Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics)

by Richard Yates

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, just for a week,” he hurried on, “and that was just because of the Labor Day weekend, but I—” Appalled at his own voice, he wondered why he couldn’t have said he was a social worker or a hospital executive. Would the kids have cared? Why was he spilling his guts instead? Did he think it might make him more interesting in Epstein’s eyes? But what was “interesting” about having been a mental patient? “—anyway, I was locked up there,” he concluded, and he wondered if Pamela and the others were embarrassed for him.

  “My goodness,” Epstein said. “And now you’re trying to turn that unfortunate episode into a work of art. I think that’s very – interesting.” Then one of the pipes was drawn out of the rack, and while tamping it he said “Julian? Do you think I might drop over and watch the filming?”

  “Sure. Be a pleasure, Mr. Epstein. I’ll get you a copy of the script, too.”

  Epstein said that would be fine, and for the next half hour, while he smoked and fondled and flourished his pipe, the talk excluded Wilder altogether. It was all reminiscence – the old professor chuckling over happy days with four favorite students – until the time came for everyone to rise and move toward the door.

  “Well, Mr. Wilder,” he said then, “if you want to make a good film I think you’ve come to the right place. There’s something rare about Marlowe, something – oh, stimulating, invigorating – I discovered it when I first came here and decided I’d never work anywhere else. There’s an intensely creative atmosphere up here that I’ve never been able to define or explain. I don’t mean to sound fanciful, but Marlowe casts a spell—” and here he broke off for a self-deprecating laugh. “Oh, I know if I tried telling this to some of my New York friends they’d say ‘spell, schmell,’ but even so, I think it’s true.”

  All the way home to their dormitory room he let Pamela do the talking (“Isn’t he wonderful? …”), and he drove with his jaws clenched tight because he was weak with the need for a drink. He made himself a good one as soon as their door was shut, and even before she finished hanging up her clothes and taking a shower he’d begun to get a little drunk. He wanted to ask if she had been embarrassed when he told Epstein he was a patient; he wanted to discuss his strange compulsion to let people know the worst about himself – this confusion of what was weak and ugly in himself with what was “interesting” – but he couldn’t find the words to begin. And the more he drank, the more that topic receded in his mind until it was replaced by irrational, sickening images of jealousy.

  “Aren’t you ever coming to bed?” she called from between the sheets.

  “In a while.” By this time he had stripped down to his shorts and he was pacing the cold floor with a glass in his hand, returning again and again to the bottle on the table. “Got a couple of questions first,” he said. “What were you and Peter doing there in Jerk-off City tonight?”

  “What? John, I don’t even know what you’re—”

  “Yes you do. You and that dreamy-eyed little bullshit painter, bullshit designer, both of you smoking pot and feeling each other up – How many times you make it with him in the old days? Huh?”

  “I’m not listening to any of this.”

  “Yes you are, sweetheart. And how about Jerry? Isn’t he just the sweet, sensitive young writer though? And how about Julian? What the hell d’ya think – you’re fooling me with all these kids? Ah, you may fool me with the kids, baby, but I’ve got your number with the old professor. Yeah, yeah, ‘My little Nietzsche scholar.’ God the Father my ass! How many times did that dirty old bastard get into your pants? Huh? Huh?”

  That was when he tripped over something (a wastebasket? a suitcase?) and the cruel weight of the floor clobbered his shoulder. Then she was up and helping him to his feet – it wasn’t easy; it took all their combined strength – and they staggered and fumbled their way into bed together.

  “Oh, John,” she said, “you’re a drunken, hateful, foulmouthed bastard and you’re half crazy, but I love you.”

  And what could he do after that – all passion spent, all jealousy dissolved – what could he do but murmur “Oh, baby,” and fall heavily asleep in her arms?

  Chapter Five

  “… I don’t care! I don’t care! Can’t you idiots understand? I don’t care! I want my father to see me like this!”

