by Paul Monette
Greg recognized the Edna mode of argument, where all roads went in circles. Vivien didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she sounded ready to pursue it, as if it were some breakthrough notion. Sid, meanwhile, was ominously silent. Once he and Edna were off and running, they scarcely paid attention to what each other said. When he threw in his two cents, it tended to come from out of left field—as now, for instance.
“Tell me,” he said to Vivien, very confidential, “how much you figure this place is worth?”
“The house?”
“Course, I know it’s not for sale. But say it was.”
“Hmm,” she said, as she paused to give it a quick compute.
Greg, who had not asked the price of anything private since he was twelve years old, so as not to get a caning in reply, blushed like the Northern Lights.
“Well,” she said at last, “you have to remember, there’s twenty-six acres. Then you’ve got the view. Ten or twelve million, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sounds about right,” Sid allowed, as if he did a fair amount of speculative buying.
And Edna again, without a break: “Who did you used to play with, way up here?”
“When I was little?”
“We know who you play with now.”
Greg looked over his shoulder to see what she would say. He’d totally blown his cover—all that studied indifference, as he brooded on the night outside. But he felt the strangest pang of fascination. It wasn’t that he thought she had much to add to what he already knew. He’d already got her early life’s itinerary down. But of course she hadn’t played, in the sense that Edna meant. Her childhood hours had been taken up with skis and sloops and horses. It was all part of a tradition. Zillionaire heiresses darting about the marble halls of stately homes were solo for the first twelve years. Raised on a single fairy tale—themselves.
“Nobody, really,” Vivien said, as if she’d had the cue from him. “I wandered all over, all on my own.” And, lest it seem too lonely, fenced on every side with swirls of raw barbed wire, she went on to talk it up as a desert island. “Oh, but I loved it,” she said. “I poked around the canyon till there wasn’t a rock I didn’t know. I could tell you the name of every bird that lives out there. It’s just—well, nobody ever asks.”
I bet Sid and Edna will, he thought.
He couldn’t think of a thing he’d rather hear just now than a list of all the mockingbirds and swallows. He hoped she’d go on to the wilder game—the jackrabbits, quail, and white-tail deer. But other commitments got in the way. A hand came down on his shoulder, full of a nervous comradeship. He knew it wasn’t Artie. Artie never touched.
“I thought you were going to send me one of your screenplays,” Maxim Brearley said. It was the Hollywood form of offensive serve, whereby you accused your opponent of minor lapses right away, to get the guilt in motion.
“All my stuff is two years old,” Greg said, as he turned to greet the director. “There’s nothing that would interest you.”
“Well, if you change your mind,” he retorted moistly, “don’t forget who asked first.”
He grinned to show he meant it, rather like a man with a suitcase full of Bibles. Greg could hear the trumped-up energy in the most offhand proposal. This was the sort of deal that was never meant to go through. Still, it was thrown out on the table all the same, since you never knew what might catch a fish. Besides, a man like Max had nothing else to say. If there wasn’t a movie in it, what was the point in being here?
“The film’s all set to go, is it?” Greg said, making talk.
“Oh, yes,” said the other somberly, as he looked off into the night. “Show time, nine P.M. I don’t think you and your friends appreciate just how lucky you are.”
“Really?”
“We got studio people haven’t seen it yet. If I had it my way, Viv and I would screen it by ourselves. Not even Carl and Artie. But what the hell,” he shrugged, “she said you guys had to be here.”
“We’ll try real hard to be worthy.”
“You always got a chip on your shoulder?”
“Me?” Greg wondered aloud. “I hadn’t really looked.”
“Nothing people hate, you know, like a failure with opinions.”
“Actually,” Greg went on, “it’s not a chip.” And he pointed at his shoulder like he had something funny perched there. “It’s gotten a good deal bigger lately. It’s almost half a cord.”
