The music grew louder and we turned to see the band descending from the top to the lower deck until the feet of the musicians were all around us. A coffin was placed on top of the two benches between which we had hidden ourselves and Trudie Page started speaking in her unmistakable high-pitched voice as a clarinet comically sulked.
Oh Lord, woe of woes, my darling son is lost and we must make this final passage across the tortuous, the troublous, the terrible swamp of my sorrow to deposit my boy on the far gray shore where he will be reunited at last with his father! I will never see either of my beloved men ever more, until my own last day, if God should choose to spare my soul…
Cut! the director shouted from the dinghy alongside the boat. It’s supposed to be funny, Trudie, not so solemn!
Listen, Billy, I have the highest IQ on this lot and you make me act like I couldn’t think without a man winding me up to play the tune. I don’t see why this has to be a comedy. The words aren’t funny. The Civil War isn’t funny! The only thing funny is the way you’re making me play it. This is about a woman grieving the death of her husband and son and you want schtick like I’m still at the Concord pitching for cheap yucks!
Do the scene the way I say and shut up already, the director yelled. If you break contract, I’ll make sure you never work again. Not here, not at the Concord, not even in a graveyard. Okay, let’s try it again.
Trudie and the other actors returned grumbling to the upper deck as the boat rattled back along the tracks to the pier. John peeked out to see what was happening as the music started again from the beginning.
Strange funeral.
We need to get you some coffee, John.
After Trudie had repeated the funeral oration five times, the boat pulled to a stop at another pier and the director finally called cut and print. The musicians trudged down the gangway and after they were gone John and I got up on our knees and looked out from between the benches. Trudie was still there and leaned over to help us stand. I’ve been wondering when you two would come out, she said. This picture is from hunger. They told me it was a drama but they’ve changed it on account of Billy has an idea a Civil War comedy is hep. I’m going to the commissary. You coming?
We followed Trudie’s black ruffled skirts off the boat and around the edge of the lake to the New England town square. What were you fellows doing in the boat anyway?
Trying to get back to Stage 3.
Strange way of going. They send a car for me if I ask but I always take the trolley. I don’t like all that star hooey.
We’re looking for Mary.
Trudie frowned. Of course I don’t know anything about it, John, but I’m pretty sure I saw her headed for the East Gate a couple hours ago.
You must be mistaken. She wouldn’t leave the lot. We’re supposed to be shooting.
Trudie squinted at us. Then why aren’t you shooting?
Because I’m looking for Mary.
You’re not making much sense. Maybe you should see a doctor, John. You look a little green.
Across the town square smoke billowed above the roofs of the buildings and after turning a corner we arrived all at once in the middle of the night, on the edge of a prison riot. John stepped back and forth between daylight and darkness, looking skyward as if he failed to understand what was happening.
Far gone, isn’t he? Trudie whispered to me. What’s he on?
He thinks Mary’s turning snitch to the Feds.
Wouldn’t surprise me. She once put a yellow star on my dressing room door. Of course she claimed it wasn’t her but no one else was around. When I confronted her she said, but Trudie, darling, why be upset? It’s a star, and you’re a star. It seems perfectly silly to make a fuss. You know how she is.
We watched as John ran back and forth between morning and midnight, his eyes wild with bewilderment.
Poor fool thinks the duvetyn is real night, Trudie laughed, and then she was caught up in the mêlée and borne away by the crowd of extras. Sorry, Desmond, see you later! she shouted as the rioting men floated her body on their hands and put her down gently on the far side of the set.
The prison was on fire and those hundreds of men dressed as convicts were shouting for it to burn. Everyone looked a little panicked, as if the fire or the riot were getting out of control, flaming beyond artifice and into reality.
You guys a part of this scene or not? one of the convicts asked me.
Before I could answer another one seized John and yelled, It’s the warden! He’s the one we want! We’re supposed to throw him in the fire!
Pig!
Fat cat!
Enemy of the people!
