Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  There were copies of Photoplay, Screen World, and Hollywoodland going back to the Twenties. Before 1918, evidently, there were no fan magazines, although there was one called Movie World which turned out to contain mainly information for theater operators and projectionists. I spent about two hours going through magazines without finding what I was looking for. In all that time no one else came into the basement, although I did hear a scuttling noise now and then, perhaps a mouse working its way under the shelves in the dark.

  Then, after I had moved several stacks around to get at the magazines in the back, I found one I hadn’t noticed before. It was called Picture Land, although in later issues the title seemed to have been changed to Pictureland. The stack was in no particular chronological order at all; neither was the collection complete. The issues seemed to range from the period just after the war to around 1928, when the magazine apparently went out of business. It was the period I was looking for.

  I couldn’t read them very well in the half-darkness, so I carried them an armful at a time to a place out under the hanging light bulb. There I squatted down on the floor, surrounded by the mounting heap of magazines. It was about a half an hour later that I first found something in the February 1920 issue of Picture Land. In a double-page photo layout entitled “Stars at Work & Play” there was a picture in the lower right-hand corner captioned, “Young starlet Moira Silver, seen here lunching with producer Julius Nesselrode. Their names are romantically linked.”

  Moira, smiling up from the table in the glare of the primitive flash powder of the time, was exactly as I remembered her: the porcelain-pale face, the dark eyes, the fine and sensitive mouth, the expression of ingenuous and slightly mischievous childishness. Nesselrode seemed to be in his early thirties, but I could have easily recognized him even without the caption. He already had his jumpy rabbit look, yet he was oddly handsome in his beady and alert, slightly bug-eyed way. I knew now whom he reminded me of; he looked like Heinrich Himmler. He had a thin mustache and he was staring straight at the photographer without a trace of a smile, the magnesium flash reflected in two tiny white points in his eyes. He was wearing an impossible sport jacket a little too large for him, with checks as large as a horse blanket’s.

  But it was the image of Moira that transfixed me. In spite of the synthetic quality of her childishness, in spite of the oversimplified, almost diagrammatic quality of her beauty with its too-perfect complexion and its conventional dark eyes, it was a curiously stirring face. I found I was unable to turn the page. Sitting there on the dusty floor under the light bulb, I felt a cool perspiration breaking out on every part of my body. The more I stared at the photo the more mysterious and elusive it seemed. It was only a rectangle of paper perhaps two inches by three. The edges of the page where the light had seeped into it were yellowed and slightly brittle. But the picture itself was set far enough inside the page that it had escaped this corruption of time; it was still blank-white, glossy, and lithe, with a slight slickness to the surface. Picture Land was printed on better paper than the average fan magazine. I focused my gaze on the face, on the dark eyes that gazed out from under their lids with a coy and perverse innocence.

  Moira.

  Moira.

  Gradually the cold layer of moisture under my clothing evaporated, leaving me slightly feverish and dry-mouthed. I decided not to get up and go upstairs to the water fountain. I set the February 1920 issue carefully aside where I could find it again, wiped the dust from my hands onto my trousers, and went on looking through the stacks of magazines piled on the floor around me. In another hour I had turned up a dozen or so photographs of Moira. I found a curious pattern. In the earlier photos, from 1920 to June or July of 1923, she was usually with Nesselrode and usually in cafés or night clubs in Hollywood. As far as I could see she had not made any pictures in this period, although she was usually identified as a “starlet.” Then, after 1923, the photos were all publicity shots and stills from her films: The Coquette, Pirate of the Dunes, Save My Child, The White Telephone. Perhaps after 1923 she had been too busy working to go out to night clubs with Nesselrode. Yet it seemed curious that precisely at the moment she had begun to succeed in pictures and had been cast in leading roles, she had disappeared from the Hollywood social scene and was no longer photographed in public. A notion occurred to me that, after 1923, some vaguely sinister power of Nesselrode had somehow impeded her freedom of movement. Perhaps from 1920 to 1923, while their names were “romantically linked,” he had only courted her, so to speak. Then, after she fell to him (I could only think of it in those terms), she was his possession, in some way I could only guess at, and was no longer free to appear in public. This notion left me feeling slightly cold again, although I couldn’t have said why. I dismissed it from my mind, or tried to.

  One photo in particular, in the period after 1923, caught my attention so that I stopped and stared at it for a long time. It was a still from a picture called Pirate of the Dunes. Moira seemed to be inside some sort of tent or room hung with rugs and shawls. Since it was a medium close-up all that could be seen of her clothing was an ordinary white blouse, with the top button unbuttoned. Her hair was slightly disarranged. With her lips parted and her head lowered a little, she was staring at the camera with a curious expression of fear in which, unmistakably, an element of the sensuous was mingled. Whatever it was that stared at her from the camera eye, she seemed to fear it and desire it at the same time. The fragile tendons of her throat stood out clearly, outlined in tiny shadows. Her lips seemed about to pronounce a word. I had the impression that if I concentrated on the photo and surrendered myself to my deeper impulses, to my subconscious, I might guess what this word was; and in this word would be revealed the whole secret of this enigma in which I had—in some way and hardly knowing when I had begun—entangled myself.

