B008J4PNHE EBOK (21 page)

“Please don’t,” she said, and Booth laughed, and Allie let her mouth hang so he could see the half-masticated food on her tongue.

When the waitress returned, Booth informed her that he had been stirred—stirred to order a turkey dinner for himself, as well as a strawberry frappé, rolls, and a bowl of gravy to dip them in.

Allie thanked him for standing up for her.

Booth said it was his pleasure; she’d been on his mind all day. “You’ll make a fine Daughter Jones.”

There were a couple of problems, Allie said. “The first is that I’ve never acted. The second is that I’ve never wanted to act.”

Booth raised an eyebrow. It occurred to Allie that each of his shoulders was just about broad enough to sit on, like a pair of matching porch gliders. He said he didn’t know what she was playing at, but it was a waste of time. She was an actress. She did want to act. “You can’t talk around me,” said Booth. “You can’t bewitch me with that mysterious smile of yours. I’ve read your file. I know all about you.”

“Don’t you ever get worn out, being so full of it all the time?” she asked.

She insulted him with such talk, Booth proclaimed. She insulted herself. She insulted them both. They were both very insulted.

“You don’t, do you?”

“No,” he said. “Never.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

The Nickelodeon, an independent theater—and not a particularly fancy one—had belonged to Booth’s uncle. It featured a single screen, a hundred seats on the floor, and another twenty in the balcony. It had closed
that summer. Television kept the older folks at home, and the teenagers could go across the river to the cineplex in Hyde Park, smoke pot in the parking lot across from FDR’s house, and spend the whole day sneaking from one picture to another.

They had returned to the theater to sit in the balcony and neck. Booth’s mouth tasted like all the things that he’d eaten. To her surprise, it turned her on, made her feel as though he were starving for her.

She asked Booth what they were going to do with the place.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe you could do something with it?”

“Oh yeah?” Allie was mostly playing along, but already the memory of her weeks-long college career was beginning to take on a hazy quality. If the point of college was to prepare you for life, then in a sense, telling Professor Murton to leave her alone made it redundant—if she could defend herself, she was prepared for anything. “What should I do with your movie theater?”

“I’ll have to think.” Booth produced a flask and a box of dusty-tasting Milk Duds.

Who was her favorite actor, he wanted to know. She said Montgomery Clift. Booth thought that was superb. He asked her who her favorite director was, and she admitted that she couldn’t name one and, for that matter, had never been clear on what they did. Allie said, “You remind me of a book I had when I was a little girl. It was about a magician and a tomcat and all the trouble they started and how they got out of it. The cat could be an accordion when he wanted. You don’t happen to have a cat that can be an accordion, do you?”

“Not yet,” said Booth. “But I have had my eye on one for some time.”

The director, he explained, was the person who provided the vision for a film. He was the one who arranged all the elements—the story, the actors, the settings, etc.—into a pleasing shape. The greatest director was Orson Welles. His movies looked the best, and they were the strangest, and moreover, with apologies to Montgomery Clift, Welles was also the best actor. Booth said that Orson Welles was like a dinosaur. That was how much presence he had. It would take a whole village worth of huntsmen, armed with spears and rocks and fire, to knock him down.

“Have you always wanted to be one?” Allie asked.

“A dinosaur?” said Booth. “Yes. From my earliest memory.”

“No, a director.”

“Heavens, no. It sounds like an awful lot of work, don’t you think?”

“But you’re directing this movie, aren’t you?”

Booth grumbled lowly. “Not willingly. No one else would hire me, Allie. I’ve been forced to employ myself.”

“Oh, don’t try and make me feel sorry for you,” said Allie. “You’ll get through it somehow. Do you know how to direct a movie? The mechanics of it?”

“How hard can it be? I’ve seen plenty of movies. Point and shoot. Make sure you get a medium one and a couple of close ones. Nothing fancy. I don’t pretend to be Orson Welles. All I need is to tell the story. Point and shoot. I suppose I can manage that.” He aimed an invisible elephant gun and took a few potshots from the balcony.

Allie told him to be careful with that thing.

They kissed some more.

 ■ ■ ■ 

He was twenty-nine, this gravy-breathed, bookshelf-shouldered boy in the wrinkled and dusty suit.

