The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (43 page)

VI.

O
NE MIGHT PUT ONE'S FINGER
inside the Etruscan cinerary urn and wipe the dust of centuries. One might try on the feathered Peruvian burial mask to see if it fit. These lurid curios were for anyone to enjoy. There was but one room that remained locked and unremarked upon; that is, until summer 1935, when Bridey brought me to the threshold with sententious and, to be frank, worrisome fanfare.

She was decked out as if for a premiere, a checked dress with an orange bolero jacket and matching orange hat. From an orange pocket she removed a large key, unlocked the door, and then, with her orange fingernails resting upon the knob, delivered a statement—prepared in advance, one would imagine, though Bridey had a gift of bringing scripted words to life.

“When you first, quote, ‘make it,' the twelve months that follow are everything. That's when the studio heads use their big, fancy man-brains to figure out, quote, ‘who you are.' For an actress, it's a losing proposition. Should they fail, well, your hit was a fluke and into obscurity you slide. Should they succeed, then you're really stuck, for now they've invented your, quote, ‘formula.'”

“I vociferously disagree,” said I. “Your roles are manifold and mutable!”

“Oh, a girl can wiggle a bit, like a worm on a hook, but she mustn't
delude herself—she's on
their
hook, and they'll make damn sure her formula goes untampered with. If you're Joan Crawford, you're the noble clotheshorse. If you're Ginger Rogers, you're the tap-dancing paramour. Your next career checkpoint? Your inevitable drop from exhaustion.”

Rest assured, Reader, that the objective to siphon money to Church remained intact. It is just that, month by month, my purpose in Hollywood had begun to broaden, and it was right then, as Bridey deprecated her many triumphs, that I knew I'd become smitten beyond the mercenary rationales of money or even physical beauty. The woman challenged me as no one since Wilma Sue had dared, and that, more than anything since my death, stimulated me toward a sort of life. I resolved to return the favor and help her through any insecurity.

“I do tell you that you work too hard.”

“Yes, but it is in aid of a goal. It used to be, anyhow. For a long while now, I've lost my way. But you've inspired me, Z. I can't tell you how much.”

“Me? Inspire you? You are overstressed, all right.”

“You have reminded me that life—my life, anyway—is short. If I am to make anything worthwhile of this frivolous profession, there is no more time to waste.”

The moment required only lowered lights, orchestral pomp, and rising red curtains to be complete. Bridey turned the knob and flung open the door, flattening her melodramatic form across the jamb like the breathless heroine of a silent-film serial.

The reveal was anticlimactic. Not a nugget of El Dorado's gold, not a hint of Smaug's riches. It was a stuffy storeroom, bigger than a monkey's cage yet smaller than a Chinatown flat. Lining the floor
and shelves were dusty reams of paper shotgunned with ink type, the lower strata of yellower age than the higher. Stacks of pink and blue carbon copies provided the only variance in color. Placed high upon a shelf, like Sacco and Vanzetti awaiting sentencing, were two doomed typewriters.

“This is quite . . . What I mean is, this is very . . .” I gave up. “What is this?”

Bridey pressed all of her choicest parts against my back.

“A
script
. Six years I worked on it. Researching, analyzing, revising; days, nights, weekends, holidays; it was everything to me. Then I walked away from it. I thought it had beaten me. But it hasn't, Z, I know it hasn't.”

An entire room lost beneath paper like drifts of snow—for a single script?

“If I may ask,” said I, “what sort of script?”

“A screenplay.
The
screenplay. The one that will change everything, not only for me but for all women. For all
pictures
.”

Bridey had no equal in chutzpah.

“I am listening, and with an avid ear.”

“I won't play The Girl forever. You know that's how they describe female leads? Doesn't matter if it's a weepie, a comedy, or a gangster picture, I'm still The Girl, as if my child-bearing organs were my only notable characteristic. A girl, I'll remind you, is not a woman. She's only allowed to have girl-sized problems. If I get a pimple, twenty men get on the telephone to discuss the state of my scabbing. If I raise a stink about it, they call it a tantrum and punish me with roles so bad I'd rather shoot myself in the face. Then at my funeral, they'll say, ‘What a woman!'”

