The Sea Came in at Midnight (16 page)

“I’ll see your point if I look in the mirror?”

Billy cracked the window on the driver’s side; everything had gotten all fogged up. Through the fog on the glass, the flashing signal of a radio tower in the distance was a throbbing blotch. “What you’ll see in the mirror,” said Louise, “is a man who never shaves, never showers, who sweats a great deal, who in other words completely conforms to the sleaziest stereotype of a man who makes fuck films. You’ll see exactly what people see in their minds when they picture a pornographer.”

“I am a pornographer.”

“But the guys we’re dealing with who run these theaters don’t want to deal with a pornographer who looks like a pornographer. Jesus, Billy, will you roll up the window? The guys we’re dealing with—”

“It’s all fogged up,” Billy explained.

“It’s fucking freezing. The guys we’re dealing with—”

“Roll up the window, Billy,” said Mitch.

“The guys we’re dealing with,” Louise continued as Billy rolled up the window, “don’t want to deal with someone whose very presence undoes their carefully constructed self-delusions of being respectable businessmen just like any other businessman. That’s the principle of subversion. The principle of subversion operates on the assumption that those who are being subverted are happy to be subverted if someone just gives them reason to believe it’s in their self-interest. By definition of what and who you are, you’re not capable of subversion.”

“As though they don’t take one look at you and want to lock the doors, Lu. They take one look at you and think you’re going to blow up their theaters. Like you’re really fooling anyone.”

For some time after that they huddled in the van in silence until Louise finally said, “I guess we should let Billy do the talking.” And so it fell to Billy, a bit dim but not altogether unamiable, to occasionally josh the theaters into taking a chance. These were one-shot opportunities. Booking a Blue Christian movie was the sort of mistake the theaters usually made only once, which didn’t bode well for any grand schemes of a trilogy, even one so promisingly titled the Virgin Trilogy. Enough theaters were duped into
Virgin White
to raise the ten thousand dollars needed to shoot
Virgin Pink,
at which point the only theaters the filmmakers could get into anymore were in the most dubious sections of the very largest cities, where there were always enough weird people to generate the requisite minimal interest in almost anything, including one of Mitch and Louise’s movies. But Louise could see the writing on the wall. With
Virgin Black
they would have to raise the stakes, and that was when, one evening around Christmastime 1976 back in the West Village, after a distinctly discouraging trip around the country trying to sell
Virgin Pink,
she proposed that in the next film they murder an actress at the moment of climax. “That’s fantastic,” Mitch said.

There was something about the way he said it that made Louise quietly add, “I don’t mean we really murder her. I mean we just make it look like we murder her.”

“Oh,” Mitch answered, and her blood froze at how disappointed he sounded. In the days that followed, she assured herself it had been her imagination, but in the years that followed, she would look back and wonder exactly where and when the great cosmic slapstick of their lives, based on nothing more terrible than their glorious and twisted incompetence, had crossed a depraved rubicon. If the terrorist in Louise had accepted, early on, the most basic premise of terrorism, that nothing is innocent, that in a corrupt world innocence is a luxury no one deserves, that it’s justifiable to victimize the innocent not in spite of their innocence but because of it, then Louise and Mitch’s incompetence would exact its price in innocence. Because they weren’t good enough filmmakers to truly fake a murder through artifice, they could do it only with an unwilling and innocent accomplice, the actress herself who was to be the victim. The only way to fake the murder successfully—the only way to make the audience believe the woman had actually been murdered in the film—was to have the actress herself believe it, to have her believe, right up until the last moment, that she was actually going to die.

