Two Weeks in Another Town (8 page)

He sat on the edge of the bed, his bare feet touching the hotel carpet, thinking about his dream, still in the presence of death. It missed me that time, he thought. It will get me the next.

The horned lion, he remembered, the white cow.

The Presence in the room. It was no good, being alone with it, at four fifteen in the morning, and a cigarette was no weapon against it. He looked at the telephone and thought of calling his wife in Paris. Only what could he say to her?
I have had a bad dream. Mother, Mother, I have had a bad dream in my Roman crib, and next time the horns will get me.

He thought of the oceanic confusion of the Italian telephone system and the high irritated voices of the operators in the Paris central and the erratic ringing in the apartment on the quai and his wife getting out of bed and going out into the hall where the telephone was, frightened, with the dead light of dawn at the windows. He gave up the idea of telephoning.

He looked at the rumpled bed and thought of sleeping. Then he gave up the idea of sleeping.

Walter Bushell, he remembered, Carrington, Carr, McKnight, Myers, Davies, Swift, Ilenski, Carlotta Lee. The movie that night had called the roster of the past and he was confronted by names that had sunk away in his memory, confronted by the shapes and voices of people who had died or failed or become famous or who had disappeared from sight.

The Night Watchman will whisper the roll call, on a scratched sound track.

The dead, the missing, the wounded, the replacements, the fit for duty, appropriately dressed, wearing all decorations. Star with bar, the celluloid cross, the canceled check, the toupee, the pancake, the iron wreath of immortelles. Andrus First Corps (or was it the Second or Third or Ninth?), sometimes called Royal’s Foot, the survivors of the crossing of the Los Angeles River, drawn up on the sound stage, at parade rest.

All present and unaccounted for.

The heroes first, those Who Had Made the Supreme…

Carrington. Dressed in a black suit and a black tie, philosophic, judgelike. Dead in Berlin, several years ago, on location, working on a picture (in all the papers—it had meant eighteen days of re-shooting, an extra cost of $750,000). A tall, soft-spoken, ambassadorial-looking man, white-haired, beak-nosed, Roman in lineament, who had been a matinée idol and who had had to fight the drink all his life and who had been the lover of great beauties for thirty years and who had died in the arms of an assistant cutter in a hotel room, among the rebuilt ruins (“Kiss me, Hardy,” in the bloody surgery off Trafalgar), sitting up in bed and calling out the name of a girl he had known when he was twenty years old, a hundred women away.

McKnight, small, hypochondriacal, violent in drawing rooms and on the edges of swimming pools. Killed in the war, run over by a tank. At the time they were making
Stolen Midnight
he had been a bit-part actor, trying to act like Cary Grant, whom he resembled faintly. “I have the gift of the comic spirit,” McKnight said, repeated, insisted, pleaded. “I would have been great in the twenties, when people still really knew how to laugh.” He was too short to be a star and he had nearly been killed when he had been thrown from a horse during the shooting of a Western picture at Universal, but he had been reserved for the tank in the Atlas Mountains, dislocated in time, the comic spirit.

Lawrence Myers was dead, too. Sallow, dome-headed, in need of a haircut, with the shaky hands of a man of eighty. He had written the script and had fought bitterly with Delaney, who changed every line. He was married to a woman who was crazily jealous and who cut off the sleeves of the jackets of his suits with a knife when he failed to get home at seven o’clock in the evening. Myers was gaunt and sickly-looking and had tuberculosis. He squandered all his money and he died at the age of thirty-three, when he got up out of bed, leaving an oxygen tent, to go to a story conference at MGM for a musical comedy.

Those were the dead, or at least the known dead, the remembered dead, and did not include grips, secretaries, cutters, publicity men, studio policemen, script girls, waitresses in the studio commissary, all of whom were alive, pushing, hopeful, with plans for the future, at the time the picture was made, and who might also be expected to have succumbed in a predictable ratio to the wear and tear of twenty years, in accordance with Jack’s mortality tables.

