ANYA INVITED HIM to her apartment for a nightcap, but he declined and went along to his own apartment, a few doors from hers. His leg hurt. He was wide awake and ill at ease, feeling like an amnesiac who had fetched up in an anonymous hotel in an unfamiliar city with no idea what he was supposed to do there. He watched CNN for a while, then knocked at a pornography channel, robust Scandinavian girls in a desert tent with a sheik who looked like Rudolph Valentino. He moved along to a western, arriving in the middle but knowing at once that he was watching John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Ford himself had told him that the movie took only thirty-one days to shoot, the cinematographer drove everyone crazy, insisting that the company stand around in the hot western sun until the light was exactly right, and only then could everyone take their places and filming begin.
Dix waited for the scene he wanted, when the troops of the Seventh Cavalry presented their retiring captain with a pocket watch. He slowly opens the box and hefts the watch, gruffly thanking his men. And after an awkward moment Wayne is gone, though from the manner of his departure it’s obvious he’ll return. The scene lacks finality, and the audience knows the Indians are not defeated. You had to admire Wayne’s great economy of speech and gesture; Gielgud could not have done it better. The trick was to keep your hands still.
Dix switched off the television set and sat in the dark, thinking about Wannsee 1899 and wondering how similar material would translate for an American audience and calculating that it would translate very well if the actors were appealing. You could set it in Savannah or Washington Square, or even Chicago, the ups and downs of class in America. Even the preposterous dance scene would play. Of course no one would watch it. Such a drama would never find an audience, because Americans were interested in class only as it applied to the British. He thought a moment more, then went to his desk and wrote a few lines to Claire, describing Willa Baz and his evening on the set, and returning to Mommsen House and the network news, Scandinavian pornography, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The Indian chief looked like a Nazi.
Have you ever thought that you were on the threshold of amnesia? Not quite here and not quite there? I’m sure it will pass. I miss you. I hope things are good on your set. Tell Howard hello from me. I had a very strange dream the other afternoon. I’ll tell you about it when we talk.
He poured himself a cognac and went upstairs to his bedroom. When he saw the winking red light on the answering machine, he knew before he touched the button that it was a message from Claire, her first in many days.
The time was noon and she was eating a sandwich in her trailer, keyed up because she had no way of knowing what they were on to with this movie or if they were on to anything. Probably Howard knew, but if he did he wasn’t saying. Everything very close to the vest with Howard. You were that way, too, Dix. But I always knew when things were going to hell because you’d snarl at me. I knew when the film wasn’t fixable, that there was nothing in God’s earth that could turn the turkey into a duckling, because you’d snarl at the children as well as me. But I don’t know Howard as well as I know you, so I can’t say how this movie will play out, but I’m not encouraged.
But the weather’s very fine, cool in Los Angeles, sixty degrees with a bright sun and no smog. That’s what I like about L.A. in the winter.
She said, Everyone asks about you.
What’s he doing in Germany? Is he working on a project?
Who would want to be in Germany in the winter? Working with Germans.
I tell them I’m not sure what you’re doing. Dixon’s in his close-mouthed mode. I explain about the fellowship. And then I say that everyone needs a change of scene from time to time. Still, I’d like it if you were here with me. How pleasant can Germany be? Right now you could get on a plane, be in Los Angeles in eleven hours. I’d meet you at LAX. We’d drive up the coast for a long weekend together.
She paused then and he could hear her breathing.
So if you’re as fed up with Berlin as I am with Los Angeles, maybe you’d think about a visit. Things are tangled up here and you could help me get them straight. You were always good at that. That was one of your strengths. You know the problem, too many egos competing for the same small space, with the usual confusion, hurt feelings, and aggression. And I think Howard’s lost a step and doesn’t know it.