“Well, you must tell me all about it.”

This I said to push along the conversation, for I'd grown alarmed at the ardor with which Bridey fingernailed my back. She rustled me from the room, locked it, and led me by the hand to the library, where she positioned us on the loveseat and lit a cigarette before taking my chilly hand.

“The title:
In Our Image
.”

“A Biblical reference?”

“Very good, Z. First, a preface. Life revolves around three things. Can you name them?”

“I shall follow my instinct. Lingerie.”

“Close! Sex. What else?”

“How about a thick cut of steak, bloody as war.”

“That's right, food. You're good at this. The third?”

“I daren't push my luck.”

“Too bad, the third one is up your alley: death. The bedroom, the table, and the grave. Nothing else matters.”

It bothered me that I was incapable of partaking in any of the three.

“The plot?” managed I.

“Forget plot. This is a
story
. The most primal of stories: a woman loves a man.”

“And you would play the woman.”

“As it happens, yes. Now this man, you see, beneath his human clothes, is a wolf.”

I glanced at the bear rug. He looked bemused.

“Is this . . . a fairy tale?”

She puffed at her cigarette.

“Of sorts.”

“Is it for children?”

“It's for
everyone
. Shut up and listen. The woman loves her man but decides she cannot stay with him. He is, after all, a wolf and he does what wolves do.”

“Eat babies and such.”

“So she sets to writing him a good-bye letter but has no paper at hand. What she has are calendars—all sorts of calendars. So she rips off a month and uses the back of it for her note, but it doesn't come out right so she crumples it up and throws it away. She rips off another month, then another, and those months become
real
, and by the time she's finished the note she's crumpled up entire years. She goes outside to deliver the perfect good-bye letter only to find that her wolf has died.”

“Because wolves have shorter life spans.”

“Exactly! But it's worse than that. All wolves have died, all natural predators, which includes man, by which I mean
men
—leaving women behind in a world devoid of violence. But is that a good thing? It's a vacuum, isn't it? A kind of slow death? So the women begin to create new men by surgically removing from each of them a rib and packing it in clay.”

Dearest Reader, I shall respect your time and skip to the end of this brain-scrambling debacle. Among the impossible set-pieces were three consecutive scenes of unexpurgated sexual intercourse and a sequence in which Bridey's character goes feral and is trapped by hunters (with wolf teeth, natch). The film's climax, to be filmed in a continuous ten-minute shot, involved her corpse being disemboweled, divided into cuts of meat, and individually wrapped and sold at a butcher counter.

'Tis a delicate art, being a critic.

“I beg your pardon,” said I, “for I am unschooled in matters of
business. But I fear the Hays Code would be inflexible regarding the depiction of animal fornication, much less human.”

She stubbed her cigarette to death.

“It's only ‘fornication' if you're scared of it. In the script I call it ‘carnal knowledge.' I use the term deliberately.”

“Again, your pardon—one thousand times I beg it. Yet it would seem to me that the ending, too, would need adjusting.”

The widening of her eyes felt like a warning.

“That's the whole point of the picture. I am chopped into little pieces, like a roll of film, and shipped all over the world to be consumed.”

“Your totality of vision I would not dispute. Which studio, do you think, might permit imagery of such . . . potency?”

“Why do you think I slave as I do? I've agreed to twenty-five pictures over the next seven years. Twenty-five more dopey go-rounds as The Girl. By 1942 I will have made MGM so much money that they will not be in a position to
permit
me anything. They will
owe
me. Frankly, I expected more understanding from you.”

Ah, but the ruffled feathers of feminine affront were my most comfortable pillows! I'd antagonized gaggles of gals in the past and knew the best tools with which to coo, cajole, and inveigle. Bridey's barricades were robust but not impregnable, and before long I had her convinced that my enthusiasm for
In Our Image
was the very marrow of my bones. It was a white lie meant as a heartfelt gift, though it was for Church that I tied the bow. Those paychecks had to keep coming.

