Disturbing the Peace

by Richard Yates

  “Well, it’s not much of an apartment, but it serves its – I mean, I like it too.” He touched the rim of his tinkling glass to hers. “So. I guess this is what might be called a man’s communion with his favorite tipple.”

  “Mm,” she said like Dr. Blomberg, and so he learned that weak jokes didn’t go over very big with Pamela Hendricks. Twenty years old or not, she required something funny to make her laugh. Another thing: never once that night did she say “What’s your wife like?” or ask if he had children, or make sly inquiries about how many girls he’d brought down here, and that alone set her apart from the others.

  After a while she began pensively stalking the floor in Borg’s raincoat and went back to her old and apparently favorite topic: the dilemma of being the world’s dopiest, no-talent square.

  “… One funny thing, though,” she said while he fixed himself a new drink, “I know I can’t act and I don’t photograph well, and I certainly can’t write and wouldn’t know what to do if somebody handed me a camera, but I’ve always had this feeling I’d be good at making movies. Good movies.”

  His drink was made, but he let an extra shot of whiskey slide in over the ice cubes before he looked up into her wide, deadserious eyes.

  “Me too,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  The air is very thin in the mountains of Vermont, and nothing there seems real to a city man. The massed trees are overwhelming, the browns and greens of the earth are unbelievably rich, and there is too much sky.

  “Right around this next turn,” Pamela Hendricks said. “You’ll see a sign.”

  He was driving a yellow Avis Rent A Car so massive and fluid that it seemed to drive itself, with the back seat full of luggage and bottles of bourbon. “It’s the funniest thing,” he told her. “None of this seems real. I can’t believe it’s really happening.”

  “Well, you’d better start believing,” she said, “because it is. Slow down a little now, or we’ll miss the sign. No, wait; there it is – see?”

  And the sign read MARLOWE COLLEGE, 5 MI.

  It was late summer again, and the past half year had been the most jubilant time of his life. After the first few winter weeks, on nights when he was supposed to be at AA meetings, he had stopped taking her to Varick Street; instead they used her own “luxury” apartment in the East Eighties, for which her father paid the rent. He would ride uptown in fright that she wouldn’t answer the door – or, worse still, that another and bigger man might answer it for her – but she was always there alone, sometimes still in her street clothes, sometimes fresh from her bath and wrapped in a loose terry-cloth robe, sometimes in a nightgown whose only purpose was to be slipped off and dropped weightlessly to the floor as they made for the bed.

  At first a great deal of their talk was of movies, and on one of their most memorable nights he related the whole scenario of The Champ, starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, which he’d seen when he was seven years old.

  “God, what a memory,” she said, and when he came to the end she almost wept.

  “Oh, it wasn’t the first movie I’d ever seen,” he told her. “In those days you had to have a good many movies under your belt by the time you were seven, but it was the first that made a real impact on me. It knocked me out. That final scene, with old Beery dead of a heart attack after regaining the championship and the kid’s parents trying to hustle him out of the dressing room, and the kid saying ‘I want the Champ! I want the Champ!’ – that was too much. I didn’t cry because it was very important not to cry at that age, but I walked out of that theatre with my throat on fire and as soon as I got in bed I cried like a little bastard.”

  He told her of other movies he’d liked before she was born, but not all of them pleased her. Some she’d seen on television and said were trash, others she’d seen at the Museum of Modern Art and called pretentious. When he described Gunga Din as “maybe the best boy’s movie ever made” she squirmed in boredom. “And you mean after Sam Jaffe gets killed they hold a special parade and pin a medal for him on the regimental flag, and they get some actor dressed up like Rudyard Kipling to recite his poem? Even if I were a boy I’d have laughed at that.”

  “You wouldn’t have laughed when they showed Sam Jaffe’s ghost coming up through the poem, wearing a full-dress British uniform and making a British salute.”

  “I think I might have vomited.”

