“You’ve been real white, Miss Maddy,” he said, his eyes relaxing at the waning sun. I hadn’t even begun. (Though I must admit I had no idea what the reference to my complexion meant.) “I need to thank you for this swell day.” I came prepared. He watched me as I sipped from a small covered cup I had brought with me. He might have assumed it contained something innocuous, water or lemonade. I didn’t let him know it was filled with a solution of borax and harsh peppermint oil. I was tired of too many nights of stalled fantasy. This evening I would pass the threshold. And for the passing I needed all the kissable freshness I could muster.
“Have you known many girls, Lucky?” I asked. He looked mildly shocked. This coming from a creature who could still wear pigtails, who could blame him? He looked away, his simple cogs beginning to turn. Then he looked at me with his crooked smile.
“A few. I guess.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?
“Did you know them well, Lucky? These girls?” I took another swig from my cup and noticed small strips of my throat rolled down to my silenced guts with the caustic mouthwash.
“How do you mean?” he asked as innocent as New Year’s Day. I moved closer to him. Could he feel my radiant chill? Was there some kind of promise on my face that could breech my ridiculous pug nose and full baby’s lips?
“I mean, did you know them well enough to do this?” And I removed my hand from the pocket of my skirt, where it had been nearly broiled by the heat of a chemical hand warmer. I placed it on his.
“Holdin’ hands ain’t nothin’.” He grinned. “I done that back in the school yard.”
“Did you, now?” I asked, stealing ever closer. Was he interested at last? I could feel a nervous heat spark from the top of his hand. His breathing jerked. He righted. Then he blinked and looked at me.
“How old are you, Miss Maddy? If I can ask.”
“Oh, so much older than I look.” I lifted my cooling hand up the length of his arm until it rested softly beneath his ear. I let my fingers play there on his neck, as I had imagined, as I had so many times dreamed. His eyes closed with a crush of pleasure.
“I reckon I was wrong about you remindin’ me of my baby sister,” he whispered through his loosening jaw.
“I don’t want to remind you of anyone, Lucky.” I brought my head to his shoulder, my face nuzzled there among the warm salt of his neck. Did I dare it? My tongue was let loose from behind my teeth and I noticed it made a contact of sorts. A kind of gentle stab that sent a shiver through him that sprung the muscles of his arms and crushed me instantly to his chest. His lips brushed the stiff surface of my cheek and I could feel them flutter there, tentative but burning.
“Not like that, Lucky,” I whispered.
“Well, I don’t mean no harm but your tongue’s a little cold.”
“So warm it.”
And I was on him. Our lips crushed together flatly. My tongue leaped like a buccaneer past his teeth and I could feel it roil dryly in the claimed warmth of his mouth. I forced his hand hard upon my chest. There was a galvanized flash of passion, one small but harsh leap of procreative memory in the pit of my stomach. Then nothing. The creature was still cold. The experiment had failed. I could sense him sour, feel his arms begin to falter, to slip from my shallow waist. His eyes opened in panic and then he reengaged and now there was a pressure on my ribs, a frantic push as he tried to rid himself of the rictus of my embrace. I did not feel the blow that tore my lips from his. I saw his eyes begin to wild and he coughed, rasped deeply for breath and then he puke-choked into his open hand. His eyes filled with a naked disgust I will never forget.
A cricket.
In his palm was the quivering hull of a cricket.
It must have crawled, unnoticed, up into the ledge of my hard palate. How long, I’ll never know. Lucky dry-heaved, then smeared what was left of it on the thigh of his jeans. He backed away. He said nothing. His jaw worked, his lungs even seemed willing, but nothing came out of his stunned mouth. No scream. No shriek. Just his eyes, wide, shattered, reduced to a terror so raw and enveloping I could hardly stand to look at him. But I did. I watched him as he finally swallowed. Watched as his eyes finally began to hood in revulsion and perhaps hate. Watched as his shoulders and hips relaxed in the hope that I would not follow. Watched as he turned. I even watched as he ran. The dead are playgrounds, Volker had said. We are never alone.
