by D. W. Buffa
He glanced at his wife, Helen, to make certain she agreed, but instead of the expected reply, she lifted her wine glass and began to drink.
“He’s out on bail,” explained Bannister patiently. “I didn’t set him free, and I certainly did not tell the world I thought he was innocent. The question of bail has nothing to do with anything except whether someone charged with a crime will show up at their trial. And, as you may have noticed, he has.”
Stanton was only slightly mollified.
“It’s his arrogance. He thinks he can do whatever he wants, that he can get away with anything.”
“Even murder?” asked his wife with a smile full of ambiguity. She held the wine glass inches from her eyes, watching the candle light sparkle on the crystal.
“You seem to hope he does!” said Stanton sharply.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she replied with a sharp look of her own. “But I like Driscoll. I can’t help it. I always have. Everyone says he murdered Gloria, and perhaps he did; but I’m not going to turn on him just because everyone else seems to have done. I’m not going to believe he’s a murderer until the trial is over and the jury says he did it. Isn’t that what a trial is for?”
“That’s exactly what a trial is for,” said Bannister before Stanton made some remark he might later regret. But Helen was not listening; her eyes were still on her husband.
“I liked her, too. That’s the point, you see: I liked them both, despite all their flaws; maybe because of them: all those insecurities, all the pressure of what everyone else expected. I lived that life myself, remember? All that movie star fame, everyone wanting to know what you’re ‘really like,’ even people you’ve known all your life thinking that it isn’t really you anymore, that you’re not the same person. Everyone wants to be your friend, but only while they think you’re this made up character they’ve seen on the screen. It’s hard; it was hard for her, it was hard for him, and they both failed, and now she’s dead and everyone thinks he’s a murderer. And that, it seems to me, is nothing short of tragic.”
There was a long silence as the maid cleared off the dishes and served the next course. The conversation, when it started again, was muted and subdued, a fragmentary exchange of meaningless opinion, a dull, prosaic commentary on food and weather, words which once spoken were immediately forgotten, words without connection to what they were thinking to themselves.
“I shouldn’t have said what I did,” said Stanton over coffee. “What Helen said is right: the whole thing is tragic; it should never have happened. And yes, you’re right what you say about the trial. It’s just that I know Driscoll and I know what he’s capable of. I know what he did to her before….”
After a short silence, Helen asked if they still wanted to watch the movie, the one that was going to be released the next week.
“It’s the best thing we’ve ever made,” sighed Stanton. With a sudden burst of energy he slapped his hand hard on the table. “Maybe the worst damn picture anyone has ever seen,” he laughed. “Which isn’t to say it won’t break box office records.” He darted a knowing glance down the table to Bannister. “I’m serious: Terrible picture, only fit for adolescents, and only stupid ones at that. We’ll make a fortune.”
“Sounds like something I’d love to watch,” drawled Helen with a mischievous grin at Meredith. “We had a lot of fun in our adolescent years, especially when we were doing really stupid things.” She was on her feet, a light teasing lilt in her voice as she threw back her head and in a stage whisper confided in Meredith, rising from her place the other side of the table, “Especially on hot nights like this in the back seat of some boy’s old Chevy!”
Stanton rolled his eyes as he watched his wife and sister leave.
“More coffee, more wine…more anything?” he said as he moved down the long line of vacant chairs and to a seat next to where Bannister was sitting.
“So the studio isn’t in trouble?”
“You mean because of the murder and now the trial? No. We won’t do as well as we would have, but close enough. The picture they were going to make together, we’ve gone ahead with that. Two different actors, but everyone will know – the publicity campaign, discreet but direct, will make sure of it – that it’s ‘the picture they would have made, the last picture Gloria Baker was working on.’ In the meantime, we come out with the kind of thing Helen and Meredith are so eager to see.” Stanton tossed down what was left of his wine and reached for the bottle. “It doesn’t take any real talent to give the public what it wants.”
Bannister sipped on his coffee. This last remark made him smile.
“How does the public know what it wants if you, or someone like you, doesn’t tell them?”
Folding his arms loosely across his chest, Stanton cocked his head. He started to say something, but then laughed at his own impatience and with an effort at tolerance reminded his brother-in-law that they had had this conversation before.
“The ‘decline of standards,’ the ‘rush to mediocrity,’ all the stupidity everywhere. And you have a point, Walter. It’s an interesting question why we pay some screenwriter a small fortune for a script in which every third word is ‘fuck’ and no one says more than three words at a time. But don’t blame me. I didn’t invent the internet, and I sure as hell didn’t invent the pictures. That was really it, you know: the idea that you could tell the whole story pretty much without words. No one seems to remember how powerful that was: the silent movies, the ones we laugh at now. They changed everything; stories did not need language: emotion is universal. Anger, fear, jealousy, rage – anything you wanted to portray; it was all there, all you had to do was watch. And that’s what we’ve gone back to: silent movies with a lot of sound. There isn’t any dialogue, nothing like what there was in the movies we used to watch when we were kids. No one is interested in what anyone thinks; they go to the movies to see things happen. You remember Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep? Watch it again, listen to the lines. You know who wrote them, who one of the screenwriters was – William Faulkner.”
