Maggie Darling

by James Howard Kunstler

  As soon as they reached cruising altitude, Tesla announced that there would be a screening of Last Train to Graz in order to familiarize the cast with his directing style. A flight attendant came around with a cart, which, oddly, dispensed only mineral water—at least a dozen different varieties, but nothing else.

  “Have you no wine on board?” Swann asked less with indignation than incredulity.

  The attendant squirmed and looked helpless.

  “I say, Franz,” Swann called across the cabin, “can’t one have a real drink?”

  “No. No drinks,” Tesla said. “A glass of wine is one hundred sixty calories. You are all too physically robust for this film. Mineral water only.”

  “Oh, bloody fucking Christ, here we go,” Regina Hargrave was heard to mutter.

  “Most extraordinary,” said Nigel McClewe.

  “No one ever accused me of being too robust,” Teddy Dane said.

  “Uh, Franz,” Swann persisted, “what about those not actually onscreen? Mrs. Darling, for example.”

  “They must suffer with the rest of us,” Tesla replied. “It would hardly be fair to the ones being asked to sacrifice. Houselights down please.”

  The film was shown on a large rear projection screen. The stunning opening shot, so often dissected in college seminars, took the viewer from an overhead of the sprawling Graz ceramic works, through a skylight in the factory roof, down among the mob of rioting workers, and finally straight into the mouth of the wounded Andrei gasping on a forklift. Tesla stopped the action frequently to remark on his directorial decisions. He took pains to point out where and how the actors had failed to carry out his instructions and how important it was to do so. “The fillum [film, he meant] exists only in the mind of the director until the instant the camera captures the image. The actor is a mere instrument. You, you Lisa Sorrell,” he said, shining a flashlight in the ingenue’s foxlike face, “you are a paintbrush, do you understand?”

  “Uh-huh,” the actress said, nodding vacantly.

  “Call me a fucking paintbrush, I’m outa here,” Dawn Vickers could be heard to mutter in the darkness.

  “Very well. We have a nice parachute for you, mademoiselle. I think you find the North Atlantic a bit cold for your taste this time of year.”

  “Can’t we at least have some peanuts?” Steve Eddy asked with a whiny edge.

  “Mineral water only,” Tesla shouted. “Now, pay attention. You see this shot at police headquarters with Eva, the party functionary …”

  So it continued. The film, which normally ran one hour and forty minutes, took three hours and ten minutes with Tesla’s didactic interruptions.

  When it was over, the director sent the performers to their staterooms to get some sleep. With a good deal of grumbling and millions of dollars in salaries at stake, they did as they were told. Maggie now very clearly understood her mission in the days ahead: to feed Swann and the rest of the cast when the despotic Tesla was not around. Toward that end, after a session of ravenous copulation with Swann at 32,000 feet, Maggie snuck out of their stateroom to investigate the airplane’s galley.

  Back down the corridor another movie flickered on the screen in the main salon, though only Tesla seemed to be watching it now. Maggie stole into the galley, closed a sliding panel door behind her, and threw a light switch. A butcher block workstation stood in the middle of a room about a third the size of her kitchen in Connecticut, but it was ingeniously equipped. Cooking tonight was out of the question, she realized, no matter what materials lay at hand. The noise and smells would certainly alarm the authorities. The aft wall of the kitchen comprised a bank of refrigerators below waist level and dry storage above. The refrigerators contained only cases of mineral water and fresh flowers. The cabinets above, however, were stocked with a bonanza of snacks, including English shortbread, mixed nuts, Japanese rice crackers, assorted biscotti, ballotines of Belgian chocolate, and enough liquor to hose down the Fairfield County Historical Society. Maggie stuffed her aqua Basilisk-issue terry-cloth robe with boxes of goodies and grabbed a fifth of Courvoisier VSOP by the neck. She killed the lights and tiptoed back down the corridor. Loud snoring could be heard above the movie sound track in the main salon. She was reaching for the doorknob to their room when the adjoining door opened and Regina Hargrave’s head appeared.

