Zeroville

by Steve Erickson

  “I’ve cheated on Elizabeth Taylor,” Vikar says, patting his own head.

  “Yes, monsieur,” the other man says dismissively. “But Elizabeth Taylor has cheated on you far more often.”

  209.

  “Mon dieu,” Cooper Léon says, looking across the room.

  “What?” says Vikar.

  “Do you know who that is?” He’s looking at the two women on the other side of the room, the older blonde in the wide-brimmed fedora and sunglasses, and the younger one with dark curls in the long white coat. Vikar isn’t certain which one he means.

  “Which one do you mean?”

  “That one.”

  Vikar believes Cooper Léon means the older blonde but he still isn’t certain.

  “That, Monsieur Vicar, is Christine Jorgensen.”

  A worrisome recollection flickers across Vikar’s mind.

  “She is here for the Irving Rapper retrospective. Monsieur Rapper filmed the story of her life eight or nine years ago. You know of Christine Jorgensen, of course.”

  Vikar doesn’t say anything. He looks back and forth from the older blonde to the younger woman in the white coat.

  “You know of the story of her life. She was a man. She was an American soldier who—”

  “I know the story.”

  “—had herself, how would you say, altered surgically—”

  “I know the story.” It has to be the older blonde.

  “Allow me to introduce you.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It is no trouble.”

  “I believe my room is ready now.” Vikar stands up from the cocktail table.

  “Are you sure you would not like to …?”

  “I’m going to check on my room.”

  “Very well,” says Cooper Léon, standing as well. The two men shake hands. “Felicitations again, Monsieur Vicar.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am very pleased to have seen you in Cannes,” he calls as Vikar rushes from the lounge.

  208.

  Forty-five minutes later, Vikar is in his small suite on the fourth floor of the Carlton. It’s eleven-thirty. From the small balcony onto which the suite’s French doors open, the Mediterranean is to the left; getting underway along the waterfront are the many parties of the festival’s closing night. Party yachts line the harbor. Vikar can’t see the fireworks but can hear them.

  207.

  He lies on the bed in his unbuttoned shirt watching the TV. He flicks around the channels; the news is in French so he doesn’t understand much. There’s a story about an Italian president or prime minister who appears to have been assassinated. Grace Kelly’s daughter is getting married; both are princesses now. The granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane has been sent to jail for being kidnapped, which Vikar didn’t realize was a crime. The coffin and body of Charlie Chaplin have been recovered, not far from where they were stolen; Vikar didn’t know they had been stolen. When were they stolen? Soon Vikar finds on the TV an old American black-and-white movie.

  Vikar’s award sits in a furious ball of mangled parchment and red ribbon on a table next to a basket of fruit, cheese and red wine. The suite is all white and reminds him of the room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey that he saw his first afternoon in Los Angeles. In another corner of the all-white suite is a small writing table. Vikar is trying not to think about anything. When someone knocks at the door, he doesn’t answer because he assumes it’s Rondell and he doesn’t want to talk to him.

  The knocking continues and Vikar ignores it, until finally the door opens and she walks in.

  206.

  The younger woman from the lounge, with the dark curls and the long white coat, closes the door behind her. In the light she appears in her early thirties; she’s tall, just under six feet. “Bonsoir, Vikar,” she says, slipping off her long white coat that falls to the matching floor, and except for her jewelry and high heels, she’s perfectly naked.

  205.

  Her face is pleasantly attractive, not beautiful, but her long body verges on the preposterous, the most extraordinary body Vikar has seen. He hasn’t seen many naked female bodies in person but he’s seen them in magazines and in the movies and he’s never seen one like this. When she drops the coat, she doesn’t pose. It barely occurs to him that she’s not simply being straightforward but making a point of getting his name right.

  204.

  She takes a plum from the fruit basket and bites into it, then puts it back. She wipes the juice on her chin precisely with a single finger and picks up the bottle of wine. “May I?” she says, holding up the corkscrew.

  Vikar says, “I can open it for you.”

  “Merci,” she says, bringing the bottle over to the bed. Two wine glasses dangle lightly by their stems from her other fingers. She sits on the edge of the bed looking around as he works the corkscrew; in her nakedness she’s entirely casual. “Do you like the hotel?”

  Oh, mother, it has to have been the older blonde, Vikar assures himself. “Buñuel stayed here.”

  “Oui, bien sûr. Cary Grant stays here, Orson Welles. Olivier, Sophia Loren, Alain Delon. Mussolini was thrown out, I believe before the First World War, when he was a journalist.”

  “He slept on the floor as a revolutionary act.”

  “Mussolini?”

  “Buñuel.”

  “Non, chéri,” the woman says, “Buñuel slept on the floor because the bed was not comfortable enough for him.” She looks around the suite. “It is a bit, what is the American? nose in the air,” and she brings her finger to the tip of her nose and pushes it up. “After the First World War, it was a hospital. Blaise Cendrars was a patient.”

  “I like the poem about Little Jeanne and the train,” Vikar says, distracted, sweat on his brow.

