HAVE I AGED at the same rate as my fellows? Certainly Arvide Chim, my roommate at Harvard who publishes my imprint, looks younger than I. He is the only one of us with whom I stay in touch. Is it because he is the more successful of us? That’s debatable, but perhaps. More to the point, though, I believe he is living his fullest life: married to a lovely, moneyed girl from the Philadelphia Main Line, three children of I imagine varying age; this is all Arvide ever wanted. This was not the life I envisioned for myself, and I have been exquisitely successful in not having it, but I have not lived the life I did envision. Have I ever had the love to end all loves? This is what I hoped for as a young man. A love for the ages: flames of passion, weeping, rapture, the realization that the one cannot live without the other, that the one would not want to. It is the love of Tristan und Iseult, of Abelard und Heloise, of Romeo und Juliet. I knew I would have it. I knew I could not be complete without it. Yet I have not had it. My relationships have been a slog of negotiations, of concessions, of compromises. I am aware of the practical impossibility of such a magnificent love, of course. I know that the type of connection I sought is an illusion, a projection….I know that all too well. I know it so well that I never sought it. I never discovered for myself through brutal, relentless trial and error that it was impossible, and so the question has always remained, and subsequently, deep in my heart, I suspect I have missed my opportunity, that I have let my soulmate, my true soulmate, get away, that I have committed a great cosmic wrong, that I have demonstrated a great weakness of character, and that all that has come after is a result of that wrong. It is the universe frowning on me, aging me before my time. Would I have had a full head of hair and smooth luminescent skin had I pursued my destiny? I suspect I might have. Where would I be now had I followed my heart? I often wonder.
There was a lovely woman with whom, as a young man, I was smitten. She seemed to have similar feelings for me. We flirted in a harmless way at work (we were concierges at a well-known upscale New York boutique hotel, I won’t say the name but you’d have heard of it). I was married at the time, too young and unhappily, but we’d had an accidental child and I was doing the responsible thing. This is me in a nutshell. I am responsible. I am a good man. I always do the right thing. But is doing the right thing the right thing? Or is doing the right thing the cowardly thing? The thing that doesn’t make waves? The thing with which others cannot find fault? If romantic films have taught us anything, it is that by being responsible we are being irresponsible—to ourselves. To the cosmos. To the narrative. Even to those we need to wrong terribly by leaving them. Because is not it better to be honest with her, him, thon? I think perhaps it is. In the end, my marriage fell apart anyway. She became smitten with an art critic, a mediocre one at that. But it was too late. My Concierge to Merge (as we once jokingly referred to each other) also married an art critic. A separate art critic, although equally mediocre. One marvels at the accidental symmetry of life. And she was happy, ecstatically so, she told me, although I always felt she sounded a tad defensive. And my life was ruined. And I aged. And I look unhappy, ecstatically unhappy. And I don’t sleep at night. And I take pills to help me cope. And it’s not only her, although if I had her, I feel certain I would be fine with every other disappointment, but I don’t, so my professional failures come to the fore. In a sense, the same brand of cowardice that kept me from pursuing my true love kept me from pursuing my true chosen profession. Oh, I made one movie. I made it on a shoestring with money I had borrowed from my wealthy-by-marriage sister. It didn’t do for my career what I had imagined it would, what to this day I believe it should have. It is, and I say this as an objective professional critic with a PhD in the cinema of postwar Europe, perhaps the single most brilliant film of the last twenty years. Certainly, there were problems with it. I won’t say there weren’t. For one thing, it was decades ahead of its time. For another, I concede, it was perhaps too emotionally draining for audiences. Most goers are not looking for an experience that unrelentingly intense, that devastatingly heartbreaking, an experience that will change them forever. And then there were the critics, who were, in a word, jealous. They all want to be filmmakers themselves but do not have the talent, so they expressed their rage with a slew of moderately negative reviews. In some cases, they refused to review it at all.
“You have veered off-course.”
Rooney and Doodle wait for their cue outside the front door of the enormous house set. Rooney puffs on a cigar. Doodle does a few deep knee bends. A voice comes from inside the house.
“Where are those two carpenters I hired? They were supposed to be here a half hour ago!”
Rooney takes a last puff of his cigar, throws it on the floor, squashes it out underfoot, waves away the smoke, then knocks on the door. Some footsteps; the door opens revealing a Vernon Dent puppet.
“Finally! You’re late.”
“Sorry, mister,” says Doodle. “We were sharpening our hammers.”
“Well, don’t dillydally. Get in here. There’s work to be done.”
Rooney and Doodle enter.
“So what do you need, boss?”
“I need you to build a staircase to the second floor.”
“We don’t—”
“You got it, chief.”
“And I need it done by the time I get back in two hours,” says Dent.
“But we don’t know—”
“Easy. Staircase to the second floor. We got it.”
“Good. Two hours. Not a second more or less. Or you’ll never build another staircase in this town.”
“Two hours.”
“You better not mess it up.”
“But—”
“Don’t you worry, boss.”
Vernon Dent nods and leaves.
“We don’t know how to build no staircase, Joe.”
“Piece a cake. Build one step, stand on that, then build the next, then the next, till we get up to the second floor.”
“That’s all there is to it?”
“That’s all there is to it. Piece of cake.”
“One step, stand on that, next step till we get to the second floor?”
“That’s right.”
“OK.”
“So get to work.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I’m the manager.”
“OK.”
There is a long silence while Rooney adjusts his tool belt, measures wood, examines his saw, flexes his hands, readjusts his tool belt. Doodle just watches him.
“Joe?” Rooney says.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know how to build a step.”
