The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  “And look here, look at the subhead,” Rex points out:

  FIRE ACCIDENT CUT SHORT CAREER

  “It says she got burned saving some guy from a studio fire. Left scars on her face. But there were no scars on the old lady.”

  “No, there weren’t,” Richard says, considering it. “But read what else the article says.” He points to a spot in the story and reads: “‘Burns had left scars on her face not readily visible to the eye, but marked to the camera—’ That’s why Florence Lawrence’s career ended. She was never able to recover her place at the box office after 1915.”

  “Oh, aging actresses will find anything to rationalize declining box office,” Rex says. “How can scars not be visible to the eye but show up to the camera? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Not a lot of what we’re thinking does,” Richard admits.

  Rex yawns, stretches. “Hate to break it to you, sugarplum, but we’ve got to start getting up. I’ve got the decorators coming in at noon.” He sits up, swinging his legs off the bed.

  “Oh, not today, Nooker. It’s Sunday. What are they going to be doing?”

  “The island in the kitchen. Those funky tiles we picked out, remember?”

  “How could I forget?” Richard collects the papers on the bed and sets them on the floor. “And how much is that costing us again?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss.”

  Rex stands, wrapping his green satin robe around his body. Richard catches a glimpse of him in the full-length mirror that stands near their closet. He’s put on a little weight since starting the new drug cocktails, making him a little soft around the waist, a far cry from the taut little perennial bottom boy of his half dozen porn films. Rex had made them when he first came to New York eight years ago, when his name was still Ralph Russo, the proverbial starving actor right off the bus from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Richard’s seen the videos: low-budget, kinky, with Rex strung up to the ceiling in leather restraints and taking whatever abuse his leather-clad masters chose to dish out. “Oh, they were all such queens,” Rex has told him. “They’d dress up in their butch leather and chains and bark orders at me when the cameras were rolling, but afterward, they’d open their mouths and sequined purses would fall out.”

  Richard finds nothing erotic about the videos. After all, that’s his little Nooker hanging upside down from the ceiling. It’s hard to eroticize the scene when Rex is out in the kitchen asking him if he wants Franco-American spaghetti with his fish sticks. But mostly, Richard suspects, why he finds the videos difficult to watch is he keeps wondering if the scene being played is the one in which Rex got infected, even though the sex on the screen always appeared to be safe. “There were times,” Rex admits today, “we said to hell with the condom.”

  Four years ago, Rex nearly died. Pneumocystis. It had taken over quite suddenly, despite the Bactrim and AZT—or maybe, as Rex came to think, because of them. He just kept getting worse, wasting down to about ninety pounds, coughing up blood and going yellow right before Richard’s eyes. They’d spent two years trying to prepare themselves for this possibility, but there’s no way to prepare for such a thing—not really.

  Richard seemed frozen, unable to act. There was a sense of unreality to it: how could Rex—his cute, silly, far younger and far less cynical boyfriend—have this disease while Richard remained negative? What kind of sense did that make? Ben and Anita did what they could, as did legions of their other friends. But all Richard could do was stand and stare, clenching and unclenching his fists, as the home health aides—and later, after Rex was admitted, the nurses in the hospital—administered his meds and turned him over every few hours so he wouldn’t get bedsores.

  It’s like Dad all over again, Richard thought. And I was helpless then, too. Unable to do my part, pull my weight. I just stood on the sidelines then, too, leaving everything to Ben.

  He’d loved his father, and he supposed Dad had loved him, too, although it was always Ben he spent time with, Ben he built motors with in the garage or shot baskets with in the driveway. Richard had tried to find common ground between them—they both loved pistachio ice cream and M*A*S*H—but such things only went so far. With Mom, he could talk about anything, tell her about his hopes and ambitions, and she always cheered him on. Dad was more reserved, uttering just a couple of syllables a day, it seemed. That suited Ben okay, because he never spoke much either. They’d be out in the garage working for hours, never saying a word. Richard had to content himself with his father’s clap on the back after nailing down straight A’s.

  Was he proud of me? Richard was never entirely sure. Did he suspect I was queer? Is that why he preferred Ben, because Ben was a real boy? Real boys don’t sit inside with their mothers watching The Guiding Light and Loretta Young movies.