  “I am impressed. Almost no Americans know of this poem.”

  “Is your name Christine?” Vikar blurts.

  She shrugs. “Would you like it to be Christine?”

  “No.”

  “Who is your favorite French actress? You may call me that.” She looks at the TV.

  “Falconetti,” he says.

  She’s slightly taken aback. “I supposed you should say something predictable like Brigitte Bardot.”

  “I like Brigitte Bardot,” he says.

  “You are a man, you are allowed.” She watches the movie on the TV. “When they asked Simone Signoret how she felt about her husband Yves Montand fucking Marilyn Monroe, Signoret replied, ‘But it was Marilyn Monroe.’ So I might have said as well, had you said Brigitte Bardot. But I am content you did not.” She says to the movie on the TV, “I adore this part.”

  203.

  In the movie on the TV, Jean Harlow, who’s living in the jungle with Clark Gable, climbs out of a barrel of rain water.

  “When they shot this,” the woman says, “Harlow came out of the barrel with nothing on. It was her idea. Immediately the director seized all the film so the frames of Harlow naked could be removed from the film and destroyed.”

  “I saw where Jean Harlow is buried,” says Vikar.

  “Her husband murdered her,” the woman says, “he was an associate of Irving Thalberg. He committed suicide while she was making this film. When he married Harlow he found he was impotent, perhaps he was impotent before but now he was married to the great, what would you say, sex god … sex goddess, and he was impotent. He beat her all the time and then …” she puts two fingers to her temple with her thumb as the trigger, “… boom, while she was making this picture with Gable who, bien sûr, was the great male sex god. Perhaps Harlow’s husband believed she and Gable were sleeping together. He might have said, ‘But it is Clark Gable’ … but men do not know how to think in such a way. In fact Gable and Harlow were not sleeping together at all, or not that anyone knows. She died four, five years later.”

  “How did her husband murder her if he already killed himself?”

  “He beat her so much that her kidneys failed but took years to do so, after he
was gone.” She turns to him; he’s looking at her body. She says, “Falconetti seems, what is the American? a mouthful,” and laughs at some private joke. “You could call me Maria or Renée, I believe Falconetti went by both. Or perhaps you should call me Joan,” she laughs again.

  “Not that,” he says.

  “Non, I do not think so either.” She sips her wine, “Besides I am Jewish, a bad Jewish oui but still I do not think one can be a Jewish Joan.” She says, “I saw Passion de Jeanne d’Arc only once, nine years ago … or some version of it.”

  “That’s when I saw it.”

  “It was the greatest film I’ve ever seen and I do not think I could stand to see it again.”

  “Did somebody send you?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Did somebody send you here tonight?” Of course it was Rondell; it had to have been Rondell. So Cooper Léon must have meant the older blonde.

  “Chéri, what do you suppose? I am strolling the Croisette and look up at this hotel and see a light in one window out of hundreds and say the mystery tattoo-man Vikar is up there alone and needs company?”

  “But you weren’t strolling the Croisette, you were in the lounge.”

  “Then you noticed me.”

  “Then you weren’t sent by the man I was sitting with?”

  “It is not an interesting question, and the answer is neither interesting nor difficult if you think about it. Can you imagine what it was like to actually act in a film so powerful that no one can stand to see it twice? No wonder it drove Falconetti mad, no wonder she never made anything else.”

  “Perhaps I’ll call you Maria. The actress in Last Tango in Paris and The Passenger was named Maria.”

  She ponders it a moment. “I am not so much like her. But we can call me Maria anyway.”

  202.

  She reaches over and rubs his bald head. “Monty,” she says.

  “Many people believe it’s James Dean.”

  “Pftt,” she says. Vikar has the feeling Maria says things like pftt and chéri because she believes he expects it.

  “Do you live in Cannes?” If she actually lives in Cannes, then it must have been the older blonde.

  “I live in Paris.”

  “Everyone in Cannes must know about movies.”

  She laughs. “You mean even the escorts in Cannes know about movies. Actually, not everyone in Cannes knows so much of movies, even at the festival. I know this because I meet quite a few. The young boys from the studios, the new ones, know nothing of movies, the new young producers know nothing of movies and even the actors know little of movies. I know more of movies than any of these people. The critics know something of movies, bien sûr, and the new young directors know.”

  “Have you been with famous directors?”

  “Now chéri, would you want me to tell others that I had been with you?”

  “It would be all right.”

  “That’s sweet but others might not think so.”

  He tries to look at the clock discreetly.

  “It is just past midnight,” she says. “I have been engaged as your companion until your press conference at half past nine tomorrow morning. Unless you would prefer me to leave sooner. I can leave any time you prefer. For me it is the same, the donation is the same.”

  “The donation?” Vikar says.

  “It has been taken care of.”

  “I hope it’s a good donation.”

  “Dix mille.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “Ten thousand dollars?” he says.

  “That would be very nice,” she says, “mais non. Francs.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Perhaps two thousand American dollars.”

