On the street outside we ran into John, who looked more frantic than I had ever seen him, his face pale and fixed. After Helen parted from us, he took me by the arm and asked if I knew where you were. I nodded towards the window of your suite.
I’ve been phoning Myles for the better part of an hour. Is he having another neurotic attack?
I lied and told him your phone hadn’t rung all morning. Then I lied again and said everything was fine, nothing was amiss, you’d just been delayed at makeup. Have you spoken to Mary yet?
John shook his head and looked past me, towards the window of Mary’s own suite.
You act as though you’re afraid of her, John.
Maybe I am, he said, squinting into the sun.
In that case there’s no better solution than to speak with her directly, without delay. I’ll come with you, I offered, even though I suspected my presence would do nothing to change Mary’s mind.
When John tried the door to Mary’s suite he found it unlocked. The room was as neat as if no one had been there for days, the beige carpet unmarked, pink cushions on the couch fresh and plump, the Cecil Beaton portrait of Mary in a pastel blue gown staring imperiously at us from the opposite wall. John picked up the telephone receiver and shook his head.
Still warm. We must have just missed her.
I could imagine Mary on the chair by the telephone, speaking to men in snap-brim hats. I had started thinking of them as Agents Leopold and Loeb, boys from good families who destroyed innocent lives for sport. Like those murderous lovers, the agents who had been trailing me were always well dressed, rather epicene, their movements marked by the same furtiveness I recognized in men of our kind. Perhaps it had more to do with Hitchcock’s Rope than anything else. I remember thinking it had either been very clever or very cruel to cast a couple of closeted actors in a film about closeted lovers.
There was no sign of Mary’s acrylic purse or platinum mink, no impression of an earlier note torn from the phone jotter, which John held up to the light, tilting it this way and that as if he were a detective. We were about to leave when a sound came from the bathroom. Mary? Is that you? John called.
It’s only me, Mr. Marsh, and then Mary’s assistant, Mozelle, appeared in the black-and-white maid’s uniform Mary insisted she wear, as if she were perpetually playing Lottie in Mildred Pierce. Your wife left a while ago, she said, standing in the door of the bathroom. John asked if she knew where Mary was but Mozelle shook her head. Mrs. Marsh doesn’t tell me anything she thinks I don’t need to know. Never mind she expects me to prophesy her heart’s desire before she knows it herself. But I expect I don’t have to tell you that, Mr. Marsh. You least of all.
You shouldn’t talk about Mary in such a tone.
Would you fire me for speaking the truth?
What’s your game, Mozelle?
No game. I’m a friend. Then Mozelle lifted a scarf from the back of a chair, drew it across her mouth, dropped her voice, changed its sex, race, and age, so that when she next spoke she sounded uncannily like me. A very good friend of yours, Mr. Marsh. I would have told you sooner if I’d known.
John crossed his arms over his chest. One of his hands was shaking. It was you on the phone. I never took you for a troublemaker.
I’d have to be pretty senseless to make trouble, she said, dropping the scarf and letting her voice return to its natural register.
What proof do you have?
I walked in yesterday and heard it all myself. You’ll just have to believe me. Sorry, I didn’t have my Dictaphone.
I find it hard to believe Mary would do this behind my back.
Your wife is not a well woman, Mr. Marsh. You have to understand, she thinks her whole life is a motion picture. Some days she’s in a romance, other days it’s historical drama. This week, it’s spies.
What are you saying?
She’ll say anything to those men tomorrow, no matter if it’s true or not, because it’ll come into her mind as dialogue for the role she thinks she’s playing. Spies. Fifth columnists. ‘Red fascists.’ She has it all on her tongue, ready to convince those men she’s whiter than white.
Sickness of the times, I said, pulling apart the blinds to look out onto the street. John glanced at me as if he had forgotten I was in the room.
Especially in this town, Mr. Frank. It’s a terminal case.
You should be in New York, Mozelle. Better opportunities for someone like you.
Someone like me, Mr. Marsh?
A smart colored girl—
Is that all you see?
John blushed. What I mean is, I don’t understand why you thought Los Angeles would be better than wherever you started out.
Mozelle sat down, slapping her legs. I came to be in the pictures! Like every other fool in this town who ends up washing cars or waiting tables.
Could it be you just gave up too soon?
Gave up? I didn’t give up. But I can’t sing, I can’t dance, and I’m not funny. I thought I’d be a real actress, but do you think there are serious parts for someone like me, as you put it? Not a chance. I’d leave this town today if I knew I’d find something better, but it’s a risk I can’t afford.
Maybe you didn’t talk to the right people.
So give me a part in your picture, Mr. Marsh. Put me in the background. Make a black woman the goddess from the machine. I read that script of yours, Mr. Frank, and the plot makes no sense. You need a solution. Let me provide it. It would be easy to do. Even people like me go to nightclubs. I could be the gangster’s moll who tips off the cops.
No, John said, I know what Mary would say.
And shouldn’t that tell you something about your wife, Mr. Marsh?
You look as if you pity me, Mozelle.
That’s because I don’t believe there’s anything wrong in having a different idea about how this country might be run.
