WHO KNOWS HOW long I might have remained in Sotogrande had it not been for Billy. August was winding down. His school year was to begin in a few weeks and he wanted to get back to New York so he could spend some time with Dianah before he left for Harvard.
From Sotogrande we drove to Malaga. From Malaga we flew to Madrid and caught a connecting flight to New York.
Billy and Leila sat in the nonsmoking section of the first-class cabin. I sat four rows behind them, smoking the last of my Spanish Fortunas.
There were still a few hours of daylight left. The sky was blue. The Atlantic below looked even bluer than the sky.
The father I got away from Spain, the better I felt. There was something unreal about vacations in general, as if nothing that happened on vacations really mattered.
There was nobody sitting next to me, so I let my body sprawl over both seats. When the stewardess offered me a drink, I asked for a coffee.
It was your run-of-the-mill airplane coffee and lukewarm at that, but it did me more good than all those countless demitasses of espresso I had drunk at Sotogrande. I felt the caffeine elbowing its way through my sluggish system and a long-dormant, almost forgotten, sense of alertness returning.
I ordered another cup and lit another cigarette, and sip by sip and puff by puff I enjoyed the sensation of becoming wide awake for the first time in a couple of months. Open for business again.
But nothing, apparently, was all benefits and no drawbacks. The more coffee I drank (I ordered yet another cup) and the more I enjoyed feeling like a fully functioning human being, the more it seemed to me that I had neglected taking care of some business during my semicomatose stay in Spain.
I found myself in the strange position of feeling anxious and worrying about something without knowing what it was.
A couple of hours later, we had our in-flight meal. Leila stood up at her seat with a champagne glass in her hand and toasted me.
“Cheers,” she chirped, smiling.
The heads of the passengers between us turned to look at me.
“Cheers,” I toasted her back.
After the meal, the stewardess announced that our in-flight movie would begin shortly. For some reason she asked us to pull down our window shades although it was now dark outside, and for some reason we all obeyed and pulled them down. The cabin lights were turned off.
It was during that brief interval of sitting there in darkness and waiting for the movie to begin that I realized the cause of my anxiety. It was so obvious, I was dumbfounded that I could have blocked it out for so long.
And then the movie began.
It had taken me over three months, working long hours with five young and energetic assistants, to recut the Old Man’s film to my satisfaction. I discovered in the end that it had taken me longer to destroy his film than it had taken him to create it.
When the three of us left for Spain, there was still a lot of work to be done. The classical music choices I had picked out for various scenes had to be arranged and scored. Opticals had to be added. The film had to be mixed. A title sequence, if any, had to be designed and shot by an expert in this field. But my job was over. What work there remained was in the hands of technical experts of one kind or another.
Before I left, Cromwell wanted to see what the new version looked like, with allowances, of course, for all the missing technical elements.
We saw the film in the same screening room where I had seen Leila’s cut footage for the first time.
Just the two of us.
I was very nervous.
The film had no musical score yet, but I had asked my editing team to underscore several scenes with a put-together temp track.
When Cromwell started roaring with laughter during the “Waltz of the Working Man” sequence, I relaxed.
Cromwell kept laughing out loud throughout the film and I, relieved that he liked it, laughed right along with him.
All those scenes that had meant so much to Leila, that she had found so moving or heartbreaking, were now hilarious. A couple of times, I heard the projectionist laughing.
What can I say about my version of the Old Man’s film?
That it was a travesty? A desecration? A lobotomy of a work of art?
Those denunciations, although accurate, did not go far enough.
It wasn’t merely that I had taken a masterpiece and, for motives of my own, turned it into a banality. I had taken something and turned it into nothing.
The only just description of what I had done was that I had created nothingness, but a nothingness of such accessible and broad appeal that it could pass for anything.
Cromwell was ecstatic. I had exceeded all his expectations. I was a genius. A bloody genius.
“You’ve really done it this time, Doc,” he told me.
Even as I basked in his praise, I felt I had more in common with Doctor Mengele, the Black Angel of Auschwitz, than with any Hollywood hack I had ever known.
But I came to terms with it. My work on the Old Man’s movie was a rare example of having to come to terms with something both before and after the fact.
My anxiety, as we flew on toward New York, had nothing to do with what I had done.
My anxiety was of another kind.
What if, while the three of us were in Spain, Cromwell had second thoughts about my version of the film?
