In Memory of Angel Clare

by Christopher Bram

  The apartment was on the first floor and there was a prompt knock at the door.

  “Just a minute!” Jack called out, buttoning his shirt over his hairy belly, sucking the belly in and closing his fly. Working at home, Jack liked to leave the top of his pants undone. Alone and writing, he could forget his homely carcass. He quickly looked around, but there was nothing else to hide. The apartment really was too small for two neurotics and a cat. How could he have been so foolishly guilty as to offer to let Michael live here?

  “Michael!” He acted pleasantly surprised as he opened the door. “You’re back!”

  A boy stood in the hall, looking very mild, blank, and tall. His pale hands were clasped demurely at his waist. His springy hair curled around his ears like hurt feelings. His height seemed oddly touching out there, like the tall, exposed absurdness of a harbor piling when the tide was out.

  Jack hadn’t seen him all summer and was surprised the boy looked rather appealing. Until Michael spoke.

  “You’re home, I see. Good. Hello, Jack. Do you still have your tape of Disco of the Damned?”

  He shook Jack’s hand, which was a regression. Michael had become a conscientious hugger during his mourning. But he sounded as arrogant as ever—he spoke as if Jack had come to see him—and cryptic, too proud to make sense too quickly, the blunt request for the tape. They were all defense mechanisms, but knowing that didn’t make dealing with Michael any easier.

  “Come in, Michael. Welcome back. Of course I have the tape. How was Europe?”

  “Oh, what I expected.” He sighed, solemnly stepping inside and leaving Jack to close the door behind him. “I’ve had to tell so many people about it, I can’t talk about it anymore.”

  His jadedness was a defense, too. In fact, he seemed more heavily defended today than Jack remembered him being. “Have you talked to Laurie and Carla?”

  Michael was judging the apartment, frowning at the number of books. “I spoke to them the day before yesterday, when I got back from Europe. I’ve been in Connecticut since then, you know. Reading Clarence’s letters.”

  “You haven’t talked with them today?”

  “I just got back. Nobody was home when I dropped my stuff off.”

  Jack was relieved. Michael was only being Michael and didn’t know yet. Jack was not prepared to deal with that today. Perhaps there was still time for him to get out of his offer to the women.

  Michael suddenly looked pained, staring at something: the framed collage of Proust and Charlie Chaplin that perched on the shelf over Jack’s kitchen table.

  Only Clare, who had never read a word of Proust, could have noticed the resemblance between the author of A la recherche da temps perdu and the Little Tramp. The two metaphysical clowns looked like brothers, especially in comparison to the sexy jock in underpants who stood between them. Jack liked to think of the picture as an allegory of their friendship, with Chaplin as Clarence and Proust as Jack, although the picture was probably intended only to represent itself. Jack began to fear Michael wanted the picture, that anything about Clarence belonged to him. Just thinking that made Jack hate him.

  Michael blinked his pain away and glanced down. “Oh. I see you’re working,” he said. “I don’t want to keep you. I just needed to see Clarence’s movie today. Will it disturb you if I watch it here? We don’t have a VCR anymore, you know.”

  “Now? Um, sure. Let me set it up for you.” It seemed a strange need, but Jack was so relieved he didn’t have to deal with his problem yet he could give Michael that much. Living with Michael was going to be impossible, as much because of Jack as because of Michael.

  Jack led him into the bedroom. His apartment was an amputated railroad flat, the living room and only windows out front, then the kitchen, then a bedroom in the back, like a dark, oversized closet. The platform bed took up most of the room, the television and VCR at the foot of the bed so Jack could watch movies when he couldn’t sleep. The shelves above the bed were piled with videotapes and more books. Jack knelt on the bed and immediately found the tape he had purchased himself. There had been no one to give him a free copy when Clarence’s movie came out on video.

  “So. How were Ben and Danny?” Jack asked cheerfully as he loaded the cassette. “They behaving themselves in the country?”

  Michael winced. “What do you mean?”

  “Just knowing them the way I do, I can’t imagine them sitting still for too long. I can’t guess what they’d do out there except throw dishes at each other. Or drive around propositioning gas station attendants for threeways.”

