Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  The hillsides above the road were green. Marcus was silent and haughty. Honor froze his face. He had always thought of love as being like the view from the windows of his father’s apartment at dusk, when the taxis in great numbers flock back from upper Manhattan with the lights on their roofs—jewels on their foreheads—alight. Now he thought of it as the sprung works of a clock which moved the hands improperly. Mrs. Tredwell was growing bored with him. He observed to himself that Mrs. Tredwell did not understand Sukie, that she was not a good mother. Sukie had become hollow-eyed and captious. “You think in clichés,” she said to Marcus. She said, “Everyone knows photographs can’t do what painting can.” She said, “You have so many opinions because you’re self-conscious and can’t feel anything.” He lay in bed, somber in the dark.

  Often at night in various towns, Robin would slip out and hunt for women. Then Marcus would lie tautly spread-eagled in bed, hating the solitude in the room, jealous of Robin, contemptuous of himself. He felt himself grow vague and sulky with concupiscence. Mrs. Tredwell was amused by him again, smiled at him again; she spoke of the noli me tangere of adolescence in her husky voice. Marcus winced, drew back, and stared at her with large eyes. She said, “You’re impossible!” and ignored him. Sukie was cool.

  Marcus wrote Nanna, “I think of Scantuate often. It’s hard to travel with people day in and day out.” He found a kind of relaxation in becoming aimless and passive. He watched Sukie and Robin giggle together in Juan-les-Pins; they walked, arms around each other, affectionate cousins. Sukie said, “He’s kind to me. I feel better with him than with you.” In Verona, the party went through the Castel vecchio, Mrs. Tredwell with Sukie and Robin; Marcus followed a different route through the rooms. Robin began to ridicule Marcus in public. In Venice, he said, “Tell us what you think about the view.” He moved his arm in a semicircle. “What’s the great man’s opinion?”

  Mrs. Tredwell and Sukie smiled, and Marcus said contemptuously that San Marco was like an advertising cutout: Want to feel bright? Try Brioschi.

  Sukie was in love with Robin. Had always been, she said. “It was a strange—I don’t know—some kind of detour or something I took with you.” Robin said, “Pony, we need your help. I helped you.” Sukie said, “Please, Pony, I’m not the kind of girl who can go too long without sex.” She said something about being passionate. Marcus said, “Sure, I understand.” He pretended to go to the movies with them, and when they sneaked up the back stairs to Robin and Marcus’s room, he wandered in the calle behind the Piazza San Marco until he was approached by two middle-aged, dog-faced whores and their shiny-haired pimp. Then he went off with them.

  The next night, he rode with Sukie and Robin and Sukie’s mother in a gondola down the Grand Canal, the moonlight and the commune’s floodlights playing on the façades of palaces (dozens of gondolas laden with other tourists floated by in the dark; the water breathed its sourish stench), and Mrs. Tredwell and Sukie and Robin laughed and chattered. Marcus sat quietly. It did not matter what Sukie and Robin did. He was corrupt; he looked down on them; they were children.

  MARCUS SURVEYS the extras for the next shot—an old man in a straw hat, a shabby and badly dressed young man, a young girl who radiates disdain to keep at a distance the lusts of passersby, and others who are to play the bystanders, among whom, not quite touching them, the movie is to occur. Where Oskar and Liselotte are to walk has been marked on the pavement in chalk; the camera, mounted on a dolly on tracks, holds Oskar’s and Liselotte’s faces and the reflections in Oskar’s sunglasses (of the obelisk, a spume of leaves from the underside of the trees, the old man in the straw hat). The reflected obelisks jog up and down like inverted sewing-machine needles when Oskar strolls with Liselotte, stitching the moment with the laws of optics and history. At a signal, the disdainful girl begins to walk briskly. Her reflection appears in the lower-left-hand quadrant of Oskar’s sunglasses, balloons upward when Oskar’s head turns to glance at her, and slides off to the right and disappears when Oskar restores his head to its former angle, parallel to his wife’s.

  A few weeks after the return from Europe, in the sudden quiet in Scantuate after Labor Day, Marcus went to Stedham’s Moor with his camera. Sukie found him there; he looked up and saw her watching him—an ash-blond, pseudo-profound, well-bred girl standing in the gelid light, among the tall brown grasses and the rocks. “Are you going to be mean?” she asked him, a lost girl: Who will love me? Who can I trust? “I couldn’t stand it if I thought you were going to be cold and hateful toward me.”

