Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald

by Ron Carlson

  “In the meantime,” he said leaning over the beer, “are you sure you need all this?”

  “You’re right, I might need some more. Got any?” I looked back toward the cooler.

  “Just a minute, there, my dear debtor, if you’ve got coins for beer, you got coins for past debts.”

  “No way, Mr. Grinmaster, we’re entertaining some important dignitaries tonight.”

  “Oh, why didn’t you say so? That’s entirely different.” He didn’t move off the beer.

  “I’ll say it is,” I growled, jerking the three cases out from under his pointed elbows, heading out. “They’re from India visiting, hoping to sue this weevil pit for libel!”

  I fell over a sandwich sign announcing a new low on cat food on my way back to the truck, but reached it and tossed the beer in the back. He came out the door of the Taj Mahal and, rubbing his nervous hands in his apron, said, “If I’m dead by the time you pay that bill, Boossinger, just donate it to a fund for rehabilitating the young idiots who are dragging this country down, will you!” See what I mean about irony. Regardless, I kept on going there because it was several billion times better than Seven-Eleven. I like Grinmaster, and, in a way, the attention he pays to me.

  The sunrise adrenalin now started to ebb, and I was on my own for the last errand. Fortunately it lay in sympathetic territory: the dormitory office. Christine, my thirty-year-old, onetime typist, and assistant dean of housing was in.

  “Larry! Great to see you. Back prowling the old home turf? How’s your lady?’”

  “Perfect,” I said. Everybody called Lenore “the lady.”

  “How are you?”

  “Imperfect. That is the same, but that’s immaterial. I have come to invite you to a film that could change your life.”

  “What? You mean it would make Roily propose?”

  “No. I mean change your life for the better. Forget that freak. But you can invite him too if he pays his own way.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “Twenty Million Miles from Earth.”

  “Huh?”

  “An informative intergalactic travelogue.”

  “Well,” she said, clasping her hands behind her head, sitting back, hoisting her pendulous twin mammalian timekeepers, “the projector is in the same cupboard as when you were here.” She pointed. “How’s the degree coming? Got any papers for me to type?”

  “A wrong question.”

  “Sorry. Listen, I’ll try and make it.” She prepared to go back to her paperwork.

  “Good.” I gripped the projector.

  “Oh, Larry,” she said, going for her desk drawer as if it was a holster, pulling out a loaded folder, “your final bills came, for the last two months and cleaning.”

  6

  At home I avoided all the Ellises and found the little yellow sign outside our apartment door that said: “Movies Tonite, Yippie!!” in Eldon’s elementary school script. Inside he was rigging the cord onto our tapestry, so that when he pulled on it, the whole thing rolled up revealing the bare wall: our screen. A showman’s touch. The tapestry was predominantly of snorting horses and the huntsmen they carried, and way back on a hill in the green and sepia distance, was a little red fox. The huntsmen were looking the wrong way as their spotted dogs went berserk at the horses’ feet.

  “Get everything?”

  “Everything. Grinmaster sends his best wishes.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Want a beer?”

  “Sure.” We sat down on the couch looking out at the traffic.

  “Who’s coming?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. Some of the Student Political Alliance people, and their candidate—Harmon, I think. Ribbo and the freaks. A Black Heron contingent. Assorted females.”

  “Sordid?”

  “Probably, who’d you invite?”

  “Wesson. Virgil Benson. I think Dotty Everest is coming.”

  “Why’d you ask Wesson and Everest?”

  “Why do people do things in this world?”

  “Is Lenore coming?”

  “I don’t know.” My instinctual phrase.

  “Well it sounds like a great party, I just hope we raise some money. I’ll have to do my DAV Speech, number four. The one about some people having advantages others don’t.”

  We moved the furniture into the small bedroom, stacking the couch and the overstuffed on the bed, knocking the phone over as usual. We decided to leave the desk this time and put the projector on it instead of in the bathroom as we had in the past. Putting the projector back in the bathroom gave us a larger picture, but also forty thousand intermissions. There was a knock on the door.

