by Jacob Rubin
The lot recalled the backstage of the Communiqué—labyrinthine and black, but blown up to a grotesque size, a backstage swollen to monstrous dimensions so that the actual site of filming, the purported reason for our being there, shrank to a contested detail. Encircled by craning lights, the set provided the sole zone of illumination, like an unexpected fire deep inside a cave. I hurried toward it.
Normally, I would have taken my time. From Bernard I had learned the art of arrival, but the suit, a heavy wool number, broad in the shoulders, ruined it all.
I thought it would be like the screen test. That day, a thin, long-striding man had handed me a sheet of paper with typed lines of dialogue. One line said, “Now you’re gonna listen to me.” Another: “I’m afraid it’s a little more complicated than that.” I did it all like Bernard, that is to say, as if pushed by the presence of others into an even greater interiority. Soon the picture was under way: Everyman, a spy film about Harry Knott, a master of disguise who through the course of the picture impersonates a slew of characters, among them a Russian diplomat and a British tycoon, to root out a Communist mole inside the government.
But on this, the first day of shooting, I was made to wear this new, double-breasted suit. Then the director ambushed me in the dressing room to discuss my character, Harry, and how he would act “when he’s himself.” I had thought it was agreed that I would just do Bernard, but the director, an excitable and lanky man with a feral rim of red hair around his otherwise bald head, seemed to have other plans. “Don’t use too much wind,” he said. “Not too much wind. He feels something underneath.”
At the set itself I was besieged by attention. The actor Sterling Smith roughhoused my hand, while a chatty makeup artist dabbed my nose. In no time, a long, black microphone materialized inches from my face while someone unseen ordered me to say the words “pepper” and “baby bubble bath,” a pair of disembodied hands straightening the shoulders of the suit. “Pepper,” I said. “Baby bubble bath.” Bernard paced by the police commissioner’s desk. “Looking a bit pale,” Max said, though I couldn’t see his face in the harsh white light.
He sounded worried, as he often did out west. At every opportunity, he encouraged a return to the City, to the stage. Yet it was hard to take these suggestions seriously, as he was so out of place in Fantasma Falls. Months before, we had attended a party at a producer’s house above the canyons. Guests (the men in bathing trunks, the women bikinis) draped themselves on deck chairs in postures submissive to the sun. In these loungers’ hands every task, whether easing onto a bar stool or waist-deep into the pool, was studiously bleached of pace, a slowness like that of bank tellers in cinematic robberies, who, warned against sudden movements, open the cash register with grinding care.
Among these sun people, Max stuck out, to say the least, wearing a straw hat, knee-length bathing suit, and flip-flops over dress socks. Several times and with no clear destination, he circled the pool, stopping briefly to squat on the end of a deck chair and then rising again to pace along the deep end. At some point in these circumnavigations, he kicked over two martini glasses, then righted them anxiously before speeding back to the pool house, from which he did not emerge for several hours. The whole thing was so strange I later imitated his look (as if the sun were a grandmother pinching his cheek) for Frankie and Lou by the car. With time, it even became a private joke. “Do the body again,” they’d say. That’s what we called him: “the body,” shouting, sweating, bumping into things.
“Just fine,” I managed to say.
The director appeared. “You know, as long as it seems natural and right,” he was probably saying, given the way he casually waved his hand and then docked it in his trousers’ pocket. After one final piece of advice, or a warning, he saluted me and stepped off into the surrounding dark. There was a grating sound, like a giant fishhook scraping the floor. Then quiet.
“Giovanni, door!”
I was meant to go back out through the door in order to reenter. I walked out of the door as well as I could. I could not feel my hands or feet.
“Action!” the director shouted.
I walked through the door into the fake office.
“Harry Knott,” the actor said to me in a put-on voice. “That right?” He rested his fists on the desk, apelike. The fake window behind him looked out on absolute darkness. Once you stood in the set, a life-size diorama of a police commissioner’s office, you could see only the set. It was like being trapped inside a window display.
