Later, when they were leaving the hangar, Cole paused before the two deep prints in the damp turf, the marks the angel’s feet had made when he jumped down from the roof. Cole regarded the prints with savvy scientific intelligence. He pressed his own heels into the ground beside the marks. ‘There was an accident,’ he said, ‘and they chose not to tell me.’
Xas asked who ‘they’ were.
‘The people who work for me. People I expect to keep me fully informed.’
‘I’d like to work for you,’ Xas said.
‘So that’s what you want? What you came here for?’
Xas went closer to Cole, who stepped away so that Xas’s hand only brushed his shirt.
‘I’d like to be of some use,’ Xas said.
‘We’ll see. You can drive, presumably? That would be good right now. Suddenly I’m very tired.’
‘That happens,’ Xas said. ‘And nosebleeds,’ he added. He eyed the man. He could still see Cole, his racked joy, his reddened skin. He wondered how Cole could be so selective with the evidence of his senses. Cole’s body knew a great deal, seemed bathed in an aura of his many conquests—but he lived in his head.
‘I have work to do,’ Cole said. ‘You can drive. You can get me there.’
Burbank
August, 1929
Three weeks after Gil’s funeral Flora was back at work in her editing suite.
She was expecting Cole that day but was surprised when he arrived with Xas. They came in talking aeronautical engineering. Flora heard Xas saying something about ‘torsional weakness’ before the squeak of the screen door covered the rest.
Flora got up, unkinked her back and moved her stool to make room for her employer. Xas backed into the shadows, stepping gingerly in the spaces of clear floor between curled shavings of celluloid. As he did he finished what he was saying. ‘When I began my descent I noticed that the fabric on the wings got a kind of sheen on it. I didn’t like that. I’d like to take it up again and test it in incremental dives.’
Cole said, ‘We’ll see.’ Then he said to Flora, ‘You got my note?’
Cole had sent Flora a note saying he wanted her to wait for him before she took a look at Monday’s rushes. She leaned over and began sorting through a stack of film cans till she found the one she wanted. She took out the film and threaded her projector.
This particular scene had been shot fifteen times—though that was quite a small number for Cole. When Flora studied the rushes she at first thought she was looking at a double exposure. Monty Mantery’s face filled most of the frame. The actor’s hair was plastered to his damp skin, his neck beaded with sweat and arched as his head thrashed about and seemed to scoop a deep hole for itself in his white hospital pillow.
Flora had viewed the scene before, she was sure. Cole had shot it just like this, and she thought he must only have re-shot to add ambient sound—which would be crazy since music would work better anyway.
Months before she and Cole had discussed how this footage of Monty’s thrashing head must be inter-cut with shots of a page of his sweetheart’s letter. The letter where his sweetheart lets him know that she’s decided to marry someone else. Monty’s character is injured, lying in a crowded ward of a French hospital. Cole had taken a great deal of trouble over the ward itself and Flora understood that the detailed, bustling scene was supposed to resolve into a montage of Monty’s face and ink on a page. She had said to Cole at the time, ‘We can all see that he is in a fever and is being persecuted by her words in a feverish dream, but none of that is as interesting as the hospital. You might have to do away with the hospital, Con. At the moment the contrast between the busy ward and the fever and letter just punctures the film. It puts a hole in its spell. It’s the rhythm that’s wrong. At this point cross-cutting like you want to will make the film feel like a car wobbling along on a flat tyre.’
At the time Cole had seemed to take in Flora’s comments—but that was months ago now, before Kay North, and Myra, and before he replaced his female lead. Flora looked at this apparently new footage of Monty’s sweat-soaked squirming head and hoped that she wouldn’t have to repeat her objections. And then she saw that the footage was entirely new. For, as she watched, brilliant, sparkling white letters began to form as though in the air above the perspiring face. ‘Dear Adam,’ Flora read. It was the beginning of Monty’s sweetheart’s letter. The words hung, bright, and smoking blackly. And then the magical writing went on, the text appeared, blazed, then blackened. Of the fifteen takes five were of the beginning of the letter, five its devastating line ‘we can never be together’, and the final five of the sweetheart’s signature. The footage was simple, expressive, and quite unlike anything Cole had done before.
