Sleeping in Flame (2 page)

Dialog comes second in this kind of writing. Only guys like Lubitsch and Woody Allen get away with great language.

If you want great words, read a book. Let me see the script tomorrow."

After I had finished my part in the film, we decided to stay in Vienna to enjoy some of a spring that had arrived in the quick, unexpected way it often does in Central Europe: two days ago sleet, today summery-slow pink clouds, and all tops down on the horse-drawn carriages.

Nicholas didn't like my screenplay, but surprisingly, _did_ like the way I wrote. He said I should start another. That gave me heart to leap into another story idea I had hiding in my shadows.

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Every morning I kissed my sleeping wife good-bye and, full of inspiration, marched out the door of our apartment, notebook and fountain pen ready to go.

Two blocks away was my beloved Café Stein where, after coffee strong as a stone and a fresh croissant, I would get down to work on my newest _magnus opum_. The waiters glided by in a professional hush. If I looked up and caught

their eye, they'd nod approvingly at the fact I was writing in their café.

They carried silver trays that caught the early sun's rays, which threw silver back against the smoke-stained walls.

Anyone who doesn't want to be an "artist" in Europe, raise your hand.

If you are very lucky, you're allowed to be in certain places during just the right season of your life: by the sea for the summer when you're seven or eight and full of the absolute need to swim until dark and exhaustion close their hands together, cupping you in between. Or in another country when there is both an exciting _now_ and enough dust and scent of the past everywhere to give fall light a different, violent color, the air a mixed aroma of open flower markets, people named Zwitkovitz, a passing tram's dry electricity.

Victoria and I were very lucky. While I wrote my movie, she discovered the Wiener Werkstatte group, which resulted in her eagerly enrolling in a

Viennese architecture and design course at the university.

A month, then two, came and went. Whenever we discussed leaving Europe and returning to the United States, a blank look crossed both our faces, and we either smiled or shrugged: Neither of us was ready to go, so why even talk about it?

One day a friend of Nicholas's called and sheepishly asked if I would be interested in acting in a television commercial. They would dub a German voice over mine after filming, so all I would have to do would be to smile convincingly and mouth how much I loved feeding _Frolic_ to my bulldog.

Things worked out well, and I talked with a number of people on the set.

A few days later one of them called and asked if I wanted another job.

For the next two years, my modeling for magazines and television commercials allowed us to continue living in Vienna. By then, both of us had made contacts all over the place. Victoria had been hired as a researcher by a professor at the School for Applied Art. In addition to modeling, I was working at an assortment of free-lance jobs, including a commissioned script for Nicholas.

Since we had first met, he had made a reputation as a smart, able director who put together good-looking highbrow films for very little money.

Our spy film had been his only real shot at a big commercial success, but it had done only so-so.

He worked all the time, but never on as large a scale as he wished.

Along the way, he had married a woman who designed furniture and had a last name so long and impressive that even she couldn't put all of her money in it. Unfortunately, Eva Sylvian didn't like Victoria Easterling (and vice versa), so most of the time just Nicholas and I went out together.

He knew so many different people -- opera singers, neo-Nazi politicians, a black American who owned the only Mexican restaurant in all of Austria.

Nicholas wanted you to meet all of his friends. They were the greatest gift he could give: He wanted to give you to them. Some of these people became friends, others simply filled the evenings with funny lines or pompous chatter.

At first, Victoria wanted to hear all about these gatherings, but as time passed, only about who famous was there, or the juiciest morsels.

We had so many things together, Victoria and I. A life fully shared three-quarters of the time.

But from the beginning, my wife and I plotted our courses on separate, albeit adjoining, maps. I
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don't know if that's what led to the death of our marriage, but I don't think so. Those different courses made our time together richer and more precious. When we met in the evening, it was to give each other the gift of our day, how it had opened, what it meant or had done to us.

But in the midst of one of those death-throe arguments you have at the end of a long and successful relationship, Victoria said we were guilty of having given each other too much room, too much rope, too much time away. I

said that wasn't true. We were guilty of having grown lazy about things that should have been checked and rechecked all the time; adjusted quickly when we saw the gauges registering in the red zone of the heart. I am not being facile, either. Life itself is fine-tuning. Marriage, that, times two.

Life starts to go bad when irony begins. Or is it the converse? The ironies in our life began with my first lover outside marriage: a classmate of

Victoria's from the university who came to our apartment one night to discuss a project they were doing together on Josef Hoffmann.

Victoria's first lover? Naturally, an actor I introduced her to, who owned a lot of Josef Hoffmann-designed furniture.

Having an affair is like trying to hide an alligator under the bed. It is much too dangerous and big to be there, it sure doesn't _fit_, and no matter how carefully you try to conceal it, some part of the beast inevitably sticks out, is seen, sends everyone running and screaming.

The last time we traveled together was to America to get a divorce.

Victoria said divorce was never having to say you're sorry . . . again.

After it was over, my family urged me to stay with them in Atlanta awhile, but I used pain as my excuse to escape to Vienna: My friends were there, my work, everything. So I returned to the town as if it were an old best friend who would put its arms around me and, over drinks, listen sympathetically to my problems.

I was thirty, and that is a turning point for anyone, even those not freshly divorced and out on the track again.

Nicholas and some other nice people were wonderful. They squired me around, fed me lots of delicious meals, often called late at night to make sure I wasn't leaning too far out the window . .

.

At one of those dinners, someone asked me if I knew how flamingoes got their color. I didn't.

Apparently those funny, long-legged birds are not naturally that psychedelic coral pink. They're born a sort of dirty white. But from the beginning, they exist on a diet of plants rich in carotene,

"a red hydrocarbon." If you are a flamingo, you turn from white to pink when you eat enough carotene.

