Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  I told her, “We seem to be living our life backwards. This is where we meet and fall in love.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter in which order you shoot things. They fix it all in the cutting room.”

  She was still playful; it was all a game. I picked up the ukulele and tuned it: “My dog has fleas.” I set it down again. For some time we lay propped on our elbows without speaking, in the fragrant meadow filled with the murmur of bees. A distance of perhaps four feet separated us. I made no attempt to move toward her. The pull of desire I had felt in the commissary was still there, but now that I was alone with her I found myself curiously paralyzed. My limbs were light, but it seemed precisely for this reason that I was unable to move them. It was as though they were made out of air and lacked substance. What I desired so strongly was immediately before me, so near that I could have reached out and touched it.

  But an awe of its perfection, a holy dread of the forbidden sanctities under the white frock, held me back. From my wide reading in literature I recognized the sensation, even though I had never experienced it before: I had fallen in love.

  We went on lying on our sides in the grass, without moving and without saying anything. I examined her fixedly, and she looked back at me with her self-contained little expression of amusement. After a while I became aware of a light humming from somewhere, as though it were coming from the air above and behind us. At first I attributed it to the bees, but it was a different kind of sound, a mechanical whir as of some well-oiled and silent machine constantly running. I realized now that this sound had been in the air for some time, perhaps from the moment when I had first passed through the Screen in the abandoned theater with Nesselrode. I was fully aware of it only at times like this when other things were quiet. And along with the sound came an odd sensation, the kind of intuition you have when someone is looking at you from behind. I turned around. There was nothing.

  When I turned back to Moira I knew from her expression that she too was aware of this odd sound, and even that she knew what it was. “Oh, that’s just the eternal Eye,” she said languidly. “That watches over us at all times. To be sure we don’t do something naughty.”

  “And if we do?”

  But she offered no satisfactory answer to this; she only shrugged. It was as though it were something that you didn’t speak about, or that was considered so trivial that it was not worth mentioning. I tried to ignore it and put it out of my mind. I centered my attention on her face again. It was not, I confirmed now upon closer examination and in the open sunlight, the face of an extremely young woman. I judged her to be about my own age, that is, thirty. The childlike gestures, the naive and sensitive smile, the crisp white frock, were exterior trivia, hardly more than makeup. They were her professional trappings, the tools of her trade. Under them was a mature woman, a body charged with sexual promise and rich in its mystery and complexity, even though it was childlike in its form. Yet in the trivial play of our game in the grass I could only address this outward semblance of Moira; I could only pretend too that she was the child she pretended to be.

  Plucking a long stem of grass, I stretched it out and playfully tickled her face with it. She wrinkled up her nose and laughed, a silvery little tinkle. She snatched the blade of grass from me and began chewing it, holding the other end, as though to contribute her part to the rustic quality of our game. I reached out for the ukulele and began strumming it. Then I offered a sample of my singing voice, a sort of countertenor with a thin schoolboyish tremor to it.

  “Down by the Old Mill Stream,

  Where I first met you …”

  She threw away the blade of grass. Her smile disappeared; she became oddly grave. She watched me expectantly and curiously out of her dark eyes, her head tilted a little to one side.

  “With your eyes so blue,

  Dressed in gingham too.”

  The smile reappeared. She looked down at her white frock and smoothed out the skirt, with a casual and yet sensuous gesture that unconsciously drew attention to the feminine curves of her body. “It’s linen.”

  I went on.

  “And it was there I knew …”

  She waited silently, with an expectant expression, to see what it was that I knew.

  “That you loved me true …”

  Here she became grave again and lowered her eyes, as though embarrassed or flustered. This gave the impression that she was looking down at her own body in the white dress, which of course caused my attention to be drawn to it too. There was a faint flush in her cheeks perhaps.

  “You were sixteen …”

  Here a ghost of a smile appeared, and she shook her head gravely.

  “My village queen …”

  Pleased, she looked down at the white dress again and smoothed out the skirt.

