Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  Once in a while we would be stopped by a traffic light and that would give us a moment’s rest. But, as I had already noticed when I had gone walking with him on a previous occasion, Nesselrode seemed to have an extraordinary luck with traffic lights. Again and again a red light would turn green just as we approached the intersection. Another instance, perhaps, of his sorcerer’s powers. But he had been walking around the city for many years, after all, and probably he had mastered the rhythm of the lights so that he was able to quicken or slacken his pace to arrive at each corner just as the light turned green.

  It was somewhere past Arlington, about halfway out to the West Side, that I first began to notice signs of a more serious fatigue in him. His face was greenish and he seemed to have even more difficulty in breathing. We were both perspiring. I noticed that the sweat on his upper lip ran down the scar at the center, which collected it like a tiny rain gutter. Once, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him wiping his eyes again with the sleeve of his coat. When he saw I was watching him he looked away.

  “You young people any more,” he said. “No stamina. A walk like this is nothing. When I was a strong young man your age …”

  He didn’t say what he had done. To judge from the photos in Picture Land, he had spent a good deal of his time in night clubs. A little farther on, a block or two west of Crenshaw, I became aware that he wasn’t at my side any more, and when I turned around I saw him leaning against a lamp post a few yards behind, clutching it with both hands. But he did so as though he were inspecting the lamp post for secret reasons of his own. Perhaps he was considering putting it in pictures. I didn’t think this was very likely; it was a perfectly ordinary lamp post and it was solidly set in concrete. He examined it, twitched his nose at it one last time, and went on.

  It was because I turned around to see why he was lingering at the lamp post, however, that I first noticed the car behind. It caught my attention because instead of moving in the stream of traffic it was creeping along at a walking pace with its wheels next to the curb, a half a block or so behind us. It was a perfectly ordinary car, a late-model Olds Cutlass of a nondescript gray-green color. Because it was afternoon now and we were walking west, the sun shone on the windshield with an opaque glare so that I couldn’t tell anything about the occupants of the car, or even whether there was more than one of them. I stole a glance at Nesselrode. He never looked behind him and didn’t seem to have noticed.

  Abruptly, without saying anything to me, he came to a halt at a rickety health-food stand on a street corner. We stood for a few moments under the shade of a piece of garishly painted plywood that swung out to form an awning when the place opened. Nesselrode ordered a large glass of carrot juice, and I took apple juice, although I was very thirsty and would have preferred a glass of plain water.

  The glasses were not very clean. Nesselrode put his down on the counter again and said, “More carrot juice.” I glanced around. The gray-green Cutlass had stopped and was waiting across the intersection a few hundred yards away.

  “Have another apple juice,” suggested Nesselrode.

  “Thanks, no.”

  “Try celery juice. Or celery and carrot, a mixture.”

  I smiled and shook my head.

  “Carrot juice,” he said, “makes you see in the dark.”

  “Is that so?”

  He allowed me to pay for the juices. Then he wiped his mouth with his coat sleeve and set off down the street without a word. I followed at his side. The stop seemed to have refreshed him and he went back to striding along almost at his normal pace, although the sulfurous air still seemed to be bothering his eyes. I permitted myself another look around. Nesselrode was still exerting his sorcery over the traffic lights. We had crossed Fairfax on the green, but it had turned red just as the Cutlass approached the intersection. It was waiting there in the right-hand lane, its silvery windshield impenetrable to the eye. I noticed for the first time that there was a tiny antenna on top of the roof, not more than a foot long and as thin as a hair. I noticed it only because it caught the gleam of the sunlight for an instant.

  We crossed La Cienega and then turned left on it, so that we were going down the right-hand side of the street. The Cutlass had to wait for the left-turn light and was quite a distance behind us by the time we reached Pico. Here we caught another green light; Nesselrode loped on across the pavement with his coattails napping and I followed. The Alhambra was ahead on the right, only a short distance away. At this point I became aware of another car that was acting strangely. This one was somewhat more elegant and more conspicuous: a Pontiac Firebird coupé in violet with fiery gold pinstriping. It was coming toward us in the other direction. What it did that was unusual was that it swerved across the center line and pulled up at the curb on the wrong side of the street, directly in front of the theater.

