Maggie Darling

by James Howard Kunstler

  By eight o’clock, Maggie had constructed a salsa Bolognese, the stock for a zuppa di pesce, a large spinach torta, a terrine of roasted vegetables, a terrine of polenta and chicken livers, a green lasagna, and two tiramisus. Then it was up to the bath with a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino (the 1986 Soldera) for a contemplative soaking. The tub was a massive sleigh-shaped thing with a gold dolphin for a faucet. Maggie’s legs ached and she realized she’d been on her feet since the middle of the day. As the steaming bath drained her discomfort away and the wine began to assert itself, Maggie wondered if it were really possible to make a life with Swann. He seemed, at this moment, a figment she’d dreamed up in a traffic jam on I-95, something to get her mind off the insistent annoyances of real life. Assuming that he was real, that she was really here in Venice, that they were together—as in a couple—was there a … well, was there a future in this? Was he a prospective mate? What in hell was she doing?

  She sat bolt upright as panic seized her. A flurry of half-formed anxieties flew before her field of consciousness the way partridges explode out of the brush on an autumn walk through the woods. What would become of the farm? The gardens? Hooper? Nina and the staff? What about her book and television obligations? Where would they live? Would they marry? Was she insane? She ran cold water over her wrists—which helped a little—except it chilled down the whole tub. Finally she lunged for the wine bottle on the bathside table, poured a goblet, and gulped it down. Soon, the partridges of worry flew over her mental horizon and disappeared.

  5

  Home Is So Far Away

  It was quarter to nine when she came back downstairs in a simple black jumper over a white cotton tee. Adelina had set the dining table in the glass-roofed courtyard where Babe Hathaway’s little jungle of palms, bananas, and live monkeys had long ago been replaced by a dozen potted ficus trees. Maggie explained the menu and the service routine to Teo and Adelina, then returned to the kitchen to arrange antipasti on a huge old hammered brass tray while Teo opened wine bottles to breathe them out. By nine-thirty, neither Swann nor the others had materialized. Though she was vaguely anxious, she understood that she could not reasonably expect punctuality under the circumstances. So, she retired to an enormous salon on the second floor that Swann had designated the drawing room but was only minimally furnished with a Bosendorfer grand piano, a lute, and some ancient Queen Anne sofas and overstuffed chairs in plain baggy cotton slips. She lugged the wine bottle and goblet with her, along with her current reading: Cutting and Grafting the Modern Apple by Alfred Pollard. The subject and the wine— two thirds of the bottle by now consumed—conspired to remind her of the multitudinous tasks and chores that awaited her in her garden back home: setting out the seedlings; pruning, feeding, dividing, and transplanting the perennials; double-digging the beds; repairing the greenhouse, the chicken house, the toolshed, and the bee scapes; dusting and spraying … Thank God for Bob DiPietro, her ever reliable chief gardener and his crew of four yeomen. It was one of the fictions of Maggie’s public persona—as portrayed in her books and on videos—that she could manage the many acres of immaculately groomed gardens without ample help. She hadn’t meant to project a dishonest persona. She hoped her smarter readers would understand that The Maggie Darling Country Life, like any show, entailed some stagecraft with a full complement of stagehands. Actually, leaving out Bob and the crew had started as an aesthetic decision on Reggie Chang’s part. They cluttered up the photographs, he said. This would change with the next book, Keeping House, Maggie decided. From now on the last page of every Maggie Darling book would include a group shot of all the backstage helpers. She had gone no further in her reveries when the book on grafting slipped out of her hands and she sank into the brocaded cushions into sleep.

  6

  The Intruder

  In her dreams, Maggie was in an enormous closet where hatboxes tumbled off a high shelf, bouncing off her head and shoulders and crashing onto the floor. The commotion was transformed into the sound of footsteps and voices below, and she realized, now fully awake, that Swann had finally arrived. She had an ache in her neck from the hard cushions and a rough taste in her mouth, so she gargled a mouthful of wine, ran her fingers through her hair, and descended to meet her guests.

  “I could eat a fucking Belgian cart horse,” Regina Hargrave snarled. “Oooh, Christ, it smells divine in here!”