  I concluded, stretching out the words and lowering my voice almost to a whisper.

  “Down by the Old …

  Mill …

  Stream.”

  There was a silence. Then she turned away, as though gazing at something in the distance, and said blithely, “You’re a quick study. How did you learn all this? Surely you didn’t improvise it.” When she caught my eye again she couldn’t suppress a playful little laugh.

  “Moira.”

  She remained motionless in the same posture, half reclining, propped on her elbow in the meadow. I threw away the ukulele. Then I pushed myself up and leaned forward toward her, slowly, as slowly as the hand of a clock, awkwardly bent over my stiffened arms in the grass. The arms passed the point of verticality and went on a little beyond it. I felt that the forward part of my body was precariously supported and might collapse. I was still unable to reach her face; it floated tantalizingly a few inches from me. The ridiculousness of my posture, threatening at any moment to topple me forward in the grass, was overwhelmed in the intensity of my desire to kiss her. We both remained fixed for an instant that seemed an eternity, my arm quivering. Then, after a hesitation, she too bent forward a little and her face moved through the air toward me. For an instant I felt the cool separateness of her lips, pressing lightly against mine. Then the sensation was gone.

  Perhaps my eyes had been closed; I opened them and saw her on her feet, slipping rapidly away with a glance over her shoulder. I scrambled up, stumbling, and set off in pursuit of her. The very intensity of my desire, which seemed to turn my limbs into a hot liquid, prevented me from moving with the necessary agility. Wavering a little and groping with my hands, I moved through the glaring sunlight after her. Somewhere behind my back I was aware of the faint whirring of the Eye. I tried to recall whether she had smiled as she had glanced over her shoulder. It seemed to me that, if I could establish this fact clearly, then I would know my fate and the future of my love for her, one way or the other, would be revealed. But I had no memory of it, and besides she was always smiling in her faintly ambiguous way. The white dress disappeared around the corner of the mill house. In some way I found myself on the wrong side of the mill stream, which was six feet or more wide and too broad to jump.

  When I turned I found Nesselrode behind me, wearing his shabby gray overcoat as usual, his fringe of straggly white hair glowing in the sunshine.

  He said crossly, “Ah, at last I am finding you. What are you doing, anyhow? This is not permitted. Moira is supposed to be working.”

  “I imagine she is. At least she isn’t here, is she?”

  He said nothing to this. We were both irritated with each other—I because he had interrupted my idyll, although this was irrational because it had been interrupted anyhow by Moira’s getting up and running away, and he probably because he suspected what I was up to. His shifty eyes took in the ukulele in the grass. Then he turned abruptly with a gesture to me. We went off together down the path through the sycamores, he leading the way and I following. I had no idea where to look for Moira anyhow. She might be anywhere. Instead of entering the commissary as I expected, or the studio where they had been shooting the Lincoln picture, he wen
t straight on down the main street of the lot and out the gate onto the boulevard.

  “Where are we going?”

  He muttered into the air, “You’ve been naughty. Okay, so maybe you don’t want to be in pictures.”

  “Mr. Nesselrode …”

  He made no reply. Once again he seemed to have forgotten that I was with him; he went on in his rapid pace down the sidewalk without turning his head to see if I was behind. I went on after him with great reluctance. I had an urge to turn around, to flee from him and go back to the lot in search of Moira; I was certain I would find her sooner or later. Yet in another part of my mind I felt I had to follow Nesselrode; he was my only guide over the landscape of this black-and-white Dante’s Inferno and if I lost him there was no telling what might happen to me. The air about me, thin and artificial, seemed charged with a vague menace, and even my own body felt insubstantial. Without his help I might wander around forever through these weedy vacant lots until I expired from exhaustion, or simply dissolved into thin air. Besides I had the impression that, in spite of his pretense of ignoring me, he would immediately turn and catch me in his dry and bony hand if I tried to escape. In this way, without exchanging a single word, we came in a half an hour or so back to the Alhambra Theater.

