Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  “Belinda.”

  “How nice to see you. Have you been out of town?” She smiled and went on looking through the records.

  “You might say that.”

  “You do lead a mysterious life, you know.”

  “How about a cup of coffee somewhere?”

  “I’ve only got a minute or two and then I have an appointment.”

  “Perhaps I could—come around to see you. Do you still live at the same place?”

  “I’m getting kicked out of the apartment. They’re converting to condos, and I can’t afford to buy mine.” Here she stopped, and glanced up at me only briefly. Then she went back to looking through the records. “And you. Are you still living in that spooky old house all by yourself?”

  Now it was time for me to make my own little smile.

  “Usually the man is the one that puts the propositions. You sound like one of those modern girls we read about in magazines.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s a little embarrassing. Just now I …”

  “I saw someone with you. Are you in the escort business?”

  “It’s just that—one isn’t always free. I have … promises to keep.”

  “And miles to go before you sleep? Well, sweet dreams.”

  She found the record she wanted and pulled it out and took it off to pay for it at the desk, with a final smile over her shoulder. For an instant she was framed in the doorway: the blond hair, the suntanned face with the pale lipstick, the long slim legs in the jeans below the shirttail. With a bittersweet tug of regret I remembered the body inside the clothes, tanned all over. So we ended, quoting Robert Frost to each other, like two high school kids.

  When I got back to Robinson’s I found that Moira had bought about seven hundred dollars’ worth of clothes in the half hour I was gone. Her purchases were in several different departments, so they added it all up and I had to go to the credit desk to write a check for it. I gave the bill to Moira to keep. She put it away in her purse, a kind of paisley affair with a clasp that snapped at the top. She was wearing a nylon dress in a colorful flowered pattern, hose, aubergine pumps with heels, and a large picture hat. Everything else she had had sent to the house in St. Albans Place. She had evidently bought some cosmetics too and applied them in the ladies’ room while I was dealing with the credit clerk, because she was made up like a mime with a white face, dark mascara eyes, and dark-red lipstick.

  I asked her if she would like to have lunch. She agreed cheerfully, and we walked back on Wilshire and up Canon Drive to the Bistro. It was cool and shadowy inside. The captain recognized me as soon as we were seated at the table. “A Shirley Temple?” he asked me.

  It was odd how Moira and I settled into the old house, almost as though we had lived there all our lives. She took one of the small rooms upstairs for a dressing room, but we slept together in the large bedroom with its walls and ceiling covered with mirrors. I bought a new toaster, but I didn’t replace anything else; I didn’t really feel we needed a camel saddle or an oaken table with ball-and-claw feet. Moira and I eat in the breakfast room for the most part; if it is a special dinner we set up a card table in the dining room. These special dinners, with good wine and a candle on the table, are what she calls our “parties”; at the end we go upstairs and I do her bidding on the large double bed, while the mirrors on the walls examine us pitilessly from all sides. Basically she is an affectionate and generous person and she appreciates my attentions. We don’t go out very much, except that now and then I get out the Invicta to take her shopping to Beverly Hills or Century Plaza. She buys a good many clothes and also spends quite a lot on cosmetics, but there is still plenty of money to spare. I myself buy almost nothing but a few books and records; we can’t spend anywhere near the monthly allowance that accumulates at the bank. It’s very quiet in St. Albans Place. When the breeze comes up in the afternoon it sighs faintly in the trees outside the windows, as though it were whispering something to itself. Late at night, after we have made love in the mirrored room and lie side by side on the bed, we can hear over the treetops the subdued and distant, almost inaudible roar of the city.

  I find that I have fallen into this new life with scarcely any feeling of strangeness, or any sense that it is different from the life I led before. The short period in my life that I spent behind the Screen might not have happened. Everything is the way it is when you return from a foreign country, or when you come out of a movie into the afternoon sunlight. The old reality is just as it always was, and the place you have been seems unreal and only half remembered. You have to make an effort of the will to recall the details, and everything takes up as it was before the brief interlude you spent in the theater of your fantasies.

  Now and then, perhaps when Moira is taking a nap in the afternoon, I slip out of the house and wander around the city on foot, in the way that I imagine Nesselrode used to. She doesn’t like me to leave her alone in the house, and the sound of a car starting up would waken her; like many old people she sleeps lightly. The city is much as it always was: the stucco storefronts, the forest, of neon signs, the bright polychrome graffiti on the walls. Only a few things change from time to time: a store goes out of business or a new shopping center is built. The other day I went back to the Alhambra Theater and found it wasn’t there anymore. The wreckers had torn it down to the foundations, leaving their bulldozer standing in the heaps of rubble they had made. You could see right across it to the alley, and there was nothing particularly special about the place where the theater had been; it was just like every other part of the daily and ordinary city. Facing the sidewalk there was a sign firmly imbedded into the ground on two legs: “Coming Soon. For Your Convenience a New Branch of the Sunset Bank Will Be Erected on This Site.”