  Michael bit his mouth shut and said nothing.

  Jack shrugged at his silence. “Okay,” he said. “All set. There’s no place to sit but the bed, so can you take your shoes off? Would you like some coffee or anything to drink?”

  “I don’t want to trouble you further, thank you.” Michael kicked off his shoes and sat crosslegged on the bed, a lean, sour Buddha lit by the cold light of snow on the television screen. A long toe poked through the hole in one sock.

  Jack pressed the button to start the tape. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.” He stepped into the brighter kitchen as the music for the distributor’s logo came on.

  His chief thought was to forget Michael and finish his damn movie review. The boy was still Laurie’s problem, and Jack should enjoy the respite while it lasted. But when he sat back at the table, he could only stare through the typewriter. Writing, difficult enough when Elisabeth Vogler was present, was impossible with Michael in the next room with Clarence’s movie. And Clarence’s death.

  Et ego in Arcadia sum: I too am in Arcadia. That was Death speaking Latin. Even without the movie, Michael had brought Clarence’s death with him, and the review Jack was writing, which had seemed like stupid work to begin with, became worthless and irrelevant. Death threw everything into focus. Jack wondered if closing the door to the bedroom would help, except that the music for the title sequence was playing and he wanted to hear it again.

  It was a version of Mozart’s overture to Don Giovanni, with a disco beat laid in that seemed both sinister and witty. The sequence was one of the best scenes in the movie, the music promising a clever black comedy while the camera glided around couples dancing in a darkness that was like red gold—using the film lab where he worked, Clarence had printed and reprinted it until he had the tones he had imagined. Those tones were lost on Jack’s TV, so he didn’t get up to look. He only wanted to listen and remember.

  Then the Mozart faded out and there was just the disco beat, and the first line of dialogue was read by the would-be actor who should have remained a would-be model: “Has anybody seen my girlfriend? She went to the ladies room an hour ago and I can’t find her anywhere!”

  Actors were not Clarence’s strong suit. Worse, the dialogue by the rich brat who wrote and produced the film was even clunkier than his story. Clarence knew the script stank, but beggars can’t be choosers on first features. The brat didn’t care what Clarence did to his script, so long as the movie kept its six bloody deaths, frontal nudity (female only), and his screenwriting credit. Clarence cut some deadwood and a homophobic joke, and tried to make the worse howlers seem deliberate, but he couldn’t write dialogue either. He had asked Jack to re-write the dialogue, without credit or payment. Jack had considered doing it, for one minute, then remembered working with Clarence on the script for Last Night at the A&P, when he had to fight with Clarence over every line, every word, Clarence unable to say what he wanted, only what he didn’t want. Clarence’s nonverbal intellect, which some people mistook for gentleness and others for stupidity, came out in all its stubborn glory when he made a movie. Calm, daydreamy Clare turned into an exacting, tongue-tied tyrant. “Our Hitler,” Jack called him, sometimes to his face, usually with a smile. Jack excused and lied his way out of doing the rewrite on what would always be a sow’s ear, believing there would be better, more intelligent projects in the future worth the aggravation of working with his closest friend. Now
he regretted not giving himself that month or so of intimate aggravation.

  “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something mighty weird about this club.”

  That was the hero, played with surprising conviction by an actor named Doug Lipper: he convinced you he was a real actor if not always a real character. Jack had run into Lipper a few months ago at a screening in the Brill Building. Leaving the plush, suede screening room, Jack introduced himself, said he recognized Lipper from Disco, and mentioned Clarence. Lipper had already heard. He expressed enormous love and grief for his colleague, as only an actor can, then added, “He wanted me to star in a serious film he was planning. It would’ve been a great role. This thing has killed yet another remarkably talented man.”

  An actor’s self-serving hyperbole, but Clarence was remarkably talented. You could see it in his short films and even in bits of Disco, a feeling for image, rhythm, and mood. What he didn’t have was a feeling for story, or the ruthlessness that would’ve enabled him to steal a film from its cocky producer and bully a decent script out of a friend. He might have learned that ruthlessness in time, only then he might not have been someone Jack would want to know. Awful as it sounded, Jack had feared he was losing his best friend to filmmaking long before he lost him to death.