  Another time she dwelt at some length on the mystery of why great novels – even good novels – were so seldom made into halfway decent movies. “I mean they’ve done all right with Dickens, especially the English, but I guess that’s because his writing is so visual in the first place.”

  “Mm.”

  “But when you think of all the dismal failures: Madame Bovary with what’s-his-name’s wife, Jennifer something or other …”

  “Mm,” he kept saying of each one she mentioned, and “Yeah,” though he’d read almost none of the books. He was damned if he was going to let her find out about his reading problem.

  “… And when you think what those Hollywood people did with From Here to Eternity!”

  “Yeah.” The truth was that he’d liked that picture and might have read the book on the strength of it, if it hadn’t been nearly a thousand pages long.

  “And did you ever see the mess they made of The Great Gatsby? With Alan Ladd?”

  Now, wait a minute. Alan Ladd had taught him not only how to comb his hair but how to carry his shoulders and how to walk, and how a short man could look at a girl in such a way as to leave no doubt of his carnal intentions.

  “It was an outright betrayal of the book,” she said. “They made it into some cheap little gangster flick.”

  “Well, hell, movies aren’t books; they’re two different forms, that’s all. Besides, you’ll have to admit Alan Ladd was pretty good in Shane.”

  “Oh my God. Shane. Like High Noon. Adult Westerns. You know what an adult Western is? It’s a contradiction in terms.”

  “Okay, look. What’s the single best American movie you’ve ever seen?”

  “The single best? I don’t know. Probably Cit—”

  “Right. Citizen Kane. And can you imagine what kind of a novel that would’ve been? A piece of schlock. A half-assed, sensational book by some all-thumbs Harold Robbins about the life of William Randolph Hearst. See what I mean?”

  She bit her lip, nodding slowly, and for the first time that night her face glowed with admiration.

  “That’s what the Europeans have known for years,” he hurried on. “Movies are movies – though I must say some of your European favorites have been screwing up that concept lately: your Fellinis and your Antonionis and whatever artsycraftsy fool it was who made Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and your – your sacrosanct Ingmar Bergman.”

  Her teeth released her lip and her eyes narrowed, ready to argue again. “What’s the matter with Bergman?”

  “Partly just that – he’s sacrosanct. Any New York movie critic with the guts to call Bergman overrated would be fired on the spot. But the main thing about him is worse.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He doesn’t have any sense of humor. Think about it. The man doesn’t have any sense of humor.”

  She thought about it, stroking his chest, and announced that she guessed he was right.

  But their first real quarrel had nothing to do with movies. It happened shortly after the abortive invasion of Cuba, which very soon became known in the press as the Bay of Pigs.

  “Whaddya think of your Wonder Boy now, baby?” he demanded, having stalked into the apartment, made himself a drink and sat down to relish it.

  “He was badly advised.” She was fully dressed and walking the carpet with her arms folded across her breasts. “It wasn’t his fault.”

  “Who do you think ordered those poor raggedy-assed bastards to go in there and get wiped out? Huh? And then lying about it! Making a patsy out of Adlai Stevenson in front of the world. It’s the most inept, arrogant, cowar
dly—”

  “Look, John. If you’re going to rant and rave I don’t want to—”

  “Who’s ranting and raving? I’m talking politics, that’s all.”

  “No you’re not. You think you are, but you’re not. You know why you don’t like Kennedy? Because he’s tall.”

  “Ah, come on.”

  “It’s true, though. He’s tall and handsome and a war hero and he’s got a beautiful wife as well as a reputation as a cocksman – He’s everything you’re not, and you can’t stand it. It’s loathsome. I don’t think I want you to stay here tonight.”

  She might as well have kneed him in the groin, but he tried a boyish, conciliatory smile, swirling his ice cubes. “Is it okay if I finish my drink?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. You look as though you’ve been drinking all day. Why don’t you just get up and leave before you make an even bigger fool of yourself ?”

