The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  Marooned, she said again.

  It isn’t good anymore, she said. She didn’t want to continue. She used to love acting, now she hated it. She used to love the set, indoors or out, soft clothes, rough clothes, barefoot or slippered, dressed up or dressed down. She loved learning her lines, pulling on a new face, any face they wanted, cruel, naive, haughty, naughty. She loved the tension and the rivalries, the tricks, the scene-stealing, the unexpected gesture or bit of business, even of drudgery, the stuff that in its mindlessness resembled calisthenics. And she always loved the crew, so sarcastic in their comments, and the takes, one take after another.

  Try it this way, Claire.

  Try it that way.

  Try it slowly.

  Claire, try lowering your voice when you call him darling.

  She loved making something new, even the unsuccessful film had one thing to admire, a line of dialogue or an unexpected glance. She loved the paraphernalia, the microphones and cameras, the heavy lights overhead. She loved making out, certainly loving it more with some men than with others, the sticky makeup and whispers in his ear, the times when the director said Cut! but said it softly, too softly for her to hear, and she and her screen lover ground on and on, as if they were teenagers at a drive-in. Now she loathed all of it. Her heart turned hard overnight. She was like a gardener who had fallen out of love with flowers. One fine morning she walked into her garden and destroyed the rose bushes branch by branch. She could not stand the sight of them, so shapely, blood red or pink or cowardly yellow or shroud white, the feeding, the pruning, the weeding, the caring. Young roses turned into old roses, the vines as thick as your wrist, gnarled arthritic vines, tough as crowbars. And then the blight set in. They are beyond me, she said. I am in one place and they are in another, so I can no longer tend my garden. I have lost my desire. I have lost my will. I can’t pull on the new face or try it this way or lower my voice when I call him darling. I am sitting in an airplane six miles above the earth, thinking of the years I loved the camera, and the years when it loved me back. It happened overnight.

  And now—I can’t do it anymore.

  I abandoned the set, she said.

  I have never done that. You know I haven’t. It’s against the rules, and not only the rules that are written down. A professional owes something to the product. That’s what you always said. Loyalty to the material, you lived by that rule. And I agreed. We always agreed about professional things. We agreed that even among whores there was a code of conduct, some one thing that was inviolable.

  Something personal, she said after a moment’s pause.

  Then I lost my desire. I’m afraid I have turned from the world. I lost my desire. And we are not together.

  Greenwood had moved up close to the machine, looking at it as if it were a human being showing the first signs of breakdown. Claire was remorseless. Her voice was not her own. Now he closed his eyes and tried to picture her marooned in her airplane in the clouds, the slap of playing cards in the salon, wild laughter, someone crying Gin! and the rattle of ice cubes in a glass. She would be sitting with her feet pulled up, compact as a cat, staring out the window at the gathering storm below, the leading edge of the hurricane, talking into the telephone in her distressed stream of consciousness, holding on six miles above the Pacific Ocean. He waited for her to continue, staring blindly at the wretched machine, willing it back to life. The electrical hiss seemed to grow, then a scratch of static and he knew the connection was broken.

  First he called Howard Goodman in Palm Springs but the telephone rang and rang, no one at home, no servants, no “people.” Then he called his lawyer, whose secretary said he was in Vegas, unreachable until the morning. The lawyer’s partner was fishing, due back the following day, weather permitting. Claire’s agent was located on the seventeenth green at Bel-Air. Between putts, Herb Risser expressed dismay that Claire had left the film and was in an airplane bound for Asia. And you say Howard’s with her? And who else? All this was news to him. He had no idea. She had told him nothing, not a hint, honest injun. He knew there was trouble on the set but hadn’t taken the news seriously because there was always trouble on Howard Goodman’s sets. He couldn’t work without trouble. Trouble was Howard’s oxygen. Some sexual anarchy, he had heard, nothing out of the ordinary; nothing involving Claire, he added quickly. And perhaps the stimulants had gotten out of hand. That girl with the green eyes? She’s been vacationing in Cambodia. The producers were pricks but Howard knew that going in. So did Claire. They weren’t born yesterday, so they knew they were in bed with pricks. Howard thought he could handle them. He assured me when I asked him on Claire’s behalf. Due diligence, Dix. He said the young one had trained on Wall Street and was brilliant, just brilliant, the sort of boy you’d be proud to have as a son-in-law or even a son. He was a sweetheart, Howard said. Can you hold on just a sec, Dix?