What if, during my absence, he had shown the film to somebody else, some other back, who had entirely different ideas of what the film should be?
What if, and this was the most terrifying possibility, what if, as an act of courtesy, he had shown the film to the Old Man himself, and what if the Old Man, with the authority and the eloquence of a dying genius, had persuaded Cromwell to return it to its original state?
What if, without my knowing it, Leila had been completely cut out of the film once again, except for that little moment in the restaurant?
I no longer had any misgivings about the role I had played in the annihilation of what I considered to be a masterpiece. My only dread was that the annihilation had been reversed in my absence.
It was possible. I was a random man living in a random world where anything was possible.
Leila couldn’t believe her eyes when we landed at Kennedy and cleared customs.
She laughed. She cried. She did both at the same time. Billy applauded, shaking his head and smiling at me.
The cause of all this commotion was a large piece of white cardboard on which, written in large black letters with a Magic Marker, was her name: LEILA MILLAR.
She had told me in Spain how wonderful it must be to be one of those famous people with limo drivers holding up your name at airports for everyone to see.
It was an easy enough wonder to accomplish.
I called my limo service from Sotogrande before we checked out and requested that the driver who met us outside customs carry a sign with her name on it instead of mine. I requested a very large sign, printed in very large letters.
The shock on her face when she saw it was Christmas morning itself.
Having forgotten all about the arrangements I had made, I surprised myself.
She hugged me. She hugged Billy. Then she hugged the limo driver. She had to have the sign. Simply had to. She took it in both hands and looked at it at arm’s length. She swaggered around as we made our way through the airport, holding up her name for everyone to see, striking sexy poses like some starlet at Cannes and then cracking up at her own antics.
She wouldn’t dream of letting the limo driver put the sign in the trunk with the rest of our baggage. It sat there on her lap during our drive to Manhattan. She kept looking at it as if it were some priceless work of art.
We dropped Billy off at Dianah’s.
Leila remained in the limo. I got out.
I suddenly felt dizzy, as if some gyroscope in my head were beginning to wobble.
Here we all are, I thought.
Here was I. Here was Billy and his two mothers, one in the limo and the other waiting upstairs for him. And here he was, without knowing it, leaving one for the other again.
It was here, in this very building, in the apartment upstairs, that I had heard Leila’s voice for the first time on the telephone. Her laughter.
Before we parted, I gave Billy a hug, but I was really holding on to him to keep from falling.
“It’s just us old fogeys now,” Leila said when I got back in the limo.
She used the pucker of her lips in saying “fogeys” to give me a sweet little kiss on my cheek. Then she put her head down on my shoulder and kept it there until we came to a stop in front of my apartment building on Riverside Drive.
It had been, in our absence, one of the hottest summers in years, and the heat wave continued without showing any sign of a letup. It was almost biblical in its relentlessness. A strange kind of heat too, because it seemed to have little to do with the sun.
The sun itself, like some scrambled egg, was almost never in clear sight. It was somewhere up there, amorphous and diffused, in the haze of the constantly hazy sky, so that it wasn’t the heat of the sun you felt, or at least you didn’t associate the heat with the sun. You didn’t know what to associate it with. It was just heat. Heat from somewhere.
When the sun set and night came, the heat of the day gave way to the heat of the night and the sounds of boom boxes and police sirens and ambulance sirens and the sirens of fire trucks that usually traveled in pairs.
There were numerous heat-related stories in the newspapers. Heat-related deaths. Heat-related crimes. Things going wrong. Little things. Big things. Murders were described as heat-related acts committed by men without any motive except the heat, as if men were no more than molecules of gas living out their lives at the mercy of the laws of thermodynamics.
My office, unoccupied in all that time, was like a pizza oven. I let the air conditioner run for well over an hour before picking up the phone.
It was so hot I couldn’t even smoke, a first for me.
I had no reason to be in my office other than to make this phone call. I could have called from my apartment, but my anxiety was such that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not with Leila there.
“Mr. Karoo,” Brad answered the telephone, “how very nice to …” He went on, his minimum greeting to me now being a short paragraph.
The fiber optics of telecommunication were at it again, destroying any sense not just of long distance but even separation between Cromwell and myself.
He asked about Spain. About the various museums and various paintings in those museums, and although I hadn’t seen any of them, I lied and said that I had and that I had loved them all. He seemed to know Spain better than I knew New York. His description of the Spanish countryside made me feel that I had never been in Spain.