  “All right, Henry; easy now …”

  “Don’t call me Henry, you dumb black bastard – call me Doctor or I’ll break every fucking bone in your—”

  “You ain’t gonna break nothin’, Doctor …”

  “Cut!” Julian said. “Okay, hold it right there. What’s the trouble, John?”

  “No real trouble,” Wilder said, “it’s just that I think the orderlies ought to be rougher on Klinger. They don’t like him; he’s a troublemaker; he calls them spades and jiga-boos, and they’re tired anyway from working the night shift. I want to see them really grab him and yell at him and muscle him around before they shoot him out.”

  “Oh, yes,” said the man playing Klinger. “Yes, that’s absolutely right.”

  Mr. Epstein dropped in toward the end of the third afternoon and tiptoed to where Wilder and Pamela stood on the apron of the set, holding a forefinger to his lips. He watched the actors for a while, watched the cameras and the sound apparatus and the lights and the trailing cables and wires, and at Julian’s next cut he said, “Could the three of us step outside?”

  He led them out onto the rich, sunlit grass. “I’ve read the script and I think it’s splendid,” he said, “and I have every confidence in Julian’s direction, assuming the actors and technicians are competent. But I must say, Mr. Wilder – and I certainly don’t mean to embarrass you – I must say I think you’re the most admirable man in this venture.” He paused there, letting the silence fill with afternoon wind in the trees. “To endure an experience like that, to observe it all so acutely despite the wretched emotional state you must have been in, and then in all humility to recapture it, to project it, to find order in the very chaos of it – I find that remarkable.”

  No man had ever spoken to Wilder quite that way; it was enough to make his throat swell and his eyes sting. “Thank you, sir,” he said, and Pamela squeezed his arm to emphasize the compliment.

  “Didn’t I tell you he was special?” she said to Epstein.

  When Epstein walked away, going home, he wanted to follow him – he wanted to join him in that wonderful library for further talk about order and chaos – but Pamela led him back to the barn instead. By the time they got there the day’s work was done and most of the company was relaxing with cups of wine and excited talk about the movie.

  “… I see Charlie as a kind of Christ figure,” a young man was saying. “He’s immensely strong and immensely gentle; he does try to ‘save’ the men, and he—”

  “No, no, no,” another man said. “Klinger’s the Christ figure – the crucified Christ …”

  “Balls,” Julian said. “Since when does every movie have to have a Christ figure in it? This is a movie about a madhouse and it’s gonna stay that way. If anybody wants to read more into it they’re welcome to – that’s their business. Maybe it’s society in microcosm – I might buy that – but I’m not even gonna shove that down their throats. Christ’s sake, let the story speak for itself.”

  “Man,” Clay Braddock said, “you said a mouthful.”

  And John Wilder – the most admirable man in the venture – sat sipping his whiskey and smiling at everyone, enjoying it all. To find order in chaos – why, of course; that was what he’d wanted all his life.

  “… Your father? Your father didn’t believe you either?”

  “Well see, he got it from the other kids’ fathers. He says ‘Ralph, I want you to tell me exactly what happened up behind that sign.’ So I tell him and he says ‘That’s not the way I heard it,’ and I says ‘I swear! I swear! ’ He just sits there and looks at me like I’m some kind of – some kind of – I don’t know. And ever since then, ever s
ince then—”

  “Wait – Excuse me, Julian.”

  “Cut! What’s the matter, John?”

  “Just that I think this scene might be done a little more subtly. The way it stands now we all believe Ralph’s story – it’s a pitiful story of brutality and misunderstanding, and that’s okay as far as it goes. But what if we played it so nobody’d be quite sure whether to believe it or not? I don’t want to make Ralph a liar – nothing that blatant – but I want him to be a very complicated, troubled kid. He’s told it this way so many times that maybe even he isn’t sure if it’s true any more. I want the audience to sort of read between the lines here. I guess what I’m after is a little whaddyacallit, a little ambiguity in the scene. Does anybody see what I mean?”