  We went on toward it. I looked around. The Cutlass had stopped a couple of blocks away, just after it had crossed Pico.

  When we arrived in front of the Alhambra I hesitated and slowed a little. Nesselrode had still apparently not noticed either car. The door of the Firebird opened and Ziff got out. Since he had parked on the wrong side of the street he only had to open the door and step out onto the sidewalk. He stood there in front of the theater blocking our way. In place of his safari jacket and silver pants he now wore a sort of mauve leisure suit with a dark violet shirt, perhaps to match the car. I saw now that the car had what looked like enormous butterfly wings painted in gold on it, beginning at the front and expanding to their full size under the rear windows, done in elaborate filigrees by an expert pinstriper. Nesselrode stared at the car and then at Ziff, working his nose.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Alys?”

  “Look here, Mr. Ziff. I don’t know who you are exactly, but you have no right to interfere with my movements or even to pursue me around town in two cars like this. That’s harassment.”

  “Illegal,” put in Nesselrode. He seemed slightly alarmed by the incident but not at all surprised by it.

  “You’re making a mistake, Alys. It isn’t real. The whole thing is bad. I explained this to you before.”

  “Thanks for explaining it. I know what I’m doing. Now will you please stand aside?”

  Instead he took hold of my lapel in a friendly, almost paternal way. “I don’t think you entirely understand the situation, Alys.”

  I reached up to his hand and pulled it away. “I’m just going to see a movie with my friend here Mr. Nesselrode, the famous producer.”

  “Don’t mention names,” Nesselrode muttered.

  “He’s a fake.”

  Nesselrode looked furtively around. “Perhaps someone could go for a policeman,” he suggested to the absolutely deserted sidewalk.

  Ziff took hold of my shoulder this time. “Alys, why don’t we get in the car and drive around for a little bit. There are all kinds of things I want to explain to you.”

  “Don’t get in the car,” Nesselrode advised the lamp post at the edge of the sidewalk.

  “So are you coming, Alys, or shall I say a word on my car phone to my friends down the street?” His Firebird, I now saw, had another little hairlike antenna on top of it exactly like the one on the Cutlass.

  “What friends?” said Nesselrode, apparently seized with anxiety all at once. He looked down the street and seemed to catch sight of the Cutlass immediately. “Gangsters. Capable of assault and battering even. Let’s go.” He took hold of my arm.

  Ziff’s hand was on my shoulder, and he slipped it down and grasped the other arm. “You see, Alys, I’m just acting in your own interest. I don’t think you’re necessarily aware of what you’re getting into here. It’s like a kid,” he said, “climbing a tree. You’re going up the wrong branch.”

  I entered into this dialogue as in a nightmare. I knew it almost by heart by now. “Ars longa, vita brevis.”

  “Art is long, Alys. But Art is artificial. Life is real.”

  “Let go of my arm and we can di
scuss it like two civilized human beings. There’s something to be said for Art after all.”

  “What?”

  “In Art we are not subject to time. As you yourself said, Art is immortal.”

  The three of us were still standing on the sidewalk in the hot sun. “Yes,” he said, assuming a reasonable classroom manner, “but Art itself is not real. Our belief in the reality of Art, or more precisely what Coleridge describes as the willing suspension of disbelief, is in itself a form of mental illness.”

  “Ah yes, your psychiatrist friend. But after all, he said it was all in my mind.”

  “Everything is in your mind, Alys. I’m only in your mind.”

  “As far as I’m concerned you can get out of it,” I gritted between my teeth. “There are plenty of other things in there and I don’t need you.”