To say nothing of the living…

First among the living, Carlotta…

Hell, Jack thought, sitting on the edge of the bed, with the cigarette between his lips, I’m not going to go through
that
again. He stood up briskly, like a man who knew what he was doing, and went, barefooted, dragging a blanket, to get away from the bedroom, the dream, the unleashed dead. He put on all the lights in the living room, the glass chandelier, the desk lamps, the wall brackets, and picked up the pink-covered script Delaney had asked him to read.

He made himself comfortable on the couch, shivering a little under the blanket, and opened the script.

FADE IN, AFTER CREDITS

A four-motor plane landing at the Ciampino Airport, Rome.

It has been raining and the runways are still wet.

THE AIRPLANE
taxis toward the point of disembarkation and the workmen run out with the ramp.

THE DOOR OPENS
and the passengers begin to come out. Among the passengers is
ROBERT JOHNSON
.

HE
walks a little apart from the other passengers,
HE
seems to be searching for something,
HE
approaches the camera and we see that he. is a man of about thirty-five, very handsome, with piercing, intelligent eyes. Jack sighed as he read the stale, familiar words, and thought again, in recurrent pain, of his dream, trying to sort out the symbols. The bull, dealing death, appeased momentarily by song and dance, deterred from his sinister intention by clowning and vaudeville tricks. What was that? The public? Unreasonable, brutelike, deadly—kept at bay only so long as you could jig and caper and howl amusingly? Jack remembered how he had felt before the curtain went up on opening nights and how shaky he had been, seated among the audiences at the previews of films in which he had acted—dry-mouthed, sweating, with electric-like little shivers in his elbows and knees. Was it because, after so many years, he was coming back to all that, even if it was only for two weeks and as the anonymous, paid voice of a shadow on the screen, that he had had the dream?

And what about the man with the averted face, the enemy locked in the same place, confronted with the same danger, paralyzed by terror? And when you turned to know the face of the enemy, the face of fear, just at the moment of knowledge, of recognition, the doors broke down…

He shook his head wearily. I will buy a dream book tomorrow, he told himself mockingly, in Italian. I will find out that I am to avoid traveling by water or by air or by land and that an uncle of whom I have never heard is on the verge of leaving me a large ranch in the Argentine.

Maybe what it all means, he thought, is merely to get the hell out of here, leave the five thousand dollars, leave Delaney, leave my youth, leave the buried life buried. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

But he read on dutifully, feeling pity and a little shame for all the souls, himself included, searching for fame or money or escape or amusement in this sad enterprise. He read through to the end, rapidly, in an impatient shuffle of pages, then dropped the script onto the floor and stood up, feeling bruised by the night, and went over to the windows. He threw the windows open and looked, without pleasure, at the dawn breaking cold and green over the narrow, yellowish Roman street. God, he thought, nagged by memories and premonitions, I wish these two weeks were over.

T
HEY SAT IN THE
darkened projection room, Delaney, Jack, and Delaney’s secretary, watching the running of the film. Delaney had called for Jack at seven thirty in the morning. He had asked how Jack was feeling and had peered shrewdly and a little worriedly into Jack’s bloodshot eyes, but had grunted in satisfaction when Jack told him, falsely, that he was feeling all right.

“Good,” Delaney had said. “We can get right to work.”

Because Delaney wanted to keep Stiles, the actor whose voice Jack was dubbing, from finding out what was being done, they had gone to another studio than the one where Delaney was shooting the picture. Delaney had put on dark glasses and pulled his cap down low in a conspiratorial attempt to remain incognito, although everyone he passed on the lot said, loudly,
“Buon giorno,
Signor Delaney.” He hadn’t introduced Jack to anyone, not even to the slender middle-aged woman in flat shoes who was working as his secretary and who sat just behind Jack in the projection room.

As the roughly cut sequences flickered past on the screen, Jack could see that, despite Delaney’s complaints the night before, he was enjoying himself watching what he had shot. He grunted approvingly, he laughed aloud two or three times, short, harsh bursts, he nodded, half-unconsciously, at the climax of two scenes. Only when the image of Stiles appeared on the screen, did Delaney seem to be suffering. He wriggled in his seat, he lowered his head and glared up at the screen from beneath his brows, as though he were protecting his eyes from a blow. “The son of a bitch,” he kept muttering, “the swilling son of a bitch.”

