“Of course,” Robert Scheib said, “you have the imprisoning logic of the whole situation, the way reality shifted on its axis—and that’s why the story’s really jarring. We lived a certain way six or seven years ago and then things changed.”
I did not think this was entirely accurate, but we were on our fourth or fifth tall glass of vodka and soda and veering, I felt, away from the whole truth and nothing but. It was a real effort not to become histrionic, sentimental, emotional. We were two men who did not know each other very well, both in early middle age, making pleasant masks for each other in the starlit dreamtime of the Chelsea roof, while all around us the world we had known all our lives moved inexorably toward a gray homogenized blankness. There was the time with Paul and the time after Paul—that’s what I now realized. Too late, as always, for knowing a thing to make any difference.
“There was the Berlin Film Festival,” I remembered. “I had some kind of awful fight with Ray for getting in a brawl over a restaurant check. Paul came to New York a few times. When they were editing Laughter in the Next Room, in fact, I went to Munich. Ray was at the apartment, this was wintertime, there was lots of snow. He gave me an address, Danzigerstrasse. Where the editing room was. So I took a cab there. Valentina was cutting the movie . . .”
Valentina was cutting the movie, and Paul was sitting beside her, hunched forward in an office swivel, joking, laughing, Valentina laughing . . . I had a sharp memory of her, wearing brown corduroy slacks and a big yellow sweater. I had never registered before how truly statuesque she was. Maybe it had to do with her sitting at the Steenbeck in the temple of her art, with the canvas bins full of splices all around her, and a big fur coat draped over her chair.
“A fur coat?” Robert’s expression sank into a kind of fixed bemusement. His little cigar was burning a deep scar into the redwood table. Yes, a fur coat—funny, the things that stick in your mind.
“Silver fox or something. It was tawny brown and white, the kind of coat you see everywhere in those coffeehouses in Vienna, you know? The places with the string quartets and gigantic pastries.”
Paul had had her run the first assembled reel through the Steenbeck, and as I watched her Valentina became, for the first time, a creature all her own, with her own strange internal movements, that queer linear scar above her upper lip a spur to memories of Cartagena and the somewhat regal way she had distanced herself from various internecine intrigues. I remembered, too, the persistence with which she’d presented the “facts” of her relationship with Rudolph Bauer.
“That documentary,” Robert sighed. “The one Paul did. We go to interview Rudolph, this is some months or weeks after Tarantella is all edited and shown at Cannes, Venice . . . anyway, we go with our equipment to the apartment where Rudolph is living with Valentina, and . . . he’s coming into the living room with the leather vest and the leather pants, lighting one cigarette from another, his face is all bloated, his eyes have become piggy little slits, puffing and puffing his cigarettes through the Chinese beard—and the cruel thing, of course, is that he can barely speak, his voice and his breathing are all destroyed from the drugs, the drinking, the five packs of cigarettes a day—Rudolph always mixed up everything all together, sleeping pills and uppers, tranquilizers, stimulants . . . Well, he gave us his answers, which were, like always, quite intelligent though it looks very odd in the movie, that interview, as if a very ancient turtle or a pile of moss had elected after centuries of rocklike stasis to speak, in words of one syllable . . . And, as you know, six or seven hours later, Rudolph was dead.”
“And she found the body.”
“Yes, he was holding a cigarette that had burnt down and gone out against his fingers. It’s odd how she knew to go into his bedroom and check his breathing: the TV was on, and he normally flicked back and forth with the remote, but she could hear that it stayed on the same channel.”
“What exactly was the scandal all about?”
Robert hiked up his shoulders and pointed his chin at the sky, his left-hand fingers held a little cigar, his right fist was planted in his left armpit.
“The main thing was he was in such terrible shape. She’d tried to get him off the various pills he was taking, making him promise not to do them. Well, you can imagine how effective that was—as he looked worse and worse each day. But then, that night, in a rather contradictory fashion, after he’d taken a lot of sedatives that didn’t do any good, and drunk about a quart of cognac, Rudolph insisted that she go score some Mandrax for him. With Mandrax he could usually get to sleep. According to her, she said no, and he pleaded and begged and badgered until she relented and made him promise if she got the Mandrax he would go to a clinic for a sleep cure.
“So she goes out, cops the Mandrax, brings it back, and leaves again to join some friends for dinner. And gets back, according to her account, at a little after three in the morning. That’s when she finds him . . . You know, at first she tried to have Paul’s documentary stopped with a legal paper, claiming it was exploitation. She especially hated the narration that I wrote, which treated him as less than a total saint. But you know, until this minute, it didn’t occur to me that what she felt threatened by was that interview. Because anyone could see what scary physical shape he was in and draw the conclusion that giving him drugs at that point was potentially lethal.”
