The air is very thin in the mountains of Vermont, and nothing there seems real to a city man. The massed trees are overwhelming, the browns and greens of the earth are unbelievably rich, and there is too much sky.
“Right around this next turn,” Pamela Hendricks said. “You’ll see a sign.”
He was driving a yellow Avis Rent A Car so massive and fluid that it seemed to drive itself, with the back seat full of luggage and bottles of bourbon. “It’s the funniest thing,” he told her. “None of this seems real. I can’t believe it’s really happening.”
“Well, you’d better start believing,” she said, “because it is. Slow down a little now, or we’ll miss the sign. No, wait; there it is—see?”
And the sign read MARLOWE COLLEGE, 5 MI.
It was late summer again, and the past half year had been the most jubilant time of his life. After the first few winter weeks, on nights when he was supposed to be at AA meetings, he had stopped taking her to Varick Street; instead they used her own “luxury” apartment in the East Eighties, for which her father paid the rent. He would ride uptown in fright that she wouldn’t answer the door—or, worse still, that another and bigger man might answer it for her—but she was always there alone, sometimes still in her street clothes, sometimes fresh from her bath and wrapped in a loose terry-cloth robe, sometimes in a nightgown whose only purpose was to be slipped off and dropped weightlessly to the floor as they made for the bed.
At first a great deal of their talk was of movies, and on one of their most memorable nights he related the whole scenario of The Champ, starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, which he’d seen when he was seven years old.
“God, what a memory,” she said, and when he came to the end she almost wept.
“Oh, it wasn’t the first movie I’d ever seen,” he told her. “In those days you had to have a good many movies under your belt by the time you were seven, but it was the first that made a real impact on me. It knocked me out. That final scene, with old Beery dead of a heart attack after regaining the championship and the kid’s parents trying to hustle him out of the dressing room, and the kid saying ‘I want the Champ! I want the Champ!’—that was too much. I didn’t cry because it was very important not to cry at that age, but I walked out of that theatre with my throat on fire and as soon as I got in bed I cried like a little bastard.”
He told her of other movies he’d liked before she was born, but not all of them pleased her. Some she’d seen on television and said were trash, others she’d seen at the Museum of Modern Art and called pretentious. When he described Gunga Din as “maybe the best boy’s movie ever made” she squirmed in boredom. “And you mean after Sam Jaffe gets killed they hold a special parade and pin a medal for him on the regimental flag, and they get some actor dressed up like Rudyard Kipling to recite his poem? Even if I were a boy I’d have laughed at that.”
“You wouldn’t have laughed when they showed Sam Jaffe’s ghost coming up through the poem, wearing a full-dress British uniform and making a British salute.”
“I think I might have vomited.”
Another time she dwelt at some length on the mystery of why great novels—even good novels—were so seldom made into halfway decent movies. “I mean they’ve done all right with Dickens, especially the English, but I guess that’s because his writing is so visual in the first place.”
“Mm.”
“But when you think of all the dismal failures: Madame Bovary with what’s-his-name’s wife, Jennifer something or other …”
“Mm,” he kept saying of each one she mentioned, and “Yeah,” though he’d read almost none of the books. He was damned if he was going to let her find out about his reading problem.
“… And when you think what those Hollywood people did with From Here to Eternity!”
“Yeah.” The truth was that he’d liked that picture and might have read the book on the strength of it, if it hadn’t been nearly a thousand pages long.
“And did you ever see the mess they made of The Great Gatsby? With Alan Ladd?”
Now, wait a minute. Alan Ladd had taught him not only how to comb his hair but how to carry his shoulders and how to walk, and how a short man could look at a girl in such a way as to leave no doubt of his carnal intentions.
“It was an outright betrayal of the book,” she said. “They made it into some cheap little gangster flick.”
“Well, hell, movies aren’t books; they’re two different forms, that’s all. Besides, you’ll have to admit Alan Ladd was pretty good in Shane.”
“Oh my God. Shane. Like High Noon. Adult Westerns. You know what an adult Western is? It’s a contradiction in terms.”
“Okay, look. What’s the single best American movie you’ve ever seen?”
