12

AS SOON AS WE were alone Max left off his camera activity and stared at me.

“I remember you,” he said.

“What?”

“I remember you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just what I said. I remember you.”

“It’s been a while.”

“Three years. Yes, I remember you.”

“Will you stop saying that, Max, will you please?” I was losing control of a situation I very much needed control of.

“I remember you, too,” I said in idiot imitation. “Only you’ve shaved off your beard.”

“Too many imitators,” Max said. “I shaved it off in the hospital, the last time around.” He slung his camera around his neck. It dangled like an enormous religious medal.

“What’s it been like, Max?”

“That’s not the question you want to ask,” he said.

“You don’t know anything about what I want to ask. Just deal with what I do ask.”

He smiled. Suddenly he seemed years younger, though he was probably about thirty. We had our ages in common as well as Jewel.

“Okay,” Max said. “It’s been okay. No hospital trips for two years.”

“And Jewel?”

“You were always much too sensitive to how your wife feels. Unhappy, happy—what the hell’s the difference?”

“And you—” I gestured toward the door through which Jewel had retreated from the tears of a strange woman, and her own.

“I don’t give a damn. If she comes back through that door—great. If I never see her again—that’s okay, too. You can’t take it, Wolf. You never could.” He paused. “I remember you,” he said.

It was true, I thought. Too vulnerable to Jewel’s misery. It was why the Academy was good for me. All this generalized suffering kept everything abstract—at arm’s length. But I was damned if I would tell this to Max.

“Why did you come here, really?” I said, instead. “Is that the question you expected me to ask?”

“No.”

“Well, why?”

“To make a film.”

“Don’t give me that crap! I remember you.”

“Then you remember that I make films. When I can scrape up the money.”

“Who scraped up the money so you could come here of all places?”

“People.”

“Why to the Academy? And why to this one? Come on, Max.”

He swung around to face me squarely. “Come on,” he shouted. “I’ll come on, all right. I came here because I thought I could find a breaking through, here. A—a liberation—a breaking down of things. And what the hell do I see? This place is as organized—as dead—as the goddamned life that drives people here.”

He started to move around wildly. The camera slapped at his chest. He was a big man—over six feet. But the habit of bending or slouching over a camera seemed to have shortened him. It made him somehow less formidable. Now he unfolded himself in fury, like a large, berserk accordion.

“What are you staring at? I look like my own death mask, don’t I … Have you ever experimented with that notion … live long enough to turn your face into your death mask … then you know you’ve lived exactly long enough … that’s one way of transforming nature … that’s what I expected to find here … a transformation … a transfiguration …”

I broke in. “We don’t have much to do with nature here,” I said. “That’s why Academies are always built in beautiful countryside. Nature is all chance, accident. That’s what we’re fighting here.”

“… not a cure … just the same fucking sickness … the slime of order … the order that serves up sex in a cold sauce … winters full of stifling heat …”

Behind Max the closed circuit TV went blank as the day’s guests moved to the next area.

“… know damned well there’s no such thing as madness … what’s a lunatic, do you know, Wolf? …”

Before I could answer he said, “It’s somebody society wants to shut up … I’ll tell you a secret … a lunatic is a man who prefers to go mad … for the sake of purity.” He laughed; no madman’s laugh, though. Cool, it was. “Yes … all madmen are Boy Scouts … they choose madness to keep their honor … to play fair with the mysteries all around them … instead of stupidly pretending they’re dealing with them … or acting as if they weren’t there …” He looked around him at the empty chairs lined up in front of the empty TV screen, at the window that looked blindly out at the surrounding grounds. “Where is the mystery here …” He stopped short. The possessed look melted from his beefy face. It was replaced by a sly expression, almost feminine.

“The only mystery,” he said, “is how she stayed married to you for five years … and for two of those years she was modeling for me …”

The bastard was deliberately re-activating my old anxieties. Strangely, the question of whether Jewel had been unfaithful with Max had not plagued me at the time she left me. I think I’d assumed that she probably had been. After all—it was Max for whom she’d left. It was Max who’d promised to make her the queen of the non-territory of Cardillo filmland. Later, I began to brood. I suffered from a post-possessive sickness. It became essential to me that there had been a clean break. Stop with me—start with Max. I convinced myself after the fact that this was the case. At one point I think I would have died if I’d been forced to believe otherwise.

