The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  “I wonder if, in the meantime, it might bring you some pleasure to . . . bring me pleasure?”

  In my decades of keening over the end of my erogenous existence, I’d never considered such a simple thing. It took, I suppose, a woman bold enough to ask for it while her partner remained despicably decent.

  I did not debate for long. I had thirty-seven years for which to make up.

  “Why, yes,” said I. “I believe it would, at that.”

  V.

  EVEN ONE AS DISMISSIVE OF social mores as Bridey could not keep a strange boy nineteen years her junior on the premises. But neither would she allow me to return to my sleazeball inn. So, in an inspired whim, she drew up papers and hired me on as her official “amanuensis”—a term for “secretary” so convoluted it all but guaranteed that no one would be clear what I was supposed to be doing. Turning down the offer was not an option, for the position included a weekly paycheck. That meant I could begin sending Church the kind of money he needed. Surely, before too long, he’d write back to say that all my trespasses were forgiven.

  Bridey gave me both an office and a bedchamber at the south end of her two-story, thirty-room Colonial Queen Anne mansion, using the excuse that the servants’ quarters were already choked with the butler, cook, lady’s maid, hairdresser, Japanese gardener, chauffeur, on-site vocal coach, and the executive assistant charged with shepherding forty-thousand fan letters a month as well as producing the Bridey Valentine Fan Club Bimonthly. These minions approved of me no more than Dixon and his gang, for if they knew one thing about their employer, it was that she did not need helping.

  In fact, she made me feel like a thumb-twiddling kiddie. Never before had I seen a woman on equal footing with men. Bridey by then was bringing in the criminal-sounding sum of ten thousand dollars per week, and yet she retained no agents, managers, or lawyers. More frequently visited than her closets of gowns or shoes was her fort of filing cabinets, in which she kept, in labeled concertina folders, ledgers enough to make old Mr. Hobby jealous. Between call times, she hunched over these logs with reading glasses and red pencil, tracing every monetary current: furs @ $7,000/year, stockings @ $9,000/year, perfume @ $30,000/year, and onward.

  She was, to use a word close to my heart, indefatigable. Bridey woke at four to have her hair done before heading to the studio. MGM’s contract stipulated four pictures per year, so invariable that they were shorthanded by season: “Spring Valentine,” “Summer Valentine,” “Fall Valentine,” and “Winter Valentine.” In February of 1934 she was Henrietta Hawk, brash flying ace able to pilot her biplane through any storm, until she meets a storm called Captain Schmidt, played by Spencer Tracey. In May she was Babs McCourt, smart-lipped small-town reporter who must team with a down-on-his-luck private dick, played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. In August, she was Letty Dekker, British spy who infiltrates Germany as a nightclub dancer in order to free Colonel Tab Candler, played by Leslie Howard. And so on.

  Then there were exercise classes, dance practices, script conferences, and charity dinners. By bedtime, though, she was Bridey, my Bridey, and rare was the night we did not lie in bed talking for an hour or two. Talking, you ask? For an hour? Or two? Zebby, poor sop, how did you withstand so much girl-gabble? With ease, friend; Bridey was the most fascinating person I’d ever met, and yet she had few, if any, real friends. Even more than rubbing her to a frenzy, she relied on me for this—to hear her speak from the heart. What I learned was a backstory for which any scandal rag would murder.

  Bridey had a daughter.

  It made good sense to tell me about it, for as long as I was under her roof, it was unfeasible that she could hide her periodic phone calls to a nine-year-old girl called Gopher (short for “Margeaux”). With characteristic lack of sentiment, she unleashed the whole dirty truth one morning over breakfast.

  “Don’t ask about the father,” sighed she. “I couldn’t tell you. Believe me, had I the money, I would’ve had an abortion faster than you can say the word. All the top girls have had two or three. There’s more abortionists out here than clap doctors.”

  Lady business of the most distasteful sort! I strived toward a bouncier mood.

  “Surely you have found some mirth in motherhood?”