  This reminded me that for some time I had been half expecting a telephone call from Ziff, but it never came. The only indication that he was still aware of my existence was a rather curious card that arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. It was a large lilac-colored affair that looked like a greeting card, but it was also a business card too, because at the top it bore the legend “Ziff & Ruben. Surveillance—Investigation—Protection.” There was an address in West Hollywood but no phone number. Framing this inscription, like cherubs in an Annunciation, was a pair of figures rather bizarrely clad in modern urban clothing, but provided with gossamer wings enabling them to hover in the upper left and right corners of the card respectively. The one on the left was unmistakably Ziff, and the other, move portly, was evidently Ruben, who perhaps took care of the more sedentary side of the enterprise. Down at the bottom—not in longhand but printed in flowery letters with daisies growing out of the capitals—were the words “Happy Birthday.” This was a rather interesting document and I considered keeping it as a memento, but after a second thought I dropped it into the wastebasket.

  “What is that, dear?”

  “A greeting card from a friend.”

  “How nice.”

  As a matter of fact it wasn’t my birthday. Since then I’ve heard nothing from him. Evidently he approves of my present way of life, or has lost interest in me. The phone never rings, and no one follows me around, on my walks, in a car with an antenna sticking up. However he may still be hovering around, making sure I am not unfaithful to Moira or that I don’t try to go back through the Screen, which would be impossible anyhow because the Alhambra Theater no longer exists. And perhaps it never existed, perhaps it was all in my mind, as Ziff & Ruben’s psychiatric consultant so shrewdly suggested. However I can hardly believe that; it was so concrete and vivid. And Moira is really here beside me, although it’s true that she’s not really very concrete: she is rather phantasmagoric and sometimes gives the impression that she is, perhaps, only an impression on a badly fading film. To be sure she is still there, I go into the bedroom and speak to her. “I love you, Moira.” She folds me in her arms. “Alys.”

  It’s odd that she has never told me that she loves me. But women are like
that; for us it’s enough if they go to bed with us, but they need constant reassurance. I tell her, “I love you, Moira” three or four times a day, or whenever she seems to be looking at me questioningly. I ask myself: is this true? Of course it is true, I reply to myself in this inner dialogue, I have always loved her, from the moment I first saw her face through a crowd of people in the commissary. And nothing that has happened since can change that. Why should it? If an octogenarian husband can still love his octogenarian wife, why can’t a young husband love a wife who has suddenly become an octogenarian? Suppose a young wife remained young but was stricken with a disfiguring skin disease. Couldn’t the young husband go on loving her? Wouldn’t he feel an obligation to stay and take care of her and be faithful to her? And wouldn’t he even, perhaps, be capable of having sexual relations with her, even though she was no longer sexually attractive? That is what it means to love, and that is how I love Moira—I conclude, satisfied with my arguments to myself.

  So the days pass, identical, indistinguishable the one from the other. I have the feeling that something else is going to happen, but the feeling is really only a hope, because nothing else will. It will be just like this. Ghosts walk through the old house, both at night and in the daytime, making the old boards creak, tittering at some private joke or humming scraps of music. For the rest, the city seems to have forgotten me. I don’t go to the movies anymore. I don’t know anybody and I don’t have any friends except Moira. I tell her, “You know, I’ve always loved you. Ever since we were in pictures together.”

  “Yes,” she says brightly, lifting her wrinkles up into a placid smile. “That was fun. But this is better, isn’t it?”

  I don’t know what to say to this. After some thought, and an effort to generate a profound comment on the situation, all I can think of is, “It’s more real.”

  “Yes. That’s what I mean.”

  I have my books and my music, and she has her clothes, her cosmetics, and the large mirrors in the bedroom in which she never tires of looking at herself in different costumes or makeups. The way it has happened is best for her, I am sure of that. At least she believes it. She has someone who loves her and is faithful to her, and she is happy to have escaped from behind the Screen, even at the price of her mortality. She takes a particular pleasure in the shopping trips, and our parties at the card table. Only a few days ago she told me, “I’m enjoying myself tremendously. Everything’s so colorful. I want it to go on forever.” Of course, as I watch her closely—and there is nothing else in particular to look at in the house, at least nothing that changes—I can see that she grows perceptibly weaker and more fragile month by month, so that she will die in a few years at the most. So will I of course, sooner or later; but there will be no particular hurry about that.

  AFTERWORD

  Simon Callow

  You and I are encountering each other after you’ve read Screenplay rather than before. At least, I hope you are….no cheating, please! The reason being, as you now know, that there is virtually nothing that I could have told you in advance about the book which would not have spoiled the delicious surprises so cunningly contrived by the author, to which you are now, of course, privy. The book, I’m sure you will agree, is a supremely elegant roller-coaster, a Magic Mirror Maze, a bedazzlement of illusions, a trip through a haunted house. These fairground aspects of the book tell us quite clearly that the author is in playful form, revelling in his showmanship and legerdemain. He is, too, but the spell that Macdonald Harris’s Screenplay casts is of an altogether different nature to the tawdry charms of the circus.