Flora said, ‘This looks German.’ Then she asked Cole which of the five takes he wanted to use. She wound the film back to run it again, saying that she assumed he was wanting to use one of each. ‘“Dear Adam” and “never together” and “your Sally”. “Your Sally” as she brushes him off. Your new girl does look like someone who might do that.’
‘Jensen was a herbivore; Jean’s a carnivore,’ said Cole.
For the next hour Flora ran the film back and forth and made marks on the edges of the frames. She got the nod and began to cut, dropping curls of discarded film around her feet. She glued the final footage together, wiped her tacky fingertips, and wound the film in again. She and Cole peered together into the light.
‘That’s good,’ he said, when they’d run it several times. Then he explained what he’d done. ‘We set up a sheet of glass between Monty and the camera and then wrote on the glass with a mixture of gelatine and gunpowder. We wanted the letters to look like a burning fuse. We had to keep wiping the glass clean and starting again. But really—in the end—the most difficult thing was finding a paintbrush that made a flat stroke like a fountain pen.’
From the back of the room Xas said, ‘We found a man in Chinatown with calligraphy brushes. I think the hardest thing was to make the mix work. It had to have enough gunpowder grains to burn in solid, lingering lines, but not so much that we could see the letters before they were lit. But, as you can see, “Dear Adam” and “we can never be together” and “Yours, Sally” all start beyond the edge of the frame as if the girl writes with big flourishes. We couldn’t do anything about that.’
‘But that only makes the effect more suggestive of a fuse,’ Cole said.
Flora noticed that Cole and Xas were leaning toward each other as they spoke, that Xas already had the habit of addressing himself to Cole’s good ear, and that—more surprisingly—Cole inclined toward Xas as though he were intent on hearing what Xas had to say.
‘So you’re pleased with it?’ Cole said.
Flora was sure Cole was speaking to Xas, not her.
Xas didn’t seem quite so sure, and nobody answered Cole’s question. Instead Xas said, ‘Are you going to let me take that plane up again and try some incremental dives?’
‘Just because you’re curious?’
‘I’m involved.’
‘Ah—’ said Cole. ‘Involvement.’ He seemed to be issuing some kind of caution. ‘Maybe I should take the plane up. You can always tag along.’
‘And lie behind you in the fuselage taking notes while you shout at me over your shoulder?’
‘That’s all that’s on offer right now.’
‘Okay,’ said Xas.
Cole turned back to Flora and said there were other people he had to see in the studio. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said. He got up and pushed through the screen door. Flora listened to her employer lope down the two flights, his steps shaking her shack so that the stacked film cans rattled.
Flora waited till he’d gone, then went outside to have a cigarette. Xas followed her and sat on the steps.
‘When he said he was leaving me to it are you sure he meant to leave you too?’ Flora said.
Xas patted the step next to him. Flora felt that she wasn’t being invited to sit because he wanted
her beside him. She thought he was testing her, looking for the cause of her stiff gait, as though she were an experimental aircraft he wanted to take up and subject to ‘incremental dives’. Flora didn’t move. She tapped her cigarette on the rail, scattering ash into the air. She said, ‘I keep finding myself thinking, “What’s this guy’s story?” But please don’t feel you need to tell me. I’m scared you’ll start quoting verse, or the wisdom of Aimee Semple McPherson.’
Xas said, ‘I don’t know who she is.’ Then he apparently decided to pick up on the conversation they’d been having, weeks before, as they walked to Flora’s trolley stop. ‘What would you most like to see on film?’
That was easy. ‘My grandmother after church talking to her cronies. My grandmother, who raised me.’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘She died before the war.’
‘Then you see what I mean.’
‘So we’re back to the speckled enamel bowl, and what film is able to preserve,’ Flora said. ‘If you’re really interested in my opinion, and not just making a point, perhaps you should ask me whether what I want to see on film has sound or is silent.’