And he walked away like a man who had no further time for small talk. It had taken him ten long years to come to a place like this—where he had the clout to cut a bigwig dead in his tracks, just for the hell of it. A bit like pissing on someone’s shoes. Yet now the moment was finally his, he found he didn’t care. Max was nothing to him at all. He’d practically forgotten what they’d all been summoned here for. To decide if The Broken Trail should be released? Well, who the fuck cared? As he crossed to the bar for another round, he didn’t give a good goddam if the last big deal of Jasper Cokes hit big. Himself, he didn’t expect to see but the first few minutes of it.
He had another engagement, shortly after nine.
The bell for dinner rang loud and clear, dark as the stroke of a final countdown. They gathered in Abner Willis’s flawless Sheraton dining room, six at a table that could have sat twenty. Vivien had ordered up a full-course 18th-century service—china from China, the Bateman silver, and Abigail Adams’s goblets, thin as a linnet’s wing. She hadn’t bothered doing up a seating plan, however. It was no use hoping she could fix them up with proper dinner partners. She let them gravitate where inclination led them. So Max ended up at the head, with Sid and Edna on either side. Vivien and Greg sat midway down, across from each other, and Artie brought up the foot.
Two men in tight black tie weaved in and out, serving without a sound. She’d kept the menu high and saucy, each thing more elaborate than the last, to keep them all as busy as she could. But even with the knotty task of lobster tails to crack, the dolloping-on of mayonnaise, Sid and Edna between them managed to keep up a barrage of questions. Max didn’t stand a chance. He was used to the kind of coddling that begged him for opinions on the fine points of his art. Therefore, what the hell was this? With all that white-hot power, he found himself fielding questions as to what it was like to direct a dog. Or what did he do when it rained? Who was his favorite star?
Vivien let him stew in it. She’d been struck by the unmistakable sense—his calling three times a day was something of a clue—that Max was out to confide in her. Over and over, he maundered that he’d come to a fork in his breathless career. She let him go on, attending with half an ear, for the sake of seeing the film tonight. She guessed he was getting pressure from the studio to shelve it, on the theory that a darksome quest—especially one which starred a corpse—would prove too much of a down in a culture hooked on uppers. Max was out to move her, preferably to tears. He needed her on his side. So he kept on telling her what a tragic grandeur lit those jaded eyes. As if, this time around and quite by chance, he and Jasper had stumbled into art.
But the longer she thought about it, the more she became convinced they put poor Jasper through it in a trance. They squeezed out another ounce of product even as the vein paid out. Once she’d seen it, she would talk it over with Artie and Greg, till they came to some sort of consensus. Unfortunately, as far as late developments in that quarter went, she was spinning in air like a fifth wheel. Between Carl’s being zipped in a body bag and the next day’s flood of mortal details, Greg and Artie had somehow got it on. That is, she couldn’t prove it, but—they must have.
In the last three days, it had been one clandestine meeting after another. Endless late-night calls that Artie picked up on the first ring. Greg’s rented car was a semipermanent fixture in the driveway. Between Tuesday and today, he must have spent as much time here as he did at the Cherokee Nile.
Of course, it was always nice to watch one’s dearest friends make contact. She had no doubt the two of them were good for one an
other. She just wished they’d tell her. It wasn’t as if they’d neglected her, even. Greg called two or three times about the screening—with a running account of Sid and Edna’s getting ready, as if for a season at Deauville. Artie went out of his way all week to clear out Carl’s effects. She liked to think she wasn’t the type to feel jealous. Still, she was alone at last—there was no denying that. She was the only widow left.
“It says in the paper,” Greg remarked, in a stiff and dinnerish way, “you’re about to go around the world.”
She started. Stared at an untouched veal bird on her plate. She looked up puzzled, saying nothing. What the hell was he talking about?
“Three months on the QE2, I think it said. When do you sail, exactly?”
“Lies,” she retorted dryly, as she watched him knit at the veal with fork and knife. “The Cunard people plant that rumor every spring. They think it sells tickets.”
“Probably does. They ought to give you a freebie.”