  If Dad hadn’t died, Richard thinks now, if he had lived, and seen what I’ve done, the house I live in, the car I drive…

  But he did die—and Richard never had the chance to say anything, let alone good-bye.

  He doesn’t like to remember how he recoiled from changing Dad’s diapers, or how, a decade later, he saw the process repeat itself with Rex. He couldn’t bring himself to hold Rex’s head when he puked up blood. I don’t deserve him, Richard thought about both Dad and Rex and occasionally still does. I don’t deserve him to get well.

  Rex had been his first boyfriend to last more than a few months, and now the Fates were snatching him away. If the Sheehan brothers were notoriously dissimilar in most things, they shared one trait in common: They each spent their lives going through lovers at least as fast as they went through razor blades. Once Ben got to college, he made up for lost time in high school by screwing every girl who said yes. Richard, meanwhile, was heading into the Village on a near nightly basis, cruising the Saint and the piers. That he managed to avoid the virus even with all that is something he still thanks God for every night.

  But I didn’t avoid it, not really, he thinks. Not when Rex is positive. Sometimes, in the weeks when Rex was the sickest, Richard would think back to his days as a single man and damn the irony. Of all the men he’d loved, the one he’d picked to last wouldn’t.

  “You’ve got to find something,” Richard had begged Rex’s doctors. They’d been together just two years at that point, but Richard couldn’t imagine life without Rex. Just as, once before, he couldn’t imagine life without Dad.

  That was when he started writing the screenplay. He’d seen other friends die—what gay man in New York in the early 90s hadn’t?—and he’d hoped the writing might help him find a way to handle Rex’s impending death. He’d be down writing in the living room while Anita and Rex’s mom changed his linens. He wasn’t proud of it, but it was the only way he’d been able to cope.

  “He can’t die,” Richard had said, glassy eyed, to Ben and Anita after a particularly savage episode with Rex. In a single night, twenty pounds of flesh had seemed to melt away through night sweats. “He can’t die. There’s so much I still want to do with him.”

  What’s amazing is, he didn’t. Unlike Dad, there was salvation for Rex. His worst illness had struck just as the new drug cocktails became available. They’d never heard of these protease inhibitors, so none of them reacted with much optimism. Yet within days, Rex was sitting up in bed. In just a few weeks, he’d put back all of the weight he’d lost. In three months, he was back at work, writing the first draft of Broadway Royals.

  They hardly ever talk about that whole time anymore, except when Richard jams the refrigerator too full and Nooker can’t find his Norrvir. “I’m taking my pills,” he insists to his friends, “but I’m not going to become one.”

  Their lives have settled into a quiet assumption of survival. “Guess you’re stuck with me,” Rex has joked to Richard.

  Now, watching Rex as he fusses around the apartment, picking up their dirty clothes so he won’t have to be embarrassed in front of the decorators, Richard still can’t imagine living without him. He also can’t imagine going
through that kind of sickness again. Could I have done it? Could I have really been there for Rex the way Ben was there for Dad had he not gotten better?

  Four years later, and the memory of Rex wasting away in that hospital bed hasn’t left him. They say it can be hiding in the brain. In the marrow. Don’t let that be the case. Please let it be gone. Please.

  It’s been six years now. They’d met not cute but rather ordinary: at a mutual friend’s dinner party, talking about the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. The party got a little dreary, so Richard made eyes at Rex and Rex made eyes back. Both assumed it would be just another quickie, a pleasant Friday night into Saturday morning, and when it was done, they’d shake hands and write down their numbers and that would be that. But Rex had ended up cooking breakfast, and over scrambled eggs and potato pancakes, they’d shared mutual Catholic school horror stories and their love for Myrna Loy. All at once, to work off their breakfast, they decided to go Rollerblading through Central Park, and then, famished by midafternoon, they’d gone for Indian food, prompting a trip to the gym and finally a night out dancing at the Roxy. It went like that the entire weekend, and they came back for more Monday night and Tuesday. By Wednesday, they’d used the “L” word for the first time. Within five weeks, they were living together.

