Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  Meanwhile, unknown to Belinda, I was experimenting in a light-hearted way with other forms of carnal amusement—some a little dangerous, enough to lend them spice. I became a frequenter of those specialized places of encounter that are provided in Los Angeles, as they are in other large cities, for ephemeral adventures with persons of one sex or another, discreet bars with names like Foxey’s and Just for Tonight. The people I met in such places, on the whole, were impressed with the house in St. Albans Place when I brought them there, and unlike Belinda they didn’t smile at my eccentricities. They also did what I wanted them to do, and not what they wanted. Some of them I didn’t even have to pay. It was enough for them to have brushed up briefly against a fantasy that was beyond their imagination, a refinement of decadence that afterward must have seemed to them something encountered only fleetingly in a dream. When I grew tired of this game I turned to sidewalk hookers, expensive call girls, and even the boys in tank tops and tight jeans who hung out late at night along Santa Monica Boulevard. I discovered, somewhat to my satisfaction, that I was polymorphous-perverse enough to be capable of almost any sexual bizarrerie to be found in this complex and cynical city where practically everything, from a joint of grass to a cold-blooded murder, could be bought for a price. I was incapable, it seemed, of only one sexual variation, that of going to bed with Belinda. My friendship with her continued on for a number of years, more or less in the same vein, or according to the same rules. I don’t think she had any other suitors. In my private thoughts I jokingly referred to her as my fiancée—she herself always told people we were “just friends.”

  Except for Belinda, and my music and books, I had few other interests. I went out to dinner once in a while, sometimes with Belinda and sometimes alone. Sometimes I tinkered a little with Dirk’s classic cars—or the two that were left, the Invicta and the Hudson—although for some reason I never found as much satisfaction in polishing them as he had. When I wanted to go somewhere too far to walk I usually drove the big Hudson phaeton, saving the more fragile Invicta for some special adventure, perhaps, that lay ahead in the future. I drank a little but I didn’t make a hobby of it. I always never went to bars except to singles bars, where I didn’t drink at all, in order to maintain the advantage of clarity over my adversaries. I had never been attracted to drugs, although I could have afforded any that I wanted. The real world, so called—the world I found palpably around me in my waking hours—bad always seemed so evanescent and ephemeral that I was never quite sure whether its objects were going to be there when I reached out to touch them; and I was reluctant to bring any further unreality into my consciousness by introducing chemicals into my body that would additionally weaken this tenuous web that connected me with reality.

  One evening—it was a Tuesday, I remember, since Belinda had her program that night—I had gone out to dinner alone at an Italian restaurant on Melrose Avenue. I came home about nine, took off my necktie and coat and hung them in the closet (I was careful with my clothes, and I dressed rather formally), and fixed myself a drink. I switched on the FM and set it to 92.5. After the station break there was a pause and then I heard her low-keyed and confident voice. “Good evening. This is Belinda Blaine, your host for Quires and Consorts, KUSC’s weekly program of early music. This evening we shall hear as our featured work Jean-François d’Andrieu’s Premier livre de Clavecin, a work which …”

  Oddly enough I felt a little stir of desire, a thing that had never happened when Belinda was actually present. By the telephone was a business card: “Ace Escort Service. 50 foxy girls. Dial day or night 555-6712.” I picked up the card and looked at it for a moment, and then I put it down. Instead I took off the rest of my clothes and went into the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror. The measured tinkle of the harpsichord came through the open door from the other room. I stood for some time looking at the image in the mirror—the thin and skeptical, slightly immature face with a shock of dark hair over the forehead, the pale complexion, the slender body with perhaps a touch of the feminine in the softness of the contours and the fragility of the shoulders and elbows, the perfect and flowerlike organ visible in the patch of hair at the bottom of the abdomen. It struck me for the first time that my body was a kind of amalgam or union of the bodies of Astreé and Dirk, both of whom had been very attractive people. I was pleased and satisfied by what I saw in the mirror. My doubts vanished. I forgot about it then and finished my drink, listened to the rest of Belinda’s program, and went to bed. I always slept the same way, in Christian Dior satin pajamas, alternating a blue pair with a maroon week by week, crouched in a kind of fetal position on one side of the large double bed in which my grandparents and my parents had slept, leaving space at the side for another person. I slept well and woke up content with myself and as serene as an angel.

  The next day I called a glass shop on Western Avenue and had them come in and install mirrors over the whole bedroom—a large one on each of the three walls facing the bed, and another huge one, eight feet by four, on the ceiling directly over the bed. I waited impatiently until they were gone. Then I stripped everything off the bed except the bottom sheet, took off my clothes, lay down on the bed, and took my pleasure with myself, while I turned successively to watch the images in the four mirrors. The experiment was a considerable success; not only was I excited by my own beauty but I felt there was no one else in the world who was worthy of it, no one who deserved this body but myself. Gradually this practice became a habit, and I continued in it with no sense of guilt or no feeling that I required anything else of myself or anyone else. I was self-sufficient. My parents’ friends at the funeral had been wrong to say that I was a cold boy. When I caught sight of myself in the mirrors, especially the large one overhead, I was filled with a hot and powerful desire that demanded to be satisfied immediately. But no one ever knew about this but myself.

