Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  I have said that Astreé and Dirk liked to go away on motor trips leaving me alone in the house, and I have explained too that they engaged Mrs. Bent to take care of me in their absence simply because of the law regarding the supervision of minors. Through consulting an attorney, they found out that this obligation ended when a child became eighteen. As a result, as my eighteenth birthday approached they looked forward with anticipation to the time when I could legally be left in the house alone. Mrs. Bent (who for some time now had been referred to as a “housekeeper” rather than a “sitter”) was getting rather aged in any case. So, according to a plan that I agreed to quite willingly, they celebrated my eighteenth birthday in a way which might have seemed odd to some people. They went off on a trip to San Francisco to stay at the Mark Hopkins for a few days, go to the opera, shop at Gump’s and Abercrombie & Fitch, and dine out in their favorite places like the Blue Fox or the Basque restaurant in North Beach.

  The Invicta was too delicate and too unreliable for a long trip, so they went in the Duesenberg. It was a powerful roadster with an enormous long hood, a set of chrome-plated exhaust headers curving down over the side, and a canvas top with a small window in the rear. They put their bags in the rear and the Duesenberg started off down the drive with its characteristic exhaust noise: a deep syncopated rumble from the twin chromed tailpipes. Astreé turned once to raise her hand in a kind of distracted “Bye” sign to me. As they disappeared down the street I saw them kissing, framed in the small rear window of the car.

  And so I was left to my own devices in the big house for a few days. Astreé telephoned once; it was three o’clock in the morning and they had just got back to the hotel from the Hungry I in North Beach. Over the phone I could hear Dirk murmuring as he nuzzled her neck from behind. That was the last I heard from them. The trip evidently went more or less as planned. Coming back along Highway 1, they had reached the scenic stretch on the coast just south of Big Sur when a van driven by a long-haired youth under the influence of some hallucinogen or other crossed the center line and crashed straight into the front grille which Dirk had gone to such pains to have re-plated. The wreckage burned fiercely, and the undertaker advised burying them both in the same grave, since the two sets of ashes were so mingled that it was almost impossible to separate them—I expect he meant it was too much trouble.

  2.

  The bank, the trustees, and the attorneys took care of everything. To my surprise Astreé and Dirk had executed an elaborate will in my favor, too complicated for me to understand in all its details, in fact, setting up a trust that provided me with a generous monthly allowance and leaving the management of the estate to the trust department of the Sunset Bank. I had nothing much to do in those first few days except to think how to respond in some way to the profuse if somewhat conventional expressions of sympathy that I received from Astreé’s and Dirk’s many friends. Naturally I was afflicted with a certain amount of grief. I wasn’t a monster, and I had been genuinely fond of Astreé and Dirk. But I kept this pain to myself, as I had always done with my other expressions of feeling, and I confined myself to formulas of gratitude as conventional as the sympathy of the friends. I would sooner have taken off my clothes in front of those people than revealed my innermost feelings to them. At the funeral, since I had excellent hearing, I caught a distant murmur across the crowd, “He always was a cold boy.” And perhaps I was; it seemed to me to be better to be cool about things than too hot. The hurt I felt over the loss of my parents was something like a thumb struck with a hammer, very painful for a while, interfering to an extent with one’s proper functioning in the world, and impossible to conceal entirely from others. But I recovered. One always does, from a struck thumb. When I hurt myself as a child, Astreé would kiss it to make it well, then she would forget it and go on blithely about her own affairs. Neither she nor Dirk ever dwelt much on private misfortunes. As casual and even negligent as they had been in my upbringing, they gave me excellent training in this respect.

