"What did he say, Rainer? What kind of things did he talk about in that scene?"
He rubbed his face with both hands and looked at us vaguely, as if only having just gotten up for the day. "He did it ad lib. None of that scene was in the original script. We all got the feeling he was making things up as he went along. He talked about evil and pain . . . but nothing you haven't heard already. A bad guy telling why he's bad. Nothing special.
"What was bad came at the end of the scene when Bloodstone killed the little girl. Christ, it looked real! None of us knew how he did it. This great-looking kid, maybe eight or nine. He went through this 'Why I'm bad' spiel and then brought her out from the wings, like a magician about to do a trick on someone from the audience.
"None of us knew what he was up to, but Phil was a good ad libber so we just left him alone. Matthew Portland had brought the girl on the set, but she'd been hanging back in the wings so quietly I'd forgotten about her."
"What was her name? Do you remember her name?"
He rubbed a hand over his face again. "Yeah, I remember because it was a funny name: 'Pinslip.' He didn't call her anything else. Brought this little Pinslip out and a moment later, with the camera rolling, Bloodstone cut her throat while she was singing this song he told her to sing." His mouth started moving as if he were chewing gum. "In my town when I was a kid there was this crazy woman we called 'Salad.' I don't know where the name came from. We used to go around scaring her whenever we could." His mouth kept moving. He looked at me, and his eyes cleared for a moment. "Ever since we finished that film I haven't felt so good. I don't want to make another Midnight. The money's good and Phil's a king, but I'm not going to do it again. I've got to call and tell him that. Is he back in town yet?"
"There she is – by the car."
Shading his eyes against the sun, Finky Linky looked toward the street. Pinsleepe was standing by a tree with a bright orange ball in her hands. Seeing us, she waved happily.
"If she's an angel then she can save me, can't she, Weber?"
"I guess so, Wyatt. Maybe she can."
We started off the porch toward her. She moved toward us.
"Hello, Finky Linky. Yes, I can save you."
He looked at me. She looked at me.
"Why didn't you tell me about that scene?"
"I can't tell you everything, Weber. Phil told you that on the tapes, didn't he?"
"Why do you talk like a child sometimes and like a grown-up others?"
"Because I'm both. Today I look like a kid with an orange ball. What did you find out from Rainer?"
"What happened to him? What's the matter?"
"Midnight Kills is the matter. So you know about me being killed in the film?"
"Yes. Did Phil know he was going to do it?"
"I think so. When he asked me onto the set, I thought it was to show how he'd decided to change the scene for the good. But he was too far gone by then. Whatever little good was left in him, he had to kill and show the whole world. No better place to do that than a movie."
"Is the scene gone?"
She tossed the ball into the air, caught it. "The film's gone, but that's not important. He burned the film and the sound tapes before he died, but it was too late and he knew it. He'd done the scene, so it was alive. It still is. That's why he killed himself."
"Then what am I supposed to do? What can I do?"
Pinsleepe tossed the ball to Wyatt. She looked at me. "You have to shoot another scene, Weber, one to replace Phil's. If it's better, things'll be all right again. Sasha will be okay. So will he."
"That's it? Is that what you want?"
"Yes."
"How do I make it 'better'?"
Someone screamed behind us. We turned around to see Rainer on his porch, still in his underwear, waving. "Hey, thanks a lot for coming, guys! Love your show, Finky. If you ever need a sound man, let me know!"
When we turned back to Pinsleepe, she was gone.
5
Look at this splendid room. Come, I'll show you around.
Sasha's always been a big collector. When you have money you collect "objects," when you're poor you collect "things." Sasha has objects. I bought her some of them. By the time that happened, I was so rich and untroubled by money I could walk into a gallery or antique store and not haggle over price, not turn the thing here and there, pretending to look for flaws or hidden cheapness. I'd say how much. They'd say some crazy price. I'd say all right.
That Maris York skyscraper, over the fireplace, and the painting by Jorg Immendorff were from me. I brought the painting over in my car with the top down. It was so big, it flapped in the wind like a sail. The gallery owner was horrified, but I wanted to give it to Sasha immediately and see her reaction. She put it down on the floor and walked around and around it for minutes, checking from all angles.
Sasha is . . . oh, don't worry, she won't be back for a few hours; she's still at the hospital having tests. We have time to appreciate her place: the two Chinese carpets, one the color of dusk, the other of dessert; an old ink bottle my father would love on the desk next to the round stone she found when we were in New Mexico. . . .
A woman who can demand or coerce millions of dollars from hard-edged money people, she also likes to laugh while fucking. When she wakes up in the morning, she's usually in a good mood. Sasha buys hardcover copies of books people recommend she read. It's ridiculous making a list of someone's good qualities. Anyway, I'm supposed to be giving you a tour of her apartment, not her personality. But our books, the two pairs of black running shoes, how often and how carefully we water the plants . . . haruspication. Remember the word? Study the order, find the answer. Why did she pick up that round rock and not another? Here, would you like to hold it? The size is unimportant, I can tell you that. Size, color, where exactly she found it: not those things. Rather the totality, the dots of a life connected by a smart eye. The stone and ink bottle on her desk, a bad drawing of a dinosaur that hangs in the bathroom. A little nothing that amuses her and which she can never take down, even when she thinks of doing it. Because I gave it to her.