That night, curled in the damp filth of my box, I did not need to sense Volker to know what he would whisper down the canyons of my bones. How he would snicker at my failed lust.
You stupid girl. No wonder you chose a theater for your perch. That’s the closest you’ll ever get to a normal life. You should have accepted the invitations of the soil. Only one thing will keep your head above the stone. And that is desire. Cultivate it wrongly and you see the result. Rightly, and the worms might be cheated one more meal. I would cultivate rightly. I would never act on such an impulse again. I went back to writing Chaney, hoping work might finally seal up where my heart had been.
Then one day a package was sent to the studio with my name on it. It was the American version of Stoker’s Dracula, complete with both Deane’s and Balderston’s plays with a note: Read these and get ready. Lon.
CHAPTER 30
Chaney collected me in a modified late-model Zagelmeyer Kamper-kar, in his line-dried plaid and lace-up boots, his head sweet-smelling and still wet. A father, a suitor, a peer? He was unannounced, unplanned for, a sudden lark that demanded immediate accord. I had no trouble getting the time off from my duties at the studio. Junior thought this was all part of my plan.
“I can’t work in the city,” Chaney said on an intake of his cigarette. “We’ll rough it for a night at my cabin in Big Bear and then maybe a week in this heap. Have you been to the mountains around here? Just breathtaking.”
I didn’t answer. I felt the stares of the secretaries as I hoisted myself into the passenger seat. For a man who’d made his living on appearances, he had no sensitivity for how things looked. The whispers rose around his cheeks like gnats and he simply ignored them.
“You think this is all right?” I asked, regretting it the second it came out of my mouth.
“Hey,” he said, splitting his face into a smile. “We’re just pals, ain’t we?”
The drive was beautiful, cradled with dense evergreens and flowering brush, and I felt the lull, the tug of the dirt that sped past my window. But he was somehow a talisman against all that. Or was it my desire to succeed well cultivated at last? He had packed a small lunch, some cold cuts and fist-size apples, but offered me nothing. He knew I would refuse. And there was an almost unbearable intimacy in his knowing this.
“What’s your take on the book?” he asked, watching the road, not me. “You said in your letters you might have some ideas about the material.”
I looked at him blankly.
“That’s why I sent you the book and stuff, kid. You okay, Maddy?”
I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to make myself indispensable to him, how I was to fulfill my unwritten contract with Junior. I thought maybe I would take the same tack I had with The Toymaker, come up with shots and bits of business that might actually make it work. I wasn’t sure if he would take me seriously, if he knew what every director knew: that words were just a blueprint for a picture and every director must be second kin to the pencil and the hammer. My ideas for Dracula hadn’t come easy. Not like the sharp and sinuous vomit I had experienced with Volker. There were many nights in my perch above the killing floor of Stage 28 where the pages had refused my concentrated forays, had remained stiff and prim and immutable as I tried to seduce them into cinematic repose. It had been a seduction of the dark in the dark with little to recommend the silent romance but the confused congress of words and whispers. I liked the book but had my issues with it. However, I wasn’t sure how he felt about it, so I was gentle, almost casual when I said, “The epistolary format will be a challenge.” He raise
d his eyebrows and laughed.
“The what?”
“The letters,” I corrected. “The fact that the book is composed of letters, correspondence, is difficult to adapt.” I scrambled to sound like I knew what I was talking about. “I assume you’ll be sparing with the dramatic versions you sent me.”
“You see me duded up like some half-baked headwaiter?”
I smiled.
“I want the essence of the book,” he said. “The action. Take it out of the drawing room, off the damn stage.”
“Who’ll be doing the adaptation?”
“You think I brought you up here for your conversation, kid?”
“Me?”
“Who else? I’ve seen your pictures.” (Plural? Had he seen Zipper?) “You understand how to get those scares under the skin.”
It was that simple. His faith in me had become founded with little more than his instinct.
“The first thing I’d change is Renfield,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster.
“You think a dame should play him?”