  It was a selfish fear. But Jack had been spoiled over the years by his friend’s availability and lack of ambition. For the longest time, Clarence ambled through life like a tourist, seeing movies, listening to music, trying out different experiences, getting laid. He might hurt Jack now and then, but he was good, steady company. It was pleasant being around someone who enjoyed life without demanding too much from it. And such passive amiability made Jack feel very serious and successful in comparison. Jack had ambition—being a critic seemed a heroic goal during the struggle to achieve it—and Clarence had life itself; their friendship seemed to make a whole person. The lovers who passed through Clarence’s bed were only supporting players to that friendship. They saw each other at least three times a week and talked on the phone every day.

  Then Clarence discovered filmmaking. He had always talked about making films, but in the vague, what-if way of anyone who loves movies, too intimidated by the expertise and expense to think it a real possibility. Shortly after he turned thirty, he took a filmmaking class, as just another new experience, and stumbled into the underworld of film gypsies: Super-8 productions, student films, more classes, film cooperatives, film labs—one of which hired Clarence as a timer. He made new friends, ambitious amateurs like himself, most of them straight, and made his own short films. Jack didn’t hear from him for weeks at a time. Then he met Michael, who was younger and more dependent than anyone else Clarence had been involved with, but who’d come along at a time when Clarence was too preoccupied to be fickle, or unfaithful. Nevertheless, Clarence suddenly had love and work. Jack felt like a failure in comparison, an unlovable grind, an unnecessary acquaintance.

  When Jack arrived at the emergency room that night and heard the terrible news, beneath the thunderclap of what it meant, beneath his shock, disbelief, and fear, he had suffered the strangest feeling of satisfaction.

  Even now, a year and a half later, he was ashamed and confused over that feeling. As if he preferred to lose his friend to death than lose him to work and success. It was not that Jack envied his friends their success. It was more an insanely possessive love—as if illness and even death might bring Clarence closer to him. Using friendship as a substitute for love produced emotions as grotesque as any that came from unrequited passion.

  He looked around for Elisabeth Vogler, wanting to hold and stroke her a moment. The cat was nowhere in sight. A thoughtless, disloyal creature, she was probably curled up on the bed with Michael. Jack stood up, tiptoed to the door, and peeked in. Sure enough, the cat nestled between the boy’s legs, holding up her shoulders for the gentle hand that rubbed the scruff of her neck. Michael had stretched out on his back and was watching the movie with his jaw clenched, so intent on the movie he did not look at the cat or glance at the door when Jack’s body blocked out the light from the kitchen. Jack wondered what the boy was looking for. Was there really any trace of Clarence in the movie? Already it was lurching into its climax, a long, beautiful sequence filmed at The Saint, where Clarence had once been a regular. Here it was used as a straight dance club in an attempt to recreate the Parisian dance hall scene from The Conformist. What failed as imitation became original by default. The camera slithered across the floor, among jerking legs and hopping feet, then craned up until it floated just above the heads of a stormy sea of dancers, lit by strobe as if by lightning. Jack hadn’t really wanted Clare to die at the very moment he had begun to use his gifts. The feeling of satisfaction had lasted less than a second. It was only guilt that fixed it in his memory and made it seem important.

  A practicing ex-Catholic, Jack was at home in guilt; he was proud of his ability to live with it. But he knew he should do more than accept guilt, knew he should put it to work, although all he had done so far with it was write a silly little article for Film Comment. He stood in the doorway and leaned against the jamb, pretending to watch the end of the movie, stealing glances at Michael.

  He shouldn’t pretend the boy was still Laurie and Carla’s problem. It was time he did something, said something, helped this arrogant boy he disliked so much. He knew he disliked Michael partly because he saw his own egotistical suffering in the boy, untempered by age or self-understanding. Jack understood himself all too well. He owed it to Clarence and the others to come down from his critical height and make some of his self-awareness Michael’s self-awareness.