  Julian did – “Right, John” – and the boy playing Ralph did too, after thinking it over. He and the Negro boy had been recruited from the High School of Music and Art; they were two of the best actors in the cast, and when they played the scene again it was just what Wilder had hoped for.

  “… Man. I mean, that is one tough story. Hey, listen, though; I got an idea. Let’s play a game. Let’s play pictures. You know how to play pictures, Ralph? …”

  Pamela was waiting for him, out of sound range, and she said “Oh, that was perfect.”

  “Well, I don’t know about ‘perfect,’ but I think it’s better.”

  “All your ideas are so good,” she said. “You really do have a natural talent for this.”

  “Want to take a walk?” It was a warm afternoon on the sixth or seventh day of shooting. What he had in mind was to take her out across a meadow and into some woodland that might have a fragrant, mossy clearing where they could rest, and where she might tell him more about his natural talent.

  “A walk?” she said. “Oh, not now; I don’t want to miss a minute of this.”

  A little later Julian called for a ten-minute break, and it seemed as good a time as any to suggest an idea that had been taking shape in his mind for days.

  “Look,” he said. “I know how you feel about Christ symbolism, Julian, but Spivack – or Klinger – does tell about a man who thinks he’s the Second Coming; says he puts on a show once in a while. And if we’re going to mention the man, why don’t we ever get to meet him? If he puts on a show, why don’t we see it?”

  “Mm,” Julian said. “What would he do?” Everyone was listening now.

  “I don’t know. He might recite the Sermon on the Mount at the top of his lungs until they shoot him out, or he might – well, try to crucify himself. That’d be better, because it’s more visual. Get a slim young guy, have him strip down to a loincloth kind of thing, have him climb up on the back of a bench against the wall and – you know – go into the crucifixion pose, until the orderlies have to come and haul him down. See what I’m getting at?”

  They all waited for Julian to speak first, and he took his time, frowning. “I don’t know, John,” he said at last. “Might be a little obvious.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so at all,” the man playing Klinger said. “It’d be marvelous if it were done right.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Jerry said, “I did think of something like that when I was doing the script; trouble was I couldn’t figure out where to put it in.”

  “Think of it in visual terms,” one of the actors said. “The audience has been locked into the ward all this time seeing nothing but ugliness and squalor, and then suddenly – wham! – here’s this classical image of the—”

  “And the irony!” someone else said. “A crucifixion in a madhouse. I think it’s tremendous. Tremendous.”

  Julian paced the floor a few steps one way and a few steps another. “I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s cornball.”

  “Cornball!” Pamela cried. “Oh, Julian, you’re missing the whole point. It’s the most beautiful idea anybody’s had yet. It could serve as the objective correlative for the whole—”

  “Ah, objective correlative my ass. I’m sorry, Pam, but I don’t see it, that’s all.”

  Other strident voices were raised against him; when it was clear that the majority opinion would hold, that Julian would give in, Wilder stole away from the set. He had made his suggestion and he felt no need to defend it; now he wanted solitude and he wanted to be outdoors.

  He took a cupful of whiskey along, but after the first few sips he found he didn’t want it; he set it carefully on the grass beside the barn and started walking.

  He had never seen such beautiful country, but it wasn’t the landscape alone that increased the pump of his heart as he walked; it was the dizzying rise of his self-esteem in this past incredible week. Epstein saying he was the most admirable man in the venture; Julian deferring to him time and again; Pamela saying “Oh, that was perfect” and “It’s the most beautiful idea anybody’s had yet” – all this and more crowded his head. He had been born for this, for finding order in chaos, and all the wasted years had been a mistake. John Wilder was coming into his own at last – this was reality – and he trembled with a pride and pleasure he hadn’t known since he was eleven years old and the soprano soloist at Grace Church.

  Glo-o-o-o-ria in excelsis De-e-o …

  To find order in chaos; to find order in chaos. He felt exalted as he trod the grass; he felt tall.

