At the Oceana Apartments, he hears Ida chopping vegetables for the pot, and music playing from one of the residences below. He has closed the balcony door. He is feeling the cold. He has tried to write more gags, but the remaining pages of his legal pad remain bare. Some days you have to walk away and let the gags come to you instead of running after them like a man in pursuit of a wind-thieved hat.
He puts a blanket over his knees. He suspects that the anniversary of a death may be approaching, but then the anniversary of a death is always approaching. He has reached an age where barely a week goes by without the necessity of an observance.
He has never visited Babe’s grave. He did not even go to the funeral. He has never attended funerals: not his son’s, not Teddy’s, and not Babe’s. He could not have coped with Babe’s funeral. He would not have been able to let Babe go.
And he has not let Babe go, since he speaks to him every day, and writes gags for him every day, and likes to believe that he can sometimes sense Babe’s presence, even though he knows that this is an illusion. If there is any ghost here, he has created it in his own image.
When his daughter was young, he would take her to Sunday school at the Beverly Hills Community Church. It was important to him that she should predicate her existence on the possibility of a higher order to the universe, even if he himself remained doubtful about such a design. Now, with the chill entering his bones, he thinks the embrace of order may have been conceivable to him only in terms of his art, and so many of the problems in his personal life arose from a failure to comprehend the distinction between these two facets of his being.
He wishes he were back in Hal Roach’s office on the lot. He would like to be able to tell Hal Roach what he has concluded. He has not spoken with Hal Roach in so long. It ended poorly between them, and when he reads an interview with Hal Roach, or sees Hal Roach being celebrated on television, he encounters a version of their years together that is not entirely familiar to him.
But they are both old men now, and old men misremember.