  “Evelyn! Come in.” A woman came into the room looking more like Jean Arthur than I could believe. “Evelyn, this is Larry; Larry, my sister Evelyn. And this is Zeke.” I shook hands with the dark-haired boy. He was three or four, and really liked shaking hands.

  “Glad to make your acquaintance, I’m sure.” he said.

  “Gosh, Eldon, don’t you boys have any furniture?”

  We all sat on the floor and I got two more beers and a glass of wine for Eldon’s sister. She had taken the bus from Nephi that morning and she and Zeke told us the wonders of central Utah, until darkness closed in on the orange end of Eldon’s cigarette.

  Then I set up the projector and the first reel, and people started arriving. Dotty arrived first, of course, towing some “Sandy,” the best male dancer in the company. Then Simpson and his new bride. Wesson, who helpfully gave Virgil Benson a ride. Most of the Student Political Alliance looking serious and talked out, pamphlets hanging from their back pockets like tails. Edith, and Jannie, and Sharon, all friends of Eldon’s. A whole crowd of sophomore “chicks,” which in this case is the right, most charitable word for them. I think one of them was a cheerleader. Two hard-looking Black Heron regulars, one already drunk. Johnny Harmon, candidate for student body president in tomorrow’s election, along with two groupies. Every time the door opened my heart yawned, in Lenore expectation. Eldon handed out drinks for a while and kept Wesson away from me. I knew Wesson was just churning to know what I’d done to give Banks such a negative coronary thrill, and then chime in with too-late warnings and codes of conduct for the future. Then Eldon made a very brief and moving fundraising speech, during which he removed his glasses twice, emphasizing the word “privileges.” His helmet, as I have indicated earlier, was awesome. He then pulled the cord raising the eternally frustrated fox hunters in a roll, as I turned on the switch and a black and white Scrappy cartoon danced on the wall.

  As soon as the cartoon was over, I left my post and helped Evelyn put Zeke to bed across the hall in our neighbor, Bunny’s apartment. Bunny, an entertainer in a way herself, always came to our parties and left her apartment open as a measure of convenience.

  “You have some interesting friends.” Evelyn said pulling the sheet up to Zeke’s chin.

  “Wherever they may be.” I shouldn’t have said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Goodnight, Old Zeke.”

  “Goodnight, Old Larry.”

  Back at the theater, the rocket carrying the Alien Visitor had just arrived on earth from twenty million miles in outer space, and Dotty came over and edged between Evelyn and myself.

  “Really a great film.”

  “Cease perturbing the projectionist please.”

  “Old man.”

  She rejoined Sandy. Eldon sat on the window sill with Jannie, whispering occasionally, his helmet reflecting the antic light from the wall, the trees behind him growing quietly greener. Outside, lilacs.

  After the Italian boy took the capsule home to amaze his father, a tremendous shadow appeared on the screen. Simpson and his bride, she rising first, stood up and exchanged one too many edged words while silhouetted in the small Italian house trailer where the Alien Visitor would grow up. Stepping over bodies, they left. Marriage. This science-fiction must be strong stuff. Simpson had once been a famous friend of our
s.

  Ribbo and the freaks arrived stoned. He handed me the joint as he came in saying, “Where’s Simpson going?”

  “Home.”

  “Far out. He said the movie is about a lizard, is that right?”

  “That lizard,” I pointed out of the projection booth, which I wore like a mask, at the Alien Visitor.

  “Wow!” he noted in a breath and headed for the kitchen.

  The relatively scaly Alien Visitor, reminiscent of the creature of the black lagoon from the film of the same name (though the special effects in Twenty Million Miles are much better) was now being scrutinized as he went through many Disneyesque, that is to say anthropomorphic, movements, in a small glass case. And the reel clack-clacked to a close.

