As on the night he left the Japanese gangster movie with an erection, Vikar takes to riding the bus. He rides across the whirling grids of Los Angeles, east to west. He rides into the early morning hours until the buses stop running, at which point often he must figure out a way home. For a while, all the bus drivers watch him in their rear-view mirrors. But soon he becomes a familiar passenger and they ignore him.
With each bus Vikar sails farther into a city of neon lily pads floating on an immense black pond. In this city a person can hide from God a long time. He rides past bars and shops, the Frolic Room and the Formosa and the Tiki Ti, Boardner’s and the Firefly on Vine, he rides past the Body Shoppe and Seventh Veil and Jumbo Clown strip joints and the Pussycat Theater at Western, and the streetwalkers on Sunset who become younger and prettier the farther west he gets from La Brea. He rides over old bridges and is struck by how many there are in Los Angeles that cross no water whatsoever, arching over rivers of dust. He rides past the hotels where the stars stay, the Roosevelt and the Marquis and the Landmark on Franklin and the Knickerbocker on Ivar; he gazes up at the Chateau Marmont’s tower and wonders who might be on its parapets, gazes up at the spinning lounge on top of the Holiday Inn on Highland and wonders who looks down at his bus at that moment.
At one point, he gets off at Santa Monica Boulevard and Fairfax and walks south. Passing Melrose, he comes to a small wooden theater; at the ticket counter the woman says, “You’ve missed the first two hours.”
“It’s all right,” Vikar says.
The woman sells Vikar the ticket and he goes inside. He has to wind through narrow wooden passages like a fun house. He gets to his hard seat just as the screen is filled with white hoods, the Klan thundering on horseback. At the front of the theater, before the silent screen, a small round man in his seventies plays the accompanying organ.
The tiny theater around Vikar is half full. He finds himself riveted less by the images than by the sound of the organ, which thunders along with the Klan’s horses. He can feel the vibration of the sound in the seat beneath him and in his feet on the floor.
The lights go up and the rest of the audience leaves. The small wooden theater is even less imposing with the lights on. Vikar remains in his seat watching the little old man who played the organ, who smiles at him. “Did you like it?” the old man says.
“I liked the sound,” Vikar says.
“You mean me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, thank you,” he says. He looks at Vikar’s head. “Friends of yours?”
“Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.”
The old man shrugs. “Kids to me. I would have said Janet Gaynor and what’s-his-name from Seventh Heaven. Didn’t he die?”
“Montgomery Clift?”
“I remember something about a car accident.”
“He didn’t die in the car accident. It was after that. Do you play here all the time?”
“Not all the time. I play out at UCLA a lot when they have screenings.” He walks over to where Vikar sits. “I’m Chauncey.” He puts out his hand.
“I’m Vikar. Did you play for silent movies?”
“Can you believe I’m that old?”
“Yes,” Vikar says. Chauncey laughs. “Did you play for this movie?”
“I don’t remember when I first played for this movie.” Chauncey lowers himself into one of the seats in the row before Vikar’s. “The big pictures had orchestras when they opened.”
“I met a man once who didn’t like this movie. He broke into my apartment.”
“You discussed motion pictures with someone who broke into your apartment?”
“He said it’s jive bullshit.”
“Well, there’s probably something to that, I suppose. Of course I’m from a different era, so maybe not the one to ask—I just see the picture, not the politics. We play it for the kids over at UCLA—you know, long hair,” he pantomimes long hair, “they’re actually quite respectful but I’m sure they also think it’s jive as-you-say. Probably the most sophisticated audiences I’ve ever played for, though God knows they don’t look very sophisticated.”
“John Ford played one of the Klansman.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I used to ride the elevator of the Roosevelt Hotel with D. W. Griffith.”
“Is that right?”
“He was a ghost then,” Vikar says.
Chauncey laughs. “Well, that makes sense. I think he did die in that hotel.”
“He built it with Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.”
“You sound pretty sophisticated, too.”
“I don’t know,” Vikar says. “But I know things about movies.”
It seems to Vikar that Dotty already has made some impact on her Jack Daniels bottle and it’s made some impact on her when she suggests they walk up the street from the studio for a drink. On the corner, Nickodell’s wearily bleats in the night its electric pastels. The blood-red booths of the cavernous interior are like the cells of a dead beehive.
Almost no one else is in the restaurant. Vikar and Dotty take a booth in which, twenty years before, William Holden and Lucille Ball had lunch; the waiter comes and Dotty orders a Jack Daniels and Vikar asks for a Coke. “Come on,” moans Dotty, “don’t do this to me. Bring the man a vodka tonic,” she says to the waiter, “maybe a little light on the vodka.”
For a while they drink in the dark belly of the restaurant saying nothing. Dotty leans against the red upholstered booth with her eyes closed; it occurs to Vikar that she dreads going home, wherever that might be. He wonders how many nights she sleeps in the cutting room. “I was thinking,” he says. “What you said about it being a dream.”
“Isn’t that the cliché about movies, Vikar,” her head still against the upholstery, as she peers at him from beneath half shut eyelids, “that they’re dreams?”
“I have this dream. I mean the same dream, all the time. Every time I go to the movies, that night I dream and it’s the same. There’s a rock, it’s night and the moon is full, someone lies on top of the rock waiting for something terrible.”
“Is it you?” Perhaps there’s a slight slur to her words.
“No. At the top of the rock is ancient white writing. The rock is open, like a …” Vikar stops and after a moment says, “I cheated on Elizabeth Taylor.”
“There’s no such thing,” Dotty says, “as cheating when you go to the movies. Don’t you know that? Just like there’s no such thing as cheating in dreams. In the movies you get to fall in love with who you want, sleep with who you want, live happily ever after as often as you want. Liz,” she says, “understands. If anyone understands, it’s Liz.”
“When you work on a movie like that, do you know what it’s going to be?”
She turns in her seat. “Can we have two more? Excuse me?” The bartender in the shadows on the other side of the room looks up. “Two more?”
Vikar hasn’t started his first one yet. “When you’re making a movie like A Place in the Sun?”
“You mean do you know it’s going to be great?” She shrugs, “Of course not. You understand you’ve got a first-rate director, a first-rate cinematographer, a fairly blazing cast … ironically, at the time the gamble was Liz, she hadn’t done anything grown-up, and Shelley was cast completely against type—but Monty, Monty was the hot young actor in Hollywood, he already had done Red River, The Search with Fred Zinnemann, and, uh …” she stops to think, shaking her head groggily, “… oh God …”
“Are you all right?”
“The other one. First picture I ever worked on.” The drinks come. “Monty and Olivia de Havilland.”
“The Heiress.”
“The Heiress. I wasn’t supposed to be on that at all because I wasn’t union, always suspected it might have been Monty himself who got me in—he was sweet that way. Up till then I was a messenger girl on the lot running notes back and forth among Billy Wilder and Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich, who were making a picture and couldn’t abide each other. Cutting was easier than a lot of things for a woman to get into, because in their quaint way Mayer and Warner and Zanuck and Zukor all had this idea that editing was like sewing. Brando was just coming along, shooting Streetcar when we were doing Sun, still an unknown quantity as far as pictures were concerned—so Monty was it and everyone knew except maybe sometimes Monty himself, who always had that thing great artists have, tortured doubt half the time and arrogance the other half … or maybe he knew he was It and couldn’t stand it. I worked on another picture with him years later, Suddenly, Last Summer, after his accident, and it was even more obvious then when you could see what he lost, not just his face but his spirit. At his peak he seemed somehow both modern and classic at the same time … so we knew we had the stuff for a good picture. But when you’re actually shooting the thing? You don’t know the iris of Monty’s eye is going to turn into a distant boat on a lake. At the moment you’re shooting it, Monty’s just another flesh-and-blood entity, right there, right then, before he gets turned into something else. Before he gets translated.” She says, “I suppose I’m one of the first people who has an idea a picture might be special, because in the editing room that’s when it really gets made into what it is.”
“Yes.”
Dotty lets out a sigh so heavy it startles him. “Young man, most pictures, they stay in the time they’re made. A really good picture—say, Casablanca—lives beyond the time it’s made, and then there are a few perfect pictures, a few sublime pictures—The Third Man, The Shop Around the Corner, that silent Joan of Arc picture of yours—that exist before they’re made …”
“The movie is in all times,” says Vikar, “and all times are in the movie.”
“… but the making of any movie, it’s in the here-and-now, it’s in the here-and-now no matter how much you want to be some place else,” the bourbon beginning to take over, “any place else. Sometimes you throw yourself into the work just to get out of the here-and-now. When I was working on the Stevens picture, the here-and-now,” she blinks heavily, “was the hell-and-gone. I was,” she takes another drink, “in love, of course. Ever been in love, of course?”
“No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.”
She blinks at him. “What?”
“It’s from My Darling Clementine.”
“This isn’t a joke,” she says quietly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Fuck it.”
“I’m sorry.”
She lapses into a deep silence. “Fuck it.”
She says, “I was twenty-nine, about to turn thirty, which in those days was like being, well, practically like being the age I am now, ha. He was thirty-nine, an actor—a married actor … you knew that was coming, didn’t you? … big actor of the day though I don’t know how many remember him now … couple of Oscar nominations, even some loose talk about him for the Monty role in Sun, but Monty was in the middle of his hot streak and this other actor, his hot streak was ending. Boxing picture, Lana Turner picture, crazy Joan Crawford picture where he played, uh … a violinist? Or … and this big prestige picture about anti-Semitism everyone was talking about … So the world saw this guy who seemed on a hot streak when, really, everything was coming apart. A few years before, he and his wife lost their little girl, to a sore throat, if you can believe it—so his marriage was falling apart and he and I were sleeping together and it was all very hot hot hot going cold cold cold, dead cold, cadaver cold, and if the public didn’t know, well he knew and I knew and Hollywood knew and the House Un-American Activities Committee, they sure well knew. Someone’s been drinking my drink,” she says suspiciously, holding the bourbon glass up to the dim Nickodell light, then dropping her head back again on the red upholstery behind her and Vikar can’t tell if the bourbon is making her memories hazier or bringing them into focus, “… all falling apart … ran Ingrid out of the country for having a baby by a husband that didn’t happen to be hers—well at least he was a husband, hey, Vikar? somebody’s husband—ran out Orson for having been a loose cannon ever since they wheeled him on deck, ran out Chaplin for his politics or for not paying his taxes or liking his girls too young or take your pick or take the whole lot. The courts made the studios sell off their theater chains, people were hauled in front of Congress for being stupid enough to attend some meeting fifteen years before, then there was television which as far as the studios were concerned was worst of all. Night Jules died, not long after I finished Sun, he was in New York and called me here in L.A. and I could tell he was in trouble. I got the next plane out. Never belonged to anything in his life let alone anything political, it wasn’t his style—didn’t know any names to name but wouldn’t have named any if he had, of course, and they knew that, of course, and while the Committee’s about to charge him with perjury he’s also getting it from the other side, the lefties who’re pissed at him for testifying at all, including his wife, she’s busting his balls too. Got to the city about one in the morning, let myself in the flat there in Gramercy Park that a friend kept for us in her name, I could smell the liquor and cigarette smoke and I could hear him sleeping and I curled up and went to sleep next to him and sometime in the night I woke and he hadn’t moved and I knew he wasn’t sleeping anymore. So-called ‘confession’ on the desk, though nothing was confessed. Paramount got some of the other studios, UA, Zanuck over at Fox, to circulate this story he’d died in bed with, I don’t know, a stripper or something, in order to protect me, and in some state of stupefaction—and I do mean stupe, Vik—I let them do it and that’s my cross to bear. So when all that’s going on, you’re not thinking too much about whether Place in the Sun is going to make it to Movie Valhalla, and the last thing you’re thinking is twenty years later you’re going to run into some guy with a scene of it on top of his head.”
She looks straight at him and suddenly seems very sober. “A sore throat, Vikar.”
“God kills children in many ways,” he says.
She covers her face with her hands. “So what does it say?”
“What?”
“The writing.”
“The writing?”
“The ancient writing, in your dream. You said on the side of the rock there’s writing.”
“I don’t know. It’s ancient.”
“I know, but sometimes in dreams you know what things say or mean that you wouldn’t otherwise.”
“I don’t know what it means.”
“Maybe it’s a movie you’re going to make someday,” she suggests wearily, “maybe it’s one of those movies that’s in all times, that exists before it’s made.”
“The movie is in all times,” he agrees, “and all times are in the movie. But this one already has been made.”
He sees Deliverance, The Bride of Frankenstein, Alan Ladd as a hit man in This Gun For Hire, Badlands, The Devil in Miss Jones, Lewton and Tourneur’s Cat People, Sisters, Minnelli’s Some Came Running, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Pam Grier in Coffy, Phantom Lady, La Planète sauvage, Mean Streets, Force of Evil with John Garfield, the nearly four-hour Mother and the Whore and Rivette’s four-hour-plus Out One: Specter cut down from twelve hours which plays for one night at the Fox Venice on Lincoln Boulevard, Vidor’s Duel in the Sun, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. When the Sheriff goes hunting for the Kid, it’s not as the Kid’s former friend but as a father who will sacrifice the son to the new god, whose shiny icon in the form of a star the Sheriff wears over his heart. The Sheriff shoots down the Kid in the aftermath of sensual pleasure, the son wandering from the arms of a lover out into a night he doesn’t know or care is filled with danger; he comes to the father open and trusting, and the father shoots him down. God despises the innocence of children and answers it with execution.
Vikar has ridden one bus particularly far one night, farther than he’s ever gone and for longer than he’s ever ridden, and has lost track of where he is when he disembarks. He finds himself on the other side of the Hollywood Hills; before him in the dark seems to be a great park with rolling knolls. Vikar passes a gate and begins climbing the largest hill toward a massive estate, the grounds around it bathed in a shallow light.
He circles to the far end of the building. A security guard is walking out a pair of glass doors just as Vikar rounds the corner; Vikar catches the doors before they close. The building is enormous but there seems to be nothing in it. The hallways are colossal but with little furniture; Vikar can’t imagine who lives or works here.
He turns to leave when he sees on the wall in front of him JEAN HARLOW in large chiseled letters. It’s like the names on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, except in walls, until he realizes that in the wall directly behind her name is Jean Harlow’s body.
Dead at the age of twenty-six. She became a star in Red Dust, “1932,” Vikar says out loud, “with Clark Gable,” and as he’s saying it, he turns to see on the wall CLARK GABLE. Next to him is CAROLE LOMBARD, dead at the age of thirty-three from a plane crash while selling bonds during World War II.
Now Vikar gazes at all the names on the walls around him. HUMPHREY BOGART. MARY PICKFORD. ERROL FLYNN. LON CHANEY. CLARA BOW. THEDA BARA. ALAN LADD. WALT DISNEY. SPENCER TRACY. The movies are in all times, but the people who made them are in the walls.
One night Vikar is removed from a theater for laughing at the movie. It’s about the possession of a child by the Devil; her head pivots on her body and she retches something primordial, a reptilian green, and she has sex with a crucifix.
Around Vikar, people in the audience vomit. When they turn to look at him laughing, it’s with the same expression as when they watch the child in the movie. The ushers who hold him at each elbow regard Vikar with the same expression. “I don’t understand about comedies,” he says, “but I believe it’s a very funny movie.” The audience stares at Vikar—glowing in the ushers’ flashlights—as if on his head is the Devil’s mark, as if being possessed by the two most beautiful people in the history of movies, with their graven images on his skull, is satanic possession itself. “It’s God who takes children,” Vikar explains to the ushers, “not the Devil.”
When Vikar walks along Sunset Boulevard, he travels with the Music. He’s not following the Music and the Music isn’t following him, they just happen to travel together, on opposite sides of the street, keeping an eye on each other. Along the Strip to Laurel Canyon and beyond, the Music is all buckaroos in the crossfire of Utopia and hedonism, clothes slightly spangled, with guitars over their shoulders; but as Vikar gets farther into Hollywood, the Music gets more primal and the buckaroos give way to space-age drag queens with soft-focus genitals and lightning bolts for eyes. Vikar hears this music on his bus rides at night. It creeps from the east under cover of dark.
He goes to see Treasure of the Sierra Madre at the Vista and is mesmerized by Walter Huston’s demented jig in the swirling dust and gold. One afternoon a few days later, Vikar is passing Book City on Hollywood Boulevard when he stops to look at a battered paperback in the window; the paperback’s cover says it’s by the author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Vikar goes into the bookstore and buys the paperback, which is about a stranded sailor far from home who becomes trapped in the cargo hold of a doomed frigate that sails on and on and on. It’s the only novel Vikar has ever read. For the next several nights, he foregoes the movies to stay home and read it.
Not long after being kicked out of the movie about the Devil, Vikar sees a better movie about possession, from the early sixties. “Spoiled, Mama? Spoiled?” Natalie laughs insanely from a bathtub in the thrall of sexual hysteria, at the mother who questions whether she’s given her virginity to Warren. It’s the most terrifying performance Vikar has seen since Mlle Falconetti as Joan burning at the stake; he shrinks from the screen.
