Night for Day

by Patrick Flanery

  As I packed, the clock above the door of my office counted me towards separation from the years I had spent in Los Angeles, from love and grief, the self-excommunicate contemplating the hill before him. Somewhere it seemed a bell was always tolling. Copies of scripts filmed and unfilmed dropped into wooden crates, buried under a glass paperweight, photographs of friends signed with affection, my bachelor’s degree certificate in an ornate wooden frame, a nineteenth-century bronze miniature reproduction of a Roman copy of a Greek statue of a man enthroned with flowing hair and beard that once belonged to my grandfather, a drapery of cloth round the lower body rising up across the back and over the left arm, extended but broken off above the elbow, the right arm snapped at the wrist and resting on the right leg, sandals on the feet, mouth open, nose missing, face fixed in judgment, bewilderment, or despair. A nose would have made his expression less equivocal. I wrapped the bronze in newspaper and stuffed it in the corner of a crate. At the time I could not imagine which among these possessions would be abandoned, whether in the end they were all no more than markers of defeat. The bronze now sits on my desk here in Florence, one of the few objects I brought with me.

  Stan phoned and tried to talk me into retracting all that I had said to Porter and Krug, and then spent ten minutes naming all the other lots and producers where he could no longer get me work, asking if I would not consider television, if I would not entertain the possibility of letting someone else take credit for my scripts, until at last I sighed into the phone I suspected was tapped and said, It doesn’t matter anyway, because by Monday everyone will know what I’ve done.

  We can fix this, Stan insisted. I know some fellows. It can be done quietly.

  I won’t betray friends. I won’t even betray enemies.

  Forgive me for saying so, Desmond, but the people you think are your friends can do nothing to help you these days and your enemies would not do you the same fav— And with that the line clicked three times before going dead. The studio operator came on to tell me that she had been ordered to terminate all calls to and from my office.

  I hung up the phone and glanced down at the photographs of you and Helen and John packed in the nearest crate. It meant nothing to hide the others’ faces but covering yours was too much like shrouding the dead so I put your photo on top, face up. I was reminded of my grandfather, deprived of his wife at the end of his life, weeping as a New York summer roasted the skin on his brow. Grief had brought delusion and my grandfather looked up at me, still a child, and said, Who are you? Why do you bother me? Where the hell have you come from? Why don’t you leave me alone? Go jump off the balcony why don’t you? My mother gripped my shoulders, knelt down, and explained that the old man was deranged by sadness.

  Deranged?

  Disturbed.

  To put out of order, to disarrange the mind, to misplace the identity of the familiar face, to replace it with another, a polite way of saying that grief had turned my grandfather crazy.

  What should we do?

  Revere him. It was not a sensible answer. How to revere the mad? He’s wholly in his grief, Desmond.

  Holy in his grief, the young Desmond heard, not wholly, and who’s to say what my mother really meant? She had a difficult relationship with her father-in-law. I never asked her to explain and only thought to wonder about it once she was dead herself. My grandfather did not wait for me to throw myself off a balcony, taking his own life a week later by striding out onto the terrace high above Park Avenue, climbing the low wall, and before my father could rush from the living room to stop him, taking one final step off the parapet and into twenty-four stories of air. His impact killed a newspaper boy, and so our family, believing in restitution as an ethical imperative, paid the boy’s parents a settlement the bewildered couple living in a cold-water tenement had never thought to demand.

  Into another crate went my own attempt at adapting The Argosy, that first novel of mine about the two college friends, the younger of whom dies in a fire. Perhaps it was too close to reality, lacking the magic of artifice. The studio censors said the men could not share a bed unless it was made comic, with a female love interest to inoculate them against suspicion, but I could never manage it. Too much artifice in that case, and lies of the heart are corrosive. That was also a factor in the decision I had made. The pretense of being nothing more than your friend was beginning to sicken me. I knew I could not spend a whole life in a state of deception, the only state I had occupied since discovering the direction of my desire. Truth could come out only in rooms with locked doors and drawn blinds. I wanted love that could live in the open. Love sequestered was no longer a love I knew how to sustain. Perhaps you would tell me that there was nothing wrong with our love, that we would have managed, that I was sacrificing real love for an impossible fantasy.

  Following the funerals of my grandparents, so close together, the next one I attended was for Noah Roy, whose body was interred in the Ithaca City Cemetery just under the heights of Cornell, because Dr. and Mrs. Roy believed their son had been happiest during his short days at the university, and they anticipated that the cemeteries of Long Island would not for long be as tranquil as Ithaca’s seemed likely to remain. Five fellow fraternity brothers and I served as pallbearers and along with the other members, the family, and additional mourners from the university, we stood around the gravesite making no attempt at stoicism. Porter, I remember, failed to attend. Everyone cried, there were bushels of white tulips, robins dug worms after an overnight rain. Two other fraternity brothers and I spoke. Every attending member of the Roy family was too stricken to form words and looking at them I found myself so overcome I lost control of my movements, sobbing from the hips and bending double when I had finished my speech. The act of putting earth over the body of that boy seemed obscene, because surely, if we opened the casket and breathed air into his lungs, he could be revived and transformed into a being unlike himself but still capable of living among us, a flower or horse or fast current of water running through those gorges where we used to sit and read. I fell to the ground and wept, conscious that my weeping was more intense than the tears of Dr. and Mrs. Roy, who stared at my sorrow and carried themselves across the grass to crouch down and comfort me as Noah’s sisters, older, both married, turned away from each other, clutched their husbands, and wondered, I have no doubt, why a young man should be so rent by the death of their brother.

