Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  “I’M THINKING OF TAKING AN APARTMENT

  HERE MYSELF, ON THE SECOND FLOOR.”

  The camera panned to me, gnashing my teeth. The antics of the animated plank continued. I stepped on the loose end of the thing and fell down the elevator shaft, and Muldoon, who had been standing on the other end of it, soared up and landed on the roof above, which consisted only of a gridwork of unfinished boards. Crossing his ankles, he made a vaudeville performer’s bow, to the applause of Moira.

  Trying again, I stepped into the elevator and went up, striking my head as usual on the plank when I got to the top. The plank sailed up and landed on a roof beam near where Muldoon was standing. He stepped onto it. The laws of physics operated in his favor as they always did, this time with magical ingenuity. Since he had stepped onto the short end, which was counterbalanced by the weight of the long end dangling over empty space, he was lowered swiftly and yet gently to the floor below. The long end of the plank, of course, whipped around with violence and banged me on the head for what I hoped was the last time.

  Stretching out his white glove politely, Muldoon invited Moira into the elevator. They descended, came out safely at the bottom, and walked away down the sidewalk. Moira looked back once at me. I was just coming to, opening my eyes and shaking my head dizzily. For an instant she gazed at me with an expression of concern. Then, with a rueful little sigh, she slipped her hand into Muldoon’s elbow and went off blithely with him down the sidewalk. The mustached carpenter came up with the hammer and angrily accused me of having thrown it at him.

  * * *

  Reiter took off his hat and polished his head again. Then he put the hat back on. He looked a little tired. He slapped his leather boot with the riding crop. “Where are we now?”

  “Take Twenty-five. The Wedding.”

  “Fine, fine. On set, everybody. Let’s get moving, folks. Where’s Moira?”

  “AT LAST IT HAS ARRIVED, DEAR,

  OUR WEDDING DAY.”

  Moira’s face was filled with bliss. And mirth. It was a churchyard scene. Everybody was in formal dress: the father, the mother, Moira in a bridal gown with veil, I in a cutaway coat and stand-up collar, and Muldoon who was to be Best Man. There didn’t seem to be any bridesmaid; evidently casting couldn’t spare anybody at the moment. Never mind; the five of us crossed the churchyard together, for some reason walking five abreast instead of going in Indian file. A pair of grave diggers were digging a grave. They stopped and leaned on their shovels to watch. I of course walked straight across the open grave and disappeared. I simply dropped out of sight. The grave diggers, entranced with Moira’s beauty, hadn’t noticed.

  Inside the church Charles Morton was waiting, wearing his clerical costume with the dog collar. Close-up of some fingers playing an organ. All four of them stopped before Morton.

  “WHICH ONE OF YOU IS THE BRIDEGROOM?”

  They all looked around at each other. For the first time they noticed that I was missing. I was standing behind the camera next to Reiter, brushing clay off my clothing and attempting to straighten my right elbow which I had apparently dislocated in my fall into the grave. There was a moment of indecision mingled with mild consternation. Then Muldoon offered himself with a graceful bow, crossing one ankle behind the other foot. He was still holding his umbrella, even though this was not customary at weddings, and he had failed to remove his top hat. Moira considered, looking first at her parents and then at Muldoon. She sighed. But after all! If that other fellow was always turning up missing and clumsily hitting himself with planks. Another moment of considering; then she smiled and took Muldoon’s arm, still with a rueful expression around the eyes.

  “Camera up! Roll up on the bride and groom!”

  A medium close-up of Moira and Muldoon gazing into each other’s eyes, she soulfully, he with a slightly mocking expression, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the camera. Moira, who seemed to have a tickle in her throat, made a little cough. Muldoon frowned at this breach of etiquette. Then, staring at her, he ad-libbed his own cough, an elegant English one. Moira coughed again, putting her hand to her mouth. Muldoon was seized with a series of coughs and clutched his chest. The minister looked alarmed.