Vikar imagines Natalie lying between his legs, supreme succubus of all, starved on her chastity, drawing him into her mouth until there’s nothing left of him. That night he stares at his head in the bathroom mirror, runs his fingers over the features of Elizabeth and imagines her as Natalie, although not the Natalie of Rebel Without a Cause for whom everyone mistakes Elizabeth. Rather he imagines her as the Natalie of another movie, an unmade sequel: In this movie, the shattered young lover of Splendor in the Grass flees her bathtub to relocate in Europe and become the dead wife of Last Tango in Paris, over whose body Brando rages at a love that forgives nothing.
After three years, Vikar replaces his radio. It broadcasts ongoing coverage of a political scandal that he doesn’t understand. Although he tries to resist it, he prefers the drag-queen music to that of buckaroos:
These cities may change, but there always remains
my obsession
Through silken waters my gondola glides and the bridge,
It sighs
I remember all those moments lost in wonder that we’ll never find again …
Jamais, jamais!
L.A.’s rare rains come in a torrent. Only the steps that lead from Vikar’s secret street make it possible to descend. The intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights is a lake, as though having risen from a hole in the ground. All the buses run behind schedule, and by the time Vikar makes his connections, he’s forty-five minutes late to the studio. A river runs down Melrose; the parked black Mustang isn’t familiar to him, he doesn’t really remember it when he hears a tapping on the window as he sloshes by.
“Hey!” he hears behind him, and a young girl about eight years old leans out of the car. In the rain Vikar stands looking at her. She opens the door and signals wildly to him to come inside the car; he hesitates. “Come on!” she calls over the roar of the rain and water. “It’s me, Zazi—remember?”
He gets in the car on the passenger side. The girl sits behind the wheel; the key to the car is in the ignition, and the tape player is turned up full blast. “You’re too young to drive,” he shouts over the music. She turns the music down a bit. “Where’s your mother?”
“Over there,” Zazi says, indicating the Paramount Gate, “trying out for some movie.”
“Did she ever get that role in the private-eye film?”
“What?” over the music.
Vikar says, “You mean she leaves you in the car …?”
“… I saw you walking by and said, ‘The guy with the head!’”
He picks up a cassette case and studies it. He believes the person on the front with bright red hair is a man but he’s not sure. “He looks like people I see on Hollywood Boulevard.”
“No,” the eight-year-old points out, “they look like him.” She turns the music back up. They listen to a song about an aging actor and a woman who stands for hours at Sunset and Vine. “Should you be listening to this kind of song?” Vikar says.
“Oh, I know all about that stuff,” the girl says.
“I liked this song I heard once about a dog.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very good song.”
Vikar says, “Is Zazi your real name?”
“Isadora is my real name,” she says.
He nods. “I remember now.”
She says, “Were you born with that on your head?”
“No.”
“Remember that time we got tacos?”
“Yes. Do you?”
“Kind of. Mom left you in the middle of the street.”
“She was just being careful. But I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I know. I went home that night and started cutting off my hair with some scissors to see what picture was on my head. She got mad. Here’s the best one.” She turns the song up:
Staying back in your memory
are the movies of the past
and Vikar looks at the cassette again. “I like songs about movies,” he says.
She says, “I don’t care about movies. I like the music.”
“Everyone in Hollywood,” he says, “likes music better than movies. I hope your mother is coming back soon.”
“Why?”
“Because you shouldn’t be out here a long time by yourself.” He says, “I should go before she returns.”
“O.K.”
“If I see her on the lot, I’ll tell her to come back.”
Zazi looks at Vikar. “I want a picture on my head.”
“It’s from the movies.”
“You picked the picture you wanted?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get one of Bowie,” she says, waving the cassette.
He wanders around the studio in the rain looking for Soledad but doesn’t find her. When he goes back out to the gate to check on Zazi, the Mustang is gone.
On the television news is a story that the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane has been kidnapped. The story says at least one or two of the kidnappers were black, but Vikar is certain some fucked-up white hippies did that business, no matter how hard they tried to pin it on black folks. It’s not clear whether they have kidnapped the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane because they believe Citizen Kane is a very good movie or not a very good movie; Vikar wishes he could ask the burglar who broke into his apartment about it. He imagines all of the kidnappers watching Citizen Kane on television together in the middle of the night, while the granddaughter lies writhing on the floor, bound and gagged.
When he’s finished reading The Death Ship, Vikar returns to Book City and buys whatever catches his attention. He reads all the Brontës, The Book of Lilith and the Arabian Nights which confounds him because it’s written by the actor married to Elizabeth Taylor, The Ogre by Michel Tournier and Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne de France by Blaise Cendrars, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, a book called Les Diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly, Memoirs of an Opium Eater and Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, The Alexandria Quartet and the Freak Chronicles of one Charles Fort as catalogued in The Book of the Damned, with its accounting of a “super” Sargasso Sea in the sky from which reptiles, animals and elements fall to earth. He reads a book by a man named Bataille called Blue of Noon that he likes very much except he doesn’t understand the politics, this as the radio announces that the President of the United States has resigned.
Nocturnally he begins to tour all the crypts and cemeteries of Los Angeles. Marilyn Monroe is buried in Westwood and Bette Davis is buried in Burbank along with Fritz Lang and Buster Keaton; below Bette’s name on her tomb Vikar might expect the inscription to read, Let’s not ask for the moon, we have the stars. Rather, it says: She did it the hard way.
Vikar goes to the graves not to pay his respects. He pays his respects in the movie theater. He goes so that he can, futilely, try to come to grips with a revelation that unsettles him and that he can’t articulate. In an old cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard he finds Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. De Mille, Marion Davies, Tyrone Power, Peter Lorre and, just recently interred, Edward G. Robinson. When he reaches Jayne Mansfield’s headstone, he sees in the fluttering dark of clouds passing the moon the forms of people moving, and realizes only after a moment what appears to be a man and woman having sex.
Then he realizes there are two men, and the whimpers from the woman sound to Vikar like cries of distress.
Later he’ll wonder whether the rage that surges in him is from the act of rape or that it’s taking place on Jayne Mansfield’s headstone. Within seconds he’s yanked one man from off the woman and kicked in the face the other just as he looks up from what he’s doing. In the confusion of sex and surprise, neither of the assailants gets his bearings. Vikar kicks the second man again and takes the first by his hair and smashes his face into the headstone.
The man lies still, blood spilling around the 1933 – 1967. In the dark the woman leaps to her feet, stops for a moment to take one look at the very still man on the headstone and another at Vikar, and bolts.
The one man collects the other and drags him off in the dark. It’s hard for Vikar to tell whether the man whose face he smashed into Jayne Mansfield’s headstone is conscious or alive. Oh, mother, Vikar says to himself. He rips off his shirt and for the next hour cleans the headstone, mopping up the blood in the moonlight. Vikar tries to think when his last violent episode took place: Was it the morning he first arrived in Los Angeles, that hippie he hit with the food tray? No, the burglar I hit over the head with the radio. I had violent thoughts as well about the kid behind the front desk at the Roosevelt. When the headstone is clean, light begins to rise over the eastern hills and Vikar can read what’s inscribed: We live to love you more each day. Years later he’ll learn Jayne Mansfield is not buried here at all but in Pennsylvania where both she and Vikar were born, and then he’ll wonder about all the tombs and headstones, and how many hold phantom bodies. The movies are in all times, but the people are in no times.
After he’s cleaned the headstone, he begins wandering south, away from the direction he originally came and into which the woman and two men ran. A few minutes later he’s stunned to reach the end of the cemetery and find himself at the back of the Paramount lot.
He stashes the bloody shirt in a dumpster in the back of the lot and washes in the men’s room. Mid-afternoon he returns to his apartment on his secret street and waits for the police and movie-star chief of detectives who interrogated him on his fourth (fifth?) day in Los Angeles. He watches a movie on TV about a man who is abused as a boy and becomes an arsonist, and then meets a beautiful blond high-school majorette and tells her he’s a spy working on a top secret operation. When he commands her to have sex with him in order to prove her loyalty, he believes he has her under his power. But it becomes clear that she has him under her power, involving him in a scheme to murder her mother, after she’s already killed several others in an orgasmic rush.
Vikar watches this young blonde in a kind of hypnosis. With her wild-child beauty and demeanor, she’s an American Bardot. She made this movie when she lost the role in another movie of a young mother pregnant by the Devil. The studios refused to cast her: Who would believe the Devil ravished this girl when everything about this girl gave every indication of having ravished the Devil? With the death of her father, at the age of three the actress supported her mother and two older sisters by modeling for catalogs; by the age of twelve, she attempted suicide. Was it on a Tuesday, whose name she then took for her own? As Vikar slumps in the couch in front of the TV, he dreams of her on her knees, mad between his legs. As he comes, her mouth curls into that smile of murder, her eyes glow red and he wakes in terror.
When the phone rings, Vikar hasn’t seen or heard from Viking Man in nearly a year. “George Stevens man!” booms the voice on the other end. “Kind of a pussy, Stevens, if you don’t mind my saying. I’m off to Spain to make a movie.”
“I heard.”
“I’m psyched, vicar, I must confess. Same part of Spain where Leone’s shot a bunch of stuff. A few casting matters to sort out still … I was going to see if I could coax you over to design some sets for me, but Dot tells me you’re editing now.”
“She’s teaching me.”
“She says you’ve got an eye. Big compliment, considering the source.” My eye? Vikar wonders, touching the tattooed red teardrop beneath his left one. “Maybe we can bring you in on some of the cutting when we get back.”
“Thank you.”
“Huston’s in Morocco shooting his Kipling thing. Maybe I can get you on that too, once they’ve wrapped.”
“I would like that very much,” Vikar says.
“Morocco is India in his movie and Spain is Morocco in mine. There’s movie-making in a scrotum sac, vicar.” There’s a long pause. “Take care of Dot, O.K., vicar?” he says.
“All right.”
“To the extent she lets anyone take care of her.”
“All right.”
“You see Margie’s Siamese-twin movie?”
“Yes.”
“A fucking hit, so that shows what I know.”
“Yes.”
“Too bad about separating the twins before the story starts. Really wanted to see Margie Ruth joined at the tits.”
“Film history will have to survive.”
“Ha! God love you, vicar, you’re getting wry. O.K., I’m off to Spain. If I tell you I’ll send a postcard, I’m probably lying, so I won’t. Hang in there on the editing gig, O.K.?”
“All right.”
“Keep an eye on Dot.”
All the Los Angeles movies are the same movie, Vikar thinks riding the bus at night into the city of the wrong turn, where there’s no love just obsession, which lovers would choose over love even if they had a choice. A hitchhiker gets to L.A. and finds himself at the end of a leash, coiled around the hand of an actress named Ann Savage (… lose my heart on the burning sand / Now I want to be your dog); blond and bland, not a line of character in his baby face, the actor playing the drifter will spend the end of his life in jail for murdering his wife. A private eye who makes a living pursuing L.A.’s infidelities finds himself at the center of its most forbidden secret, when the woman he’s sleeping with is her own father’s lover, from whom she’s desperately trying to protect the daughter she had by him. Later, the actor playing the private eye will learn his mother is his grandmother and his sister is his mother. God has seeped into Los Angeles after all, and found His instruments there by which to sacrifice the city’s children.
In another movie, the most famous and romantic of L.A. private eyes finds himself at the beach, amid the lazy decadence of the seventies. Vikar almost can recognize the beach house where he was seduced by Margie Ruth. When the gangster’s girlfriend is smashed in the face with a Coke bottle and people in the theater cry out, Vikar is only surprised that she’s not Soledad Palladin; Vikar finally recognizes Soledad among the naked nymphs dancing along the ramparts of Hollywood faux-castles. “It’s all right with me,” the private eye shrugs, not seeming to care about anything until it becomes clear he’s the only one who does care. Three years later Marlowe will move to New York, change his name to Bickle and drive cabs for a living.
Variety, September 24, 1974: “LOS ANGELES—Dorothy Langer, veteran motion-picture editor who worked on the Academy Award-winning A Place in the Sun and the Oscar-nominated Giant under chief editor William Hornbeck—as well as The Heiress, The Barefoot Contessa, Suddenly Last Summer, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Americanization of Emily and The Greatest Story Ever Told—has been named by Paramount Pictures vice president of cultural affairs effective immediately, it was announced today.
“In a joint statement Gulf + Western CEO Charles G. Bludhorn, Paramount chairman Barry Diller and head of studio production Robert Evans said: ‘Dotty Langer is a legend in the business with a deep understanding of both a proud tradition that dates back to Cecil B. De Mille’s The Squaw Man in 1914—the first Hollywood feature—and the recent winds of change that have produced such modern Paramount classics as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, Paper Moon, Serpico, Lady Sings the Blues, Murder on the Orient Express, and Love Story, on which she worked as editor. Paramount Pictures is excited by Ms. Langer’s new position and the possibilities it presents for both her and the company, and expects in the coming years to continue a fruitful relationship that already has lasted more than two decades.’”
Vikar stands in Dot’s new office. It’s less grand than he expected. “She’s vice president,” he tells the blank-looking receptionist at the front desk, but when he’s shown into the office Dotty gently explains, “Vikar, there are about three thousand vice presidents at this studio.”
“Three thousand?”
“Maybe not three thousand,” she says, “but it’s like ‘associate producer.’ In this town, if you don’t have a job or you’re not the least bit important, you’re an associate producer. At a studio, you’re a vice president.”
The office is filled with unpacked boxes and Dotty’s desk is in disarray, with no sign of the Jack Daniels bottle, although Vikar feels certain he detects bourbon. The office is small and Dotty appears smaller in a big black chair behind a big black desk. “Well,” Vikar says, “congratulations.”
“God love you,” Dotty laughs, “as our viking friend would say, you’re probably the only one in Hollywood naïve enough to believe it and sincere enough to mean it. I’ve been Hornbecked, Vikar. Like what they did to Billy over at Universal, which is one level of purgatory away from retirement. ‘Vice president of cultural affairs’? It sounds like I’m having a tryst with Chairman Mao. One morning I’ll come into the studio and my furniture will be out on the lawn. The funny thing is I was doing better when the studio was tanking four years ago. Now it’s the hottest studio in the business and I’m on the way out.” She sees the look on Vikar’s face. “Forget it. I hear you’re editing the Max Schell picture.”
“Another as well, with Rod Steiger as W. C. Fields.”
“Jesus,” Dotty rolls her eyes.
“There’s a very attractive actress in it.” Vikar can’t think of her name. “The one from Lenny.”
“Our viking friend is in Spain making a big picture,” Dotty says.
“He called me.”
“It’s MGM but maybe we can fix things so you can work on it in post. You probably could learn some things on a big picture like that.”
“Viking Man said perhaps a John Huston movie as well.”
She says, “You’re still vexing them, from what I hear.”
“Perhaps I’ll always be vexing.”
“It’s good for the town to get vexed now and then. Don’t worry about me, Vikar. It’s pretty civilized, really, this vice-president thing. Not that many studios would take the time to ease me out rather than just pull the lever on the trap door underneath, and the writing is on the wall anyway—all the higher-ups are devouring each other, which is what they do when they get successful. Evans is entertaining enough and I’ll make the best of it, as long as I don’t have to score his coke or deal with the crazy Germans at the top of the food chain.”
For several moments, neither of them says anything. Finally Vikar asks, “Are there any movies I should see?”
“What are you in the mood for?”
“Not a comedy,” he says.
Because Dotty doesn’t hear the “not,” she recommends The Lady Eve at the Vista. “Positively the same dame!” Vikar remembers from the burglar in his apartment, and is enthralled by Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda’s love story of labyrinthine treachery and desire. This is a very good movie, he concludes, disconcerted only by the laughter around him.
He reads a nineteenth-century French novel called Là-Bas about a writer living in a bell tower in Paris. The writer becomes obsessed with an historical figure named De Rais, who at the behest of the king of France became Joan of Arc’s right-hand man. It’s not clear, even to history, whether De Rais betrayed Joan or defended her, but after she was burned at the stake he went on to become the greatest child murderer in history, leading a cult of homicidal priests. Investigating De Rais, the writer receives strange letters from an unknown woman called Hyacinthe. God I hate this book, Vikar thinks to himself as he reads Là-Bas in a single night; the next night he reads it again, and the night after that, each time telling himself, God I hate this book, until finally, halfway through the eighth consecutive reading, he whispers to himself, God I love this book.
When Michael has Fredo killed, it isn’t just Cain slaying Abel. It’s Abraham sacrificing Isaac, because Michael has assumed the role of father to his older brother, who has assumed the role of son. Michael sacrifices the child to the god called Family; he destroys the family in its corruptible human form to preserve the idea of Family that’s more divine, and to preserve Michael’s love for Family that the older brother has betrayed. God has love only for purity, and everything is washed pure by blood, burned pure by fire, rendered pure by gunshot.