I watched horrified as three men tore John’s jacket from his back and began beating their fists against his shoulders. He bent double to protect himself but the men forced him upright again and one of them punched him square in the face, splitting his lip open. I had never been in a fight, not once in my life, but I tried to intervene, placing myself between John and the men as the mob propelled us closer towards the prison gate where the flames were most intense. At the moment it seemed we might be pushed straight into the fire, I saw there was a gap in the flames and seized John’s hand, pulling him through the blaze and around to a quiet corner behind the gate, just out of sight of the mob.
We were both out of breath, scorched but not burned, John’s shirt filthy and his face covered in blood.
I lost my jacket.
You’ll get another.
I seem to be bleeding.
We’ll get you patched up, John.
How do we get past them?
It was a reasonable question. The gap in the flames had closed so that we were stuck between the prison set and the backlot’s high perimeter fence. By chance, I noticed a manhole cover and remembered a conversation I’d had with that carpenter I once slept with which made me think it might offer an escape.
Help me with this, I said.
Together, John and I lifted the cover and pushed it aside. I climbed down first, finding my way by touch until I dropped into darkness. John followed, balancing on the narrow ladder so that he could pull the cover back into place before climbing down to join me at the bottom. In the dark he felt for my hand.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust but sunlight was coming in from grates farther along the tunnel and that was enough to guide us. Time seemed to thicken, the planet dragging in its rotation, flattening us both. John breathed in a lungful of sewer air and doubled over, retching. I held his shoulders as he heaved, vomiting like he was bringing up organs. When he was finished he coughed a few times and wiped his face.
Any better?
Turned inside out. Where are we, Desmond?
This tunnel runs back to Main Street. There should be an exit near Stage 5. It’s a half-hour walk from here. Back in the twenties they were going to build an underground train to link the soundstages to the backlot, to make more efficient use of studio land, but then they ran out of money and repurposed it as a sewer. You can’t say the studio doesn’t know how to reuse what it has. All the fundamental principles are already in place, you know?
I don’t follow.
I mean politically speaking. Films are of necessity communal works, made by a community of people sharing in the labor, doing the jobs for which they are most suited by their natural talent or ability. Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!
You shouldn’t speak German, Desmond. It makes you sound suspicious.
I ignored him and continued. The difference is most of the people on this particular assembly line don’t get paid what they deserve or what they need, and the problem comes from the top, with Leo Krug and the New York executives who see this not as a great communal endeavor for the creation of art and mutual cultural benefit but as a factory producing units to sell to a populace bewitched by the screen stories and transformed by those illusions into zombies of false consciousness, believing they too might overcome the daily tribulations of life in this natio
n just as their favorite stars do, trusting they too might strike it rich and employ maids and own country houses in Connecticut. But you and I, John, we know better. Such dreams are only for the lucky – people like you who won the game through hard work and innate talent, and people like me born with every advantage and nurtured by parents and teachers to keep them and their offspring always advancing higher. It’s a system stacked against people like you, John. You managed to beat it but you’re the exception—
John had increased his pace and was walking ahead of me. I knew he had stopped listening because this was not a version of the American story he wanted to hear. No matter how much money he had, how large a house or how many cars, he would never stop being a boy from gold-rush country who had panned in streams, climbed apple trees, and stolen into vineyards to eat grapes from the vine. He would always be hungry for more, guarding his plate with both hands, and he would always want to believe that the myth of America was anything but. With a wife he had discovered he could not trust, there were only a handful of friends who might stand by his side. His parents still lived on the same land where his father had been born, and where his mother insisted she would go on keeping house although John had offered to build them a larger one, pay for a housekeeper, and give them a new car every year. When he once asked if they would consider moving to Los Angeles, his mother, raised a Presbyterian but converted to the Foursquare Gospel of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson’s radio ministry, said they could not conceive of it given what they had heard about the doings of the Hollywood community. Sodom and Gomorrah. He had invited them to each of his premieres but they had never condescended to attend. It would make your father uncomfortable, his mother claimed. He prefers I should read him the Bible, and that is my pleasure and duty.