I’m no Communist, John said.
I never said you were, Mr. Marsh, but there’s no law against being one, is there? I didn’t mean to offend you.
The three of us sat there for a moment in silence, the sounds of studio life reaching us muted, at a distance, and I thought how different this conversation might have been if we could have had it in a version of America where John and Mozelle and I could sit as equals at the same table. I would like to believe such an America remains possible, somewhere, but it certainly was not in the studio, not on that day in 1950, not with a man like John who could never overcome the bias imprinted on his thinking. I don’t mean to suggest he was a bad man, you understand, but one who could not escape the conditioning of the place where he had come from or the family who raised him.
I’m sorry I can’t do more for you, Mozelle, he said.
I was surprised to hear John sound so genuinely sorry, as if he were repenting not only for his missteps over the past few minutes, but for anything he might have done wrong in all the time he had known Mozelle, even for everything Mary had ever done, for what his ancestors had done and what Mary’s own people might have done, what all the white people of America had done, for all that we were still doing and would keep on doing.
Today, though, I wonder whether those layers of regret and intent were only in my head.
Thank you, Mr. Marsh. May I say one last thing?
I expect you can say whatever you like.
Your wife’s just a decoy. She’s flushing you out so the hunters can get a clean shot.
As we walked back to your suite, I could see how unsettled John was, and how eager he remained to dismiss Mozelle’s warning as troublemaking, but I told him I thought she was telling the truth. Given what’s at stake it would be foolish to doubt her, I said. She’s trusting you to understand the gravity of the situation and not do what ordinary circumstances might demand.
Everyone’s turning on me, John grumbled.
That’s right. Even me, I said, hearing my impatience with him, and then I admitted that I had been with you, told John how we had ignored the ringing ph
one. I could see how my confession affected him: triple-x Kopfkino, double feature, banned in every country on earth and nothing like the truth of that sweet quarter hour you and I spent alone. But I could not yet tell John why it would have been unbearable to let the ringing phone derail our lovemaking, I could not yet tell him I was counting down the hours left to me in your presence just as I could not yet tell you.
When we first met, Desmond, I never would have guessed about you.
That’s because I’m no different from anyone else, I said. Though of course I was different, as you were, Myles, but because we policed every aspect of our behavior, never letting our laughter get out of control, never crossing our legs at the knee, never holding our hands palms outward to examine our nails, never dressing with too much extravagance, most people would not have guessed what we were. We knew how to hide in plain sight. I’m no different from you, John.
The suggestion seemed to disturb him and he staggered as you opened the door. I was struck by your strength, how you helped him down onto the sofa where you and I had so recently been entwined. I knew John had tolerated knowing what I was, what you were, only because he did not have to imagine precisely what this meant. So long as what we did failed to impress itself on John’s imagination and he did not have to envision the way his own body might perform the same acts we enjoyed, he could tolerate us, tolerance being but a distant cousin of acceptance.
Perhaps if you had not poured John that glass of water and dropped in a couple of bromide tablets or doubled the dose when John twitched his finger to ask for more, the day would not have unfolded as it did. Perhaps if John had not chased the bromide with a double bourbon from your bar cart, a solution would have presented itself and you and I could have gone on living our secret life until secrecy was no longer required of men like us.
But that is all speculation. Nothing you or I did that day would have changed the next decade of American politics, and that I cannot allow myself to forget. In the absence of the personal, there was always the political.
John whimpered, wiping his brow. I think I ate something last night. We went to Don the Beachcomber and Mary insisted on a table in the Cannibal Room. I had too many Zombies on top of the mandarin duck. It was gruesome.
John swallowed the bourbon in one and you poured him another, which he drank so quickly he almost choked. Some days the world has too much clarity and it’s easier not to see everything in such sharp focus. Get a filter, smear petroleum jelly on the lens, bring in the smoke machine and dim the lights. Betrayal looks better with atmosphere. John stared meaningfully at the bourbon and you poured him a third. He was drinking like he could already see himself testifying before Congress, walking a tightrope between spilling his guts and betraying his friends, or, if he took the moral high ground, condemning himself to prison.
I told him he had nothing to worry about. You’re as political as paste, John.
If Mary talks, I don’t think it matters that I only went to meetings and signed a few letters. She’ll blab about us all and then the pink slips will come and they’ll haul us before the House Committee and ask the same questions they asked Trumbo and the others and we’ll feel just as cornered and angry and stubborn as they did.
Although one could invoke the Fifth Amendment, it was my contention that this just made a person look guilty. The only conscionable choice was to plead the First, to insist that being a member of the Communist Party was the very definition of freedom of speech. Perhaps I said as much then. How easy to claim bravery when one’s bags are packed. In my mind I was already on the plane, it had already touched down in Shannon and then again in London, I was already crossing the Channel, already in the piedà-terre in Paris, already at home in my mother’s family villa outside of Florence or their apartment in Rome. How little I had to fear given the comforts my parents could provide.
Even if you get summoned, John, and even if you refuse to name names, as you certainly should, and even if they find you in contempt of Congress as they have the others, and there’s no guarantee that they will if scores of us are resisting, then you can still drag it through the courts. You can always appeal.