Jewel’s entire self was tangled up in her body, more so than most people, most women. She was the triumph of the apparent: utterly white skin, absolutely blue eyes, blonde hair that was the complete absence of black, of darkness. Perhaps it was her all-embracing narcissism that finally transferred itself to me. I saw her body and her self through her eyes. The strength of my passion for her was doubled, adding to it Jewel’s love for herself. Like all passions this self-love was far from simple. Toward the end of our marriage, when I knew she was going to leave, I would look at her while she slept. It was the only moment of the day when she was cut off from the intensity of her own self-regard. She lay there, whitely beautiful under the harsh latticing of the venetian-blind shadows—abstract as a piece of exquisitely carved wax fruit. (Yet only a few hours earlier she’d paraded in front of me, half-naked, wearing a mad orange beret she’d just bought—or had Max given it to her?—asking: “How do I look? Does the French style become me?” as if I were nothing but a mirror.)

I’d woken her up and made love to her, searching out new possibilities with lips and fingers.

Now, of course, with three years at the Academy behind me, a certain objectivity was ingrained. Or so I’d thought. The dream in which Jewel sang “reviens …” mixed in my mind with Max’s verbal jab.

“What mysteries are you making, Max?” I said.

“What mysteries?” he replied.

“I remember you, Max,” I said. “Jewel’s modeling for you was no mystery. Was there anything else—while she was still living with me?”

“That,” he said, “was the question you wanted to ask.”

“Well?”

“… whether the serpent ever invaded that fourth floor walk-up Eden on Bleecker Street?” He smelled control. “Listen,” he said. “I’d like a drink.”

“Against the rules.”

“You’re the goddamned Director.”

“Rules.” I wasn’t giving an inch.

“Then how about a cup of coffee.”

“How about an answer,” I said, implacable.

“What’s the difference when something starts? When things end is all that matters.”

“When?”

“I told you, Wolf: you’re too sensitive.”

I moved toward him. I had no idea where I could borrow the menace I was trying to invoke. There was urgency, too—I could feel it at the back of my neck—knowing that the door could open at any moment and I might not be alone again with Max for the rest of the day, forever. He took a step backward. To distract him from my intensity I changed the subject.

“What are you doing here, anyway? You didn’t want to find your big liberation by making a movie of the Suicide Academy. You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. Who told you to come? Are you going to report to someone?”

“To who?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

“You’re crazy.”

“They can make it pretty rough on you if it turns out you’re spying.”

“Spying for who?”

I was right next to him now. He was disconcerted for the moment by my last question—or rather by his own, whether because of his innocence or his guilt I didn’t know. Anyway I took advantage of it, though I was as surprised as he was when I did it, by grabbing the camera and lifting it from around his neck.

“Give it back, Wolf.”

“Not until you tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Is that your way of telling me?”

“Give me that camera.”

“It’s a good one, isn’t it? Ah—German. They know how to do it, all right.”

“Give.”

“Expensive, isn’t it? Where’d you get the money for a camera like this?”

He made a lunge for me but I backed off swiftly, keeping a row of chairs between us.

“Come on, you Jew-bastard,” he said. “Give it to me.”

“Good,” I said, exhilarated. “Turn ugly. Let’s have only the truth between us.”

He lunged for me again and fell, his big bulk flopping among the wooden chairs like a fish on dry land.

I have always been the kind of Jew who provokes the anti-Semitic remark. Some Jews go through life just missing the slur, narrowly avoiding but never knowing the open contempt or anger of their neighbors. Not me! It’s a kind of perverse destiny. Perhaps because I was brought up in a pseudo-Chasidic community devoid of all but Jews. Good, I thought, perverse as my destiny, Gilliatt has company for the day.

And before he could get up—he was on his knees—I pinned Max to the floor. He was flabbier than I thought and I was able to hold firm.