  I came across the book (his tenth) in 1983 when it was first published in England, and received a rave review in the Sunday Times; I had never read a word of MacDonald Harris, though I knew of The Balloonist. The review led me to believe that I had missed a true original. Reading the book confirmed this. It was so many things in one: a semi-gothic fable in the manner of Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Isak Dinesen’s Anecdotes of Destiny; an evocation of two Los Angeleses; a celebration of the profoundly naïve mysteries of the silent cinema; a portrait of a coldly charmless sybarite—Alys—who shares elements of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes in À Rebours, but who finally comes to understand the meaning of love. Above all the book creates that most elusive of literary phenomena: atmosphere. The novel has its own tone, quite unlike that of any other MacDonald Harris novel, or any other novel, full stop. It is a narcissistic world of reflecting surfaces, of monochrome, of drawn curtains, of the dark rooms in which movies are viewed and in which they come to flickering life. There is something sinister and latently violent about it. It is stylish and hectic at the same time. Even love, when it comes, is a desperate, clawing, all-consuming obsession. And there was something else about it, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first.

  I immediately wanted to film it. This was a reckless ambition for a 35-year-old stage actor who had barely appeared in a film, let alone written or directed one. Somehow, thanks to my close friendship with the great play and screenplay agent Margaret Ramsay, wheels were put into motion, and one day I found myself talking to MacDonald Harris. He was as warm and as funny and as positive as his central character was cold, self-involved and snidely witty. He was all for my directing and writing the movie; he liked my enthusiasm, he said—that was the most important thing. But then we got to talking to His People, and they proposed a sum for an option which was way beyond any conceivable sum that I could raise, I had to let it drop. It seems, however, that a year or two later any other possible interest in making the movie evaporated, and so, shyly, tentatively, I started to approach producers, all of whom were highly appreciative of the book and the treatment but thought that it was not sufficiently now, which of course it wasn’t: that was the whole point of it. I managed to wangle an interview with Roger Corman, who adored the story, and instantly understood what I wanted to do with it; indeed, he offered me the job of directing it there and then, if I could bring it in at under $40,000. Even in 1988, this was a suicidally small sum. I patiently explained that above all the film had to be done beautifully. He just smiled and reiterated: “$40,000.”

  Time passed. I never forgot Screenplay; it haunted me. About 6 years ago, I found myself in Los Angeles—not my favourite city in the world—and decided to have one last stab at making the film. Again I contacted Harris’s people—he had by now died—and they offered me a very generous option, so I resumed my efforts. The usual cordial but hopeless responses followed—too Art House, too odd, too expensive (recreating both 1970 and 1923). Sometimes they cited Woody Allen’s film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which characters walk in and out of the auditorium into the film, as having been there before, but Allen’s whimsical film has none of the poetry, none of the atmosphere, none of the uncanniness of Screenplay. I wrote proposal after proposal, none of which landed; I spent hours and hours telling the story in various huts across Los Angeles—“Great story, Simon! What a great storyteller you are! I’d like to see that movie, Simon!”—to no avail whatever.

  Then one day, I was framing the story in yet another way, from yet another angle, and I typed out the hero’s name—Alys—and for the first time I finished the phrase: Alys in Wonderland. And I then felt very, very foolish. For over twenty years I had thought about this novel, had tried to find a filmic equivalent for every aspect of it, and I had missed Harris’s greatest joke. The hyperactive producer Nesselrode, for example, with his obsession with time, is palpably the White Rabbit; Harris scatters clues everywhere, like, well, rabbit droppings. Early on he flags the point up by describing Nesselrode as having a “jumpy rabbit look.” Later, outrageously, he has him stop off to have some carrot juice (“makes you see in the dark”). But Harris is not interested in mere parody, in literary jokes. His Carrollian framework is less concerned with the characters than with the poetry of Alice’s dream landscape, the realm in which the inverted logic and the irrational eruptions foreshadow Kafka. The movie b
usiness is as wayward and erratic as Joseph K’s employers, as mad as any Mad Hatter’s Tea party. Similarly, the drowsy implied eroticism of Alice in Wonderland has its complement in Screenplay, too, in the long first love scene with Moira Silver, while Alys’s passage through the Downtown movie theatre screen is an inspired equivalent of his little female counterpart’s descent down the rabbit hole.

  The ending of the novel, which takes us far away from Alice Liddell and her little companions in Folly Bridge that summer in Oxford in 1865, is a masterly resolution, redeeming the narcissism of Alys: his passion for his exquisitely monochrome Moira is obsessively indulged, until finally they return to his home in Highland Park, and he wakes up the following morning to find her the age she would have been in real life. In an insouciant final sequence which has elements of Billy Wilder’s inspired last line in Some Like It Hot—“nobody’s perfect”—Alys, with perfect aristocratic equanimity, accepts his destiny as the lover of an ancient wrinkled woman. One day, he thinks, in the not-too-distant future, she’ll die. So, somewhat later, will he. What of it, he asks, like an existential hero from Camus or Sartre.

  I tell you, the film of Screenplay will knock the world sideways.

  DONALD HEINEY (1921–1993) was born in South Pasadena. Writing under the pseudonym MacDonald Harris, he was the author of seventeen novels, including The Balloonist and The Carp Castle, both published by Overlook. He taught writing for many years at the University of California, Irvine.