A Graveyard for Lunatics (18 page)

Constance blew her nose, got up, grabbed Lopez’s hand, and thrust something into it. “Don’t fight!” she said. “That was a great year, ‘28. Time I paid my lovely gigolo. Stay!” For he was trying to shove the money back. “Heel!”

Ricardo shook his head, and hugged her hand to his cheek.

“Was it La Jolla, the sea, and good weather?”

“Body surfing every day!”

“Ah, yes, the bodies, the warm surf.”

Ricardo kissed each and every one of her fingers.

Constance said, “The flavor starts at the elbow!”

Ricardo barked a laugh. Constance punched him lightly in the jaw and ran. I let her go out the door.

Then I turned and looked over at that alcove with the small lamp, the desk, and the filing cabinet.

Lopez saw where I was looking, and did the same.

But Clarence’s picture portfolio was gone, out in that night, with the wrong people.

Who will protect Clarence now, I wondered. Who will save him from the dark and keep him, living, until dawn?

Myself? The poor simp whose girl cousin beat him at hand wrestling?

Crumley? Dare I ask him to wait all night in front of Clarence’s bungalow court? Go shout at Clarence’s door? You’re lost. Run!

I did not call Crumley. I did not go yell at Clarence Sopwith’s bungalow porch. I nodded to Ricardo Lopez and went out into the night. Constance, outside, was crying. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.

She swabbed her eyes with an inadequate silk handkerchief. “That damn Ricardo. Made me feel old. And that damn photograph of that poor hopeless man.”

“Yes, that face,” I said, and added, “… Sopwith.”

For Constance was standing right where Clarence Sopwith had stood a few nights ago.

“Sopwith?” she said.

Driving, Constance cut the wind with her voice:

“Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day. Tonight is over, I choose to forget it.”

She shook tears from her eyes and glanced aside to see them rain away.

“I forget, just like that. There goes my memory. See how easy?”

“No.”

“You saw the mamacitas in the top floor of that tenement you lived in a couple years back? How after the big Saturday night blowout they’d toss their new dresses down off the roof to prove how rich they were, and didn’t care, and could buy another tomorrow? What a great lie; off and down with the dresses and them standing fat- or skinny-assed on the three-o’clock-in-the-morning roof watching the garden of dresses, like silk petals going downwind to the empty lots and alleys. Yes?”

“Yes!”

“That’s me. Tonight, the Brown Derby, that poor son of a bitch, along with my tears, I throw it all away.”

“Tonight isn’t over. You can’t forget that face. Did you or did you not recognize the Beast?”

“Jesus. We’re on the verge of our first really big heavyweight fight. Back off.”

“
Did
you recognize him?”

“He was unrecognizable.”

“He had eyes. Eyes don’t change.”

“Back off!” she yelled.

“Okay,” I groused. “I’m off.”

“There.” More tears fled away in small comets. “I love you again.” She smiled a windblown smile, her hair raveling and unraveling in the flood of air that sluiced us in a cold flow over the windshield.

All the bones in my body collapsed at that smile. God, I thought, has she always won, every day, all her life, with that mouth and those teeth and those great pretend-innocent eyes?

“Yep!” laughed Constance, reading my mind.

“And look,” she said.

She stopped dead in front of the studio gates. She stared up for a long moment.

“Ah, God,” she said at last. “That’s no hospital. It’s where great elephant ideas go to die. A graveyard for lunatics.”

“That’s over the wall, Constance.”

“No. You die
here
first, you die over
there
last. In between—” She held to the sides of her skull as if it might fly apart. “Madness. Don’t go in there, kid.”

“Why?”

Constance rose slowly to stand over the steering wheel and cry havoc at the gate that was not yet open and the night windows that were blind shut and the blank walls that didn’t care.

“First, they drive you crazy. Then when they have driven you nuts they persecute you for being the babbler at noon, the hysteric at sunset. The toothless werewolf at the rising of the moon.

“When you’ve reached the precise moment of lunacy, they fire you and spread the word that you are unreasonable, uncooperative, and unimaginative. Toilet paper, imprinted with your name is dispatched to every studio, so the great ones can chant your initials as they ascend the papal throne.