  Everybody rose and went into the kitchen to get another drink, or to the bathroom. Some people strolled across to Bunny’s. I saw Ribbo go up and assure Johnny Harmon that he had the freak vote. Everyone assumed Ribbo had extensive influence that way, because he had an enormous underground comic collection, which he kept on his pad’s cubic version of a coffee table just like Professor Roachfield keeps Overview on his. Whenever Ribbo got into a situation where he felt his power waning, he would begin muttering, “Guns, money, men, guns, money, men, …” Harmon was moving freely through the crowd. Fortunately there were no babies for him to kiss. Then he talked to Edith and Sharon for a while. Smiling at him, they sat Indian-style on the floor, nodding, as he tried to organize their bloc. The three of them made an attractive picture; and he appeared magnetic, larger than life. As I snapped down the last projector facet and readied reel two, Eldon looked over to me, “Is she coming?” I don’t know what’s going to happen. Am I uncommitted? How can I gain a little magnetism? Even a little static electricity? How do people get larger than life?

  A “Bullshit!” or two came from the audience as the Alien Visitor suddenly sprouted man-size, and committed the first overt act of rural violence. For a minute the beer-traffic in the room slowed as people received their dollar’s worth from the film.

  A thin line of light from the door projected Evelyn’s shadow as she returned from Bunny’s where she’d been checking on sleepy Zeke. Smoke rose through the projector beam in occasional streams, and Evelyn smiled to see the closeup of the Alien Visitor’s profile: like Abe Lincoln with scales.

  “He’s asleep.” she whispered to me.

  “Good.”

  “What a peculiar film.”

  “Yeah isn’t it great? Want some more wine?”

  “No, I’ll wait.”

  “Here, Evelyn, sit here in the booth.” I cleared a little place for her on the edge of the desk. As she sat down, some of my books fell off the other side. One weighs some things against others, I suppose.

  Fish-man from outer space had grown to his fully spurned fifty feet and made huge strides toward Rome, as all young upcomers in Italy should. There was a shot of the hustle and bustle of downtown Rome with the many citizens going about their daily business in the real world. It became pretty obvious by now, as members of the audience passed the ninth round of beer among themselves, that the Alien Visitor was not going to make it; this is just not his world. All the moviegoers’ hair reflected the blinking grey light from the screen, as the projector, oversize in the crowded room, whirred and sputtered, in a small continuous fit of heat and light.

  It was at that moment when Lenore stepped into the plank of hall light from the doorway and took a hold of my elbow. Firmly. Behind her in the hall was friend Gary, the pharmacist. They were overdressed, Gary wearing a sealskin overcoat for some reason, and I saw, not staying. Lenore, looking more at my hand than at me and still holding my elbow, pressed the ring down into the flesh of my palm as if she were putting out a cigarette and Smokey the Bear was watching. They walked to the stairwell and turned. “Think it over, Larry,” was all she said, leaving. Probably for Rome.

  What could I have said? I actually mean this, what could I have said? Ouch? She had looked perfect in a lime-colored dress, light as air, under which as perfection allows there must have been lime underwear. I confess a sublime ignorance of what is supposed to be done. Would I go then years from that night to her front door only to be invited in and expected to ask questions about her babies? How’s little Gary, Jr.?

  Turning back into the room I saw that Eldon had witnessed this little exchange, and he turned his back on the film and sat with his feet on the roof. I shut the door and walked carefully over to Bunny’s, fell on the sofa and lit a cigarette from her plexiglass cigarette box. The initials K.B.L. were cut nicely in the top. Superman once compressed a piece of coal in his bare hand into a diamond to impress a witchdoctor after Jimmy and Lois’s plane had crashed. I rolled the perfect gem between my thumb and first finger, feeling the corners. I thee wed. I threw my feet up on the table and blew three malformed smoke rings at the ceiling. Bunny’s terrace doors were open and the breeze erased the rings, bringing in a large dosage of lilacs. Evidently they had the house surrounded. Trying to pause, to gather, I tried to calculate how many hours I had been awake. My mouth tasted tannic and my closed eyes felt slack. “Oh la.” went the sigh.