Nothing I gave her has left this house. Not before, not after I died. I check every day, take a walk through the house when she's not around to see if some of me is still alive here. If even one thing were gone I would worry.
Sometimes when she's here I'll sit in a near room and listen to her going about the small acts of her life. The whish of her shower, the way she often hums, the quick click of channels when she tries to watch television but finds nothing – nothing to put an hour of her life into because there is nowhere else to put it right now.
I almost never sit in the same room with her. Too close. Too sad. From the looks on our faces, you wouldn't be able to figure out which of us was sadder, the pregnant woman or the dead man.
Can I tell you about this? Do you mind? I'd be very grateful.
Relationships begin with the delicate, scared use of big words you hope will apply someday soon: concern, commitment, love. Sasha and I were in the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard when I said the first one, honesty.
"I have to be honest with you."
Sasha looked quickly away and I thought, Uh-oh. When she looked back, she wore a suspicious, unhappy expression. Said I didn't owe her anything, she'd gotten something "out of the fuck" too. The word sounded silly. I took her hand, but instead of responding or squeezing mine, she only looked at our two clasped hands on the table and asked if my "honesty" meant I was telling her thanks for the roll last night but go away now.
"No, my honesty meant admitting right away I'm in love with you."
"I wasn't ready for that. I'm still getting used to the idea of our sleeping together."
"Yes, get used to it. Get used to me."
We were each other's big, real hope and luckily recognized it fast. When good fortune pulls up in front of you too quickly, it can make you suspicious. You hesitate before getting in. But both Sasha and I had been through enough lonely ti
mes to know there were only so many chances at contentment with another person. In other words, don't think too long before acting.
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke copies down one of his correspondent Kappus's poems and sends it back to the young man.
And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your own.
For some reason, the idea of this great man hand-copying a fan's poem and sending it to him has always touched me deeply. What generosity! Who would ever think of doing that?
But then I met Sasha, and she took much of what I was or believed and, putting her own stamp on it, handed it back to me as if I had never seen it before. Perhaps that is what love is – another's desire to return you to yourself enhanced by their vision, graced by their script.
I asked her to live with me.
She looked at her feet. "I've never been very successful at that." Her smile was over just after it began to grow.
I reached out and stroked her hair. "I don't care what your won-loss record is. I want you for what you are, Sash, not for what I want you to be."
"Me too. And that's the best place to begin.
"When I was out walking Flea tonight, I saw this man on a big motorcycle with his girlfriend on the back. He started dragging his boots on the ground, and I guess he had metal heels or something because sparks flew in all directions. The girl laughed and did it too. It looked so impressive and magical: the big ruuuuum of the bike, her laughing, all those sparks. . . .
"I couldn't wait to get back in and tell you about it But then when I came in, after only ten minutes outside, I saw you and was so glad to see you that I forgot what I wanted to say. Those are sparks too, aren't they, Phil?"
Relationships that begin in your late twenties or early thirties have a dimension that doesn't exist when you're younger. Besides knowing more, you're also more grateful for the good things, forgiving toward the bad. What drove you nuts at twenty is only a crumb, at most a small stain on your sleeve, ten years later. It can be cleaned. It can be overlooked as long as the rest of the jacket hangs well and feels right.
From the beginning of our relationship, I didn't see great sparks flying up from our boots. I'd never have said it to Sasha, but it was enough to put my hand under her skirt in the dark at a film and feel the soft down of hair and stipply gooseflesh on the inside of her thigh. There was love and respect. We discovered we had a world of things to talk about.
When Weber came over for dinner one night, he said we felt like a couple. "Some people live together for years, but you never get the feeling they fit very well. It feels like they live on separate floors of their house. Not you two."
We agreed. What was odd was going to my office every day and working on something as vile as Midnight Kills, then home to Sasha and Flea at night and a life that had become so full and good.
In retrospect, I realize it couldn't have lasted a long time. I knew Midnight hadn't gotten me this good luck. Sasha admired my Esquire column about life in Hollywood, not Bloodstone. Yet, like it or not, he was my bread and butter and I spent a good part of my life thinking about him.
In bed one night as we watched Flea walk around on top of us, looking for a place to lie down, Sasha asked where Bloodstone came from.
"You mean really, or in the film?"
"Really. Where did he come from in you?"
Flea plumped down and, coincidentally, looked straight at me, as if she too were waiting for the answer. My two girls.
"Rock and Roll."
"Music?"
"No, not exactly. When I was a boy, my father took us on the first and last vacation we ever had: to Browns Mills, New Jersey. The only distinguishing things about it were it had a muddy lake and was near Fort Dix, one of the big military bases on the East Coast. We had a bungalow in the middle of the woods and were surrounded by army families from the base. One of them was named Masello, and the father was in the military police. My sister and I spent a lot of time in their house that month because they had – kids around our ages.
