Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  Vikar goes to see a new movie by Buñuel. It’s a remake of Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman and takes place near Soledad’s hometown of Seville. At first Vikar believes the movie is about a middle-aged widower in love with two women who share the same name, until he realizes, halfway through, that in fact two different actresses are playing one and the same woman. Buñuel knows about the profiles, Vikar realizes. He has taken it farther than anyone, actually showing each profile as played by an entirely different person. In one incarnation the woman dances flamenco, as Soledad did when she was a small girl.

  188.

  He doesn’t install a telephone, as much by design as indifference. “Give Dot a call sometime,” Vikar hears Viking Man in his sleep one night, and when he wakes, he knows it’s too late.

  187.

  “All of us are too fucking late, vicar,” Viking Man says quietly, a week later, “once someone is gone.” Subdued, he smokes his cigar in the bar of the Hyatt on the Strip below Vikar’s house, across from the Sunset Tower where Vikar used to look for a light in George Stevens’ window. The two sit at a small round corner cocktail table as young girls flit around in tiny cellophane dresses waiting for rock stars to appear. “Who thinks he did all he could, once someone is gone?”

  “I should have called,” Vikar says.

  A shot of Cuervo Gold sits on the small cocktail table before Viking Man. Vikar drinks a vodka tonic like Dotty first ordered for him at Nickodell’s. “You see the thing that ran in Variety?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not much,” says Viking Man. “It’s a cliché to say it doesn’t seem like much of a life when it comes down to an inch and a half in Variety, but that’s more than most of us get.” He puts out the cigar. “I mean, she worked on A Place in the Sun. Never was a George Stevens man myself, but still.”

  186.

  Vikar says, “I didn’t understand about the note.” Viking Man doesn’t answer. “The part in Variety about the note.”

  Viking Man nods.

  “Did you understand about the note?”

  “Well, vicar,” says Viking Man and stops, suspended for a moment, “just briefly, as a matter of fact, I saw the note, such as it was. Barely a note at all, really, some half-baked haiku on a cocktail napkin about sore throats and broken hearts—isn’t it just like Dot to leave a ‘suicide note’ on a cocktail napkin, to be read in a bar?”

  “She was in love with an actor once.”

  “Whose daughter died of strep … yeah, I know that story. That poor bastard had a shitstorm of a life, his last five or six years. The fucking patron saint of Hollywood martyrs.”

  “God kills children in many ways,” says Vikar.

  “She wasn’t a child.”

  “I meant the little girl with the sore throat.”

  “Does not caring if you wake up the next morning constitute suicide?”

  “Sometimes God has help. A mother leaves her daughter in a car.”

  “Vicar, are we having the same conversation?”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Hollywood Memorial, there behind Paramount. I tried to get word to you.”

  “I know. I don’t have a telephone.”

  “That constitutes aberrant behavior in Hollywood. They take away your Hollywood passport if you don’t have a telephone.”

  “Cecil B. De Mille is buried there. Jayne Mansfield.” Vikar says, “I believe I may have killed a man there once.”

  “Did this homicidal spree take place recently?”

  “Three or four years ago. Perhaps five.”

  “Jayne Mansfield isn’t buried there. She has a tombstone there, but she’s buried in Pennsylvania.”

  “I’m from Pennsylvania.”

  “I see your movie opens next week.”

  “It’s not really my movie.”

  “I gather the DGA sorted out the credit. Friedkin must have had an aneurysm,” Viking Man chortles. “You going to direct that French novel of yours?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You might make more headway with a telephone. Just tempestuous wild-hair-up-the-ass speculation on my part.”

  “It’s about God’s greatest disciple, the right hand of Joan of Arc.”

  “I imagine Hollywood gets a hard-on thinking about that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought Siamese-twin sisters,” shrugs Viking Man, “was the stupidest idea in the history of cinema, so what do I know? But I would move if it’s something you want to do, vicar. Get yourself a phone and then get yourself an agent. Because it’s all changing, and not in our favor. We’ve run it into the ground. That egomaniacal wop in the Philippines is spending thirty million or whatever it is on a Vietnam movie no one understands, and that includes me and I wrote the bastard, or thought I did, with all apologies to Conrad, and you have that hermaphrodite up in Montana trying to follow up his Vietnam movie with some prairie Gone With the Wind or whatever it is he thinks he’s making. Oil companies own the studios now, vicar. Schmuck though Louis B. Mayer may have been, he knew the difference between movies and unleaded.”

  “If God makes us bury our children,” says Vikar, “who makes us bury our parents?”

  “We do that on our own.”

  185.

  Seen from the bus, the shimmering black limos on La Cienega reflect the city as pieces of a jigsaw night rearranging themselves. I am the passenger, the radio plays, I ride and I ride, and it isn’t the soundtrack for an Antonioni movie but Vikar’s life, and he doesn’t even know it’s by the same man who sang the song about the dog.

  184.

  In the waning days of winter, Vikar sits on the top floor of his house watching a serviceman install a telephone on his kitchen wall, next to a cork bulletin board. The man finishes, walks out the front door, and ninety seconds later the phone rings. Vikar runs after the serviceman to take the phone out, just as the truck is pulling away.