‘I know you don’t like sound,’ Xas said. ‘But I don’t really understand why.’
Flora told him that her first talkie was Tenderloin, with Dolores Costello and Conrad Nagel. ‘I sat there listening to the dialogue, and was embarrassed. It was as if the people sitting beside me in the cinema had caught me eavesdropping. It was all too intimate. Besides, Dolly and Nagel kept saying dim things in a dopey way. So—bad acting is one reason I don’t like sound. Another is that the studios are putting so much money into sound that it’s making them too investment-minded about the films they want to make. I can see a time when it’ll become harder and harder for anyone to freelance in this town. I’m starting to feel that if I don’t attach myself to a particular director I’ll wind up pinned down in one studio—having to edit every film only one way.’
‘If that happens then Conrad Crow would be the one to choose,’ Xas said.
‘You worked for him for a single day and you picked that?’
‘People hang on his every word. He’s autocratic, but not grandiose. He’s having fun. And he’s slippery, which is interesting in itself.’
Flora was fascinated. This young man had read her friend very quickly, and very well. She wondered what he thought of Cole. Surely he mustn’t be seeing clearly there. She decided to ask him: ‘And what do you make of Cole?’
‘I don’t understand him. But you mean as a director?’
‘Directing film is just something Cole’s doing, I think,’ Flora said. ‘He’s extremely able. But I haven’t worked out yet what he is naturally—playboy, director, inventor—apart from being someone who does things that would terrify just about anyone else. Professional and personal things. Cole sometimes acts as though he has no imagination, but he does. I’ve known him for some time and I can’t work him out. It’s like trying to learn a river. You might get a stretch of it figured, and then it changes on you. Cole has fixed habits, though. For instance, he doesn’t like beef in his sandwiches. He’s predictable in that way. But, with most people you can say that their habits are like landmarks in the country of their characters; you can’t with Cole. If he was a character in a film and you were watching him behave you might be able to think, “If he does that then he’s this kind of person.” But I’ve been watching Cole for ages, and as far as I can see he’s not coherent.’
Flora finished talking and lit another cigarette from the end of her first. She wondered, would Xas take this warning? Which was how she’d meant it.
He was looking at up at her, his face in full sunlight. His expression was open and alert—but she couldn’t read him at all. She could tell that his alertness was a combination of excellent health and intelligence, but couldn’t tell whether his openness was simplicity or a kind of faithful courage. She wanted to know—suddenly needed to know—so she asked him whether he’d understood what she was saying.
‘Cole is complicated,’ he said.
‘I’m saying he might be crazy, and you should be careful of him.’
‘I try to be careful with everyone.’
‘I said “of ” not “with”. Be careful of Cole.’ Flora stubbed out her half-finished cigarette on the handrail and flicked it into the lane. The shadow of the nearest soundstage was climbing her two-storey shack. Flora thought that, if she stood a moment more, sober, without a smoke in her hand, then she’d have to admit to herself that she was doing more that passing time with this person. Cole had left them together, and for a short while Flora had felt as if she and Xas were Cole’s retainers, left to themselves after receiving their orders. They were both doing things for Cole. That was their only connection. And Millie. But Flora kept feeling that she wasn’t just passing time. She felt she needed to know why this person sitting on the step at her feet and looking up at her had a quality of attention that was quite unlike anything she had experienced before. What had happened to him to make him able to focus on things with such vivid patience?
The shadow had reached the step where he was sitting. He stood up and leaned on the rail opposite her.
Flora said, ‘All right, I’ll play your game. What would you most like to see on film?’
He began to stroke the mesh of the screen door. It didn’t rasp but made a soft, breathy singing under his fingertips, as though it were being rubbed with silk. He said, ‘I’d like to point the camera and microphone at a person or a group of people, and ask them questions. That’s what I’d like to see—a film of people answering questions.’
‘What kind of questions? And what kind of people.’
‘Anyone. And before you started filming you’d have to find out something about them first. You could ask about their job, or family, or hometown. You could ask about their health. Anything. Keep the camera rolling—then keep the film forever. Keep what God won’t.’