"One day after swimming we were out on their back porch eating brownies and listening to the radio. It was a station in Trenton. Remember the song 'Monkey Time' by Major Lance? That was on when it was cut off by a news bulletin. A man had walked up to a military police car on the base, leaned down, and shot the two policemen inside, point-blank. One of them was Mr. Masello.
"All of us kids looked at each other. I remember that very well, because we all had brownies in our mouth and were chewing."
"You used that scene in one of the Midnights!"
"Right, Midnight Too. I shot it exactly the way it happened: The oldest Masello kid's mouth dropped open and big chunks of brownie fell out. He closed his eyes and started screaming 'Rock and Roll! Rock and Roll!'and kept screaming until his mother came and dragged him on his knees back into the house."
"How could you use that, Phil? What if one of those kids saw your film?"
"They did. One wrote a letter and called me a motherfucker."
"Why did you do it?"
"Let me finish the story. My parents got so scared that this killer might come and get us that they packed us up that night and drove home. In the car I fell asleep and had a dream where a man with a silvery, featureless face chased me, screaming 'Rock and roll!' I've had that dream all my life. It still scares the bloody shit out of me.
"After that I was traumatized by Rock and Roll. Every time I heard of a murder on the radio or read about one, I thought of Rock and Roll. That was his name, and he must have done it. My mother read The National Enquirer, and every crime in there, brains on the floor, blood on the walls, was done by him. Everyone has their vision of evil, and he was mine. A war in Africa? Rock and Roll did it. A baby disappeared in Darien? Rock and Roll. He was everything bad. He covered the field. And every time I had that dream again, he got bloodier and more frightening because I'd given him credit for something else."
Sasha sighed. "How much of your films is from your life?"
"More than I like."
"Does it help to film it? Is it a catharsis?"
"Sometimes. Sometimes it's too far down. Like those glass-bottom boats you ride in Florida that let you see the big fish below? Sometimes doing this brings me close to the things, but I can only see them, their dark shapes. I can't get them out."
There are nights in a relationship when you come as close as you're ever going to get to another person. It usually begins with a few doses of wonderfully all-out sex, but then it blossoms into something much more profound and transcendent. You start by doing things to each other physically you'd only fantasized before. Then, when it's calm again, you start telling secrets about yourself or your life you never thought would come out. Weber called them "Holy Nights," which is an apt description. To him, there are few times in our adult life when we are "simply " honest. It is either unnecessary or detrimental to tell the truth in our everyday life, so we don't.
That is one of the reasons religion suffers so in our century: To really find God, you must be honest. To be honest you must begin by looking clearly at yourself, but that's too distressing. So we learn to worship material things instead, because not only are they attainable but how we attain them doesn't require virtue or virtuous behavior, as some higher goals do. We don't want goodness, we want a Mercedes. Who needs a relationship when you can have all the fun of one without making any of the commitments? In the end, even AIDS is the perfect consumer's disease: It comes from either bad sex or bad needles. None of this "wrath of God" stuff in our time. Plagues are for the Dark Ages.
I'm rambling. But why are we so honest on Holy Nights? Because we're so close to death then. That night Sasha and I discussed death. We spoke of how we imagined it to be (we were wrong), how we imagined we'd die (I was wrong), of how we wanted to be buried. We
spoke as if the other would be there at our end to see to these last wishes. After that we made love again, because talk of death always makes you feel more fragile and hungry.
Look, I can say this: Death is the minimum. The minimum of anything. In those hours when you're so dose to another person, you go from being two to almost one. The minimum. Love is death: the death of the individual, the death of distance, the death of time. The delightful thing about holding a girl's hand is after a while you forget which is yours. You forget there are two instead of one big one. Death. It is not a morbid thing.
Let me tell you one more story. When I was twelve, my friend Geoff Pierson and I were down at the river in our town, fooling around. We'd smoked all the cigarettes we had and gotten bored enough to be in the middle of a stone-throwing contest. It was a hot July day, and the only sounds around were a lawn mower somewhere off in a far distance and the ker-plunk of our stones hitting the water. He threw one. I threw one farther. He threw one farther. I threw one that hit something.
Slowly, languorously, the thing turned and became an elbow, a crooked elbow sticking like an inverted V out of the water. It stayed there a few seconds and then, just as languorously (as if tired), turned back over into the water.
I told Geoff to go call the cops while I leapt wildly into the water, like a dog jumping off a boat. Nothing more had surfaced there, but where that elbow had appeared was so burned into my consciousness I didn't need any landmarks to find the place again. Thirty feet out, I saw something light, something dark, something large in front of me. There was the elbow just under the surface! Taking it, I started swimming with one hand back to shore. It took a long time and the thing in my hand was hard and cold. I didn't look back until I could put my feet on the bottom and pull it in to shore.
A Child across the Sky Page 12