“The single best? I don’t know. Probably Cit—”
“Right. Citizen Kane. And can you imagine what kind of a novel that would’ve been? A piece of schlock. A half-assed, sensational book by some all-thumbs Harold Robbins about the life of William Randolph Hearst. See what I mean?”
She bit her lip, nodding slowly, and for the first time that night her face glowed with admiration.
“That’s what the Europeans have known for years,” he hurried on. “Movies are movies—though I must say some of your European favorites have been screwing up that concept lately: your Fellinis and your Antonionis and whatever artsy-craftsy fool it was who made Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and your—your sacrosanct Ingmar Bergman.”
Her teeth released her lip and her eyes narrowed, ready to argue again. “What’s the matter with Bergman?”
“Partly just that—he’s sacrosanct. Any New York movie critic with the guts to call Bergman overrated would be fired on the spot. But the main thing about him is worse.”
“What’s that?”
“He doesn’t have any sense of humor. Think about it. The man doesn’t have any sense of humor.”
She thought about it, stroking his chest, and announced that she guessed he was right.
But their first real quarrel had nothing to do with movies. It happened shortly after the abortive invasion of Cuba, which very soon became known in the press as the Bay of Pigs.
“Whaddya think of your Wonder Boy now, baby?” he demanded, having stalked into the apartment, made himself a drink and sat down to relish it.
“He was badly advised.” She was fully dressed and walking the carpet with her arms folded across her breasts. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“Who do you think ordered those poor raggedy-assed bastards to go in there and get wiped out? Huh? And then lying about it! Making a patsy out of Adlai Stevenson in front of the world. It’s the most inept, arrogant, cowardly—”
“Look, John. If you’re going to rant and rave I don’t want to—”
“Who’s ranting and raving? I’m talking politics, that’s all.”
“No you’re not. You think you are, but you’re not. You know why you don’t like Kennedy? Because he’s tall.”
“Ah, come on.”
“It’s true, though. He’s tall and handsome and a war hero and he’s got a beautiful wife as well as a reputation as a cocksman—He’s everything you’re not, and you can’t stand it. It’s loathsome. I don’t think I want you to stay here tonight.”
She might as well have kneed him in the groin, but he tried a boyish, conciliatory smile, swirling his ice cubes. “Is it okay if I finish my drink?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. You look as though you’ve been drinking all day. Why don’t you just get up and leave before you make an even bigger fool of yourself?”
At the door he wondered whether to say “Can I call you?” but that would make it all too easy for her to say no. Instead he slung his raincoat jauntily over one shoulder and said “Well. See you in the funny-papers.” On the elevator it occurred to him that “See you in the funny-papers” was something people had said in the thirties; she’d probably never heard it, and it must have struck her as drunken gibberish, if she’d been listening at all.
The first bar he came to was loud and Irish, festooned not only with shamrocks and the green cardboard lettering ERIN GO BRAGH but with a framed photograph of President Kennedy from the waist up, making him look very tall indeed. Six or eight years ago the portrait might well have been of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He left after a couple of quick ones and found a dark, mercifully apolitical lounge of deep leather and black mirrors, where the only sounds were the tinkle of heavy glassware and a muted jukebox. What the hell was he going to do? Calling her was out of the question, if only because he’d had so much to drink now that he’d only mess it up worse.
“I’ve lost my baby,” he whispered into his glass, and might have begun to weep except that this kind of bar would tolerate no crying drunks. He had to make plans.
He wouldn’t call her for two weeks—well, one week. Then, assuming she’d welcome him, he would arrive at her door with a bashful, cold-sober smile that hardly any girl could resist. When she offered him a drink he’d say “No thanks; not just yet,” and with any kind of luck he’d have her back.
The funny part was that the week seemed to pass quickly. The office was the worst—every time his phone rang he thought it might be Pamela—but it was endurable, and so was life at home. On his meeting nights he went to movies instead of bars, or movies before bars, and he tried to drink nothing but beer. On the final day of the week he was all anxiety: he dropped two dimes on the floor of the phone booth before managing to get one into the slot, and his finger trembled in the dial.
“Oh,” she said.
“Look: can I—would it be okay if I come over tonight?”
“Well, sure. Come on up whenever you want. I mean—you know—whenever you can.”
And he did, complete with a bouquet of roses which made her laugh.
“Why didn’t you call for so long?”