“That right?” he said again.
I was supposed to say, “That’s me.”
“Cut! Everything okay? Try it again,” the director might have said. It had the rhythm of something like that.
I walked out again, no blood in my hands.
“Action! Giovanni? Giovanni—”
• • •
Later I looked down at the set, maybe twenty feet below, where the director kicked imaginary stones. “Okay, you’ll be okay,” a voice above me said. Max, I saw. It seemed I was lying limply in his arms, being transported up a set of cast-iron stairs. Bernard was ahead of us.
I was brought up several flights to a door. Bernard opened it, and Max followed. Inside was a high-ceilinged office, the size of a warehouse. A desk occupied the center of the room where Nathan, of all people, held a preposterous leg of lamb to his mouth, like a piccolo. On both sides of the desk, many men, perhaps twenty in all, stood in the same wool suit, fixing their eyes on me with the incomprehension of animals.
Max laid me on the low couch opposite them.
“Victim Two in Perfume of Shangri-La?” a man with horn-rimmed glasses asked.
“No, no, he’s the, uh, bookkeeper in Diamonds One,” answered a stooped man with flaking skin.
“The kid’s sick!” a third said.
In no time, the word sick carried across the room.
There was a pop. A musket. The neigh of a horse. A light cast the men in bloodred. Out of instinct I searched for Bernard, who had established himself behind Nathan’s desk. He’d crossed his arms and kicked up his foot, resting it against the window in the posture of a fierce, appraising woman at a cocktail party.
“What’s going on here, Bernie?” Nathan asked, not taking his eyes off me.
The door opened and in shuffled Frankie and Lou.
“He fainted.” Bernard took his time. “Not an actor, it seems.”
“A movie star who doesn’t act is the kind of riddle a man in my position can’t much afford to contemplate,” Nathan said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin imprecisely before embarking upon another bite of the lamb.
Again a lurid red blanketed the studio boss and the men, and Bernard, too. I understood. The wall behind me was no wall at all, but the back of a movie screen. We were somehow behind it. A voice shrieked, “Mince ’em—to the bone!”
“The boy belongs on a stage,” Max said, pacing along the far wall. “As the man who discovered him, I think I’m entitled to some views on the subject.”
“Do us a favor, Max,” Bernard said. “If you find your mouth is beginning to open, close it, please.”
“Break ’em!” the screen shouted. “To bones!”
Suddenly, my mind was full of Lucy’s apartment, its warmth in the winter, when the radiator clanged by the soft land of her bed. The couch of Sea View, too, where Mama might have been sitting that very instant, and how greatly I wished to sit on her lap, in the light of the lamp.
“A movie star’s the dictionary definition of a man,” Nathan said. “This looks like a dog to me. I took a risk on this kid.”
“Mince ’em!”
“He doesn’t have to act,” Bernard said and, with the usual ecstasy of self-control, sauntered over to the side table. There he poured a glass of water and slowly fished something out of his pocket. The men watched Bernard as he decanted the carafe and set it on the bar. He approached me w
ith an extended hand. In his palm lay a green pill.
For the record, I did picture pushing his hand away. I pictured fleeing down the stairs, through the set, out past the lot café where the long-necked women in floppy hats were having their ginger ales; I pictured running past the gate of the studio, past the boulevard to the howl of the interstate, where I would hail a car that would carry me east, back to the City, perhaps, to the Communiqué, where I would step onstage, where I would pick out the first available volunteer, whoever it was, or even venture farther north, to Sea View, and knock on Mama’s door, but in what suit would I knock? I wondered as I swallowed the pill and was led, by Bernard, to a nearby closet, where I changed back into my outfit, that is, one identical to his, at which point the thought of escape seemed so ridiculous I couldn’t believe I’d considered it at all.
Upon my reentering the room, the men’s expressions shifted subtly but decisively, like figures in a famous painting captured, as indelibly, moments after breaking their pose. Some cocked their heads. Others straightened their backs. I lit a cig, bathed in the blue of the screen.