Booth recounted to Allie how he had tried to make it as an actor in the theater, living in a basement apartment in Brooklyn and taking classes at the school of a famous acting teacher. She had not been encouraging. “Booth,” the teacher said, “dear heart. I love you. You’re very funny. When you are up there, I want to watch you. The problem is that no matter what you are doing, as soon as you speak in that basso profundo of yours, I come apart at the seams. You make me giggly even when you are dying of gangrene.”

While he was living in New York City, the only part Booth managed to land was as the fifth banana in a production of
Waiting for Lefty
that was so far Off-Broadway it was performed in a garage and most of the actors were actual taxi drivers. The revival ran for a single show. A portion of the audience, drivers of Eastern European and Russian extraction with limited English, had become confused. The verisimilitude of the play was such—the play being a play set in a garage, and some of the actors being drivers acting as drivers—that they came to believe the fictional assembly to decide whether or not to strike was actually happening. When the actors began to chant, “Strike! Strike! Strike!,” several of these men in the audience, anti-Communist refugees from the USSR, became incensed and stormed the stage, yelling, “No! No! No!” Punches
were thrown. Booth escaped being clobbered only by proclaiming to an agitated Muscovite wielding a chair leg that, if given the chance, he would punish the corpse of Stalin. “Friend,” said Booth, palms up, to the man, “I swear it to you. I would not hesitate to abuse that fascist’s dead body. I would be glad to do it. I would throw his pelvic bone for a dog to fetch.”

His New York City sojourn was an ignominious experience, and Booth resolved that he had no choice but to write and raise a production of his own. He had returned to Hasbrouck, quickly sketched out the script of
New Roman Empire,
engaged his friend Thomas as set designer, and that very morning contracted most of his youthful cast, Allie included.

“Now let me serenade you,” he said.

From the projection booth, Booth retrieved a peculiar guitar. It held eleven strings and a body shaped like a bisected watermelon. On the neck there was a stamp of a silver crescent moon. He had salvaged it from a garbage mound in the Bowery.

“Listen.” He played her a song of his own composition called “The Huckster’s Lament.”

The progression of his plucking, the notes warped and slippery and somehow tuneless and melodic at once, put Allie in mind of a time when she had lain at the top of a high, grassy hill and rolled all the way down. At the bottom, she had tried to stand, and the world had swung away like a gate banging wide, a thousand colors streaking across the surface of her right eye, and it felt like her head was about to come apart, but it wasn’t bad, it was good, and her legs folded beneath her, and she was back on the ground, smelling grass and blood up her nose—and so high, and so glad. She remembered the feeling, and it was even better to feel it a second time.

He swayed back and forth as he played, a shadow against the silver sheet of the blank screen behind him. “Well? What do you think?” asked Booth.

Allie stood and padded down the balcony steps to where he stood in front of the railing. She put her hands on his shoulders and smoothed the bunched fabric. “I think,” she said, “that if I had a ladder, I could climb right up on one of these great big shoulders of yours, take a seat, and have myself a nice look around.”

They made love—not without some difficulty—on the steps of the aisle.

 ■ ■ ■ 

“So how come you’re such a movie fan?”

“Well, as you know, my uncle owned this theater. So I watched a great number of films as a boy. When they went to work, my parents often deposited me here for the day. If I was lucky, I got to see whatever was playing three or four times before they came back to pick me up.”

“That’s sad, Booth.”

“Oh, no! This screen was the most pacific babysitter I ever had. It took me all around the world and introduced me to the most extraordinary people. It rewarded me with the education of a lifetime.”

“If you say so. My babysitter used to take me to the park and let me ride the swings and stuff. I thought that was pretty nice. Fresh air, you know?”

“Poor child!”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Since they had the place to themselves, she suggested that they screen a picture. Booth’s face fell. The reels were always returned to the distributors, and no more had been ordered since the theater’s closing. But then he remembered the intro reel, the forty-second lead-in stitched to the front of every film. It asked the audience not to talk during the feature, to use the ashtrays and not to put out their cigarettes on the rug, and advertised the delicious concessions available in the lobby.

Three times they watched the animated yellow and blue butterfly that was the central figure of the intro reel twinkle across the screen, spilling in its wake the Hasbrouck Nickelodeon’s rules and advertisements.