Anyway, the image fascinated me. I kept thinking I had gone through almost a decade with Victoria, largely unaware of either our original colors or the shade our relationship had eventually turned us after all that time together.

And almost more important, what color was I then, back in Vienna, alone?

To go from a good marriage to a stranger's bed was a pretty big change from a

"carotene diet." It is not only God who is in the details, it is also very much us.

It was time for me to pay attention to those details. Next time around, assuming I would be lucky enough to have another chance at a shared lifetime with someone, I would know the color of my skin (and heart!) before offering it to another.

Did that mean carrying a hand mirror with me at all times so I could see myself from every angle? No, nothing so drastic or inane. Self-examination is usually a half-hearted, spontaneous thing we do when we're either scared or bored. As a result, whatever conclusions we reach are distorted either by a clumsy urgency or a listless sigh. But in my own case, I simply wanted to be less surprised by what I did _after_ I did it.

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About six months after I returned to Austria, luck, like a boomerang, came flying back to me on a wide slow arc. The movie I had been commissioned to write was shot. For some unknown, delightful reason, it did great business in Italy and Spain. Its success led to another Nicholas Sylvian-Walker

Easterling collaboration that happened at just the right time. I also liked the idea of this new one more, so the actual writing came much more easily. It was a romantic comedy and I was able to plug many of my own good memories into the story. Another time, those memories would have left me feeling blue and failed. But integrating them into a film world that ended happily, with a long kiss and a fortune in the pocket of the lovers was the best way to relive that part of the recent past.

The film was never made, but it led to another producer, another script, and a basic assurance that, for the time being, I would be able to rely on the writing profession to keep me going.

I bought a small, sunny apartment on Bennogasse, two black leather chairs that looked like matching pistols, and a blind cat from the _Tierheim_

that somewhere had picked up the mysterious name Orlando. He came when I called and spent the first week in my new home walking carefully through the rooms like an astronaut just landed on a new planet. He was the salt-and-pepper gray of week-old snow, and spent most of his day asleep on top of an old baseball glove I kept on the edge of my desk.

Orlando's greatest, his only, trick was knowing when the telephone was going to ring before it did. If he was asleep on the desk, a few seconds before the call came he would lift his head suddenly and move it left and right, as if a fly were somewhere in his neighborhood. Then, _ring_! I liked to think that being both a cat

_and_ blind made him privy to certain small cosmic secrets. But the longer we lived together, his early-warning telephone look appeared to be his only talent in that direction.

I also tried to make the days more orderly and worthwhile. Wake up, exercise, eat, write, go for a long walk. . . . In certain ways I felt like a lucky survivor; someone just out of the hospital after a dangerous operation or terrible illness.

A direct result of all this reshuffling and reappraisal was that, despite meeting a number of attractive and interesting women, I did not want to get involved in any kind of relationship then, not even just to "fool around." Sex with new faces held little appeal in those days, although that had been one of the prime causes of my dead marriage. There were so many other things that needed to be sorted out and understood before I visited the Land of Ladies again.

Four months later I was married again.

2.

The whole ride in from the Munich airport Nicholas talked about the woman he wanted me to meet. It was characteristic though, because whatever

Nicholas liked, he liked whole-heartedly and described in glowing, mountainous terms.

"Do you know Ovo, the fashion photographer?"

"Sure, he's the guy who does models parachuting out of planes in ball gowns, doesn't he?"

"That's right. Maris York was his main model for two years. You'll know her face when you see it, I'm sure."

"Is she beautiful?"

He frowned, hesitated before answering. "Beautiful? I don't know about that. She is six feet tall, has hair as short as yours, and brown eyes that are a miracle. But no, she's not what most people would call beautiful. But she's the kind of woman you see someplace and wish you were going to spend the rest of your life with."

I laughed and nodded to show I was impressed. He wasn't finished.

"She drives an old Renault R4 with no heater and the radio is always broken. The wires stick out
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of the dashboard. You love her even more for that car."

"Have you ever been together with her?"

He looked at me as if I had said something terrible.

"Hell no! It would be like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Walker, some people you touch and some you dream about."

Herr Nashorn looked like a goldfish in aviator glasses. We had coffee and cake in his office and talked about films we'd all enjoyed. It was get-acquainted chatter, and we were all waiting to see who would be the first to mention our project.

In the middle of the gabbing, Nicholas stood up abruptly and asked if he could make a telephone call. He winked at me, and started dialing from a phone in the corner of the office.

While he called, Nashorn began talking to me, so I couldn't really hear what my friend was saying. But when he reached her, his voice went low and sexy, and his face was truly happy.

"Herr Nashorn, where are we eating lunch, and at what time?"

"The _Vier Jahreszeiten_, I guess. About two o'clock."

"Good." Nicholas held the receiver up and pointed to it. "Do you mind if I bring a guest?"

We waited half an hour before ordering. She didn't show up. The food came, we ate and talked, she didn't show up. Nicholas went twice to look for her, but came back both times shaking his head.

"It's not like Maris to do this, damn it. I wonder if something is wrong. It has me worried."

"Did you call her?"

"Yes, but there was no answer."

After lunch we went back to the office and spent the afternoon talking, but Nicholas was clearly preoccupied with his friend and not much help selling our picture. Every half hour he got up to call again. Nashorn didn't like these interruptions one bit. He kept shooting exasperated, annoyed looks at one or another of his associates every time Nicholas excused himself to go to the phone.

I did what I could to keep the ball rolling, describing wonderful scenes I already had in mind to write, suggesting actors I thought would be right for the different roles.

Whenever someone made a suggestion or comment, I listened carefully and even pretended to take notes.