  For a number of years I went on living alone in the big house in St. Albans Place. I had few friends and nothing to do in particular except to do what I wanted. It shouldn’t be imagined that I was lonely or unhappy in any way. I enjoyed this solitary life intensely. My only enemy was boredom, and I found a thousand ingenious ways to combat this. Of course I had access to my grandfather’s excellent library. Now and then I enrolled in a course at UCLA, in eighteenth-century French literature perhaps, or something more esoteric like the history of the Albigensian heresy, but for the most part I educated myself through private reading—like Proust and Virginia Woolf, or the Baron Corvo, that odd and elaborate impostor who was perhaps my favorite author in the panoply of eccentrics, recluses, and decadents I had collected for myself. I began exploring the top shelves of my grandfather’s library, in the locked glass cabinets where years before I had found Une semaine de bonté. Here I discovered books that for a long time I thought nobody else knew about: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, Baudelaire’s Paradis Artificiel, and Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus. Roussel’s elaborate and slightly mad world of the imagination, filled with its ingenious, complex, and totally useless mechanical contrivances, seemed to me a satisfactory analogue to the predicament of modern man—hypnotized by his elaborate technology until he spent his whole existence watching its wheels go around—in my case a seven-hundred-dollar turntable with its diamond needle, carving away in its groove like the torture machine of Kafka’s tale “In the Penal Colony.”

  One of the first things I bought, after the fuss over my sudden orphaning had died away, was an excellent stereo system, the best that money could buy. It filled one whole end of the living room in its custom cabinets, and each piece of equipment was duplicated in the bedroom upstairs, so I could lie on the bed and control the whole thing with an array of electrical buttons at the bedside. As for music, I had no strong preferences, except for my dislike of the deafening electronic cacophonies of my own generation, so I started with what was in the house. There was a large glass case in the library downstairs full of old records. Most of them had been acquired by Dirk and Astreé—big-band swing from the Forties, musical comedy albums, old Cole Porter songs. But farther back in the cabinet, so covered with dust that it was clear nobody had touched them for years, I found a hundred or so old seventy-eights in faded paper covers. The collection included the French court musicians from Mouet and Philidor to Couperin, Lully, and Marin Marais; D’Andrieu and Loeillet; most of Telemann including the Fantasien for flute and orchestra; and scratchy arias from the operas of Galuppi and Paisiello. Evidently my grandfather had made a kind of professorial and erudite hobby of this music that corresponded to the period of his academic specialty in the French pastoral. This was long before the contemporary fad for the baroque, and he must have gone to a good deal of effort to acquire these fragile old shellac records at a time when no one in particular could have been interested in them but himself, playing them, no doubt, on an old wind-up Victor phonograph that was still preserved, with a rug over it, in the attic in St. Albans Place.

  In time I began to develop my own addiction to the music of this period, for reasons in myself that at first I didn’t identify, or wasn’t interested in analyzing. Like many people who live alone I was an insomniac, and often when I couldn’t sleep I would spend half the night drinking—moderately, and staying carefully away from the thin edge of intoxication—and listening to these old records. With a little dry vermouth in my glass, sipping at it now and then, I could lose myself for hours in these highly symmetrical, highly intricate chamber pieces with their complex harmonies, their intricately interlaced fugal structures, the solemnly funereal, weirdly graceful stateliness of the slow movements. Their beauty and grace were quite obsolete; it was an elegance of court and drawing room, the music of a time when a tiny fraction of humanity enjoyed their exquisite and overrefined pleasures at the expense of the brute labor of the others. I preferred the past, almost any
past, to the present. There was no reason why you had to live in the present, I thought, especially if you had a little money. Partly through the accident of birth, partly through my own preference, I had arranged a life for myself in which I was surrounded by obsolete things, by anachronisms: old music, the old house with its stately and slightly spurious charm of a New England university town, old cars, the old books in the library. When I had to make an occasional foray into the flashy modern world of the “L.A.” outside, to buy food or on some other errand, it was like stepping into the sunlight from a darkened theater—a sporadic and ephemeral expedition into the present, a harmless jag to the nerves. There is a story by Kafka called “The Burrow” in which the narrator—an animal of an unidentified species—creeps out of his burrow now and then to contemplate its entrance from a distance and enjoy the mild sense of danger that this produces, knowing that security is immediately at hand whenever he wishes to return to it. This was exactly my impulse.