  “What’s this? What’s all this coughing? Cut! No, wait. Okay, let’s let ’em roll.” Reiter by this time had a broad grin on his face.

  The wedding turned into a Camille-like coughing contest in which Moira and Muldoon competed in trying to die from consumption. She barked like a circus seal, he more deeply like a Saint Bernard. Between them they ran the whole gamut and range of catarrhal explosions. Moira clutched at her throat and rolled her eyes, her chest racked by spasms. Muldoon coughed violently in her face, then fell to the floor and writhed, his whole body shaken with violent paroxysms. He rolled to a spittoon which was for some reason provided in the church and coughed copiously into it.

  Moira, not to be outdone, fell down too and began writhing, but there was only one spittoon and she had to cough into her handkerchief. Clearly he had the better of it, at least for the moment. Moira flung herself up over a pew, downstaging him and cutting him partly off from the camera. Her bosom heaved. Muldoon had no bosom to heave and she had drawn ahead of him. He reached into his pocket and came out with something: a ketchup bottle. Surreptitiously, his back to the camera, he unscrewed it and poured the contents down his chin and shirtfront. Then, concealing the empty bottle under his leg, he rolled over onto his back with his arms flung out. This put him closer to the camera and at a point where he was no longer blocked by Moira. Since it was impossible to conceal a ketchup bottle in a wedding dress, Moira couldn’t match this. She attempted to increase the violence of her coughing, but she was already at the maximum. Muldoon coughed ketchup now; he had evidently managed to get some into his mouth.

  By this time even the cameraman and the grips were laughing. The script-girl had dropped her book in an access of mirth and was down on her hands and knees picking it up. Reiter still wore his broad grin. Muldoon coughed again weakly. Then he gave a final jerk, stretched out all four limbs in different directions, and contracted them. Morton, bending over him, hurriedly administered the last rites.

  “Cut! Great! Print that!”

  Moira got up from the floor and dusted off her wedding dress. She stared rather crossly in Muldoon’s direction. He with great fastidiousness was removing ketchup from his face with a handkerchief and didn’t notice.

  Reiter took off his African hat, got out his own handkerchief, and wiped the perspiration from his head. Then, putting the hat back on, he took out another handkerchief and polished his eyeglasses. This seemed to be his ritual whenever he finished a picture. With the thick lenses removed his eyes had a curious pale fishlike look; he blinked a little. He put the glasses back on.

  “Well, it’s in the can, I guess. However,” he reflected, “I think we ought to do the construction site again. Alys didn’t react right to the plank hitting him on the head. His reaction was always the same. He ought to look more and more pained every time the plank hits him. How many times does it hit him?” he asked the script-girl.

  She consulted her book. “Six.”

  12.

  Moira was still in her wedding dress, although she had taken off the veil. We walked down the street of false-front bungalows and out into the square. I too had on my wedding clothes, with a good deal of clay on them from the grave. My elbow seemed to work all right now. It wasn’t dislocated after all. Moira, like Reiter, seemed a little tired. It had been a long day’s work. It was about five now, to judge from the white disk hanging in the absolutely clear sky to the west.

  “Where can we go?”

  “There’s nowhere, really. It’s all sets.”

  We walked around behind one of the shop fronts and sat down, leaning against the back of the flat. Moira seemed amused to find herself sitting there on the grass in her wedding dress. She stretched out her legs and looked at her toes in their white shoes. The gown was a satin so white that it see
med iridescent. It was skillfully cut and fitted her perfectly. The bodice came up to her neck, but the dress was so tight that her bosom was clearly outlined in the flimsy material. Moira was a study in white. The gown was a glowing white, her face and hands a papery white without gloss and perfectly uniform in texture. Only her loose short hair, and her dark eyes like birds’ wings, contrasted with this slightly uncanny albinism.