  Jesus Christ, Herb Risser said a moment later. Three putts. I took three putts from nine feet. He said, I don’t think you’ve cause for worry. You know how things are, the Hollywood pissing match.

  Dix said, What do you know that I don’t know, Herb?

  Nothing. Honest injun.

  The agent agreed to check around, learn what he could, and call back. Berlin, isn’t it, Dix? Are you getting on all right? I worry about you over there, Germans aren’t your type of people. Something’s wrong with them. God, they’re cold. They’re the coldest people I know.

  Dix replaced the receiver, trying to identify the lie. Maybe it was all lies, even the three putts from nine feet. He picked up the telephone to call Billy Jeidels, then decided not to. Billy wasn’t in Claire’s loop. And a blizzard of telephone calls would indicate panic, and with panic came the rumors, and after the rumors the newspapers, and after the newspapers the lawyers. There would be no end to it. But Claire sounded terrible.

  He prepared another drink, his third, and sat in the chair by the window overlooking the lake. The time was now well past midnight, no lights anywhere. He heard the rumble of the train to Potsdam, then silence. He tried to recollect the starlet with the green eyes, she had a name like Gwladys or Fiona, but everyone called her Madcap. Her father was an MP. Her mother was French. She was a high-spirited girl, gorgeous to look at. Everyone liked to have her around because of her looks and good humor, and now suddenly she wasn’t so good-humored. He and Claire had talked many times of the atmosphere on sets, a complex chemistry, a mirror image of life as it was actually, perhaps life as one wished it to be. All unhappy sets were alike. The main element was the director, his confidence, his sense of himself, his concentration, his enthusiasm for the picture. No one knew beforehand how the personalities would mesh, so many egos, so little oxygen. So the director had to have some actor in him. He had to know how to play his own scenes, and this was as true for a cast of veterans as it was for youngsters. Howard Goodman was an overactor, never one word where three would do. And he misread people, although Claire was one of his favorites.

  You’re too hard on him, Dix. Cut the man some slack.

  Really, she went on, he’s a professional. It’s only that he likes to make mischief. He’s a mischief maker, and that’s what keeps him going. And he loves the bedroom scenes, particularly when the lovers don’t like each other. When they detest each other, in fact, and desire only to make the other look bad. The scenes when hatred governed but the audience was in the dark. The acid test of direction, according to Howard Goodman.

  Dix remembered laughing and referring to Howard Goodman as the Tolstoy of the Higher Hackery, and watching as Claire’s smile turned into something very like a smirk, though she denied it when he accused her. He only rarely heard her talk about her own lovemaking scenes in that way, a rush so headlong that she did not hear the word “cut.” She talked about it when she had had drinks and somewhere in her mind was remembering her bohemian parents, who had made a life for themselves in the ski country of Vermont, long before it was fashionable. They were as voluble and indiscreet as Harry Greenwoo
d, but voluble and indiscreet about their private lives; they retailed their own adventures, not the adventures of others. Other people’s adventures were tedious while their own were hilarious, filled as they were with late-night après-ski anarchy, drinks before the fire, a lively wine-drenched dinner, and sauna mischief later. Dix heard her mother’s voice in Claire’s, something sly and insinuating along with apprehension. Claire was a long way from Mad River Glen, but she remembered her family’s ski lodge as vividly as Dix remembered summer dances at the country club overlooking the lake. Lucky childhoods, uninhibited by the standards of the time; if you wanted something badly enough, you were entitled to take it. You were limited only by the reach of your ambition, and equally by the ambition of your adversary.