  3.

  Looking out one day through the leaded panes of the living-room window, I saw a curious figure examining the house from the sidewalk. He was a very old man, I could see that even from a distance. Although it was a mild spring day, he wore a shabby overcoat which he left open with the tails flapping behind him. He was hatless and bald on top, with uncut white hair that hung in a fringe around his head. The notion struck me immediately that he was not an American. He stood there for some time looking at the house reflectively with his lips pursed, as though he were thinking of buying it. He walked away down the sidewalk, looked at another house a few doors down, and then came back. Finally he came up and knocked on the door.

  At either side of the door there was a narrow frosted window with decorations cut in the glass, but I could see only a blurry shadow through this. I opened.

  “I want to rent your room,” he said in a reedy voice. He seemed to have a slight middle-European accent, although I wasn’t able to identify the language.

  I could see now that the coat was a genuinely odd garment. The material was a kind of imitation suede, light gray in color, with a soft furry surface that was worn smooth in places. It was cut like a trench coat with pockets all over it, except that there weren’t any straps. There were stains on it here and there and the tails were frayed from wear.

  “What are you talking about? What room?”

  “Any room. It doesn’t matter. I want to rent a room in your house.”

  I was amused more than anything else. “But why this house?”

  “It suits my needs. The location and also the design. There are not so many houses like this.”

  He twitched his nose and looked cautiously around as if to see whether anyone was overhearing our conversation. His ears were oversized, and he also had large, rather protruding eyes, which flickered constantly and never quite met my glance. I saw now that he had a cleft lip which had evidently been repaired by surgery; a fine scar braided like a shoelace ran down the center of it. It left him with a slight lisp, and it was perhaps this that I had taken for an accent. His complexion had a gray cast to it as though he
weren’t very well. Still he was very energetic, or at least nervous. He had a way of jumping at me every time he spoke, with an abrupt little spasm that almost lifted him off the ground.

  “Who are you anyhow? How did you get in here? This is supposed to be a private street.”

  “Why shouldn’t I come in here?” he said with some indignation. “It’s a free country. This is America. It isn’t Germany after all.”

  “Well, come in,” I told him, suppressing my smile.

  He entered and I shut the door. He had the musty smell about him of somebody you might meet in a free soup kitchen, or some dingy place of business like an unsuccessful pawnshop. I saw now that he was even older than he had looked from the sidewalk. The wrinkles of his face gave the impression that they had dirt in them, although this was perhaps only a feature of his complexion. He was very fragile; he seemed hardly more than a wraith inside the voluminous overcoat.

  “Won’t you take off your coat?”

  “No. I would expect to be treated with a little more courtesy. After all I am not nobody.” He proffered a card. He had evidently been carrying it around in his pocket for years; it was so wrinkled and creased that it resembled a soiled rectangle of cloth more than a piece of cardboard. On it I made out the words “Julius Nesselrode.”

  I handed it back to him. “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of you.”

  “You’ve heard of me,” he insisted querulously. “Everybody in pictures knows who I am. I have been a director and a producer and at one time I was a studio executive. Which room is it that you wish to rent me?”

  “This isn’t a rooming house.”

  “No. It’s a fine old mansion, designed by Kohlman and built in 1921.”

  I reflected. My life was rather boring. Nesselrode was original. At one time or another I had, in fact, thought of taking in a roomer, perhaps a college student, just to have someone to talk to. It would be amusing perhaps. It was possible that he was a dangerous madman—I didn’t believe for a moment that he was a film producer or ever had been—but even that would be entertaining; at the worst there might be a nasty little episode or two before I had them come and take him away. “I’m afraid it won’t be cheap,” I told him with a perfectly straight face. “Fifty dollars a week.”

  “I got money,” he said, still crossly.

  * * *

  I decided to put him in a spare room on the second floor, which as it happened was one of several that had been my bedroom when I was a child. Even with the three of us living in it the house had been too big, and I often moved from room to room as the whim struck me. There were many times, I am sure, when Astreé and Dirk didn’t even know which room was mine. The one I put him in faced toward the rear rather than toward the street. It gave out onto a rather charming vista of old trees in an emerald lawn, stretching away to a glimpse of an artificial lake. I possibly had the idea in the back of my mind that if I put him in a front room he might exhibit himself indecently at the window, or commit some other tactlessness. I tried to get along with my neighbors and with the St. Albans Place Owners Association as well as I could. Another advantage of the room was that it was at the opposite end of the house from my own. At the top of the stairs there was a broad corridor, with my own master bedroom on the left. This corridor continued through the house and then branched to the left, leaving place for a small room beyond it at the rear. There were several rooms between his and mine, and we wouldn’t disturb each other. It was true that he had to pass directly by my door to go down the corridor, but I had the impression he would do this discreetly. In fact I never heard him go past the bedroom door in all the time he lived in the house.