  The truck disappears down the road that eventually empties onto Sunset Boulevard in one direction and Laurel Canyon in the other. Vikar watches it the whole way and then walks back into the house where the ringing has stopped. He looks at the phone and it begins ringing again.

  183.

  He picks up the phone on the ninth ring. “Hello.”

  “Hello?” The woman on the other end is about to hang up.

  “Yes.”

  “Is this Mr. Vikar Jerome?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Jerome, my name is Molly Fairbanks. How are you?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “May I call you Vikar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vikar, I’m with Creative Artists.” Vikar doesn’t say anything. “CAA. We’re a talent agency. Have you heard of us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She laughs. “Well, we’re still a little new, but we’re doing very well. Do you have a moment to talk?”

  “All right.”

  “Congratulations, first of all.”

  “Thank you.” He says, “For what?”

  There’s a pause. “The nomination.”

  “Oh. Thank you,” Vikar says. “What nomination?”

  “This is Vikar Jerome the motion-picture editor, is that correct?”

  “I’ve edited motion pictures.”

  “You edited Your Pale Blue Eyes, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been answering your phone, Vikar? Or read any newspapers?”

  “I just got the phone.”

  “You mean you just had a telephone installed?”

  “Yes.”

  “You just had a telephone installed this morning?”

  “I couldn’t catch the phone man as he was driving away. I would have had him take it out, if I could have caught him.”

  “Have you heard of the Academy Awards?”

  “Of course.”

  “The nominations were yesterday.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your picture received two, in
cluding for editing.” She says, “That’s you.”

  “Oh.” He says, “Will they make me go like they made me go to Cannes?”

  “Did you like Cannes?”

  “No. But I met a nice woman who knew a lot about cinema.”

  “I see.”

  “I believe she wasn’t the woman who used to be a man. She knew what I wanted.”

  There’s another pause. “I see. Do you want to go to the Academy Awards?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, I think you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “They might try to make me.”

  “Would you be relieved or disappointed if I told you that you probably won’t win?”

  “Relieved.”

  “Well, there you are. But as I understand it, there’s a project you’ve been wanting to direct, and if that’s the case, then this is a good time to pursue that.”

  “The company hasn’t called me.”

  “Well, they’ve been going through some changes.”

  “I haven’t had a telephone, either.”

  “There’s that as well.”

  “Perhaps the company doesn’t want to make the movie.”

  “They may be more interested, Vikar, if other studios are interested. Studios tend to be like that. Also, these days distributors are trying to figure out just how involved they want to be on the production side of things. The business has gotten a little unsettled the last few years.” That was a word, “unsettled,” that Rondell used. “But as to this project, I believe you had some sort of informal understanding with UA, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Normally, informal understandings don’t mean a great deal in this business. But you’ve just been nominated for the Academy Award.”

  “I probably won’t win.”

  “No, but the nomination is not a small thing and there’s a general feeling that, if not for you, UA might not have had a releasable picture, let alone an Academy Award nominee.”

  “They booed in Cannes.”

  “I know, and the reviews here were a little mixed too, but the good reviews were very good, and strange as it may sound, being booed at Cannes is not always bad, if you’re booed for the right reasons. Or maybe I mean the wrong reasons. Sometimes when people don’t like a picture for the right reasons, it makes other people want to see the picture, and studios appreciate that. They booed L’Avventura at Cannes, too.”

  Vikar likes the way she talks. She sounds young and friendly, and he completely understands everything she says. He wonders if she’s related to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. “I completely understand everything you say.”

  “I don’t want to press you, but I can make inquiries for you among the various studios and production companies and represent you in trying to get this off the ground.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I would go to UA first and to Mitch Rondell, who’s started his own independent company and is no longer working for UA in the same capacity, although they maintain a partnership.”

  “It sounds confusing,” Vikar says.

  “He’s in L.A. now.”

  “Is he on vacation?”

  “He’s living with someone and has moved his work here.”

  “I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Your situation with the telephone, maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  She says, “I’m sure he would have called otherwise.”

  182.

  We bury our parents on our own, said Viking Man, and one afternoon Vikar picks up the telephone and dials the entire number and doesn’t hang up until it rings on the other end. He has no idea if his father or mother are alive or dead. He puts the phone back before anyone answers. This is why I should have the phone taken out.

  He came to Los Angeles as a Traveler hurtling through space toward infinity, vestiges of childhood falling away like dimensions.

  One morning he walks down the hill to Sunset and takes the bus heading west. It continues along the boulevard through Beverly Hills to UCLA. Vikar crosses the street and through the film school and into the Structure Garden; slightly overwhelmed, he finally stumbles into the campus art gallery which directs him elsewhere. For an hour he wanders from one school to the other until he winds up in a large flat black building everyone calls the Waffle that looks more to Vikar like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, except bigger and with windows. On the eighth floor is the School for the Study of Biblical Languages.

  181.