In truth, I knew that I could never manage to sustain such a battle myself. The fight would kill me. I would never be able to write again without imagining philistines in bad suits reading my words and seeing political intent where there might be nothing of the kind, or seeing the politics only and failing to see everything else.
It’s all gone to hell, John said. He poured himself a glass of water and took another two bromide tablets.
Go easy, buddy.
It only works for me in high doses. I’ve got a bitter taste in my mouth. It’s been there all morning. My wife – John sniffed the air and swayed where he sat. I’m getting the vapors. He squinted at me as if trying to pull my profile into focus. Please help me, Desmond, you’re my best friend.
You too, John.
While it is true that for several years I had thought of John as one of my closest friends and colleagues, the only straight man I could trust with my secrets, I had never quite thought of him as my best friend because I loved you and Helen too much to consider anyone else could be closer. It was surprising to hear John describe me in this way, and yet what could I do but agree? When I said that, I wonder if you felt I betrayed you, or that I was suggesting love and friendship were mutually exclusive orders of sentiment, that you could be my lover but not my friend. I propose this might have been the case because of what you did next, something that struck me as so incredible at the time I wondered if I was hallucinating. You leaned over from the chair where you were sitting and opened my mouth with your lips, slipped the tip of your tongue inside, and flickered it against mine as John watched, red-faced. He looked away but when we kept kissing his gaze returned to us. We were conscious of him watching but continued, open-mouthed and gentle. I wondered if John had ever kissed Mary in that way. He always struck me as a prude, but then he shifted on the couch and adjusted the flaps of his blazer the way a man will when he finds himself aroused in public. We parted and he began laughing. It was not a laugh of derision – this is how I remember it – so I started laughing as well, as if the three of us had been drawn into an alliance through realizing the force of their connection. I am not suggesting John was secretly queer, only perhaps that he understood how his own attractions were neither as fixed nor as polarized as he might once have believed.
I pulled you close again, kissing you once more because the taste of your mouth made me hungry and no matter how much of it I had I always wanted more. John began giggling again. Somewhere a bell was ringing but no one was down, no fat man counting. Then you picked up the phone and the bell stopped and you spoke a few words in your soft western drawl before putting the phone back on its cradle and rolling your eyes.
It was Nick Charles.
Our studio’s own Sammy Glick.
That kid’s a skunk but he knows his job.
He says Mary’s on set and wants to know where I am and whether I’ve seen you, Mr. Marsh.
When John tried to stand he lurched forward and raised his arms to balance himself. Halfway to the door he stopped, glanced over his shoulder, and leaned against the wall. His words came at us fast and angry.
Knock it off! I don’t want to hear dirty talk like that.
Neither you nor I had spoken.
The bromide, you whispered, on top of the booze.
Outside in the glare, swerving through costumed bodies, panels of medieval scenery, a trolley of extras, I noticed a stout man in a panama hat catch my eye. The newsstand pulsed with actors coming and going, and then it was just the three of us again and the ex-carnie who sold papers and traded in daily gossip. There was no chatter that morning so I started reading the front pages of the Los Angeles Times and New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. Every headline made me laugh because the news was so absurd. American airmen lost over Latvia were nothing but spies who had to be taught a lesson by Russia, accordi
ng to the Russians. Bookies had paid off the law to the tune of $108,400 and the law had been only too happy to play racketeer. The City of Los Angeles was close to broke but jobs in the region were on the rise. Some California boy married the sister of the Shah of Iran. Korean ships being rebuilt in Long Beach were the suspected targets of recent alien submarine sightings off the coast. President Truman had credited himself with America’s successes at home and abroad. The whole spirit of the time made me feel out of place, as though I was no longer at home.
By the time we arrived on set, Mary had stepped out again. We’ll start anyway, John said, we can shoot around her. I have to get this picture in the can before they kick me off the lot. He turned to Nick Charles and asked him to bring a cup of coffee, and when it came the director of photography offered John a slug of bourbon from his flask. How many drinks was that? How much bromide had he taken in your suite? How could he be lucid enough to do his job? It seems impossible that he could still have functioned, but this is what I remember, the steady drip of booze and drugs all morning, most mornings, just to keep John going until lunch.
Without Mary, John had to shoot the club scene instead of the one in Ursula’s apartment, so they got you changed into a dinner suit and everyone assembled on Stage 4, extras slouching at tables while chorus girls leaned against planks that let them rest without ruining the press of their gowns. The cameraman measured the distance to you, the lighting was adjusted, and everyone fell silent. It was a short take, you playing the piano as the Arran Sisters sang ‘I Hate to Lose You’. Nick called for quiet on the set and roll it and the camera operator said rolling and speed and someone shouted the scene number and take one and then John shouted action. In the background the song was playing and you began striking the piano keys in time to the recording, fingers dancing while the Arran Sisters yelped their lyrics and it was all over in less than five minutes. People waited for John to call cut, which he did nearly a minute after the action had finished. This had been happening all week, his distraction growing, as if he had known for days that Mary was up to something and the call from Mozelle merely confirmed what he already suspected.
Night for Day Page 9