  They had both become bewitched on movie sets, it was part of the fun. You lost yourself in the role and before you knew it, you were cheating. You wore so many faces it was hard to remember which was the home face and which the away face, which the smile and which the smirk. Usually the affair wrapped when the movie did. Everyone went home or across town or across the country to make another movie. These affairs rarely flourished after the lights went out because the lights were part of it, as the new-car smell signaled the new car. The lights, the camera, the makeup, the action, and always the potential for something inspired. The affair was as natural as the clothes you wore and the directions you gave. If you didn’t have an affair it meant you were missing out, with no specific regrets except the glum thought that an awful lot of genuine affection was wasted. Or not wasted. Misplaced.

  Dix went to the sink and threw away the dregs of the vodka.

  Those days were in the past.

  Claire may have had a thing at one time with Howard Goodman. Howard definitely had a thing for her.

  But wouldn’t that be unlikely now?

  Not necessarily, he said aloud.

  Claire loved high-stress atmospheres, and the truth was this: a set romance was like a romance in wartime, sharing the danger and the uncertainty. Falling in love on the set or on the battlefield was a great dose of good luck, and good luck meant staying alive. Luck was an essential ingredient of the set and the battlefield. You believed you were invulnerable because people were watching, and the work was so fine. Some of the wartime romances succeeded wonderfully, so long as neither party went to another war. Another war meant another romance because each war created its own high-stress atmosphere, different objectives, different combatants. But he had rarely heard her details and he did not like hearing them now. He did not like hearing them over a cell phone in someone’s airplane bound for Java, Borneo, or the Celebes, destinations that promised bad news. Something would break that would be hard to fix.

  Years ago she told him that her father always offered a reward for the first girl to undress in front of the fire, and another reward for any girl who wanted to follow up. Claire watched from her room on the second floor, leaning over the inside balcony that looked down on the rec room with its stone fireplace. She laughed and laughed at the antics, then when she was older did not laugh so much. Still, everyone was having such a good time, pleasantly relaxed after a day on the slopes. She could not fail to notice that they were not having such a good time the next morning, the breakfast table silent and everyone getting an early start home or to the slopes. Her father and mother were always laughing when the room was empty at last. They would sit across the breakfast table from each other and have coffee together, trading stories from the night before and deciding themselves to take a run off-piste on Super Paradise, a little later in the day when the chores were done.

  Dix washed the glass and put it away. He turned out the lights and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. What had she said? She said she was in a coal mine and the canaries were dying. The children were rampaging in the sandbox and—Are things more serious in Berlin, Dix? He felt like the infantryman rummaging in his pack for a Hershey bar or a stick of gum. But there was nothing for him to do but wait for the next telephone call, and hope that she was not as troubled as she sounded.

  13

  WILLA ASKED HIM to lunch at Munn Café. She had an idea she wanted to explore, and also she wanted to apologize for the behavior of her uncle Reinhold. They met in the back room as before, and when Willa started in on Reinhold as a throwback, a peasant pig without manners, Greenwood waved her silent. It was an interesting afternoon for him, Reinhold’s search for the ur-boar. A mysterious encounter all the way around. Even the conclusion was mysterious, and perhaps the conclusion most of all. Willa seemed grateful for the reassurance. The Vietnamese served them beer and she asked question after question about him and Claire, the life they had together, and the Hollywood of the sixties and seventies. She believed those two decades were the golden age of the Industry, Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy, MASH, Cabaret, both Godfathers, Chinatown, and of course your own, Dix. Summer, 1921 and Anna’s Magic. Almost as an afterthought she asked him about their children. How did children grow up in such an atmosphere, so feverish and extravagant, everyone always so busy. Didn’t the children get in the way?