  At the door he wondered whether to say “Can I call you?” but that would make it all too easy for her to say no. Instead he slung his raincoat jauntily over one shoulder and said “Well. See you in the funny-papers.” On the elevator it occurred to him that “See you in the funny-papers” was something people had said in the thirties; she’d probably never heard it, and it must have struck her as drunken gibberish, if she’d been listening at all.

  The first bar he came to was loud and Irish, festooned not only with shamrocks and the green cardboard lettering ERIN GO BRAGH but with a framed photograph of President Kennedy from the waist up, making him look very tall indeed. Six or eight years ago the portrait might well have been of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He left after a couple of quick ones and found a dark, mercifully apolitical lounge of deep leather and black mirrors, where the only sounds were the tinkle of heavy glassware and a muted jukebox. What the hell was he going to do? Calling her was out of the question, if only because he’d had so much to drink now that he’d only mess it up worse.

  “I’ve lost my baby,” he whispered into his glass, and might have begun to weep except that this kind of bar would tolerate no crying drunks. He had to make plans.

  He wouldn’t call her for two weeks – well, one week. Then, assuming she’d welcome him, he would arrive at her door with a bashful, cold-sober smile that hardly any girl could resist. When she offered him a drink he’d say “No thanks; not just yet,” and with any kind of luck he’d have her back.

  The funny part was that the week seemed to pass quickly. The office was the worst – every time his phone rang he thought it might be Pamela – but it was endurable, and so was life at home. On his meeting nights he went to movies instead of bars, or movies before bars, and he tried to drink nothing but beer. On the final day of the week he was all anxiety: he dropped two dimes on the floor of the phone booth before managing to get one into the slot, and his finger trembled in the dial.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Look: can I – would it be okay if I come over tonight?”

  “Well, sure. Come on up whenever you want. I mean – you know – whenever you can.”

  And he did, complete with a bouquet of roses which made her laugh.

  “Why didn’t you call for so long?”

  “I thought you were sore at me.”

  “That was last week.”

  He didn’t ask if she had “seen” or “dated” anyone else all week, and once they were in bed it no longer seemed to matter.

  And it wasn’t very many nights later, during one of his rambling autobiographical monologues, that he told her about Bellevue. He tried to make it light and brief but she wouldn’t let him: she pressed for more and more details, sitting up against the pillows and chain-smoking, and when he falteringly came to the end she said “God. Have you ever thought of what a movie that would make?”

  He hadn’t, and he didn’t start thinking of it until he’d gotten up for two cold beers. “I don’t see it,” he said. “It’d be like some New York Post exposé on the Terrible Conditions in City Mental Health Facilities.”

  “No it wouldn’t,” she insisted. “Not if it were done right; it wouldn’t be like that at all. Think of the mood; the characters; the situations. It could be – well, I know this is a cliché, but it could be the world in microcosm. And you may be one of the very few patients they’ve ever had who can remember it all so vividly, because you were stone-cold sane the whole time. You know something, John? Just from the way you tell it, I’ll bet you’ve really been thinking of the whole thing in cinematic terms all along. Even while you were going through it.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Yeah; come to think of it I guess I have, in a way.”

  “Of course you have. It’s an absolute natural for the screen. And hasn’t it occurred to you that you might be the only man in America who could do it right?”

  “How do you mean, ‘do’ it? No money; no talent.”

  “But you said you always wanted to be the man who raised the money and hired the talent. Isn’t that true?”

  “Well, sure, baby, but let’s be realistic. I’m only a salesman, after all, and I’ve got a family to support, and I—”

  “John, I refuse to let you throw this beautiful idea away just because you’re feeling dumb and middle-class tonight. You be quiet and drink your beer; let me think.”

