Night for Day

by Patrick Flanery

  Give me the key.

  You should be institutionalized, Desmond. You’re sick.

  I don’t think you understand. I have nothing to lose because either way my time here is finished. I have no intention of cooperating with you or the FBI or the House of Representatives or whoever else might demand I betray my friends and principles to go on living a free life in this supposed land of liberty. You, however, have a great deal to lose, and if you don’t cooperate with me, I will phone Hedda Hopper myself and tell her not only about your wife and your marriage, but also about Noah Roy and that fire fourteen years ago. And then I’ll call the cops. So, give me the key.

  Porter fumbled in his pants pocket, withdrew a set of keys, and threw it towards the desk. The record was over. I rose, flipped it, and set it to play once more.

  Round 4

  There was no gun, as I had half-expected to find in the locked drawer, but dozens of files on producers, directors, writers, actors, composers, costume designers, set decorators, and other staff. The largest of the files was on Krug himself. At the back of the drawer was a photo album. I placed each of the files on the desk and as I withdrew the album from the drawer Porter shouted at me to put it back.

  The genre of photograph was not shocking in itself, not to me. Each page presented an array of young men in gymnastic poses. Some depicted two men wrestling, one carrying another, always wearing small posing-strap pouches if anything at all. In the back of the album were a dozen issues of so-called fitness magazines.

  I have an interest in bodybuilding, Porter wheezed.

  As do other men I’ve met in my life.

  The personnel files were similar to my own, stuffed with photographs, documents, clippings, copies of letters, and notes from private detectives employed by the studio. There was a file for you, Myles, and ones for Helen and Barbara, although both of the latter included information only on their political activities. The nature of their personal relationship, as I suspected, remained unknown to the studio or its investigators. It was the Krug file that most interested me. Unlike the others, the case against the head of the studio was chiefly financial. There were copies of bank statements, bond certificates, financial records, deeds, rental agreements, invoices, and check stubs.

  You’d have to be an accountant to make sense of it.

  Laundering, embezzlement, bribes to city officials, organized crime. We’re trying to figure a way to get rid of Krug, but nothing ever sticks. He’s always one hand removed from the actual exchange.

  You don’t have a loyal bone, do you, Porter?

  I’m loyal to myself and the men in New York who sign my paycheck. Krug is a child. He has tantrums. Someone has to keep him in line. I’m the person responsible.

  That must be consoling.

  Listen, I can help you if you just keep quiet. I’ll arrange it so you sit down in private with a couple of fellows, answer their questions, and you’ll never be bothered again. You can go away, spend time in that clinic. We’ll get you well again. I’ve been there myself.

  You call yourself well?

  I manage my illness. They helped me understand I was an anti-narcissist who had no real interest in his personality and projected that interest outward. I have learned to redirect it inward. Bodybuilding has helped me love myself again, Desmond. It might help you as well.

  Nonsense. I wish I could sit inside your head for a couple hours and see what picture you’re running because I bet it’s directed and produced and written by Porter Cherry with music by Cherry and gowns by Cherry and every part in the goddamn picture played by Cherry. Fuck your clinic and your files and your quiet meetings with G-men.

  Porter took off his jacket. Underneath it his shirt was soaked. Whatever affliction he might have, the man was definitely sick. Under other circumstances I might have mustered the selflessness to feel sorry for him but I kept seeing Noah Roy’s face after the fire. Save for Porter’s deception, Noah might have lived, and the life I had known in the intervening years would have been a very different one. I might never have come to Los Angeles, I might never have met you, Myles, although that is only speculation. I regretted and grieved Noah’s death and hated Porter for what I understood to be his responsibility, but I could and can still hold those feelings alongside gratitude for the years you and I spent together. My desire was always, from the moment I met Noah, from the moment I met you, from the moment I have met other men in the years since you and I were last together, a life of open companionship rather than isolation and subterfuge.

  Porter coughed, propping his head in his hands. What are you going to do, Desmond?

  I came here hoping that because of the friendship we once had, you would see your way to making a situation less difficult than it might be. I believed in your humanity. I can’t say that now, and it saddens me to realize you’ve always been a stranger to me. You accuse me of deception, but you were the worse deceiver by far. I deceived only to protect my wellbeing, and the wellbeing of those I’ve loved. You deceived to advance your own position. So I don’t know what I’ll do, but you probably won’t see me again.

  Although I was tempted to take them all and make a bonfire in the hallway, I left the files on the desk and walked out the door without looking back. It was the sort of moment when, in one of my scripts, the character would hear the click of a gun and freeze, but there was only the susurration of air from the vent, the wailing trumpet, and the mechanical slaughter of Susie Cott’s typing. I waited for a moment, hoping Porter might apologize, but neither of us said anything.

  Susie grinned at me as I stepped into the hall. It was more unnerving than if she had frowned.

  Mrs. Tinges called to say that Mr. Krug is waiting for you, Mr. Frank. You’re to go upstairs right away. You’ll find Mr. Krug in the executive gym.

