Zeroville

by Steve Erickson

  224.

  Over the course of the following week the phone doesn’t ring at all, then one morning he receives three calls, the first two from the Los Angeles Times and Variety asking for Vikar’s reaction to the response at Cannes to Your Pale Blue Eyes. “The true movie has been set free from within the false movie,” he says, to silence on the other end of the line. The third call is from Mitch Rondell.

  223.

  Vikar says, “You found them.”

  “What?” says Rondell.

  “You found Zazi and her mother.”

  Rondell sounds slightly flustered. “I’m at JFK, about to get on a plane for France. Vikar, we need you to come over.”

  “To New York?”

  “Europe. There’s an Air France flight this evening. We’ve booked you a first-class seat.”

  “Newspapers are calling.”

  “About the picture?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ve heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  “It screened in competition at Cannes a week ago. Apparently it was riotous. You didn’t hear?”

  “No.”

  “Not Rite of Spring tear-up-the-theater riotous, but the sort of commotion one picture in the festival always whips up every year. I gather it was hard to tell whether the applause or boos were louder.”

  “Boos?”

  “Air France will fly you into Nice and someone will meet you and drive you to Cannes, which is the next town over.”

  “People booed?”

  “Vikar, it’s the picture everyone’s talking about.”

  “They booed.” Vikar is fascinated.

  “We’ve booked you a small suite at the Carlton, which at this point was difficult. Truth is we had to move someone else out.”

  Vikar says, “Is it farther than Spain?”

  “You may have to change planes in Paris …”

  “Perhaps I’ll come in a couple of weeks. I just got back to Los Angeles.”

  “Vikar, there won’t be a festival in a couple of weeks.” Now the tension in Rondell’s voice is unmistakable. “The closing ceremony is tomorrow night. The driver will take you straight to the Palais.”

  “The director of the movie should be there.”

  “There is no director of this movie. Literally, at this point there is no ‘Directed by’ in the credits. Until the DGA decides otherwise, this picture directed itself.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to come.”

  222.

  Vikar can hear the panic rise in Rondell’s voice.

  “Listen to me,” comes the voice on the other end of the line, “three hours ago we got a call in our offices here—I can’t say who—to get you to Cannes. Do you understand? This person wouldn’t say more, he wasn’t even supposed to say that much, but … The head of the festival jury is an American director who just did a Jane Fonda-Jimmy Caan picture for us … modern Western thing he’s nervous about … do you understand what I’m getting at?”

  “No.”

  “I mean this guy wouldn’t be jerking us around five thousand miles away if there wasn’t something afoot. Listen. What about that French novel you want to film?”

  “God, I love that book.”

  “That can become a very real possibility, but you have to get to Cannes.”

  “You don’t believe Zazi and her mother are there, do you?”

  “I’ve got to catch my plane, Vikar. We’re sending a car to pick you up in … what time is it in L.A.?” There’s the sound of the phone on the other end changing hands as Rondell checks his watch. “Eleven-thirty in L.A., right? A car is going to pick you up in five hours. Please tell me you have a passport. You must, because you went to Spain for that madman.”

  Vikar says, “I live on a secret street.”

  “What?”

  “It might be hard to find me.”

  “Someone will call you in the next thirty minutes and sort everything out. The driver in Nice will have formal wear for you … you’ll have to change in the limo.” A moment’s pause. “We’ll get a hat for you.” Another moment’s pause. “No, you know what? No hat. Better no hat. We’ll make it work for us. See you tomorrow night on the Red Steps.”

  221.

  In the limo traveling southwest from Nice, looking at the coast Vikar can almost believe he hasn’t left Los Angeles at all, that the plane flew around in the air twelve hours and returned where it took off. “Is that the Atlantic Ocean?” he asks the driver, who glances at Vikar in the rear-view mirror. “Monsieur, it’s the Mediterranean,” the driver says. In a large plastic bag in the seat next to him, Vikar unwraps the black pants, jacket and tie, white shirt, socks and shoes. In a smaller plastic bag are strange black beads that he lays precisely on the seat side by side, like a series of keys that have failed to start a car.

  220.

  The limo drives twenty-five kilometers to the outskirts of Cannes, along the rue des Belges before cutting down to the Croisette. In the distance Vikar sees a large round building bathed in a light. Reaching a point where other traffic is being turned back, the limo is waved through and then suddenly it’s in the midst of a throng caught between the sea, where the white beach tents are visible in the night, billowing like parachutes as though everyone has dropped from the sky, and red-carpeted steps on the other side, nearly as wide as they are long, leading up to the Palais. The limo stops and Vikar doesn’t move; someone outside opens his door. “Am I supposed to get out here?” he says to the driver. He’s slightly astonished to find that the shirt has no buttons. He lays the tie on the seat next to him with the black beads.

  219.