“Please,” said I, “may I read it?”

Her fingers flew to her beautiful throat.

“No! Oh, no, no. I couldn't allow it, it's not ready. But it will be, Z, there's no more question about that. A few more years of acting and then I'll show you—I'll show
everyone
—exactly what kind of woman Bridey Valentine is. Can you be patient?”

I'd been dead nearly forty years.

Patience? Yes, I'd heard of it.

VII.

B
RIDEY HADN'T HYPERBOLIZED HER MARTYRDOM
at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cross. She succumbed to a fifth MGM seasonal and acquiesced to every lucrative loan-out to Paramount, Warner Brothers, and RKO. What few calendar boxes remained were crossed out by live dramas at Lux Radio Theatre or advertisement shoots arranged by the image department, most of which married a shot of my regal Bridey with blather she'd rather die than utter aloud:

“This Face Powder Allows Me to Be Nonchalant About My Complexion.”

“Nine Out of Ten Women Have Hosiery Problems—But I'll Tell You My Secret.”

“For Now I'm Only a Bridey, But I Still Dream of Rose Blossom Engagement Rings!”

For the sake of
In Our Image
she accepted these indignities and more. She was absent day, night, and weekend, leaving me oodles of time to wander the mansion's dueling grand staircases, red-wallpapered sitting rooms, bead-curtained verandas, and even dull pantries, dodging servants and, because it was my disposition, contemplating the occasional theft.

In fact, I was pondering the pilferage of a sinister stone carving of Paleolithic origin when I became aware of footfalls advancing upon the drawing room with greater speed than any servant. So convinced was I that a sneak thief was in my midst that I lifted the priceless carving like a bludgeon.

That it was a twelve-year-old girl flustered me. My unnatural silence had scrambled the child's radar and she pulled to a halt. I remind you that it was 1936 and the little lasses of America had been brainwashed by the bouncing ringlets, polka-dot baby-doll dresses, and red Mary Janes of child star Shirley Temple. Even mothers battered by the Depression sewed their daughters copycat costumes. This girl, however, wore an expressionless gray tunic. Her long black hair flaunted not one festive ribbon and was instead held at bay by a nondescript band.

Verily, she was a wholly unremarkable thing save the banker's stack of money she was stuffing into her wee purse. She was caught in the act, eyeing my makeshift weapon, young muscles flexed to flee. I lowered the stone figure and she exhaled. From the other end of the palmette-patterned Mahal rug, she fired a penetrating squint.

“You're Z.”

Usage of the private nickname was all the evidence I required.

“And you,” said I, “must be Gopher.”

“Nnn.”
A hard hum of irritation. “Margeaux.”

I postulated that the pubescent's impertinence stemmed from the tragedy of having inherited none of her mother's beauty. Indeed, what traces existed of Bridey—the ember eyes, the natural frown—emphasized the regrettable averageness bequeathed by the uncredited father. The girl was thirty pounds too heavy and bore the weight on a slack, dangling posture. Crooked glasses pinched her nose, and
teeth, indeed gophery, shone with the first set of steel orthodontia I'd ever seen.

I attempted a host's smile.

“Your mother forgot to mention your visit.”

Her voice was thick from the mouthful of metal.

“My mother doesn't forget anything.”

“She wished to surprise me, then?”

“Wow,” said she. “You don't know anything, do you?”

She traversed the rug with slow, scuffling steps, making no attempt to hide the cash-crammed purse, and placed her crossed arms across the top of a rosewood armchair.

“You're just like Mother said. You're all pale and sad-looking.”

“Sad? No, small child, you are confused.”

“There's nothing wrong with being sad. Sadness builds character.”

“I don't believe in it,” sniffed I. “Never understood the point.”

Margeaux shrugged.

“That's what they tell me, anyway.”

“Are all modern instructors so cheeky?”

“Therapists. Mother has me seeing a million. They ought to just lobotomize me and get it over with.”

“I fail to see how one could be sad with so much money in her purse.”