  “I’ll just say this: an actress should be wary, very wary, of children, and should never, under any circumstances, marry, not if she wishes to control her own fate. Now hand me that grapefruit before I starve.”

  It was a momentous grapefruit. In the passing of it I weighed whether to tell Bridey of Merle. If there were a stage fit for such dissonant music, this was it. But Merle was older than Bridey, a fact perhaps too weird for even a self-proclaimed connoisseur of weirdness. Bringing up Merle would also bring up Wilma Sue, and that was a subject Bridey abhorred. As ever, Merle was a poison; mentioning her was tantamount to sprinkling arsenic atop, say, a grapefruit.

  Young Bridey had known that her role in An Orchid Unknown was her ticket to stardom. She therefore concealed the existence of Margeaux and designed to steal the picture from star Norma Talmadge. No matter the costumes presented to Bridey, she scissored them all to hell to more favorably display her assets. She swung her hips in long shots and licked her lips in close-ups until the crew wolf-whistled so loud you could almost hear it—and it was a silent film!

  By the end of 1925 Bridey had received the honor of being named a Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers “Baby Star.” Thus was she thrust into the limelight. Overnight, MGM publicists crawled from the crannies to whitewash her past of any dirt, and boy, did they ever find a large clod of it. Within an hour of finding out about Margeaux, a screenwriter had been assigned to concoct a story about a dead GI.

  I, for one, liked the sound of it—wasn’t I myself a dead solider? Bridey, though, tore the pages from the writer’s hand and stomped them with her heels. Never would she allow herself to be defined by a man, much less a fictitious one! A single option remained, and so she took it, bestowing upon Margeaux the untainted surname of “Malone” and sending her off to be raised and schooled at an expensive boarding institution in Santa Barbara.

  Marooned in the mansion, I had no choice but to take these stories on faith. Certainly there was no denying Bridey’s dedication to the outré. Where other celebrities outfitted their homes in Seurat, Tiffany, and Cartier, Bridey appareled hers in macabre historical relics. A gold-leaf death mask from Ancient Greece. A jade Egyptian mummification kit. An Iron Age cauldron depicting human sacrifice. A death pendant taken from an aboriginal burial box in Newfoundland. In many ways, these morbid objets d’art had foreshadowed my arrival.

  It was as if Bridey had been waiting for me her entire life.

  The most alarming artifacts were an assortment of Middle Ages chastity belts. The gentlest resembled buckled leather underwear, while the harshest were steel-toothed traps capable of scaring away the most determined of deflowerers. Bridey posited the collection as a rejoinder to the censor Will Hays—it was best to keep sex locked up, eh, Will? But as with everything Bridey did, her comedy had a point. It was all points, in fact, all edges.

  Roughly once a week, you see, she rededicated herself to my seduction, and my stern deferrals only goaded her gambler’s nature. She would win the kitty, resolved she, if she but sharpened her play.

  “You are the rarest thing,” she’d flatter, “in my entire collection.”

  There went her hand, creeping up my leg.

  “Just try,” she’d beg. “I’ll help you. I’ll be patient.”

  I required no belt to be locked inside my chastity.

  “I am dead,” said I, “and that is that.”

  “Forget Wilma What’s-Her-Name. I can be better than her. Let me prove it.”

  “Are you deaf? I cannot.”

  “Then I’ll borrow a movie camera. Put it in the corner while we do it.”

  “Why on Earth would that help?”
/>   She tickled my ear and laughed.

  “Because pictures never die, silly. That’s why I, too, am going to live forever.”

  VI.

  ONE MIGHT PUT ONE’S FINGER inside the Etruscan cinerary urn and wipe the dust of centuries. One might try on the feathered Peruvian burial mask to see if it fit. These lurid curios were for anyone to enjoy. There was but one room that remained locked and unremarked upon; that is, until summer 1935, when Bridey brought me to the threshold with sententious and, to be frank, worrisome fanfare.

  She was decked out as if for a premiere, a checked dress with an orange bolero jacket and matching orange hat. From an orange pocket she removed a large key, unlocked the door, and then, with her orange fingernails resting upon the knob, delivered a statement—prepared in advance, one would imagine, though Bridey had a gift of bringing scripted words to life.