“How did Paul deal with her anger over the film?”
Robert laughed. “Oh, he went to her and said the interview was all my idea, which it certainly wasn’t, and that after Rudolph croaked he’d wanted to remove it from the film, but I had insisted on leaving it in. So they made up as friends while she went on hating my guts for some years.”
“That is so like Paul, deflecting that anger onto somebody else.”
“Paul had a genius for that sort of thing.”
“But you couldn’t really get mad at him.”
“Some people could. He liked to see people squirm when their nasty little secrets got laid on the table, and some people didn’t find that amusing. I always thought what attracted Paul to Rudolph was that stone cold malevolence Rudolph could get into, which was so much more extreme than anything Paul could really allow himself. But he liked to watch it in action.”
“He was fascinated by power.”
“Yes, his whole thing was to be the valet of power. The henchman standing off to the side, watching.”
I remembered that January afternoon in Munich again: as we prepared to leave the editing room, Valentina began straightening up her things, putting reels into tins, sticking labels on them. Paul was on the phone to Ray, reporting that Valentina insisted on catching a flight to Berlin that afternoon, despite his efforts to keep her there. Then she went out to the lavatory, and Paul hid her purse. She had a huge vinyl bag with her whole life stuffed inside it, and a suitcase.
There was another editing room next to the toilet. Paul put her bag in there. Valentina took a long time primping in the WC. Paul made a phone call. Valentina came out, got her coat on, and then got that sudden panicked look people get when something they need is missing. She looked all over for the bag; meanwhile Paul was on the phone, and she kept asking him if he’d seen the bag, and Paul was such a convincing actor that he got her believing she’d left it at his apartment . . . I could see that she knew she hadn’t, but once he got off the phone she called Ray, just to check. But Ray had gone out and turned the answering machine on.
In the end, Paul had to relent and show her that he’d hidden the bag. It was obvious that Valentina was touched by his childish attempts to delay her departure, like a kid hiding his mother’s purse so she won’t leave him alone. But when I thought about it later on, it bothered me. It wasn’t simply that he played tricks on her to keep her around him, but this frightened need for her company I sensed in his distraction once she left, his fretting at dinner that night that she might be away in Berlin longer than she’d promised—and Ray, too, seemed peculiarly focussed on Valentina’s itinerary. It was as though her movements influenced not only their social life but the emotional equilibrium between them. There was something bizarrely juvenile, not to say freakish, in the way they talked of her, she was a wondrous, magical creature for them, full of wit, goodness, and occult good judgment. This had not been the attitude in Cartagena and I could not account for it now, except by supposing that the realm of lack between Paul and Ray had grown so wide that a third person was necessary to dissipate tensions.
After that he paid more visits to New York, phoning up out of the blue. We would meet for dinner. Paul was never in New York for more than three or four days at a time, he had business in Chicago, business in L.A. In the year after shooting The Laughter in the Next Room he seemed to be on a plane every minute. Ray spent most of that year in Sydney. Even though there was a sort of reunion the following February at the film festival, and Alex duly showed up in New York pressing me to bring his slides around to galleries, I lost any sense of Cartagena as a time that had really happened, and felt that I had dreamed up all the people down there. They were becoming ghosts . . . Some were literally ghosts. I heard from Paul that Luis Vasquez, for example, died from AIDS, and some months after that, strange to tell, Hannah Slausen, the line producer, threw herself out a sixth-story window in Berlin. Paul said that Hannah, after breaking up with Vale, the cameraman, resumed an old affair with a policeman, who apparently brutalized her, beat her up all the time, the details were unclear. At any rate, out the window she went.
New York was a city with its own growing ghost population. I can’t talk about all the people who died that year, and the next year, and the year after and the year after, except to say that what had been a nebulous and ill-understood menace became the main thing on practically every person’s mind. In the ordinary course of my week, I often walked past a building just off Union Square where a dead friend had briefly lived, in a small tenth-floor apartment, which I had only visited once; and every time I passed this building, or passed near enough to remind myself that it was near, an hour’s conversation with that particular ghost replayed itself, the stark New York efficiency decor of that apartment sprang into my memory, the black-and-white octagons on the bathroom linoleum, the pinkish light in a tank of tropical fish, a phone call he’d taken during my visit, a call from another junkie. Even though I have an ample memory file about that person, a single afternoon of his very brief tenure in that obscure location has come to dominate all my other memories. The city was becoming mined with these architectural aides-mémoire, structural residue of vanished lives; the route to the Chelsea itself took me past the studio of a photographer whose disintegration I witnessed in close-up over a three-year period.
