Girl of My Dreams (51 page)

“Why is the sun coming up over the water?” Dr. Pogorzelski asked in our next session. I'd told him about the crazy weekend, with its pain, its lunatic and incandescent moments, and then the dreams. Since the position of the sun was the most trivial thing in any of the dreams, I scoffed at his being a geographic stickler. “But really,” he persisted, “the sun doesn't rise over the ocean in California, it only sets in the Pacific.”

“You think I transported us to the East Coast?” I asked.

“No, you were in front of Palmyra's house. I think you may be on guard against the sun setting. The sun rising is sexual and hopeful. The setting sun is the opposite.”

“The sun is setting on capitalism,” I offered. “That was the message of the party.”

“I see.”

“The Communists will resolve the future into triumph. It looks like only a dream now, but it can come true. A solution to a number of life's problems, isn't it?”

“Well, yes, it is. It is life itself.” He paused. “For children.”

“What.”

“We might call it pre-rational life, the life of fables and fairy tales, the life that faith attempts to explain, make bearable.”

“The Reds don't want to make life only bearable, they want to transform it.”

“It's a potent faith.”

“But look at Russia. The faith is revealing itself as a true guide.”

“We'll see. I am from Poland. One man's revelation is another's fantasy is another's hell. Tell me about the rat in your dream.”

“Fear. I'm afraid of rats.”

“Why?”

“Being bitten. Injury.”

“Bitten, yes, where?”

“Ah, castration? I'm afraid of being castrated?”

“That's easy, but what is a rat in your life?”

“Oh, a producer. There's a joke at the studios that an associate producer is the only person who will associate with the producer while an assistant producer is a mouse in training to become a rat. But Mossy isn't exactly a producer.”

“Of course he is. He is
the
producer. And his humiliation of you for your innocent gaffe with the drunken tennis player is truly dastardly. You want to kick him for that. Or at any rate resign your position.”

“I couldn't do that.”

“Why? You need the money?”

“Sure, but that's not it. I could work somewhere else, write for the magazines, teach. But I want the movies. Motion pictures are the most exciting art on earth. Jubilee is the studio I know best. I don't like having Mossy Zangwill as a god.”

“God, yes. God is … ”

“God is not Mr. Amos Zangwill, I can assure you. A devil, yes, not a god.”

“Scripture aside, I'm not sure there's much difference between them in our fantasy lives, each so powerful and terrifying. Zangwill is no worse than any other figure you might choose to explain the unexplainable in nature. The idea of God is the intuitive perception of the power of the unconscious. The devil is his brother.”

“I'll think about that. Meanwhile, Mossy haunts me like a ghost.”

“It's up to you whether you take his brutal treatment or reject it. In here we can only try to get you to understand the choice. A rat can be many things—penis, money, power, monstrous—not only something you fear, perhaps something you desire.”

“The last thing I want to be is a rat,” I said heatedly. “They're fearsome to me.”

“An object of fear isn't only what harms us but what fascinates us because we wish to possess its powers, to be able, literally, to frighten others. Particularly after being humiliated. In recounting a dream, pride can have more power than memory. We don't want to admit wishing to be what we hate. The rat suggests many things for both of us to consider. Ambivalence may be the only handle to hang on to, and it is slippery. We can offer merely crumbs of insight, as Freud happens to have said himself. The whole cake eludes us for some time. This FDR dream, what were you doing with him?”

I paused. Dr. Pogo was doing far more guiding than usual, and I thought he might be impatient with me, which seemed unfair. At the time I knew nothing of Freud's famous Rat Man, who had been both terrified by his own rat fantasies and obsessed with them. If Freud was a spider and I a fly, I had stumbled into his parlor.

“I told you,” I said a little testily, “I was having lunch and then we were wondering who would pay the bill.”

“But you were on a train, no?”

“Oh yes, that's some sexual reference, don't tell me. And Sylvia was there, who I went to bed with. So I'm presenting my sexual conquest to the president. In the dream Sylvia already knows him. She's more sexually experienced than I am.”

