Night for Day

by Patrick Flanery

  ORPH

  You knew right where to find him. Led me to that house like you’d been there a hundred times. I heard you talking after you thought I’d passed out. What’s the drift, little sister?

  Faye stares with a new sense of distance, but also respect. She flicks her hair back over her shoulder, turns to face the mirror, and touches up her lipstick, eyeing Orph’s reflection against her own.

  FAYE

  Sure, I knew where he lived, and I knew Ursula had trouble with him, but Woody Montez is no friend of mine. He’s more dangerous than you can imagine.

  ORPH

  I know how to deal with dangerous men.

  FAYE

  Not Woody. Montez thinks Right and Wrong are two sides on a menu, choose a dish from whichever you please, hold the gravy. Apple pie grenades for dessert with a side of arsenic ice cream.

  ORPH

  I’ll call the cops.

  FAYE

  If you think that’ll do any good you’re as big a fool as Ursula said.

  Orph grabs Faye by the shoulders and pulls her from the chair. He looks like he might hit her, then realizes what he’s doing and stops himself.

  FAYE (CONT’D)

  Just like Woody. Nothing but a lousy thug. At least Woody knows which side he’s on.

  ORPH

  I’m nothing like him. I’ll show you. I’ll go to the cops.

  Faye steps away from him, her right hand reaching inside the dressing gown to fondle the butt of a pistol. For now it sleeps where it lies, wrapped up warm in Chinese silk.

  FAYE

  Cops in this town are so crooked they think a girl walking a straight line is a criminal.

  In the background, they hear the Fury Girls’ number come to an end and Faye slides her hand out of her pocket.

  FAYE (CONT’D)

  I’d tell you to come play but you don’t look up to the job.

  ORPH

  Nothing wrong with my hands.

  FAYE

  Go home, Orph. Get some sleep. You can’t fight Montez. If Ursula’s in trouble with Woody we might as well forget her, but one way or another you’re gonna have to pay up.

  EXT. MALAVITA - NIGHT

  In Malavita’s parking lot Orph climbs into Ursula’s white convertible coupe. He sits for a moment, studying the war-zone map of his face in the rearview mirror.

  ORPH (V.O.)

  I couldn’t tell if Faye was playing me or playing someone else. I had the idea she knew more than she was saying about Ursula. Maybe Ursula wasn’t even gone and the two of them were cooking up something together only I was too dumb to see it.

  INT. URSULA’S CAR - NIGHT

  Driving through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, Orph can’t stop glancing in the rearview mirror – no longer to look at his face, but to survey the traffic that might be behind him.

  ORPH (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  Every corner I turned, I kept looking for the little white bullet of Faye’s car, expecting it to hit me right between the shoulders before I’d even heard the trigger. And if it wasn’t Faye holding the gun, I knew it would be Montez collecting in the only way that would give a guy like him satisfaction. And if it wasn’t him or Faye, then I had this feeling my own big brother might be there, riding on my back fender, waiting for the right moment to catch me in his sights.

  INT. URSULA’S APARTMENT - NIGHT

  Orph opens the door to the Wilshire apartment, leaves the key in the lock, and pours himself a drink.

  Two fingers of bourbon, no ice, nothing to slow its transit. He drinks it quick and has another, looking out the window at the semaphore of city lights as if trying to read the code.

  ORPH (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  That night I realized I was alone. There was no one I could trust. Only person I had on my side was me, and I began to wonder if everything I’d been told since I came back from the war was a lie.

  When the doorbell buzzes, Orph puts down the empty glass on the windowsill, steps into the bedroom, finds his uniform in the closet, and from the pocket of the jacket retrieves a key that opens a locked drawer in the top of his dresser.

  From the drawer he removes a .45 semiautomatic pistol. The doorbell buzzes again and he tucks the gun inside the waist of his slacks before cracking the front door.

  It’s Faye, cocooned in black silk. When he sees the glint of blonde hair he opens the door wider, standing close as she slopes into the room, drawing the hood of material away from her head. Orph keeps one hand behind his back.