  We entered as we had come out, through the stage door at the rear. Nesselrode closed the door, and we were in almost total darkness except for the rim of sunlight around the door behind us. We groped our way along the corridor and up the stairs to the stage. Here there was a little more light from the grayish shape of the Screen at the other end. The piled-up crates, the heap of lumber, and the stepladder were exactly as they had been, coated in a light film of dust. Without being told I took Nesselrode’s hand. Or, to be precise, our little ballet—one in which we each pretended to ignore the other—was more complicated than that. I was standing two feet or so behind him and to the side, and I stretched out my hand tentatively in his direction. And he, without turning around, facing away from me so that he couldn’t possibly see what I was doing, felt back in the gloom with his own bony fingers until they met my own, as accurately as though they were guided by some kind of sixth sense. It was the way lovers reach for each other in the dark, I thought, each knowing where the other’s hand is, or the way a mother can feel for her child and instinctively touch it without looking around.

  Attached by our hands in this way, and elaborately ignoring each other, we passed back through the Screen in the same way that we had come through it, I wasn’t sure when—perhaps the day before, or perhaps only a few hours. The theater of course was deserted. Nesselrode fumbled with the employees’ door at the side, and finally it opened with a scraping noise. To my surprise when we came out into the city again it was twilight. After the blankness of the black-and-white world I had left behind, the intense, glowing, almost incandescent color of everything struck me like a blow. People’s faces were orange, the storefronts blared tangerine and bright yellow, even the asphalt of the pavement seemed purple rather than black. As night fell the neon signs of the shops were coming on one by one, glowing and wriggling worms that hurt the eyes with their glare. The headlights of passing cars bored yellow holes into the air.

  He set out to cross the boulevard in the middle of the block, ignoring the hurtling traffic.

  “Watch out for the cars,” I warned him.

  “Let them try to hit me. I am more agile than they think,” he said.

  6.

  I have said that I was the sole heir of my parents and inherited their fortune totally. This was not entirely true, or at least it was an oversimplification of the matter. My possession of the estate was limited by certain conditions that Astreé and Dirk (more probably Dirk; Astreé couldn’t have cared a pin what I did with the money) had seen fit to attach to the will in the form of a trust agreement. This arrangement was understandable given that I was only eighteen when they had the will drawn up shortly before their deaths, but as far as I could tell it was still in effect now that I was thirty, and was apparently to go on into perpetuity as far as I knew; no one had ever explained it to me very well. In fact I had never even seen a copy of the will, as far as I could remember, but the funds under the trust agreement were managed by the West Los Angeles branch of the Sunset Bank. The bank took care of most of my financial affairs, investing the capital as they saw fit, paying the taxes and insurance on the St. Albans Place house, preparing my income tax returns, and transferring to my checking account each month a sum far too large for me to spend, even if my tastes had not been as austere and restrained as they were.

  It was shortly after I came back from my first expedition behind the Screen that I received a personal communication from a person who—as I assumed at first— was a representative of the bank, or at least connected in some way with this trust arrangement. The telephone rang, I picked it up, and a voice said in a barking tone, “Ziff!”

  Since I had never heard this vocable before, I was silent for perhaps two seconds, uncertain whether to reply “Who?” or “What?” I finally decided on “Who?”

  “Eldon Ziff. We have to talk a little about your life, Alys.”

  “My life?”

  “Yes. There are some problems that have arisen in connection with some of its ramifications.”

  The voice was a vibrant masculine baritone, an energetic and confident voice, and yet there was a note of seriousness in it, a kind of mortician solemnity, that suggested that the problems were real and grave and needed to be talked about. I was caught totally unprepared (I had been lingering over a late breakfast, including toast made by holding it over the burner of the stove on a fork) and could only repeat in an idiotic way the key word of each statement.

  “Ramifications?”