“I thought you were sore at me.”
“That was last week.”
He didn’t ask if she had “seen” or “dated” anyone else all week, and once they were in bed it no longer seemed to matter.
And it wasn’t very many nights later, during one of his rambling autobiographical monologues, that he told her about Bellevue. He tried to make it light and brief but she wouldn’t let him: she pressed for more and more details, sitting up against the pillows and chain-smoking, and when he falteringly came to the end she said “God. Have you ever thought of what a movie that would make?”
He hadn’t, and he didn’t start thinking of it until he’d gotten up for two cold beers. “I don’t see it,” he said. “It’d be like some New York Post exposé on the Terrible Conditions in City Mental Health Facilities.”
“No it wouldn’t,” she insisted. “Not if it were done right; it wouldn’t be like that at all. Think of the mood; the characters; the situations. It could be—well, I know this is a cliché, but it could be the world in microcosm. And you may be one of the very few patients they’ve ever had who can remember it all so vividly, because you were stone-cold sane the whole time. You know something, John? Just from the way you tell it, I’ll bet you’ve really been thinking of the whole thing in cinematic terms all along. Even while you were going through it.”
“Well, I don’t know. Yeah; come to think of it I guess I have, in a way.”
“Of course you have. It’s an absolute natural for the screen. And hasn’t it occurred to you that you might be the only man in America who could do it right?”
“How do you mean, ‘do’ it? No money; no talent.”
“But you said you always wanted to be the man who raised the money and hired the talent. Isn’t that true?”
“Well, sure, baby, but let’s be realistic. I’m only a salesman, after all, and I’ve got a family to support, and I—”
“John, I refuse to let you throw this beautiful idea away just because you’re feeling dumb and middle-class tonight. You be quiet and drink your beer; let me think.”
And soon the brave beginnings of her plan began to emerge: it might just be possible, she said, to make this film on a very, very low budget. First of all, the script would be no problem. There had been a wonderfully talented writer at Marlowe College named Jerry—Jerry Porter. He’d sold a story to the Atlantic while still in school, but then decided he’d rather work “in film” and had done some marvelous scripts, one of which had been optioned and nearly bought by a good producer. She would call him tonight—she was sure he’d be interested—and if John would arrange to meet him they could get started on the screenplay right away. And Jerry had a friend named Julian Feld, another Marlowe graduate three or four years his senior, who was a director—“a magician with the camera.” Julian had spent a summer in France studying with Truffaut; he’d worked as a second-unit man in Hollywood and made some civil rights documentaries in the South, but the last she’d heard he was back here in New York with time on his hands. Both Jerry and Julian had money of their own—they came from enormously rich families—and might even help out with the financing of the venture; at the very least they’d be willing to work on spec. So would another young Marlowe man she knew—an artist and stage designer who would do the set—and so would most of the actors. God, there had been more fine actors at Marlowe than he could imagine.
“Wait a second, sweetheart. You can’t have a bunch of fresh-faced college kids playing Bellevue characters. What about all the Negroes and Puerto Ricans?”
“I’ve already thought of that. Julian can round them up. He knows scads of them.”
“You mean some of his best friends are Negroes and Puerto Ricans.”
But she seemed not even to hear him as she hurried on to a triumphant conclusion: if the script and the casting and rehearsals were done by midsummer, they could all go up to Marlowe and do the actual shooting there, in one of the great Marlowe barns. Think of the money they’d save! They’d have to get the dean’s permission, of course, but this was just the kind of thing Dean Walcott loved—an experimental film created on campus.
“What time is it?” she demanded. “Oh, good, it’s still early. I’ll call Jerry right now.”
Jerry Porter turned out to be a slight young man with a nervous boyish face and a handlebar moustache that picked up suds when he drank beer, and he was indeed interested. Wilder met with him at regular intervals over a period of five or six weeks, telling him everything he could remember about Bellevue—about the look and sound and feel of the place, about Charlie and Spivack and all the others. Jerry frowned and listened and took notes and asked questions, and when the screenplay began to take shape he introduced Wilder to the director, Julian Feld.