  In the weeks after Noah’s funeral I found no consolation in the Catholicism that my parents, of negligible faith themselves, had done little to encourage. Amens were hollow. I observed no rituals of grief, instead sinking my sadness into study. There was nothing holy about grief. Holiness was as imaginary as divinity. There was only the human, the profane, the everyday muddiness and saltiness in which grief could expand to be the whole world and cosmos, so that all I sensed and thought, the fullness of my body, mind, and experience of living, pulsed with anguish. In the passing years, sadness has never drained itself entirely from my sense of the world. Occasional transfusions of happiness have topped up the balance. While I was with you the steady drip of your affection was quick against the torpor that had left me stalking the underworld, but loving one who had died before his time also kept me tethered to death, carousing at the banks of the same dismal river. And that feeling of being drunk on death has never entirely receded through the many decades that have now passed, while the loss of you through my own actions constitutes a grief all its own.

  Paused in my ruminations that afternoon, the door opened without a knock and you stepped into the orange sun that came through my office window. Out of costume, in your own clothes, makeup removed, hair swept with brilliantine, you seemed an arrival from another order of nature, a hundred different characters composed on your face as you closed the door behind you and fell into a chair, gaping at the empty shelves and open drawers of the filing cabinet, the crates stuffed with my career. The only sounds were the murmur of cold air passing over metal and the music of oil derricks pump
ing across neighboring hills.

  I hear you’ve agreed to let them make a man of you, I said.

  I wasn’t given a choice, Desmond.

  You should have walked out the door.

  Don’t you see it won’t make any difference? I’ll do whatever they want but it’s nothing to us.

  You knocked over the chair as you stood and though it startled us both you left it where it fell and tried to embrace me. Your eyes, bright with confusion and pain, jammed a knife in my brain because I knew that this was it, the critical moment, and I had so little to give.

  I’m leaving, Myles.

  I know! Jesus, everyone knows. Nick has been telling the whole studio you quit, and if you hadn’t Krug would have fired you because you’re a Red and a queer.

  I had never hit anyone, not in play, not even in sport, but the temptation to destroy Nick’s face struck me in that moment. I wanted to do irreversible damage, to tear the skin from his bones and poke out his eyes.

  No, Myles, I mean I’m really leaving.

  I saw one of my own expressions inhabit your features. That was your talent, being absolutely yourself at the same moment you could be a mirror for anyone else. I looked at myself in you, and then, by some magic, felt I could gaze at my actual self through your eyes, which reflected all the fear and desperation alive on my face.

  Back to New York? But what about Helen and me?

  Not New York, Myles.

  To stall for time I rifled my empty desk drawers to be sure nothing remained. Put belongings into furniture and the vessels take on the qualities of their contents and the character of their owner. Even when I stayed in a hotel I could not place items in drawers because I would have to check ten times the next morning and wonder whether the end table or dresser might have adopted one of my many souls, perhaps one I could ill afford to lose. Once I walked out the studio gates they would never let me back inside, and whatever was left in the desk might be thrown in the incinerator or absorbed into the prop warehouse only to show up one day in a B-movie about an insurance salesman or a corruptible banker who thinks he’s found the surefire loophole that will let him get away with a million. That stapler would be his, with its sleek engineered line and steel gray finish. Those guys, the banker and insurance men characters who thought they knew how to game the system, could never imagine they lived in a universe ruled by the laws of Joseph Breen and his Production Code Administration. The criminal always had to pay in the end. It was as solid a guarantee as death. Was I not, in my own way, the criminal who fails to see his place in a system rigged against him?

  If you’re not going to New York, then where? Lake George?

  Maybe it’s better you don’t know. Easier for both of us.

  You’re killing me, Desmond.

  Was it then that you picked up the chair and held it like you might throw it at me only to put it down clumsily and begin to cry? I reached across and touched your shoulder and felt you collapse under the weight of my hand.

  Why don’t you just stay here? You’ve got the money, and if you ever run out, Helen and I will look after you.

  You don’t get it, Myles. I can’t stay in America. If I don’t leave I’ll end up with no choice but to walk straight into a federal prison or go on the run and I can’t do either.

  But where then?

  France? Italy? There are other places to make movies. Maybe I’ll finally write the book about this city I’ve been trying to start for years. Or maybe I’ll just do nothing. Maybe I’ll put away the pen.

  Sun rotted the planes of your face. If you leave me I’ll kill myself, you said.

