by Paul Monette
“Because unlike you and Nick, my darling, I don’t always have to be acting out the Seven Ages of Man.” He stood up and held out his hands to her. “Come on, come on,” he said, as if they were on a tight schedule. “Nick must want to show us what Hey gave him.”
She got up and hurried along, looking over her shoulder once at the props of the clown show strewn on the terrace. Peter was probably right, but what Peter really had against juggling, she thought, had more to do with gypsies and the tawdry decor of circuses. He couldn’t see past the tacky part to the magic. And Rita could. The lovely thing it said about Varda was that nothing at all was tied down to stay. Everything at any moment might begin to frolic in the midday air. A juggler was a man who held out hope.
“Why doesn’t Hey give me something?” Rita asked as they clattered up the stairs in their fancy shoes.
“You don’t need it. You find things all by yourself,” he said playfully. “Every time you look down, there’s a cameo there at your feet.” They arrived out of breath at the door, and Peter knocked and opened it. But just before they went in and got lost in the dark, he touched her cheek and added one more thing. “Hey is trying to tell Nick and me that Crook House is finally ours. He’s turning over the deeds and the titles. The funny thing is, he’s got me feeling grateful.”
“Come sit on the bed,” Nick said when they came in. He was perched on pillows in his bathrobe, Indian-style, with a movie projector in front of him trained on the opposite wall. The blankets dimmed the light, but not so much so they couldn’t see. The air was about as thick as twilight. As they kicked off their shoes and sat on either side of him, he clicked it on, and the film rolled. A man in an Edwardian suit ran up and down in a field, driven to distraction by something they’d missed.
“Wait a minute,” Peter said irritably. “Start at the beginning. Explain.”
“Most of it’s really bad,” Nick said apologetically. “You haven’t missed a thing. Grainy little one-and two-reelers. I can’t even follow the story half the time.” Just then, a woman came tearing down the field as if for a touchdown. There was a moment of recognition. Then she and the troubled man danced around for a minute or so, delighted to have met at last. It was about as heavily textured as Mickey Mouse. “I’ve watched about two hours, and I’m up to 1919, and believe me, he’s not a forgotten genius.”
But all the same, it was actually Rusty Varda’s work, and they couldn’t take their eyes off it. He’d saved it all meticulously. Where a hundred other pioneers, too broke to care, had let their reels rot in the attic, Varda transferred every blessed foot to modern film. He’d spliced it up so they ran in the order he shot them. Then he’d listed them all in a log that he tucked in the lid of the wooden box Hey dragged up the stairs to Nick that morning. A box about the size of the juggler’s kit. With a sense of method as sharp and passionate as the plan for the secret room.
“How much Frances Dean has there been?” Rita asked tensely, afraid she’d been cheated, about to beg him to please start over. She didn’t care about films much, unless they told a story very like a book’s. She only wanted to see that face.
“That’s why I called you up. She’s about to make her debut.”
The film in the field ended with a kiss. Then the numbers zeroed down from ten to nothing, and the next film began before they knew it. “Varda Cinegraph Presents A Test of Faith.” The titles flipped and listed a cast of dozens, and the last line said, “With Frances Dean as The Woman from Paris.” She was more real to them suddenly, in just that line. But the film was awful. About a rich old man who’d returned from abroad with a pretty young wife who spoke no English. It all took place at a party he threw to introduce her around his vast Victorian family. A lot of preparation went on in a great big gingerbread house, and the servants whispered darkly about the way things used to be. The sons and their families gathered and went through aimless footage, with sight gags of dumb family pranks and heavy picnicking. When Frances Dean entered at last on the old man’s arm, pale and thin and sleepless, confused by all this American cheer and Fourth of July noise, the rhythm went haywire. Nothing seemed to matter except why this beautiful woman was so sad, and there probably wasn’t a film in the world that could say.
“This is terrible,” Peter said. “She looks like a little girl. No, worse. She looks like a little-girl junkie.”