“I think you’ve got the makings of a good little film here, Mr. Wilder,” Julian said, just as Pamela had promised he would. “I’d like to work with you.” He was squat and moody-looking, given to wearing work shirts with so many buttons unfastened as to suggest that a dark pelt ran from his nostrils to his ankles, and he lived in an East Village loft that soon became the stage for casting and preliminary rehearsals.
“Isn’t it wonderful,” Pamela said, “how everything’s working out?”
“Hold all my calls, honey,” George Taylor said. “Now. What can I do for you, John?”
“A favor. Look: I know my vacation is set for July and I want to take it then, but I want two more weeks at the end of August. I want you to fake up a business trip for me.”
All the joviality drained from Taylor’s face; he looked as if they scarcely knew each other. “Fake up a business trip?”
“Hell, George, you know I’m way over my quota. I don’t have to tell you how much money I’ve brought into the magazine over the past couple of years. And the thing is—the thing is I’ve got a girl.”
That was all it took. What did she look like? How old was she? How had he met her? “Well, now, let’s see,” he said at last, getting down to business. “A couple of weeks in August? Just between the two of us I imagine that might be within the—you know, the realm of possibility.”
He had dreaded his real vacation, the one in “the country,” until Janice declared it would be only sensible for him to drive back to town four or five nights a week for his meetings. Sitting on the raft with her toward the end of their last afternoon, he came out as casually as possible with his lie about August.
“Two whole weeks in Boston?” she inquired. “He’s never sent you to Boston for that long before.”
“He isn’t ‘sending’ me, Janice; it’s something we worked out together. Matter of fact it was mostly my idea. We’re having a lot of trouble with the Northeast Distillers’ account, you see …” Talking, he looked down at the heavy spread of her thigh on the wet boards and then into the top of her bathing suit. How could he ever have been so young and callow as to believe that this was the woman for him? For life?
“Hey, watch, Mom,” Tommy was calling. “Watch this.” He loped across the raft (he was skinny, but on the tall side and filling out; at least he would never be a shrimp like his father), took three or four awkward bounds on the springboard, flung himself into the air and came down all arms and legs in a great splash.
“Wonderful, dear,” Janice called when his soaked head appeared again, and Wilder said “Pretty good one, Tom.
“… There’s been a change of management up there,” he went on, “and there’s a good chance they might drop McCabe-Derrickson and go with one of these new, small agencies—in which case they might very well drop the Scientist. The first week is just the distillers’ convention, and I’ll spend that just sort of glad-handing around as usual, but the second week’s the important one: that’s when I’ll have to do everything I can to persuade Northeast not to change agencies—or, if they do change, persuade them to keep on buying space in the Scientist.”
“I’m afraid I’m not following this. I’ve never really understood your business.”
“Well, to put it simply, if they drop the magazine it’ll mean a loss in personal income to me of something over six thousand a year.”
“Six thousand a year?”
She understood that, all right, and after a long and respectful silence she had only one admonition: he would be careful, wouldn’t he? Would he try to keep up with his meetings?
“Oh, hell, yes. They’ve probably got as much of an AA organization in Boston as here. Don’t worry about that.”
“As you see it doesn’t look much like a campus,” Pamela said. “It looks more like an old New England farming village or something, which is pretty funny when you consider it’s the single most expensive college in America. When my father asked why it looks so poor, they said it’s because most of the money goes into faculty—the faculty’s enormously well paid.”
“Oh.”
“These are some of the classroom buildings and the dorms,” she told him as he eased the car between two rows of white clapboard structures. “It gets prettier farther on, when we come to the Commons and the—wait! Stop! There’s Peter!” She sprang from the car and ran to embrace a scrawny boy wearing faded Levis and a new beard, which he fingered self-consciously as she made the introductions.
“… Peter’s the marvelous designer I told you about. This is John Wilder.”
Wilder expected the boy to hold out a loose hand and say “Hey, man,” or to squint past him at the car and murmur “Nice set of wheels”—he looked like that kind of kid—but instead he shook hands firmly and said “How do you do, sir,” just as the youth of Wilder’s own generation had been taught to do.
“Where are the others?” Pamela said. “Is everybody here? Are Jerry and Julian here?”
“They’re all over in P barn, Pammy; can I have a lift?”
“P barn is Peabody barn, you see,” she explained as the boy pressed shyly into the front seat, “and C barn is Carlton—that’s where you’ve built the set, isn’t it, Peter?—and L barn is—”
“They run the whole school in barns?”