Stanton took another drink, staring past Bannister into the middle distance, haunted by something he could not forget. Though candles had been lit for dinner, there was still some light outside. Streaming through the windows, the dark scarlet sun seemed to deepen and make more profound the anguished nostalgia in his eyes.
“That’s what made me so crazy about her…about Gloria. The picture part,” he added, realizing that Walter could not know what he meant. “You thought there was something there: an intelligence, a meaning, behind all those graceful movements and those wonderful shining eyes; that if she could only speak there was something she could say that you had always wanted to hear.”
Stanton shook his head, trying in his mind to get it right, to put into words what he had felt every time he watched her, the effect she had had that no one else could quite rival.
“It was incredible, what she was on camera, on the screen. There was no one like her. Even when I tried I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It had been years since I had seen anyone who could do that, draw every eye to her wherever she happened to be in a scene. You’d look at her and think those eyes of her held all the secrets of everything you had ever wanted to know. They were Eve’s eyes, the mirror of the Garden. And then, when she wasn’t in front of a camera repeating a screenwriter’s lines – it was maddening – she’d open her mouth and you’d feel cheated, that it was all a fraud. She was crude, aggressive, pushy, and spoiled and intolerant. She was impossible. The sweetest face, the kind of gentle vulnerability that made you want to shelter her in your arms, and then, a moment later, when she started on one of her obscenity laced tirades, all that lethal sarcasm pouring out, that hot-tempered….You’d want to shove her away, slap her snide, all-knowing face – Hell, they deserved each other, Gloria Baker and Driscoll Rose, the only question which one was going to kill the other first!”
Bannister placed his hand on Stanton’s sleeve and smile sympathetically
.
“It wasn’t your fault, Roger. That’s what has you so upset, isn’t it? You think none of this would have happened if you had called the police the night he beat her up, or if he had been sent to jail after what he did that day in Santa Barbara. You can’t think like that.”
Stanton pulled his arm away and searched Bannister’s eyes.
“Because I didn’t call the police; because I asked you not to report what he did to that Hispanic kid.” He said this as if he were taking it under advisement. “You’re wrong, Walter; it would have changed everything, it would -”
“You can’t think like that! It’s all in the category of what might have been. You can drive yourself crazy that way.”
“He’s going to get convicted, isn’t he?” asked Stanton suddenly, and then immediately apologized. “I’m sorry. You’re the judge, and I’m going to be called as a witness in a few days. I wish I didn’t have to do that.”
Bannister was growing more concerned. Stanton was become nervous and erratic, driven by some kind of pent-up frustration. Bannister thought he knew what it was.
“You were in love with her, weren’t you, Roger? That’s why you’re beating yourself up like this, blaming yourself, because you think you could have prevented this from happening.”
“In love with her? No, I wasn’t in love with her. I was fascinated by her, by what she could have been,” he added with a distant smile full of ambivalence. “That picture, the portrait I had done of her – I’m not sure why I gave it to her. No, that’s a lie: I know damn well why I did it: to show her what she could be, what beneath that tarnished selfish surface she really was, or might have been, if she had ever figured out that what she did on screen had less to do with pretending than the role she played in real life.” With a look of discouragement, he shrugged his shoulders. “That portrait caught her essence, and I think each time she looked at it she realized that, and maybe thought she ought to try a little harder to change, to quit all the self-destructive things she did. It was a wonderful picture, but now, slashed to pieces, no one will ever know what she really was, deep down inside, the source, really, of that marvelous quality she had that never came out except when she was in front of a camera.”
“The picture,” said Bannister, repeating it as if he had just been reminded of something, “slashed to pieces. Yes, just as you say. People do things, don’t they, in moments of anger, of rage?”
Stanton was not listening. He wanted too much to talk, to lose in the sound of his own voice all memory of Gloria Baker and everything that had happened.
“We never talk about you, Walter. It’s always about the movies and the business and what’s going on with me. You never talk about yourself. When someone asks, you turn the question around and make it all about them. I was still in college when you married Meredith, and for reasons I can’t imagine you’re still married to her. Don’t misunderstand,” he cautioned with a quick, indulgent smile, “she’s my sister and I love her, but it must drive you crazy the way she is, always flitting from one thing to the next, desperate to be at the center of things. She’s always been that way, as long as I can remember, afraid something might happen when she wasn’t there. You must hate it, dragged to all these dinners and parties and fund-raising events for all the dozens of charities with which she’s involved. You’d rather be home reading, studying the law, getting ready for whatever you have coming up in court.”
“Your sister,” remarked Bannister in a civil, forgiving voice; “thinks the world of you. She won’t hear anything against anything you’ve done, any picture you ever made.”
It was exactly what Stanton would have expected, the immediate defense of his sister, whatever Bannister really thought.
“Yes, I know; but I wonder if she’d be like that if instead of running a studio I had been a failure. You don’t have to answer that. Maybe I don’t give her enough credit. I suppose I could look at it the other way round and wonder why, given how different the two of you are, she’s stayed married to you.”