They had always been so incompetent at everything else, perhaps Louise believed deep down they would be incompetent at this as well. But in fact it was the only thing Mitch would ever be supremely competent at in his life; casting a particularly naive eighteen-year-old from Minneapolis named Marie, who had come to New York hoping to be in musicals, Mitch scheduled her to show up a day early at the deserted Brooklyn bus terminal where the filming was to take place, at which point she was tied, gagged, blindfolded and hung naked on a hook by her bound hands in a back storeroom for twenty-four hours while there swirled around her various discussions of what was to be done with her body once filming finished. After that, Marie was competent enough for all of them: she was more than competent, she was
inspired.
The movie, or the rumors that came to surround it, flabbergasted everyone, exceeding Mitch’s fondest dreams and fulfilling Louise’s intentions all too perfectly; but perhaps it didn’t flabbergast everyone enough. Perhaps any age that could produce such a phenomenon—and every age had produced such phenomena, after all, going back to coliseums of spectators happily watching men and women torn apart by lions—wasn’t capable of being fully flabbergasted. For a time Marie from Minneapolis just vanished, and when the police arrested Mitch and Louise on suspicion of murder, and the couple had to produce the girl in order to clear themselves, they wondered if they had been competent to a fault.

They were in jail four days before the girl turned up. On the one hand she was such a complete emotional and psychological wreck that the couple faced a whole new battery of charges, not the least of which was kidnapping and torture; on the other hand the district attorney’s office finally had to conclude the victim’s account was too rattled and incoherent to build a case on, since there were no other witnesses. “I would ask what kind of animals you are,” the detective who came to release them said, “but I suppose if you could answer that, you wouldn’t be here and none of this would have happened.” Mitch was beside himself with joy. On the subway back to the Village he went on and on about it; it was a coup; they were quite famous now, he assured Louise.

Louise smoked a cigarette and watched the black tunnel walls out the train window. Her hatred of the cop who had spoken to them that way kept rising in her throat like bile. For four days in jail she had convinced herself she was well and truly fed up with all this horseshit that included Mitch and cops and some little mouse from Minneapolis too stupid for life in the big city to even be in the big city in the first place. Over the course of the four days in jail Louise almost convinced herself that everything that had happened was everyone’s fault except hers. When they got home she was exhausted; Mitch actually wanted to have sex and she pushed him away angrily. She wanted to sleep and sat staring at the bed, where Mitch went on fooling with his camera like always, and she kept thinking about lying down and going to sleep but instead just sat in the chair hypnotized by sleep’s prospect until, in the light of the afternoon sun through the window, she did doze off for several seconds, before waking herself with a start.

She wanted desperately to sleep, but she also wanted to avoid sleep at all cost. She kept waking herself, until that evening she couldn’t keep awake anymore. Then, asleep in the chair, she had the dream of Marie from Minneapolis that she had known all along was waiting for her outside jail, in the sleep of freedom where dreams are always unbound. She dreamed of Marie from Minneapolis and woke weeping; she continued to have the dreams on and off for the next year, until one morning in the early fall of 1978, sitting in the same chair, with Mitch still on the same bed still fooling with his camera, she read the newspaper and put it down and went into the bathroom and threw up, and Lulu Blu’s own private millennium had begun.

I
MMEDIATELLY MITCH ASSUMED
she was pregnant. When she came out of the bathroom he just looked at her and said with great irritation, “Fuck, you’re pregnant.” She returned to the chair clammy and pale, and sat looking out the window where ten years before she had heard the far-off sound of a gunshot. Mitch’s attention returned to his camera, and he said offhandedly, “I know a place we can get rid of it.”

“Maybe I don’t want to get rid of it,” she answered after a while.

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe I don’t want to get rid of it. Maybe I’ll have it.”

Suddenly he didn’t care about the camera so much. “You’ll have it?”

“Maybe.”

“You’ll have it?”
He was incredulous. “You can’t have it.” He began sputtering. “Listen, you go have a baby if you want, but you’ll have it by yourself, you understand? Don’t expect me to be there. I’m not ready yet to be father of any fucking baby.”

“You’re not ready
yet
?” Louise laughed, more weary than contemptuous.

“Oh, yeah, as though
you’re
really ready. As though you’re really ready to be a mother.” He stopped. “Maybe it’s not mine,” and then he stopped again, confused as to whether this possibility relieved or enraged him. Louise laughed again. “Listen, Lu,” he threatened again, “if you do this, you do it alone, you understand? It’s up to you.” When she didn’t answer he said, “You can’t just go have a baby without me saying it’s all right.”