Vikar is in an editing room on the Paramount lot one morning when he gets the phone call. The line has a lot of static and the voice on it sounds as though from the other side of the world, which it is. “… making my Lawrence of Arabia, vicar,” he finally hears. “Barbary pirates, bedouin armies, desert battles, Moroccan castles—well, they’re really Moorish castles …”
“You sound far away,” Vikar says. There’s a delay in the voices back and forth.
“Of course I sound far away,” Viking Man says, “I’m in the fucking depths of Spain, not far from Gibraltar. Some grand surfing, though.”
“How’s the movie?”
“I’m going to be David Lean while I’m waiting to become the next John Ford.”
“What about the other David Lean?”
“There you go getting wry on me, vicar.”
“They made Dotty vice president.”
Sometimes the lag in transatlantic response is longer. “I just talked to her,” Viking Man finally says. “Listen, vicar, this call’s expensive and I don’t know how long the connection will last, so here’s the thing. While you’re busy getting wry on me, I need you in Spain for a couple of months.”
“What?”
“Dot’s going to get you out of that W. C. Fields nonsense and I’ve set it up with the MGM front office, they’re making the arrangements. Someone will pick you up—probably day after tomorrow at the soonest—put you on an Iberia jet out of LAX, and someone will be waiting for you on the other end in Madrid.”
“I’ve been reading this book.”
“While we’re still shooting, we need to sync and assemble as much of a rough as we can if we’re going to stay on schedule. We’ll do the fine cut back in L.A. Seville is the nearest city but they don’t have the facilities so we’ll set you up in Madrid and get dailies to you there, fly them in or send them by truck over five hundred kilometers of bad Spanish roads if need be.”
“God I love this book.”
“We’ve found a cutting room we can use in the Chueca section of town. We’ll put you up in a hotel somewhere around the Gran Villa.”
“I can’t come …”
“We’re losing this connection, vicar.”
“… I’ve read this book five times and need to read it again …”
There’s a particularly long pause and Vikar wonders if the connection has broken. “What are you talking about, vicar,” Viking Man’s voice finally comes through, “is this book of yours chained to the Hollywood Sign? You’re going to be on an airplane thirteen fucking hours, you’ll be able to read it another five times.”
“I want to stay in Hollywood.”
“God love you, vicar, but you’re being a pussy. Don’t you understand? This is Hollywood.”
“What do you mean?”
“This godforsaken stretch of Gibraltar. The cutting room in Madrid. Paris, Bombay, Tokyo, fucking Norway, wherever—it’s all Hollywood, everywhere is Hollywood, the only place on the planet that’s not Hollywood anymore is Hollywood. You got a passport?”
“No.”
“Of course you don’t. Well, that’s just going to add another day or two. I’ll get Stacey or Kate or one of the girls in the Culver City office to expedite things but of course you’ll need to apply yourself, can’t do that for you. They’ll also get you a copy of the script so you can be looking at that. I wish there was a way to get you shooting boards but that will have to wait until you get to Spain. Now there’s one more thing. You still there, vicar?”
“Yes,” Vikar says.
“The Generalissimo over here,” Viking Man says, “is dying and taking his sweet time about it. There are more troops than usual in the streets and things are a bit tense and may get more so. So I’m having the girls in the front office pick you up one of those woolen ski caps nobody wears in L.A., and before you get off that plane and go through customs, I want you to pull that cap down over your head. Do you understand?”
“The General who?”
“Pull that cap down over your head, because one look at you and the officials might get irritable. The Generalissimo may not be a George Stevens man.”
Four days later, a limo is parked outside the Paramount Gate with the back door open. Sitting on the black leather backseat is a plane ticket, passport and shooting script, the MGM lion roaring in the upper left hand corner of the envelope. From the radio comes a song—What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?—by an old Los Angeles band whose singer died in Paris; perhaps he lived in a bell tower, in pursuit of the world’s greatest satanist, the right-hand man of Joan of Arc. Between the limo and the gate, Soledad Palladin sits on the edge of the fountain, arms folded, as though Vikar conjured her.
Four years have passed since she left him on Sunset Boulevard, but she looks at him as if they’ve seen each other every day since.
Her auburn hair is sun-bleached and she wears a simple black dress, slightly low cut, that seems more like a slip. Perhaps she’s more beautiful than when he last saw her, the small cleft in her chin more perfect and irresistible. She nods hello to him more than she says it; across the street, not far from where it was that day in the rain when he last saw Zazi, is the black Mustang. Vikar leans into the limo and says to the driver, “Just a minute.”
“This is for you?” Soledad says. “Are you going somewhere?”
“Spain.”
She looks at the car. “Right now?”
“Viking Man is making a movie there.”
“Oh yes,” she smiles, “pirates or something. A boy’s adventure.”
“They’re shooting outside Seville.”
“My hometown.”
“I’ll be in Madrid. I’m cutting a rough from dailies. Do you still see the people at the beach?”
“Everyone is busy now,” she says. “I get a small role now and then.”
“I saw you in The Long Goodbye,” Vikar says. He looks across Melrose at the Mustang and the girl in the backseat. “She’s gotten big,” he says.
“They do that.” Soledad says, “I have been wanting to talk to you for a while, but …” She’s lost a bit more of her accent. “About that night.”
“It’s all right.”
“What?”
“I vex people.”
Her eyes look away and she tilts her head slightly. She takes hold of her hair and wraps it around her fist distractedly. “I wonder if I know what you mean.”
“But I would never hurt her.”
“Who?”
“Your little girl. Or … do anything bad.”
She looks back at him. “I wonder if I know what you mean,” she says again, except this time she sounds like she really does.
“That night.”
“Which night?”
“In the car. When you drove me home from the beach house.” She stares at him blankly; he believes she may be most beautiful when she’s blank. “When she was in the front and I said you should put her in the back.” He adds, “You left me on Sunset.”
“Oh,” she says. “I had forgotten that. I know you wouldn’t hurt her. It had more …” She stops. “It had more to do with … other things … experiences of my own … than with you. I was not speaking of that night. I was speaking of the other night.”
“The other night?”
“The night,” she says, “in the cemetery.”
The limo driver says, “Mr. Jerome?”
Stunned, Vikar nods at the driver and turns back to the woman. “Did they hurt you?” he says finally.
She chooses her words carefully. “What matters,” she says, “is that you tried to help me. So I have been wanting to thank you …
Vikar says in a low voice, “Did I kill that man?”
She draws herself up when she says, “I never saw them before and have not seen them since.”
“I waited for the police to come to my apartment. I’m not one of the singing family that killed those people.” He gazes at the Mustang across the street. “Was Zazi all right?”
“Of course.”
“I mean from that night.”
“Sometimes I’m certain she’s tougher than I. That she’s not as beautiful, for which I’m grateful, so the men won’t get the same look in their eyes. Perhaps,” she shifts from the fountain, “she will not spend her teenage years in and out of institutions like her mother.”
“But that night—”
“She was with friends,” says Soledad. “With her father.” She shrugs. “You don’t want to miss your plane,” and she turns to cross the street to the Mustang, where Vikar can barely make out Zazi in the back, watching her mother and watching him.
From the liquor cart going up and down the aisle of the airplane, Vikar orders three vodka tonics. Notwithstanding Viking Man’s assurance that Vikar would have thirteen hours to read Là-Bas five more times, Vikar makes it through only once before pulling the script for Viking Man’s movie from the MGM envelope.
He reads the script twice and the third time begins breaking the story into sequences and numbering them as he would identify the parts of an architectural structure. When the sun is behind him, he puts the script away and watches a Spanish movie he doesn’t understand; the actress in it navigates between relationships with two men and Vikar keeps seeing Soledad in the part of the woman. At one point he closes his eyes.
In the dark of his lids, the Spanish movie intercuts with the open horizontal rock of his dream and its white ancient writing and the mysterious figure lying on top. Vikar sits up with a start.
When he finally dozes again, it’s to the dull roar of the engines and the pitch black of the night above the Atlantic. Upon landing at Barrajas Airport in the late afternoon Vikar remembers only at the last minute, as he steps through the door, to pull the cap from his coat pocket and down over his head.
The customs officials make him take the cap off. In the waiting area beyond the customs control Vikar can see a driver holding a cardboard sign that reads VICAR, with a C. When Vikar takes off the cap, everyone around him—customs officials, police, passengers—stops and a hush falls on the room.
As Vikar is ushered into a smaller room, he looks back over his shoulder at the driver in the distance with the sign. In the room, one of the officials takes Vikar’s passport and motions for him to sit at a table. On the wall hangs a portrait of a mild looking man in a uniform, wearing small round spectacles to go with his small trimmed moustache; Vikar realizes this is the General person of whom Viking Man spoke. He doesn’t appear fearsome.
Several of the officials lean over Vikar to study his head. “Anarquista?” one asks. The official with Vikar’s passport vanishes and for a while no one says or does anything. The official finally returns ten minutes later with another who’s studying the passport as he walks in the door; he looks at Vikar and says, “Señor Jerome?”
I should have stayed in Hollywood where nothing bad happens except singing families that slaughter people. “Yes.”
“Welcome to our country.”
“Thank you.”
“How long do you plan to be with us, Señor Jerome?” the official asks.
“I’m not sure.”
“Is your purpose here business or holiday?”
“Business.”
“What is the name of your company?”
I don’t have a company, Vikar almost answers, but says, “MGM.”
“The hotel,” says the official.
“The movies,” Vikar says. “I believe there is a hotel as well.”
“Las Vegas. Dean Martin.”
“Rio Bravo,” Vikar nods.
The official looks at Vikar, some inexplicable annoyance flashing across his eyes. “I speak English,” he says.
“What?”
“Is there someone who can vouch for your business here?”
“A man outside,” says Vikar.
“A man?”
“Holding a sign.”
The official turns and says something in Spanish to one of the other officials, who leaves the room. The official sits down next to Vikar and looks at his head. He points at Vikar’s head and says, “There are not many people in my country who appear like this.”
“No.”
“In America there are many people who appear like this?”
“No.”
The official looks around at the others. “Myself,” he confides to Vikar, “I am a great admirer of Miss Natalie Wood.”
Vikar just nods.
“I saw her in the film about the two married couples who trade.” He shrugs. “This film is not allowed in my country. I saw it while on holiday in Paris. Miss Natalie Wood is very beautiful in this film.” A low, desperate groan seems to emanate up from within him. “Muy, muy, muy. Do you know this film?”
“Yes.”
“She is very beautiful.”
“Yes.”
“She is very immodest in this film. You hear my English is excellent.”
“You should see Splendor in the Grass.”
“This Splendid film stars Miss Natalie Wood?”
“Yes.”
“In this film she is immodest?”
“It’s like The Exorcist, except better.”
“I know of this Exorcist film, this is the film about Satanás. Yes?”
“What?”
“Diablo. The Devil.”
“Yes.”
“This film is not allowed in my country.”
Vikar nods. “It’s not very good.”
“This film,” the official taps Vikar on the head hard, “is not allowed in my country.”
Vikar says, as politely as possible, “It’s not Natalie Wood.”
The official rises slightly from the chair, looks at Vikar’s head. He studies the woman’s face.
“It’s Elizabeth Taylor,” says Vikar.
“Elizabeth Taylor?”
“And Montgomery Clift. A Place in the Sun.”
“Qué?”
“The name of this movie,” Vikar taps his own head in turn, speaking slowly, “is A Place … in … the … Sun.”
“This,” the official says, tapping Vikar’s head back even harder, “is …” tap “… not …” tap “… the …” tap “… film with Miss Natalie Wood about the young degenerate American hoodlums who are probably homosexuals?”
“No.”
“Do you know this film that I mean?”
“Rebel Without a Cause.”
“This is the one I mean,” the official nods, “it is not allowed in my country.” The two men say nothing more but sit at the table looking at each other. Five minutes pass, then ten.
The door opens and the other official returns, and says something in Spanish.
The official sitting with Vikar continues to stare at him as if barely registering whatever has been said. Then he stands. He hands Vikar his passport. “This film you are working, is Miss Natalie Wood in this film?”
“I don’t believe so,” Vikar says.
“Perhaps your film will be allowed in my country.”
“I’m certain it will be a very good movie,” Vikar says.
When the phone rings in his hotel room, Vikar assumes it’s Viking Man. But amid the static of the phone call he hears a female voice saying his name; for a moment he imagines it’s Soledad and only after the phone has gone dead does he realize it was Dotty. He waits for the phone to ring again but it doesn’t, and finally he sleeps.
When he wakes in the morning, someone seems to have been knocking at his door for hours.
The same driver who met Vikar at the airport and drove him to the hotel now drives him through a depressed part of Madrid to an ugly industrial building twenty minutes away. In the editing room Vikar finds bread, butter and jam but no knife to spread them, coffee and bottled water, and a stack of film cans that have just arrived from a lab. There are no instructions from Viking Man or anyone else.
For a while Vikar sits staring at the cans. He eats the bread with the butter and jam that he spreads by using the other end of the china pencil with which he’ll mark the print. He doesn’t drink the coffee.
He sits a while longer staring at the cans. He believes his life itself is in a kind of jet lag. After half an hour he gets up and begins stripping away posters, photos and memos from the room’s largest wall until it’s bare.
He takes the film can on top and separates the lids. He threads the film through the drive mechanism of the viewer. For the moment he doesn’t concern himself with what kind of splices to make, with fades or dissolves or wipes, let alone with lighting or color. He’s putting miles of film into order, which means locating the sequences that he’s marked in the script, and the camera set-ups within each sequence.
Over the weeks to come, first he’ll match the exposed film with the soundtrack, then select a representative still from each setup, sometimes more than one.
If there is, for instance, a sequence in which the Berber chieftain lops off the head of a thief, Vikar will choose a single still of perhaps a flying head, or a head rolling on the ground. He’ll print an enlargement of the still and number it and tack it onto the bare wall that he’s stripped. He’ll group set-ups chronologically into sequences, then number and group sequences as they’re represented by the set-up stills, until finally he’s determined the sequence for everything that’s been shot. He’ll catalog images and sounds by a synchronization code, then begin splicing together footage. Sometimes he’ll make a decision for one take over the others when the choice seems clear, particularly from a technical standpoint.
As Vikar does this, more rushes come each day or sometimes arrive every two or three days, or occasionally two or three times in one day. He works nine hours a day. Around one o’clock his driver brings lunch, and sometimes he eats dinner around ten o’clock in the Spanish fashion. Not once in the weeks to come will he receive a phone call from Viking Man.
At night, after his work, he falls asleep in the back of the car, and the driver shakes him awake when they reach Vikar’s hotel. Vikar doesn’t go out into the city at all; he doesn’t care about the city. Madrid is a ghost town, fixed in the suspension of the Generalissimo’s pending death. Black wrought iron wreathes the city’s doors and balconies and fountains and windows. As the weeks pass, on the Fuencarral below his hotel window Vikar notices first the appearance of one streetwalker, then another, then another.
After he’s been in Madrid three weeks, one night on the way back to his hotel Vikar wakes not to the driver’s touch but rather the jostling of the car, and realizes he’s blindfolded.
He also realizes his hands are bound. “What’s happening?” he says; he can feel someone on each side of him in the backseat. “What’s happening?” he says again, and someone answers, “Please do not talk. We will be there soon.”
“Where?”
“Please do not talk.”
Soon he feels the car come to a stop. All the doors open and someone pulls Vikar out of the backseat. Led blindfolded for several minutes, at one point Vikar trips and two men catch him and pull him to his feet.
They stop and there’s the metal creak of an opening door. “There is a step here,” someone says. Vikar lifts his feet to step inside the door, which he hears pulled closed behind him.
Vikar assumes he’s been arrested by the same officials who interrogated him in customs when he entered the country. When the blindfold is taken off, he expects to see the fan of Miss Natalie Wood waiting for him.
Instead he’s in some sort of warehouse. On the far side is what appears to be a makeshift soundstage with a bed, and in one corner a particularly old moviola. Lined against the wall are a dozen guns and rifles and rounds of ammunition.
There’s also a small screen and projector with a low table nearby and someone sitting on a stool watching a movie. Vikar looks around him; one of the men, his driver, holds several film canisters. The other men wear rifles on their shoulder or guns in their belts. The figure on the stool doesn’t turn to look at Vikar but continues watching the movie.
When the man on the stool turns from the movie to Vikar, he doesn’t look like a policeman or customs official.
He’s slight in stature, dark, in his late twenties. He wears dark pants and combat boots and a kind of workshirt; a scarf is tied around his neck. On the table next to the stool where the man sits, next to a bottle of wine and several glasses, Vikar sees a military issue .45.
The man on the stool notes Vikar’s bound hands. “Untie his hands,” he says to the other men. He says to Vikar, “I apologize for the ropes. Please,” and indicates another nearby stool for Vikar to sit. He turns his attention back to the movie, and together the two men watch.
The movie is about a young bride who travels to Thailand to be with her French diplomat husband. Among the embassy’s aristocratic females, the bride has a number of sexual relationships, then is sent by her husband to be trained by an older man in the art of sexual submission.