  FAYE

  You can use both hands, Corporal. I’m a big girl...

  Faye grasps his arm, he holds it firm, and then, rising on the balls of her feet, she angles her face up, brushing her lips against his. His shoulder moves and Faye’s expression turns cold as she feels the pistol poking her in the ribs.

  FAYE (CONT’D)

  I said hands, not arms. Thought you were honorable, soldier.

  ORPH

  You want me to believe this is a fair fight?

  FAYE

  Told you I know nothing about Montez.

  ORPH

  Maybe you tell me what you do know, and quick, before my finger starts to twitch.

  Faye slinks into an armchair as Orph keeps the pistol trained on her. It jumps in his hand, as though it needs a longer leash, but when he’s satisfied Faye isn’t going anywhere he sits across from her, putting the gun at his side.

  FAYE

  I shouldn’t be here. Jack will wonder.

  ORPH

  Then go home.

  FAYE

  Couldn’t help myself, Orph. When I saw you again, I began to remember how it used to be with Jack and me.

  ORPH

  You had your chance, Faye. I told you I’d go away with you, once upon a time, but it’s too late for that.

  FAYE

  What do you mean had my chance?

  Orph seems surprised, as if Faye has forgotten a part of the past he could never imagine forgetting, as if the whole story of his life over the last decade was starting to unspool on the floor.

  ORPH

  I’m talking about the night of our weddings. We both felt it. I told you then we could go away together and leave Jack and Ursula to lick their wounds. But it’s too late for that now.

  Faye looks so startled she almost seems angry, and then, a little too slowly for it to make sense to Orph, she composes her face.

  FAYE

  You and me – of course, I have to confess I’d forgotten.

  ORPH

  Not exactly consolation.

  FAYE

  That isn’t what I meant. It was so long ago. You mean to say you’ve loved me all this time?

  Orph strokes the pistol and looks away from her, blushing.

  FAYE (CONT’D)

  I see. Oh, yes, I see. Of course you’re right, I can’t go away with you now, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t stay here. Sometimes sticking around can be just as exciting as leaving...

  ORPH

  Jack’s my brother. That hasn’t changed.

  FAYE

  You think he stays in nights when I’m not around?

  ORPH

  Maybe you both need a little house training.

  Faye slides across to the couch. Orph grips the pistol and although he doesn’t move the gun he has it pointing in Faye’s direction as she presses her mouth against his once more. This time he responds, letting her lean hard across his chest. He releases the gun and moves his hand to touch her back, gripping her tightly.

  ORPH (V.O.)

  Sure I was wondering what Jack was gonna do when he found out, because I knew there was no way this monster would stay locked underground. We’d let it out and now we had to deal with the beast. But I still couldn’t make myself trust her.

  EXT. WILSHIRE BLVD - NIGHT

  From the street, the lights in Orph’s apartment go black. Inside a dark telephone booth a flame darts, illuminating the face of Eddie Majestic. He flicks a lighter on and off but has nothing
to burn as he holds the phone receiver up to his ear.

  EDDIE

  Nah, if that chump suspected she’d a been out the door already. I’ll stick around. You know me, I likes the night.

  As he finishes the call, Eddie turns the flame on the telephone cord, smiling as it starts to smoke and melt.

  EXT. WILSHIRE BLVD – NEXT DAY

  Eddie wakes up the following morning in his car, watching when Faye emerges from Orph’s apartment building. She gets into her own car and drives off.

  Orph appears a moment later. He climbs into Ursula’s car and heads in the opposite direction. Eddie starts his car and follows, a block behind Orph.

  INT. URSULA’S CAR - DAY

  Orph checks the rearview mirror and as he turns a corner the traffic thickens. Eddie’s car is just visible in the distance, but Orph doesn’t notice.

  ORPH (V.O.)

  I had a hunch that Rose Zapatero might have more to tell me than she did before, so I headed back to Pasadena.

  EXT. PASADENA BUNGALOW - DAY

  Outside the Zapatero house, Orph is surprised to see a FOR SALE sign hammered into the front lawn.