“I’ve already seen the world, thank you,” she said.
She couldn’t even catch his eye to make it funny. Now why did it have to be so awkward? Did they think she disapproved? She knew, the same as anyone else—a good fuck was the only way to shake the life back into you.
“I wouldn’t go if you paid me,” Artie observed laconically. He cut his roll crosswise, opening it up like an English muffin. He looked around for the marmalade. “It’s much too long to be gone, for one thing. How would you ever get back to normal afterwards?”
“I think it’s mostly for people with fatal diseases,” Vivien said. “They’re out to have a last look at things.”
“The reason I wouldn’t go,” said Greg, “is, I don’t like the idea of seeing everything once. I mean—you’re in Bora Bora for twenty minutes. You come to this beautiful temple. The jungle’s almost buried it. There’s all these monkeys screeching in your ear. You think: ‘Well, there it is. I’ll never see it again.’”
“But that’s what you have a camera for,” she insisted, squinting down the table at the others.
“Well, I’d just as soon stay home,” Greg said with some belligerence, rather as if she’d tried to ship him out.
She was damned if she’d go on this way, forcing a lot of chitchat, only to have it thrown back in her face. If they wanted to keep it all private, that was fine with her, but she was bailing out. She took up her glass and swallowed a gulp of wine. She stood with a murmured pardon and made her way to the raucous upper reaches of the table—where Sid, not one to waste good food, was spearing one by one the braised white grapes off Max’s plate. Edna must have had her fill, for she sat back contentedly. She folded and fluffed her napkin, glad to take a breather. Max looked as if he’d given up eating for Lent—or as if he planned to stop by Chasen’s later on.
“You giving them all the inside dope?” she asked him, standing firm at Edna’s side.
“It was a bit more general, actually,” the director said with a straight-edged smile.
“We ought to make us a movie, Sid,” said Edna. “We’ll call it Close Quarters—a story of modern love among the elderly.”
“Not me,” Sid shot back, fork suspended in the air. “My life’s more of a western.”
“Oh yeah? Well, who am I, then—Tonto?”
Vivien had to cut the visit short, as the endive salad was being brought on. Reluctantly, she resumed her place between the sudden lovers. Sid and Edna sparred at the other end like Fibber McGee and Molly. Otherwise, silence reigned.
As she looked around the table, Vivien saw them all for what they were—a room full of realists. Widowed or not, she thought, they knew they were all alone. So what if Greg and Artie had a momentary liaison in progress? That wouldn’t last three weeks. Sid and Edna, after all, had gone so far as to live as partners, half and half, and yet one felt an air of separate bedrooms even there.
They were six of a kind, this makeshift party. None believed that things were made to last. They probably couldn’t produce a sustaining illusion among them. And yet, she thought with dizzy irony, they still looked forward to sitting in ones and twos in a drafty theater. They kept their faith in movies.
All she really wanted, she thought, was a house on Walden Pond.
It was time to start. She promised them tart and coffee after and stood to lead the way. They rose as one, worn out with all these dinner-table notions. They followed her, lost in thought. One would have supposed the walking might revive them, but the lines of communication had all gone underground. Nothing could break the silence now but The Broken Trail itself.
As she swept across the canyon room and down the spiral stair, Vivien, up at the head of the line, felt like the others were ranked in single file behind her, rather like an expedition. Down on the lower floor, the corridor arced in a constant curve to the left, so it tended to straggle them out in a line, as if they were queuing up. Something to do with the curvature threw off their sense of level ground. They seemed—this band of loners, met by chance—to be winding deeper down, and deeper into the hill. By the time they got to the end, where a double door opened in, they must have thought the screening room was buried under a mountain.
But here the house had tricked them. As they crowded in, they found that one whole wall was a sheet of glass. They looked out, as if from a hovering airship, down the starlit canyon. They made their way to the triple ring of seats, while Maxim Brearley fumbled for the light. There was just enough nightshine to see by. They sat down as if to witness a dream. When he snapped the switch and lit them up, they squinted like sleepers shaken. The planetarium vanished.