  There was a theatrical scream as the sex maniac-killer fell from the catwalk and crashed through the lights. The body hit the dance floor like a side of beef, which was what Clarence had used for the sound effect. Then more dancers arrived, Danny among them in his third role. Not noticing the stunned people staring at the corpse in the flashing, thumping darkness, the newcomers began to dance around the dead psychopath. Fade-out to the closing credits, accompanied by another shrill song from the East Village band managed by the producer’s girlfriend.

  Jack stepped into the room and gingerly sat on the edge of the bed. Reverently watching the credits, Michael drew back an inch so they wouldn’t touch. Jack knew what he watched for and patiently waited for it before he began the conversation.

  There it was: “Special thanks to… Jack Arcalli… Michael Sousza…” Then the disclaimer about the story not representing real people, and the screen went blue and silent.

  Jack leaned forward and turned off the set. “And they all lived happily ever after,” he joked.

  “Get away from me, stupid.”

  But Michael was only pushing Elisabeth Vogler off him, as if ashamed of showing affection to Jack’s cat. He sighed importantly. “I’ve now seen this sixteen times,” he announced.

  “Really? I’ve seen it maybe a dozen,” Jack admitted. “It’s better in a theater. You know, they’re showing it next month at Cinema Village. On a double bill with Suspiria.” An artsy, incoherent Italian horror film Clarence had hated. Jack attempted a wistful smile. “It’s funny. Both of us giving so much time to a bad movie.”

  Michael looked puzzled. “You think it’s a bad movie?”

  “It’s your basic generic horror film. Except for the dance scenes and some of the camera angles.”

  “You must not understand it,” Michael sniffed.

  Jack had intended to use the movie only to talk about what they had in common. He tried to resist the impulse to argue film. “No, it’s nicely shot and some scenes without dialogue are striking, only—What do you see in it?”

  “It’s a disturbing film.” Michael addressed the blank screen. “It’s full of menace and tension and death. Everybody dies in it. It’s like… Jacobean tragedy.”

  Michael knew as much about Jacobean tragedy as Jack’s cat did, but Jack did not pursue that. He had been afraid the boy would say the movie was abo
ut AIDS. “It’s a scare machine, Michael. Like all those movies.”

  “No, it’s only disguised as a horror movie,” the boy insisted. “It’s more serious than that. I’m surprised at you. That as a friend of Clarence and a film critic you can’t see that.”

  Jack winced. “Well, Clarence said some pretty negative things about it himself.”

  “Of course. That’s his right as an artist. The results never live up to the artist’s expectations.” Michael sat up on the bed, drawing his knees against his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “All the artist can see is his failure. Clarence worked very hard on that movie. I was with him from start to finish on it. There were nights when he didn’t get home until three in the morning, then had to be up again at six. A normal man would’ve been exhausted, but not Clarence. He was too high on his movie. Because he believed in it.”

  “He worked very hard on it,” Jack agreed. Clarence had claimed he didn’t take the project seriously, then threw himself into it completely. Clarence didn’t do anything halfway. He exhausted himself on that movie. Which must have weakened his body and triggered the thing that eventually killed him. That was what was disturbing about the movie, even tragic: it had killed Clarence. Maybe that was why Michael had to believe it was a good movie: the irony of Clarence dying for schlock was too black for anyone so young.

  Jack gently said, “You miss him, don’t you?”

  “Of course!”

  He sounded offended, and Jack was sorry he had brought it up so abruptly. “No, I know you do. I think about Clarence every day,” he confessed. “So I can imagine what you must feel.”

  Michael stared long and hard at Jack. He clutched his folded legs and stroked the long bones. “I wonder if you can,” he said. “I wonder if any of you can guess what I’m feeling. You were only his friends. I was his lover.”

  Jack kept his temper. Michael took what Jack granted him—the possibility Clare’s death hurt him more than it hurt Jack—and slapped Jack in the face with it. He could ignore the other bits of arrogance that barbed Michael’s conversation, but not that one. And he classed Jack’s grief with everyone else’s, which stung.