  The earth was spongy underfoot and there were hummocks that made him stumble; the stumbling jogged him rhythmically along until a little chant or jingle began to sound in his ears. Even when he stopped and steadied himself with his arm around the trunk of a tree it persisted:

  When you meet a man who’s spent a half a lifetime

  In a life he doesn’t like or understand

  When you find him hugging trees and collapsing at the knees

  That’ll be the

  He let go of the tree – it left a spoor of sap on his shirtsleeve – and walked again, beginning to feel as if hundreds of needles were gently pricking his flesh. His vision was distorted too: colorless flecks hung and danced before his eyes; and still the doggerel went on, as real as if someone – Epstein? – were whispering the words beside him:

  If he wants to find an order in his chaos

  If he wants to put his passion on the screen

  If he comes to me in time and says

  “Hi, Mr. Wilder,” said one of the minor Marlowe actors on his way to the set.

  “Hi. Hey, wait – wait.”

  The boy stopped and gave him a long, odd look.

  “Can you tell me how to get to Mr. Epstein’s house?”

  “Sure. You’re headed in the right direction. See that dirt road? Leads you right up to it – it’s only a couple of hundred yards. You okay, Mr. Wilder? You look—”

  “How do I look?”

  “I don’t know.” And the boy lowered his eyes like a girl. “No special way, I guess; I just – never mind. By the way, I think it’s a great film, Mr. Wilder. Really great.”

  He was headed in the right direction – anyone could walk a couple of hundred yards, even with knees like jelly – and now the words were clearly in Epstein’s voice:

  If he comes to me in time and says da da da da dime

  That’ll be the

  He didn’t want to look up because he knew the sky had turned from blue to red and yellow, and he didn’t want to look back because Pamela and all the young men were gathered there under the massed trees to urge him on – keep going, John; keep going – so he looked down at his own walking feet. These were the feet that had taken him through years and years of error and falsehood; now they were treading the dirt of the right road at last – the true road, the high, lonely road of self-discovery….

  “Well, Mr. Wilder,” Epstein said, opening his white door.

  He stepped inside and slumped against the vestibule wall, barely able to stand. He stared into Epstein’s calm, wise face and Epstein peered at him closely, encouragingly, as if he’d been waiting for this very confrontation for years.

  Go on, John, the young people behind
him were saying; go on. Say it.

  But he was paralyzed with indecision. If he said what seemed so clearly to be expected it might be all over. He would be himself, but he might be –

  “Yes, sir?”

  Then he said it: “Brother, can you spare a dime?”

  And Epstein didn’t seem at all surprised. “A dime? Why, certainly; I’ll be happy to oblige. Won’t you come in while I—”

  “No – no, thanks. I’ll wait here.”

  Epstein went into his study for a moment and then he came back. “One thin but very shiny dime,” he said, and he looked straight into Wilder’s eyes as he gave it to him; then, smiling, he held out his right hand for a ceremonial handshake.

  If the dime hadn’t done it the handshake would, and Wilder hesitated again. Go on, John; let it happen.

  Epstein’s smile had given way to a troubled look, but his hand was still there and Wilder shook it.

  “You’re – all right, aren’t you, Mr. Wilder?”

  “Yes. I’m all right.” He had taken the man’s hand at last, and because there should have been a thunderclap of recognition he provided one, or at least a sound deep in his throat like the tolling of a great bronze bell.

  Epstein looked puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t – Can I get you a glass of cold water? We have wonderful fresh spring water here.”

  “No. No water. Nothing.” He couldn’t move from his slumped position against the wall until he’d made a moist fist around the dime and sunk it deep into the pocket of his wrinkled summer slacks. He was being tested and he hadn’t yet passed the test. There was more to this; there had to be more. “Thank you,” he said. His mouth was almost too dry for speaking. “I’m sorry if I—”

  He turned and walked down the short path to the road, feeling Epstein’s eyes on his back.