In its place was the pebbled, snow-white screen—looming now at the end of the room like a window on some purely abstract region, polar as the limits of a sphere. Max went off to the minuscule projection booth. The room was walled with Mayan-figured blocks, plushly appointed in leather chairs that accommodated an audience of twenty. Sid and Edna sat side by side. Greg and Artie sat apart, with a row between them. Perhaps because she stood so undecided, just within the door, Greg beckoned Vivien over to sit by him. She went because she had no better offers.
“Tell me how it used to be,” he whispered when she settled in. “Did you used to show movies every night?”
“We never came down here, really,” she said. “Not when I was a kid. I hardly knew we had a screening room, till after I was married.”
“See? They always meant for you to hook up with a movie star. This room’s part of the dowry.”
“Jesus, you’ve gotten weird,” she said.
“Listen,” he continued, without a shift of gears. “The minute the picture starts, you walk out with me.”
“What?”
“He’ll probably try to stop you,” Greg went on, in a toneless way. “Just keep moving—don’t look back.”
“What?” she asked, a bit louder now. She was still a couple of steps behind. But he would not stop to repeat—would not accept that she hadn’t heard. She had the impression he didn’t have time.
“Just hold my hand,” he instructed her matter-of-factly. “I’ll tell you when.”
She stared at him hard, like he’d just gone mad, but he chose that particular moment to duck, bending double to tie his shoe. So she craned around to Artie, just behind and to the left. He looked right through her, like she wasn’t there. Sid and Edna, just beyond, were tight-lipped as village locals, eyes on the blank white screen. They were all in the grip of a common spell, and wholly self-contained.
Vivien saw it all in a flash: They were meant to act as a team. They had to avoid all contact till the moment was at hand. She understood that she mustn’t try to catch anyone’s eye, lest she appear to be in collusion. She faced around again to get her bearings. She looked at the screen herself, the better to clear her mind. In the past, she’d have given some thought as to whether she’d left her senses. Not anymore. It came down to just one thing: They’d let her in at last.
You had to know when to act alone and when it
did no good. She wondered if anyone ever guessed what a sudden test the years came down to. The crisis came like a coronary. There wasn’t the time to moralize. Your people had to be there—right there with you, all along. Mostly, you ended up with acquaintances. The point of it all was this: Who could you count on to stay the night?
Well, now she knew.
Besides herself, exactly four. They sat around her in the screening room like crack commandos, fighting ready. She did not know yet what the mission was, but she trusted things would happen just when they were meant to. Her part must come later.
“I don’t know what I should tell you,” said Max, sauntering up the room as if in search of a podium. “I’ve still got to cut five minutes,” he said, “and I don’t know where to start. It’s down to the bones already. You tell me.”
By which he didn’t mean to imply that he valued their opinions. He was trying to say the film was perfect, just the way it was.
“Are there any questions?”
There were not.
“An audience after my own heart,” he said with a gelid smile. “A man’s art speaks for itself—right?”
He headed back now to start it rolling. She didn’t dare turn to watch him go, but as he passed, she took in the briefest glimpse of him from the corner of one eye. She saw, as if on a single frame of footage, his pale patrician features in repose. He had the slightly parted lips of a man forever lost in speculation. Don’t, she scolded herself, don’t think of him. She locked eyes front, on the square of white, till she shut him out entirely.
The overhead light snapped off. The projector began to purr. A splatter of film went on the screen—dark flashes and bits of gray, like rain. It shook and fluttered, and then came clear. It opened on a long shot, down into an empty prison yard. For a moment, they were there as much as here.
And then they made a break for it. Greg took her hand as he leapt up. She saw the first title come on—A MAXIM BREARLEY FILM—as he pulled her to her feet. She could feel the film’s light ripple across them both the moment she stood to follow. They lit up like sitting ducks.