  “When you first, quote, ‘make it,’ the twelve months that follow are everything. That’s when the studio heads use their big, fancy man-brains to figure out, quote, ‘who you are.’ For an actress, it’s a losing proposition. Should they fail, well, your hit was a fluke and into obscurity you slide. Should they succeed, then you’re really stuck, for now they’ve invented your, quote, ‘formula.’”

  “I vociferously disagree,” said I. “Your roles are manifold and mutable!”

  “Oh, a girl can wiggle a bit, like a worm on a hook, but she mustn’t delude herself—she’s on their hook, and they’ll make damn sure her formula goes untampered with. If you’re Joan Crawford, you’re the noble clotheshorse. If you’re Ginger Rogers, you’re the tap-dancing paramour. Your next career checkpoint? Your inevitable drop from exhaustion.”

  Rest assured, Reader, that the objective to siphon money to Church remained intact. It is just that, month by month, my purpose in Hollywood had begun to broaden, and it was right then, as Bridey deprecated her many triumphs, that I knew I’d become smitten beyond the mercenary rationales of money or even physical beauty. The woman challenged me as no one since Wilma Sue had dared, and that, more than anything since my death, stimulated me toward a sort of life. I resolved to return the favor and help her through any insecurity.

  “I do tell you that you work too hard.”

  “Yes, but it is in aid of a goal. It used to be, anyhow. For a long while now, I’ve lost my way. But you’ve inspired me, Z. I can’t tell you how much.”

  “Me? Inspire you? You are overstressed, all right.”

  “You have reminded me that life—my life, anyway—is short. If I am to make anything worthwhile of this frivolous profession, there is no more time to waste.”

  The moment required only lowered lights, orchestral pomp, and rising red curtains to be complete. Bridey turned the knob and flung open the door, flattening her melodramatic form across the jamb like the breathless heroine of a silent-film serial.

  The reveal was anticlimactic. Not a nugget of El Dorado’s gold, not a hint of Smaug’s riches. It was a stuffy storeroom, bigger than a monkey’s cage yet smaller than a Chinatown flat. Lining the floor and shelves were dusty reams of paper shotgunned with ink type, the lower strata of yellower age than the higher. Stacks of pink and blue carbon copies provided the only variance in color. Placed high upon a shelf, like Sacco and Vanzetti awaiting sentencing, were two doomed typewriters.

  “This is quite . . . What I mean is, this is very . . .” I gave up. “What is this?”

  Bridey pressed all of her choicest parts against my back.

  “A script. Six years I worked on it. Researching, analyzing, revising; days, nights, weekends, holidays; it was everything to me. Then I walked away from it. I thought it had beaten me. But it hasn’t, Z, I know it hasn’t.”

  An entire room lost beneath paper like drifts of snow—for a single script?

  “If I may ask,” said I, “what sort of script?”

  “A screenplay. The screenplay. The one that will change everything, not only for me but for all women. For all pictures.”

  Bridey had no equal in chutzpah.

  “I am listening, and with an avid ear.”

  “I won’t play The Girl forever. You know that’s how they describe female leads? Doesn’t matter if it’s a weepie, a comedy, or a gangster picture, I’m still The Girl, as if my child-bearing organs were my only notable characteristic. A girl, I’ll remind you, is not a woman. She’s only allowed to have girl-sized problems. If I get a pimple, twenty men get on the telephone to discuss the state of my scabbing. If I raise a stink about it, they call it a tantrum and punish me with roles so bad I’d rather shoot myself in the face. Then at my funeral, they’ll say, ‘What a woman!’”

  “Well, you must tell me all about it.”

  This I said to push along the conversation, for I’d grown alarmed at the ardor with which Bridey fingernailed my back. She rustled me from the room, locked it, and led me by the hand to the library, where she positioned us on the loveseat and lit a cigarette before taking my chilly hand.

  “The title: In Our Image.”

  “A Biblical reference?”

  “Very good, Z. First, a preface. Life revolves around three things. Can you name them?”