  “Feed me! Feed me!” said Steve Eddy in the weird nasal voice he was cultivating for his character in Starvation, Reuthner, the feckless young Swiss engineer–turned–vampire-in-training. Maggie noticed that he was now holding hands with tiny Lisa Sorrell, who either was stoned or had developed a thousand-mile stare from two days of nutritional deficit. Regina introduced Maggie to four actors of various gender identities who had flown in from England that morning. Swann stepped forward and gave Maggie a husbandly kiss. “Tesla’s been a beast all day,” he said. “Nothing but that damned mineral water and a few soda biscuits. Nigel’s about to chuck it.”

  “I am about to chuck it,” Nigel said. “And to think that Merchant and Ivory wanted me for Herbert Asquith in Sissinghurst. Oh, this is Horst,” he said, indicating at his elbow a sinewy young man with dyed orange hair and a sniveling facial expression that might have been acquired at birth. “My catch o’ the day,” Nigel explained with a salacious wink.

  “I am zecond costume assistant,” Horst said. “Nice plaze you haff here.”

  Maggie was abashed to realize that she’d literally overlooked Teddy Dane, who bumped against her hip in the crowded vestibule. “I’m very grateful you invited us over, Mrs. Darling,” the diminutive veteran actor said in a voice like deep plush velvet. “This is a very old-fashioned city, really, and all the restaurants have closed for the night, even if we’d dared try to sneak into one.”

  “Tesla’s spies are everywhere,” Swann said.

  Dawn Vickers followed her nose straight to the kitchen zombie-like and went to work on the antipasto. The rest of the gang followed. The kitchen soon rang with cries of delectation, laughter, and clanking wine goblets as the Tesla-induced gloom dissipated. The cast devoured the antipasto like army ants—eating even the garnish—before Maggie could shoo them into the courtyard for the main event. The courses came out in no particular order, given the late hour and the condition of the guests. In a little while they were all drunk. Dawn Vickers engaged in a belching competition with the doll-like Lisa Sorrell. Steve Eddy brought out a bag of Afghani high-test weed. As he was lighting the first reefer a thunderous pounding echoed through the old palazzo. Someone at the front door? Swann signaled Teo to see about it. The table fell silent except for Regina Hargrave, who was braying at a story Teddy Dane told about working on a recent Schwarzenegger epic. Nigel McClewe reached over to clamp his hand over Regina’s mouth. Then there was some shouting from a distance—the harsh Magyar voice of the despised Tesla.

  “I know they are in here,” he cried. “And I smell cooking!”

  The actors gaped at one another while Teo could be heard attempting to placate the director. Swann brought his index finger across his lips. “Sssssshh.” He then stood, took off every stitch of clothing, and strode out of the room like a naked deity who had somehow fallen from a Tiepolo ceiling and come to life.

  “Why Franz,” Swann’s voice echoed melodically off the stone walls, “to what do we owe the pleasure of this unexpected call?”

  “I know they are here, Swann. Don’t try to protect them, and don’t try to deceive me.”

  “Why, dear boy, I believe you’ve had too much too drink.”

  “That is not your affair,” Tesla cried. “You stink of garlic!”

  “Mrs. Darling fried me a friendly tidbit, I confess. I’d offer you the leftovers, but frankly, Franz, we were screwing our brains out when you came by, and as soon as I can persuade you to leave we shall resume—that is, if the spell hasn’t been broken.”

  Maggie shrank in mortification, but it was all the others could do not to howl. Regina stu
ffed a napkin into her mouth. Dawn Vickers held a loaf of bread in one hand and stabbed it repeatedly with a fork. Steve Eddy fumbled with a joint he was rolling and spilled marijuana all over his plate.

  “You think this is frivolity, Mr. Swann?” Tesla ranted. “This is craft. This is art. And you are tools. Tools do not think for themselves.”

  “I say, old chap, look here at my tool. It has a mind of its own and it wants to get back to what it was doing just a little while ago. I presume to speak for it, since it lacks that ability, but I assure you, sir, that you trespass on its sense of decorum.”

  Two of the English boys made silent masks of hilarity at each another.

  “I have news for you.”

  “What’s that, Franz?”

  “Mine is bigger.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Look for yourself.”

  “A contest is hardly necessary, Franz.”