  The man in the office behind the desk doesn’t look like a professor of Biblical languages. He’s in his early forties and wears a black T-shirt and his head is shaved; looking at Vikar, he says, “I have to get me one of those.”

  Vikar puts his hand on his head like he does sometimes, as if he’s just finding it. “Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift,” he nods, “A Place in the Sun. Are you Professor Cohen?”

  “Cohn, without the e.”

  “I’m Vikar, with a k.”

  “Vikar with a k,” he says, putting things in a briefcase, “what can I do for you?”

  Vikar takes from his back pocket a piece of paper and unfolds it on the desk.

  180.

  Standing up behind the desk, the professor looks at the paper and frowns. “May I?” he says, picking it up and examining it more closely. “Can I ask where you got this?”

  “I would rather not tell you yet,” Vikar says. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t. It just would help me to know where you got it.”

  “I don’t believe it would help you. Do you know what it says?”

  “Not really. It’s a kind of Hebraic.”

  “Does that mean it’s Hebrew?”

  “Yeah …” The professor sits back down in his chair still looking at the piece of paper from the Carlton Hotel. “It’s like, there’s Chaucer’s English and late twentieth-century American English. They’re the same language but they’re not.”

  “So, it’s an old language.”

  “It’s a very old language, maybe pre-Aramaic. Carrying out the analogy, it’s not Chaucer, it’s, I don’t know, early Celtic Dark Ages, for all I know about the Celtic Dark Ages, which should teach me not to make analogies. It may be the oldest form of Hebraic I’ve seen, but at this point I can’t even be sure about that. Can you leave it with me?” Vikar hesitates. “Let me make a xerox.”

  “All right.”

  Making the xerox, the professor examines Vikar’s head again. “What movie did you say again?”

  “A Place in the Sun.”

  He nods and rubs his own head. “I’m thinking maybe Dylan in Don’t Look Back.”

  179.

  Your Pale Blue Eyes loses the Academy Award for editing. Vikar regrets not attending when he learns the presenter—though he would not have been the one presented to—is Kim Novak, with whom he cheated on Elizabeth Taylor long ago.

  178.

  Variety, May 25, 1979: “NEW YORK—Following protracted negotiations, Mirron Productions has signed Academy Award-nominated editor Vikar Jerome to direct God’s Worst Nightmare, based on the 19th-century French novel Là-Bas, for possible release in fall 1980 by United Artists.

  “Jerome received an Oscar nod this year for his work on UA’s Your Pale Blue Eyes, under the supervision of Mitchell Rondell, who recently left his position as a production executive at UA to launch Mirron. Insiders say the budget of God’s Worst Nightmare has been set at $3.75 million, with the stipulation that a lead with box-office draw is attached.

  “‘At that cost,’ says one unnamed participant in brokering the deal, ‘which may not be blockbuster but isn’t paltry for a feature by a first-time director, UA must be planning to spend close to a million on a star—maybe not a Redford or Eastwood or Nicholson, who are out of that price range, but someone of the next rank.’ Names mentioned include Robert De Niro, Richard Dreyfuss and Kris Kristofferson (provided a speedy completion of UA’s Heaven’s
Gate, which began shooting in Montana last month).

  “Written by Belgian author J. K. Huysmans, Là-Bas (Down There) is the story of a writer who becomes obsessed with the possibly historical figure of Gilles de Rais, a trusted lieutenant of Joan of Arc who may have massacred hundreds or even thousands of children. Over the course of the writer’s investigations, he becomes involved with a mysterious, perhaps demonic woman. It’s not clear whether Huysmans’ story will be updated for God’s Worst Nightmare or remain a period piece.

  “Mirron’s announcement is taking some by surprise in the industry, where there are concerns about the experience and even stability of the untested director, particularly following behavior at last year’s Cannes festival—where Your Pale Blue Eyes received a special jury award—that varying reports characterized as ‘unhinged’ and ‘retarded.’

  “Responds Molly Fairbanks, Jerome’s agent at CAA: ‘Everyone understands Vikar Jerome is an unusual individual but also an original, perhaps singular talent.’ Denying rumors that Mirron and UA resisted the deal until other companies such as the newly formed Orion indicated interest, Rondell personally issued a statement expressing ‘extraordinary enthusiasm and passion’ for the project and calling Jerome ‘potentially the most interesting American director since Scorsese, if not Welles.’ When contacted about Jerome’s alleged eccentricities, Rondell answered, ‘We’ll make them work for us.’

  “Rondell offered no comment on widely circulating stories of contingency plans that include a back-up director such as Alan Pakula, William Friedkin or John Milius.”

  177.

  From the windows on the top level of his house, he believes he sees her on the hillside below. The first time, she’s near the bottom where the road that eventually leads to him begins to wind its way upward. He believes he sees her standing there looking up and then the next moment she’s gone; the next time he sees her, at dusk several days later, she’s moved up the hill but stands motionless as before. It’s like Last Year at Marienbad where people are statues on a vast terrace, except Soledad plays all the statues, posed against chaparral. Each time Vikar believes he sees her, she moves up the hill a little further, advancing in frozen Marienbad poses.