To fill the silence between us I kept talking, my voice echoing along the tunnel, arms and hands gesticulating, but John was now several paces ahead and seemed oblivious. I wondered whether he would notice if I stopped and turned back, but I hurried up to catch him so that soon we were again walking two abreast, quickening our speed as I went on narrating my screed against the studio, the system, the way America had turned against itself and turned its own people against one another, until the two of us broke into a steady run, and although we did not say why we were running haste seemed paramount: we had to find Mary, to finish shooting that film while we still had time, because time was running beside us, flowing in the filthy red water at our feet, water so red with iron it looked like blood, splashing up against our legs and reminding us that this might be our last day on the lot.
After a quarter hour of running John stumbled to a stop ahead of me, climbed a ladder, heaved a manhole cover clear, and disappeared into the light. I stood there a moment alone, the light from above catching my face. In the strange silence that settled around me, I was sure I heard another pair of feet in the tunnel, and the low murmur of a man trying to quiet his breath.
7
In my youth, I was never one to tabulate my accomplishments. I hardly kept track of what I completed, working along steadily, trying to keep myself occupied and using writing as a means of preserving my sanity. But now, as the end approaches, I feel moved to catalogue the products of my mind. In the absence of children who might outlive me, there are only these works, the films and books and stories I wrote, which may have given pleasure or solace to strangers as well as to friends, and which may, if they have any value, outlast my own presence on this earth. Is that not what everyone wishes, to be certain that something of us remains even when we are gone, that someone somewhere will remember we were present for a microsecond of history? She Turned Away was not my greatest work, but I feel affection for it nonetheless, perhaps because of your place in it, Myles, your role in bringing it to life, although I know that if it is remembered now or in the future it will be not because of me, not really, but because of you and Mary and John, who animated my words with such vividness.
This evening Alessio helps me begin the project of cataloguing. Copies are missing – editions of some books, particularly from the series of Orph Patterson novels that followed the film, because I was too generous in giving away what stock I had, and copies of some films, because they were made before video and DVDs and such technologies were ever invented. So we set about ordering what is missing to fill in the blanks in my own collection of myself. I describe these books and films as myself because what else are they, even the films, even when produced and populated and made possible by the participation and performance of so many others, but an aspect of my own mind and person? It is a narcissistic project, but no different in a way to what other elderly people do, making albums of their children and grandchildren, sending an annual holiday letter to friends and family recounting all the successes and minor dramas of their offspring. The larger archive – haphazardly maintained over the years – of correspondence and contracts and drafts of the books and scripts, is already boxed up in this study, where Alessio knows to find it after my death. Who will care about such papers when I’m gone, or about my library? I thought of leaving it to you, or to your own children, Myles, those children I have never met and yet about whom I feel a strange sense of relation, as if I had made them possible, even though I was not the one responsible for bringing you and Helen together. But perhaps I was responsible for ensuring that you remained together. Perhaps my departure facilitated the longevity of your union and the children you acquired.
Forgive that note of bitterness. I know that had I remained there would have been no children for me unless I entered into my own lavender marriage, and I do not mean to suggest I disapprove of your family, or resent the fact that you were able to have one. The choice was there for me to make, and I refused it. Do your children help mitigate the melancholy of old age? Do you look at them and feel a sense of consolation that your spirit will continue beyond your physical presence, that you have made some lasting mark upon them that they will in turn pass along to their own children, or do you feel just as uncertain as I that you have done anything to ensure you are remembered after all who have known you are themselves dead and gone?