Jack found the picture very little better than the script he had read. There were felicitous inventions here and there on the part of Delaney, and happy moments in the performances of some of the actors, especially that of Barzelli, the girl who played the leading part, but the general effect was heavy and lifeless and there was a leaden feeling that everybody concerned had done the same thing many times before. Stiles, as Delaney had said, looked all right, but his speech, when it wasn’t slippery and almost incomprehensible from drink, was stilted and wooden and even the rudimentary indications of passion and intelligence which the script had offered were wiped out in his performance.

“The godamn Italians,” Delaney said. “They can’t resist a bargain. They got him for half his usual salary, so they didn’t ask any questions and they signed him. Why don’t you shut up?” he growled at the screen, where Stiles was telling the girl that he loved her but that he felt he had to leave her for her own good.

The showing ended abruptly, in the middle of a sequence which Jack remembered, from reading the script, was somewhere in the last third of the story. The lights went on and Delaney turned to Jack. “Well, what you think?” he asked.

“I can see why you want somebody else’s voice for Stiles,” Jack said.

“The sonofabitch,” Delaney said, almost automatically. “Cirrhosis of the liver is too good for him. What about the rest of it?”

“Well.” Jack hesitated. After all, he hadn’t seen Delaney for more than ten years and he wasn’t sure how frank he could be after the interruption in their friendship. In the old days, Delaney had used Jack as critic and sounding board for everything he did. In the world of sycophants and money-hunters in which Delaney lived, Jack had performed a great service for his friend. His standards had been youthfully strict, his taste astringent, his nose for falseness and pretension sharp, and he had been mercilessly candid with Delaney, who from time to time called him a supercilious young snot, but who listened, and more often than not redid the work of which Jack disapproved. Delaney did as much for Jack, never sparing him for a moment when he felt Jack was not doing his best. They had made three pictures together in three years, in this loose, informal, candid arrangement. The pictures had been among the best of their time and they had created the Delaney legend, on which, in a fashion, he still lived. Delaney had never approached that level again. He and Jack had had a sardonic, symbolic phrase that they used with each other, both for their own work or the work of others, when they detected the sugariness or false violence or pseudo-profundity that was so easy to get away with in the booming Hollywood of those days. “It’s terribly original,” they would say to each other, drawling the words out affectedly. Or if the offense was greater, “It’s terribly,
terribly
original, my dear boy….”

Now, after seeing the film that Delaney had run for him in the projection room, Jack wanted to say, “It’s terribly,
terribly
original, my dear boy….” But remembering the tension in Delaney’s voice in the car the night before and the fierce appeal that had lain under the surface of his words, Jack sensed that it would be better to feel his way before he ventured any real criticism. “The script is pretty weak,” he started.

“The script!” Delaney said bitterly. “You can say that again.”

“Who wrote it?” Jack asked.

“Sugarman,” Delaney said, spitting out the name as though it left a bad taste in his mouth. “The crook.”

“That’s surprising,” said Jack. Sugarman had written three or four good plays in the past fifteen years, but there was no hint in what Jack had read the night before or seen that morning of any of the talent of his other work.

“He came here for three months,” Delaney said, accusingly, “and went to all the museums and sat in the cafés with all the crappy, unwashed painters and writers that this town is lousy with, and he told everybody I was a stupid sonofabitch, and he wouldn’t write a line the way I could shoot it and I wound up rewriting the whole godamn thing. Writers! The same old story. You can have Sugarman.”

“I see,” Jack said noncommittally. From the time he had begun to be successful, Delaney had fought with all the writers he had worked with and had finally taken to rewriting his scripts himself. He had the reputation around Hollywood of a director who had written himself into failure, and producers who were tempted to hire him were apt to say to his agent, “I’d take him, if I could tear the pencil out of his hand.” Until now, nobody had managed to tear the pencil out of his hand.

“It’s still rough,” Delaney said, waving at the screen, “but I’ll whip it into shape yet. If I don’t die from Italian exasperation first.” He stood up. “Look, Jack, you stay here and run it a couple of times and get familiar with it. Maybe you might even read the script again this afternoon. Then, tomorrow at seven thirty, we start dubbing.”