  I was soon adding to the collection by buying records of my own, and in time I even became a fairly competent amateur musicologist in the period, just as I had become something of a scholar by reading the books in my grandfather’s library. As I explored further into the subject I began to make a specialty of music played on authentic period instruments—the viola da gamba in place of the cello, the lute rather than the guitar, the recorder instead of the flute, or even odder old and unwieldy museum pieces like the krumhorn or the tromba marina. I would lie sometimes until daylight on the bed, listening to the thin and acerbic, slightly twangy tone of a Renaissance oboe, or a concerto played on an antique valveless horn—archaic, muffled, slightly brassy, like a hunting horn echoing in the depths of some medieval forest. Such records were hard to find, but I became an expert in searching them out, sometimes ordering custom pressings from specialty music houses in Europe, or rerecording my own cassettes from rare records in libraries. I corresponded with other rare-music collections in America and Europe, and I had a whole file cabinet full of notes and cross-references, rather badly organized, but which I hoped to make use of some time. Once, when I was taking a musicology course at USC, I even started to write a monograph on Pergolesi’s string concertos and their possible sources in the works of Ricciotti, but I quit when I ran out of typewriter ribbon. I still have the manuscript, about thirteen pages, marked with the date when I abandoned it: June 14, 1976.

  Still it was on account of this monograph, or at least of my efforts to write it, that I met Belinda, who in time became a good friend and perhaps even something more. I had been doing some work on Pergolesi in the Doheny Library, and when I went for a coffee break in the student union I took my book with me and went on reading it while I sat at the long coffee-spotted wooden table. The atmosphere in the union was very informal. Everybody talked to everybody else. After a while I heard someone inquire, “Why are you reading a book about Pergolesi?”

  I looked up. She was a tall girl with sun-bleached California hair, blond at the ends and darker down inside, and a tennis player’s tan. Her clothes were casual, a cashmere sweater and a skirt. She looked much like any of the other students on the campus, except perhaps for her lipstick, which was a very pale pink, almost white, so that in contrast to her tanned face it gave her the slightly disorienting look of a photographic negative in which light and dark are reversed. That and her crisp and self-assured way of speaking, with a faint touch of irony.

  “You know Pergolesi?”

  “La Serva Padrona. The Stabat Mater.”

  “Of course. Those are the ones that everybody knows. I’m interested in the concerti for string orchestra, which aren’t as well known.”

  She regarded me appraisingly for a moment, as though I were a picture she were contemplating in a museum.

  “What about them?”

  “I have a theory that they may owe something to an obscure Italian composer named Carlo Ricciotti, about whom almost nothing is known except that he was Musikmeister in The Hague around 1740. Pergolesi’s concerti are different from the rest of his work. The mode is no longer high baroque, it’s pre-classical. The whole harmonic development, and especially the way the accidentals are handled, very much resembles Ricciotti. It’s even possible, in fact, that four of the six concerti are Ricciotti’s work and not by Pergolesi at all.”

  “Ricciotti was in The Hague in 1740. But Pergolesi lived to be only twenty-six, and died in 1736.”

  Now it was my turn to give her a long thoughtful look. She was still the same, a tall girl with pale lipstick, a little more mature and self-assured than the ordinary coed.

  “Yes. But no one knows Ricciotti’s dates. He could have been working in northern Europe in the early 1730’s, at the time when Pergolesi was supposedly composing his concerti. In any case the attribution of the concerti to Ricciotti has to be made on stylistic and harmonic grounds rather than biographical evidence, because there is no biographical evidence.”

  This lecture of mine seemed to amuse her more than anything else.

  “Who in the world are you, anyhow?” She added, “If you were anybody I would have heard of you.”