  “That’s still a good donation.”

  Lying on the bed, she turns her head upside down to look at him sitting behind her. She says, “Are you going to ask now why I do it?”

  “Does everyone ask?”

  “Actually, almost no one asks. The question is there but not asked.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “I do it only at Cannes, once a year, because I love cinema. I am … what is the American? ‘moonlighting’? This is my sixth festival. Now why,” she says back to the TV, “would Gable give up Harlow for Mary Astor?”

  “Moonlighting?”

  “It is another life, different from my real life.”

  “Like Belle de Jour,” he says.

  “Non, not like Belle de Jour,” she says a bit impatiently. “In Belle de Jour Deneuve has no other life, that is why she sells herself to men, in order to have a life, any life, a life of the senses, a life that is not dead or suffocated. I have entirely another life.”

  “What do you do in your other life?”

  “I am, what is the American?” still watching the movie, “a barrister? … or is that British? ‘Attorney’?”

  “You’re a lawyer?”

  “A lawyer,” she nods.

  “Really?”

  “Then at the end,” she says, “Gable goes back to Harlow because he does not want to take Mary Astor away from her husband, who is his business partner, so because he does not have the heart to break her husband’s heart, he finds it easier to humiliate Mary Astor and break her heart so she will hate him and leave him. And he tells Harlow he is being noble for once and she is content with that even though he has given up Mary Astor not out of love for Harlow but out of love for his own nobility, his masculine code.”

  “Press conference?” Vikar says.

  “Gable,” she says, “should just forget the two women and fuck the partner, that is what he truly wants, that is what this film truly is about.” She says, “Certainly this is a film made by men.”

  “What press conference?”

  “At half past nine tomorrow morning.”

  “I don’t want a press conference.”

  “At the Palais in the grande salon.”

  “No.”

  “Someone will take you, it is arranged.”

  “That’s not my name, what they said tonight.”

  “Exactement. You can, what is the American? ‘set the record straight.’”

  Vikar considers this. “Set the record straight.”

  Maria rolls over and runs her hand over Vikar’s belly. “Let us set something else straight.”

  “What do you think,” Vikar blurts, “of the films of Irving Rapper?”

  “No more cinema for a few minutes, chéri.”

  “I …”

  “Chéri. I know what you want.”

  201.

  He knows where Jean Harlow is buried, or at least where they say she’s buried, but perhaps like Jayne Mansfield she’s buried somewhere else.

  Is her tomb empty then, or is someone else buried there? Is everyone who comes to Hollywood so desperate to be Jean or Jayne or Marilyn that she would accept being Jean or Jayne or Marilyn in death if she couldn’t be in life? Are the hills of Hollywood filled with the bodies of doubles, of imposters for legends? Do only dead blondes with large breasts have surrogates for their graves?

  It has to have been the older blonde, Vikar feels certain, but as Maria takes him in her mouth, irrational notions skitter across his mind like centipedes. He closes his eyes and thinks of Soledad.

  200.

  Afterward she says, “Was that what you wanted?”

  He stares at the ceiling and feels from across the balcony outside the breeze off the Mediterranean. “How did you know?”

  “It is my talent to know,” she says. She wipes her chin very precisely with one finger as she did the juice of the plum. “I like doing it that way. I prefer it to the fucking.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not. One of those things not to regard so much. It makes me sexy.”

  “You mean it makes you feel sexy?”

  “That is what I said, non?”

  “I guess.”

  “This is over now,” she says to the movie, “it
is curious. When Harlow died, you know, she was the fiancée of William Powell, who once was married to Carole Lombard, who married Gable before she died so young, like Harlow. Both men outliving their great loves who died so young. There was a second version of this film … what is the American title?”

  “Which one?”

  “This one we just watched.”

  “Red Dust.”

  “There was a second version twenty years later, with a different title, a funny title, also with Gable, twenty years older, playing the same part as in the first. Bien sûr in cinema the men get to remain young even as they are old.”

  “I saw where Carole Lombard is buried. I saw where Clark Gable is buried.”

  “Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly were in the second version, with the funny title.”

  “I don’t know where Ava Gardner is buried.”

  “She is still living.”

  “She is?”

  “She has made several bad films of late. A few years ago a big shitty earthquake film.”

  “Earthquake.”

  “Are there four women less alike?”

  “What four women?”

  “Gardner and Kelly, Harlow and Astor? Change around all those women, put them in each other’s parts, and the films would be completely different, non? Five if you count Garbo, who originally was supposed to play the Harlow part in the Red Dust, when John Gilbert was to play the Gable part, because you know Garbo and Gilbert were so popular together from the silent films. But Gable, he was the first true superstar—after cinema had sound? When he killed a man in an auto accident, the studio got someone else to, what is the American? ‘take the fall’? Directors, they make the art, but stars make culture. My country has made too much of the directors. I cannot remember in the second version if Ava Gardner plays the Harlow part and Grace Kelly the Mary Astor part, or the other way around.”

  “It’s the way you said first.”

  “What is the funny title?”