  Ben and Anita had predicted they wouldn’t last. They’d joshed that Richard was robbing the cradle. Sure, there’s eight years difference between Rex and Richard, but Richard doesn’t feel it. At least, not usually. Oh, all right, so Nooker has odd taste in music—whiny slacker girls—and he wears old 70s fashions—the kind of silky, shiny, pointy-collared shirts Richard wore to high school—as a sign of being hip. But he’s given Richard a sense of home that he’s never had before.

  Never. When Richard was quitting his full-time reporter job and going freelance, it was Rex who provided the emotional support he needed to take that leap. “Sweetheart, you move with the flow,” Rex told him. “You know when the time’s right. I know you can do it. And if you can’t, well, then we’ll figure that out as it comes.”

  Sure, he seems flighty—never missing an episode of Ricki Lake or getting in a tizzy trying to decide which wallpaper was best for the upstairs bathroom—but there’s a solidness to Rex that belies his image. Rex had been the one to hold his own family together after his father went bankrupt back in Harrisburg. He still sends money home from his acting gigs, and he’s the one his mother still calls when she’s had a fight with any of her other kids. “You’re my rock,” she says to him as he stands there in his fuzzy slippers and frilly apron, licking cake batter from the electric mixer beaters.

  He’s Richard’s rock, too. Oh, sure, Richard pays ninety percent of their household expenses—not a lot of income from Rex’s gigs these days—but there’s no question of Rex’s contribution. Rex just seems to have this sixth sense whenever Richard comes home foul mooded and depressed. He instinctively knows how to stroke the infamous Sheehan ego. “Great letters on the Internet about that piece you did for Vanity Fair,” he’ll say when he senses Richard’s feeling down about not selling his screenplay. “Here, I printed them out for you.”

  “Rex is a saint for putting up with you,” Ben has said many times, and for once, Richard agrees that his brother is right.

  Richard knows he’s ego driven. Arrogant, some have called him. All those sweaty mornings pumping up at the gym—he doesn’t do it for his fucking health. It matters a great deal to him to see heads turn as he walks down the street—to get the looks that say: You are fine. You are hot. You did good.

  There was only one boyfriend before Rex that Richard ever felt strongly about, and he’s smart enough to know why. The guy’s name was Scott, a drop-dead gorgeous, cleft-chinned blond model who’d once made the cover of Men’s Health. They dated for just three months, and Richard loved walking into bars with Scott, loved watching his friends’ reactions when he introduced them. Scott made him look even better. And when Scott broke up with him—the only boyfriend ever to break up with him—Richard had been crushed for weeks.

  That wasn’t love, he tells himself now. That was just part of the game. The challenge. The dream to have it all.

  “Richard will go far—as far as he wants,” Mom would say at the dinner table. “Won’t you, Richard?”

  Dad, of course, never said a word. Richard would look over at him during Mom’s effusive praise but he’d just sit there, eating his cube steak with A-l sauce without ever looking up. After dinner he’d motion to Ben and they’d go out to the driveway and shoot some hoops. Richard would hear the thump, thump, thump of the ball as he sat at the table, now cleared of dinner plates, working on his school project. He’d carefully cut out pictures from magazines, pasting them onto construction paper, neatly writing the captions under them.

  “Ben’s just like your father,” Mom would sigh, standing over Richard’s shoulder, complimenting him on how beautifully he printed. “Your father has said he’ll fix the roof, but does he ever? I’ve been waiting for a color TV set for years. And now Ben’s turning out just like him. He won’t start his project until the night before it’s due. But you, Richard—you’ll show them.”

  Goddamn Ben, Richard thinks, throwing his legs off the side of the bed and standing up—finally responding to Rex’s threats that he get up now or he’d come in and pull him out of bed. Goddamn Ben. Squandering Dad’s money. Dad worked hard to leave us that money—surprised us all. And now Ben’s squandered the education Dad got for him, fulfilling all of Mom’s predictions. He’s proving to be the loser she always said he’d be.

  “Sure, I work hard,” Richard says, defending himself to no one in particular, but everyone just the same. He pulls on a pair of boxer briefs, admiring his body in the mirror. He flexes. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let it all go to waste.”

  So how come you haven’t gotten a book published yet? How come none of your screenplays have sold?