“It’s unearthly,” Rita said. Beautiful, she seemed to mean, but out of synch, like Garbo and the Keystone Cops.
Nick didn’t notice, one way or the other. As he’d done all morning, he was staring stony-eyed at the young male lead, in this case one of the sons, being primed on one side by his brothers to test the young wife, to flirt with her till she was compromised, on the other side smitten in spite of himself. He was all out-of-place in his morning suit, hemmed in as if by armor. But the look was unmistakable. They were different in every movie, but they always looked like Sam. They walked like workmen, and they slouched like whores. Though his heart was in smithereens, Nick had to wonder for one dispassionate moment how so many men could be the same. His eyes weren’t playing tricks. Not a single one appeared a second time. He must have seen twenty or thirty, all told. For some reason, Rusty Varda wanted a new one in every film—in his bed as well, presumably. So maybe Sam was right. Varda had asked him back to Crook House again and again, as if in his old age he’d finally found a boy he couldn’t leave alone. Finally found the one. What did it mean, Nick wondered, if Sam was right about that?
“It’s amazing, isn’t it,” Peter said, “how people get all their power together?You’d never know how far Varda got from the shit he left behind. A juggler’s gear, for Christ’s sake, and a crate of second-rate silents—it all seems so puny.” He didn’t see that both of the others were somewhere else, overwhelmed by the shaking image on the bedroom wall. The fragmentary evidence of Varda’s life struck him with how little a man ended up with. Not a typical feeling at all for someone who measured the world by clutter. But somehow it called up his deepest image, of Czarist Russia stripped of estates. It was as if someone had started to play the balalaika. “If we’d never found the room in the hill,” he said, floored by the irony, “there would have been nothing to him. Nothing at all.”
Rita and Nick nodded agreement. They didn’t want to say how jarred they felt, since each believed he was the only one knocked over. They’d worked hard at not seeming extreme for weeks. It was a point of pride that things had gone back to being the same as ever. And acting so had made it so. They’re looking right at it, but they don’t see it, Nick told himself. And Rita thought, Even Peter doesn’t know me well enough to know that’s who I always wanted to be, without ever knowing exactly who. If she could only have looked like that, Rita thought, she would never have had to waste a minute on herself. She would have been through the wall before she was twenty.
Frances Dean had about her a gaunt sort of flapper look—smoldering, weary, surrendered. And whether it was the dope or just an attitude she was born with, she seemed to maintain complete indifference toward her bruised and sullen beauty. She wouldn’t have known what a mirror was for. She might with a tilt of her head have acknowledged a kindred spirit, but women like her didn’t talk to women like her. She waited in the garden for the man who looked like Sam. The furtive glances she gave the camera seemed to imply that it caused her pain, just to be watched like that. It was the strangest play for stardom Rita had ever witnessed. As if she’d engaged the camera’s power to hurt, and it sent out a beam like a laser that burned her skin. The boy was no match for her. They strolled in a circle, and she did a long speech about the flowers of her country. She touched a rose with one long finger and shook her head because there wasn’t any way to say it. Every couple of seconds, every four or five, an idiot title flashed on. He was telling her he’d fallen for her madly. He didn’t look it at all.
Peter had had enough. “Hey’s right about one thing,” he said. “Rusty Varda is dead and buried.” He turned on one of the g
reat terra-cotta lamps next to the bed, got up, and started to leaf through the mail on the bedside table. “She would have made a fabulous fashion model, don’t you think, Rita? She’s ahead of her time. That look is pure Art Deco.”
“You know,” she said, “I just realized I don’t know the start of the story. Where Varda found her. You don’t meet that type on a stool at Schwab’s.” The film on the wall was paler now. The faces were nearly whited out.
“He was probably fucking her, pardon me,” Peter said, and he walked to the bathroom door, breaking the light of the film so it rippled across him. “He probably met her on the street.”
“No,” said Nick and Rita, one on top of the other, but you couldn’t say which was the echo. Peter shrugged his shoulders, aware he was being outvoted two to one. He closed the bathroom door behind him, and Rita said to Nick, “Turn off the light, why don’t you?”
