by Owen Thomas
There was something so striking, so indefinably emblematic, in the sight of this man, caught in such languid repose beneath such a magnificent tree, that I had an impulse to paint him. I wanted to drop everything where I stood and tell my escort to find me an easel and canvas and some vibrant oils. The sky was a deep clot of cobalt and the sun roared, shaking its fiery mane along its midday arc.
The pond at Blair’s feet was on a corner of acreage that surrounded the two-story villa he had rented for the duration of our stay in Kenya. The villa was owned and operated by the hotel in which the rest of us were staying, but safely ensconced on its own atoll floating in indigo waters about an eighth of a mile off shore. It was one of maybe a dozen such islands, strung together in a tiny corporate archipelago that unwound gracefully into the Indian Ocean. Each island had a private dock and a motorboat that waved the company flag of red, green and gold interlinked rings – a colorful, Olympic-inspired chain – on a field of white. On the ocean-side of each island, safe from the prying eyes of the mainlanders, were deep crescents of soft white sand.
I remember marveling to myself – as I had stepped precariously from the water taxi up onto the dock, grabbing the strong, reedy black hand of the man who was there to greet me and show me the way – that Blair spent so much of his time on shore, meeting with us into the late evenings in the common courtyards and restaurants of the hotel, returning to his island only once everyone else had patted their pockets for a room key and shuffled off to bed. I think, had it been me, I would never have left the island. I would have made everyone come to me. I would have made a point of holding court, even under a pretense of business, so that every evening was a generously spread, richly catered affair under the African moon with music and good wine. It was that lovely.
Blair, dressed only in faded blue trunks and an Outback Safari hat, was busy hacking up the script with multi-colored pens. If he was aware of our approach across the lawn, his demeanor betrayed nothing. My escort, dressed in a starched, ocher uniform, his skin so black as to seem almost midnight blue as we stepped into the shade of the Waterberry, announced my arrival with a slight genuflection as though addressing a king.
“Miss Tillijohn, sir.”
“Thank you, Sunjata.” Blair made an angry, slashing circle around eight lines of dialogue. He gave me a darting glance without really looking up.
“Sunjata, bring us another chair if you would, mate.”
“Yes sir.”
“And, oh, another one of these.” His hand dropped behind the lounge and brought up a large empty glass wrapped in white cloth.
“Yes, Mr. Gaines. And may I bring one for Miss Tillijohn?”
“Yes. Right.” Blair answered for me before I could respond. With another slash across the page, he shook his head and smiled a little, apparently liking the sound of my new name. “By all means, bring one for Miss Tillijohn.”
“Yes sir,” and Sunjata was gone, striding across the lawn, up towards the villa.
“It’s got as certain charm, don’t you think?”
“What?”
“Tillijohn. Maybe you should keep it.”
He looked up at me for the first time. He was smiling, but I knew him well enough in just a few weeks to know that this was a façade; that he was not really in a smiling mood. The pleasantry was quickly melting in the heat of his agitation and the derailment caused by ill-ness and British frailty.
“Maybe I will keep it,” I said. Then, giving an obvious glance at the script on his lap, “Are you going to keep any of this script or are we starting from scratch?”
“Ahhh … Bloody thing. I should start over. I should start from page one and write the goddamned thing myself.” He capped his pen and stood up abruptly, dropping the notebook on the lounge. “Have a seat, Tillijohn. Back in a tick.”
He dropped his hat on top of the notebook and, with one forward step, he dove cleanly into the pond, submerging beneath the lilies and the fallen Waterberry blossoms and did not resurface until he had reached the far bank.
Most of Blair’s working man’s director reputation really came from a general aversion to displaying his great wealth in public, which I believe was his genuine antipathy to attention and not the coy, diamonds-n-denim, stubble-grooming, ill-kempt affectation that the Glitterati so commonly adopt in order to stand out in a crowd. When he was not on a movie set, Blair genuinely preferred to blend into his surroundings; to become the common man or, at least, the extraordinary man unseen. He was not a man of scandal and he was remarkably successful in avoiding the tabloids.