  “I’m not that kind of person,” Marcus said proudly.

  The scene is retaken. Between takes, Liselotte probes at her tooth with her tongue. “This is work for imbeciles, hein?” Marcus says to her. “No, don’t look up.” She tenses and petrifies with self-control. To Oskar, Marcus says, “The mouth, Oskar—emptier. You’re an ordinary person, like those imbeciles”—he gestures toward the people gathered behind a barricade of sawhorses, watching them—“and your emotions are not well defined. You are bored, mon cher, but you do not admit it too openly. Your wife is a distinguished woman—you chose her; you respect your own judgment. Do you understand?”

  Oskar’s face blankens slightly. “Ja,” he says. “Ich verstehe.”

  They commence the next shot. Oskar takes a step, tugging Liselotte after him; Marcus thinks, The ego and the whore. The reflection in Oskar’s sunglasses is first of Liselotte’s forehead, then of her breasts, then the obelisk, the street, and the leaves.

  How much did Nanna see? Sukie and Robin were secretive about their affair. Marcus never discussed his sexual adventures with Nanna. But Nanna was old, shrewd; surely she guessed. She clung tightly to his arm when they walked on the bluff. She said, “You have become an interesting-looking young man.” She did not go to Florida that winter until after Christmas, but stayed in Scantuate, giving as her reason that she felt like enjoying the cold weather; but Marcus was sure it was to be near and help him. He was starting college and might get into trouble. Nanna asked him about Sukie. “She likes someone else,” Marcus said evasively. “She and I are still friends.” “I’m glad,” Nanna said. “Gamma Foster hasn’t been well. You never do your imitations anymore.” He saw Sukie at college from time to time. The people he knew said of her she was a very stupid girl, a snob, shallow, affected. One of Marcus’s cousins (she also told him Nanna was cold and hadn’t loved her husband and children: “She was crazy about her father and nursed him, and you know that kind of thing. He was one of those citizenship-mad Jews, very anxious to win awards”) mentioned that Sukie had always had a reputation in Scantuate: “Definitely loose.”

  Work commences on the shot that will introduce the figures of Oskar and Liselotte when the film is edited. Marcus, Alliat, and the camera are ensconced on the boom. Marcus signals, and the boom rises into the air. High above Rome, Marcus and Alliat confer in whispers. Far up the street, Oskar and Liselotte begin to walk. Oskar slightly in advance—that is, Oskar walks and Liselotte is pulled. Marcus leans forward. Liselotte teeters on the vanity of her high heels. The camera sights down through the frozen surf of leaves toward Oskar and Liselotte among the pedestrians, speckled like the street with leaf shadows and bits of light, adrift, like the leaf shadows, details of the day, and as transitory. When they come to a place where the shadow is thick and unbroken beneath the trees, Marcus shouts, “Halt!” and Oskar, Liselotte, and the extras pause, as still as death, while the camera whirs. Marcus shouts, “March!” and Oskar and Liselotte emerge from the shadow. Oskar points from time to time, and Liselotte nods; on the sound track, Liselotte’s voice, from a distance, will say, “Ja, ist schön.” When they pass the chalk marks of the shot before, Marcus shouts, “Bon! Stop! Halt!” and calls a retake for safety.

  On autumn Saturday afternoons, Nanna walked with her cane in the garden. Nanna had a cyst on her leg. Marcus came down in the convertible she had bought him. On the road between college and Scantuate, he left behind the life he led at college�
�the moods, the self-disgust, the talk, the alcohol, the girls and women, pursued without imagination or fervor but with indignation; they ought to give in. “Everything’s fine, as usual,” he told Nanna. That meant he was glad to see her. When Sukie and Robin were in Scantuate at Gamma Foster’s, they always came to see Nanna. Nanna had become a member of their group. Nanna, who had never been demonstrative, now kissed Marcus—not frequently: when he arrived and when he left—and she held his arm when they walked in the garden. “I may fall,” she said. There is no old woman among the extras, Marcus realizes, no old Roman women, only an old man in a straw hat.

  Oskar tells Marcus through Whitehart’s headset telephone that Liselotte is terrible, and he asks if in the next shot he should play his part as if he is acting according to a conscious plan.