  “What’s up?” Regina whispered. “We’re fucking famished!”

  “We?”

  Steve Eddy’s head popped out above Regina’s.

  With an impish smile, Maggie hoisted the cognac bottle.

  “You are a very saint,” Regina gasped.

  Maggie pulled back the folds of her robe, displaying the snacks.

  “She’s no saint,” Steve Eddy croaked. “She’s God.”

  An irritable harrumphing snort resounded up the corridor.

  “Tesla!” Maggie whispered.

  Regina indicated in sign language that they would follow Maggie into her cabin. Maggie turned the door handle and they all piled in. The two stars were stark naked. Their bodies looked eerily familiar, however, and indeed Maggie had seen them before in the nude scenes of their movies.

  “What’s this … ?” Swann said, awakening.

  “Just us, love,” Regina said, climbing into bed beside him. Steve Eddy crawled in on her other side, forming a sandwich with the veteran actress in the middle. Maggie sat on the end of the bed and leaned forward so that all the goodies spilled out of her robe onto the bedspread.

  Regina had already seized the cognac. Steve Eddy scarfed down chocolate bonbons with methodical precision while Swann devoured a box of shortbread. Maggie gorged on the sweet-salty rice treats. The bottle went round and round. They ate like that for perhaps ten full minutes, with no exchange more elaborate than a groan or an “mmmmm” or an “ahhhhh.” As her hunger abated, like a wolf sent scurrying from a country garden, Maggie reflected on how strange and magical it was to be six miles above the Sargasso Sea with the present company in a state of undress.

  “I love your movies,” she blurted out to Regina, feeling instantly like any crass, moronic fan.

  “Well, I love your cookbooks,” Regina said, and at once they were both giggling. “But I tell you, this fucking food nonsense will not continue,” Regina whispered, sounding very much like the imperious monarch she’d played the previous year in Kevin Costner’s historical epic Catherine the Great.

  “Darn straight. I’m a growing boy,” Steve Eddy said.

  “What a nice way to become acquainted with the great Swann,” Regina said, caressing his Apollonian face and hoisting herself to it until her magnificent bosom was exposed and their lips touched. Eddy ignored the developing scene and determinedly started in on a fresh box of coconut crisps. Maggie goggled in wonder and horror as Swann appeared to yield to Regina. His right hand came up and seemed as though it were about to cup her dangling breast, but instead he gave her a little slap on the shoulder, saying, “Not tonight, dear, I have a headache,” a famous exit line from one of Regina’s early comedies, The Great Cosgrove.

  “Clever fellow,” she teased him, evidently intoxicated.

  “Ahem,” Maggie said, clearing her throat.

  “Remember the sixties, love?” Regina said to Maggie as she sank back into the pillows, not bothering to cover her famous mammaries, which joggled like plates of aspic when Regina spoke. “What a mad era.”

  “I remember them,” Maggie said, “but probably not the way you do.”

  Regina shot her a hostile glance but just as quickly broke up laughing again, seeming to recognize the ironic truth in Maggie’s reply. “Well, I’m sure they don’t remember the sixties,” Regina said, rolling her eyes at the two men.

  “Mine are but a small boy’s memories,” Swann said, nibbling a sweet biscuit. “Lawns and cricket bats.”

  “I was dead then,” Steve Eddy said.

  “Dead?”

  “Not born yet. Same as being dead.”

  “He’s very philosophical,” Regina said. �
�Makes up for what he lacks—”

  She had finally succeeded in wresting Steve Eddy’s attention from the snacks.

  “—for what he lacks in experience,” she concluded. “Well then, let’s shove off, love.”

  Maggie watched the boy climb out of the bed with a remarkable feline economy of movement. A moment later, the two stars were gone. The bed was full of crumbs and Maggie made Swann get up while she shook the bottom sheet out. Then they were recumbent again.