As much as anything, it was the Vanity Fair piece that came out after Obsidian Iris swept the Oscars that cemented Blair’s personae as the reluctant, unassuming cinematic genius. It was his open disdain for Hollywood (if not all of America), and his hobby building sailboats, and the photos of him and his golden-haired sons streaked with sweat and mud and swinging axes to clear some of his Australian homestead. They – Vanity Fair – were aiming for the anti-establishment appeal and they hit the bulls-eye.
The irony was that when Blair was working – when he did the very thing that made Vanity Fair care about him in the first place – there was nothing remotely common about him and he made absolutely no effort to blend into the background. Quite the contrary, Blair made it very clear who was in charge. He owned every aspect of the production; a point he would make if he had to mark, like a dog at a hydrant, every camera, every actor and every square inch of set. He owned it all. It belonged to him.
But, and here is really the point, while Blair wielded his professional dominion as an entitlement, it was an entitlement born not of wealth or fame, but of sheer talent and hard work and an ego-maniacal hubris of epic proportions. He was in charge because he cared more than anyone else and because no one else – the writers, the actors, the technicians, the producers, the animal trainers – no one, could do their jobs as well as Blair could do their jobs.
“You a swimma?” he asked, hoisting his body out of the pond. His suit clung to his body and I averted my eyes from the topography of his groin out of a sense of decency and decorum I did not really possess in those days.
“I’m from Ohio,” I said, a little too self-evidently. He toweled his mop of tawny hair that hung in wet ringlets and tendrils down to his shoulders. He stuffed his hat back on his head and set the towel to work over the rest of him, which was fit and muscular in the way of older men who used to be fit and muscular.
“Thought you were from L.A.?”
“I grew up in Ohio.”
“No shit? You know Angus is from . . .”
“Yeah. I know.”
“So, what, no lakes in Ohio? Rivers? No pools?”
“Well, yeah. But not where I lived. No ocean anyway.”
“Pity. Nothin’ like a swim.”
“Well, I did more reading than swimming. I didn’t grow up Down Under.”
“Oh, God. Please don’t call it that.”
“Really? Why?”
“Just don’t. I fucking hate that.”
“Okay.”
“Australia. Aus-tral-ia.” He flattened out the middle syllable just to be obnoxious. “Right?”
“Yeah. Whatever. I didn’t grow up in Australia.”
“It’s a tourist phrase. I hate tourists.”
I opened my arms at the Indian Ocean, taking it in as it broke in soft surges over the tiny island. “Aren’t we … tourists?”
“No.”
“Then what are we?”
“I’m an Earthling, Tillijohn. What are you?” He swung the towel over his shoulders, leathered with old sun. “Choose to be a stranger if you want, but I claim the whole bloody planet. I’ve got to piss and grab some clothes. Back in a tick.”
He pointed at the script on the lounge as he strode past me up the lawn.
“Start reading. Anything in red is new Ivanova. You haven’t seen it yet. Anything slashed through in black is old Ivanova that is already gone. Anything slashed through in green is
current Ivanova that I hate and still needs to be cut and replaced.”
Sunjata was making his way back down from the villa, pulling a bright yellow lounge behind him. Two dark women in matching uniforms followed, watching their steps as the ground sloped away towards the magnificent Waterberry and me beneath it. I later learned these to be Sunjata’s daughters, Kainda and Urenna. One carried a small wicker table; the other a pitcher and glass.
Blair gripped Sunjata vigorously by the shoulder as they passed. Sunjata laughed, as though in some secret conspiracy, showing his large yellowed teeth.
“Thank you, Mr. Gaines. Thank you, sir.” And the women laughed with him.