  I carefully sorted out all the magazines that had pictures of Moira in them and turned down the corners of the pages so I could find them again. Then I arranged them in a neat pile and, carefully lifting up the stack of magazines at the end of the shelf, put my collection on the bottom and the others on top of it. The only way you could tell the ones I had selected from the others is that they were more neatly stacked.

  When I got home I was still in a state of feverish excitement. I fixed myself some dinner, started to eat it and found I had no appetite, and went upstairs to listen to some music. For a quarter of an hour or so I lay on the bed listening to Pachelbel’s Canon, a soothing piece of baroque music said to be used to calm mental patients in hospitals. But even this failed to induce the nepenthe-like euphoria that it usually did. I switched the music off and went to stare out the window into the darkness. There was no question, I realized, that my behavior in the past few days had been a little peculiar. I had always seemed a little queer to others, but now I was beginning to seem queer to myself. I decided that perhaps I had better interrogate myself a little about it and see if I could find out what I was up to.

  To begin with I asked myself in what I hoped was a detached and objective tone of self-analysis, why was I so fascinated with Moira? To this, I could only reply that she seemed in some way to correspond to some latent image in my memory, a gauzy other-self which had always been there and had only been brought to the surface by the photograph. Moira was inside me. Ah, but wasn’t it perhaps only a case of a light Oedipus complex, the most common and banal imprint in the modern male consciousness according to the delegation from Vienna? Possibly, I conceded. We form our reveries of women from the women we have known, and the woman we know best is our mother. And yet, in the plain point of fact, I hadn’t really known Astreé very well. It was impossible to be intimate with her. She went through the gestures of intimacy but everything was a game. She was artificial, ephemeral, elusive—you could no more possess her than you could possess a paper doll just like Moira, I told myself.

  Well, all this was morbid. I decided not to monkey around with my subconscious any more. If you started turning over old r
ubbish there was no telling what you might find.

  The next day I went back again to the L.A. Public. But by this time I knew I had found all the pictures of Moira in the storeroom, and I had come for a different purpose. I was armed. I squatted down on the floor again, in the slightly wavering light of the bulb hanging from the ceiling, and pulled out my stack of magazines. The particular issue I was looking for was easy to find: in addition to turning down the page with Moira’s picture on it I had also turned down the corner of the cover. The date was September 1925. It fell open in my hands to the still from Pirate of the Dunes.

  My emotions as I stared at the page were curious and not really describable. I felt an intense desire, but it was an abstract one. It was only paper after all that pulled at my emotions, as intensely and keenly as I felt the sensation. There was no question that I had fallen in love, but it was like falling in love with someone in a book—which one sometimes does, as a child. The thought occurred to me that there are all sorts of things, in this existence of ours, that bar us from the women we desire. There are the barriers of chastity, of matrimonial bonds, of social class or a difference in race. But the most curious and elusive of these barriers is that of time. We may fall in love with Cleopatra (as I did at the age of ten, reading Shakespeare alone in my grandfather’s library) or with Eleanor d’Aquitaine, perhaps, in a painting in a museum. But these women are forbidden to us by the gulf of mortality that separates us from them—a dark valley, bottomless and impassable, that no one has ever gone into and come out of again—it is, precisely, that bourn from which no traveler returns. This was the gulf that separated me from Moira. Yet, I thought, seeking to control my excitement, I knew the path into that valley.

  Reaching into my coat pocket, I removed the small packet I had prepared when I left the house—a razor blade wrapped in several layers of waxed paper and secured with a rubber band. I looked around me. The storeroom was, of course, deserted, and in the silence I could have heard the footsteps of anyone approaching. It took me several minutes to cut out the picture, because of a problem I had not anticipated in advance. I found in myself a strong desire not to cut out the yellowed and slightly brittle margin that extended a half-inch in from the edge of the page. Neither did I want simply to sever the whole corner of the magazine and then cut off the yellowed edge by laying the picture on the floor. I wanted to remove only the picture itself, in its pristine form on slick white paper, leaving the rectangular hole of the same size intact in the magazine. This took a little doing, because the picture, being at the lower right-hand corner of the page, was enclosed on two sides by the brittle yellowed edge, and it took a delicate hand to cut out the picture without breaking the margin around it. My heart rose in my throat a little as I made the right-angle cut at the corner of the page, but I managed it perfectly. I held in my hand my heart’s desire, something I wanted more than I had ever wanted anything in my life—Moira’s white face with the dark eyes staring at me, eloquent with the unknown and unspoken word that hung on her lips.

  This picture was a little larger than the others in the magazine, perhaps three inches by five. I preferred not to fold it. I slipped it with care into the pocket of my coat, along with the razor blade wrapped up in waxed paper again and secured with its rubber band. I reminded myself to be careful not to thrust my hand carelessly into the pocket of the coat, or even into my trousers pocket, which might wrinkle the coat and thus the paper with the photograph on it.