  “Thanks for the provisions, Mum,” Swann said, brushing her cheek with his hand.

  “Mum?”

  “Mind if I call you that?”

  In fact, she did, but he was so sweet she could not bring herself to say so.

  “These movie people, they live on another planet, don’t they?” she said instead, feeling exhaustion pull her down like an ocean undertow. Somewhere in the distance an engine droned.

  “You think this is strange? Wait till you see Venice,” Swann said.

  2

  The Water Palace

  Venice was a dream from the moment the limousine discharged them at the Tronchetto and they piled into the mahogany launch on the Grand Canal. It wasn’t the architecture that got Maggie—many of the city’s grandest buildings evinced an oriental preoccupation with repetitious detail that did not appeal to her Western mind—but the arrangement of the buildings, the compactness and intimacy of them along the backward S of Venice’s watery main street, and most of all, the way the town visibly brimmed with life, as though the whole place were a stage set for an enormous never-ending opera. The day itself was gray and cool with a kind of continuous spittle issuing from the leaden sky that did not quite add up to rain. It was when they passed underneath the Rialto Bridge that Maggie noticed something else about Venice: the wonderful absence of automobiles. She felt like some long-suffering victim of a chronic disease magically freed of symptoms. At the same time, an emotional rumble gathered deep inside her, and not until they came around the curve at Rio Nuovo did she identify it as an upwelling of long-repressed rage at Kenneth for having deprived her of Venice all those years. Finally, as they passed under the Accademia Bridge, the tumult of emotion spilled out of her and tears streamed down her cheeks as she gazed up at the beautiful Swann, his golden curls swept back in a clammy breeze that stank of fish and sewage.

  The launch turned down a narrow side canal near Longhena’s Santa Maria della Salute and one of the boatmen leaped onto the fondamenta with a line.

  “Swann’s quarters,” Tesla announced. Another boatman wrangled their luggage ashore. “You have an hour to get comfortable,” Tesla barked. “Costume fittings at eleven. Blocking at three. We send the boat for you.”

  “What about lunch?” Dawn Vickers asked.

  Tesla laughed, the agile boatmen leaped back on board, and the handsome boat puttered away. Meanwhile, a mulish elderly male servant threw open the door to a dark palazzo and took up the smallest items of their luggage. Swann turned to regard the ancient structure with its rotted stone dog heads snarling down blindly from the elaborate lintel above the entrance.

  “Here stood the fortification of Narses the Eunuch, the emperor Justinian’s victorious general in the wars against the Goths,” Swann declaimed. “The building and the facade you see today were completed in 1611 by the salt merchant Pedrocchino Guaio. In 1926, ’twas purchased by the American socialite and art patroness Babe Hathaway, who turned the courtyard into an artificial jungle populated by monkeys and declawed ocelots. Tales of her decadent soirees still reverberate through Venetian society. At one unfortunate gala, for example, she had a score of boys painted gold to resemble naked torch-bearing statues. One died of toxic dermal asphyxiation on the spot and the rest soon became palsied imbeciles. Babe’s bottomless bank reserves shut up the families and the magistrates. There were also innumerable gifts for public works between the world wars. Miss Hathaway—she never married, though the list of her famous lovers, including Mussolini, would clog a Rolodex—committed suicide here in 1939. The note she left said that she had tasted everything life had to offer except old age, an ignominious dish she preferred to forgo. Thus she went out, with a generous dose of morphine, among the potted palms and bromeliads, surrounded by her beloved pets.”

  “Swann, are you making this up?”

  “The idea.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I bought the bloody heap three years ago,” he said and they went inside.