  That’s a terrible thing to say. How could you threaten me?

  I can’t do without you.

  Then come with me. I dropped to one knee, took your hands in mine and kissed them, covering my eyes with your palms. You cupped them around my head, pulling it against your body. This is what I remember. You asked what people would say if you left your wife and I told you to bring Helen, too, that the hunters would be coming for both of you and it was imperative we all climb out of this hell before it swallowed us whole.

  When you let go of my head I knew it was never going to happen and for the first time I felt embarrassed before you, like taking off my clothes in front of a new lover. The sun hit my eyes and I flinched.

  If you stay, we’ll protect you.

  This isn’t a movie, Myles. The good guys don’t win. Maybe in a few years things will get better, but one day they’ll come back to finish the job. What does it matter if people whisper? Let them talk.

  I’d be finished.

  Find the right haven and no one would care.

  We stood next to each other, silent. I remember thinking the wrong word would ignite the air around us. And then you said something that so stunned me I nearly screamed.

  What if you did what they ask? What if you said you were sorry? If you could repent—

  I don’t believe in repenting for something I could never bring myself to regret, Myles.

  But if you say you’re sorry, no matter how you really feel—

  You can’t go around saying the lines you think people want to hear. Life’s not a performance.

  Isn’t it?

  Not for me.

  But if you could just say you were sorry they might forgive you and we could go on like nothing’s changed.

  Do you love me?

  Of course I love you, Desmond. How can you ask?

  You were crying again, beating the air with your fists.

  If you love me, how can you answer any other way but to say I’m coming with you? Learn your lines, I shouted. The words came out with such rage it shocked us both but we had no chance to react because at that moment the door flew open and Margaret Brookes tumbled into the office with Stuart Carmichael behind her.

  What have you done? Margaret cried. If they see it’s that easy to get rid of you, none of us has any hope! At least you could have told us first!

  Leave him alone. He did what he had to do. He didn’t have a choice, Stuart said.

  I was aware of your uneasiness and the way Stuart seemed to notice the redness of your face, our mutual discomposure, and the fact that the two of us had been alone together. You made an excuse about an appointment and asked if you would see me at Mary’s party that night, as if we had not already arranged that you and Helen would come to my house for dinner and drive over together, but we performed this planning again for the sake of appearances. Such habits were so engrained that even in crisis we stuck to the script.

  Stuart and Margaret smiled, moving aside to let you make your exit. Everyone knew how to behave for the scene, remembered their blocking, managed to hit their marks as the sun captured us all in magic-hour light. Was this what you imagined we might do indefinitely? Play the parts society wrote for us?

  So where will you go? Stuart balanced against the edge of the desk, absently picking through my old scripts.

  My mother’s family has a place in Florence.

  I think you should go farther, said Margaret, spitting her words. Africa maybe. You’re not made for civil company, Desmond.

  What’s so uncivil about Africa? I might like it there. I could join an independence movement.

  You’d pick up a gun and try to write with it.

  We talk all the time about revolution and do nothing but make donations and compose editorials for journals that only preach to the converted. Maybe it’s time we were a little more active. Vanguard action, insurrection.

  Hollywood could never be the home of revolution.

  I’m not talking about Hollywood, Stu. You think you can stay here, either of you, and survive what’s coming? The studio heads will line you up as human shields while the armies of Congress approach. Servile Hollywood! A ship without a pilot in the middle of a fascist storm!

  Jesus, Desmond, calm down.

  The industry has turned itself into a tool of the Republican Party and the Legion of Decency and every other crypto-fascist organ g
rinder. If we were properly organized, if the whole movie industry was suitably led by the people and for the people then we would have been able to defend ourselves, but it’s already too late. Do either of you even realize? You can make yourself a martyr, turn traitor against your friends, or get out of here to save your own life. Those are the three choices. And once you get out, join the fight where there’s actually some chance of winning a battle that might help us remake the world.

  Margaret stared at me. Stuart shook his head. I could see I was never going to convince them.

  You two think militancy is madness, but the other side is not just crazy, they’re evil. They mean us ill. They will try to win at all costs. I’m leaving before they throw me in a windowless cell.

  You should stay and fight, Desmond. We need you.

  You can’t fight a system that’s been rigged against you, not without blowing the whole thing up. If either of you ends up testifying and they ask whether I called for the overthrow of this government, please tell them I did. Throw the whole thing on the fire and start fresh.

  Their faces looked pitying and then both began talking, Margaret trying to persuade me to make a formal apology, Stuart convinced I could find a gig at a rival studio. Paramount would have you in a heartbeat. Or Universal! I know you said you’d never work there, but why not? And there’s always Columbia…

  They meant well but I wanted none of it. I glanced out the window in time to see you and Helen and Mary walking along the studio’s Main Street. I tried to read your body language but you looked no different than you did on any other day, your shoulders relaxed, a broad smile on your face, one hand around Helen’s waist, everyone playing their part. Then Mary waved goodbye to the two of you and headed towards the front gate with the twitching undulation of a snake.