  He pulled from one side, Nesselrode from the other. Between them they might have pulled me apart, like the Cloven Viscount in Calvino’s novel, except that neither one was pulling very hard. There was a stylized, almost balletic quality to the whole thing. A black woman across the street, out walking with a little boy, had stopped to watch. Nesselrode might have shouted to her to call a policeman, but I knew he didn’t really want a policeman. The policeman would only get involved in the discussion between Ziff and me on Life and Art and after a while he would lose his head. Besides I could not really swear to a police officer that Ziff was exerting force on me against my will.

  They were both pulling hard enough, however, so that my shoulder joints were beginning to stretch a little. “How about you, Mr. Nesselrode?” I inquired. “Which do you think is more important, Life or Art?”

  “The boy could be a star,” muttered Nesselrode between his teeth, again not to me or to Ziff particularly, just to the sidewalk at large.

  “Where are the stars?” inquired Ziff, still pulling on his side. “Do you see any around here? Are they walking the streets of Los Angeles today?”

  “Don’t speak,” Nesselrode advised me. “Don’t engage in talking with the man. He is a gangster. He is right now committing assault with personal damage.”

  “He isn’t, really,” I said, “although his friends might. But he can’t call his friends on his car phone until he lets go of my arm.”

  Ziff let go of my arm and made a leap toward his Firebird. He opened the door and began talking into a violet telephone. Nesselrode and I hurried around to the side of the theater and in through the ramshackle employees’ door. Inside in the semi-darkness he took my hand.

  When we came out at the rear of the theater the stark contrast of black-and-white struck me again forcibly, even though this time I was prepared for it. We walked around through the vacant lot to the street. There we stood for a moment drinking in great quantities of the crisp and clear, absolutely transparent air. It felt like champagne to the lungs, refreshing and invigorating. I looked around me. To the south the Baldwin Hills stood out with exaggerated clarity, as though cut out of cardboard, and in the other direction the mountains seemed almost so close that you could reach out and touch them. Nesselrode still didn’t look very well. I could see his chest going up and down spasmodically inside the unbuttoned overcoat, and his skin seemed grayer than usual.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Nah. You think the old man can’t walk any more? Come on then.”

  We set off together down the street in the direction of Culver City. My own way of walking, I noticed, was beginning to resemble his. We went along in a jerky and abrupt manner, yet somehow we made less progress than we had in our race out to the west side from downtown. When I looked down I could see my legs switching back and forth, but the sidewalk underneath seemed to go by only rather slowly. I made a great effort and for a time surged a little ahead of him. Then I had to stop for a moment and wait for him to catch up. “What is it now, an Olympics hundred-yard dash?” he grumbled. “We’ll get there.” He was no longer wheezing but he seemed tired; his shoulders were going up and down in reciprocating fashion as though he could scarcely lift them.

  Turning right on Washington, we came in due time to the lot with the chain-link fence around it. There had been some improvements, I noticed; a stucco office building had been erected in fake Spanish style, and workmen were just finishing a miniature sea suitable for naval battles, with a backdrop full of clouds behind it. As we passed they were filling it with a fire hose. Nesselrode led me directly down the main street of the lot toward the commissary, through the transparent white sunlight that seemed to penetrate through to my bones like X-rays. A few bushes had been planted around the commissary now, I noticed, although the rest of the lot was still only dirt scattered with gravel. Nesselrode pushed the door open and went in, and I followed him.

  The place was almost deserted. Two cowboys, one with his boots off and his feet on the table, were smoking cigarettes at the far end. A couple of actresses were leaning on the counter talking to the counterman, a good-looking young man who, probably, had hoped to get into pictures but had never expected to end up behind the counter in the commissary. At a table near the middle Reiter was sitting with Charles Morton and Roland Lightfoot. Morton was dressed as a clergyman with his collar on backward, and Lightfoot was sportily clad in corduroy knickers, a tweed jacket, and an ascot.