  I was sitting cross-legged on the grass a few feet from her. I couldn’t take my eyes from her. I had the premonition that if I went on staring at her carefully and intently in this way I might penetrate through to the secret of this enchantment she exerted on me. I had an irresistible urge to—I didn’t know what. Perhaps just to be with her. To have her eyes meet mine. And yet merely sitting with her in this way left me unsatisfied and queer-feeling, floaty. It was as though something inside me, in my viscera or in my head, were missing, and there was an empty space there that only she could fill.

  She went on contemplating her shoes for a while longer, then she turned to me with her usual girlish blitheness, only a hint of sensuality in the eyes with their half-lowered lashes.

  “Do you have a cigarette?”

  I went through my pockets and to my surprise found a rumpled pack of Chesterfields with three cigarettes still in it. Apparently it was part of the bridegroom costume as provided by the wardrobe department. There was even a box of small wooden matches. I offered her one and lit it, and then lit my own. She drew on the cigarette deeply and exhaled through her tightened lips, in the manner of a habitual smoker. The gesture contrasted oddly with her air of virginal girlishness. The combination was exciting; I felt a little stir of desire rise up in me again.

  “Moira, I want to …”

  “What?”

  “Play a serious part with you.”

  She drew on the cigarette again and set it down on the ground beside her.

  “Aren’t you satisfied? You’re doing fine so far.”

  “Fall-down parts are not what I had in mind.”

  “But it doesn’t hurt, does it?”

  Reflecting back, I had to admit that it didn’t hurt. Or did it? Perhaps it had hurt at the time and now I had forgotten it. I remembered reading an article about curare. It seemed that curare at one time was used as an anesthesia. When you gave it to people, they lay perfectly still and showed no signs of pain while you operated on them. But later it transpired that they were suffering the agonies of the damned, except that the curare paralyzed them so that they couldn’t move so much as an eyelid to show that they were in pain. Perhaps this was the way it had been with the plank striking me on the head. Still, if I had forgotten it, the pain didn’t exist, so to speak, and it didn’t matter.

  “I didn’t mean that exactly. I meant that—I want to know you seriously.”

  “We can’t always have what we want … here,” she said vaguely, not meeting my glance.

  I said nothing for a moment, studying her face. Then I said, “You’re not happy?”

  “We’re not put into this world to be happy-”

  “This world. Perhaps there are other worlds where one can be happy.”

  “Yes. I used to be,” she said in a toneless voice, as though she were talking to herself. “A long time ago. Would you believe it? There was a time when I was in love with Julie.”

  It was a moment or so before I realized she was speaking of Nesselrode.

  “You used to go out with him in the evening.”

  “Yes. I was his mistress,” she said quite simply. The old-fashioned term rang strangely, as though it were something in a book and not in a real conversation. “It was fun. For a while. I didn’t realize then …”

  “Did he love you too?”

  “I don’t know. He’s not a very communicative person. It’s impossible to know what he’s thinking.”

  “But at least he got you into pictures.”

  “Not then. Later.”

  “Moira.”

  She looked up at me.

  “How did he …”

  We were both silent for a moment. It was as though a shadow had come over us, leaving a chill in the air. Then she said, “Oh, that’s all past now. It happened a very long time ago. Nothing can be done about it.” She stopped, and after a moment she went on in a flat, almost indifferent voice. She might have been talking about somebody else. “I was just a kid from Bakersfield. My God, but I was young! Nobody has ever been that young. I knew nothing about the world, nothing about anything, except that I wanted to get into pictures. He told me he was a producer and he was; the others said he was too. Then all the clichés started happening. You know, the casting couch and all that. I didn’t object. If that was the price you had to pay, it was little enough. Besides he was … You may find this a little difficult to believe. He was attractive in those days.”

  All I said was, “I’ve seen pictures of him.”

