IT TOOK A while, after that “working breakfast” with Cromwell, actually to start working on the film. Editing rooms and equipment had to be rented. A team of editors and assistants had to be hired. There was some difficulty in hiring the staff because most of the reputable editors refused to have anything to do with the recutting of Mr. Houseman’s last film. A couple of them showed up for the interview just for the pleasure of telling me what a reprehensible sonovabitch I was to be cooperating with Cromwell in the ruination of a film by a great man. I didn’t need them to tell me this. I knew it better than they did.
It took almost a month, but a staff of young editors eager to work on a feature was found. Three young men and two young women. Nice kids, all of them. Hard workers. Their first big chance.
And so we began.
My recutting of the film was one thing in theory, but something else when the first day came to put the plan into effect.
A dread accompanied me and everything I did that day. A horror, not an intellectual horror but a physical horror, made me shake like an old drunk when the time came to cut into the first scene and undo the perfection of its form.
I was sure I wouldn’t be able to continue. I was positive that something within me would recoil and refuse to go on with it. But I was wrong.
Working was working. Working on the desecration of something required as much dedication, was just as time-consuming, as if one were working on a masterpiece.
Undoing was doing too.
The drive to and from the Burbank studio where our editing facilities were located was exhausting at first, but soon became soothing and reaffirming. Driving in the rush hour in both directions gave me the sensation of being a part of the great tidal movement that swept millions of people away from their homes in the morning and then deposited them back home again in the evening. It was like being a part of some great daily cycle. Of being a working man.
And having Leila to come home to at the end of the day gave me the feeling of having a home. A family, in fact. I was a working-class family man. I was doing it all for my family.
We alternated. She spent nights at my hotel suite. I spent nights at her house in Venice. All that was missing was Billy.
And so one day I picked up the phone in my editing room and called him.
It was four o’clock in Burbank, seven o’clock at Cambridge when I picked up the phone. The members of my young crew were walking about with strips of film hanging around their necks. They were splicing scenes together. Tearing other scenes apart. They were all around me.
I hadn’t spoken to Billy since the night of the McNabs’ party and, as I dialed his number, I had no idea what I would say to him.
He answered the phone on the third ring.
“Billy,” I said, “please don’t hang up. It’s me.”
It was a good opening on my part. By putting myself at his mercy, I rendered him speechless. Before he could recover, I continued talking.
The members of my editing team, not wishing to appear to be overhearing a very painful, private conversation, continued working around me, but I knew that they were listening to every word I said.
“Listen to me, son, I can imagine what you must be thinking to get this phone call after all this time, but I beg you to …”
I went on.
On the Steembach editing machine to my right (we had two of them) I saw a close-up of Leila’s face from one of her cut scenes that we were putting back into the film.
“I know, believe me, I know, what a miserable father I’ve been. Father, indeed. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t even have the right to use that word anymore, considering the nature of my derelictions, but …”
I told him how he had every right to hate me for the rest of his life. That what I was doing now was too late. That I neither deserved nor expected another chance.
Every word I uttered was utterly sincere, but at the same time the confession I was making was a travesty. What I was doing to the film in the editing room, with the help of five assistants, I was now doing to my relationship with my son. I was snipping away at its complexity and integrity and reducing it to something as banal as a bowl of soup. But every word I uttered was sincere.
I told him that although I neither deserved nor expected another chance, I wished with all my heart that he would give me one, just one more. I told him that hardly a day went by that I didn’t think about him. I told him how hard it was for a man like me to show love for others when, in the deepest recesses of my being, I had no love for myself. I retraced briefly, but without assigning a bit of blame to her, my relationship with Dianah, and how the limbo of that relationship, being neither a marriage nor a divorce, nor even a real separation, had created a limbo in my soul.
And then I told him about the woman I had met. And how, because of this wonderful woman, I had dared to think that perhaps there was something worthwhile about me after all. Something worthwhile I could do with what was left of my life. And the one thing that was uppermost in my mind right now was to be allowed to love him again.
“That’s all I ask,” I told him. “I’m not asking you to love me, son. I have not earned the right to ask you that. All I’m asking of you now is to allow me to love you again. Maybe I have forfeited the rights to that privilege. Maybe …”
I got so moved by my own words, or whoever’s words they were, that I started crying. I could hardly go on.
“Maybe I won’t get a second chance. It’s up to you. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll understand. Good night, son.”
“Good night, Dad,” he stammered.
When I put down the phone, the members of my editing team reached to embrace me in that support-group kind of way. Then we all went out for pizza.
From that day on, Billy and I talked on the telephone almost every other day. I called him from my editing room, with my young crew now listening freely.
I called him from my hotel suite, with Leila listening from the other room.
With Leila listening from the other room, I told him how much I loved him, how much I loved her, how much they both meant to me, and how I hoped when they met they would like each other.
There were at least two separate occasions when, after talking to Billy on the phone and putting down the receiver, I saw Leila, returning from the bedroom where she had been listening, with tears in her eyes.
“Oh, Saul.” She walked toward me, her face contorted with grief and joy. “Oh, Saul,” she sobbed my name.
And there were times when, drunk out of her mind, she wept that her father had not been a man like me.
Over and over again she told me—without knowing, of course, that she was speaking about her own child—how lucky Billy was to have a father like me.
All that remained was to bring the two of them together. To introduce them to each other.
Billy still had over a month of school left, but he had no classes on Fridays and so he jumped at the chance to have a long weekend in LA.
Days before his arrival, Leila was in a complete tizzy. It was the only time that she ever reminded me of Dianah. The same nervousness. The same excitement. The identical rush of anticipation. It was like that time many years ago, when Dianah and I were waiting for the little and as yet unnamed baby to arrive in our apartment.
Leila was terrified that she wouldn’t make a good impression. That she didn’t look right. That her hairdo was all wrong. That she didn’t have the right dress to wear, as if there were a right dress for such an occasion. Not the least of her terrors was the prospect of meeting a boy from Harvard, because Leila was positive that kids who went to Harvard “knew everything, absolutely everything, there is to know.”
In the end, I also got caught up in the excitement and the terror.
There were two of us again, waiting for a child to enter our lives, only now the child was a young man. The same moment, but with a different woman.
We stayed at my suite at the Beverly Wilshire, where a guest bed awaited Billy in the living room.
The whole time that he was there, on his first visit, Leila religiously refrained from turning on the TV, because she was positive that kids from Harvard didn’t watch TV. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that some of the best and the brightest Harvard graduates were in LA writing episodes and pilots for TV series.
When Billy came back for another long weekend two weeks later, he and Leila simply picked up where they had left off and went on from there.
They started playing tennis.
The trip to Spain was my idea.