“I don’t think anybody should play him. I think he should get the air.”
“The air? Listen to you. Real American, huh? Why axe old Renfield?”
“He dilutes the basic tension, I think.”
“Which is?”
“Incestuous sex, yes?”
“Hey, hold on. Incestuous?” He looked to me. “I thought this was just a two-reel dark ride with a little fluid exchange.”
“You are serious?” All my reticence seemed to evaporate. I was back in Germany, back in Zann’s hot little office fighting for my reason to exist. “He is a tragic creature of appetite, an aristocrat of the Other.”
“Why tragic?”
“He can desire mortal women but he can only love those he sires. In effect he gives birth to his own sex partners. You understand? He can only love his own daughters. Hence, incest.”
“Censors are gonna love this.”
“He is a creature constantly running, consistently hiding, shunned, hated, misunderstood and yet deeply desired. He is confounded by an earthly existence to such a degree that night becomes his day. He has confused sustenance with intimacy or perhaps he is the first to truly define the nature of intimacy. He is part god, part ghoul, living only half a life—a life that will never cease and thus never culminate into the only thing he truly desires.”
“And what’s that?”
“Release.”
“Well, sweet Jesus, if you haven’t done your homework.”
“Too much?”
“There’s more?” He chuckled. I felt his eyes on me then, and I willed some color to my face. “I’ll need a treatment by the time we leave,” he said. “Wait’ll you see the makeup I have planned for the son of a bitch.” And we continued to drive.
His cabin in the woods was an idyllic thing. Made of stone and shingle, it had a set of comfortably sagging wood steps that led up to a wraparound porch. It seemed the product of age, of weather and long talks. But upon careful inspection I saw the seams. The steps had been cut at ingenious compound angles to simulate wear. The porch, equally guilty of the set-shop touch, had even been aged with careful dry brushes of blue and gray. The inside seemed modest enough, a single room of raw wood paneling with a river-stone fireplace. An enormous tin bathtub supported a pine plank top that doubled as the only vertical surface apart from an iron bed. Four mismatched chairs were easy to dismiss as dimly practical until one assessed the masterful carving at the headrests. A zinc-lined water heater hid behind a sliding panel, a luxury even in fine homes at the time, and a telephone hid coyly behind the wicker of a carefully aged creel. It was a set. An environment designed to evoke rustic calm as quickly as a shot of nicotine. But cigarettes were far too urban a protuberance for him when he came here and were replaced with a cherrywood pipe that he stuffed, tamped, and lit even as I was coming through the heavy front door.
“Drop your gear anywhere,” he said as he shoved the pine tabletop to the floor and opened a steaming tap that filled the tub in mere minutes. “You don’t mind if I wash up.”
Not a question. Not even a request. He had his clothes peeled and in crumples around him before I could answer.
He stood there in two flavors, naked, tanned to the throat and elbows and pale everywhere else, one of those two-toned orange Creamsicles in the shape of a man. His lack of modesty could have been an affront, should have been. Was I so sexless as to not even merit a blush?
“Hand me that mug and brush, would ya?”
He lathered his jaws and lip, sinking into the steaming water, exhaling liquored smoke, gaily carrying out the duties of his toilet without so much as a glance in my direction.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said on the way up here, about the count seeking release.” A drag on his pipe, then the rasp of his straight razor down the slope of one horsey jaw, “and that’s there in spades. But we can’t play down the sex angle, the gothic romance, the effect he has on the two girls. His kiss, the bite he puts on them, must be almost a benediction, a sacred rite.”
“Blood of my blood. Flesh of my flesh,” I said, quoting the book (and the Bible) to the best of my recollection.
“Exactly. A sexual Eucharist. Hand me that towel. The last rites and the transubstantiation all in one go.”
“Hays will get the church groups circling the wagons.”
“Hays won’t know what hit him. He’ll be squinting so hard to see our ingenue’s nipples he won’t even notice the blasphemy. Let me get this fire going.”