“Don’t be silly; I’ve shown you the classroom buildings and the dorms. The barns are simply for—well, activities.”
Jerry and Julian sat in the big double door of P barn as if waiting to have their picture taken for the film section of a national magazine, but they got quickly to their feet as Wilder’s car pulled up.
“Come on inside,” Julian said, and they let Pamela and Wilder go first into what seemed like a primitive wooden cathedral. Most of its great space was in shadow, but there were mote-filled shafts of sun slanting down from high, small windows to make yellow rectangles on the floor. The scent of marijuana hung in the heavier, more solemn smell of ancient lumber, and Wilder had to wait until his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness before he made out clusters of men sitting on bedrolls and knapsacks against the walls. He recognized the actors from Julian’s loft, and he guessed the people he didn’t know were cameramen and technicians.
“Well,” said the big Negro who’d been hired to play Charlie. “Here’s the man.” And there were courteous little greetings from some of the others: “Hi, Mr. Wilder. Hi there, Miss Hendricks …”
Somebody handed Wilder a Styrofoam cup of red wine and he said “Thanks, that’s fine, but wait—we’ve got better stuff in the car.”
Out in the late afternoon sunshine again, under the deep rustle of lofty trees, he found he was trembling. He got the whiskey from the car, but on the way back he had to stop a few feet short of the barn door because he wanted to get his emotional bearings, to strengthen his soft knees and slow down the beating of his heart. He was totally free for the first time in more years than he could remember. He was standing on a lawn of the single most expensive college in America. He was about to return to the girl he loved and to a barnful of men for whom he was “the man.” It was a little too much for the mind and senses to absorb all at once.
“Great!” somebody said of the whiskey, and somebody else said “Trouble is we got no ice.”
“Who needs ice?”
“There’s ice in the snack bar at Commons,” Pamela said.
“Commons is locked up, Pam. Refectory’s locked too.”
“Where’re we going to eat, then?”
“Have to go down the road to Dirty Ed’s, I guess, or else blow a bundle and go to the Old Colonial.”
She looked crestfallen, but only for a second. “Well, never mind that now. Nobody’s hungry yet. Listen, Julian: you had your final rehearsal today, right? And you start shooting tomorrow?”
“Right.”
“Well then I think this might be the time for one last run-through of the script,” she said, walking out into the middle of the floor to address them all, and Wilder noticed something aggressive in the fit of her tight white slacks. For a moment she seemed like a bossy little rich girl telling the other children how to play. He was in love with her, but he had discovered there were times when she wasn’t very likable. “Jerry can read the camera directions,” she was saying, “and the actors can read their parts. That way we can all—”
At least three of the men groaned, and the others showed by their faces that they thought it was a very poor idea.
“No,” Wilder said, “come on, Pamela; these guys’ve been working all day.”
She turned on him with bright eyes. “Well, can’t we at least have a meeting?”
“How do you mean, a ‘meeting’?”
“Get some chairs,” she said, “and sit everybody down, with Julian in charge, and have a discussion. That way, if anybody has any problems, we can get them settled now. I mean this is our last chance—we’re shooting tomorrow.”
And probably because she looked so helpless—or because she was the only woman there—they all complied. Lights were turned on, folding chairs were drawn from some recess in the barn and set up in a ragged half-circle, and a kind of “meeting” came to order.
“Okay,” Julian said. “Has anybody got any problems or anything?”
Nobody did, which caused embarrassed smiles around the group, until the man playing Charlie got to his feet. “Something’s been bugging me about my part all along,” he said, “and I’ve just now figured out what it is. Charlie’s the only Negro in the cast—with the exception of the little faggot kid—the only Negro in the cast who speaks what white people call Perfect English. All the others talk like stereotype down-home niggers, and I object to that. On racial grounds.”
Julian turned to Jerry for an answer, and Jerry looked confused. “Well, Clay,” he said, blinking and tucking his forelock behind one ear with nervous fingers, “it strikes me that Charlie speaks pretty much the same way you do.”