  After several long minutes that seemed an interminable exhalation, I heard the general shuffle that told me: end reel two. Ribbo strolled in accompanying one of the nubile cheerleaders. She was fairly drunk, and he was doing his people’s logic voice into her incoherent face, all the while keeping his underground arm around her waist, “1 don’t do football games, because the sanctified violence is absurd. Fans aren’t the people. The people can’t afford to do football games, they’re stuck in the streets …” They went out onto the terrace. Ribbo used the verb “do” for everything. He was going to do some dope. He was going to do some sleep. He was going to do the revolution. That verbal umbrella didn’t bother me as much as going to the salmonella cellar he lived in; I mean, he never did the dishes.

  In our kitchen the empties overflowed the garbage sack. Somebody had started a trend by putting his cigarette out in the sink.

  “How’s the beer?” I asked Eldon.

  “Holding out. How are you?”

  “Holding out. On with the show, I guess.” I stepped back over the people and debris, Dotty playfully grabbed my foot and I nearly fell onto Wesson and Virgil Benson.

  “Dotty!”

  “Yeah, graceful?”

  Never mind, Dotty.

  Wesson had been feigning an interest in the film for an hour and a half, and he looked wasted, shell-shocked. He’d been trying too hard to figure out what disorder would cause people to watch such a movie.

  “Really superb.” Virgil said smiling. I sat down by him a minute. “The animation is amazing. I’ve seen photos of that model; it’s only two feet tall.”

  “Two feet!” Wesson was astounded.

  “Right. And did you notice how expertly he uses his tail? They really knew what they were doing. I think a guy named Harryhausen did it.” Benson’s collection of Famous Monsters of Filmland was much more extensive than my own. “1 can’t wait to see this finale, I’ve heard about it.”

  I started reel three. The dramatic countdown: 10 X 9 X 8 XX blank 4 X, then that slick numberless black flickering. My instincts were not communicating how I should feel. My pockets were full of diamonds, remember. The Italian Army, a fully equipped modern-type army, had been called in. The phone rang. Men with walkie-talkies directed traffic.

  “Larry here.” I always answer the phone like that; I find it reassuring.

  “Who’s up there?” Accusingly said.

  “Eldon and I and a friend.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  “The army versus the monster.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know what you can hear. We’re just sitting around up here looking at the walls, Mrs. Ellis.” As I said her name, Eldon tossed another beer can out over the roof onto the lawn.

  “Well, why are you in the kitchen?”

  “Making sandwiches, ma’am.”<
br />
  “At eleven-thirty?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well can’t you use someone else’s kitchen?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  “I’m bringing the rent over bright and …”

  She hung up. Tanks rolled in and troop convoys converged.

  “He’s heading for the circus!” the commander, who looked like Gene Barry, said. The now fully misunderstood monster turned left, eyes searching, turned right, looking frantically for the way to go. An elephant looked up from his straw dinner. This unmistakable montage was accompanied by the ringing of the phone. Eldon answered and experienced one of the shortest conversations on record. He waved to me and I shut down the projector.

  “That was Mrs. Ellis, our cinephobic landlady. She says she’s called the police. I hate to tell you all this, since this last reel, I’ve been informed, is a prize winner, and we’re continuing regardless of the consequences, which is the manner in which we do most things. Leave at your own risk! It may be only a threat since she calls us nightly and says the same thing.”

  Wesson and Johnny Harmon were the first to leave, and then nearly everyone left. Even Dotty. Being zany is good; jail is bad. Bunny and Virgil Benson stayed. Bunny said she was curious which officer would arrive, and Benson simply said he couldn’t miss the ending. Eldon and Evelyn stayed, Evelyn asking if we thought a policeman would really come. I woke one of the Black Heron regulars, a former creative writing teacher in whose irrigated brain nothing more would grow, who was sleeping in the desk well, and he left, muttering about an absolutely frightening dream.

  The place was a wreck. It looked like the day after The Little Big Horn. But it was a comfortable wreck, and we all stretched out amid the beer can rubble, spilled wine, and cigarette butts. Art for our sake.

  Eldon leaned over toward me and asked, “What did she say?”

  “She said think it over.” I handed him the ring.

  “Think it over?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you say?”