Vikar believes that the young woman is very attractive but perhaps the movie is not so good. “This film is not allowed in my country,” the man on the stool says to Vikar. “You know of this actress?” Over the man’s shoulder, Vikar watches the driver of his car set the film cans on the editing table.
“No.”
“Miss Sylvia Kristel,” the man says, as though this explains everything.
“Is she French?”
“The film is French. She is …” he thinks, “… Dutch, I believe.”
They watch awhile longer, the man riveted by the Dutch actress. Then he reaches over and turns off the projector. He says, “You are Señor … Vicar? How do you say it?”
“Vikar.”
“Like a church name.”
“With a k.”
This isn’t altogether clear to the other man but he says, “I am Cooper Léon. Are you hungry?”
“No, thank you.” There are seven or eight men besides Cooper Léon. One is an older man who sits on the soundstage bed smiling at Vikar, and who appears to Vikar to be wearing some sort of military costume and make-up, although from the distance Vikar can’t be sure.
“Have a little wine,” says Cooper Léon, who takes the bottle from next to the pistol on the table and pours a glass and hands it to Vikar. “Of course Cooper Léon,” says the man, “may not be my real name. Or it might. It might be that my parents really did name me after Gary Cooper who fought for the Republic in For Whom the Bell Tolls. If that is so, then it places you in a potentially untenable position, since I have told to you my real name.”
“But it might not be your real name,” says Vikar.
“Exactly. It is as with the chamber of a gun that may or may not have a bullet in it. But the larger point is that if you cooperate, you will be all right in either case and it will not matter if it is my real name.” Cooper Léon says, “Do you know who we are?”
“No.”
“We are the Soldiers of Viridiana.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“We are the resistance to the fascist assassin the Generalissimo.”
“The man who’s dying?”
“Ah.” Cooper Léon is pleased. “Gracias. We arrive at the heart of the conversation without further preliminaries.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Dying is not dead, this is the mournful truth of our situation. The assassin dies and dies and dies and dies, it goes on and on and on and on, which is to say he lives and lives and lives and lives. It is a tedious thing.”
Vikar says, “He should die more quickly.”
“He should die NOW!” Cooper Léon roars in Vikar’s face, then pulls back, hands raised. “You see?” he waves to the men around him, then places his hand on his chest. “It unsettles us. It unsettles all of Spain.” He pours himself more wine and stares at the blank movie screen, lost in thought.
Cooper Léon says, “What is cinema, Señor Vicar?”
“What?”
“What is cinema? Cinema,” he answers himself, “is metaphor.” He looks at his men around him to gauge the awe with which this insight has been received. “Cinema is metaphor, and this is one of the things that cinema has in common with politics, which often is metaphor as well. The assassin the Generalissimo, it is no longer a question of his power. He is dying, and in his dying he has no true practical power anymore. Slow but sure the country rustles itself to freedom and justice. On the Fuencarral by your hotel, for instance, you have recently noticed more women of the night?”
“Yes.”
“This is what I mean.”
Vikar considers the political implications of the women he has seen on the Fuencarral.
“But in his unseemly insistence on continuing to live, the assassin the Generalissimo holds another kind of power over the minds of the countrymen he has oppressed for more than thirty-five years. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“No.”
Cooper Léon waves it away. “It is of no matter,” he says. “We are going to make a film about the death of the assassin the Generalissimo.”
“The one who hasn’t died.”
“That is why we make the film. Cinema is metaphor, and when politics is metaphor as well, then cinema is guerrilla action. So that although the assassin may live another thirty-five years, he will die in the imaginations of the people, which is what matters. I am certain you understand.” Vikar doesn’t understand. Cooper Léon indicates the old man sitting on the bed on the soundstage. “My papa here, he is playing the assassin the Generalissimo. You will direct the scene.”
“I’m not a director.”
“You will direct the scene, and then you will put the film together with what we have filmed, and with documentary footage we have gathered of the assassin the Generalissimo over the last thirty-five years, and with what you have cut from the film that you have been working on in Madrid.”
Vikar looks at the soundstage and the little old man, and looks at the cans of film that his driver has placed on the far editing table. “Those,” he says to the canisters, “are what I’ve cut from Viking Man’s movie?”
“Who is this viking?”
“That is footage from the movie I’ve been cutting?”
“Some is other footage, as I said. As well,” he adds, patting the projector, “we might put in some of this film.”
Vikar looks at the projector. “The French movie starring the naked Dutch actress?”
Cooper Léon frowns. “I have to consider this. I have to consider whether it is proper to sacrifice this film for this purpose. Perhaps some parts of this film that are not as,” he’s at a loss for the precise word, “stirring. If you cut something from this film,” patting the projector again, “you can put back together what is left?”
“I can splice it,” says Vikar.
“That is it,” Cooper Léon points at Vikar triumphantly, “splice!”
“You want to make a movie of your father,” says Vikar, looking at the little old man on the set, “and Viking Man’s movie and old documentaries and the movie with the naked Dutch actress?”
“You keep saying this viking.”
Vikar says, “I don’t believe I can make this movie you want.”
Cooper Léon’s face goes cold. “This has been a civil conversation, has it not?”
“I’m very busy with the other movie.”
“It has been a pleasant conversation, no?”
“All right.”
“Let us not be uncivil. Let us not be unpleasant. You will do this.”
Vikar looks at the .45 on the table and at the stage behind Cooper Léon.
“Pablo,” Cooper Léon calls. One of the other men raises a handheld camera.
“Viking Man’s movie,” Vikar nods at the cans of film on the editing table, “is about long ago. It’s about the desert and people who ride horses and wear robes and have swords. I don’t believe,” he says, “your movie is going to make sense.”
Cooper Léon smiles, having anticipated this objection. “Señor,” he says, “do you know of Buñuel?”
“Yes.”
“He is known in your country?”
“People who know about movies know about him.”
“He is considered a good director?”
“Yes.”
“Your great American novelist Henry Miller said, ‘They call Buñuel many things but they do not call him a lunatic.’ Señor Vicar, have you seen a film by Buñuel that makes sense?”
“No. I believe the movie of Catherine Deneuve getting splattered with mud is a very good movie.”
“That is my favorite as well,” Cooper Léon nods. “The mud splattering especially.”
Vikar says, “Do you know Buñuel yourself?”
“This is what I have just said.”
“I mean, do you know Buñuel?”
“You mean Buñuel the man?”
“Yes.”
“Buñuel has not been in Spain a long time.”
“Do you know his daughter?”
“I know of no daughter. I know he has sons.”
“No daughter?”
“If Buñuel had a daughter, would he not acknowledge it?”
“You would be surprised,” says Vikar, “what fathers do to their children.”
The car returns Vikar to his hotel where he sleeps three hours, then rises to find the car waiting to take him to the cutting room where he edits Viking Man’s movie. Every night the car picks up Vikar from the cutting room; three or four other men are always in the car, where Vikar is blindfolded but his hands are no longer bound. By night Vikar “directs” the death of the Generalissimo, starring Cooper Léon’s papa. By day he cuts Viking Man’s Barbary pirate movie.
As the Generalissimo’s death is filmed, one of the Soldiers of Viridiana cooks what the men call the “Basque Breakfast”—although it’s the middle of the night—a hash of fried eggs, potatoes, onions and chopped tomatoes. It becomes the one thing Vikar looks forward to, eating it out of the skillet with the other men and drinking it down with Spanish red wine.
Pablo with the handheld camera shoots the Generalissimo’s death scene from every angle. For the “lights” on the makeshift soundstage, three stainless-steel standing floor lamps that twist into shapes appear to have been liberated from a gynecologist’s office. Cooper Léon’s papa is lit and shot in every position that might conceivably suggest a dictator on the verge of death. Vikar shoots and shoots night after night because, first of all, he has heard that when a director has no idea what he’s doing, he should shoot as much film as possible, and because, second, he’s trying to prolong the filming so that he might finish Viking Man’s movie first and slip out of the country.
“Perhaps you should moan,” Vikar suggests to Cooper Léon’s papa during filming. For a “soundstage,” the set is remarkably absent of any kind of sound equipment—perhaps, Vikar believes, because it’s the style of European filmmaking to dub in the sound later. Nonetheless Vikar also believes Cooper Léon’s papa should moan even if no one can hear it; the camera will hear it. These directions are translated to Cooper Léon’s papa and he moans. I don’t believe it’s a very good moan, Vikar thinks. But perhaps this is the way they moan in Spain when they’re dying. “Perhaps,” Vikar says to the translator, reconsidering, “he should not moan,” and Cooper Léon’s papa stops moaning.
Two weeks pass. Cutting Viking Man’s movie by day and the movie for the Soldiers of Viridiana by night, Vikar feels not only his eyes going but whatever distinctions onto which he’s been able to hold. In Cooper Léon’s movie, Vikar intercuts footage of Cooper Léon’s papa in bed with the old documentary footage of the Generalissimo and left-over shards of Viking Man’s movie, to show the Generalissimo flooded by memories and strange dreams as he dies. Bits of the sequence in Viking Man’s movie where the Berber chieftain chops off the thief’s head become a dream in which the Generalissimo as a child has his own head chopped off by his father, dressed in the black robes of death.
Vikar believes perhaps the movie doesn’t look so much like Buñuel. He’s also not certain how Viking Man would feel about some of his movie making its way into a movie by the Soldiers of Viridiana. Cooper Léon insists that a bit of the French movie with the naked Dutch actress should be included, preferably some stray moment from the film’s “most superb scene” where the young bride is raped in an opium den. At the same time, Cooper Léon doesn’t want his print of the French movie too violated; Vikar decides to surgically remove a single frame from the opium den scene and drop it into the Generalissimo movie. He feels a bit like God doing this, sending a clandestine message to anyone who sees the movie. “But no one will see only a single frame,” Cooper Léon protests.
“They will not see it but they will,” says Vikar.
Cooper Léon’s eyes narrow. “They will not see it but they will,” he repeats slowly, then again, “they will not see it but they will! It is like a secret weapon, then, that explodes in the imagination of the viewer!”
“Yes.”
Cooper Léon looks at Vikar and his eyes glisten. “You are a man of vision,” he declares quietly.
“Uh.”
“Spain is fortunate you were sent in this trying hour.”
Editing the death of the Generalissimo, Vikar notices that in scenes shot from one side Cooper Léon’s papa is not ominous in the least, but that in scenes shot from the other side, a menace presents itself that was unseen either on the stage or in the camera’s lens. It’s as though one profile of the old man is possessed in a way that only film captures. He uses all the footage from the menacing profile and rejects the rest.
One night, after sleepless nights and days of Vikar working on both movies, the car that always waits for him isn’t there.
Vikar gets a taxi back to his hotel. The next morning at the hotel, the car still isn’t there, nor that night, nor the next morning and night. It never appears again. The driver never returns, and no one brings Vikar lunch.
Sitting at the window of his hotel room one night, Vikar notes out of the corner of his eye the mirror over the bathroom sink, and in it his reflection.
Looking at his reflection in the mirror, Vikar thinks about the scenes of Cooper Léon’s papa and how by cutting to someone’s right or left profile in the editing, he can expose something. He can expose the side of the person that’s true and the side that’s false. He can expose the side that’s good and the side that’s evil.
He can—he’s still thinking to himself a week later, on the plane home—expose the side that punishes and the side that receives, the side that dominates and the side that submits. It’s different with each person and each profile: what’s represented by one actor’s right might be represented by another’s left. George Stevens understood this in A Place in the Sun; Vikar remembers what Dotty said about the close-ups of Taylor and Clift on the terrace, how Stevens had no regard for continuity in cutting from one profile to the other. As Vikar begins to decipher which profile is which—although he can’t articulate it to himself let alone anyone else—a new visual vocabulary of meaning becomes available to him.
Variety, January 5, 1976: “LOS ANGELES—Long-time motion-picture veteran Dorothy Langer is leaving the studio after more than 25 years as editor and vice president, effective immediately, it was announced today by Paramount Pictures. Neither Ms. Langer nor a spokesman for the studio could be reached for comment.”
Back in Los Angeles, Vikar goes by Dotty’s office on the chance she’s still there. He tries phoning her once, to no answer.
Over the coming weeks and months, he walks out to the Paramount Gate looking for Soledad against the fountain, arms folded. He searches everywhere and asks anyone who might know her; he calls information over and over for her number, but there never is one.
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well. Penn’s Night Moves. Warhol’s Heat. Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales. Meyer’s Up! Sarre’s The Death of Marat. Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. In The Story of Adele H, the daughter of a famous nineteenth-century author falls in love with a soldier. She follows the soldier from France to Nova Scotia and haunts the streets of Halifax looking for him; everything she believes or has believed has collapsed into his form. She is Joan of Arc but without a god; she becomes so pure in her crusade that, by the end of the movie, the soldier himself means nothing to her and is unrecognizable to her. She’s beyond love, beyond the pettiness of her own heart; she’s beyond God. By the end of the movie, she’s gone somewhere God can’t reach her.
Later he’ll tell himself it’s for Dotty, but he doesn’t really believe that. Deep in the bowels of the Paramount archives one afternoon he sees it, there on a shelf like this week’s disposable magazine: place in the sun / stevens scrawled on the edge of the canister; and he stands looking at it a long time as if deciding whether to steal it rather than how. But really he’s deciding how.
If they hadn’t fired Dotty, I wouldn’t, but he knows he would and feels no guilt. He also knows he cherishes this movie more than its owners ever could. Finally he simply carries the cans out of the building under his arm in broad daylight, making no attempt to hide them; when no one stops or questions him, the theft is only validated. Back in his apartment on Pauline Boulevard, he makes a shrine for it.
Dietrich and Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman is next. As the pirated movie collection grows, the shrine grows; soon it’s filled a wall. I’m going to need more walls.
He goes to the Fox Venice one night to see an Antonioni double bill. In the first film, a group of vacationers visits an island where one of them vanishes; the woman is never found, and by the end of the movie she is all but forgotten. In the second film, the private eye from Chinatown has become a foreign correspondent who changes places with a dead man, leaving in his wake a successful career and an estranged wife. So really the second half of the double bill solves the mystery of the first, and of the vanished woman on the island, who clearly also has exchanged places with someone. Vikar knows she has become Soledad Palladin, who was originally supposed to play the part. By the end of the double bill the foreign correspondent has assumed not only the dead man’s itinerary but his destiny, and a growing hush falls over not just these movies but all movies—the hush of looming cataclysm, the slow pan of the camera across an empty town square outside a hotel room, where a body lies.
Vikar returns to Jayne Mansfield’s headstone at Hollywood Memorial one night and lies on the headstone waiting for her. But she doesn’t come.
After three projects as an assistant editor, Vikar hasn’t worked for eight months when he gets a phone call.
“Mr. Jerome?” The voice on the other line is pleasant and self-assured. “Mitch Rondell with United Artists in New York. How are you?”
“I’m all right.”
“I’m wondering if we can fly you back here to discuss a project. It would be on our dime, of course.”
“When?” says Vikar.
“I don’t mean to be pushy, but as soon as possible. This afternoon or, if that’s not feasible, tomorrow.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“I would rather talk about it in person. It’s pressing and a little delicate.”
“It doesn’t take thirteen hours, does it?”
“To New York?”
“The last plane I flew took thirteen hours.”
“You must have gone farther than New York.”
“Spain.”
“That’s farther than New York. Have you ever been to New York?”
“No. I’ve been to Philadelphia.”
“Well, that’s close to New York. It didn’t take you thirteen hours to fly to Philadelphia, did it?”
“I took a bus from Philadelphia. That took longer than thirteen hours.”
“I would think so. Can I have my assistant call you back in twenty minutes or so to make the arrangements?”
“Someone will need to drive me to the airport.”
“Of course. Someone will be waiting for you at JFK as well, and bring you to a hotel here in the city, probably the Sherry-Netherland, and we’ll take things from there. Everything will be handled on our end.”
“Thank you.”
“See you in the next day or two, Mr. Jerome.”
“You may call me Vikar. With a k.”
“You can call me Mitch with an M,” although Vikar can’t imagine how else he would spell it.
The sign the driver holds the next evening when Vikar arrives at JFK doesn’t say “Vikar” by any spelling, but MR. JEROME. The car takes Vikar to his hotel; he has a small suite overlooking the park.
The next morning Vikar is driven to the company offices at Forty-Ninth and Seventh. It’s the worst neighborhood he’s ever seen; a porn theater is across the street. He’s wandering the building’s twelfth floor, lost, when someone says, “Vikar Jerome?”
“Yes,” Vikar says.
“Your head precedes you,” the man laughs. He looks like one of the actors in Carnal Knowledge, who also was half of a singing duo Vikar once saw on television, with the same blond brillo hair except thinning. “I’m Mitch.”
“Hello.” Vikar shakes his hand.
“How was your flight?”
“All right, thank you.”
“Not thirteen hours.”
“No.” Vikar says, “I know New York is closer than Spain.”
“How is the hotel?”
“It’s nice. Thank you.”