He was in a plaid flannel robe now, the color up in his cheeks from the hot water, his feet leaving winking puddles on the broad planks of the floor. The fire caught with a single match. More Hollywood magic? And he reached for his portfolio, the stem of his pipe rattling cold in his teeth.
“I want to show you this makeup I’ve been working out, see what you think.”
Imagine a well-lubricated machine, so perfectly calibrated to its function of reproducing the grotesque, the tiny cunning details of the discarded and the damned that even nature might balk at its veracity. And this glorious engine wants your opinion. It was too much to hope for. Then I thought of Laemmle. My ridiculous mission.
“So Metro has the r-rights?” I stuttered. “Because last I heard . . .”
He paused to light his bowl.
“What have you heard?”
“Nothing. I just thought the rights were still up for grabs. Uncle Carl . . .”
“Uncle Carl is in for a mighty rude awakening, honey. I signed the contract last week. Dracula is officially a Metro super jewel.”
So I had failed. I had convinced him of nothing. In fact, in agreeing to write the treatment for him, I was the one who would be defecting. But I couldn’t languish in another failure. I was too happy. Have you ever sat in a room with the genuinely imbued? Have you felt the sea change as his vision atomizes, rises, and begins to shift the cogs of his heating brain? Where is loyalty when history, real artistry, stares back in shaded black crayon?
He was a meticulous draughtsman, as a few remaining sketches of his can attest to. And there before me was the face of the count, exactly as Stoker had described him: an older man, made a night creature well past his boyhood, seemingly against his will, feral, tentative, the nervous glint of the predator, the reluctant glance of the executioner. Long graying hair, wild and matted as raw hemp. A heavy mustache. The tips of two sharp teeth making gentle divots in the meat of his lower lip.
“The teeth are problematic, I’ll admit,” he mumbled. “They have to be plausible but can’t override the sexuality. Murnau got it right with Schreck’s ratty look but a mug like that won’t make the Pacoima housewives swoon. Go with the canines, it’s too wide a splay. The jugular would open up like a fireplug. Go with the lateral incisors, you have practicality on your side but the look is a little front heavy.”
He thought everything through like this.
“Maybe he carries a sma
ll knife,” I suggested.
“Stoker is clear about his sharp teeth.”
“Stoker didn’t make pictures.”
He smiled at this and I reminded myself to blink. “So you think no teeth?”
“I think,” and I must admit I paused for dramatic effect, “I think teeth. But only just before we see him bite. In normal conversation, he has teeth like anyone else. But before he bites . . .”
“They grow. Like little dental erections.”
“Sorry?”
“Jesus. What am I saying? You’re too young for that. But your idea is terrific. A face like a Swiss Army knife.”
“Perhaps he gets younger after he feeds,” I offered.
“And he ages when hungry. His appearance will clue the action. That’s a girl. Let me show you the harness I rigged up for the wall-climbing scene.”
And it went on like that all night, a steady precipitation of details misting up the windows of that close little cabin. The count would not wear evening clothes. He would be arraigned in all black, his version of tiger stripes in his hunting grounds of ever-night. He would have an accent but only a slight one, a taint, not readily placed. His sexuality would be tethered to the animal, not the manners of the drawing room. His hands must be clean, no fur like in the novel, but the nails could be long, well manicured, slightly effeminate, but dangerous. He would wear a heavy cloak, not a cape. He must struggle with the social graces, with the expectations of his moneyed prey. He would look only the women directly in the eye. But the most startling discovery I made that night was his plan for the wolf transformation. Chaney wanted to show it, show the count transmogrify before the slack jaws of the audience into the black wolf of the novel. Half a decade before Henry Hull would awkwardly launch the virgin effort of this effect in Werewolf of London, Chaney had planned a seamless twenty-six-stage progression that would rival his already impressive accomplishments. He had even discovered yak hair as the medium of choice. It was the same stop-motion build we had used when the creature grows flesh in The Toymaker. But I said nothing. I was so excited, so enamored of working again I didn’t care if he believed the idea had all been his.
Only the Dead Know Burbank Page 17