  “Why should you have heard of me?”

  “Because I know everybody who works in early music in L.A.”

  “I keep pretty much to myself.”

  It was a double misunderstanding; we each took the other for a student—which was an easy mistake to make, since we met in the student union and I looked a good deal younger than my age—whereas in fact I was a rich dilettante, and she was a professional musicologist who just happened to be on campus to do some work in the library. She was a programmer for the classical FM station KUSC, which had its studios near the campus, and she had her own weekly program of early music called Quires and Consorts. In fact I had occasionally listened to this program at home, although it was some time before I connected the voice that came out of the speakers with the Belinda I met in the union.

  After we got over our initial amusement at this malentendu we became friends and frequently went out together—to concerts and ballets, to dinner where we went Dutch and split the bill, or to old films. Out of boredom, more or less, I had developed an addiction to the primitive pictures that were put on by the classic films series at the County Art Museum or at UCLA. I liked them best when there was no sound at all except for some scratchy music, or some inexpertly dubbed dialogue tacked on in a later epoch by hacks who scarcely cared whether they did a good job or not. Like my walks, the films for me were a kind of vulgar relaxation, a retreat from the excessive refinement of the world of books and baroque music which I inhabited in the house in St. Albans Place. I had my own private fantasies about them, which I didn’t communicate to Belinda. For me, the world of the silent film was another world than our own—an artificial and synthetic world in which there existed another life parallel to our own and yet different—a world where other physical laws operated so that impossible athletic feats could be performed and devastating accidents happen without harm to the victim—where even the laws of psychology and character were different, where there was a freedom, an invulnerability, a kind of zany marionette behavior that made everything simpler and less complex than life in our real world of three dimensions. In spite of the stiffness of their movements and the rigid conventionality of their behavior, these black-and-white figures moving jerkily across the screen seemed to bear a charm that freed them from the limitations of the ordinary human condition. One envied, almost, their doll-like posturing, their kisses that produced soulful expressions but were followed only by fade-outs, the comedians in baggy pants who were run over by buses but only got up and dusted themselves off, the orphans who were certain to find in the end that they were the lost children of millionaires. There was no real suffering in this world, no boredom, and no mortality. When people were shot they only fell down, dramatically and with pathos, as they had been taught to do by directors with the aesthetic sensibility of second-hand pants dealers. If they were young they were always young, and i
f they were old they were always old. And if they were young they were beautiful—as I was myself. In the projection hall I almost forgot my three-dimensional existence and lost myself in this play of jerky cardboard figures on the screen.

  I can’t think that Belinda really cared much for these primitive works of art, but she came along, probably more amused at me than she was at the pictures. Sometimes after a concert or a movie I would bring her back to the house in St. Albans Place. She was impressed with the house, and with my general way of life, no doubt, but always with the touch of irony with which she regarded most things. We would have a drink or two and we would kiss sometimes, lightly, as friends. Nothing more. I don’t know what she wanted of me. Perhaps a more intimate physical relation—if so she never spoke of it or made any sign, even though it was she who had made the first overtures in asking me from across the table in the union, with her distant little smile, “Why are you reading a book about Pergolesi?”

  As for me, I knew very well why it was that I felt no desire for Belinda, at least no overt sexual desire. Partly it was her general tone of an emancipated young woman, her self-assurance and aggressiveness in a conversation, her tenacity in adhering to a point when she knew she was right, her private air of amusement at my own little quirks. But above all it was her status as a professional musicologist, one who made her living from her profession. While I was confident enough of my own expertise in this field not to feel any sense of disadvantage, it nevertheless prevented me from feeling toward Belinda as I would have to feel toward her if I were to desire her sexually. There was no emotional jealousy—it was a purely physical matter. It was simply that I felt myself incapable of going to bed with a person who knew more about music than I did. If we did, I felt, she would have to be the one who was on top. So nothing happened, beyond our friendly kisses.