“Have you had lunch?”
“No.”
“Let’s go have lunch.”
The two walk along Forty-Ninth to a restaurant called Vesuvio’s, where Rondell has a salad and Vikar orders a pizza.
“Let me get right to why I called you,” says Rondell, his voice dropping. He looks around. “For some time we’ve been in production on a picture called Your Pale Blue Eyes. Have you heard of it?”
“Yes,” Vikar says.
“I’m afraid,” Rondell sighs, “many people have heard of it, and have heard all the wrong things.” He glances around him again. “The company is going through an interesting period, Vikar. On the one hand, we’ve won the last two consecutive Oscars for best picture. I would love to say it’s part of a grand plan but of course you know better. Cuckoo’s Nest was kicking around ten years—and a B-picture about a boxer shot in four weeks for a million bucks, starring and written by somebody whose biggest credit was The Lords of Flatbush? On the other hand, the moneymen in San Francisco are making changes, everything is moving west, and soon there probably won’t be any New York office—which, I grant you, if you saw the neighborhood as you were driving in, maybe isn’t such a terrible thing. There’s serious talk that the guy who’s been running the company thirty years is on his way out to start another company. None of which any reasonable movie fan cares about, I know, but that’s the back story. How’s that pizza?”
“It’s very good pizza.”
“Now we have this picture. A very New York picture, which made it seem right for us, budgeted at five million. Well, it’s going to cost ten if we’re lucky, likelier twelve-plus. Ridiculous that this picture should cost that, and if we could turn back the clock and pull the plug on the whole thing, we would, but we can’t. Two days ago, the day I called you, the director quit. Do you know who I’m talking about? Don’t say his name if you do, not here, anyway.”
“He made the movie about the Devil.”
“Right.”
“Splendor in the Grass is better.”
Rondell appears slightly befuddled but says, “That’s probably true.”
“It’s all right,” Vikar assures him. “Sometimes I vex people.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you told me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“In a lot of ways, we’re not sorry to see him go. Certainly none of the crew is sorry to see him go. The original D.P. couldn’t work with him and quit, and none of the major talent we wanted will work with him either. Now he’s walked off and we’ve had to bring up the second-unit director to finish the picture—it’s just a situation that we have to make work for us. They’re trying to wrap on a soundstage in Queens as we speak.”
“Is that close?”
“Forty minutes by car.”
“Closer than Spain, then.” Vikar says, “I’m being wry.”
“Closer than Spain,” Rondell laughs. “None of this I’ve told you has gotten out so far in the press; but of course such discretion won’t last long. It probably won’t last another day. The phone calls from Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and the L.A. Times will start pouring in,” he looks at his watch, “about five minutes ago.”
“Five minutes ago?” Vikar asks, confused.
“It’s an expression. We’ll have DGA arbitration and, until the Guild sorts it out, this picture is officially directed by nobody. This is why we needed to see you quickly. We’re unofficially scheduled to screen at Cannes in seven months, and while the rational thing might be to pull out, if we do that then between the official undirector and the unofficial withdrawal of the unofficial Cannes selection, what we wind up with is a very official disaster. How is Dotty Langer, by the way?”
It takes Vikar a moment to answer. “I haven’t talked to her in a while.”
“She worked on that picture, right?”
“What?”
“That picture,” Rondell says, his eyes cast slightly upward.
“Oh.” Vikar touches his head. “I forget it’s up there.”
“I imagine people remind you.”
“Yes.”
“The truth is that if we can get away with it, we would rather go with someone a bit under the radar than some powerhouse editor who will attract attention—I mean,” he laughs a bit, “a different kind of attention than you attract. Please don’t be offended if I say this may prove to be out of your depth, assuming you take it on. But whether you realize it, and I know you haven’t been in the business long, you’re developing something of a reputation for coming into troubled projects and sorting things out.”
“I’ve only done it two or three times.”
“We understand that. We also understand that this project requires more than just sorting out. This will be the biggest thing you’ve done—it’s not some madman in the south of Spain who thinks he’s making Lawrence of Arabia—and I hope I don’t offend you again if I say that in the long run we may wind up bringing in that powerhouse editor after all, who may wind up doing no better than you. This is not a reflection of any lack of confidence in you. It’s a lack of confidence in the circumstances.”
“I’m not offended.”
“Most of the time we feel like we don’t know what this picture is. We don’t know if it’s a thriller or an art film or—”
“Perhaps it’s a thrilling art film. I’m being wry again.”
“We’ll settle for a thrilling art film at this point,” says Rondell. “We’ll settle for salvaging the situation, forget any sort of actual success.”
“Is there a rough yet?”
“Someone’s assembling one now.”
“I hope not too much footage is being cut. I would like to see it.”
“I appreciate that. Do you appreciate, in turn, that time is of the essence?”
“Yes.” Vikar says, “You need the movie in the can if the movie is going to be in the Cannes.” He laughs.
“Six months from now we need something as close to an answer print as possible. An actual booking print would be a dream.”
“All right.”
“What about terms?”
“Terms?”
“We’ll more than match whatever you’re making now for whatever you’re working on.”
“I’m not working on anything. I’m probably not supposed to say that, am I?”
“I’ll pretend you’re being wry again. Let us know what you made on your last job and we’ll increase it twenty-five percent, if that’s acceptable. How’s the room at the Sherry?”
“It’s nice.”
“We keep it for situations like this. Maybe not lavish, but a month from now you won’t feel like the walls are closing in on you, either. Can you be comfortable there for a while?”
“Yes. There’s something else.”
Rondell says, “What’s that?”
“Old movies.”
“Old movies?”
“I collect old movies.” Vikar believes it sounds better to say he collects them than that he steals them. “Prints of old movies. Can I get prints of old movies you’ve made?”
“Are there any you have in mind?”
“I wouldn’t sell them or anything. I would keep them for myself.”
“It would depend on what you have in mind. You know, Broken Blossoms, probably not.”
“Not that old. The private-eye one at the beach,” he says, “The Long Goodbye. Is that yours?”
“Yes, that’s ours. I might be able to get you that.”
“Kiss Me Deadly. Sweet Smell of Success. Those are yours?”
“Yes.”
“Especially The Long Goodbye.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
He’s in New York through the end of the fall, into winter. The winter reminds him of Pennsylvania, bitter mornings rising in his room back at Mather Divinity. As when he was in Madrid, for a while he doesn’t go out into the city, beyond shuttling between the hotel at Fifty-Ninth and Fifth and the editing room at Forty-Ninth and Seventh, where he works nine, eleven, sometimes fourteen hours a day.
Then one Sunday, the cold breaks and he leaves his suite and walks out into the city. He believes he’s going to cross the street over to the park; instead he turns south, down Fifth past the Empire State Building all the way to Union Square, cutting down Broadway to the Bowery. The afternoon passes and he wanders along St. Marks Place; there aren’t any hippie buckaroos or even many space-age drag queens. People wear motorcycle jackets and jeans with holes in the knees and T-shirts with pictures of Captain America, and Mickey Mouse doing something strange to Minnie, and the words I KILL MOONIES. What are Moonies? Some wear rings in unusual parts of their bodies, and their wrists are wrapped from suicides attempted or postured or postponed.
At one point, Vikar and a girl on the street with cropped, dyed-black hair stop and stare at each other, she at Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, he at the words on her chest. GABBA GABBA HEY, says her shirt. “Hey, man,” she calls to someone across the street, “check this out.” It’s difficult to know who finds the other more mystifying. As these people are nothing like he’s seen, he is nothing like they’ve seen; and then, as dark falls, he hears something for which—he realizes in retrospect—he’s been listening for years.
It’s not just a music, rather it’s the Sound, the real Music everyone has tried to tell him over the years that all the other music was when it wasn’t.
Vikar is standing on the Bowery outside what seems to be a tunnel cut into a bunker. The sidewalk is crowded with more kids like he saw on St. Marks Place, as well as old people sleeping under newspapers and drunks stumbling through the crowd asking for money. A dirty barefooted woman shivers under a yellow awning in nothing but the paper-thin gown that patients wear in hospitals.
The address on the awning is 315. There are nonsensical letters on the awning that spell nothing. A mystifying handwritten cardboard sign on the black glass doors says
HEARTBREAKERS
MAXXI MARASCHINO
SIC FUCKS
SHIRTS
and while nothing about this is comprehensible to him, the illicitly narcotic Sound is irresistible and he goes inside, the doorman eying him with wonder.
Inside, the club isn’t much bigger than Vikar’s hotel suite. There are two stages, the main one in front, a smaller and lower one off to the side. There’s a pool table and a couple of pinball machines. The walls are peeling and needles litter the shadows and wafting clouds of urine collide with clouds of beer. The Sound, made by the band on the main stage, is overwhelming; people at the front fling themselves wildly into each other. Something wells up in Vikar. There’s a break, then a singer who reminds him of Brigitte Bardot or Tuesday Weld.
It was never the Music at all, it was always the Sound; and though there’s no way for him to understand this, perhaps the Sound moves him now because, a little more than twenty years after its birth, the Sound has become about itself, the Sound is about its own truth and corruption in the same way that, a little more than twenty years after the Movies found their sound, there was a wave of movies about the Movies: Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, The Big Knife, The Bad and the Beautiful. When the Sound has circled to swallow its tail, it becomes a world of its own, god or no god, or in which Vikar is god—or in any event a god that kills fathers rather than sons.
Vikar returns to the club the next night and the next, and the next five after that. There’s never a moment when he says God I hate this music before he admits God I love this Sound. By his third night, when he steps over the woman in the hospital gown sleeping in the doorway and walks into the club, everyone turns to look and in the din he catches stray fragments of buzz, “He’s here …” and people part before him. When the audience begins its tribal smash-ups, the thing in him wells up and he lurches into the crowd, slamming into everything and everyone, toppling over the edge of the stage. He feels people’s hands on Liz and Monty. Later behind the club, a feline Asian named Tanya and her “slave” Damitra take turns putting him in their mouths, and as he leans back against the wall he can feel the vibration, like the vibration he felt when he went to the silent-movie theater one night on Fairfax, and Chauncey played the organ to the ride of the Klan in The Birth of a Nation. Returning to the editing room in the mornings he glows with a bruised blue, and the secretaries and assistants regard him even more strangely than usual.
For a while he realizes he’s come to care more about the Sound than the Movies, and in his infidelity he’s ashamed, memories washing over him of his first days in Los Angeles when no one seemed to love the movies. I would never betray you, he promises the bathroom mirror, caressing his head. I might cheat on you for Kim or Natalie or Tuesday, but I would never betray you for any sound or music.
One early morning in the dark after returning to the hotel, Vikar sits looking out the window at the park. It’s turned cold again. Christmas decorations go up all over the city. The heat of his night at the club, however, makes him unlatch the window and push it open. The park reflects off the glass of the window in the light from his suite. He keeps pushing the window in and out, the image of the park shifting with its reflection in the glass.
I would never betray you, one lover might say to another in a scene, but by choosing one profile over the other, Vikar can lay bare either credibility or mendacity in the character, irrespective of the actor’s intention or the writer’s or director’s.
As people have right profiles and lefts, so places and moments have them. Vikar looks back and forth from the park below to its image in the window, listening to the image’s stereo. In a movie, every shot is a profile of something. By cutting from rights to lefts or vice versa, or from rights to other rights or from lefts to other lefts, Vikar reinforces or sabotages the audience’s perceptions, not to mention the film’s. He sets free from within the false film the true film.
He’s been working on Your Pale Blue Eyes for two months when, going over the previous day’s rushes, he hits the stop button and looks at the face in the frame before him.
He picks up the phone and puts a call through to Mitch Rondell.
“I hear you’re a busy man these nights, Vikar,” Rondell says. The tone of concern is unmistakable. “At some point soon, it would be helpful if we took a look at what you’re doing.”
“It’s better if you trust me,” Vikar says.
“I’ll be honest—that makes us nervous. Why is it better?”
“Because otherwise it would be hard for someone to understand or for me to explain.” There’s silence on the other end of the phone. “Let me finish a little more.” Vikar adds, “Hiring another editor now would be bad.”
“We’ll be the judge of that,” Rondell says. “I didn’t say anything about hiring another editor.”
Vikar doesn’t answer.
“Tell me honestly how you feel it’s going.”
“I don’t know yet. That doesn’t mean,” Vikar says, “it’s not going well.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means I have to finish to know. It’s a matter of faith.”
“The faith feels a bit blind.”
“In one eye, perhaps.”
“This is all very poetic, Vikar, but both eyes would like to see what you’re doing. Take until the end of next week and then you need to show us something.”
“All right.”
“I’m also sending something over to your suite this afternoon. Depending on what I see next week, there will be more where that comes from.” Is it illicit narcotics? Vikar wonders. “You’ll find it when you get back to the hotel. You are going back to the hotel these nights, aren’t you?”
“Sooner or later.”
“They’re your nights, as long as it’s not hurting the picture.”
“All right.”
“We understand and accept that a certain amount of mystery is part of your personality, Vikar. You do understand that sometimes it unsettles people?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever get unsettled?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“I guess that’s good.”
“I get other things.” Looking at the face in the viewer before him, Vikar says, “But I called about something else.”
When Vikar returns to his suite that evening, a large stack of film canisters waits for him on the table in the front room. The Long Goodbye, Kiss Me Deadly, Sweet Smell of Success, Body and Soul, Monsieur Verdoux, To Be or Not to Be, A Hard Day’s Night, One Million B.C. (the final movie D. W. Griffith produced, and part of which he may have directed). When I get back to Hollywood, Vikar thinks, I’m going to need a bigger place.
He doesn’t go to the club that night, and the next day he leaves the cutting room early and returns to the suite. He waits for a phone call, or a knock on the door.
She holds her hair, wrapping her hand in it. She wears a black dress like the last time he saw her. “Hello,” he says.
“You are editing my film.” She smiles. “My film.”
“Come in.”
“I can’t. But perhaps we can go out Friday night.”
“Do you want to give me your phone number?”
“I will just come over, O.K.?”
“Yes.”
“We can go out and have a drink or go dancing or go to a club.”
Vikar says, “I know a very good club.”
Until the last second, some part of him believes she’ll disappear again. When he answers the door Friday night, she wears a shorter, sexier dress and her lips glisten; she’s slightly flushed, and across her eyes is a mysterious veil, as though the eyes and lips are each of a different face. “I have to make one stop,” she says breezily in the taxi on its way down Fifth Avenue.
The streetlights ripple across her face. A full moon hangs over Grand Central Station. “Is it waxing or waning?” she says. “I’ve been on the set so many nights I don’t know.”
“Which is which?” he says. “Which is becoming and which is begoing?”
“Waxing is becoming.”
“It’s waxing.” He says, “I didn’t know you were in this movie until I saw your face in the viewer.”
“I didn’t know you were on it,” she says, “until they told me.”
“What did they tell you?”
“They told me you were cutting the movie.” She half laughs, “I play the model’s friend.”
“I know.”
“It’s not a big part. I tried out for the part of the model.”
“I saw you in The Long Goodbye.”
“Yes, you told me.”
“I did?”
“That afternoon at Paramount. There was a limousine for you and you were going to Spain.” She says, “I was supposed to play the gangster’s girlfriend.”
“The scene with the Coke bottle.”
“At the last minute, the director decided no one would smash my face with a Coke bottle. They needed a more … disposable actress with a more disposable face. I lost the lead in L’Avventura for the same reason.”
“The woman who disappears on the island.”
“She was the second lead,” Soledad corrects herself, “she was a disposable character too. As with Altman, Antonioni said, ‘No one would lose you on an island.’ Driver, turn left here please.”
The taxi turns on Thirty-Fourth Street. “Another block and a half,” Soledad says to the driver.
The taxi crosses Park Avenue.
“Pull over here please.” The taxi pulls in front of a parking structure. “I will be right back,” she says to Vikar, opening the door.
“Where are you going?” Vikar says.
“I will be right back.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Stay and hold the taxi. I will be back.”
Inside the club, Soledad says, “What is this?”
“Why did we stop at that parking structure?” asks Vikar.
She gazes around her. “I thought we were going to a club.”
“I believe this is a very good club.”
“I thought we were going to a disco, I thought we were going dancing.” She’s stricken by the spectacle; for a moment, her accent flares. “Everyone is looking at me,” in her short sexy dress, there among the ripped jeans and leather.
“They’re looking at me,” Vikar says. They’re both right.
“I don’t like this club.”
“I believe it’s a very good—”
“I hate this music. It’s not even music.”
“No,” Vikar agrees, “it’s the Sound.”
“It’s …” she thinks, “bárbaro. Barbaric.”
“Yes,” he says, “that’s it, barbaric,” and throws himself into the roiling pit of the audience.
Outside, he tries to hail a cab while she waits under the awning. Standing in the empty street he turns to see Soledad gazing down at the sidewalk and the dirty barefooted woman in the hospital gown who always sleeps in the club doorway.