  He rings the doorbell and when there’s no answer he knocks, rings again, and finally gives up, walking back towards the curb as a WOMAN in the house next door shouts from her backyard.

  PASADENA NEIGHBOR

  Oh mister! You looking for someone?

  Orph turns around, walks to the other house, and talks to the woman over her low picket fence.

  ORPH

  Rose Zapatero still live next door?

  PASADENA NEIGHBOR

  That house has been vacant for the last six months. They’ve been trying to sell but no one’s biting.

  ORPH

  Come again?

  PASADENA NEIGHBOR

  I feel bad for the girl and her mother, they could sure use the money.

  ORPH

  I don’t understand. I thought Rose Zapatero lived there.

  PASADENA NEIGHBOR

  Used to be the Wesleys lived there, but then the father, Mr. Wesley that is, he got killed, shot right through the living room window while his wife and daughter were upstairs. My stars, I can hardly bear to think about it. This was always such a quiet neighborhood, too.

  ORPH

  But I was here a couple days ago. I met the woman who lived there, Rose Zapatero.

  PASADENA NEIGHBOR

  You must have the wrong house, that’s all I can think. Such a tragedy, but then everyone knew Ralph Wesley was mixed up in business on the Strip, gambling and whatnot, and like I always say to Mr. Darien, nothing good can come of business on the Strip. It’s getting so I’m ready to move back to Iowa.

  As Orph walks to his car he catches sight of a dark vehicle parked down the street. Maybe it looks a little out of place, maybe there’s nothing suspicious about it at all, but as he gets back in his own car he keeps clocking the drag in the rearview mirror. It’s too far to see who the driver might be, too distant to recognize Eddie Majestic, slumped low behind the wheel.

  ORPH (V.O.)

  I had the right address, and I remembered the house, but if Rose Zapatero didn’t live there I started to wonder if she even existed. What with the murder and the connections to the Strip, the smell was getting stronger all the time. It was sweet and sour and a little too familiar. And then there was the tail I thought I’d grown, hard and dark and a hundred miles long. I sat there for an hour, waiting to see if the other guy would make a move and when I finally drove off, he twitched to life, wagging me all the way back to the city, and Malavita, and the brother I was sure I oughta know better.

  Internal Memo

  April 10, 1950

  To: John Marsh and Desmond Frank

  CC: Leo Krug, Nick Charles

  From: Porter Cherry

  Gentlemen –

  Having spent this past weekend reading the most recent draft of She Turned Away, I cannot help raising what I feel are two quite grave concerns, one of a political, the other of an artistic nature. I hope you will consider these issues as seriously as I take them.

  First of all, I did not recall the very queer dream sequence from any of your previous drafts and can only imagine you must have inserted this at the last minute to prevent it being overruled. It cannot, of course, stand as it is, being too far beyond the ordinary, too much in the realm of the surreal for such a picture of daily life in the Los Angeles of today.

  Secondly, I must object in the strongest possible terms to your inappropriate references to the bombing of Japan. It seems entirely unacceptable to pervert an innocent picture of this kind into some ugly variety of pacifist commentary on what all reasonable people would now agree was the legitimate and wholly honorable end to a war that no one wished to see prolonged.

  The presence of Japanese soldiers in the dream sequence, which you will have no choice but to modify or eliminate, is beyond the pale of taste, as it seems to suggest some equivalence between our own fighting boys and those of our enemy, whom you must not forget we vanquished.

  The American picture-goer does not want to sit down in the dark and find himself smacked in the face with the unpopular beliefs of what our friends in England rightly deride as ‘Percies’ too scared to do their duty in defense of freedom. Be honorable, gentlemen, and change this rotten script.