“I don't think so.”

“Sure she is, she's older, she's been around, she's—”

“That's not what I mean. I don't think you're presenting Sylvia to FDR. In the map of your unconscious you have drawn for me, I don't see Sylvia anywhere. We're surveyors here, with our transit and compass measuring the boundaries of your land.”

“My perceptions?”

“Just so. Who I see in the subconscious is Palmyra Millevoix and Amos Zangwill. Tormenting you, attracting you. Sylvia in the dream is a stand-in for the star, who is Palmyra and who you don't dare approach even in a dream. In the sunrise dreams you're not with her until the very last one and even then she disappears. With FDR you have converted the bad father, Zangwill, into a benign figure, the devil into a god. The good father. Even more benign because President Roosevelt is a cripple, isn't he? You have a power, a potency, he does not possess. He is no threat. This converted Zangwill, who Palmyra is already on familiar terms with, is who you wish you could win her from. Almost it is like asking her father for her hand. And so you wish to pay for the meal—money is an emblem of your power and generosity. You didn't say who finally paid.”

“I'm not certain.”

“Yes, perhaps we can't know that yet. The letters FDR are initials as well for Freud, DR, or Dr. Freud.”

“I suppose Freud hovers over anyone in analysis. Over you, too.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Maybe my dreams are having dreams of their own. They keep doing this until … ” I paused lengthily, unsure where to go.

Finally Pogo said, “Until?”

“Until at last I am awake,” I said.

“What is conscious is transient,” he said. “The unconscious is what endures—until we make it conscious, and then the unconscious gets a little smaller. With Shakespeare and Mozart, for example, they seem to have been able to make their entire unconscious expressible. Tell me the last sunrise dream again, the one on the beach.”

I did this, giving him the same details about Pammy vanishing into the sea.

“I don't understand something,” Dr. Pogo said. “You described her as holding a flower, an obvious symbol of sexuality, yes?”

“I guess so. What don't you understand?”

“The flower had sick petals.”

“Wilted petals, yes, that's what I said.”

“What about flowers?”

“Mossy Zangwill has an enormous garden, flowers blooming all over it. Gloriana Flower, the widow Flower as she's called, gave the party I was at with the Communists.”

“Living flowers in Zangwill's garden, and Gloriana is notoriously alive, though her name might have planted, one might say, the word in your consciousness from which it could descend into your dreamlife. In the earlier dream the maid is named Rose.”

“Not Pammy's maid's name in real life,” I said.

“Yes. You said sick flower, wilted petals. Do you remember anything about flowers in your childhood?”

“No. Sure. Not much. I mean we did have flowers around sometimes, and my grandmother, she liked to have a bouquet in her apartment. That was in New York.”

When I said the words
New York
, it was as though another light had been turned on in Pogo's office. Holding my father's hand, which I did not normally do, I saw us returning on Broadway to the Ansonia Hotel from my grandmother's apartment, where he had told me. “Oh, New York,” I repeated.

“What about New York?” Dr. Pogorzelski asked.

“My mother died at Flower Hospital in New York. And on the East Coast the sun comes up over the ocean.”

“So.”

“Oh.”

“See you next time.”

25

Jubilee Regnant

“Master Youncey,” read the scrawled letter that Yeatsman thrust at me as soon as I reached the studio from Pogrezelski's office, “Newman wouldn't keep off Sugarlee so I shot him 7 times and he ran plum to gin and died off. I in seres trouble. High Sherf took me to gale and juge send to pen for life. I tole juge you in Hollywud was my boss and wooden put up with no nigger of yrs in pen for life but so plese tell juge I'm yo ol nigger. I holp you Master Youncey and yr ol miss is well and fine. I am well and fine and in seres trouble. Sir do something. Yore ol Willie Waddy.” The envelope's return address was Wetumpka, Alabama, home of the state penitentiary. I shook my head.