To Vikar’s astonishment, Soledad pulls off over her head her flimsy black dress, laying it over the woman as though it could keep her warm, and stands on the freezing New York sidewalk in nothing but her panties, high heels and a glimmer of recognition rooted seven years before and three thousand miles away, on Pacific Coast Highway.
Vikar looks around to see if anyone is watching. Some people stop to stare at the nearly naked woman but others just pass by; finally flagging the attention of a distant taxi, Vikar dashes to Soledad and removes his coat, draping it around her shoulders.
“As we get older,” Soledad says in the cab back to the hotel, shivering in Vikar’s coat, “does the wall between youth and madness become higher? Or do we just learn how to … better stay on our side of the wall?”
“I don’t know,” Vikar answers.
“That club,” she says softly. “There was no wall.”
“No.”
“The bathroom was a cesspool.”
After a while Vikar says, “How is Zazi?” Soledad turns to him in the backseat; her breasts fall out of his open coat and press against his sweat-soaked shirt. “I wonder if I know what you mean, Mister Film Editor,” she says, and this time he knows she doesn’t wonder at all. “I wonder why you ask about that. She’s in L.A. With friends. With her father.” She whispers, “You want to get bárbaro, Mister Film Editor?” inches from his mouth, the passing lights from the street outside rolling across her face. She pulls his belt out of the loops of his pants and unbuttons the front and takes him in her hand.
Back at his suite in the hotel, she says, “What’s this?” She holds it up before her eyes. In her other hand she still has his belt, carried defiantly through the hotel lobby.
“Something I made,” he says, “a long time ago.”
She examines it. “A toy house?”
“It’s not a toy, it’s not a house.” Vikar takes two small bottles of vodka and red wine from the mini-bar. Is this the moment for such autobiography? Is there any moment for such autobiography? “It’s a model of a church.”
She turns the model in her hand. “You take it with you wherever you go?”
“I was an architecture student.”
“I remember.” She points at one wall. “It’s bent.”
“From the earthquake. The big one, seven years ago.”
She studies the small steeple with its crowned lion holding a gold axe. “There is,” her eyes narrow at the other tiny walls, “no way out.”
“That’s what I believed. The review committee,” he says, “saw it as no way in.”
She smiles at him and hurls the model into the wall, like a champagne glass into the fireplace.
He stares at the shards of the smashed model on the floor. She reaches over to the wall and flips off the light; in the dark, his coat slides off her bare body and she wraps his belt around his neck, running it through the buckle and tightening it. “When we fuck, Mister Barbaric Church Builder,” she says, giving the belt a yank, “do we make death an ecstatic experience rather than a lonely one?” What? thinks Vikar. She takes him out of his pants again and gets on her knees and puts him in her mouth; he stares through the window at the lights on the park outside. After a while she pulls herself back to her feet by the belt around his neck and says, “Put it inside me.” He sways where he stands and she pulls him into the other room as if she’s been in this suite a hundred nights. In the dark, she stretches herself out on the bed. “Put it inside me.”
He sways where he stands, caught in the lights off the park. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” she says.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re hard.”
“That’s not why.”
For a moment nothing happens and then she says, “O.K.” In the dark she pulls him by the belt onto the bed where she curls between his legs, breasts pressed against his thighs, and takes him in her mouth again.
Afterward she says, “It’s O.K. We can do it however you like,” and he drifts to sleep.
He wakes a couple of hours later. It’s still the middle of the night; she’s sitting at the edge of the bed in the dark, with her back to him. “What?” he says. He can’t hear her when she answers. “What is it?” he says.
He hears her say, “You should not have used what I told you in that way.”
“Used what?”
“It was cruel.”
Vikar says, “I don’t understand.”
“Your little church. I know it’s not a church.”
No, he admits to himself, it’s a movie theater: Did she see the tiny blank screen when she threw it at the wall?
“It’s a private thing,” she says, “that belongs to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.”
“No.” He sits up in bed.
“The institution.”
“What institution?”
“I told you. When I was a teenager, in Oslo.”
“Oslo?” he says.
“In the institution there.”
He remembers about the institutions. “I remember now about the institutions, but not Oslo.”
“You made a toy of it.”
“My model looks like an institution in Oslo?” Perhaps someone did tell him about Oslo, he thinks, but it wasn’t her.
In the dark she turns to him. “You’re making it worse.”
“I made it before I knew you. I’ve never been to Oslo. It’s far, isn’t it? Farther than Spain?”
“Why won’t you admit it’s cruel?”
“I promise it was a church,” he lies.
He feels her staring at him. “A lion wearing a crown? Holding a gold axe?”
“I don’t know where that came from.”
“A crowned lion holding a gold axe,” she says, “is the symbol of Norway.”
He wakes again at five-thirty in the morning. It takes him a moment to realize she’s up and moving around in the dark. “I have to go to work,” she says. Is she rummaging through his clothes? “I’m taking a pair of your jeans,” she says. In the dark he can see her holding one of his white shirts. “I’ll use your belt. May I take your belt?”
“Yes.”
She cinches around her waist the belt she tightened around his neck the night before. She says, “Your work, how is it?”
“All right.”
“Go back to sleep, but not too late. You don’t want to miss work.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s a good job. You don’t want to lose it.”
Every night she lies between his legs like his dream; and then one night he turns
to the suite’s empty doorway, and the cylinders in his head click into
place, and he sits up from the bed. She stops and says, “What is it?”
“Where’s Zazi?”
“What?”
“Where’s Zazi?”
“I told you. She’s in L.A. With friends.”
“You said with friends. Then you said with her father. Then you said with friends.”
“What does it matter?”
“‘What does it matter?’” he repeats. He gets up from bed in the dark and begins putting on his clothes.
“Where are you going?” she asks. He doesn’t answer. He finishes dressing, slipping on a coat.
By the time he’s down to the hotel lobby, she’s caught up with him, pulling on her own clothes. “Stop,” she says, grabbing him by the arm, but he doesn’t stop. Out at the street in the cold night, the doorman hails a cab.
He says, opening the cab door, “You can come or not.” A panic is in her eyes. He gets in the cab and she darts in after him before the cab pulls away.
It’s one-thirty in the morning. At the parking structure on Thirty-Fourth Street, he gives some money to the driver and gets out, leaving the door open behind him. “What are you doing?” she keeps saying. He walks into the structure and wanders among the aisles of cars on the first level, then walks up the concrete stairs to the second level, then the third.
In the midst of the parked cars on the third level, he turns to her and says, “Where is it?”
“What?”
“The car.” He begins searching again.
“I moved it,” she says, “it’s parked in another structure now.”
“Where?”
She shivers in the parking lot. Her mind races almost audibly. “Back uptown,” she says. Then, “Out in Queens.”
“Is it uptown or out in Queens?”
“I …”
“Is she with friends or with her father?”
When she doesn’t answer, he turns and sees a black Mustang at the end of the lot. Three thousand miles from Los Angeles, he didn’t believe it would really be the black Mustang.
He walks toward the car. Again she grabs him by the arm to pull him back, again he pulls his arm away. She stops in her footsteps and begins screaming. “All right then! All right!” He reaches the Mustang and peers through the window into the backseat and sees a form huddled under some blankets. The form sits up and looks back at him.
He rattles the handle of the car door. The young girl inside the car reaches over and unlocks it.
Vikar sticks his head in the car. It’s strewn with the cellophane wrap of eaten junk food, MacDonald’s bags, styrofoam cups. Zazi must see something in his face because she retreats, pulling the blankets up around her.
When Vikar turns to Soledad and steps toward her, in this moment she sees in his eyes the person she was afraid of when they first met.
He slams the back window of the car with his fist and glass implodes. Both Soledad and Zazi scream.
His bloody hand hangs at his side. The girl begins crying. “Oh mother,” Vikar says, then reaches to Zazi with his other hand as she draws away from him amid the glass.
Soledad sobs, “You’re frightening her.”
“I’m frightening her?” Vikar says. The wrath that seemed momentarily satisfied when he smashed the window returns.
“No,” Zazi calls to Vikar when he takes another step toward her mother.
“Now do you want to see bárbaro?” Vikar says to Soledad, raising his bloody fist.
“Don’t,” says the girl.
“All these nights your daughter is sleeping in the car?” says Vikar. “Do you believe you’re the Whore of God, to sacrifice your child on the altar of pleasure?”
“Mi dios,” Soledad cries.
“He’s not my god,” he says. “Look.” He turns his head. “This is the profile of the one who wants you,” and turns his head back, “this is the profile of the one who would kill you, for sacrificing your nine-year-old child.”
“Diablo.”
Zazi says to him, “Don’t. I’m O.K.” She adds, “Actually, I’m eleven now.”
In the corners of the parking lot’s concrete bunker, homeless people look up from the rags where they sleep. Crying, Soledad rushes Vikar and pounds his chest. “Don’t you think I’m trying?” she blurts. “Don’t you think? Driving all the way from L.A. for this shitty little part in this shitty little movie?”
“By spending your nights with me?” he says. “You try to take care of her by sp—?”
“Yes!” Her pounding exhausts itself. “It’s exactly what I’m trying to do!”
Vikar begins walking away. He gets halfway across the parking lot and turns; his hand leaves a trail of blood. “Come on,” he says.
Soledad still cries.
“Come on.” He motions to Zazi.
“Where?” Soledad finally says. “I can’t sleep with you when she’s with us. It’s not right.”
“Come on.”
Back at the suite, mother and daughter sleep in the bedroom and Vikar finally falls asleep on the couch. Both are gone when he wakes. He doesn’t go to work but lies on the couch looking at the remains of his model church on the floor.
On the fourth day, someone slips something under the door. He still lies on the couch. Another hour passes before he rises from the couch and walks to the door; it’s that day’s Variety. A small notice in the bottom left-hand corner of the second-to-last page is circled in purple, announcing that United Artists has brought onto its “troubled” production of Your Pale Blue Eyes a “respected Academy Award-nominated” editor to take over the project in its “final stage.” I wonder if this is how Dotty found out. An hour and a half later Vikar gets a call from the Sherry-Netherland front desk, informing him his balance is paid through the next day.
Vikar takes a cab to the parking lot on Thirty-Fourth Street. Soledad’s Mustang is gone from where it was parked; the space still glimmers with broken glass. He walks up and down the aisles and up and down the structure from one level to the next, but the car is gone.
He arranges with the hotel to stay in New York another forty-eight hours. In his inertia he manages to ship to Los Angeles the stack of movies: I’m not giving them back. The night before he is to catch his plane, he shakes himself from his torpor for one more trip down to the Bowery.
He finds himself watching the band without seeing it, listening to them without hearing, until someone pulls at his elbow. There in the dark he almost can’t register her; she’s shorter than everyone else. He says, “What are you doing here?”
“Mom told me about it,” she says. “The more she talked about how disgusting it was, the cooler it sounded.”
He says, “How did you get in here? You’re nine.”
“I’m eleven,” Zazi says, “almost twelve.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I’m not drinking or anything.” She says, “Everyone seems to know who you are.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“You missed this great band. They’re from England and the lead singer’s this little fat chick with braces and I can’t tell if she’s black or white or what, and get this, the sax player is a chick too.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“There are ten million fucks in the naked city, and she’s with one of them. Or maybe,” Zazi shrugs, “three or four.” She sees the look on Vikar’s face. “Sorry,” she says.
“You’re nine,” he says, “you shouldn’t say things like that.” He gives her fifty dollars and the key to his suite. “Do you need a place to sleep? Do you remember where my hotel is?”
She looks at the money and key for a moment. “Thanks,” she finally says. “Aren’t you staying?”
“No.”
Back at the hotel he gets another key from the front desk, goes up to his suite and packs and leaves a folded blanket on the couch in the sitting room. He goes to bed and sometime in the night hears the door open and close. In the morning the couch is empty, the blanket draped over the end.
When Vikar reaches the TWA ticket counter at JFK, Mitch Rondell is waiting with an assistant. “Can I talk to you?” he says to Vikar. He wants his movies back. Vikar imagines an armed struggle there in the terminal. “Don’t check him in yet,” Rondell says to the woman behind the counter.
Vikar says, “I’ve already shipped them.”
“What?”
“I’ve already shipped the movies back to Los Angeles.”
“What movies?”
“The ones you gave me. The Long Goodbye.”
“The movies are yours, Vikar. I want to talk to you about what happened.”
“It’s all right. I saw the Variety article.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“Can we go into the lounge and talk?”
“I’ll miss my flight.”
“We’ll put you on another flight, if it comes to that. In first class. I need to talk to you.” Rondell puts his hand on Vikar’s shoulder and the assistant picks up Vikar’s bag.
In the lounge Vikar and Rondell sit at one table and the assistant with Vikar’s bag sits at another on the other side of the room. “We would like you to come back,” Rondell says.
“What happened to the respected Academy Award-nominated editor?” Vikar asks. From anyone else, it would sound sarcastic.
Rondell leans across the table, speaking with more intensity than Vikar has heard from him. “No one understands you or what you’re doing,” he says. “No one understands what this picture is as you’ve cut it. I don’t understand it. It’s not an art film and it’s not a thriller and maybe it’s a thrilling art film but I’m not getting it.”
“It would be better if it were finished.”
“Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. I’m accepting that I may never get it. That’s O.K., I don’t have to get it, not at this point. We brought in a very smart editor, very hip, he did the sound edit on Coppola’s last two pictures and just cut Zinnemann’s last picture, two Oscar nominations in the last four years. He looked at what you’ve done and we talked about it.”
“Is it faster in first class?”
“What?”
“Is it faster in first class, back to Hollywood?”
“It’s the same, Vikar. Listen, this guy didn’t understand what you’re doing either. But he was more or less convinced you’re doing something. He said the first ten minutes he thought you were completely incompetent but by the time he got to the end he knew that wasn’t it. He said he has no idea whether the picture is working or any good but that every decision you’re making is original at best and counterintuitive at the least.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Me neither. But the way he explained it is that most editors, if they’re cutting from a shot where the action is going on at the right of the frame, then they cut to another shot where the action is at the right so the audience can follow it, unless the picture wants to unsettle the audience at that moment, then they do it the other way around. I gather you’re doing everything upside down, not to mention you’ve taken the central murder plot about the artist and the nightclub and framed it with the sub-plot about the supermodel rather than vice-versa, which is also backward from what anyone else would do.”
“Scenes have profiles like people and things. All stories are in the time and all time is in the stories.”
Rondell blinks. “If you say so, Vikar. So I asked this guy, ‘What are you telling me, he’s some kind of genius?’ and the guy says of course not, there are no geniuses other than Bach and Rita Hayworth, but I am telling you, the guy says, that he’s editing in a way I haven’t seen before and now there’s an internal logic to this picture that you would be better to follow through on rather than try to fix, if that’s the word. The die is cast and we should go with it. Make it work for us. Is what he said. Otherwise we’re messing with the aesthetic continuity of the thing. Is what he said.”
Vikar says, “Continuity is one of the myths of film. In film, time is round like a reel. Fuck continuity. In every false movie is the true movie that must be set free.”
Rondell sighs heavily.
“That, vicar,” Viking Man will explain a few months later, “is the sound of a studio executive, God love him, staring into the Nietzschean abyss of his own ignorance, venality and spinelessness,” but Viking Man isn’t here to say it now.
“No,” says Vikar.
“Pardon me?” says Rondell.
“I don’t want to anymore.”
“We have an agreement.”
“You fired me.”
“Does this have anything to do with Ms. Palladin?” Rondell rubs his brow with both hands. “Vikar, the company is going through a great deal at the moment. All the top people have left to go form another company, including the man who’s headed ours more than a quarter century. They’ll take talent with them, Woody Allen, others. We need to salvage whatever of this picture can be salvaged. Cannes is in seven and a half weeks. All the principal shooting is done, we’re down to a few final establishing shots, pick-up stuff. We don’t need to absolutely lock the picture but we do need something more than a fine cut. It may still be we can make Cannes work for us. I don’t want to withdraw the picture. We can’t withdraw the picture. Very bad if we withdraw the picture. What do you want? We’ll raise your pay and I’ll take you down to the archive at midnight myself, as many pictures as you can carry out. Do you want to make a picture of your own?”
“There’s a book. It’s in French. I’ve read it many times.”
“We can make a lot of things happen if you pull this out for us.”
Vikar says, “About Soledad.”
“You want her off the picture.”
“Why would I want that?”
“What, then?”
“Off the picture?”
“Vikar, listen. You said to find her so we found her. You saw her. If that’s what it took to make you happy, then that’s what we were ready to do. If you were a normal person we would have done things the normal way and supplied you with the usual kilo of coke.” He adds, “She had her own interest at stake, too.”
“It’s her daughter.”
“Her daughter?”
“She’s sleeping in cars and going to clubs she shouldn’t go to and she’s nine.” He says, “Actually, she’s twelve.”
“A little young for you, wouldn’t you say, Vikar?”
“What?” Something barely comprehending compels him to say, “Her mother doesn’t take care of her,” with an undertone of violence that makes Rondell draw back.
“Sorry,” Rondell laughs uneasily, “bad joke.”