“Shee-it. Look, man, I’m an actor. That’s my trade. I had to go to school and study this Perfect English. I’ve played Othello with white kids who had to learn British accents for the same reason. That’s not the point. The point is, this cat Charlie’s a nurse. Where’d he study, and what for? What’s his excuse?”
“Well,” Jerry said, “maybe Mr. Wilder can help us there.”
And Wilder was scared. All the Negroes in the barn were looking at him. “First of all, Clay—I’m afraid I don’t remember your last name—”
“Oh, you’re afraid? Well, I’m afraid I don’t remember your first name, Mr. Wilder.”
“John.”
“Braddock.”
“First of all, Mr. Braddock, I don’t agree that Charlie speaks Perfect English. He speaks neutral English, or rather neutral American—the kind of accent telephone operators and radio announcers use. Sure he’s only a nurse, but he’s been in charge of all these lunatics every day for a good many years, and maybe he’s developed that manner of speech as the best way of—you know—maintaining authority. Does that make any sense?”
“Some,” Clay Braddock said. “Yeah, that makes some sense.”
And when the talk had moved on to other things Pamela hugged Wilder’s arm—a little too vigorously, he thought—and whispered “That was wonderful. You know what you did? You just saved practically the whole movie.”
“I don’t have a problem,” said the man playing Spivack—or “Klinger” as he was called in the script. “Far from it; I’m in love with my part. I just want to take this opportunity to thank you, Mr. Wilder. I never did get a chance to thank you properly in New York. It’s an absolutely exquisite part, and it’s perfect for me.” He was all in white, as if ready for tennis—white shirt and shorts, white socks and sneakers. “I don’t mean just professionally, though it’s certainly that too, but in a personal sense. I’ve been in analysis for three years, you see—deep analysis—and I can’t imagine a more cathartic experience. Klinger could be my breakthrough: this caustic, sarcastic, egomaniacal creature who loathes the very word ‘psychiatrist’—oh, and by the way I think it’s marvelous that we never do find out what brought him to the ward in the first place—and the subtle suggestion of incestuous feelings for his sister; it’s all just perfect. Perfect.”
“Well, that’s fine,” Wilder said, not looking at him. “But I think it’s Jerry you ought to thank.”
“Oh, I have, I have—both for writing the part so beautifully and for hiring me. It’s just that I feel an enormous gratitude to you, too, because it was you who conceived the role. Oh, you look embarrassed. Have I embarrassed you?”
“I move the meeting be adjourned,” Julian said, and there was a great scraping of chairs.
Wilder found a place in the shadows where he and Pamela could sit and drink warm whiskey, but it wasn’t long before Julian came over, bringing Jerry and Peter behind him.
“You people want to see the set?” he asked. “Peter’s worked his ass off on it; thought you might at least want to look it over.”
All five of them, in two cars, rode out across the darkening campus to C barn, where Julian flicked on many lights. At first all Wilder could see was a maze of raw wallboard, but Julian was quick to guide them through the first opening. “If you’ll come this way you’ll see what we’ve done—tried to do anyway. We’re shooting in black and white, of course, so the colors don’t matter. Here’s your corridor. I know you’ll say it’s too short, but don’t worry. A camera can make thirty feet look like sixty if you use it right. Same goes for the bunks. We’ve only got eight bunks, but I can give an illusion of five or six times that many. Peter got the bunks from this home for retarded kids they’re tearing down upstate; then he put hinges on ’em and went to a scrap-metal yard for the chains and the grids. Look.” He slammed two bunks against the wall, clamped them, and drew the grid across them. “That look right? Sound right?”
“It’s fine; fine.”
“And here’s your padded cells. The padding was another of Peter’s inspirations; borrowed it from the gym here at school. Look all right?”
“Looks fine.” But Pamela and Peter weren’t there, and he had begun to wonder where they were.
“And here’s one of your windows. You stand here, I’ll go around and light it, then you tell me if the light’s right.”
It was; either an early grey morning or a late grey afternoon.
“… and as for your mess hall, if you’ll just come through here …”
“Fine,” he kept saying. “Where’d you get the benches?”
“Peter borrowed ’em from the library. And here’s your front door, with the cop’s stool, and here’s Charlie’s KEEP OUT door …”
It was all fine, but where was Pamela?
“… Oh, and here,” Julian said. “Come over this way. Here’s your Jerk-off City.”