  He told her the story of a down-on-his-luck poet who arrived in Los Angeles from Greenwich Village in the early seventies, staying with a cousin who worked for one of the studios. The poet had had some unspecified trouble in New York and was asked to leave. Greenwood owed the cousin a favor so he hired the poet to write additional dialogue for a film then in production. We called it a mercy fuck, Greenwood said to Willa. Every film had one, usually more than one. The poet was amusing and reasonably hard-working and did what he was told to do, and was not bad at what he did. He loved Los Angeles. He loved the beaches, the girls, and the freeways. He said he would never leave. He said the Industry, in its maliciousness, spite, insecurity, and flashes of brilliance, reminded him of the Partisan Review in the thirties and forties. What Delmore said to Mary and what Mary said to Bunny and what Bunny said to Philip, and what Philip did. At Partisan it was the romance of politics and the integrity of the intellectual, and in Hollywood it was the romance of celebrity and the integrity of the accountant. For Trotsky, substitute Darryl Zanuck. So it was not surprising that a tremendous amount of work got done, and now and then something superb. Not often. Often enough, when you considered the odds against.

  Later on, the poet wrote some not-half-bad celebrity biographies and ended with a starlet in his bed at the beach house in Malibu. But every now and then he’d return to New York to see how everyone was getting on; and they were not getting on very well, at least compared with him. And so many were dead. So he stopped going.

  The children weren’t a nuisance, Greenwood said.

  Willa looked at him strangely.

  So many narcissists, she began.

  The children fit right in, Greenwood said. He signaled for more beer and started to reminisce about Jerry’s birth, a difficult cesarean. They were filming in Baja and he gave the crew the day off so he could be with his wife. The doctor had asked if he wanted to be present at the birth, and Claire looked up in alarm and said, No, it’s impossible. It’s the modern way, the doctor said, and Claire replied that they were modern people but not that modern. Greenwood held her hand while they wheeled her down the long hall to the delivery room, and then he went back to her room in Maternity and opened the window and lit a cigarette. The day was fine. He smoked and watched the cars in the parking lot, making bets with himself whether his first child would be a boy or a girl. When a Porsche scooted into the lot with a young blonde at the helm, he guessed girl; he thought probably the blonde was one of his fans, a member of the audience. She wore a linen miniskirt and carried a thick paperback book under her arm. He remembered standing at the window, thinking about the particularly demanding scene he would shoot the next day. Billy Jeidels had one idea and he had another. Probably he would do it Billy’s way but the scene was salient; the back half of the movie depended on it. He imagined the blond girl in the theater, it would be Brentwood or the Palisades or Santa Monic
a, her eyes narrowing at the scene bleached white by the sun. Two lovers were on the run and she would be pulling for them, except the man was a sonofabitch.

  Cars came and went. The white Porsche baked in the sun. Greenwood pitched the cigarette out the window, watching it tumble end over end and bounce on the asphalt in a little shower of sparks. That gave him an idea so he stayed at the window for another thirty minutes, thinking the way people on the run thought, thinking about camera angles and the bright splash of light on the surface of the water at Baja. He was back in Baja, thinking about the next day’s shoot, the preparations for it and the consequences of it. The runaways meet an ingratiating stranger, and their lives unravel from that moment of carelessness. He began to make notes, losing himself inside the idea and the technical details surrounding it. Did the scene begin from the point of view of the lovers or from the point of view of the stranger? He was searching for more paper when Dr. Andaman arrived to tell him that the birth had been difficult, more difficult than expected. He described the complications in language Greenwood did not understand. When he repeated himself in plain English, Greenwood was still at sea. Then the doctor explained that Claire had lost blood and had not yet regained consciousness.

  No, you can’t see her yet.

  Another hour, maybe.

  Stay here, Dr. Andaman said. Where I can find you when there’s news. He was looking into the mirror, holding his own steady gaze. Morris Andaman was blandly handsome, with curly hair and a button nose, a stethoscope around his neck and a Rolex on his wrist. He was a great favorite of the Industry. Everyone went to Morris Andaman for their children and every so often someone would cast him as a walk-on when they needed a sympathetic doctor to deliver bad news. His looks were safe and the audience would know without being told that he had done everything he could, everything humanly possible. He would be well paid for his morning’s work on the set. That was the point, putting a bonus in the doctor’s pocket.