“Find her and make sure she’s all right. Get her a room in a hotel.”
“And her mother?”
“If she’s with her mother,” Vikar says.
“I’ll do what I can. It’s all I can promise.”
“Do what you can.”
He returns to the Bowery at night looking for Zazi, but she isn’t there and no one has seen her. “We can’t find her,” Rondell says when Vikar phones four days later from the cutting room, “on my word we’ve tried. Production wrapped a week ago, they’re probably driving back to L.A. Short of the Highway Patrol putting out an APB, I don’t know what else to do.” On Vikar’s last night in New York, confronted with a choice between the Sound and the Movies, he finds he loves the Movies after all, raiding the archives one last time.
Variety, May 8, 1978: “NEW YORK—A subject of intense gossip, rumor and speculation over the past year, United Artists’ production of Your Pale Blue Eyes will premiere in competition at the 31st annual Cannes film festival beginning next week, it was announced today.
“Rife with difficulties during production, the motion picture is now at the center of a heated dispute leaving it without an officially credited director, pending arbitration before the DGA. Editing of the picture reportedly has changed hands several times in the last eight months.
“Other U.S. pictures in competition at Cannes this year include An Unmarried Woman, Coming Home, Midnight Express, Pretty Baby and Who’ll Stop the Rain. The jury that bestows the Palme d’Or and other prizes is headed by an American, director Alan J. Pakula (All the President’s Men, The Parallax View), for the third time in the festival’s history, following screen legend Olivia de Havilland in 1965 and, two years ago, playwright Tennessee Williams.”
The large boxes packed with movies are waiting when Vikar returns to Los Angeles, after being gone nearly six months. He unpacks his library that now crowds his apartment, and falls asleep to visions of smashing Soledad in the face with a Coke bottle.
Vikar doesn’t know it, but everything now has been reset to zero.
The first movie he sees back in Los Angeles is a French gangster film where a beautiful samurai hit man floats through Paris without expression, in white fedora and gloves. Vikar is most taken with a scene involving a huge ring of keys that the hit man uses to steal cars. In the driver’s seat of a car that isn’t his, the hit man in white coolly lays out on the passenger seat beside him a ring of what must be a hundred keys; one by one he takes each key from the ring and tries it in the car’s ignition until finally the correct key starts the car. As each key fails, the hit man lays it with precision on the passenger seat next to the previous key. In the movie, the fourth attempt starts the car—but what if he had begun at the ring’s other end? The car wouldn’t have started with the fourth key but the ninety-sixth. Under what growing spell and for how long would the audience be held as each key failed? The entire scene is shot from the vantage point of the passenger’s seat, which is to say the hit man’s right profile, the profile that reveals his calm, resolve, grace.
For a week and a half Vikar hires a car to drive him around the city, looking for a black Mustang. He phones the beach house where he hasn’t been for years now, Viking Man whom he hasn’t spoken to since before Madrid, anyone who might know where the daughter and mother are. He calls methodically as though laying out on the passenger seat the keys of a car to be stolen.
Over the course of the following week the phone doesn’t ring at all, then one morning he receives three calls, the first two from the Los Angeles Times and Variety asking for Vikar’s reaction to the response at Cannes to Your Pale Blue Eyes. “The true movie has been set free from within the false movie,” he says, to silence on the other end of the line. The third call is from Mitch Rondell.
Vikar says, “You found them.”
“What?” says Rondell.
“You found Zazi and her mother.”
Rondell sounds slightly flustered. “I’m at JFK, about to get on a plane for France. Vikar, we need you to come over.”
“To New York?”
“Europe. There’s an Air France flight this evening. We’ve booked you a first-class seat.”
“Newspapers are calling.”
“About the picture?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve heard.”
“Heard what?”
“It screened in competition at Cannes a week ago. Apparently it was riotous. You didn’t hear?”
“No.”
“Not Rite of Spring tear-up-the-theater riotous, but the sort of commotion one picture in the festival always whips up every year. I gather it was hard to tell whether the applause or boos were louder.”
“Boos?”
“Air France will fly you into Nice and someone will meet you and drive you to Cannes, which is the next town over.”
“People booed?”
“Vikar, it’s the picture everyone’s talking about.”
“They booed.” Vikar is fascinated.
“We’ve booked you a small suite at the Carlton, which at this point was difficult. Truth is we had to move someone else out.”
Vikar says, “Is it farther than Spain?”
“You may have to change planes in Paris …”
“Perhaps I’ll come in a couple of weeks. I just got back to Los Angeles.”
“Vikar, there won’t be a festival in a couple of weeks.” Now the tension in Rondell’s voice is unmistakable. “The closing ceremony is tomorrow night. The driver will take you straight to the Palais.”
“The director of the movie should be there.”
“There is no director of this movie. Literally, at this point there is no ‘Directed by’ in the credits. Until the DGA decides otherwise, this picture directed itself.”
“I don’t want to.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to come.”
Vikar can hear the panic rise in Rondell’s voice.
“Listen to me,” comes the voice on the other end of the line, “three hours ago we got a call in our offices here—I can’t say who—to get you to Cannes. Do you understand? This person wouldn’t say more, he wasn’t even supposed to say that much, but … The head of the festival jury is an American director who just did a Jane Fonda-Jimmy Caan picture for us … modern Western thing he’s nervous about … do you understand what I’m getting at?”
“No.”
“I mean this guy wouldn’t be jerking us around five thousand miles away if there wasn’t something afoot. Listen. What about that French novel you want to film?”
“God, I love that book.”
“That can become a very real possibility, but you have to get to Cannes.”
“You don’t believe Zazi and her mother are there, do you?”
“I’ve got to catch my plane, Vikar. We’re sending a car to pick you up in … what time is it in L.A.?” There’s the sound of the phone on the other end changing hands as Rondell checks his watch. “Eleven-thirty in L.A., right? A car is going to pick you up in five hours. Please tell me you have a passport. You must, because you went to Spain for that madman.”
Vikar says, “I live on a secret street.”
“What?”
“It might be hard to find me.”
“Someone will call you in the next thirty minutes and sort everything out. The driver in Nice will have formal wear for you … you’ll have to change in the limo.” A moment’s pause. “We’ll get a hat for you.” Another moment’s pause. “No, you know what? No hat. Better no hat. We’ll make it work for us. See you tomorrow night on the Red Steps.”
In the limo traveling southwest from Nice, looking at the coast Vikar can almost believe he hasn’t left Los Angeles at all, that the plane flew around in the air twelve hours and returned where it took off. “Is that the Atlantic Ocean?” he asks the driver, who glances at Vikar in the rear-view mirror. “Monsieur, it’s the Mediterranean,” the driver says. In a large plastic bag in the seat next to him, Vikar unwraps the black pants, jacket and tie, white shirt, socks and shoes. In a smaller plastic bag are strange black beads that he lays precisely on the seat side by side, like a series of keys that have failed to start a car.
The limo drives twenty-five kilometers to the outskirts of Cannes, along the rue des Belges before cutting down to the Croisette. In the distance Vikar sees a large round building bathed in a light. Reaching a point where other traffic is being turned back, the limo is waved through and then suddenly it’s in the midst of a throng caught between the sea, where the white beach tents are visible in the night, billowing like parachutes as though everyone has dropped from the sky, and red-carpeted steps on the other side, nearly as wide as they are long, leading up to the Palais. The limo stops and Vikar doesn’t move; someone outside opens his door. “Am I supposed to get out here?” he says to the driver. He’s slightly astonished to find that the shirt has no buttons. He lays the tie on the seat next to him with the black beads.
He gets out of the limo. From out of the throng, Mitch Rondell appears. He has a shirt that buttons. I should have gotten one of those. All around is an explosion of bulbs flashing from cameras that Vikar can’t see. Rondell stares aghast at Vikar’s completely open shirt. “There are no buttons,” Vikar explains. Rondell frantically sticks his hand in the pockets of Vikar’s coat searching, then peers into the limo at the black buttons sitting on the seat. He begins to reach in and scoop them up, and another round of flash bulbs goes off around them. “You know what?” he says to Vikar, withdrawing from the limo, “better without the buttons. We’ll make it work for us,” and then one of the ceremonial escorts leads Rondell and Vikar up the long red steps, camera flashes barraging the man with the unbuttoned shirt and the tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head.
In the yawning theater where the festival’s closing ceremony takes place are more people than Vikar has ever seen. They fill the mezzanine and a grand balcony above him; he didn’t know a building could hold this many people. He stands in the middle looking around, everyone looking back. Everyone looks at him but not the way people used to when they would throw themselves off hillsides and not the way they did in the Bowery when he came into the club. A golden glow settles on the theater, and up onstage in a box to the right are nine people that Rondell explains to Vikar are the festival jury. They include a famous Swedish actress whom Vikar recognizes from several Ingmar Bergman movies he can’t think of because all Ingmar Bergman’s movies are the same to him, and one of the producers of the James Bond movies. Mitch Rondell seems fairly beside himself. “My God,” Rondell says, partly to Vikar, mostly to no one, “do you suppose we might actually win the fucking Palme d’Or?”
The fucking Palme d’Or is presented to a three-hour Italian epic about a peasant boy on a long walk home from school who breaks his shoes. Italians, Vikar believes, like to make movies about things that break or get lost, like shoes and bicycles. Two so-called Grand Prizes are presented to a British movie by a Polish director about a man who’s learned from Aborigines a shout that kills people, which people in the movie insist on hearing anyway, and a French movie by an Italian director with Marcello Mastroianni and Gerard Depardieu about a man who finds the body of King Kong washed up on the beach; the title translates as Bye Bye, Monkey. “That sounds like a very good movie,” says Vikar.
It’s also announced that this year the jury has created a special award, the Prix Sergei, presented “to the film Your Pale Blue Eyes and editor Isaac Jerome for an original and provocative contribution to the art of montage and the creation of a revelatory new cinematic rhetoric.”
“That’s not my name,” Vikar says.
“What?” Rondell says, the applause around them swelling. Neither notices the sprinkling of boos.
“That’s not my name.”
“Vikar,” Rondell whispers urgently, “please go up there now.”
“Who put that name on the movie?” In the midst of the ceremony audience, Vikar is an eye-twitch away from ripping Rondell’s head off his shoulders, while Rondell appears on the verge of leaping out of his body. “I’m sorry, it was a mistake,” he begs, “a terrible, terrible mistake. We’ll change it, we’ll do anything you want, we’ll make it right. Just please please please go up there.”
Vikar reaches the stage several seconds after the mystified applause has died. Applause rises again in what sounds to Vikar like a swarm of bees—a collective murmur at the sight of the man with the unbuttoned shirt and tattooed head. The boos apparently have been stunned into silence. The jury president leans slightly away from Vikar as he hands him the award scroll, rolled and tied in the center with a red ribbon, and shakes his hand. A third wave of applause rises and Vikar steps to the microphone. “That’s not my name,” he says and walks off, strangling the award in his fist.
Dashing through the salons of the Palais, Vikar finally staggers out into the Mediterranean air. Small food and drink stands begin to close, as well as an outdoor café only a few meters away. Since he has no idea where he is or where to go, he takes it as something of a sign that there before him, just around the bend of the Croisette, are the nouveaux cupolas of the massive Carlton. Its vertical banners hang from the hotel’s rafters, mildly ruffled by the breeze off the harbor.
Thoroughly conflicted by Vikar’s tattooed head, his state of undress and the throttled red-ribboned scroll in Vikar’s hand, the concierge at the front desk apologizes that the suite isn’t ready. “We weren’t expecting you for at least another hour or two, monsieur,” he says, “are the ceremonies over?” He invites Vikar to wait in the Petit Bar, where someone will come retrieve him.
The bar is mostly empty. Everyone else is at the Palais except two men at a far table talking and an attractive blonde in her early fifties at another table, wearing a wide-brimmed fedora and sunglasses even though it’s night and the lounge is dark. At another table is a younger woman, around thirty, with dark curls, wearing a long white coat; she drinks a glass of red wine and seems to be waiting for someone. She surveys Vikar for a full minute with a cool and overt curiosity. Vikar orders a vodka tonic.
Now one of the two men talking at the far table looks at Vikar. He gets up from the table and comes over; he’s sharply though informally dressed in a light cotton summer jacket, and Vikar realizes he’s familiar. “Monsieur Vicar,” the man says, Vikar still trying to place him. “It is I, Cooper Léon.”
“Yes,” Vikar says, uncertainly.
Cooper Léon puts out his hand. “How are you?”
Shaking the other man’s hand, Vikar says, “All right.”
Cooper Léon looks at the crumpled scroll on Vikar’s cocktail table. “You have received one of the prizes at the ceremony tonight?”
“They said my name wrong.”
“May I sit with you?”
“All right.”
Cooper Léon sits down. “Felicitations. I am not surprised in the least. I knew three years ago in Madrid that you are a man of vision.”
Now Vikar remembers. “The movie about the General.”
“Yes.”
“For the soldiers of …”
“The Soldiers of Viridiana.”
“Are they here?”
“Who?”
“The soldiers.”
“In Cannes?” Cooper Léon says, surprised. “I am no longer leading the revolution in Spain. The assassin the Generalissimo died, and now many good films are allowed in my country. Thanks to you.”
“I don’t believe the movie I made for you was a very good one.”
“That, Monsieur Vicar,” Cooper Léon points to the award, “says differently.” Vikar notices that Cooper Léon’s Spanish accent has turned to French. “I no longer am living in Madrid. I live in Paris now.”
“Are the soldiers there now?”
“Monsieur, there are no more soldiers. Please forget the soldiers. Now I am a publicist for Gaumont. We are here at the festival representing the new film by Claude Chabrol with Isabelle Huppert. I believe she won a prize this evening as well.”
“I don’t know.”
“We also are sponsoring a retrospective, as …” he pauses, “… as an unofficial tangent, you might say, to the official festival, a retrospective of one of your great American auteurs. Well, actually he is British, but he made all of his films in America. Irving Rapper.”
“Irving Rapper?”
“You know of Monsieur Irving Rapper?” Cooper Léon asks.
“Now, Voyager.”
Relief floods Cooper Léon’s face. “Of course I was certain a scholar of film such as yourself would know of Irving Rapper. Cinema’s great poet of la femme dérangée. As you say, Now, Voyager. Deception. The Glass Menagerie. Marjorie Morningstar. Would you care for another?” He points at Vikar’s vodka tonic.
“I’m waiting for my room to be ready.”
“Of course. Allow me please to buy for you another drink while you wait. It would be my honor.” Cooper Léon calls out something to the bartender and turns back to Vikar. His brow furrows. “Monsieur Vicar, I feel it is fateful that I should see you here this evening. I wonder if I might make a confession to you that I never have told to anyone else.”
“All right.”
“It seems proper that you are the person to whom I should confess this.”
“All right.”
Cooper Léon says, “Monsieur Vicar, perhaps you are wondering how it is I no longer am leading the revolutionary struggle for justice and rather have become a publicist for Gaumont.”
“Uh,” says Vikar.
“It is a difficult thing to comprehend, even for me sometimes. It is a result of a moment of truth I had, as it happens, not long after we met and worked together on our film about the death of the assassin the Generalissimo.” He pauses as if waiting for Vikar to respond.
“Oh.”
Cooper Léon shrugs. “Not long after we worked together on our film, I had a dream. Do you know who came to me in this dream?”
“God?”
“Luis Buñuel.”
“Oh.”
“Luis Buñuel, who once stayed in this hotel, this same hotel where he slept on the floor of his suite rather than the bed, as a revolutionary act. This dream was so real that I might almost have thought it was not a dream at all but the ghost of Buñuel, visiting me in the night, if Buñuel were not still alive. So it could not be his ghost.”
“No.”
“In this dream, Buñuel gave me a choice. Do you know what this choice was?”
“No.”
“Buñuel said to me, ‘Cooper Léon, you may have one of two things.’ Monsieur,” Cooper Léon’s voice breaks, “this is a difficult thing to confess.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Buñuel said, ‘Cooper Léon, you either may see the fruits of your revolutionary struggle and have justice and freedom for all people in the world, or you may fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel.’ Of course you remember Miss Sylvia Kristel, Monsieur Vicar?”
“Yes.”
“From the French masterpiece Emmanuelle?”
“Yes.”
“And Emmanuelle 2?”
“I guess.”
“And Emmanuelle ’77?”
“Uh.”
“And Goodbye, Emmanuelle?”
“I don’t know about those last ones.”
“So then. ‘Now I know what you are thinking,’ Buñuel went on in my dream. ‘You are thinking that you will fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel and it will be over in the usual forty-five seconds and that is hardly worth it. No,’ Buñuel said in my dream, ‘if you choose to fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel, I will give you an erection not as in real life but a cinematic erection, as men have in films. It will last as long as you want, it will last hours, days if you want. But,’ and Buñuel was emphatic about this, Monsieur Vicar, ‘but once you have reached climax and the fucking is over, then … no more.’ And as soon as Buñuel said this, I woke.” Cooper Léon sighs heavily. “I woke, monsieur, to the truth that I would trade the freedom and justice of all the world’s oppressed masses for one chance to fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel. And of course the tragedy, monsieur, is that I woke to this truth that I have to live with forever without ever having actually fucked Miss Sylvia Kristel. So it is as though I made the choice in my soul without ever having received the benefit of that choice. Do you understand?”