  Reiter looked up indifferently, as though Nesselrode had been gone only for an hour. “Hello, Julius.”

  “Don’t speak,” said Nesselrode. “I am tired completely out. It’s terrible out there. The smog.”

  Reiter smiled, wrinkling his forehead. “Smog?” he repeated, puzzled.

  “It’s hot. A terrible day. Haze,” Nesselrode explained rather too quickly. He caught my eye and looked away again. He went on chattering to cover up his mistake. “You should meet Lightfoot. A romantic lead, a genius,” he told me. Lightfoot extended his hand with a rather aloof smile. “Business is good, no?” Nesselrode rattled on to Reiter. “I see they are filling up the ocean.”

  “We’re just starting Antony and Cleopatra tomorrow. After that we’ll use it for America Ho. Morton is playing Columbus.”

  I said, “Moira, I imagine, is going to do Cleopatra.”

  Reiter stared at me curiously. “Who?”

  “No, no,” said Nesselrode nervously. “Cleopatra is Vanessa Nesser. She must be an older woman, vamp. Moira is ingenue.”

  “Ah, Moira Silver,” said Reiter. He seemed to understand things only when Nesselrode explained them to him.

  “What is Moira doing just now?” I persisted.

  “None of your business,” Nesselrode mumbled to himself. “Already I have told him, don’t have attachments to the actors. But he is young.”

  “I’m thirty.”

  “Young,” reiterated Nesselrode.

  “You do comedy?” Reiter asked me abruptly.

  “Comedy?”

  “It isn’t much. A second part in a Muldoon. We’re shooting right now. But the guy we were using has a sore arm and can’t fall down. It’s a fall-down part.”

  “Who’s playing the feminine lead?”

  “Moira Silver,” he said matter-of-factly, as though I hadn’t mentioned the name myself only a moment before.

  “All right.”

  “All right?” said Nesselrode, alarmed. “What do you mean, all right?”

  “I mean I’ll do it.”

  “Reiter, this is not a good idea.”

  Reiter paid no attention to him. “It’s called My Lord. You’re the fiancé. Muldoon comes along and gets the girl. We’re starting to shoot again in a half an hour. You’d better go over the part with Moira and Muldoon.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Dressing rooms,” said Reiter shortly. He turned his back and went on with his conversations with Morton and Lightfoot.

  I left hurriedly. I had no idea where the dressing rooms were, but I was afraid that if I lingered around asking any more questions Nesselrode would follow me, and that would spoil everything. As it turned out it wasn’t very difficu
lt finding the dressing rooms. There were only four kinds of buildings on the lot: the galvanized-iron shooting studios, the stucco office, the commissary, and a set of low wooden buildings with tar-paper roofs that looked like the barracks in a hastily erected army camp. All the rooms had outside doors and there were no connecting corridors. There were no names on the doors and I had no idea how to find Moira. After I had circulated up and down the dusty alleys between the buildings for a while I found a door open and put my head into it. An intense dark mournful-looking woman of perhaps forty, with heavy white makeup and black eyes, was engaged in combing out her long black hair before the mirror.

  “Moira Silver?”

  Wordlessly, still evidently crushed under her melancholy, she indicated the building across the way with her comb. Searching in the direction indicated, I found another door slightly ajar and pushed my way in. Moira was sitting in a wooden chair at the other end of the small room, her hands in her lap and a faint smile on her face, doing nothing at all, as though she were waiting for me. She was wearing a gingham frock with lace at the collar, white ankle socks, and patent-leather shoes. The costume made her look about sixteen years old. Since she had her back to the mirror with its frame of light bulbs her face was in shadow and I could make out her expression only indistinctly.

  “I knew you’d come.”

  “I’m going to do a picture with you.”

  “Ah yes. Harney fell off a hay waggon and sprained his arm. It’s a fall-down part.”

  “That’s what Reiter said. Can’t we go somewhere?”

  “We’re shooting in a half an hour.”