  The room was furnished, after a fashion. There was the narrow single bed I had slept in as a child, a dresser, a threadbare armchair, and an old European armoire with carvings on the doors. In one corner was an object of furniture typical of the Twenties: a tall narrow wicker-work table, no larger than a dinner plate, with legs like tiny fawns’ hooves resting on the polished rugless floor.

  “Maybe it’s cold up here in the winter,” said Nesselrode dubiously.

  “I’ll put in an electric heater.”

  “Sometimes I write things.”

  “I’m sure there’s a desk.” There was an eighteenth-century French escritoire that had belonged to my grandfather around somewhere. Perhaps in the attic. I would look around for it.

  “I haven’t got the fifty dollars right now,” he told me. “I am expecting a remittance.”

  Oh, fine, I thought. It was not ten minutes since he had crossly told me, “I got money.” But I was still secretly enjoying the whole business. It was the first thing that had broken the monotony of my existence for several years.

  The name Nesselrode seemed to me spurious and at the same time faintly comic, probably because I associated it with a certain flavor of ice cream rather than with human beings. But when I looked it up in the Britannica in my grandfather’s library I found that it was in fact an authentic name, whether or not my roomer had any legitimate right to it. A Count Nesselrode had been Russian ambassador to Lisbon in the eighteenth century, and his son, Karl Robert, was an eminent international statesman who took an important part in the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Karl Robert died in 1862. After that there were no more Nesselrodes, at least not eminent enough to appear in the Britannica or in the biographical dictionary which I also consulted. The family, as far as I could make out, were Westphalians and not Russians, although there was also a minor Austrian branch. My roomer’s accent, insofar as it was not due to a cleft lip, seemed to me more Austrian than anything else. Perhaps he was an authentic Nesselrode. At least it was likely that he was a genuine Austrian. As for Julius, it seemed a plausible name for such a person and I accepted it.

  To verify his claim that he had been a director and screen producer the Britannica was no help, and it was necessary to pay a visit to the USC library. I soon found what I was looking for in a book on films of the pre-1914 era. Julius Nesselrode was listed as one of several European émigrés who were active in the picture business in the pioneer days. Apparently he had been only a producer, because he wasn’t mentioned in the discussion of early directors and no films were attributed to him. In another book the index led me to a single brief reference. “Hans Reiter, who was said to be the inventor of both the camera dolly and the close-up, was one of several directors brought to the U.S. in this period by Julius Nesselrode.” That was all I could find. I was left with my riddle only half solved. There was no question that there had been a real Julius Nesselrode who had been a producer in the silent film days, but the dates didn’t work out very well. The man who had taken a room in my house could not have been old enough to be the same person who was making pictures as early as 1910. No birth date was given in the sources I found, but even assuming that he was as young as twenty at that time, which seemed unlikely, he would have had to be ninety in 1980. My roomer was an old man all right, but he seemed too spry and energetic for an age so phenomenal, even though his energy manifested itself mainly in querulousness. I decided that he was probably an impostor and had found out about Nesselrode in the same way I had, by running across his name in some book on silent films. Whether he had assumed the name for some fraudulent purpose or had merely deluded himself into believing he was the original Nesselrode was impossible to say. Probably the latter. He had nothing to gain by passing himself off as somebody he wasn’t, except perhaps a free room.

  If he was a conscious impostor, however, he was a crafty and assiduous one. He never forgot his role and he never made a mistake, as you might expect from someone who was getting on in years and suffered occasionally from a faulty memory. We crossed paths occasionally in the morning—he had “kitchen privileges,” as they are called, although he never seemed to avail himself of them except to make himself a pot of tea—and he would occasionally mumble something about his alleged career as a producer. “I knew them all,” he told me once in the kitchen, not seeming to address me partic
ularly and looking off in the other direction. Then, at intervals of ten seconds or so, he muttered the names of various well-known celebrities of the silent film era, sniffing after each name, as though to defy me to say that he hadn’t known them.

  “And X? And Y? And Z?” I went on, baiting him with other well-known names.

  “I know them all,” he said, looking away from me into the cupboard for something or other, perhaps the tea.

  It was only after a moment that I noticed he had slipped into the present tense. It was the first evidence that he was genuinely deluded. Then he turned around and stared at me directly—a thing he almost never did— even though he kept his head turned a little so that his eyes fixed on me only from the diagonal.

  “I could get you into pictures,” he said.

  The line was so banal that I almost laughed outright. The thought passed through my mind that he was perhaps a homosexual. There had been other times when he had looked at me in this appraising way, as though he were examining my personal qualities and licking his lips a little over them.

  “You’re a good-looking boy.”

  I played along with him. It was an amusing game.

  “I don’t particularly want to be in pictures.”

  “You’re the type,” he insisted. “I got plenty of people into pictures. It’s not hard. You just do what the director tells you. They tell you everything to do.”

  I began to see now into his mind, enmeshed as it was in a confused skein of time that was not that of the real world. An interesting and malicious idea occurred to me. Cunningly I phrased my next remark.