  He gets out of the limo. From out of the throng, Mitch Rondell appears. He has a shirt that buttons. I should have gotten one of those. All around is an explosion of bulbs flashing from cameras that Vikar can’t see. Rondell stares aghast at Vikar’s completely open shirt. “There are no buttons,” Vikar explains. Rondell frantically sticks his hand in the pockets of Vikar’s coat searching, then peers into the limo at the black buttons sitting on the seat. He begins to reach in and scoop them up, and another round of flash bulbs goes off around them. “You know what?” he says to Vikar, withdrawing from the limo, “better without the buttons. We’ll make it work for us,” and then one of the ceremonial escorts leads Rondell and Vikar up the long red steps, camera flashes barraging the man with the unbuttoned shirt and the tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head.

  218.

  In the yawning theater where the festival’s closing ceremony takes place are more people than Vikar has ever seen. They fill the mezzanine and a grand balcony above him; he didn’t know a building could hold this many people. He stands in the middle looking around, everyone looking back. Everyone looks at him but not the way people used to when they would throw themselves off hillsides and not the way they did in the Bowery when he came into the club. A golden glow settles on the theater, and up onstage in a box to the right are nine people that Rondell explains to Vikar are the festival jury. They include a famous Swedish actress whom Vikar recognizes from several Ingmar Bergman movies he can’t think of because all Ingmar Bergman’s movies are the same to him, and one of the producers of the James Bond movies. Mitch Rondell seems fairly beside himself. “My God,” Rondell says, partly to Vikar, mostly to no one, “do you suppose we might actually win the fucking Palme d’Or?”

  217.

  The fucking Palme d’Or is presented to a three-hour Italian epic about a peasant boy on a long walk home from school who breaks his shoes. Italians, Vikar believes, like to make movies about things that break or get lost, like shoes and bicycles. Two so-called Grand Prizes are presented to a British movie by a Polish director about a man who’s learned from Aborigines a shout that kills people, which people in the movie insist on hearing anyway, and a French movie by an Italian director with Marcello Mastroianni and Gerard Depardieu about a man who finds the body of King
Kong washed up on the beach; the title translates as Bye Bye, Monkey. “That sounds like a very good movie,” says Vikar.

  It’s also announced that this year the jury has created a special award, the Prix Sergei, presented “to the film Your Pale Blue Eyes and editor Isaac Jerome for an original and provocative contribution to the art of montage and the creation of a revelatory new cinematic rhetoric.”

  “That’s not my name,” Vikar says.

  “What?” Rondell says, the applause around them swelling. Neither notices the sprinkling of boos.

  “That’s not my name.”

  “Vikar,” Rondell whispers urgently, “please go up there now.”

  “Who put that name on the movie?” In the midst of the ceremony audience, Vikar is an eye-twitch away from ripping Rondell’s head off his shoulders, while Rondell appears on the verge of leaping out of his body. “I’m sorry, it was a mistake,” he begs, “a terrible, terrible mistake. We’ll change it, we’ll do anything you want, we’ll make it right. Just please please please go up there.”

  216.

  Vikar reaches the stage several seconds after the mystified applause has died. Applause rises again in what sounds to Vikar like a swarm of bees—a collective murmur at the sight of the man with the unbuttoned shirt and tattooed head. The boos apparently have been stunned into silence. The jury president leans slightly away from Vikar as he hands him the award scroll, rolled and tied in the center with a red ribbon, and shakes his hand. A third wave of applause rises and Vikar steps to the microphone. “That’s not my name,” he says and walks off, strangling the award in his fist.

  215.

  Dashing through the salons of the Palais, Vikar finally staggers out into the Mediterranean air. Small food and drink stands begin to close, as well as an outdoor café only a few meters away. Since he has no idea where he is or where to go, he takes it as something of a sign that there before him, just around the bend of the Croisette, are the nouveaux cupolas of the massive Carlton. Its vertical banners hang from the hotel’s rafters, mildly ruffled by the breeze off the harbor.

  214.

  Thoroughly conflicted by Vikar’s tattooed head, his state of undress and the throttled red-ribboned scroll in Vikar’s hand, the concierge at the front desk apologizes that the suite isn’t ready. “We weren’t expecting you for at least another hour or two, monsieur,” he says, “are the ceremonies over?” He invites Vikar to wait in the Petit Bar, where someone will come retrieve him.

  213.

  The bar is mostly empty. Everyone else is at the Palais except two men at a far table talking and an attractive blonde in her early fifties at another table, wearing a wide-brimmed fedora and sunglasses even though it’s night and the lounge is dark. At another table is a younger woman, around thirty, with dark curls, wearing a long white coat; she drinks a glass of red wine and seems to be waiting for someone. She surveys Vikar for a full minute with a cool and overt curiosity. Vikar orders a vodka tonic.

  212.

  Now one of the two men talking at the far table looks at Vikar. He gets up from the table and comes over; he’s sharply though informally dressed in a light cotton summer jacket, and Vikar realizes he’s familiar. “Monsieur Vicar,” the man says, Vikar still trying to place him. “It is I, Cooper Léon.”

  “Yes,” Vikar says, uncertainly.

  Cooper Léon puts out his hand. “How are you?”

  Shaking the other man’s hand, Vikar says, “All right.”

  Cooper Léon looks at the crumpled scroll on Vikar’s cocktail table. “You have received one of the prizes at the ceremony tonight?”

  “They said my name wrong.”

  “May I sit with you?”