“Look at them,” Yeatsman said, pointing to the writers gathered in the rotunda of the building in which we all worked. The writers building was low-slung, two-storied, as undistinguished as an Army barracks. Near the center of the ground floor was a large circular room off of which were several writers' offices. In the middle of this space was a typewriter on a pedestal. This was in honor of a boyhood friend of Mossy's who had hoped to become a novelist. Mossy had talked his pal into forgetting novels and coming west to try his luck in pictures. As Mossy described the journey, the two of them lit out for the territory in 1921 driving an aging Stutz Bearcat that had belonged to the friend's rich uncle. Mossy's face would cloud as he told of the friend's death in an accident at the Grand Canyon. When he created his own studio, Mossy had his friend's old Underwood bronzed and mounted on a pedestal in the writers building.

Around this typewriter about twenty writers were now huddled, like gulls gathering at a lighthouse before a storm. They were murmuring about a strike. Several had looked up when I walked in, reassuring themselves that I was not their keeper, Colonel DeLight, whom they didn't trust.

The Screen Writers Guild had been formed the year before by hardier souls than I. Eventually I did join. The producers hated it, tried to splinter it by promoting a company union, the Screen Playwrights. These were two more groups I could feel inferior to. Eventually the Guild won and prospered, saved all our asses, but at this early point in my career I judged the few Guild members were on a futile errand, more articulate than I but just as ineffective. Who wanted to be numbered in the company of losers?

“Just look at them,” Yeatsman repeated, having descended from his theological podium at the Party party to his more characteristic skepticism, “over there planning our little strike, or whatever it is. Work stoppage for a writer is an occupational disease anyway. Now they want to institutionalize writer's block to see if they can get the fifteen hundred a week writers up to two thousand and so on up and down the line. I'm supposed to be shop steward, but I'm leery of so-called creative people getting themselves into so-called unions. Meanwhile, this good old sot, Willie Waddy, with a better soul than mine, who once dragged me out of a swimming hole when I should have drowned and years later poured me into bed first time I was drunk so my father wouldn't find me passed out on the side porch, who never saw twenty dollars in a month, is moldering in the state pen for killing someone who probably deserved to die. What do I do?”

I looked at Yeatsman and shook my head again. “Can you help him some way?”

“I can't spring him from the pen. I'll send him a few hundred and ask my old uncle, who still goes to his law office in Montgomery, to see if he can make the right phone calls to get Willie work in a prison cotton mill instead of a chain gang. ‘I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart,'” Yeatsman quoted from his hero, “so I'll pay off this black fellow, with whom I probably share a great-grandfather, and I'll go on being white and as red as I dare while making sure I can pay for a new swimming pool, eh, how's that? Don't you dare call me a cynic. I'm a regional realist.”

Half a dozen rough-looking, muscular men in overalls and work shirts marched into the rotunda. They'll break up the writers' grumble session quickly enough, I thought; Mossy figures he'll scare the writers back to their typewriters by having some toughs threaten to beat them up. I was wrong. These men were the Jubilee carpenters who constructed the sets on all the sound stages. I'd seen some of them before.

The carpenters were coming to join the writers, making common cause against Jubilee. They'd been approached by Yancey himself, whom they knew by his given, screen credit name. He put away the letter from the black prisoner and greeted the carpenters. Sylvia Solomon waved her cigarette holder at me from the other side of the pedestaled typewriter. It was going on thirty-six hours since I'd shared her bed. She may have winked at me, and I may have wondered whether that token of familiarity was a gesture of intimacy or a friendly brush-off.

A strange moment followed. The writers and carpenters appeared to have nothing to say to each other. Everyone was getting nervous. Though his squad was outnumbered three or four to one, the head carpenter, a straightforward man named Bill Wilkins, chopped through the ice. “Look,” he said, “between us we make this studio run. You guys furnish the blueprints, we build the scenery. That's all movies are, stories and places where they happen. The actors and directors are nowhere without you and us. We stand together is how I see it. What do you say, Yancey?”

“That's exactly how I see it,” Yeatsman said, “and I couldn't say it half as well without taking twice as long.”

“At least,” Tutor Beedleman said. Other writers piped in their agreements.