They watched for a while in silence. It was clearly becoming a situation where nothing was going to happen. Frances kept her distance and told him they had to be true to what they’d got. She groped for the words in her strange new language. No, no, Sam cried, they had to run away. When he reached to take her in his arms, Nick and Rita could almost hear Varda talking through his megaphone, trying to pump in some feeling. Frances skipped away and put a border of rosebushes between them. She spoke a last passionate speech, flinging her arms about and calling him to honor. In the course of it, Nick and Rita found they’d developed the skill of not reading the titles at all. They might not have agreed at what point it happened, but Frances Dean had started to act up a storm.
It was hard to say what became of the language barrier. It looked as if the film had stopped pretending she couldn’t speak English, and the shift could have come out comical, but she acted as if she’d found the words because she had to. When the brothers and cousins fell out of the bushes, expecting to find her in Sam’s arms, she saw what they’d tried to do to her. She shot a single strangled look at Sam as she took the old man’s arm and went away. Her eyes were full, poised at the peak like the roses. And as she turned to go, they swept across the eye of the camera, hovered there, and seemed to accuse it of the same betrayal. The final shot was Sam wringing his hands, his own life now in ruins, except he looked like he hadn’t felt a thing. Frances Dean had pulled off a three-act ballet while the boy was stepping all over his feet.
“Oh, my,” Rita said, forgetting for the moment how they’d all agreed it was silly. “Couldn’t you tell she loved him, too? For a minute she almost ran.”
“That boy is as bad as the kids I went to high school with,” he said, dissatisfied and edgy. “I don’t understand these movies, Rita. They’re all too short to have a story, so they just set up these comic-strip plots, like a Punch and Judy show. But then they try to act them as if they’re Hamlet. They can’t have it both ways.”
“Wasn’t that a story?” she asked impatiently. “The story was what she was feeling, wasn’t it?” Why was she defending Varda’s work? She was only going to get melancholy if she started to care in such detail. She’d be holding back tears by the time the press was seated. “It isn’t in words. It’s all states of mind.”
“They were never lovers, were they?”
“Who?”
“Varda and Frances Dean.”
“No,” she said, remembering back when Hey first told her, how instead they were just like brother and sister, as if that were a better arrangement all the way around. The next film had already started, meanwhile. A fancy Park Avenue apartment. Swells in evening clothes. Rita didn’t catch the title, and she paid no attention to the setup. She just waited for Frances Dean. And as no Sam had yet appeared, Nick was as free as she was to go on talking. They looked straight ahead at the sepia glow on the wall, each of them primed for a single entrance, and they lounged against the hill of pillows Peter stacked on every bed he put his hand to.
“One thing I don’t understand,” she said. “Why did you come home early that afternoon?” Please don’t say, “What afternoon?” she thought, though she hadn’t mentioned it in weeks, and though anyone might have been excused for thinking they were in the middle of something else just now. But he caught on right away. And he didn’t seem to mind.
“It was about the car,” he said, and it crossed her mind that back in New York nothing would ever be about a car. “I thought you might have had second thoughts, getting a gift that big.”
“Should I have? You mean, it makes me something of a kept woman. A man slips me the key to a sports car, and who knows where it might lead?” It struck her funny, and she rocked in the pillows and laughed so lightly that all sorts of things they might have talked out no longer required it. Just then, meanwhile, Frances Dean took her entrance down a staircase, stopping to light a cigarette halfway down, and Rita suddenly felt terrific, as if she and Frances both were traveling first cabin for once, at least for the course of an evening. It was as if they’d have the most wonderful things to tell each other later, when at last they’d get back to the room they shared. I ought to wear silk more often, Rita decided. And incidentally, she hadn’t been to a single movie in all this time in LA, not until now, and she thought she ought to go more. “To be honest, Nick, I never gave it a thought. It was just an MG that dropped out of the sky. But I’m awfully glad you started to worry. You were our last chance.”
