Carl Laemmle saves him.
Isadore Bernstein’s dreams of a motion picture empire may be so much smoke, but Carl Laemmle sees Nuts in May, even if no one else does.
He gets the call.
—Mr. Laemmle likes you. Come in and talk to us.
He shines his shoes, the shoes that have not yet been stolen because he no longer leaves them outside his door at night. He pays to have his suit pressed, and examines it at the laundry counter to ensure that the fabric is spotless and without wrinkle or burn. He irons his own shirt, even though Mae offers to do it for him. He will perform all these duties himself because he is superstitious, and he has worked so hard, and he fears that if he does not take care of every detail his future will slip through some small fissure and he will be forced to watch as it tumbles into the void until at last its light is lost.
He does not sleep that night.
He bathes in the morning. The proprietor of the rooming house is not used to men wishing to bathe in the morning. The proprietor regards it as a tendency worthy of comment and suspicion for a man to bathe excessively—or even, it is speculated, given the state of the proprietor’s personal hygiene, to bathe very much at all.
Word spreads through the rooming house, among the failed and the yet-to-fail. They wait for him. He can hear them gathering in the halls, on the stairs, crow women and crow men.
Mae helps him dress. From his suit she picks stray lint and infinitesimal molecules of dust and dirt that have conspired to undo the good work of the laundry and might present sufficient cause for Carl Laemmle to refuse him entry to the studio.
Finally, he is ready. Mae moves in to kiss him, but stops just as her lips are poised to brush his skin, as though even this might be too much for the fragile warp and weft of present and future. Instead she tells him that he is as good as any, that she loves him.
And Mae does. Child-weighted and child-scored she may be, a creature of craft and ambition, but Mae has already begun the process of willing into being the man he is to become. Without Mae, he is weaker. Without Mae, he would still be merely A.J.’s son.
They stop him on the stairs, the failed and yet-to-fail. They speak of acts they have stolen from others, of gags old before they were told, of motion pictures and missed chances. They wish him luck only that they might benefit from it, but the wiser ones understand luck to be in finite supply, and whatever he gains must be procured from the rest. If he is to succeed, then all others in this house on this day must founder.
He steps into the sunlight, and takes their luck with him.