It was a perfect replica of that loathsome alcove; and there they were, Pamela and Peter, sitting cross-legged on a single dirty mattress and sharing a joint.
“What’s the deal?” he asked her. “Don’t you want to see the set?”
“I’m too tired,” she said. “Besides, I don’t have to see it—I know Peter’s done everything beautifully.”
“Yeah, well, that’s true. He has.”
“And anyway I’m starving. Can’t we please go have dinner now?”
Wilder drove for what seemed many miles to a restaurant where tough, expensive steaks were served by waiters dressed in the tight knickerbockers and white stockings of Revolutionary times.
“… Oh, hey, Pam,” Jerry said with his mouth full. “I forgot to tell you. Guess who’s on campus?”
“Who?”
“God.”
“No!”
“Yup. Old God the Father himself. Went to England for the summer, got bored and came home early. He’s holed up in his old study. I told him about the picture; he said he’d like to meet John and all that. Said he’d especially like to see you again.”
“Did he really? Oh, I’d love to see him. You think it’s too late?”
“I don’t think he’d mind. I’ll call him first.”
Wilder finally managed to swallow a stringy piece of meat that had threatened to gag him. “Will somebody tell me what’s going on? Who’s ‘God,’ for God’s sake?”
“Oh, he’s just the most wonderful, wonderful man,” Pamela explained. “He’s probably the most serene and learned and beautiful person I’ve ever known. He’s a philosophy professor. His name’s Nathan Epstein, and he’s a widower, and he’s about—I don’t know; sixty? We used to call him ‘God’ and ‘God the Father’ because we adored him so much. You’ll see why.”
“Did he know you called him ‘God’?”
“Oh, of course not; he’d have been terribly embarrassed. That was just a silly undergraduate thing of ours.”
“Wouldn’t be too sure of that, Pam,” Peter said. “It wasn’t only our class that called him that. I imagine the kids’ve been doing it ever since he first came here—ten, twelve years ago.”
And Jerry came back from the phone to announce that Mr. Epstein would be happy to see them in half an hour.
His house on the outskirts of the campus was very small, the picture of a lonely scholar’s retreat, and when he opened the door it turned out that he was small too—about Wilder’s size. His thick white hair was disheveled and he wore a sweater so old and raddled that it seemed ready to fall off his back, but his face did look wise—like some commercial artist’s vision of a Supreme Court justice.
“Pamela!” he said, opening his arms for an embrace in which she melted. “My little Nietzsche scholar. Have I ever told you,” he asked the others over her shoulder, “that this young lady wrote one of the best term papers on Nietzsche I’ve ever read? And Jerry; Julian; Peter—” he managed to shake hands without releasing his grip on Pamela—“How nice of you to come. And you’re Mr. Wilde, right? Or is it Wilder?”
“Wilder. Good to meet you, Mr. Epstein.”
Only then did he let Pamela out of his arms, and she seemed reluctant to leave. “I’ve heard so much about your film project, and I must say it sounds fascinating. Won’t you all come into the other room? We’ll have some coffee and a little brandy.”
The other room was his library, or study. All four walls were packed with books—more books even than Janice owned, and more impressive because only a few of them had bright jackets: the rest were old and dark. There was a desk, too, with piles of manuscript and a portable typewriter and a rack of well-used pipes (unlike Paul Borg, Mr. Epstein knew how to smoke a pipe), and there were enough chairs for everyone to sit down while he went about the business of the brandy bottle and the glasses. Rooms like this, and men like this, always gave Wilder a fresh sense of pain and loss at having flunked out of college.
“Well, Jerry,” Epstein was saying, “I’m sure screen-writing is a challenge, but I do hope you’ll get back to fiction before long. That Atlantic story was really striking. And Peter: I must say I’m a bit disappointed in you, designing a film set when you could be off somewhere painting. Joe Barrett told me—Well, never mind what he told me; surely you must know what a talented painter you are.”
“I’ll get back to it, Mr. Epstein; it won’t go away. I just got hooked on this movie. Julian talked me into it.”
“Yes, well, I imagine our friend Julian could talk anyone into anything. And you, sir,” he said, approaching Wilder with the brandy bottle. “Would you care to tell me something about your—your film? I understand it’s set in a public psychiatric ward. Bellevue, is it?”