  But the gym itself was deserted so I went looking for Krug in the locker room, wending my way through rows of steel cupboards until I found him near the back, by the showers, immersed mid-chest in an ice bath, bat-wing arms balancing on the rim of a roll-top tub. A chiropractor massaged his shoulders and with each palpitation Krug’s chins jiggled, his whole face bloodless under a bristle of dyed black hair. Through tri-focal lenses, tears running down his face, he squinted and frowned. As I approached the bath, Nick Charles and an assistant appeared from behind a bank of lockers.

  That’s too hard! Krug snarled, reaching up to scrape his fingernails against the back of the chiropractor’s hand. Give me the Pocketbook File.

  Nick passed Krug a thick manila folder. He opened it and held up a photograph of a naked woman.

  Whatcha think of that pussy, Mr. Frank? You might call it a beautiful beaver, don’t you think?

  I wouldn’t know, Mr. Krug.

  What about this one? Krug held up a second photograph. Ain’t that a sweet fucking honeypot?

  I couldn’t honestly say, Mr. Krug.

  Nick? What about you? Dig the shape of this privy pond?

  Nick smirked. I’d say it’s perfect, Mr. Krug. Swimmable.

  Krug laughed, flapping his arms against the ice. This kid kills me.

  The other assistant piped up, I’d swim it, too, Mr. Krug.

  Et tu, Bruce? Krug laughed. Even little boy Bruce would swim it. What about this one, Mr. Frank? Heat your hands in a muff like that?

  No, Mr. Krug, I would not, I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

  And this one? Krug held up another photo, and another, and another. I thought I recognized each of the women from around the lot and began to wonder if the price of bit parts in the studio’s films was posing for Krug’s private gallery. When I failed to pass comment on any of them, Krug shook his head. What a waste.

  How’s that, Mr. Krug?

  I assume Porter has explained the studio’s position, and what will be required if you want to remain in our employment, although given your moral and political deviance I have my doubts about the wisdom of doing anything other than burning you at the stake. I don’t believe Reds or queers ca
n be reformed. Porter has other ideas. He’s the pragmatist in this marriage. I’m the realist. You might be able to win him over, but I’ll always see a Red Queen when I look at you. And after all I gave you. That’s not gratitude on your face.

  I think you’ll find Porter has changed his mind.

  I know he’s as big a faggot as you, if that’s what you’re implying. Porter doesn’t matter. I make the decisions here. I decide who stays and who goes. I’m a rich man. I’m the most successful movie man in history. I’m so fucking rich I could buy and sell everyone in this town if the fancy took me, and you are a peon, Mr. Frank, nothing more than that. You know how many novelists and dramatists and cartoonists and two-bit scribblers would bend over and let me fuck them blind just to set foot on this lot? You are replaceable, and I say you go.

  I wanted to ask Krug if he had ever truly cared for someone other than himself, demand to know what he had done for the war widows, for all the fatherless children and childless parents apart from make money off their grief. I wanted to know what he did for the young men and women who came to the studio and earned so little they could barely survive. Instead I stood there in silence, but my silence seemed to anger him more than anything I might have said. His face began to turn red, so deeply red that it appeared nearly black in the low light of the locker room. The ice in his bath cracked and the meltwater sloshed. I thought of telling Krug that I spent every day inventing characters who were each, in some small respect, portraits of myself, and that when audiences across the country watched actors playing those versions of me they began to see the world through my eyes, legions of people like me weeping and suffering, laughing and delighting, just trying to live happily and prosperously, and that in time they would turn to men like Krug and condemn them, just as I do now.

  Except I said none of this, because it seemed pointless to do so. I was not going to change his mind. I was not about to make him see himself differently or become a better person through my righteous indignation. He was too evil or too stupid, or both.

  I took a breath and said, Oh go to hell, Leo. I quit.

  When he heard this, Krug began to struggle, pressing his weight up and rising to stand in the ice. The moment he reached his feet, revealing the whole red and yellow mass of his body, he slipped and fell back into the tub, howling in pain.

  Rather than feeling defeated, as I walked back to the elevator I imagined I could dance up the walls and across the ceiling. Never in my life had I quit anything, and the sensation was so strange, so liberating, that I both wanted something to happen, for there to be an immediate response, and feared it would be so dramatic that it would make me change my mind. That potential for undoing was as perversely attractive as the determination to continue on the path I had chosen was reassuring. I expected someone would come running after me to drag me back into that locker room – perhaps Nick and Bruce and the chiropractor, or even Leo Krug himself, naked and dripping meltwater, screaming for my head. But no one came, I was alone, and those halls that were supposed to signify wealth and glamor looked cheap, the paint applied hastily, boards joined roughly in corners, lights flickering and carpet riding up, everything smelling faintly of sewage and damp. The whole place was nothing but a pile of plaster and horsehair, bound together with sawdust and glue.

  In my office, I picked up the phone and called Stan, who had been looking after my affairs since I first came to work for the studio. When he had finished screaming at me for five minutes he asked what I intended to do next and I told him I would go to Paris or Rome, although I had not at that moment decided one way or the other.

  You and Julie Dassin, Stan sighed. Maybe you can shack up and make plotless po-faced pictures about the proletariat and put us all to sleep. I wish you’d phoned me before you went to see Cherry. You should have done what he asked. It would have made your life much easier in the long run.

