft over the living room. There’s even a little breakfast nook back in the kitchen, which would have made a nice place to work, but here he is in the dank, cool grit of fitted stone, working at what it is he has to do. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t put the fireplace to its intended use, which would have been a good thing, considering the bite of New England winter. He figures his decision to use it instead as an office must have to do with wanting to get a little heat going in his writing, to light a fire under this project.

  He sees things a little too literally sometimes, Pimletz does, and he’s tucked himself into Terence Wood’s stone hearth expecting sparks. What he gets, instead, is an inventory of false starts and misguided notions, including the giant fucking one that put him here in the first place. Yeah, right, Axel. You can write a book. On some other plane, you can write a book. In your dreams. . . .

  Predictably, this is not turning out to be the book of his dreams, but Pimletz isn’t sure it ever was. It’s an assignment, he keeps telling himself. A good gig. The deal is, for twenty-five thousand dollars up front, he gets to slog thigh-deep in the life and times of Terence Wood, the blustering movie actor whose mysterious death a couple months back vaulted him from a waning celebrity to just about legendary status. He gets to live in the great man’s cabin, thumb through the great man’s papers, consume the nonperishables in the great man’s pantry, wipe his ass with the great man’s Charmin, and call down to Boston on the great man’s nationwide calling plan. All of it with the sanction of the great man’s estate and all in the ostensible name of research and atmosphere-soaking. And, here’s the kicker: if Pimletz does all of these things to the estate’s satisfaction and, in the process, produces a posthumous autobiographical manuscript written, natch, under the great man’s name that, in turn, meets with the satisfaction of the publisher, then Pimletz will receive another twenty-five thousand, a vaguely delineated piece of the back end, and the thin chance at lending new shape to his career.

  In the meantime, he deludes himself into thinking he is in control, at least in editorial control, at least until he relinquishes the first draft of the book to Wood’s various people. Right now, tucked cozily into the opening of Terence Wood’s stone fireplace and slipped easily into the great man’s open-toed sheepskin slippers, Pimletz is not about to give up control.

  It is not for reasons of artistic integrity that Pimletz expects to remain in charge, but rather for reasons of sloth. From his perspective, on page thirty-seven, Pimletz is not expecting to finish a first draft any time soon. He’s made about full use of the scant notes and log entries Wood left behind at the time of his death, and he’s come up dry in his efforts to pull salient note and comment from the great man’s wives, his kid, his famous friends. Past week or so, he’s busied himself screening old Terence Wood movies on the great man’s big-screen television to see if they might suggest some way to fill a few paragraphs. And he’s thumbed through a coffee-table reference book, The Films of Terence Wood, to where the pages are fairly stained with margin notes and Cheese Doodle residue and turned-over pages. The book includes production notes—dates, credits, and locations—for every movie Terence Wood ever made (and a few he merely thought of making, but never quite managed), beginning with a small part in the 1953 thriller Magnificent, in which, the coffee-table author is quick to note, Terence Wood wasn’t.

  Hamlin, at the front end of this misguided notion, suggested to Pimletz he keep a list of Wood’s dead costars so that he might let his imagination run. Trouble is, Pimletz’s imagination runs like a drugged tortoise, so he hasn’t gotten much past the list itself: Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Lucille Ball, Barbara Stanwyck, Lee Remick, Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman. . . .

  “Now what?” he said to Hamlin one afternoon, back in Boston for a change of clothes and scenery. He actually brought the list with him for Hamlin’s approval.

  “Now what?” Hamlin echoed, mocking, working the lead on a piece of his own, not paying full attention. “I’ll tell you now what.” He rolled his chair back from his desk, turned to face Pimletz to focus on this particular piece of show-and-tell, flipped through the oranged pages of Pimletz’s reference book, and landed on an idea: “Trouble No More,” he read, without looking up. “This is fucking paydirt. United Artists. 1969. Durango, Colorado. Richard Widmark, Lee Remick, John Wayne in a cameo. Janis Joplin, even, in her first screen role. First and only.”

  “I can read, asshole,” Pimletz interrupted, not sure he wanted to hear how what keeps him up nights is no trouble at all for the next guy.

  “It’s not the reading I’m worried about, my overwhelmed friend,” Hamlin taunted, swatting Pimletz playfully (and a little too hard) on the head with the book. “It’s the comprehension.”

  “Fine,” Pimletz said, rubbing his head, “I get it. I com-pre-hend.” He
drew out the word. “So now what?”

  “Now is where you sit down and write that the filming of Trouble No More, down there in sleepy Durango—population, what, like, twelve, couple dozen more in summer maybe—calls to mind a memorable moment. Now you write that Wood and Lee Remick and Janis Joplin were tripping one night on some mushrooms or some shit, this was the sixties, right? This was what people did. It’s not that much of a stretch.

  “They were sitting uncomfortably in one of those phony mining cars they had strewn about the set because, you know, Durango is one of those old mining towns. There was that scene in the movie where Wood’s character was trapped in the mine, and Janis Joplin, who played his daughter, had to go running through the town one afternoon to find her mother, Lee Remick’s character, to tell her the trouble with Pa down in the mine. Then there was that great moment where John Wayne swept in to lead the rescue attempt, and the whole fucking town had gathered outside the mine to see what the matter was. He took one of those beat-up cars from outside the shaft and hurled it right at the opening, in one giant frustration. Only, you know, the Duke was getting on in years, so the car he picked up was pretty flimsy, like it was just painted plastic, or balsa wood, or whatever they use in those Hollywood prop departments. But there were also a couple real cars strewn around, for authenticity, and it doesn’t seem possible that even the Duke in his prime could have hurled one of the real deals, least not all that far.

  “But anyway, now is when you establish about those mining cars and tell about what a dead-end town Durango was—throw in some local color. Then you get back to how Wood was just tripping his brains out and running around bare-ass naked with his wife and daughter—his screen wife and daughter—and how they somehow managed to squeeze, all three of them, butt-naked, into one of those little cars, one of the real ones because, you know, what the hell else is there to do in Durango, right? I mean, this is fucking Durango, Colorado. The Toenail of the West. Fuck it, the In-Grown Toenail of the West.