“When you are dead they shake you awake to kill you again. Then they hang your carcass at Bad Rock, OK Corral, or Versailles on backlot 10, pickle you in a jar like a fake embryo in a bad carny film, buy you a cheap crypt next door, chisel your name, misspelled, on the tomb, cry like crocodiles. Then the final inglory: Nobody remembers your name on all the pictures you made in the good years. Who recalls the screenwriters for
Rebecca
? Who remembers who wrote
Gone With the Wind
? Who helped Welles become Kane? Ask anyone on the street. Hell, they don’t even know who was president during Hoover’s administration.

“So there you have it. Forgotten the day after the preview. Afraid to leave home between pictures. Who ever heard of a film writer who ever visited Paris, Rome, or London? All piss-fearful if they travel, the big moguls will forget them. Forget them, hell, they never
knew
them. Hire whatchamacalit. Getmewhats-isname. The name above the title? The producer? Sure. The director? Maybe. Remember it’s deMille’s
Ten Commandments
, not Moses’. But F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
? Smoke it in the Men’s. Snuff it up your ulcerated nose. Want your name in big type? Kill your wife’s lover, fall downstairs with his body. Like I say, that’s the flickers, silver screen. Remember, you’re the blank spaces between each slot-click of the projector. Notice all those pole-vault poles by the back wall of the studio? That’s to help the high jumpers up across into the stone quarry. Mad fools hire and fire ’em, dime a dozen. They can be had, because
they
love films,
we
don’t. That gives us the power. Drive them to drink, then grab the bottle, hire the hearse, borrow a spade. Maximus Films, like I said. A graveyard. And, oh yeah, for lunatics.”

Her speech over, Constance remained standing as if the studio walls were a tidal wave about to fall.

“Don’t go in there,” she finished.

There was quiet applause.

The night policeman, behind the ornate Spanish ironwork was smiling and clapping his hands.

“I’ll only be in there a while, Constance,” I said. “Another month or so, and I’ll head South to finish my novel.”

“Can I come with you? One more trip to Mexicali, Calexico, South of San Diego, almost to Hermosillo, bathing naked by moonlight, ha, no,
you
in raggedy shorts.”

“I only wish. But it’s me and Peg, Constance, Peg and me.”

“Ah, well, what the hell. Kiss me.”

I hesitated so she gave me a smack that could flush a whole tenement tank system and make the cold run hot.

The gate was opening.

Two lunatics at midnight, we drove in.

As we pulled up near the wide square full of milling soldiers and merchants, Fritz Wong came leaping over in great strides. “God damn! We’re all set for your scene. That drunken Baptist Unitarian has disappeared. You know where the son-of-a-bitch hides?”

“You called Aimee Semple McPherson’s?”

“She’s dead!”

“Or the Holy Rollers. Or the Manly P. Hall Universalists. Or—”

“My God,” roared Fritz. “It’s midnight! Those places are shut.”

“Have you checked Calvary,” I said. “He
goes
there.”

“Calvary!” Fritz stormed away. “Check
Calvary
! Gethsemane!” Fritz pleaded with the stars. “God, why this poisoned Manischewitz? Someone! Go rent two million locusts for tomorrow’s plague!”

The various assistants ran in all directions. I started off, too, when Constance grabbed my elbow.

My eyes wandered over the facade of Notre Dame.

Constance saw where I was looking.

“Don’t go up there,” she whispered.

“Perfect place for J. C.”

“Up there it’s all face and no backside. Trip on something and you fall like those rocks the hunchback dropped on the mob.”

“That was a film, Constance!”

“And you think this is
real
?”

Constance shuddered. I longed for the old Rattigan who laughed all the time. “I saw something just now, up on the belltower.”

“Maybe it’s J. C.” I said. “While the others are ransacking Calvary, why don’t I take a look?”

“I thought you were afraid of heights?”

I watched the shadows run up along the facade of Notre Dame.

“Damn fool. Go ahead. Get Jesus down,” murmured Constance, “before he stays like a gargoyle. Save Jesus.”

“He’s saved!”

A hundred feet off, I looked back. Constance was already warming her hands at a hearth of Roman legionnaires.

I lingered outside Notre Dame, afraid of two things: going in and going up. Then I turned, shocked, to sniff the air. I took a deeper breath and let it out. “Good Grief. Incense! And candle smoke! Someone’s been—J. C.?”