  And soon the brave beginnings of her plan began to emerge: it might just be possible, she said, to make this film on a very, very low budget. First of all, the script would be no problem. There had been a wonderfully talented writer at Marlowe College named Jerry – Jerry Porter. He’d sold a story to the Atlantic while still in school, but then decided he’d rather work “in film” and had done some marvelous scripts, one of which had been optioned and nearly bought by a good producer. She would call him tonight – she was sure he’d be interested – and if John would arrange to meet him they could get started on the screenplay right away. And Jerry had a friend named Julian Feld, another Marlowe graduate three or four years his senior, who was a director – “a magician with the camera.” Julian had spent a summer in France studying with Truffaut; he’d worked as a second-unit man in Hollywood and made some civil rights documentaries in the South, but the last she’d heard he was back here in New York with time on his hands. Both Jerry and Julian had money of their own – they came from enormously rich families – and might even help out with the financing of the venture; at the very least they’d be willing to work on spec. So would another young Marlowe man she knew – an artist and stage designer who would do the set – and so would most of the actors. God, there had been more fine actors at Marlowe than he could imagine.

  “Wait a second, sweetheart. You can’t have a bunch of freshfaced college kids playing Bellevue characters. What about all the Negroes and Puerto Ricans?”

  “I’ve already thought of that. Julian can round them up. He knows scads of them.”

  “You mean some of his best friends are Negroes and Puerto Ricans.”

  But she seemed not even to hear him as she hurried on to a triumphant conclusion: if the script and the casting and rehearsals were done by midsummer, they could all go up to Marlowe and do the actual shooting there, in one of the great Marlowe barns. Think of the money they’d save! They’d have to get the dean’s permission, of course, but this was just the kind of thing Dean Walcott loved – an experimental film created on campus.

  “What time is it?” she demanded. “Oh, good, it’s still early. I’ll call Jerry right now.”

  Jerry Porter turned out to be a slight young man with a nervous boyish face and a handlebar moustache that picked up suds when he drank beer, and he was indeed interested. Wilder met with him at regular intervals over a period of five or six weeks, telling him everything he could remember about Bellevue – about the look and sound and feel of the place, about Charlie and Spivack and all the others. Jerry frowned and listened and took notes and asked questions, and when the screenplay began to take shape he introduced Wilder to the director, Julian Feld.

  “I think you’
ve got the makings of a good little film here, Mr. Wilder,” Julian said, just as Pamela had promised he would. “I’d like to work with you.” He was squat and moody-looking, given to wearing work shirts with so many buttons unfastened as to suggest that a dark pelt ran from his nostrils to his ankles, and he lived in an East Village loft that soon became the stage for casting and preliminary rehearsals.

  “Isn’t it wonderful,” Pamela said, “how everything’s working out?”

  *

  “Hold all my calls, honey,” George Taylor said. “Now. What can I do for you, John?”

  “A favor. Look: I know my vacation is set for July and I want to take it then, but I want two more weeks at the end of August. I want you to fake up a business trip for me.”

  All the joviality drained from Taylor’s face; he looked as if they scarcely knew each other. “Fake up a business trip?”

  “Hell, George, you know I’m way over my quota. I don’t have to tell you how much money I’ve brought into the magazine over the past couple of years. And the thing is – the thing is I’ve got a girl.”

  That was all it took. What did she look like? How old was she? How had he met her? “Well, now, let’s see,” he said at last, getting down to business. “A couple of weeks in August? Just between the two of us I imagine that might be within the – you know, the realm of possibility.”

  He had dreaded his real vacation, the one in “the country,” until Janice declared it would be only sensible for him to drive back to town four or five nights a week for his meetings. Sitting on the raft with her toward the end of their last afternoon, he came out as casually as possible with his lie about August.

  “Two whole weeks in Boston?” she inquired. “He’s never sent you to Boston for that long before.”

  “He isn’t ‘sending’ me, Janice; it’s something we worked out together. Matter of fact it was mostly my idea. We’re having a lot of trouble with the Northeast Distillers’ account, you see …” Talking, he looked down at the heavy spread of her thigh on the wet boards and then into the top of her bathing suit. How could he ever have been so young and callow as to believe that this was the woman for him? For life?