  That’s his own voice. He’s been hearing it a lot these days, especially as Rex’s renovations have become increasingly expensive. Richard likes to live as big as he can—driving that goddamn Saab that the bank has threatened to repossess twice, buying this amazing apartment in Chelsea and weighting himself down with an absurd mortgage for the next thirty years. He gave up job security because he realized his job at the Times was dead-end, that too many people were in front of him in line, that he would never write a great novel or blockbuster movie that way. Going freelance was his only option if he wanted to take that next step. But it sure made paying the bills a constant struggle.

  “Goddamn Ben,” he whispers, and he thinks about the screenplay he’d written while Rex was sick. It was hard, wrenching stuff—but funny, too. Funny and sweet, so Rex had thought. Ben was a fool to pass it up. We could’ve both made it big with that, Richard thinks.

  “I don’t like diseases,” Ben had said. And I do? Richard had thought. What a crock that excuse was. Ben was just too fucking stubborn to let Richard in. Mom’s right: If Ben didn’t accept Richard’s help, he’d get nowhere fast. His lack of movement these past few years simply confirms that assessment. If Ben had agreed and they’d done that film together, Richard is convinced they’d have had a hit on their hands by now.

  “Both of us, you idiot,” Richard says to the mirror. “Both of us.”

  “Who are you talking to, honey?”

  Rex is standing behind him with some envelopes in his hand.

  Richard looks at him and smiles. Just the sight of Rex calms him down. “You know, Nooker,” he says, “one of these days I’m gonna do something big.”

  Rex smiles. “You can do it today. You can move the tiles up from the foyer. They weigh a ton.” He kisses Richard lightly on the cheek. “Sorry. I forgot to give you the mail yesterday.”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” Richard says. “You just didn’t want me freaking out about all the bills.”

  He takes the envelopes from Rex. There are certainly bills aplenty. The wallpaper. The new furniture. The recessed
lighting. The electrician.

  “Hey.” Richard’s about to put the bills on the bedside table when he notices a long, legal-size envelope among them. State of California, Department of Health Services, Vital Statistics. “Hey,” he says again, his adrenaline suddenly pumping. “It’s here.”

  Rex squints his eyes to see. “What’s here?”

  Richard looks at him brightly. “This is Florence Lawrence’s death certificate,” he says.

  He tears open the envelope. A pink photocopied document falls out, framed in a blue filigreed pattern. Richard picks it up off the floor: Standard Certificate of Death.

  “Okay, let’s see,” he says, reading the handwriting that’s filled in the particulars. “‘Full name: Florence Lawrence. Residence: West Hollywood, California.’”

  “Hey,” Rex laughs, “old Flo was a WeHo girl.”

  Richard skims down the list, itemizing. “‘Female. Caucasian. Divorced. If married, widowed, or divorced, name of husband or wife: Henry Bolton.’” He looks over at Rex. “Who was he? Some actor or somebody?”

  Rex shakes his head. “Never heard of him.” He peers around at the certificate. “Oh, look—suicide. And there was an autopsy.”

  “Yeah,” Richard says quietly. “There was an autopsy.”

  Rex goes on reading: “‘Date of birth, January 1, 1890.’ Hey, the old girl was born on New Year’s Day.”

  Richard nods. “‘Birthplace: Hamilton.’ Just like—” He pauses. He sees the name on the next line and feels as if a cold invisible hand has just touched him on the shoulder. The top of his head goes numb.

  “Rex, look,” he says softly.

  “What? Where?”

  Richard points. He speaks slowly, reading the words. ‘“Father’s name: Charles Bridgewood.’”

  “Bridgewood,” Rex repeats, whispering.

  “Bridgewood,” Richard says again.

  December 1906

  My grandmother once said that Bridgewood was no kind of name. I’ll never forget it. She was standing out at her backyard fence, on a miserably hot summer night, talking with her neighbor, a wrinkled old pear of a woman, Mrs. O’Shaugnessy. They were all Irish on Grandmother’s street. Grandmama herself had been born in County Cork—a prim, white-haired lady in her perennial black widow’s dress. It was the first night of the great Pan-American Exposition, as I recall—we could see the lights from the fair glowing over the trees. Mrs. O’Shaugnessy was asking Grandmama what our name was—Mother’s and mine and my brother Norman’s. We’d just recently arrived in Buffalo to live for a while, in my grandmother’s house, in the town where my mother had been born. I was nine, ten—somewhere around there. The Year of the Fair.