* * *
We worked through the rest of the morning and into the late after-noon. Sunjata and his daughters plied us with chilled mango juice and freshly roasted meats, nyama choma, from a fired spit up near the villa. We used our fingers and our teeth to pick the flesh clean from charred bamboo skewers. My lips burned in spicy barbeque that stained the skin. I have kept as a memento from The Lion Tree production the draft script that we worked from that afternoon. Many of the pages are stuck together. On most are clear fingerprints, Blair’s and mine, cast in red, as though evidence of some awful violence.
I could say that we were collaborating on revising the script; reshaping Colonel Ivanova into someone coherent and believable. I have said that, in fact. Many times I have told the story of us beneath the Waterberry in Mombassa as if it had been an exercise of collaboration. But it was nothing of the kind. It was an exercise in obeisance.
It was an exercise of reflection and amplification. Blair did not need my creative input as much as he needed to hear his words on someone else’s tongue. Had we been painting, I would have been holding the easel. And the irony … they were not his words at all.
“Where did you last see her?” I remember speaking coldly to Blair who, pacing back and forth between the tree and the pond, was reading the part of Lieutenant Alan Miller. I remember that it was difficult for me to find Ivanova in those surroundings, so relaxed and lush; my words were like reluctant stones cast into a garden. “What was her name? Jules? Was that it? Where did you last see . . . Jules?”
“I don’t care for your tone, Colonel.”
“Good. Where did you see her last, Lieutenant?”
“Can you spare one of those snappers?”
“Answer my question.”
“Ocean Park. At home. Four days before we left. That’s where I last saw her. Can I have a goddamn snapper now?”
I looked at him from the yellow pocket of my lounge, and he at me, for here Ivanova is to extract what her prisoner desires from a pocket in her uniform.
“She wasn’t at the launch?” I asked.
“She never came to the launches. Never saw the point. Anyway, she was sick.”
“Sick with what?”
“Just didn’t feel good. Is the Army going to allow me an opportunity to grieve the loss of my wife?”
“Grieve all you want, Lieutenant. Just answer my questions.”
“I don’t understand why this is happening. I did not hurt her.” Blair spoke the words in a tone that was half anguish, half anger. I can admit now that I was impressed.
“She’s not hurt, lieutenant, she’s dead.”
“I didn’t kill her. What makes you think I did? I was . . .”
“You were what? Here?”
“Yes. With you. Here. Jesus, Elle, it happened, ten months ago. How could I?”
“That’s Colonel Ivanova, Lieutenant. I won’t …”
Blair slapped the script against his bare leg in exasperation. “Damn it, Tilly.”
“What? What?”
“No. No, you tell me what.”
“Still too fast?”
“Yes. Still too bloody fast.” His words were sharp, his face was pinched and red with impatience; his lips still stained with hours-old sauce. “What exactly is your hurry?”
“I thought …”
“Were you hoping to use the day to tan ya’ legs? Is that it?”
“What?”
I was unaccustomed at that age of being self-conscious about my body. Quite the contrary, as more than a few shameless photographic misadventures will attest. And yet, Blair’s remark made me feel like a child; like I had been caught trying on my mother’s lipstick. Caught not by my mother, who might have understood, but by my father.
This is not to suggest that I was a particularly provocative dresser in Africa. I was not. Lots of khaki and denim and hiking shoes and socks that kept the grass flies off my ankles. The crew more than once accused me of modeling for a safari-wear catalogue.
On the day of my script work with Blair, I wore one of three African sarongs that I had purchased at a market in Tozeur. On top I wore a peridot tee with high-cut sleeves. Beneath the sarong and the tee I wore a bathing suit. Two pieces made of white Lycra. Lying about at the hotel pool, or on a pile of white sand working on my lines had indeed been on my agenda after we were through that afternoon, if only to take advantage of a rare day that we were not bouncing along in jeeps and trucks over dusty savannahs. As my day with Blair wore on, the sarong had become increasingly twisted in the deep cushion of the lounge causing me to have to stand up and retie and press out the damp wrinkles with the flat of my hands. Eventually, the sarong was such a nuisance that I took it off entirely. I thought nothing of it, certainly with Blair having set the tone for the afternoon in his own trunks.