  “Not attractive exactly, but desirable. Physically desirable. At first I didn’t like his lip. When he kissed me I could feel the scar—ugh. But then … he taught me. He used to be able to make me come seven or eight times. You can imagine—a girl my age. I had no idea of such things. After a while I was addicted to it, as you might be addicted to opium.”

  I began to feel a kind of chill creeping around on me under my clothing. I didn’t know whether I wanted her to go on or not. But I myself was addicted to her story. I had to know the rest of it.

  “And … the pictures?”

  “I kept on pestering him. I thought I could have both, you see. He would never answer me. He didn’t argue. He still doesn’t; it isn’t his way. But he wouldn’t take me to the studio and he wouldn’t introduce me to studio people. The fan magazines called me a starlet, but that was just a euphemism for a mistress. Everybody knew that. When I reminded him of his promise—he had never promised me anything, but I kept on saying he had and after a while, perhaps, he believed it—he would only change the subject. Then one day he abruptly gave in. I think it was because … no, I shouldn’t tell you that.”

  I didn’t know what it was but I didn’t think I was going to like it. After a long moment I said, “What?”

  “He always had … a little trouble with women. Even with me. Even though he was skillful with women, he wasn’t strongly masculine. And so one day he … we had a …”

  “Fiasco.”

  “Yes. I was still lying there, and he got up and went away to the closet and came back with a riding crop.”

  “A riding crop?”

  “Yes. It was a rattan thing, with a brass tip at the end. I was quite afraid of it.”

  “The same one that …”

  “Yes. He held it up in the air over me and I screamed. I think that was what stopped him. He had a nice house in an expensive district and I think he was afraid that the neighbors would hear. But when he stood there holding the crop in the air I could see that …”

  I helped her. “The fiasco was over.”

  “Yes. I put my clothes back on and neither of us said anything about it. But it was shortly after that—it was the next morning in fact—that he grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘Okay, if that’s what you want so much, I’ll do it.’ There was something about his eyes—they frightened me. But I had to obey; I could never stand up to him in anything. So he dragged me off to the …”

  “The Alhambra.”

  “Yes. He took me there in his car. He had a car with a chauffeur in those days.” I tried to imagine Nesselrode as a non-pedestrian, but without success. “He had to pull me after him the last few inches,” she went on. “I didn’t like the look of the thing. But we went through it, and on the other side everything was black and white. And so,” she concluded, leaving out a good deal of the story and telling only the end, “I became a star.”

  She finished with her cigarette and crushed it out in the grass. She still had her curious stiff air of indifference, as though she were telling a story about somebody else.

  “Did you ever try to …”
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br />   “Not at first, of course. I was excited by being in pictures and by all the fuss that everybody made over me. But then I began to notice some—odd things. Some things I didn’t like. I asked him if I could quit. Or not quit exactly, just take a vacation for six months or a year. He wouldn’t answer this either. I made a few silly attempts to run away. But I found out that it’s as I told you. There’s no place to go. And since then I’ve … gone on making pictures.”

  “And all this happened …”

  “I don’t know. I lose track. Just a few years ago.”

  “But … you got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t what I expected. I wasn’t happy making pictures. It was just work like everything else. I thought that I was young and good-looking and I could have anything I wanted. But the looks didn’t do any good, because there was nobody to—go to bed with. You couldn’t do that here. And it was impossible to escape to a place where you could.”

  “I don’t understand. Why … why can’t we, just the two of us …”

  “Because they own us. Once we’re in pictures, we belong to them. And they don’t want us to. They don’t want us to have real lives.”

  “But you’re famous.”

  She said quite simply, “Movie stars are like racehorses. Everybody knows their name, but they have to obey the stable boy.”

  She got up abruptly and smoothed out her gown. Then she tossed her head in a girlish gesture to shake the curls from her cheeks.

  I got up too and dropped my cigarette into the grass. “Moira …”

  “Don’t, Alys,” she said in a thin and unreal voice. “It’s …what I want too,” she added awkwardly. “But it’s no use.”