  “I shall follow my instinct. Lingerie.”

  “Close! Sex. What else?”

  “How about a thick cut of steak, bloody as war.”

  “That’s right, food. You’re good at this. The third?”

  “I daren’t push my luck.”

  “Too bad, the third one is up your alley: death. The bedroom, the table, and the grave. Nothing else matters.”

  It bothered me that I was incapable of partaking in any of the three.

  “The plot?” managed I.

  “Forget plot. This is a story. The most primal of stories: a woman loves a man.”

  “And you would play the woman.”

  “As it happens, yes. Now this man, you see, beneath his human clothes, is a wolf.”

  I glanced at the bear rug. He looked bemused.

  “Is this . . . a fairy tale?”

  She puffed at her cigarette.

  “Of sorts.”

  “Is it for children?”

  “It’s for everyone. Shut up and listen. The woman loves her man but decides she cannot stay with him. He is, after all, a wolf and he does what wolves do.”

  “Eat babies and such.”

  “So she sets to writing him a good-bye letter but has no paper at hand. What she has are calendars—all sorts of calendars. So she rips off a month and uses the back of it for her note, but it doesn’t come out right so she crumples it up and throws it away. She rips off another month, then another, and those months become real, and by the time she’s finished the note she’s crumpled up entire years. She goes outside to deliver the perfect good-bye letter only to find that her wolf has died.”

  “Because wolves have shorter life spans.”

  “Exactly! But it’s worse than that. All wolves have died, all natural predators, which includes man, by which I mean men—leaving women behind in a world devoid of violence. But is that a good thing? It’s a vacuum, isn’t it? A kind of slow death? So the women begin to create new men by surgically removing from each of them a rib and packing it in clay.”

  Dearest Reader, I shall respect your time and skip to the end of this brain-scrambling debacle. Among the impossible set-pieces were three consecutive scenes of unexpurgated sexual intercourse and a sequence in which Bridey’s character goes feral and is trapped by hunters (with wolf teeth, natch). The film’s climax, to be filmed in a continuous ten-minute shot, involved her corpse being disemboweled, divided into cuts of meat, and individually wrapped and sold at a butcher counter.

  ’Tis a delicate art, being a critic.

  “I beg your pardon,” said I, “for I am unschooled in matters of business. But I fear the Hays Code would be inflexible regarding the depiction
of animal fornication, much less human.”

  She stubbed her cigarette to death.

  “It’s only ‘fornication’ if you’re scared of it. In the script I call it ‘carnal knowledge.’ I use the term deliberately.”

  “Again, your pardon—one thousand times I beg it. Yet it would seem to me that the ending, too, would need adjusting.”

  The widening of her eyes felt like a warning.

  “That’s the whole point of the picture. I am chopped into little pieces, like a roll of film, and shipped all over the world to be consumed.”

  “Your totality of vision I would not dispute. Which studio, do you think, might permit imagery of such . . . potency?”

  “Why do you think I slave as I do? I’ve agreed to twenty-five pictures over the next seven years. Twenty-five more dopey go-rounds as The Girl. By 1942 I will have made MGM so much money that they will not be in a position to permit me anything. They will owe me. Frankly, I expected more understanding from you.”

  Ah, but the ruffled feathers of feminine affront were my most comfortable pillows! I’d antagonized gaggles of gals in the past and knew the best tools with which to coo, cajole, and inveigle. Bridey’s barricades were robust but not impregnable, and before long I had her convinced that my enthusiasm for In Our Image was the very marrow of my bones. It was a white lie meant as a heartfelt gift, though it was for Church that I tied the bow. Those paychecks had to keep coming.

  “Please,” said I, “may I read it?”

  Her fingers flew to her beautiful throat.

  “No! Oh, no, no. I couldn’t allow it, it’s not ready. But it will be, Z, there’s no more question about that. A few more years of acting and then I’ll show you—I’ll show everyone—exactly what kind of woman Bridey Valentine is. Can you be patient?”

  I’d been dead nearly forty years.

  Patience? Yes, I’d heard of it.