It was a Noel Coward play up on the screen, twenty years before its time, except it was silent, and this one Rusty Varda wrote. To miss the setup, Rita thought, you had to want to miss it. Frances Dean was a famous something—actress, probably—and she expected to be center-stage from the moment she came on. Sam was her opposite number, a famous something else, and they saw each other across the room, did double takes, and got ready for battle. It was a comedy of the old school, where the people fell in love while under fire. And if Frances Dean in A Test of Faith had seemed suited only to heavy drama, the maid of sorrows, she cavorted here and told a hundred visual jokes just walking about, with quicksilver timing, one right after the other. Garbo laughs, Rita thought.
“While we’re at it,” Nick said airily, making his move with his eyes closed, “you can tell me how you found us.” In the mine was what he meant. It was a tribute to how well they’d gotten over everything that she hadn’t even found it odd that he’d never asked. She hadn’t really done much, after all. She’d been the least tested by physical pain, so she wasn’t a hero, or by loss, so she wasn’t alone. She’d picked up Peter, naked on the ranch road, and driven back down to the mine and gone in and after a while come out with Nick. All she’d done was drive home two naked men.
“Peter showed me,” she said, but totally uninterested.
“How did you know to come to the ranch?”
Varda’s movie had altogether too much talk, which made it a mess to watch because it had to have too many titles. Sam and Frances were dancing with partners chosen to make each other jealous. They showed off their fancy footwork and then made as if to get carnal, but all the while keeping the beat to a fox-trot. She’s a hell of a hoofer, too, Rita thought, vindicated somehow by the fact that the tragedy of Frances Dean was total. It was one thing if she fell apart and was just another pretty face, but it was too terrible to bear if she could have been great. She and Sam found themselves at last on the terrace to have it out, and it was strange to watch them flirting just ten minutes after the scene among the roses. Rita didn’t catch it that the man with Sam’s face wasn’t the same as his counterpart in the other film. She thought the two actors must be a kind of team, like the Lunts. Frances strutted around Sam in a circle and laid out an ultimatum. Then it was his turn, and he poked and poked his finger at her till he backed her up against the wall. He did a better job of being in love, Rita thought, than he’d done in the old man’s garden.
“Well,” she said a bit sheepishly, turning to Nick, “I sort of went through all your things.”
“What things?”
“Your desk, your dresser, your p
ockets—everything in the house,” she admitted with a shrug, trying to simplify it some. “I’m very good at it, really, because I have this basically sneaky nature. It only took me twenty minutes, and I’d had a look at everything you own. You’d never have guessed. I always put things back the way they were as I go along.” She seemed to feel better with it out on the table. She may have come across as less of a hero than she was in fact, but that was all to the good. She was keeping both feet on the ground in this. And then Nick started to laugh. Then they both did. It took care of much of the rest of what was too hard to put into words.
“So what was the clue?You found the deed to the ranch?”
She shook her head. “I came up against a dead end. I could feel it in my fingers, like they were almost going numb. So I sat on the floor of your closet and started to cry. Hard.” She could see back to two things at once, down on the floor in two closets—the night she tripped and hit the hollow door and the day she almost lost the trail. It was as if she had to do everything twice before she could see herself plain. “See, I knew it was a mine. But nothing seemed to lead me to one, so I gave up. Which sometimes is just what you have to do,” she said, so gently she seemed to forgive herself all manner of sins, “because it wasn’t till right then that I saw.”
“Saw what?”
“Peter’s paintings. That’s just where they got put away—on the floor against the wall, behind the clothes. I could see maybe three or four at once. All these pictures of the hills around the bunkhouse. So then I knew. All had to do was call your office and find out where it was.” She held up her palms as if to say there was nothing else up her sleeves. It might not be much of a story, but there it was. She wasn’t expecting a medal.
“Does Peter know that?” Nick asked. It delighted him, he realized, just to hear the details of how the day turned out for someone else. There must be millions of things he didn’t know yet, and now he wanted them all.