“And you call yourself a carpenter.”
“I don’t call myself a carpenter. You called me a carpenter.”
“Because I had faith in you. Now I don’t know what to think. I’m ashamed of you.”
“But—”
“You got us into this mess. Now figure it out and get the job done.”
“All right, Joe.”
Rooney tentatively picks up a piece of wood, a hammer, and a nail. He looks up at Doodle.
“Do your job!” says Doodle.
Rooney performs an elaborate pre-hammering ritual of stretching his arms and wiggling his fingers, then finally bangs a nail through a piece of wood. The house begins to shake. Both Rooney and Doodle look up, clearly startled; a wall falls toward them. Rooney pulls Doodle to a spot in the room. A wall falls inward, and the two are safe because Rooney has placed them in the path of an open window. This dance happens five more times as the walls of the house fall one by one. Each time, Rooney runs with Doodle and puts them squarely in the path of the open window. When it is over, the house has collapsed and Doodle and Rooney are unscathed. The crew erupts into applause.
Variety review:
What can one say about Well Plastered, a film that introduces us to the delightful new comedy duo of Rooney and Doodle? Whereas the picture relies somewhat on the well-trod verbal antics seen before in the comedy of Abbott and Costello, this novice pairing adds a remarkable physicality to the mix. Indeed, it features perhaps the most remarkable physical gag ever committed to cinematic film. Students of motion-picture history will certainly remember One Week, the 1920 Buster Keaton silent film featuring the gag in which a house falls on our hapless hero, but he remains remarkably unscathed as he is, by happenstance, situated in the path of an open window. Imagine that stunt multiplied many times as Rooney and Doodle run from room to room inside a collapsing house, avoiding certain death not once but six times. This feat of derring-do elevates the team of Rooney and Doodle to a new level of physical comedy. Since the advent of sound motion pictures, there has been a movement in film comedy toward entirely verbal antics. Subsequently, this new class of comedians has not developed the physical skills of the vaudeville-trained comedians of the silent era. This is a disappointment for audiences who tire quickly of the hackneyed gibes of an Abbott and Costello. Without this remarkable physical stunt, perhaps Well Plastered would have been viewed as merely imitative, a second-rate Abbott and Costello movie, but with this spectacular addition, we welcome it into the pantheon of all-time film classics.
AS I TOSS and turn in my sleeping chair, worried over money and my legacy, I suddenly have an idea. Its brilliance will make me wealthy enough to finance a full remake of Ingo’s film and then some, killing these dual birds of failure with a single stone of ingenuity.
I knock on Marjorie Morningstar’s window. She opens the shade, regards me coolly, says, “What?” through the still-closed window.
“I was hoping I could briefly discuss something with you,” I say.
“Yes?”
“May I come in? I have an idea.”
She sighs theatrically enough that I can hear it through her newly installed double-paned soundproofing glass, opens the window, steps aside.
“Thank you, Marjorie Morningstar.”
She nods. And I go right into my pitch.
“What’s the worst part of a long road trip?”
“Um, I don’t know, what?” she says.
“Well, take a guess. You have to take a guess.”
“Leg cramps.”
“What?”
“I get leg cramps from holding my foot down on the gas pedal for so long.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“You asked me and I told you.”
“But that’s not it.”
“Fine. Why don’t you tell me, then? I’m kind of busy right now.”
There’s a man with an erection lying on his back on her bed.
“Dirty bathrooms.”
“Uh-huh. Cool. So I’m actually in the middle of—”
“You like dirty bathrooms?”
“No—”
“That’s right. Nobody does. So I have a business proposal to propose to the people who own Slammy’s.”
“Ah.”
“And I was hoping you could get me in the door.”
“You want to propose they clean their bathrooms?”
“I want to open a chain of highway luxury restrooms. And I need capital. It’s a big idea, I’m certain. For a nominal fee, say three dollars, you get a nontraumatic restroom experience.”
“I don’t think I can—”
“Just get me in the door. I’ll give you twenty percent for your trouble. An estimated two hundred and twenty million people are in the car an average of ninety minutes a day. Let’s say, let’s say conservatively, that one-eighth of those good, honest folks would pay three dollars to use a clean, luxurious bathroom. That’s twenty-seven million people a day. At three dollars a pop, that’s eighty-one million dollars a day! So if Slammy’s parent company—”
“Degesch North America Holdings.”
“Really? Wow. I didn’t expect that. OK. If Degesch gives me one percent, that’s eight hundred and ten thousand dollars a day for me, two hundred and ninety-five million dollars a year, of which I’ll give you twenty percent, or almost fifteen million dollars. A year.”
“I don’t really—”
“Let’s say I’m off by a factor of ten, which is impossible as I minored in business strategization at Harvard, that’s still one and a half million dollars. For you. A year.”
“Private bathrooms for travelers?”
“Yes. A Bathroom of One’s Own, I’d call it.”
“Huh.”
“Woolf,” I add.
“Uh-huh.”
“Virginia Woolf.”
“OK.”
The naked man, his erection gone, gets up and heads to the bathroom.
“It adds a touch of class. And by that I am not referring to that ridiculous Melvin Frank movie starring that ridiculous George Segal (not the sculptor, who was remarkable!), who, regrettably, one must admit, was delightful as the banjo-playing Honey in Michael Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which brings us full circle.”
“OK.”
“OK?”
“OK.”
“Great!”
“Let me call my boss and see if something can be set up.”
“Great!”
I stand there. She stands there, her eyes flicking from me to the window and back.
“After you leave.”
“OK.”
I leave.
“Don’t tell them too much!” I yell through the now-closed window. “I wanna!”