“Let go!”

“When did it happen?”

“Go to hell.”

I shoved his neck down, hard, toward his chest, imagining the sounds of breaking bones.

“When?”

“I thought … you wanted to know why we came … who sent us …”

“Answer, you bastard.”

“Which—” he gasped. I could feel him trying to get a purchase with his knees, tensing his body to lunge upward.

“Who—” he blew like a mad owl, “When, why—which?” His mad sounds communicated to me my own madness. I stopped abruptly. I tried to catch my breath while he disentangled himself from the debris. Then in a blast of snowy air, Gilliatt and Jewel stood in the doorway; behind them, Barbara. Max was on his feet, looming large next to me. He took the camera from my hands with an incongruous delicacy for one so large and furious. Jewel stared at Max and then at me. She seemed to know everything that had passed between us, but that was of course only the consequence of her blue eyes set wide apart in her ingenuous ingénue’s face.

“We’re ready for you, Mr. Cardillo,” Gilliatt said, blandly. “We’ve set up lights for the filming at three places. First—”

“No lights, you idiot!” Max said. “I use available light whether there’s any available or not.”

Jewel said, “What have you and Wolf been doing?”

“Playing,” he said.

“What did you tell him?”

I looked from Jewel’s frozen face to Max’s sweaty one. Laughter was threatening to bubble up in my throat. It was, after all, not only broad daylight but before noon. And such physical jealousy, long after loss, was funny. Even looking at Jewel’s perfect, upthrust cheekbones (she had repaired her make-up in the interim) and her slender legs placed in some balletic stance that had not yet been given a number, I could see how funny the whole notion was, and the violence that had followed from it. Over her shoulder Barbara’s face stared at me or past me. It was impossible to tell.

“I told him why I’m here,” Max said.

“What?”

“Yes. From the old anarchy, the old wildness—to see if, maybe, my suicide is waiting for me here. I believe in the freedom of suicide. An American to the last. But I could never create the time and place for my suicide; the minute it becomes the only logical step—I’ll take it.”

“Romantic,” I said. “Those choices are too random. Your whole life has to lead toward the logic—or it’s foolishness.”

“… want the luck of my death … not the plan … the lie …” As his internal pressure grew, his speech began to splinter apart again. He made a contemptuous gesture with his arms. “Naaah,” he said. “I’m not like the ones you get here…. If I would ever commit suicide it would be not to break up myself and the old painful combinations—it would be to paste myself together, once and for all …”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jewel’s stiffened mouth unpurse itself. Was he lying, then? Perhaps they were hiding something worse than Max’s dabbling in suicide. Spies? No, spying was at the same time too complicated and too simple for them. Something even worse? My mind slipped around the slippery edges of that one.

By the natural mechanism of a silence the lead passed to Gilliatt. He took advantage of it by starting to herd everyone out of the room. Barbara escorted Jewel; Gilliatt, after a reproachful glance that included both the scattered chairs and myself, followed; and after him came Max and myself. Suddenly, Gilliatt reversed his course and appeared at my elbow as Max bent to retrieve some equipment.

“By the way,” he said softly, “Brand wants to see you at four o’clock. And then Rath. Just before the meeting of the Board of Management.”

Brand was the Chairman of the Board, a difficult man who rarely saw anyone outside the confines of the Board Room. I’d only seen him twice since my employment at the Academy. And I’d never met Rath, the Academy President. Something was up.

“I’m impressed,” I said to Gilliatt, to cover my confusion.

“I would be,” he said, with a friendly, demonic smile. He blinked swiftly; the skin of his eyelids was pinkish, trailing off to blue-blacks near the lashes. He left, followed by a burdened Max.

Just before he reached the door, Max turned to me.

“I remember you,” he said. “You were a lousy actor and a lousy director. Jewel told me all about your crazy childhood. That’s why you’re up here in this phony Nirvana playing Buddha to a bunch of scared suicides who haven’t got the guts to do it. No matter how lousy I treat Jewel she’s better off with me. I remember you!”

Alone in the room observed only by the silent blank TV screen, I remembered me, too.