  “No, look. Here it is.”

  Tears streamed down Regina Hargrave’s cheeks.

  “I shudder at its sight,” Swann declared. “Why, ’tis more gorgon than organ.”

  “Just so you know.”

  “Well then, what do you propose we do at this hour, Franz? Duel?”

  Regina Hargrave’s explosive laughter finally propelled the napkin out of her mouth like wadding shot from a cannon.

  “I heard that! Who is that up there? I demand to know!”

  Swann had to physically seize Tesla’s shoulders to restrain him.

  “’Tis Mrs. Darling, my lady friend, Franz. Upon my honor. Be a good chap and sod off now, will you please? It’s midnight. And for goodness sake, man, put that thing back in your trousers.”

  “I hear your whispers of mockery,” Tesla shouted to the unseen others within. “All will be punished! All will suffer!”

  The enormous ancient door slammed as Tesla walked out zipping his fly. An interval of suffocating silence followed, then an eruption of laughter and even some applause when Swann reentered the candlelit courtyard room.

  “How big was it?” Regina blurted out.

  “’Twas not so long as a Brompton banger nor so broad as a Butzbach bratwurst—” Swann began.

  “But ’tis enough,” Nigel McClewe chimed in, having played Mercutio many times in repertory as a youth. “’Twill serve.”

  The director’s immoderate intrusion was quickly forgotten and an ambient good cheer restored. But the cast had a 6 A.M. call, and at the urging of the consummate professional Teddy Dane, the party adjourned at a quarter to one in the morning.

  When the last guest was gone, Maggie and Swann retired to the glorious bedchamber upstairs, the angels aloft seeming to swim before their eyes. Swann averred that he had achieved such an unprecedented state of exhaustion that lovemaking was out of the question. Maggie was in complete accord. What bothered her was when he pecked her on the cheek saying, “’Night, Mum.”

  7

  Making Movie Magic

  She prepared a big English breakfast for Swann at the crack of dawn. He said, “Thanks, Mum,” and little else, as he was preoccupied with studying his script and all the last-minute rewrites. Maggie could not bring herself to inform him that, notwithstanding the traumas of his childhood, she didn’t relish a dual role in his life as lover and mother. But promptly at six the water taxi arrived to convey them to the set on the Piazza San Marco, and there could be no discussion.

  Tesla was shooting out of sequence, standard procedure in the movie business; the interiors would be completed the following month in Toronto. Today’s work happened to be the movie’s climax. The setting is eighteenth-century Venice. Salario (Swann), chief of the ancient “guild of vampires,” having vanquished his nemesis, the nobleman-cum-necromancer Grimaldi (McClewe), is cornered by an angry mob of carnival maskers near the campanile. Among them is Grimaldi’s protégée, Nicola (Dawn Vickers), a vampire initiate who is determined to hunt down her former lover Salario for the glory of God, the honor of the Venetian Republic, the dawning Age of Reason, and the satisfaction of revenge. The shot at hand involves the mob overrunning the stately procession of the doge (Teddy Dane). In the ensuing melee, Salario escapes down the Rio Canonica with Nicola in hot pursuit, wooden stake and mallet at the ready.

  The piazza was strewn with the equipment of moviemaking, a dozen trailers serving as mobile production offices, costume shops, and dressing rooms for the principal actors. Lighting scaffolds stood among anacondas of cable and humming electronic generators. Camera cranes loomed at five different positions. Technicians swarmed everywhere laying dolly track and adjusting light levels. An Adriatic morning fog made the time of day indeterminate, though, in fact, Tesla was shooting day for night. An army of extras queued up to a gauntlet of costume assistants who fussed with their outfits and accessories. Trying to imagine the cost of all this made Maggie’s head swim.

  In his own trailer, Swann was besieged by two dressing assistants, a wig wrangler, and the makeup chief. Regina Hargrave, already in costume as Nicola’s mother, the dissolute marchioness della Fabrizio, wandered in clutching a cardboard cup of herbal tea against the morning chill.

  “What do you think of our little showbiz world?” she asked Maggie.

  “It’s such a spectacle in and of itself,” Maggie said. “Nevermind the movie.”

  “Yes, nevermind the movie,” Regina said, her husky voice dripping disdain. “Have you read the script, by the way?”