“You just said it was up to me.” The more apoplectic he became, the more she liked it. All day long his rant shifted strategies, becoming more and more one-sided as she became less and less responsive; she preferred instead to watch him writhe and squirm and twist in his predicament as he tried to bully, persuade, and reason with her, until finally, in the late afternoon, she got up from her chair where she had spent most of the day looking out the window, and on her way out the door she said, “Relax, Mitch. I wouldn’t disgrace the planet with a child of yours.” She went downstairs and down the street into the Village to a café on Bleecker.

That was the end of her and Mitch. On the one hand she had entirely enjoyed Mitch’s consternation at her pregnancy, and on the other hand it made her sick, in the same way everything made her sick now. Of course, she firmly believed she would have aborted any child of his she might carry, not only because it would have been his but because a terrorist who targeted the world’s false innocence wasn’t worthy of anything as innocent as a child. Exactly when she had come to believe this about herself wasn’t clear to her; maybe she had always believed it, and believing it was what had led her down the path of the past ten years that, in turn, had only confirmed what she believed, right up until this morning when she finally had to vomit up as much of the past ten years as could be expelled. She was not pregnant. She had thrown up in the bathroom because—unlike three years later with the story in the paper about Mitch’s death—there had been another story in this morning’s paper she had seen right away, even though it was buried deep in the front section, and when she read it the abyss opened up behind her, and she was standing on the other side.

Authorities in Hamburg, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Tokyo and Los Angeles, said the newspaper, had confirmed the recent arrests of nearly two dozen people, in five separate pornography rings, for the murders of five different women tortured and executed on film, whose bodies had been found fastened to racks or bound in chairs or chained to walls or hung from hooks. The crimes were unrelated except by the similar circumstances and the way they “followed in the wake,” the story went on, “of a controversy last year involving a New York husband-and-wife team of pornographers widely believed to have made the first known, so-called ‘snuff’ film. Sources close to at least several of the investigations say that while those under questioning appear to have been influenced by the New York case, they were apparently unaware, until being taken into custody, that in fact the earlier film was a hoax.”

It was only a momentary relief to Louise that the name of Marie from Minneapolis was not in the story. It was only a momentary relief not to see her own name or Mitch’s, or that of her brother, who had disappeared in his van after their arrest the year before, lighting out for a less intense America of laughing weed and room-temperature six-packs and aging hippie women, in order to forget New York, where he couldn’t figure out anymore what was real. And not seeing Billy’s name or Mitch’s or Marie’s or her own in the morning paper was only a momentary distraction from the fact that Louise was the Pandora of the story, and that all the ways over the years she had thought herself so tough now vanished, all the things over the years she had so bluntly denied now tormented her, and on this day in the early fall of 1978 she wasn’t Lulu Blu anymore but Louise Blumenthal again, if not Louise Pagel, which would represent a turning back of the clock she didn’t deserve.

After leaving Mitch, Louise took a job in a small bookstore where she barely earned enough to pay the rent. She kept to herself. When she did go out at night, terrified she might run into Marie from Minneapolis, she was also looking for her, though what she could possibly say to her if she found her, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t even sure, assuming Marie had pieced herself back together enough to be cognizant of anything, that the girl would still know who Louise was. For a while Louise had the dreams again, five murdered girls all looking like Marie, and then all the women in the streets of the Village looking like the five girls.

In the rumors that she heard about Mitch during these years, he transformed from a hopeless bungler into something of more consequence, in the way that evil always makes someone more consequential, always makes someone more serious. Who, Mitch might have well asked, wouldn’t willingly become evil in order to make himself taken more seriously? He was now another embodiment, ludicrous and penny-ante though it was in comparison to more spectacular examples, of the Twentieth Century’s most prevalent phenomenon: the failure and laughingstock who transcends penny-ante ludicrousness through evil genius of a distinctly audacious kind, the rejected art student who takes over half the world and in the process wipes out a few million here and a few million there on French battlefields and in Polish extermination factories, for the sheer sake of being taken seriously. Having perpetrated a pathetic fraud that led to the monstrous realization by others of an idea he didn’t have the nerve for—conscience obviously having had nothing to do with his previous restraint—he was now as inspired by his own fraud as others had been.