After the third, Booth asked her what she thought.

Allie leveled with him. “That was the lousiest movie I’ve ever seen.”

“Dreadful!”

They made love again, this time at the top of the balcony stairs, on the landing, where it made more sense.

 ■ ■ ■ 

“Do you see yourself as an activist?”

“What an awful thing to say!’

“But the story, it’s kind of political-seeming. CIA Juice. Nix-on-Avon. The kids and the riot and stuff. Right?”

“No, no. It is all for entertainment, I assure you. Don’t get me wrong: I hate fascists of all stripes. I hate the big fascists who try to destroy our world. I hate the little fascists who talk, talk, talk through the whole movie. Can’t stand them. If, to you, the film is a parable of fascist threat, I don’t have the least problem with that.”

“What’s fascist about talking during a movie? Isn’t that just rude?”

“It’s fascist. It’s terribly fascist. It spoils the communal experience of the theater. Go to a movie with a dictator sometime. I bet he’ll never shut up.”

“I have a hard time telling when you’re being serious.”

“At the moment I am being almost entirely serious. It ought to be a felony to speak during the showing of a movie.”

“So your movie is only, what, a lark or whatever? All pretending for fun?”

“Yes! It is entirely for fun. We dress up and we tell a story.” Booth smiled faintly. “Can’t that be enough, Allie darling?”

Allie wept. She was drunk and happy. She thought that sounded wonderful. She thought that was plenty.

 ■ ■ ■ 

It was morning. “Breakfast?” asked Booth. “We could go back to the diner. Someone might remember us and be scandalized.”

“I wish we could just stay here.” Allie was curled up naked in a seat, huddled under Booth’s jacket. “I don’t feel like getting dressed. I wish that there was a movie showing, and it was called
Coffee,
and it starred coffee and maybe, in a supporting role, cranberry scones.”

Booth chuckled. “It’s not a bad idea, you know,” he said.

“Yeah.” Not really paying attention, she yawned, pulled the coat tighter. It would take over a year for Booth to convince her that her offhand comment was a potentially creditable enterprise, that the way to hang on to the property was to convert it into a café and serve coffee to college students and sell baked goods from the glass candy case. Before that, Allie had to officially drop out of college; she had to sell her music books and her metronome and live in sin with her boyfriend; and Booth had to direct a movie, and Allie had to act in it.

“Now be quiet, Booth Dolan. You’re not the only person in the theater, you know.” She fell asleep thinking that there was something she meant to ask him about.

After a year of intermittent shooting—through mechanical breakdowns, lack of funds, lack of film, snowstorms, rainstorms, and a hundred other minor disasters—
New Roman Empire
was completed. The residents of Tomorrowland, Allie and Mayor Paul and Marty and Anissa and Adam and Brittany and all the others, including Randall (who eventually mellowed to such a degree that he moved out of the DeSoto trunk and into a truck cab), gave their performances according to readings from Booth before each shot. His friend Tom Ritts, the bingo assistant, was handy, and he built Dr. Law’s medicine wagon, as well as many of the other props; he even improvised a short dolly track. A few of Hasbrouck’s theatrically inclined residents chipped in to fill different roles; no less a personage than Irving O’Dell, the Vice President of the Ulster County Chapter of the Republican Party, took a turn. (He played the ill-fated Mr. Jones.)

Booth cajoled, and made promises, and hugged, and kissed. No one was paid. Infrequently was anyone fed. Everyone accepted these realities. It amazed Allie, the way Booth managed so many people and always knew what to do, what to say, and what not to say.

It took Tom a couple of weeks to build the wagon from scratch, using a combination of discarded railroad ties, wood scraps, and the wheels from a Studebaker. When Booth saw the finished construction, he told Tom that he loved him.

“Gosh, Booth.” Color ran high up Tom’s forehead where his light blond hair was already receding. “It’s just a lot of rubbish no one was making any use of.”

“It’s not rubbish now,” said Booth. “It’s beautiful, and you damn well know it. You’ve made an astonishing vehicle with nothing but a few simple tools and your bare hands. Your ingenuity, Thomas, is matchless, and if you can’t say it, then I must.”