One day, in a science fiction bookshop and novelty store on Broadway, I ran into Michael Simard. He was browsing through Japanese slash comics, dressed for the gym in a strappy undershirt and workout pants. His hair had grown almost down to his shoulders, which gave him a “French hippie” look. His body, his face, stunning as ever. It is hard to render the exact attitude I picked up from him. He talked about Cartagena with a certain air of bemused disillusionment, as if it had happened in the long-ago past, though at that date the film wasn’t even finished (Paul filmed two added scenes in the Munich zoo, I believe). If he had been carried away by the thought of becoming a film star, it seemed that he’d since realized that The Laughter in the Next Room would not be the vehicle for his discovery.
But I’m getting this wrong: Michael’s expressions weren’t specific to his feelings about the movie, or at least I can’t say so with any certainty. Perhaps that night beside the pool he had revealed himself in a way that he hadn’t intended. Maybe he’d gone down to Cartagena with the plan of presenting a wholly invented, “new” Michael Simard to a group of complete strangers, and had almost made it through as that mysterious laconic being, and then, at the last minute, afraid that we were all losing interest, he turned himself into a complete whore. Looking at him in Forbidden Planet, against a backdrop of gorilla and android full-head masks, I could not quite believe I had ever had sex with this man. The connection had meant nothing: he’d fucked with me and Ray and Paul out of sheer boredom, or maybe to curry favor with Paul. But here, in the northern hemisphere, on a warmish day in early June, the thought that I had once had my tongue in this person’s rectum struck me as preposterous and even a little sad. Desirable as he was, Michael had nothing in common with me, nothing to do with me, and I realized then that I scarcely existed in his mind. For him I was boring, powerless and therefore boring. I had nothing to offer him. As we chatted, I noticed he wore a beeper hooked to the elasticized waist of his workout pants.
No, everything was losing its reality . . .
“Ray bought a house,” Robert said. “Just before you all went down there. Near Bonday Beach in Sydney. He rented an office in King’s Cross—you know Sydney?”
“No, I’ve never been to Australia.”
“It’s interesting. It really is.”
“. . .”
“He’d set up a distribution business for art house movies, independent movies. He really did quite well.”
I nodded. “Yes, and then I remember, when we went to the Berlin Festival, he met that couple, Ned and Claire. I’ve got their address written down. They’re living now in Rome. But at that time they were the other independent distributors in Australia.”
“Right. Some big company went in and hiked the rentals up and so on. But at the time Ray made a lot of money. That was a strange time.”
“Well, he was out from under Rudolph,” I said.
“The fact is he couldn’t really work in Germany at that point, not without Rudolph. After Rudolph, everything fell apart. So he went there and set up his company and then, I think, he started thinking over his relationship to Paul. That was the only real long-term relationship Ray’d ever had, and, you know, Ray was kind of the doormat.”
“They seemed so . . . together.”
“Sure. Hey, Ray was a simple guy. He worked for Rudolph all those years, and you know what Ray liked? To play pinball in a bar, drink a few beers, hump a trick or two on the weekends. Other than that, he had his life with Paul, very domestic, they had their book collection, their tape collection, it was normal, and the relationship quite open. Paul said when the sex wasn’t great anymore that he got off on watching Ray do it with others. Right around when coke became a big thing in Paul’s life, that was when the fisting craze really hit. He could get off in a big way to see Ray with his arm up somebody’s can . . . Of course that was Rudolph’s thing, too.
“There was always a rivalry between Paul and Rudolph over Ray—and there you really had two men who could drive somebody crazy, but somehow Ray managed both of them. You had on one hand Rudolph, an impossible person whose self-loathing exploded in all directions, his body growing fatter and grosser every year, with his uppers and downers that he washed down with quarts of cognac and weisswursts and schnitzels and big plates of carbonara spaghetti, Rudolph was like, total oral city. That was one person who never truly relaxed for a single micro-fraction of an instant. And being the assistant, Ray sits next to this time bomb for eight to sixteen hours every day. And then he’d come home to find Paul ablaze with cocaine fantasies. The insane projects he dreamt up, requiring Byzantine global manipulations . . . financing from Saudi sheiks and Texas heiresses and floating bits of international white trash Paul managed to hypnotize in the course of his endless travels. Paul spent most of his time wondering how to get rich people to give him money, you know.
“Somehow, Ray let it roll through him without ever getting crazy. He just had a real calmness about him. After Rudolph died and he went to Australia, he made that little movie—”
“Oh, the sheep film! Yes, my god, Paul showed me a tape of that.”
“And imagine, it won a prize! And Ray did it all by himself, I really believe it was the first time that person had anything of his own going for him.”
“So that . . . kind of gave him a leg up.”
“Well, precisely, and then he got sick. He went very quickly from feeling independent and making money for the first time in his life, to getting very, very sick.”