  3

  A New Life

  Swann went off to his fittings and blockings, conveying the secret message that the cast were all invited for a hearty supper whenever Tesla released them from their duties or nine o’clock that evening, whichever came first. Meanwhile Maggie had the run of the city. She couldn’t remember feeling so free and fulfilled since the day that Hooper entered nursery school. Actually, all that seemed another lifetime—not just Hooper’s childhood but Connecticut, Kettle Hill Farm, and the rest of her alleged real life. Though a self-confessed control freak, she was determined to refrain from checking in with the crew back home as long as possible—certainly not on her first day in Venice. So, after inspecting the kitchen—fabulously up-to-date—and the pantry—full service for twenty—she left the palazzo for a quiet little café off the Campo San Angelo to reflect on the amazing path that fortune had taken her down since the fateful Christmas Eve party when she threw Kenneth out into the snowy darkness.

  Here she was, a woman on the shady side of forty-five, widely admired, successful in business, financially secure, physically radiant, desired by a man with the look of an angel and the libido of a Shropshire ram; and she was in Venice, no less, consorting with stars of the silver screen, supported by a Hollywood strike force of technicians and factotums. Even Tesla’s insane diktats about food worked to her advantage: she was truly in a position to rescue her new friends. It was too much. She wanted to sing out Rogers and Hart right there in the café. But the extremity of her own high spirits rather alarmed her—or perhaps it was the poor night’s sleep on the airplane or the syrupy Italian coffee jangling her nerves. In any case, she resorted to the palliative that rarely failed to clarify her mind: she began making lists. She devised a menu for that evening’s secret banquet. She made a shopping list. And she wrote out a game plan for getting things done. She liked the way her sense of organization made her feel so in charge, so forthrightly American.

  4

  A Plague of Doubts

  She had no trouble finding the open-air seafood market behind the Ponte Rialto. There she bought mussels, divine little brown and white clams, the gamberoni or giant Adriatic prawns, and a great mass of monkfish fillets. She found the Venetians to be very patient with her phrase-book grasp of the language. They directed her to the strada Nuova for other foodstuffs, and she rode a vaporetto to the Ca’ d’Oro one stop over. Here were all the purveyors of sausage, cheese, pork, poultry, fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, condiments, bread and pastries, each in his own little establishment. A nice man in the wine shop offered his teenage son to help Maggie lug her accumulated provisions a block over to the Grand Canal, where water taxis waited. The teen, a slight youth outfitted in short pants, a round-collared shirt, and a V-necked sweater, was anxious to practice his excellent school English, and he stayed aboard to help Maggie find her way back to Swann’s palazzo. He told Maggie it was his dream to move to America. She told him that America had become a gigantic dreary tronchetto, from sea to shining sea, and he would be much happier remaining in Venice. She tipped the boy and boatman the equivalent of twenty dollars apiece, grateful to have gotten home so swiftly with all her purchases. The boy protested that the tip was extravagant, and the boatman told him to shut his foolish little mouth, which resembled the pudendum of a goat, and that was the end of it.

  Maggie napped until five o’clock—she never indulged in naps at home—in a bedroom whose ceiling had been decorated with angels and clouds by Tiepolo. Then it was off to the kitchen to play. Swa
nn had equipped it down to the last citrus stripper, and the armamentarium of cookery was arranged in a way that Maggie the professional recognized as impeccably rational. The counters and workstation were all built into salvaged seventeenth-century cabinetry, with excellent overhead halogen lighting on dimmer switches. Fresh oregano, chives, thyme, chervil, parsley, and three kinds of basil grew in deep stone windowboxes along a south-facing window. There was even a small but powerful stereo with a good supply of discs—though none by Swann. Maggie put on Scarlatti and went happily to work. The mulish old butler, Teo, and a sturdy uniformed maid, Adelina, who might have been any age between forty and sixty, looked in regularly to ask if everything was bene. Both were apparently astounded to find the consorte della Inglese slaving over a hot stove, and old Teo seemed so anxious and perplexed that Maggie sent him out to the local alimentari for a bottle of Marsala just to give him something to do.