  Yours,

  Porter

  Internal Memo

  April 10, 1950

  To: Porter Cherry

  CC: John Marsh

  From: Desmond Frank

  Dear Porter,

  It was with considerable dismay that I read your memo this morning. As for your accusation of some late addition, all I can do is tell you to read the earlier drafts: the dream sequence was always there, as it is in my story, on which this picture is based. The story, as you may remember (if you read it), is even more political in its references to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than the screenplay we have written. If, in your limited wisdom, you think it impossible for our picture to examine issues of equivalence between Japanese and Allied Forces, even in the setting of a recently discharged and traumatized soldier’s dreams, then what can we two lowly artists do but bow to your insistence of superior knowledge and morals?

  Where I would wish to draw the line is with your insistence that a dream sequence of this kind does not belong in a serious and otherwise realist picture. Have you not seen Mr. Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (produced, in case you forgot, by your dear friend and erstwhile Svengali Mr. Selznick), which includes one of the most extraordinary dream sequences ever put to film and was made a scant five years ago with the guidance of no lesser a figure than the artist Mr. Salvador Dalí? Or, if that is too recent for you, who seem ever more cemented in the past, what about Georg Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul, a deeply serious picture with one of the strangest and most unsettling dream sequences in the history of our young art.

  What makes such montages of the unconscious mind (however imaginary) so distressing, and so uncanny, is their placement in a picture set in and drawn from the ordinary world around us, a world recognizable as our own, and one that by its very ordinariness allows us to distinguish our dreams as dreams because they are so extra-ordinary. If dreams become ordinary in art they are no longer dreams, because the world of the dream is the world of our darkest and most hidden self. That is all we are trying to do in this sequence, to explore the depths of the character Orph Patterson’s tormented inner life. If the unconscious is so distressing to you, Porter, even when imaginary, then perhaps you should not be in the business of motion pictures, which are about nothing if not the subconscious and unconscious parts of our tortured minds.

  As for your imputation of cowardice, I resent the suggestion. I, for one, presented myself to fight and was refused as physically unfit, a clear 4-F case. That is all I hope I need say on the matter.

  Yours regretfully,

  Desmond

  10

  Alone in my office I sat spinning a fountain p
en between my fingers, an image surrounded by countless other images, myself no less an image than the framed photographs of you and Helen, no less an image than the pen or desk or door or my books or copies of the scripts I had written, no less an image than my typewriter or stapler. I touched my brow automatically, as I learned to touch it, blindly, as a child, discovering the arc required for my fingertips to find the precise place on my face where I wished them to rest, my body the center of all my perceptions, trained to understand its place, its association, with all the things, all the images of things, that surround it, those images received by my retinas, processed by my brain, two streams of information brought together into a single perception. The sense of liberation I felt on leaving Krug and telling Porter I would not submit to his demands that I prostrate myself before analysts and agents had evaporated and in its place was a sense of panic that debilitated me because I knew I had already left it too long in telling you what I intended, and yet a part of me still believed that if I kept delaying, willing everything to resolve itself so that by some magic I would find a solution that might allow me to stay without compromise, or could imagine a proposal that would convince you to accompany me, I might not have to tell you I had already purchased a plane ticket, or that my clothes were already packed at home, or that I had given the man who cleaned my house notice and a severance, or that I had instructed my agent to handle the sale and disposal of my house and its contents – in other words that I had already put my Los Angeles affairs in order and was ready to leave.

  Sitting at my desk now, in Florence, rather than my desk at the studio in Los Angeles, I take up a different fountain pen, turn it over in my shaking hands, and as when the images of all the desks I have ever sat before came to me recently, a succession of images of other pens, earlier pens, rises from the depths of memory and overflows to submerge and replace the pen in my hand now, the pen I can only understand as a pen because of the memories that tell me it must be such a thing, memories completing the rudiments of perception. There is always a moment of delay as I hold this pen, any pen, a moment in which, however unconsciously, my memory summons a catalogue of all the other pens I have handled over the span of decades. A pen is never just the utensil I use to write. A pen is what I was holding when I found myself paralyzed by the prospect of confessing to you that I was leaving you, and so all the writing I have done, every pen I have held in the years since last standing in your presence has been marked by the memory of my terror and guilt, my sense of not wanting to break your heart while knowing I must.