“That’s right. I had all this material on my hands, you see, and I’ve always liked movies; this Bellevue stuff seemed right for a good experimental movie, that’s all.”
“Mm. Are you a psychologist, Mr. Wilder?”
Only then was it clear that Epstein didn’t know the truth. The kids hadn’t told him; and why should they? Why should anyone tell anyone? But almost before he knew what he was doing, he told the truth himself: “No. Actually, I was a patient in Bellevue.”
“Oh?”
“Oh, just for a week,” he hurried on, “and that was just because of the Labor Day weekend, but I—” Appalled at his own voice, he wondered why he couldn’t have said he was a social worker or a hospital executive. Would the kids have cared? Why was he spilling his guts instead? Did he think it might make him more interesting in Epstein’s eyes? But what was “interesting” about having been a mental patient? “—anyway, I was locked up there,” he concluded, and he wondered if Pamela and the others were embarrassed for him.
“My goodness,” Epstein said. “And now you’re trying to turn that unfortunate episode into a work of art. I think that’s very—interesting.” Then one of the pipes was drawn out of the rack, and while tamping it he said “Julian? Do you think I might drop over and watch the filming?”
“Sure. Be a pleasure, Mr. Epstein. I’ll get you a copy of the script, too.”
Epstein said that would be fine, and for the next half hour, while he smoked and fondled and flourished his pipe, the talk excluded Wilder altogether. It was all reminiscence—the old professor chuckling over happy days with four favorite students—until the time came for everyone to rise and move toward the door.
“Well, Mr. Wilder,” he said then, “if you want to make a good film I think you’ve come to the right place. There’s something rare about Marlowe, something—oh, stimulating, invigorating—I discovered it when I first came here and decided I’d never work anywhere else. There’s an intensely creative atmosphere up here that I’ve never been able to define or explain. I don’t mean to sound fanciful, but Marlowe casts a spell—” and here he broke off for a self-deprecating laugh. “Oh, I know if I tried telling this to some of my New York friends they’d say ‘spell, schmell,’ but even so, I think it’s true.”
All the way home to their dormitory room he let Pamela do the talking (“Isn’t he wonderful?…”), and he drove with his jaws clenched tight because he was weak with the need for a drink. He made himself a good one as soon as their door was shut, and even before she finished hanging up her clothes and taking a shower he’d begun to get a little drunk. He wanted to ask if she had been embarrassed when he told Epstein he was a patient; he wanted to discuss his strange compulsion to let people know the worst about himself—this confusion of what was weak and ugly in himself with what was “interesting”—but he couldn’t find the words to begin. And the more he drank, the more that topic receded in his mind until it was replaced by irrational, sickening images of jealousy.
“Aren’t you ever coming to bed?” she called from between the sheets.
“In a while.” By this time he had stripped down to his shorts and he was pacing the cold floor with a glass in his hand, returning again and again to the bottle on the table. “Got a couple of questions first,” he said. “What were you and Peter doing there in Jerk-off City tonight?”
“What? John, I don’t even know what you’re—”
“Yes you do. You and that dreamy-eyed little bullshit painter, bullshit designer, both of you smoking pot and feeling each other up—How many times you make it with him in the old days? Huh?”
“I’m not listening to any of this.”
“Yes you are, sweetheart. And how about Jerry? Isn’t he just the sweet, sensitive young writer though? And how about Julian? What the hell d’ya think—you’re fooling me with all these kids? Ah, you may fool me with the kids, baby, but I’ve got your number with the old professor. Yeah, yeah, ‘My little Nietzsche scholar.’ God the Father my ass! How many times did that dirty old bastard get into your pants? Huh? Huh?”
That was when he tripped over something (a wastebasket? a suitcase?) and the cruel weight of the floor clobbered his shoulder. Then she was up and helping him to his feet—it wasn’t easy; it took all their combined strength—and they staggered and fumbled their way into bed together.
“Oh, John,” she said, “you’re a drunken, hateful, foul-mouthed bastard and you’re half crazy, but I love you.”
And what could he do after that—all passion spent, all jealousy dissolved—what could he do but murmur “Oh, baby,” and fall heavily asleep in her arms?