Can I tell you what I think the problem is here? I think the plot of this film is in actual fact an excuse to get a fifty-year-old man in bed with a seventeen-year-old girl without it seeming exploitative and sleazy. No question about it, the girl’s adorable and the man’s adorable, too, and when you see them in bed in their underpants it’s doubly adorable, the girl especially, and the grisly death at the end makes it a film of trenchant social commentary of which the Industry can be justly proud. And it goes without saying that the action takes place in a suburb somewhere, and everyone knows what soul-destroying joyless places they are. So they’re very earnest and committed over at the studio.
But I forgot. You read the script, didn’t you?
But you didn’t say what you really thought.
Howard’s thinking Academy Award, maybe more than one. I’m in line, he says.
So it’s junk, she said after a little pause.
And one other thing. I hate the part, the prissy missus, naïve, deceived. She wasn’t always that way but they’ve been rewriting. Some new kid fresh in from Princeton or NYU, supposed to be a wizard with women, better than Oscar Wilde. So now half my scenes are shot in the kitchen, making a pie or browning the roast. Fetching a beer for my fifty-year-old and saying—this is today’s contribution from the wizard—“Cold enough for you, honey-bunch?” And it won’t escape anyone’s notice that he looks younger than his age and I look exactly what I am, fifty-five. So he and the babycakes look terrific together and I don’t look so terrific except in the last reel, at the wheel of my sporty new convertible, hair flying, tape deck rising in song, heading for glorious Bainbridge Island and a new life. Or that’s what the script promises. Maybe Howard will have another idea by then, and the wizard can work it up.
Dix began to laugh.
Maybe I’ll die, she said. Maybe he’ll have me die of a broken heart.
But no. Howard has lots of ideas. That will not be one of them.
The fifty-year-old will get Valhalla. I’ll get Bainbridge Island.
It goes without saying that the wizard is a great admirer of yours, darling. So you’re far from forgotten, in fact you’re a sort of living god he takes time to worship. He seems to have memorized every shot in Summer, 1921 and your other movies as well. This is the way he looks at the world. The world is the movies, and what he doesn’t know about the movies isn’t worth knowing. Sometimes I wonder what else they know, the wizard and his friends. They’ve seen and committed to memory every shot of every film ever made, the bad along with the good, and sometimes the bad in preference to the good. And that’s the idea, today’s shot winking at yesterday’s, parallel worlds so to speak. In that way the incoherent becomes coherent, and signifies. That’s how they explain it, the bad shot recalled and reworked into a good shot depending on the context. It’s a question of the specific situation, each context bearing on the other, inducing a sense of déjà vu in the viewer. So the overall meaning is situational. Are you following me, Dix? I hope so.
That’s what I listen to all day long. Isn’t it a riot?
Dix had walked downstairs, still listening to her message. Her voice had grown more sarcastic as she went along. He pulled out the cognac bottle and poured out a finger, sipping it thoughtfully as she continued to speak of life on the set, the parallel worlds of the Industry, the bad shots reformed into good shots, owing to the grammar of the wink and the situational meaning of the overall. She said she had some mar-velous gossip about the costar, but that would have to wait for another time. He heard her say something in a muffled voice, and chuckle.
Okay, she said. Gotta go.
Duty calls, he said aloud.
They want me on the set immediately, she said.
He said, Go well.
I’ll call you tomorrow. Try to be in, Dix.
Do my best, he said, raising his glass in a toast to the ceiling.
I wish you were here, she said, and rang off.
That was a private joke. He didn’t wish to be in Los Angeles and she didn’t wish to be in Berlin. They spent so much of their life apart, and when they were working there was no room for the other. That was the bargain they had struck, work always took precedence, and work was a solo flight. So when they talked they traded stories of an esoteric kind, opening the door a crack to admit the other so that when they reunited things would be less strange. He had his dream, Anya Ryan, Willa Baz, and the Wannsee 1899 set. She had her careless script and a young wizard who could write women’s dialogue as inspired as Oscar Wilde’s. He thought somehow that he was more in touch with her world than she was with his, but that was because she had never been to Berlin. It would be a pleasure explaining to her that when he first arrived he had difficulty telling east from west, north from south, because the sky was so overcast he could not fix the position of the sun.