We talked about everything except the reason for my call.
I was unable to bring up the subject of the movie for fear that some catastrophic revelation awaited me if I did.
“Vera,” Cromwell told me, “has been having a hard time of it adjusting to the U.S.”
I couldn’t remember at first who Vera was and when I did, I didn’t really care how hard a time she was having. I only cared about what I cared about.
My stomach was slowly contracting into a rock-hard little ball.
Had Cromwell not brought up the subject of the movie, I don’t know if I ever would have.
“By the way, Doc,” he told me, “in case you don’t already know, your reputation has taken a quantum leap forward. I showed your cut to some of my close friends and their reaction was to die for.”
“Really?”
“To die for,” he repeated. “You’re the talk of the town.”
“Any changes from the last time I saw it?”
“What’s to change? You’re a fucking genius. It hurts me to say this, but it’s going to cost me a lot more money if I want you to work for me again. Your price, when this movie comes out, is going to skyrocket, you sonovabitch.”
He laughed.
I felt a burden falling away from me and the resulting euphoria of relief caused me to laugh along with him. I laughed as if I had no intention of stopping.
He told me that he had decided to call the film Prairie Schooner:
Prairie Schooner was the name of the restaurant where Leila’s character worked.
“It’s wonderful,” I applauded his choice.
The title, he told me, had market-tested very well. He planned to release the film just before Christmas, but only in a few select theaters. Then, when the big Christmas movies began to die like flies, as he thought they would this year, it would go to more and more theaters around the country. This was a release pattern predicated upon the assumption that we would get wonderful word of mouth and rave reviews from the critics.
Cromwell thought we would get both.
He had a hunch.
We had a sleeper on our hands.
As always, he planned to have a few sneak previews in several cities prior to the release, just to see how the movie played in front of a real audience. Our first preview (“Call it a world premiere,” he said) would be in Pittsburgh. In that very same theater where we had had our last preview together.
“Call me superstitious,” he said, “but we did great starting there the last time we worked together, and I see no reason to change.”
The exact date of the preview was still being worked on, but it would be sometime in mid-November. He would let me know.
“If I don’t see you sooner,” he told me, “I’ll see you in Pittsburgh.”
Even before I hung up, inspired, perhaps, by the euphoric relief I felt, I began to feel something else as well.
Something coalescing.
A swirl of themes from my whole life moving through me as if toward some long-delayed and much-desired resolution.
It was Pittsburgh.
That was where I would tell Billy and Leila that they were mother and son.
In a single, blinding moment of total clarity, I saw the perfection of Pittsburgh, both as a time and a place, for the telling of the truth.
I saw it all.
I saw the three of us at the world premiere of Leila’s movie. Billy and me dressed in tuxedos. Leila wearing a brand-new evening gown for the occasion.
I saw Leila watching herself for the first time on the screen.
The loud, maybe thunderous applause at the end of the film.
Leila crying, covering her face with her hands, standing up to receive even more applause from the public. Billy and me sitting down, looking up at her.
And then afterwards, back at our hotel, when in her giddy delight she was positive that nothing could possibly top this wonderful, magical night, I would top it.
At first, they would wonder if I was joking or not, but as I continued to speak and elaborate, the expressions on their faces would slowly change.
Leila, I decided, would be the first to break down. Her long-lost child was here again. And then Billy, weeping himself, would envelop his mother in those long, gangly arms of his. At that moment, Leila would have everything. Everything that had happened to her would now be worth it, for it had made this moment possible.
And I?
I saw myself, the agent of their reunion, withdrawing a few paces from them. Standing there. Saying nothing. Asking for nothing. I would not intrude until they, on their own, turned to me in love and gratitude for all that I had done for them.
Maybe then I would cry a little myself.
“Oh, Dad,” my Billy would say.
“Oh, Saul.” Leila, squinting, would open her arms.
The three of us would embrace (I could see it) and become, in that moment of embrace, a real family, thereafter indivisible.
In the years to come, Leila and I, happily married now, would make yearly pilgrimages to Pittsburgh, in celebration of that unforgettable night.
Maybe, just maybe, I would even write my Ulysses movie.
Nor was I unaware, while I sat there in my office, happily smoking my head off, of the symbolic aptness of Pittsburgh as our rendezvous. The three of us converging upon that city of the three rivers. The Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. Leila, Billy, and I.