  Marcus thinks and says, “No. You plan, you don’t plan. It doesn’t matter. You do what you do anyway. I’ll tell you what it’s like. Excuse me, but it’s like a dog. The expression in the dog’s eyes when he is going to disobey a command. Is he thinking? It is his body. He smells the woods. But plot if you like. Only remember to be innocent at the same time, a man who does not plot. You have a very fine sense of life. Play it with uncertainty.” Marcus, even from the boom, can see the tension in Oskar, and he is pleased. Liselotte crosses her spindly arms stiffly over her large breasts and stands pigeon-toed while Whitehart slips a pebble into her shoe. The shot will follow the ones of Oskar and Liselotte strolling and is to be taken from the boom, from above, to suggest Oskar’s aloofness, his detachment from Liselotte after the disdainful girl has passed. Marcus shouts, “All right, let’s go!” and Oskar tugs Liselotte, who cannot walk very well with the pebble in her shoe. She watches Marcus tearfully, and when Marcus nods, Liselotte halts with stunning suddenness, pulls back, and passes her hand over her forehead and speaks to Oskar. On the sound track her voice will say, “Meine Fusse”—a child near tears. “Gut, Lise, gut! No, don’t look at me!” Marcus shouts. He thinks, Very good and crude: an unimaginative woman. Oskar bends his head over Liselotte woodenly, to hide his confusion about the nature of the man he is playing, and to conceal his wrath with her amateurishness. In the inclination of his head and the way his hand touches her shoulder, he overacts—Oskar wants the scene done with and to be rid of having to deal with Liselotte. The concern he pretends has a vast adamancy, a coldness of spirit, and the grace Oskar cannot help displaying in his attempt to appear a gentleman. Peremptorily the man and the actor merge; he raises his arm and snaps his fingers. A taxi screeches to a halt in front of Oskar and Liselotte; Oskar helps Liselotte in, and the taxi roars in a U-turn while Marcus shouts to Alliat’s assistant, “Allez oop!” and the boom rises and dips to suggest Oskar’s sensation of freedom and release, as if he were flying above the Viale Trinità dei Monti as the taxi vanishes with Liselotte in it.

  That shot will be succeeded in the movie by the close-up of Oskar standing at the railing atop the Spanish Steps, smiling at Marcus’s joke about Goethe and the statue. The smile will seem to the audience to be expectant—Oskar is waiting to see what reality will emerge for him from the City of the Absolute.

  As soon as the shot ends, Oskar hurries toward Marcus, who is standing beside the boom. Oskar says, “That woman! That whore! She is stupid—an amateur.” His mouth assumes a bent, paranoid smile. “You put her in the movie to make me a fool. It is a plot.”

  Marcus says, “Oskar, I need her. I need her for the movie.”

  “Why?”

  Marcus shrugs. “For a touch of innocence. Of soul. She is a symbol of your soul, Oskar, mein Lieber.” Oskar relaxes in part. “A symbol,” he says. “Ja, ich verstehe. And I cast her off. Ja, I see.” Marcus walks away, to end the conversation. Sweating in the sunlight, he thinks, So she’s dead. How could a woman so old know so little? The minnow eyes are stilled—how strange. His heartbeat generates a haze in his chest. Whitehart, on the first landing of the Steps, a sketch in his hand, is arranging extras and instructing them in their attitudes and actions for the next shot. Marcus says to himself, “I must go down.” But he knows Whitehart finds his safety in thinking he is indispensable to Marcus. Marcus tells himself, “I must give him another moment to be important.”

  He turns and goes down—not the Spanish Steps but the steep flight of steps that leads to the Via della Carrozze. Marcus’s heart labors. He thinks it will be forty-five minutes before the sun is right for Jehane’s ascent. He wants no shadows when Jehane climbs the Spanish Steps. He turns from the Via della Carrozze into the Piazza di Spagna, a middle-aged, heavyset man moving slowly. He says to himself, “It is the work; I take everything too seriously. The shots went well; if they had gone badly, I wouldn’t grieve for her.”