“I believe so.”
“I believed that you would,” Cooper Léon nodded. “I believed that you of all people would understand that this is the exquisite cruelty of cinema, confronting men with truths about themselves that they must live with without ever actually getting to fuck Miss Sylvia Kristel.”
“I’ve cheated on Elizabeth Taylor,” Vikar says, patting his own head.
“Yes, monsieur,” the other man says dismissively. “But Elizabeth Taylor has cheated on you far more often.”
“Mon dieu,” Cooper Léon says, looking across the room.
“What?” says Vikar.
“Do you know who that is?” He’s looking at the two women on the other side of the room, the older blonde in the wide-brimmed fedora and sunglasses, and the younger one with dark curls in the long white coat. Vikar isn’t certain which one he means.
“Which one do you mean?”
“That one.”
Vikar believes Cooper Léon means the older blonde but he still isn’t certain.
“That, Monsieur Vicar, is Christine Jorgensen.”
A worrisome recollection flickers across Vikar’s mind.
“She is here for the Irving Rapper retrospective. Monsieur Rapper filmed the story of her life eight or nine years ago. You know of Christine Jorgensen, of course.”
Vikar doesn’t say anything. He looks back and forth from the older blonde to the younger woman in the white coat.
“You know of the story of her life. She was a man. She was an American soldier who—”
“I know the story.”
“—had herself, how would you say, altered surgically—”
“I know the story.” It has to be the older blonde.
“Allow me to introduce you.”
“No, thank you.”
“It is no trouble.”
“I believe my room is ready now.” Vikar stands up from the cocktail table.
“Are you sure you would not like to …?”
“I’m going to check on my room.”
“Very well,” says Cooper Léon, standing as well. The two men shake hands. “Felicitations again, Monsieur Vicar.”
“Yes.”
“I am very pleased to have seen you in Cannes,” he calls as Vikar rushes from the lounge.
Forty-five minutes later, Vikar is in his small suite on the fourth floor of the Carlton. It’s eleven-thirty. From the small balcony onto which the suite’s French doors open, the Mediterranean is to the left; getting underway along the waterfront are the many parties of the festival’s closing night. Party yachts line the harbor. Vikar can’t see the fireworks but can hear them.
He lies on the bed in his unbuttoned shirt watching the TV. He flicks around the channels; the news is in French so he doesn’t understand much. There’s a story about an Italian president or prime minister who appears to have been assassinated. Grace Kelly’s daughter is getting married; both are princesses now. The granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane has been sent to jail for being kidnapped, which Vikar didn’t realize was a crime. The coffin and body of Charlie Chaplin have been recovered, not far from where they were stolen; Vikar didn’t know they had been stolen. When were they stolen? Soon Vikar finds on the TV an old American black-and-white movie.
Vikar’s award sits in a furious ball of mangled parchment and red ribbon on a table next to a basket of fruit, cheese and red wine. The suite is all white and reminds him of the room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey that he saw his first afternoon in Los Angeles. In another corner of the all-white suite is a small writing table. Vikar is trying not to think about anything. When someone knocks at the door, he doesn’t answer because he assumes it’s Rondell and he doesn’t want to talk to him.
The knocking continues and Vikar ignores it, until finally the door opens and she walks in.
The younger woman from the lounge, with the dark curls and the long white coat, closes the door behind her. In the light she appears in her early thirties; she’s tall, just under six feet. “Bonsoir, Vikar,” she says, slipping off her long white coat that falls to the matching floor, and except for her jewelry and high heels, she’s perfectly naked.
Her face is pleasantly attractive, not beautiful, but her long body verges on the preposterous, the most extraordinary body Vikar has seen. He hasn’t seen many naked female bodies in person but he’s seen them in magazines and in the movies and he’s never seen one like this. When she drops the coat, she doesn’t pose. It barely occurs to him that she’s not simply being straightforward but making a point of getting his name right.
She takes a plum from the fruit basket and bites into it, then puts it back. She wipes the juice on her chin precisely with a single finger and picks up the bottle of wine. “May I?” she says, holding up the corkscrew.
Vikar says, “I can open it for you.”
“Merci,” she says, bringing the bottle over to the bed. Two wine glasses dangle lightly by their stems from her other fingers. She sits on the edge of the bed looking around as he works the corkscrew; in her nakedness she’s entirely casual. “Do you like the hotel?”
Oh, mother, it has to have been the older blonde, Vikar assures himself. “Buñuel stayed here.”
“Oui, bien sûr. Cary Grant stays here, Orson Welles. Olivier, Sophia Loren, Alain Delon. Mussolini was thrown out, I believe before the First World War, when he was a journalist.”
“He slept on the floor as a revolutionary act.”
“Mussolini?”
“Buñuel.”
“Non, chéri,” the woman says, “Buñuel slept on the floor because the bed was not comfortable enough for him.” She looks around the suite. “It is a bit, what is the American? nose in the air,” and she brings her finger to the tip of her nose and pushes it up. “After the First World War, it was a hospital. Blaise Cendrars was a patient.”
“I like the poem about Little Jeanne and the train,” Vikar says, distracted, sweat on his brow.
“I am impressed. Almost no Americans know of this poem.”
“Is your name Christine?” Vikar blurts.
She shrugs. “Would you like it to be Christine?”
“No.”
“Who is your favorite French actress? You may call me that.” She looks at the TV.
“Falconetti,” he says.
She’s slightly taken aback. “I supposed you should say something predictable like Brigitte Bardot.”
“I like Brigitte Bardot,” he says.
“You are a man, you are allowed.” She watches the movie on the TV. “When they asked Simone Signoret how she felt about her husband Yves Montand fucking Marilyn Monroe, Signoret replied, ‘But it was Marilyn Monroe.’ So I might have said as well, had you said Brigitte Bardot. But I am content you did not.” She says to the movie on the TV, “I adore this part.”
In the movie on the TV, Jean Harlow, who’s living in the jungle with Clark Gable, climbs out of a barrel of rain water.
“When they shot this,” the woman says, “Harlow came out of the barrel with nothing on. It was her idea. Immediately the director seized all the film so the frames of Harlow naked could be removed from the film and destroyed.”
“I saw where Jean Harlow is buried,” says Vikar.
“Her husband murdered her,” the woman says, “he was an associate of Irving Thalberg. He committed suicide while she was making this film. When he married Harlow he found he was impotent, perhaps he was impotent before but now he was married to the great, what would you say, sex god … sex goddess, and he was impotent. He beat her all the time and then …” she puts two fingers to her temple with her thumb as the trigger, “… boom, while she was making this picture with Gable who, bien sûr, was the great male sex god. Perhaps Harlow’s husband believed she and Gable were sleeping together. He might have said, ‘But it is Clark Gable’ … but men do not know how to think in such a way. In fact Gable and Harlow were not sleeping together at all, or not that anyone knows. She died four, five years later.”
“How did her husband murder her if he already killed himself?”
“He beat her so much that her kidneys failed but took years to do so, after he was gone.” She turns to him; he’s looking at her body. She says, “Falconetti seems, what is the American? a mouthful,” and laughs at some private joke. “You could call me Maria or Renée, I believe Falconetti went by both. Or perhaps you should call me Joan,” she laughs again.
“Not that,” he says.
“Non, I do not think so either.” She sips her wine, “Besides I am Jewish, a bad Jewish oui but still I do not think one can be a Jewish Joan.” She says, “I saw Passion de Jeanne d’Arc only once, nine years ago … or some version of it.”
“That’s when I saw it.”
“It was the greatest film I’ve ever seen and I do not think I could stand to see it again.”
“Did somebody send you?”
“Pardon?”
“Did somebody send you here tonight?” Of course it was Rondell; it had to have been Rondell. So Cooper Léon must have meant the older blonde.
“Chéri, what do you suppose? I am strolling the Croisette and look up at this hotel and see a light in one window out of hundreds and say the mystery tattoo-man Vikar is up there alone and needs company?”
“But you weren’t strolling the Croisette, you were in the lounge.”
“Then you noticed me.”
“Then you weren’t sent by the man I was sitting with?”
“It is not an interesting question, and the answer is neither interesting nor difficult if you think about it. Can you imagine what it was like to actually act in a film so powerful that no one can stand to see it twice? No wonder it drove Falconetti mad, no wonder she never made anything else.”
“Perhaps I’ll call you Maria. The actress in Last Tango in Paris and The Passenger was named Maria.”
She ponders it a moment. “I am not so much like her. But we can call me Maria anyway.”
She reaches over and rubs his bald head. “Monty,” she says.
“Many people believe it’s James Dean.”
“Pftt,” she says. Vikar has the feeling Maria says things like pftt and chéri because she believes he expects it.
“Do you live in Cannes?” If she actually lives in Cannes, then it must have been the older blonde.
“I live in Paris.”
“Everyone in Cannes must know about movies.”
She laughs. “You mean even the escorts in Cannes know about movies. Actually, not everyone in Cannes knows so much of movies, even at the festival. I know this because I meet quite a few. The young boys from the studios, the new ones, know nothing of movies, the new young producers know nothing of movies and even the actors know little of movies. I know more of movies than any of these people. The critics know something of movies, bien sûr, and the new young directors know.”
“Have you been with famous directors?”
“Now chéri, would you want me to tell others that I had been with you?”
“It would be all right.”
“That’s sweet but others might not think so.”
He tries to look at the clock discreetly.
“It is just past midnight,” she says. “I have been engaged as your companion until your press conference at half past nine tomorrow morning. Unless you would prefer me to leave sooner. I can leave any time you prefer. For me it is the same, the donation is the same.”
“The donation?” Vikar says.
“It has been taken care of.”
“I hope it’s a good donation.”
“Dix mille.”
“How much is that?”
“Ten thousand.”
“Ten thousand dollars?” he says.
“That would be very nice,” she says, “mais non. Francs.”
“How much is that?”
“Perhaps two thousand American dollars.”
“That’s still a good donation.”
Lying on the bed, she turns her head upside down to look at him sitting behind her. She says, “Are you going to ask now why I do it?”
“Does everyone ask?”
“Actually, almost no one asks. The question is there but not asked.”
“Why do you do it?”
“I do it only at Cannes, once a year, because I love cinema. I am … what is the American? ‘moonlighting’? This is my sixth festival. Now why,” she says back to the TV, “would Gable give up Harlow for Mary Astor?”
“Moonlighting?”
“It is another life, different from my real life.”
“Like Belle de Jour,” he says.
“Non, not like Belle de Jour,” she says a bit impatiently. “In Belle de Jour Deneuve has no other life, that is why she sells herself to men, in order to have a life, any life, a life of the senses, a life that is not dead or suffocated. I have entirely another life.”
“What do you do in your other life?”
“I am, what is the American?” still watching the movie, “a barrister? … or is that British? ‘Attorney’?”
“You’re a lawyer?”
“A lawyer,” she nods.
“Really?”
“Then at the end,” she says, “Gable goes back to Harlow because he does not want to take Mary Astor away from her husband, who is his business partner, so because he does not have the heart to break her husband’s heart, he finds it easier to humiliate Mary Astor and break her heart so she will hate him and leave him. And he tells Harlow he is being noble for once and she is content with that even though he has given up Mary Astor not out of love for Harlow but out of love for his own nobility, his masculine code.”
“Press conference?” Vikar says.
“Gable,” she says, “should just forget the two women and fuck the partner, that is what he truly wants, that is what this film truly is about.” She says, “Certainly this is a film made by men.”
“What press conference?”
“At half past nine tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t want a press conference.”
“At the Palais in the grande salon.”
“No.”
“Someone will take you, it is arranged.”
“That’s not my name, what they said tonight.”
“Exactement. You can, what is the American? ‘set the record straight.’”
Vikar considers this. “Set the record straight.”
Maria rolls over and runs her hand over Vikar’s belly. “Let us set something else straight.”
“What do you think,” Vikar blurts, “of the films of Irving Rapper?”
“No more cinema for a few minutes, chéri.”
“I …”
“Chéri. I know what you want.”
He knows where Jean Harlow is buried, or at least where they say she’s buried, but perhaps like Jayne Mansfield she’s buried somewhere else.
Is her tomb empty then, or is someone else buried there? Is everyone who comes to Hollywood so desperate to be Jean or Jayne or Marilyn that she would accept being Jean or Jayne or Marilyn in death if she couldn’t be in life? Are the hills of Hollywood filled with the bodies of doubles, of imposters for legends? Do only dead blondes with large breasts have surrogates for their graves?
It has to have been the older blonde, Vikar feels certain, but as Maria takes him in her mouth, irrational notions skitter across his mind like centipedes. He closes his eyes and thinks of Soledad.
Afterward she says, “Was that what you wanted?”
He stares at the ceiling and feels from across the balcony outside the breeze off the Mediterranean. “How did you know?”
“It is my talent to know,” she says. She wipes her chin very precisely with one finger as she did the juice of the plum. “I like doing it that way. I prefer it to the fucking.”
“Why?”
“Why not. One of those things not to regard so much. It makes me sexy.”
“You mean it makes you feel sexy?”
“That is what I said, non?”
“I guess.”
“This is over now,” she says to the movie, “it is curious. When Harlow died, you know, she was the fiancée of William Powell, who once was married to Carole Lombard, who married Gable before she died so young, like Harlow. Both men outliving their great loves who died so young. There was a second version of this film … what is the American title?”
“Which one?”
“This one we just watched.”
“Red Dust.”
“There was a second version twenty years later, with a different title, a funny title, also with Gable, twenty years older, playing the same part as in the first. Bien sûr in cinema the men get to remain young even as they are old.”
“I saw where Carole Lombard is buried. I saw where Clark Gable is buried.”
“Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly were in the second version, with the funny title.”
“I don’t know where Ava Gardner is buried.”
“She is still living.”
“She is?”
“She has made several bad films of late. A few years ago a big shitty earthquake film.”
“Earthquake.”
“Are there four women less alike?”
“What four women?”
“Gardner and Kelly, Harlow and Astor? Change around all those women, put them in each other’s parts, and the films would be completely different, non? Five if you count Garbo, who originally was supposed to play the Harlow part in the Red Dust, when John Gilbert was to play the Gable part, because you know Garbo and Gilbert were so popular together from the silent films. But Gable, he was the first true superstar—after cinema had sound? When he killed a man in an auto accident, the studio got someone else to, what is the American? ‘take the fall’? Directors, they make the art, but stars make culture. My country has made too much of the directors. I cannot remember in the second version if Ava Gardner plays the Harlow part and Grace Kelly the Mary Astor part, or the other way around.”
“It’s the way you said first.”
“What is the funny title?”
“Mogambo. Grace Kelly is a princess now.”
“Oui, chéri,” Maria says, changing the TV channel with the remote control, “she is forty kilometers down the coast if you want to go visit her. Watching the Mabom—”
“Mogambo.”
“Watching that second one, you think the same as in the first, why would Gable give up Ava Gardner for Grace Kelly? Mais bien sûr Gable and Kelly were fucking when they made the film, so how can one argue.” Searching the channels, she comes upon a porn film of two people fucking who don’t look very much like Clark Gable and Grace Kelly. “It is strange that no one seems to make a great film about sex.”
“Last Tango,” says Vikar. “Realm of the Senses. Emmanuelle.”
“Emmanuelle is shit,” Maria scoffs. “In Dernier Tango Brando is great but the film? The Japanese are interesting because about sex they are even more perturbé—crazy, nuts—than Americans. But I mean a film that makes audiences sexy.”
“You mean that makes them feel sexy?”
“That is what I said, non?”
“I guess.”
“That … turns them on? is the expression? As a porn but also dramatique. In America you have this idea that anything about sex is acceptable only if it absolutely is not, under any circumstances, sexy. It would be the same to say that a comedy is acceptable only if it absolutely is not funny. The Americans are too romantic to make such a film. They are in love with shame.”
“The French are romantic.”
Maria dismisses this with the flick of her fingers. “Quelle mythe! No one ever said in a French film, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ Can you imagine Bogart fucking Bergman with a cube of butter on the Champs-Elysées as the Nazis march in?” For a few minutes they watch the two people having sex on TV. “The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with who the characters are. For the pornographer, sex is … spectacle humain sans consequence. It is as they say: you do not pay me—well, not you, in your case—the man does not pay me for the sex, he pays me to leave afterward. For the lack of consequence.”
Vikar says, “He pays you to leave?”
“This is what Brando believes will save him in Dernier Tango,” says Maria, “sex without consequence.”
“You are paid to leave?”
She changes the channel. “That is what destroys him, because there is no sex without consequence.”
“Perhaps Last Tango in Paris isn’t just about sex.”
“Chéri,” she laughs, “sex is never just about sex.”