  My next task was to get out of the library undetected with my prize. Taken objectively, this was not really so difficult. No one searched you as you left the library, and people cut things by the hundreds out of magazines, books, and even encyclopedias, to judge by the number of holes you found in pages. But it was the first crime I had ever committed, as minor as it was. If I was nervous about it, it was simply because the object in my pocket had a value for me that it couldn’t possibly have for any librarian, as neurotic as members of this profession are about the mutilation of the materials under their care. With a Dostoevskian Pale-Criminal smile I was unable entirely to suppress, I went up the stairs, down the corridor and past the periodicals room, and out the exit on Hope Street, where there was a guard at the turnstile to check the materials you carried with you. I had nothing in my hands and he hardly gave me a glance. The rectangle of paper in my pocket burning against my hip, I made my way down Hope Street and turned left on Sixth toward the Biltmore, where I had parked the car.

  Once safely home in the privacy of my bedroom, I slipped the scrap of paper carefully from my pocket. It was intact and unwrinkled. I looked around for a place to put it. Except for the bed, the most important piece of furniture in the room was an old-fashioned sideboard with a silver-framed mirror at its back and a number of drawers with intaglio silver handles. Of course there were mirrors on all the walls of the room, as well as on the ceiling, but the mirror over the sideboard was the only one with a frame around it. I attempted to wedge the photograph under the edge of the frame, but the paper edge, slightly furred by the razor blade, bent and threatened to wrinkle. I saw this wasn’t going to work.

  My eyes came back to the sideboard, which I used as a dresser. On it was a small silver frame with a photo of Astreé in it. The frame more or less matched the fittings on the sideboard; the silver edge, about a half-inch wide, was elaborately chased and the carved parts filled in with black. If you turned it over, a triangle of the cardboard back was cut away and folded out to serve as a stand. This business was held into the frame only with a pair of thin brass clips. I bent these away and removed the cardboard back and the photograph. It showed Astreé in a picture hat, at the wheel of the Duesenberg, turning sideways toward the camera with a blithe smile as though she were just leaving on a trip and saying “Bye” in her offhand way.

  I was about to drop it in the wastebasket. After a moment I changed my mind and put it away in the top right-hand drawer of the sideboard, which also contained a collection of various other objects such as mismatched socks, empty deodorant containers, keys to unknown locks, a tube of Vaseline, a ribbon or two, and a partly used pack of condoms. Then I forgot it and as far as I can remember I never opened that drawer again.

  The frame had a black mat in it which was designed precisely to hold a three-by-five-inch photograph. The picture from the magazine was a little larger than that, but by shifting it around under the mat I was able to arrange it so that nothing important was obscured. I fastened the picture to the back of the mat with Scotch tape. Then I reassembled the whole business again: the frame, the mat with the photo, and the cardboard back.

  I bent out the stand at the rear and set the frame on the sideboard. Immediately I was struck with the perfection of what I had done. If I had searched over every shop in the city I could never have found a frame so exactly suited to this picture. Not only did the sizes of picture and frame match almost perfectly, but the aesthetics of the ensemble were faultless. The old-fashioned silver frame gave the impression that it was from the same period as the picture, and it probably was. The paint in the depressions of the silver was faded and had lost its gloss. Then came the black mat, also flat and without gloss. The picture itself, in the style of the time, was printed in slightly excessive contrast; the blacks were a little blacker than in real life and the whites a little whiter. In the center was Moira’s moon-white face with its dark eyes staring directly at me, even when I moved a little to one side of the picture or the other. The paper was not quite flat and had a slight gloss to it, so that a faint sheen appeared here and there as the light struck it. A shadow played over Moira’s brow, just above the right eye. I couldn’t tell whether it was something in the original photograph or an artifact of the way I had inserted the picture in the frame.

  8.

  The photograph remained there in the silver frame, multiplied and reflected in the various mirrors that lined the walls of the bedroom, and I gazed at it idly as I dressed every morning standing before the sideboard. My old life went on much
as before; nothing had changed at least in its external details. And yet I wasn’t the same as before, even if I might pretend outwardly that nothing had happened. There was a curious distracted or hypnotized quality to my state of mind, as though I were sleepwalking my way through my life.

  Then about a week after my second visit to the L.A. Public I remembered something. The idea struck me like a flash and I closed the book I was reading and sat bolt upright in the chair. A few days before, I remembered, the monthly program for the various cultural events at the County Museum had come in the mail. Because I was distracted by other things at the time I hadn’t opened it. In fact, it was some time now before I could find it. After some searching I found it on the mantelpiece, in a pile of advertising circulars and other unopened mail.

  I slit the envelope open and pulled out the brochure. When I had read about halfway down the page I came to the film listings, and as I grasped what I was reading my nerves gave a little jump. I glanced at the calendar. The films were always on the second Friday of the month. It was tonight.

  After a little thought I called up Belinda and asked her if she would like to go to the movies. I knew she was free on Friday evenings and we had gone to films in this series before. She said “All right” in her usual matter-of-fact way, cheerfully but also without enthusiasm.