  He gave me no other choice, Stan.

  Now, now, Desmond, he chided me, remember the first thing I ever told you when you arrived from New York? Always you have a choice.

  It is no more than a reassuring fantasy to suggest that one always has a choice. Sometimes at least one of the choices presented is impossible, or appears impossible, because it would imperil the life or wellbeing of yourself or someone else, because it is ethically compromised or antithetical to everything you believe to be moral and right. I still say that I did not have a choice, that I could not have lived with myself if I had taken Porter’s offer to submit to psychoanalytic treatment determined to harangue the queer out of me, or condescend to cooperate with a witch hunt I believed then and still believe was evil, however I might look back critically upon my own political beliefs at the time, however Marxism has been irremediably tarnished by the twentieth-century history of Communist states, however the Russia that was briefly our strategic ally in World War II has proven itself over the subsequent decades (notwithstanding the hopeful years of Gorbachev) to be hostile to freedom and democracy and America itself, hostile in more recent years to everything I hold dear, including the possibility of being a man who loves men openly, without apology, without risk of persecution.

  As I sat in my office, I did not know whether to believe what Porter said about you, Myles. His suggestion that you had so easily acceded to the studio’s demands was more upsetting than the discovery that our relationship was known to Porter and Krug, and presumably also to Nick Charles and others. I also felt pained that I had put you in such a position, that I had pursued you in the first place, that I had convinced you we could manage our secret if we were careful. I even felt pained that I had allowed you to straddle me by the pool in your own backyard rather than insisting we do nothing, ever, which might be captured by the lens of someone who wanted to destroy us. Thinking through all of this, I found you splitting apart in my mind, one Myles cooperating with the studio, perhaps even giving evidence against me, quick to agree to treatment you did not need, the other Myles a victim of my own selfishness, thrown into peril because I had done too little to protect you. I would not be so cruel as to compare you to Noah Roy. I am old enough to see that between two people one has loved there will always be an element of incommensurability. You were each your own person, absolutely, of such radically different origins and character that no comparison was truly possible except in the most reductive terms: your sex, your appearance, your way of being in the world. Nonetheless, as I looked around at the desk and the shelves I would soon begin packing, I thought to myself that Noah Roy would never have made me doubt his loyalty in the way that you suddenly had.

  SHE TURNED AWAY

  Part Three

  EXT. HIGHWAY 99 - DAY

  Faye’s car stings along the freeway, zipping past mountains and onto the desert where the shimmer of afternoon light blurs its outline.

  INT. FAYE’S CAR – CONTINUOUS

  Orph digs his fingers into the steering wheel and checks his watch, as if wondering how long this adventure might take. From time to time he and Faye turn to each other, every glance drawing them deeper into their own shadows.

  ORPH (V.O.)

  Thing with twins, even identical ones, you always like one of them more than the other. I’d married Ursula, but it was Faye who had something – not just poise and beauty but that strange quality a woman who’s been overlooked most of her life always has, of recognizing when a man is low and knowing how to pick him up.

  A jackrabbit runs across the road and, as Orph fails to see it, Faye reaches out to turn the wheel and save them from hitting the animal.

  Her hand lingers on Orph’s longer than it should and he looks down at her fingers. Maybe he’d like them to stay there and maybe Faye wouldn’t mind obliging, but she puts her hand back in her lap.

  ORPH (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  Ursula was all opportunity. For a while I liked it, but Faye was the nurse in the ward who bathes your cuts and dabs your brow and even when she’s low herself never lets a guy think he’s in danger of stumbling out of life if he cou
ghs too hard. I told her something like that once, but it was already too late.

  FLASHBACK TO:

  INT. BALLROOM - EVENING

  Years earlier, at the party following the joint wedding ceremony between Faye and Jack, Ursula and Orph, both couples share a champagne toast, surrounded by friends. Orph wears his Army dress uniform.

  EMCEE

  Now it’s time for the best man’s dance. In this case, since the grooms are each other’s best men, the couples invite everyone to join them.

  Swapping partners, the two couples trip down to the floor as the band whirls into ‘Frenesi’. Faye and Orph get caught up in the crush of their guests, becoming separated from Jack and Ursula.

  FAYE

  Looking very handsome, Private Patterson.

  ORPH

  Come on, Faye, don’t tease.

  FAYE

  Take a compliment, soldier. You’re dashing. Why, if I –

  Stopping herself, she looks away from Orph, but her feet keep moving as the tempo quickens, hand tightening where it touches his shoulder.

  ORPH

  Faye, I want to tell you something –

  Turning her head so gradually time might have stopped, Faye looks at him as if she knows what he’s about to confess.

  ORPH (V.O.)

  I knew she felt it, too. We were both a little wounded, both ready to look after someone who’d been wounded in the same way. We were the ones who were supposed to be together and it would haunt us for as long as we came home to the wrong person.

  As they hold each other’s gaze, Orph leads Faye around the dance floor. They are far enough away from the others that they can speak without fear of being overheard, although they keep their voices low, as if conscious of the danger.

  FAYE

  You know it isn’t possible.

  ORPH

  Why shouldn’t it be?