Bernard said, “I present you Harry Knott, international spy.”
“Now why didn’t we think of that earlier?” asked Nathan with a smile, his plate finished.
• • •
Mama and I resumed our correspondence some weeks before the completion of filming. That day I had been running late, heading out of my bungalow at the Chateau Ravine, a hotel set in a small hill veiled by Jurassic vegetation. I jogged briefly to the town car in which Bernard, Frankie, and Lou waited for me. Yet Bernard was never one to jog, and that harried pace seemed to stick to me, like a bad thought, once I’d slipped into the backseat. As we drove along, Frankie told a joke about a black man, and Lou laughed very hard, and I had a strange premonition that these men were ferrying me to some abandoned lot, though I only smiled at the billboards.
That night I wrote to Mama. To my shock, I was able to construct myself on the page.
SEPTEMBER 10
I’m sorry not to have written, Mama. I’m sure you know the story from Max—the movie we’re making and all of it. I had a very bad day the first time but otherwise I’m doing well. It is of the utmost importance that I achieve my own person, and this seems to be the way. I grew tired of the Communiqué, of all those volunteers tugging at my sleeve and having to be the man they expected of me. I know you don’t care for Bernard, but he is the most unrequiring person I’ve ever met. If anyone was born for the silent life, it is your son, who has much rock inside him. The world, if it likes, can beat against the rock and make the sound of itself. Please feel free to write. But I think it’s best if, for now, you don’t visit. Everything I do is for you, Mama.
She wrote back.
SEPTEMBER 16
My Giovanni,
All of it makes me sick, and yes, Max has been giving me sly little updates on all that you’re doing. I’ve been thinking about this Bernard business. I was thinking of when you were a child: Do you remember the day you learned about the guards who stood outside the royal palace all day and never moved once? Remember, they showed you in school? You loved these palace men who barely ever blinked, even with thousands of visitors passing right in front of their eyes, and you decided one day that you were going to be one of these guards. Do you remember, Giovanni? “I was born to be a guard,” you told me. And you stood still for a long time. You were looking out into the distance just as if the queen were behind you! You did it late into the night, but in the morning I woke up and heard the news report going full blast on the radio. It had come on, and you were mimicking it. I said, “I thought you were born to be a guard?” and you said, “I was wrong.” Well, it’s true—you are not a guard. Remember, there is so much more for you to be in life. I will keep my distance, for now, I’ll agree to that, but you must, must write me back.
M
I did, keeping these exchanges secret from Bernard, who would have disapproved, I knew. Yet, he shouldn’t have, for these letters, if anything, helped sustain my imitation of him, providing a release, an imaginary realm in which I could once again sound like Giovanni. The two (writing like Giovanni, living like Bernard) aided each other, in fact, as a periscope allows a submarine to dart along, unseen, unharmed. And through this correspondence, all my new adventures, the characters I met, were soon layered with a second, deferred pleasure: that of imagining how I would describe them in my letters to Mama.
So it was the night of the premiere.
Years before a two-hundred-yard desert was built on the Monument lot to satisfy the director Arnold Tolstoy, a by-all-accounts impossible man who considered the set a necessity for the filming of The Raj, the three-hour epic that was to make his name. As Tolstoy had just made a killing for Monument Pictures with The Impossible Tower, the studio heads happily met his request. Over a period of months, the trucks passed day and night, hauling in two-ton bags of sand marked by the hues (Persian khaki, oasis yellow) Tolstoy felt necessary to achieve what he called a “heightened verisimilitude” of the Arabian expanse. Union carpenters spent months shaping dunes of pleasing composition and plausible distance. An elaborate lighting system was installed to simulate the passage of the desert sun, and its absence, which meant the stringing up of a vast black tarp wired with a new kind of scattered electrical light. In the last weeks, hundreds of scarabs were set loose in the sand. When The Raj bombed, ending Tolstoy’s career, many wondered what would become of the lot. But Monument Pictures honored scale above all, whether in catastrophe or triumph, and elected to maintain the Desert as an all-purpose venue for parties and premieres. It was there they held the event for Everyman.