  Clumsily, he bangs open the door of the costume trailer and steps inside. Jehane lies on a couch; her costume, a department-store dress, too short in the waist, too narrow in the shoulders, is bunched across her hips as she lies. Jehane sits up, her pale eyes like erasures in her face, and immediately, vivaciously cries, “Mon amour!” and asks him to pass on her makeup, only to break off with surprise—he has not been fervent with her for many months—when he presses his head into the hollow between her throat and shoulder, and murmurs, “Tu es belle … tu es belle, belle, belle,” and then he raises his head, ashamed. “Ton maquillage?” he says, and gravely studies the face she holds atilt for his inspection. It seems to him the light whispers and weeps on her skin, and it occurs to him that once, long ago, he was more forgiving of Noreen than of his father, was always more indulgent to women than to men, to the woman in him more than to the man. He does not care now. Jehane and he discuss her makeup. She is well into her part, more than half illusion.

  Marcus steps outside. Whitehart is standing near Alliat by the flower stall, and as Marcus walks toward him, the reporter and the photographer from Réalités, who are doing a story on Marcus, intercept him. Whitehart signals that the extras are not quite ready. “I can give you a moment,” Marcus says—a gift.

  They ask him for a photograph, and while he poses expressionless in the sun, the Spanish Steps behind him, the reporter, who is a thin young man with a large nose, smiles deferentially, says, “What is the sensation when you begin the movie?”

  Marcus bursts out, “It brings death closer,” then he hurries on. “When I was young, it was different, fai chanté. I’d waited so long for my chance to speak. It was like when I had my first woman—one isn’t careful—one feels, and then suffers when it goes wrong. The young, you know, are not educated. I had no technique. I felt. Though, God knows, I took the technique of feeling seriously enough. Thinking led to dishonesty. But I was wrong. The young are always wrong. They are imbeciles. They have too many lies to defend. They must go blindly or not go at all.” He is embarrassed suddenly and stops, until he notices admiration in the young reporter’s eyes. He goes on, “Now I plot everything. I am no longer innocent. I am corrupt with intentions. Sometimes I am rude when I work. I am rude because the idea insists on it, because I am in a state of ambition—do you understand?”

  WHEN HE came back from Europe corrupt, he found that with Nanna the corrupt part of him, which she did not know about, became insignificant. But when she bought him clothes, arranged an expensive room for him at college, a large allowance, a car, he protested, “I don’t need those things. I haven’t earned them.”

  “I want you to have them,” she said. He said to himself, “I am a person who has these things.” His car and the money he had to spend helped make him popular, except that he was not welcome in certain places or to certain girls after they heard his name. His classmates admired him, because he was moody, and knowledgeable about vice. He attached himself to the dramatic group and persuaded them that the way to raise money was to make a movie. “A silent. A joke. A parody of a movie. People like to be swindled.” The movie had as characters Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin as a petty crook, Keaton as a pickpocket; the hero was a plainclothes detective disguised as an old-clothes man;
the heroine, played by a boy, was, according to the subtitles, a mistress-criminal, killer, and left-wing deviate, and at the end was revealed to be Princess Margaret, bored with palace life. The college-student audiences laughed, and the profits from the movie paid for a production of Richard II, Marcus as Bolingbroke. Nanna came to a performance and said jealously, “Do you intend to make acting your life?” Sweaty and covered with makeup, Marcus cried, “I don’t know! Don’t be a snob, Nanna.” She said, “You still have some lipstick on.” She said, “I’ve missed you the last several weeks.” She touched his arm.

  Marcus lost interest in being one of a troupe of actors. He met a fierce-beaked young man named Rappaport, overweeningly stoop-shouldered, a clever, militant Jew.

  “Weill? Ah,” Rappaport said when he was introduced to Marcus, and smiled.

  “Half and half,” Marcus said, smiling back, sarcastically.

  “Half and half? A half Jew is a Jew who’s ashamed of being Jewish.” Rappaport said, “Always some of our best people get drawn away from us—Einstein, Marx, Freud. Renegades. And what did they gain? Nothing. Nothing plus nothing. They weren’t treated like Jews. Did they finally feel they were the equals of the goyim? My God, tell me, were they equals before they started or not? Anyway, why talk about it with you—you’re not a Jew. You’re a half-and-half.”

  Marcus said, “My God, why make a fuss about it?”

  “They make a fuss,” Rappaport said. “Well, to be honest, we make a fuss, too.”

  “What’s a Jew?” Marcus said.

  “A Jew? A Jew is a kind of man who believes in God and believes that everything is a matter of religion. You can’t hide or lie about it. No saints. No divine prophets. Just prophets, and they’re not always right. You have the Ten Commandments. Money can’t be a God. Art can’t be a God. Only God is God.”