“My legs? No. Blair …”
“Slow… down, Tillyjohn. Slow… down. Ivanova is going to slowly crush this guy with her questions. See? He’s the one in a hurry. See? She’s like... she’s like…”
He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair, staring hard at the ground, forcing himself to calm down; thinking.
“You know in old, bad horror films how the victim is running like mad, like crazy, like bloody crazy to get away from Frankenstein or the zombies or whatever?”
“Night of the Living Dead.”
“Yes. Right. I mean running all out; sweating and panting and wheezing they’ve been running so hard. And the zombie takes his bloody time. The zombie is out for a fucking stroll, Tilly.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“The zombie is relentless, Tilly. He’s gonna get the guy. It’s inevitable. There’s no need to be in a hurry. That’s horror at its most excruciating; slow, crushing inevitability. She’s gonna get him and she’s not in a hurry about it. Okay?”
“Okay. I’ll slow it down.”
“Let’s pick it up with, ‘she’s not hurt.’”
I closed my eyes, re-centered, took a breath and tried again. “She’s not hurt, lieutenant, she’s dead.”
“I didn’t kill her. What makes you think I did? I was …”
“You were what? Here?”
“Yes. With you. Here. Jesus, Elle, it happened ten months ago. How could I?”
Here I actually lit a cigarette, just as Ivanova is supposed to light a “snapper,” the distant future’s self-mentholating, entirely ingestible answer to Virginia Slims. I lit it more because I needed it than because it worked with the script. I kept the smoke roiling in soft pillows over my tongue, like some vaporous serpent choosing not to pass my lips. Blair seemed momentarily satisfied that it had slowed down the dialogue.
“That’s Colonel Ivanova, Lieutenant. I won’t say it again.” A long exhale as the serpent left its fleshy lair. “It takes over ten months to get a relay. You knew that, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” Another pull on the snapper. “Of course you did. We’re a long ways out there, lieutenant. Even for a beam of light.”
I counted to five in my mind before I continued.
“But now I’m getting a steady stream of information. Three, four updates every twelve hours. Who knows what they’re doing now. All those UNIX MP’s. They’re on to something else for sure. Like little sleuthing carpenter ants. It’s always something.”
Another pull on the snapper. Another cuckolding
of smoke. “But ten months ago they were speaking your name every other breath. And every other breath they scribbled out a message, stuck it in a photon bottle and tossed it into the ocean. Now, after all this time, those little bottles of light are beginning to wash up on shore. It’s like looking at old starlight really. We’re looking at history. But I’m learning a lot about you now, Lieutenant. An awful lot.”
“Goddamnit, Tilly! What do I have to do?”
I fell back into the lounge and looked at him, dismayed. There was no call for this degree of agitation. I was not racing through the lines. I was not stepping on his words. I was acting, at least as best I could given the informality of the setting. And even so, this was not supposed to be an audition. I had the part. This was not a second or third take on a scene that was not working because the dialogue was too fast. The exercise was supposed to be conceptual; more about the character on the page than my ability to bring her to life. And yet, suddenly, it seemed all about me and only about me. The disappointment was everywhere on his face.
I consulted my cigarette for a moment and then looked at him again.
“Ivanova the zombie?”
“Yes!”
“But she’s not a zombie, Blair, and this …”
“Tilly …”
“Blair, this is not a horror movie.”
“Oh, Christ.” He took another breath before continuing, massaging the back of his neck with his free hand. “I know it’s not a bloody horror movie. I was making a point.”
“And so am I. This is a love story, Blair. A love story. Ivanova is a woman in love. Everything else is an act. A cover. A fraud, Blair. She is duty-bound to learn what she can of Lieutenant Miller, her lover. But she knows that everything she learns about him will separate that love from her own soul, leaving her to die just like Miller’s wife was left to die on Earth. If Miller is tortured by the questions, Ivanova is doubly tortured by the answers. She’s not a zombie and if she is at all robotic or cold in her method, then she has to be at least a little unconvincing because that is not what she really feels.”