The picture had premiered earlier that night at the Broken Temple, a theater on Last Hour Boulevard built to seem a half-century old. Monument Pictures had secured the attendance of its best actors and actresses as well as other capering types: elegant figures, mainly, whom I didn’t recognize but who carried themselves with the brisk, supple air of the broadly known. They chatted and reached across the soft-cushioned rows to shake a hand or blow a kiss; some saluted far-off acquaintances or performed some snappy task in their handbags before turning, at the cue of the dimming lights, to take their seats, hiking up their pant legs or sliding their hands cleanly under the seat of their dresses. The theater went dark. A lively silence. I sat, alert as a rabbit, in the opera box with Bernard, Max, Frankie, Lou, and Ms. Julie Dark, the hired woman from the Jade House and my companion for the evening.
Since my first trip with Bernard, I had returned to the Jade House several times, beginning to understand it more. Ms. Dark, I saw, was an exquisitely attuned performer. She could read in the way a man smoked his cigarette a desire to be punched playfully on the arm or petted on the shoulder. In a moment she could switch from carnivorous desire to motherly concern, and even, at times, performed a sort of under-self, in which costume she would, in the longueurs of the late evening, divulge heartrending details about her brother Dennis and his long struggle with leukemia. Not very much of it was convincing, but it didn’t have to be. It was the very exaggeration that was of value, like old Greek theater, with its swooning and its masks.
On future occasions I would be provided with different women from the Jade House. Yet each one, whether a broad-shouldered blonde or shy-eyed black girl, went by the name Julie Dark and each, it seemed, had consulted the same well-kept file or card catalogue or whatever organizing system the house used to keep track of notable moments from our previous outings. In this way, each new girl (who said, “So good to see you again,” when stepping into the town car or appearing at my door) helped contribute to the illusion of a history, referring with ease to the time the paparazzi chased us outside Town Hall or that oyster night at the Tangiers.
Some of these pretenders, of course, demonstrated more skill than others, and yet I came to enjoy the poorer ones in the way one relishes even amateurish renditions of a familiar song, each, in
the vagaries of their difference, pointing to some ur-melody one could never actually hear. Except one girl, a chatty type with bags under her eyes, at the crucial divot in the night when she was to lay her head on my chest and relay the latest episode in the long sufferings of her dear brother Dennis, so mangled the story (making him a younger brother and sentencing him to lung cancer instead of leukemia) I immediately, in a strange, high-pitched voice, called for the car to pick her up and, after she left, paced madly around the bed, feeling as I had that first day of shooting. This feverish state of mind might have lasted for several hours if I hadn’t swallowed two more of those green pills, a hefty supply of which Lou had given me.
To myself (I never discussed them with others) I referred to these panicked spells as bursting moments and was quite worried, in fact, that I would suffer one the night of the screening. I took a pill before leaving, but when the movie started up in the held silence of that theater, my heart was going hard. There he stood, me, twenty feet tall, peering through the blinds of an office window onto the traffic on Fifty-seventh Ave. A man could be heard shouting from the street, the blinds tinkling under my fingers. Onscreen I raise the cigarette to my mouth as if posing a question. So, deliciously, is presented the life of this character: a man who studies the hieroglyph of traffic from a tenement window. Harry Knott, posing as a private dick hired on the main by desperate men days into their second ulcer. But when a customer comes in, a nervous hat-fiddling man, asking for “a new fabulous raincoat,” a code word, we learn the government needs Harry, for Harry is a spy.
We had filmed it on the lot. Rather than a busy avenue, the window looked out on a pile of orange utility cables. But the camera turned that moment into a succulent image, such was the camera’s genius. And as the movie went on, I watched myself in a kind of rapture. I watched myself kiss a woman in that way that involves a dip. I shot a man dead at the airport. I could not wait to describe to Mama the dream and statue they had made of her son.