Flora was startled. She blinked at him.
He went on. ‘You could put the camera on a couple of eighty-five-year-old veterans of Shiloh, for instance.’
‘Hang on,’ said Flora. ‘What won’t God keep?’
Xas said, ‘God doesn’t keep bodies—bodies and all their faults. Let’s start with that. After all, I’m only talking about what it would be good to have on film. The bodies of people, and the voices of those bodies. Can I give you an example? Can I tell you a story?’ He waited for permission, and began to speak only when Flora gave him a nod.
‘I lived for a time in Burgundy in the town Beaune, near the ramparts, where I had an attic room. This was after my friend, Sobran Jodeau, died. Actually everything since then has been after his death. Sometimes things happen like that. You find yourself living not really in the world any more, but in another sorry place called Afterward.’
Flora touched her dress and, beneath that, her girdle of scarred skin. She nodded again, mute.
‘I had a room with a candle, a table, a chair,’ he said, then finished his sentence in a rush, ‘a room with rot-riddled beams, and a tiny arched window looking out over the street. I remember sitting in that room determined that it should be my whole universe, as though, if I were responsible for only a tiny territory, I could somehow take control of time there. Because, you see, it was time that took my friend from me.’
Flora said gently, ‘But then you had to go out to get something to eat.’
‘No, I didn’t. But I frightened myself. That’s why I left the room. Anyway—this isn’t a story about how I frightened myself, this is a story about what should be on film.
‘There was a school near my room. At intervals I could hear the children out in its yard. They sounded very wild to me. The first thing I did when I finally left my room was to go past the school and stop at its gate to have a look at these wild-sounding children. I was only idly curious, but I stayed at the gate because they were beautiful. Children of all sizes, in faded, patched uniforms—apparently ordinary chi
ldren, but every one of them was graceful and amazingly alive. I realised that they were deaf, and were communicating by looking at one another and gesturing. I watched one boy trying to impose his plan of action on some others; trying to convince them to play the game his way, arguing his case without making any articulate sound. I found myself wanting to do what he suggested, whatever he suggested. I would have obeyed any of them—they were so forcefully expressive.
‘So,’ he said, ‘that’s what I’d like to see on film—deaf children at play. In Heaven those children’s hearing would be restored to them, even if they were born deaf. So they’d lose their particular beauty along with that language of gestures.’
Flora stared at Xas for a long while in silence. The silence was like the balance of something—the remainder of his story. The story that extended on either side of his observation, and the peculiar theology he’d chosen to draw from it. There was the history of his friendship with his dead friend—Sobran Jodeau—who was what to him? And there was whatever he chose to do after he left the gate of the school for deaf children, whatever it was that brought him, eventually, to the door of her editing suite.
The sun was still shining on the distant Verdugo Mountains, and on the cylinder of the studio’s water tower, but the roofs of the soundstages were saw-tooth shadows.
After a long while Flora found herself simply saying ‘Yes’ to Xas. Surprised by the sound of her own voice she collected her wits and decided to make her ‘Yes’ pertain to something. ‘That’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘Someone should do that.’ Then she asked him what he was up to—apart from helping Cole with fire-effects.
‘I did some work on Millie’s plane—she lets me take it up. And I’ve flown one of Cole’s experimental aircraft. Not his racer, but one with a big brute of an engine and six propellers. And I found the new public library. I spend time there reading. There are people I see every time I go, they are the regulars. I’m the new regular.’ He smiled happily. ‘The other day a boy talked to me for two whole hours about L Frank Baum, and not just The Wizard of Oz, which is the one he says, scornfully, everyone knows. He’s a funny kid, everything he says seems to come from far off, as if he doesn’t belong in the solar system but is just coming around with his enthusiasms like a comet in its halo of ice. In fact, he reminds me of a relative of mine.’ Xas shook his head, then said, ‘I like libraries because I used to live in a kind of library.’ Then he dropped his head and murmured, ‘It’ll take me forever to catch up.’
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