In acknowledgment of the touché, she raised one eyebrow. Just like Bridey.

“You're meaner than Mother's other men,” said she.

“I am not mean. I simply do not care for children.”

“That's a laugh. You're barely older than me.”

“I am older than I look.”

“Then why don't you like children?”

The query was fair, but the answer private. My extended death had introduced me to three: Little Johnny Grandpa, Gladys Leather, and Harold Quincy, juveniles with nothing in common except for having left my acquaintance desolated or dead. It was time, thought I, to frighten away this ankle-nipping imp before she began down a comparable road.

“I do not like children because they do childish things like steal money. Now, shall I bother your mother at the studio with a telephone call? I'm sure that director, producers, actors, and equipment operators alike will welcome such a worthwhile interruption.”

Margeaux gestured her chin at the stone Austrian I was throttling.

“You weren't planning on stealing
that
, I hope.”

“You know, I've had a change of mind. Let me make some calls about that lobotomy.”

The girl did not know how to smile (with that orthodontia, who would want to?), but she dropped her shoulders to convey disarmament. The movement pulled at the sleeves of her tunic and I saw dozens of lines drawn across her pudgy forearms in seashell patterns. They were scars—deliberate and artful and the most beautiful thing about her, which was, I realized, a truth of considerable melancholy.

I clacked my teeth in vexation. I did not enjoy feeling sympathy for this funked Ophelia, even though I knew by instinct that she understood me; both she and I had won attention because of our contiguity to death. It was an obnoxious reminder of my intrinsic uselessness and I lashed out.

“Well, girl, are you returning the money or not?”

Her voice was gentler.

“I don't mind that you're mean.”

“You have yet to see mean, I promise you.”

“Mean is real, at least. Mother's other men had all these big phony smiles and big phony faces. Sure, they were nice. But what's the point of being nice if you're just going to look in a mirror all day? My therapists tell Mother I'm depressed because I'm not pretty, but that's stupid. I'm depressed because nobody cares about anything. Do you know about the Dust Bowl? Farmers are losing everything they have and you think people out here care? They don't even know what farmers
do
.”

“Your mother is not like that.”

“She is. She thinks she's different but she's not. You watch. I'd rather be dead than be like that. Really, truly. I'd rather be dead and buried.”

My eyes shifted again to her armful of scars. This time she noticed and her eyes, Valentine all the way, flared. Rapidly I contemplated adultlike consolations one might speak and—Hail Mary, full of grace, all that drivel—I spoke them.

“Bridey cares about you very much. If things were different, if she could claim you without scandal, I have no doubt that you would be living right here with us.”

“Is that what she said?”

“Yes.” I shrugged. “More or less.”

“Don't forget she's an actress. She's Bridey Valentine and she gets what she wants. We're just two of the people who give it to her.”

Such dismal wisdom from so pint-sized a sage might have inspired laughter had not the words cut with so sure a hand. Even I had to admit that I was there at Bridey's pleasure, and that she could dispose of me at first displeasure. The realization rattled me.
It was, surmised I, how Margeaux must feel every day.

Perhaps I would steal the Paleolithic figure after all. It was worth money, and it was always wise to plan ahead.

Margeaux patted her purse.

“I don't suppose you could forget to mention I was here.”

“The servants,” said I, “have all seen you.”

“Yes, but them I can pay off. Mother isn't known for spoiling her staff.”

Her accosting stare broadcasted the hope that I, on the other hand, was unbribable. Had you told me an hour earlier that the respect of a twelve-year-old girl would have me burning with pride, I would have booked you a padded cell. Now I was reluctant to see Margeaux go and so delayed her with a question.

“Where on Earth did you get that money?”

But Margeaux had determined that our conversation was kaput and was already stomping toward the veranda exit. She did do me the favor of pausing at the doorway. Her graceless stoop was unchanged; there was something brave about that.

“The walk-in shoe closet. Top shelf. Second-to-the-last hatbox on the left.” She shook her head. “Honestly, Z. You need to work on your snooping.”