  “Only little snippets here and there.”

  “Well, it’s the sheerest drivel. I think it was written by Mr. Torkleson’s nine-year-old son. A word of advice, darling. Your first day on a movie set will be the most exciting day of your life. Your second day is apt to be the most boring. Don’t let it get you down.”

  Someone was calling Regina’s name on a bullhorn outside.

  “Ta,” she said and departed.

  8

  The Battle of Wills

  The scene involving the doge’s procession and the mob took all morning, though it would run no more than forty seconds in the final cut. It required thirteen takes. The complexity of the operation awed Maggie. It made a major catering job like a society wedding or a Christmas feast for two hundred seem like a stroll down a country road. When something went wrong it was rarely a major problem such as the doge’s litter-bearers missing their cue or the twenty-seven horses misbehaving. Rather, a fuse would blow in a generator, or a gaffer would trip over a cable. On take 11, one of the mob extras had failed to put out his cigarette before the cameras rolled. Tesla had behaved with stoical forbearance until then, but the cigarette set him off. He stalked across the damp square to the offending extra, shouting, “You think we are doing Noël Coward here? You are trying to appear sophisticated? You are not just a member of the rabble? You are special? Cosmopolitan? A little bored with life? Jaded?” Tesla’s voice grew louder as he closed in. The extra, meanwhile, had ditched the butt. He seemed astounded that Tesla kept coming at him, and before he knew it Tesla had him by the sleeves, tossing him out of the security of the mob and over beside the wheels of a crane. When the extra went down on the slippery pavement, Tesla commenced kicking him savagely like an old-time commissar beating up a factory worker caught trying to pilfer a cotter pin. Tesla kicked and kicked until it appeared that he had injured his own foot and the poor extra had subsided in either resignation or unconsciousness. Tesla finally limped back to the directorial chair in stark silence while a couple of grips dragged the battered extra behind a trailer. Ten minutes later during take number 12, a cloud of San Marco’s famous pigeons decided to fly back and forth in front of camera two. Take 13 was distinguished, it seemed to Maggie, only by the fact that nothing went wrong.

  Tesla’s PA called a lunch break—for the crew only. The cast was told to assemble for rehearsal in a kind of artificial piazzetta formed between three trailers and a crane near the campanile. Along with the usual ration of mineral water, Tesla had provided trays of raw vegetables and fresh fruit. None of the principal
s complained—apparently regarding this as an improvement. But then Dawn Vickers appeared with a plate heaped with farfalle rustica, veal and portobello mushrooms, and assorted morsels of antipasto, all from the tent of the caterer that was serving the crew. The dark-eyed beauty, famed for her lopsided grin, took a chair between Nigel McClewe and Steve Eddy exactly opposite the director and attacked the contents of her plate with a dramatic gusto that looked, to Maggie, a little bit deliberately provocative.

  “Who gave you permission to stuff yourself like a pig, Dawn?” Tesla asked, pronouncing her name more like “Down.”

  Looking right at Tesla, Dawn merely shrugged her shoulders and continued eating.

  “See here, Franz—” Swann tried to interject.

  “When I want your opinion, Frederick, I’ll let you know. Dawn, let us speak adult to adult, yes? Who is the director here?”

  She pointed at Tesla with her fork.

  “Ah, so you understand that someone is the authority here.”

  Dawn nodded.

  “Yet, when that authority issues instructions, you disobey?”

  Dawn speared a marinated artichoke heart, regarded it happily for a moment, and popped it into her mouth. Then she nodded her head in agreement.

  “So, I understand this to be deliberate insubordination?”

  She speared a little ball of fresh mozzarella. The others followed back and forth as though seated in the grandstand at Wimbledon. Dawn nodded again, swallowed, and dabbed her lips with a napkin.

  “How would you like it if I fire you from this fillum, Dawn?”

  “I’ve been fired before,” Dawn finally replied. “The first time, the director was a cokehead—you know, out of control. He’s dead now. The second time it was a prick like you, but just a plain old lowbrow American prick. He didn’t have your artistic pretensions. Anyway the movie was a complete piece of shit. Burnout? Did you see it? And he hasn’t worked in features since—not that I take credit for that.”