Alessio tells me I think too much about such things, and instead suggests it is the fate of the queer artist without children to leave behind nothing apart from his works. Easy for you to say, I tell him, you might fall into bed tomorrow with some young woman who would produce an heir for you. But this is disgusting, Desmond. What, the idea you might love a woman? I don’t see that’s disgusting. Of course not, no, he says, but all this talk of heirs and inheritance. This is not a need that I feel. I am here, I live, I love you, when you are gone I will love others, and I will try to be a good person and leave behind some decent work, the best work I can produce, and if that is not enough, then at least I have tried to be kind to those who know me, even to strangers who just encounter me. It sounds very cozy, I say, and he grimaces. You are in a bad mood. This raking over the past, it makes you sour. You should live for now, or get on the phone and call Myles and tell him for goodness sake the silence has gone on long enough, you’re sorry, can you please come see him, or whatever you imagine might happen. I wouldn’t resent it, I would totally understand. Anyway, it’s time for bed, almost midnight.
He is right, of course, but the fact is I cannot bring myself to do it, to pick up the phone, or even to apologize to you without also holding you to account for your own decisions that day more than sixty years ago.
As John and I emerged from the sewer twelve tones rang bronze and equal through the air, reminding me there was only an hour until my lunch with Krug and Cherry. A reek of vomit was coming from John so I led us to the Men’s Wardrobe building and asked them to loan us a couple of suits. In a corner stuffed with armor John and I undressed, bundling our dirty clothes into paper bags. I had escaped most of the blows at the prison shoot but John’s body was blooming with yellow and purple splotches. The cut on his lip had stopped bleeding and one of the wardrobe boys brought us cotton swabs and a bowl of warm water.
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I can do it, John said, splashing on the floor.
No, let me, your hand’s trembling, I imagine I said, and he gave me a pitiful smile of defeat. We had never been as close as this, standing in our briefs with clothes piled around us and suits of Roman armor clattering above our heads. While I dabbed at the dried blood on his face it struck me that the scene had been dressed for a different variety of encounter, one that neither of us would have wanted, and yet John put a hand tenderly, almost intimately, on my bare shoulder, as if he was imagining a future in which he would open himself to the full spectrum of desire. Nothing happened of course. Neither of us wished for anything of the kind, or at least I did not. I realize I cannot speak for John, who may have had more complex feelings than I assume.
Once I had finished with John’s wound we dressed in fresh white shirts, navy suits, silk ties, and slipped back into our own socks and shoes, which one of the wardrobe boys had polished.
I want to say sorry, Desmond. I know you’re not against me. I wasn’t in my right mind.
Don’t apologize. In this time and place you would have to be naïve not to wonder if everyone around you isn’t engaged in an elaborate deception. When I lie next to Myles I ask myself whether what he tells me is true. How can you trust a genius of artifice, whose job is to sell the most convincing lies? Writers, too, we’re no different, it’s just that we don’t have to perform our lies in the flesh. And you, John, in a way you’re the master deceiver because you have to orchestrate word and flesh and make the lies convincing at one remove from reality, to make my lies and Myles’s lies and the lies of the scenery and locations marry in a semblance of truth. How do I know I can trust you? How do you know you can trust me? We’re caught in this rotten system of professional deception and what have we left but blind trust? I trust you because of the length of our friendship and the fact that you’ve always been fair with me. I trust you because you know about Myles and me and say nothing to no one. I trust blindly and wildly that Myles doesn’t go to bed with his wife or, God forbid, take himself down to that gas station on Hollywood Boulevard to sleep with some man other than me. And I trust him because he assures me he doesn’t. If I didn’t trust him I would be alone, miserable and paranoid, until the day I died. You’re right to wonder who you can trust. In the end, it’s a gamble. We think the hand we hold is stronger than the hand of the man or woman across the table and so we put down our chips and take off our gold watches and lay down the deeds to our properties, strip off our clothes, and sit here naked, betting everything in our possession because we think we know the truth about the people in whom we’ve invested our trust in this hazardously blind way. And in the end, you know, it’s mostly the fault of this capitalist system. If we didn’t have property to lose we’d all be much happier and more trusting.
Night for Day Page 17