“Habit, mainly; we’ve gotten used to one another,” replied Bannister with a cryptic smile. “That’s probably the reason most marriages go on, don’t you think?”
Raising his eyes to signal his brother-in-law had a point, he pushed back against the chair until his legs were stretched out straight in front of him. For a moment, he stared pensively at his hands, clasped together in his lap. When he looked up there was an embarrassed, puzzled expression on his face. A question that had not occurred to him before now seemed a mark of his own regrettable self-absorption.
“Habit, what we get used to; it explains more than marriage, doesn’t it? How long have I known you, and we really don’t know anything about each other.”
“What is it you think you don’t know about me?” he asked cautiously.
“Hell, I don’t know. Well, all right – why did you become a judge? I actually have no idea. You were first in your class in college, first in your class in law school. You joined one of the biggest law firms in town – you could have ended up running the place. And if you wanted to be a judge, why this – a trial court judge – instead of….You could have been a federal court judge, an appellate judge – maybe by now on the Supreme Court.”
“You want the truth? – I never liked the law, I didn’t like law school, and I hated the practice. It’s duller than anything you can imagine, and the firm I was in….It was all about money. That was the one real advantage I had: I didn’t need the money; I was already rich. But there I was, a lawyer, married with a house in Bel Aire. And yes, I could have become an appellate court judge, not because I had any great talent for it, but between Meredith’s side of the family and mine we contributed enough money to politicians….But that would have been to exchange one kind of paper law for another, looking at how someone else had applied the law to a case. I wanted to do something that would show me more of life, what it means to sometimes do things you’re not supposed to do. That’s the real secret, if you really want to know: a trial judge gets to watch what happens when the real secrets of other people get exposed, when they’re called to account for doing the terrible things people do.
“I thought I might like the action, the struggle when something more serious than money – life or death – is at stake; a look at how people really live. I suppose I was a kind of voyeur, protected all my life behind a wall of privilege that, I have to admit, I didn’t even know was there. I just assumed – maybe most of us just assume – that everyone has the same ambitions and wants the same things. It isn’t true, of course. We read about things in the paper, see them on television, but it all seems unreal, the kind of things that don’t happen to ordinary, normal people – people like us – whose main problem growing up was deciding where to go to college and after we get married where we want to live.”
Bannister had said more than he had intended to say, drawn on, as he now realized, by the eager curiosity shining in Stanton’s eyes, nodding in agreement as if they had in some sense led parallel lives.
“What I said about Gloria, how she was more real in front of the camera than anywhere else – It’s the same thing, don’t you see?”
Bannister did not see at all.
“On the screen, in front of the camera, she put everything into living that one part. There’s a consistency in that. She wasn’t doing one thing one minute and something else the next; she wasn’t always changing her mood, happy without a care in the world and then, without warning, the complete bitch, demanding and resentful, full of malice. Isn’t that what you were looking for: something that let you make sense out of things: a trial, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, the action always heading to one inevitable result, even when the result is wrong.”
“Even when the result is wrong,” said Bannister slowly, repeating the words with a significance they had not had when Stanton first spoke them. “That happens sometimes in court; there’s no doubt about it.”
Stanton caught the meaning, or what h
e thought the meaning. He looked at Bannister with a sense of urgency.
“But that won’t happen this time, will it? Driscoll will be convicted, won’t he?”
Bannister would not violate the practiced impartiality of his position. He said nothing. The silence became awkward and uncomfortable.
“He deserves to be convicted,” insisted Stanton, inventing the certainty he needed. “And he will. Hector doesn’t try cases he thinks he might lose.”
With a cool, appraising glance, Bannister almost agreed.
“That’s always been his problem: the only thing he ever looks at is the effect something will have on him. Driscoll Rose could be completely innocent, but that would not stop him; not if a conviction will help make him governor. But then, everyone has something they want, don’t you think?”
* * *
Though always generous when it was a question of something her brother had done, Meredith had to admit that the movie she had watched with Helen had been “maybe not as good as some of the others he has made.”
Sitting in the passenger seat, watching the endless traffic on the freeway, the lights like fireflies in the night, Bannister could not help but laugh.
“That means Roger was right: it was pretty awful.”
Her eyes straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, she refused to go that far.
“Just because it isn’t something you or I might like, there is that whole audience out there that seems to like this kind of thing and -”
“We talked about that. What did Helen say – not about the movie, about Roger? He doesn’t seem himself. He seemed nervous, distracted, and what he said about the studio not being in trouble…I’m not sure I believe him. Something is bothering him.”
Meredith gave him a sharp look, and then, because she was not a very good driver and knew it, turned back to the road.
“You’d be a nervous wreck too, if you had to deal with all the things he’s had to. One of your best stars murdered, another one charged with doing it; everyone in Hollywood – all the reporters – always calling, demanding to know what’s going on; the money people worried about their investment; and at the same time still trying to run the studio, get pictures made. I wonder if you have any idea what that kind of pressure can do to someone.”