  “All right.”

  Cooper Léon sits down. “Felicitations. I am not surprised in the least. I knew three years ago in Madrid that you are a man of vision.”

  211.

  Now Vikar remembers. “The movie about the General.”

  “Yes.”

  “For the soldiers of …”

  “The Soldiers of Viridiana.”

  “Are they here?”

  “Who?”

  “The soldiers.”

  “In Cannes?” Cooper Léon says, surprised. “I am no longer leading the revolution in Spain. The assassin the Generalissimo died, and now many good films are allowed in my country. Thanks to you.”

  “I don’t believe the movie I made for you was a very good one.”

  “That, Monsieur Vicar,” Cooper Léon points to the award, “says differently.” Vikar notices that Cooper Léon’s Spanish accent has turned to French. “I no longer am living in Madrid. I live in Paris now.”

  “Are the soldiers there now?”

  “Monsieur, there are no more soldiers. Please forget the soldiers. Now I am a publicist for Gaumont. We are here at the festival representing the new film by Claude Chabrol with Isabelle Huppert. I believe she won a prize this evening as well.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We also are sponsoring a retrospective, as …” he pauses, “… as an unofficial tangent, you might say, to the official festival, a retrospective of one of your great American auteurs. Well, actually he is British, but he made all of his films in America. Irving Rapper.”

  “Irving Rapper?”

  “You know of Monsieur Irving Rapper?” Cooper Léon asks.

  “Now, Voyager.”

  Relief floods Cooper Léon’s face. “Of course I was certain a scholar of film such as yourself would know of Irving Rapper. Cinema’s great poet of la femme dérangée. As you say, Now, Voyager. Deception. The Glass Menagerie. Marjorie Morningstar. Would you care for another?” He points at Vikar’s vodka tonic.

  “I’m waiting for my room to be ready.”

  “Of course. Allow me please to buy for you another drink while you wait. It would be my honor.” Cooper Léon calls out something to the bartender and turns back to Vikar. His brow furrows. “Monsieur Vicar, I feel it is fateful that I should see you here this evening. I wonder if I might make a confession to you that I never have told to anyone else.”

  “All right.”

  “It seems proper that you are the person to whom I should confess this.”

  “All right.”

  210.

  Cooper Léon says, “Monsieur Vicar, perhaps you are wondering how it is I no longer am leading the revolutionary struggle for justice and rather have become a publicist for Gaumont.”

  “Uh,” says Vikar.

  “It is a difficult thing to comprehend, even for me sometimes. It is a result of a moment of truth I had, as it happens, not long after we met and worked together on our film about the death of the assassin the Generalissimo.” He pauses as if waiting for Vikar to respond.

  “Oh.”

  Cooper Léon shrugs. “Not long after we worked together on our film, I had a dream. Do you know who came to me in this dream?”

  “God?”

  “Luis Buñuel.”

  “Oh.”

  “Luis Buñuel, who once stayed in this hotel, this same hotel where he slept on the floor of his suite rather than the bed, as a revolutionary act. This dream was so real that I might almost have thought it was not a dream at all but the ghost of Buñuel, visiting me in the night, if Buñuel were not still alive. So it could not be his ghost.”

  “No.”

  “In this dream, Buñuel gave me a choice. Do you know what this choice was?”

  “No.”

  “Buñuel said to me, ‘Cooper Léon, you may have one of two things.’ Monsieur,” Cooper Léon’s voice breaks, “this is a difficult thing to confess.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Buñuel said, ‘Cooper Léon, you either may see the fruits of your revolutionary struggle and have justice and freedom for all people in the world, or you may fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel.’ Of course you remember Miss Sylvia Kristel, Monsieur Vicar?”

  “Yes.”

  “From the French masterpiece Emmanuelle?”

 
“Yes.”

  “And Emmanuelle 2?”

  “I guess.”

  “And Emmanuelle ’77?”

  “Uh.”

  “And Goodbye, Emmanuelle?”

  “I don’t know about those last ones.”

  “So then. ‘Now I know what you are thinking,’ Buñuel went on in my dream. ‘You are thinking that you will fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel and it will be over in the usual forty-five seconds and that is hardly worth it. No,’ Buñuel said in my dream, ‘if you choose to fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel, I will give you an erection not as in real life but a cinematic erection, as men have in films. It will last as long as you want, it will last hours, days if you want. But,’ and Buñuel was emphatic about this, Monsieur Vicar, ‘but once you have reached climax and the fucking is over, then … no more.’ And as soon as Buñuel said this, I woke.” Cooper Léon sighs heavily. “I woke, monsieur, to the truth that I would trade the freedom and justice of all the world’s oppressed masses for one chance to fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel. And of course the tragedy, monsieur, is that I woke to this truth that I have to live with forever without ever having actually fucked Miss Sylvia Kristel. So it is as though I made the choice in my soul without ever having received the benefit of that choice. Do you understand?”

  “I believe so.”

  “I believed that you would,” Cooper Léon nodded. “I believed that you of all people would understand that this is the exquisite cruelty of cinema, confronting men with truths about themselves that they must live with without ever actually getting to fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel.”