I moved through the entryway and stopped.

Somewhere high in the strurworks, a great bulk moved.

I squinted up through the canvas slats, the plywood fronts, the shadows of gargoyles, trying to see if anything at all stirred up there in the cathedral dark.

I thought, Who lit the incense? How long ago did the wind blow the candles out?

Dust filtered in a fine powder down the upper air.

J. C. ? I thought, If you fall, who will save the Saviour?

A silence answered my silence.

So…

God’s number one coward had to hoist himself, ladder step by ladder step, up through the darkness, fearful that any moment the great bells might thunder and knock me loose to fall. I squeezed my eyes shut and climbed.

At the top of Notre Dame I stood for a long moment, clutching my hands to my heartbeat, damned sorry to be up and wanting to be down there where the great spread of Romans, well-lit and full of beer, stormed through the alleys to smile at Rattigan, the visiting queen.

If I die now, I thought, none of them will hear.

“J. C.,” I called quietly into the shadows.

Silence.

I rounded a long sheet of plywood. Someone was there in the starlight, a dim shape seated with his legs dangling over the carved cathedral facade, exactly where the malformed bellringer had sat half a lifetime ago.

The Beast.

He was looking out at the city, at the million lights spread across four hundred square miles.

How did you get here, I wondered. How did you get past the guard at the gate or, no, what? over the wall! Yes. A ladder and the graveyard wall!

I heard a ballpeen hammer strike. I heard a body dragged. A trunk lid slammed. A match lighted. An incinerator roared.

I sucked my breath. The Beast turned to stare at me.

I stumbled and almost fell off the cathedral rim. I grappled one of the gargoyles.

Instantly, the Beast sprang up.

His hand seized my hand.

For a single breath we teetered on the cathedral rim. I read his eyes, fearful of me. He read mine, fearful of him.

Then he snatched his hand back as if burned with surprise. He backed off swiftly and we stood half-crouched.

I looked into that dreadful face, the panicked and forever imprisoned eyes, the wounded mouth, and thought:

Why? Why didn’t you let me go? or
push
me? You
are
the one with the hammer, aren’t you? The one who came to find and smash Roy’s terrible clay head? No one but you could have run so wild! Why did you save me? Why do I
live
?

There could be no response. Something clattered below. Someone was coming up the ladder.

The Beast let out a great heaving whisper: “No!”

And fled across the high porch. His feet thudded the loose planks. Dust exploded down through the cathedral darkness.

More climbing noises. I moved to follow the Beast at the far ladder. He looked back a final time. His eyes! What? What about his eyes?

They were different and the same, terrified and accepting, one moment focused, one moment confused. His hand swung up on the dark air. For a moment I thought he might call, shout, shriek at me. But only a strange choked gasp unraveled from his lips. Then I heard his feet plunging down step by step away from this unreal world above to a more terribly unreal world below.

I stumbled to pursue. My feet shuffled dust and plaster of paris. It flowed like sand seeping through an immense hourglass to pile itself, far below, near the baptistery font. The boards under my feet rattled and swayed. A wind flapped all the cathedral canvas around me in a great migration of wings, and I was on the ladder and jolting down, with each jolt a cry of alarm or a curse trapped in my teeth. My God, I thought, me and him, that thing, on the ladder, running away from
what
?

I
glanced up to see the gargoyles lost to view and I was alone, descending in darkness, thinking: What if he waits for me, down there?

I froze. I looked down.

If I fall, I thought, it’ll take a year to reach the floor. I only knew one saint. His name popped from my lips:
Crumley
!

Hold tight, said Crumley, a long way off. Take six deep breaths.

I sucked in but the air refused to go back out of my mouth. Smothered, I glanced at the lights of Los Angeles spread in a four-hundred-mile bed of lamps and traffic, all those people multitudinous and beautiful, and no one here to help me down, and the lights! street by street, the lights!

Far out on the rim of the world, I thought I saw a long dark tide move to an untouchable shore.

Body surfing
, whispered Constance.

That did it. I jolted down and kept moving, eyes shut, no more glances into the abyss, until I reached and stood, waiting to be seized and destroyed by the Beast, hands outraised to kill, not save.