  “Yes. This is a word referring to branches, like those of a tree. As a person grows older his life develops ramifications. That is, with increasing sophistication and experience, new interests and new concerns grow up which lead him in new directions, and these in turn branch off into sub-interests and sub-concerns, just as a tree grows branches. Some of these proliferating branches are sound and some are rotten.”

  “I don’t see what business this is of yours.”

  “Now then, come come, Alys. You know very well that you are not entirely free to conduct your life along lines which, to say the least, are rather bizarre, and might if they were divulged incur the moral disapprobation of persons who—”

  “Let’s not talk about that on the telephone.”

  “Just as you prefer, Alys. Let’s have lunch together then.”

  “Why don’t we meet in your office? Or you could come here,” I countered, feeling more assertive and defending myself as I began to recover my wits a little.

  “Well you see, Alys, it’s a highly personal matter and I didn’t think you’d care to discuss it in the office with a lot of people around. I thought you’d prefer a more intimate ambience.”

  “You don’t have a private office?”

  “How about the Bistro in Beverly Hills?”

  It was all rushing on too fast for me. I felt swept away by the energetic baritone voice that answered no questions, countered every objection by ignoring it, and seemed to drive straight at the goal it had decided on in advance.

  “All right.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s say today.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “Are you sure you know the place? It’s 246 North Cañon Drive. That’s Two Four Six, just north of Wilshire. The word Cañon has a kind of bendy thing on top of the n. It’s called a tilde.”

  “Yes.”

  “Be there at one. I’ll phone for a table.”

  He hung up. It occurred to me only then—in fact only ten minutes or so after the call—that at no point in the conversation had he said he was acting in behalf of the Sunset Bank or had anything to do with that institution. The phrase “might if they were divulged,” in fact, suggested that h
e might be a quite ordinary blackmailer.

  By the time I had bathed and dressed it was already after twelve. The next decision was which of the two cars to take. My life, I was beginning to see, was sometimes complicated by these nostalgic hobbies. The Invicta, a 1925 tourer with a handmade body, was a beautiful machine but somewhat temperamental. Ziff’s invitation was so peremptory that in the back of my mind I was a little afraid of being late. Besides the delicate coachwork might be damaged in traffic. I decided on the Hudson, which was enormous and unwieldy to handle but could buffalo its way past ordinary cars, being a good two feet higher than they were, and was rugged enough to withstand any slings and buffets that Los Angeles traffic could hand it. I backed it out down the winding gravel driveway with skill, since I had done it many times. I often took the Hudson when I went with Belinda to concerts and films. It was a double-cowl phaeton with a second windshield for the back seat, and sometimes she liked to ride back there alone as though she were the Queen of Sheba, gazing out aloofly at pedestrians and owners of mere Cadillacs. Belinda had a well-developed sense of humor, which I would have appreciated more if it had not sometimes extended to me and my own personal habits.

  Guiding this behemoth down the street and past the guard in his kiosk, I turned out onto Wilshire and headed west. It was not very far and perhaps I had allowed too much time. When I went to Beverly Hills—usually to buy records, but sometimes to go to lunch at the Brown Derby or the Bistro—I always parked at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, pretending successfully that I was a guest. This had several advantages. You entered the broad drive behind the hotel where there was a glass canopy overhead to provide shelter from the rain and sun, and a carpet to step out onto. There you stopped your car, a valet took charge of it, and when you came back he delivered it to you swiftly, deftly, and courteously. It was kept somewhere under cover (I never knew exactly where it was that the valet took it) so that when you got into it again it was cool and free from dust. From the carpet under the canopy you stepped directly into the cool opulence of the hotel, where you could browse around in the various shops off the lobby in case you were early for your appointment. The only disadvantage was that it was very expensive, so that it often cost me as much to park my car as it did for my lunch. This of course was a matter of absolute indifference to me. The valets knew the Hudson and drove it away without showing either any alarm at its ferociously clashing gears or any amusement at my eccentricities. I came there often enough that they remembered me, and they knew that I tipped them well.