Innocents and Others (3 page)

On one of those special nights when he did want to see a film, we watched a hand-marked videotape of Terrence Malick's
Badlands.
He asked me if I'd seen it and I pretended I hadn't because I didn't want to spoil the fun of his introducing it to me. It's the story of two American kids, Kit and Holly, who calmly fall into a killing spree as if it were a Sunday matinee. We watched, but he didn't say anything as he watched. I was disappointed. I wanted him to point out what he thought worked so well in the film. I wanted him to say, instructively, knowingly, “See how he uses long shots? Kit gets farther away from us as the film progresses.” But he did not.

There is a scene in which Holly uses a stereoscope and we get her point of view as she looks at photos. We hear her voice-over as she looks at the hovering vintage images of strangers and wonders:

“It sent a chill down my spine, and I thought, where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? . . . Or killed anybody? This very moment . . . If my mom had never met my dad? If she'd of never died? . . . And what's the man I'll marry going to look like?
What's he doing right this minute? . . . Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn't know me? Does it show on his face?”

This:

I used to have a View-Master with various “sets” of viewing reels that each contained twelve related photo slides. You pushed the plastic-and-cardboard reels into the View-Master and clicked through the illuminated photos. I had the Wonders of the World set. I looked at those a lot, but the ones I loved best were the slides of the Apollo landing. The capsule tiny and glowing on the screen. The men fragile and unprotected in their tinfoil suits. I imagined climbing into that capsule, and being the first person to do it, shooting past the clouds, the ship burning away, and then the world beneath me. Would I be brave enough to do it? What did they think about, the very first time they shot into space?

But also this:

Holly didn't love Kit anymore, and the movie shows us that through Holly's fantasizing about her future husband, obviously not Kit. It shows us how dreamy and self-centered she is, and it shows us the flatness of her moral imagination. Part of it is in Holly's monotoned-but-childish recitation, and part of it is in the cheerful drum-churn of the soundtrack.

And this:

While I understood the art of Malick's construction, I felt—like a revelation—that I was Holly, unrealized, my future uncertain, all possibility and no accomplishment. I had only dreams and the child
ishness of yet, yet, yet. My dreams not of future husbands, but of making a film like this one, a film that implicated the viewer even as it delighted her. I blinked and tears blurred my view despite the fact that the filmmaker had gone to great lengths not to create a feeling of emotional sympathy with Holly and Kit. I blinked but I did not wipe my eyes; my boyfriend didn't need to know I was crying. What a mystery the way things act on us, like secret messages just to you as you sit in the dark. We watched the film together, but my feelings were private, unshared and unspoken.

We saw films together only a handful of times. Much more often I would see a movie on my own after he fell asleep. Sometimes I watched a video or I would watch what was on the Z Channel. But just as often I would get stoned and look at reruns of Rod Serling's creepy '70s TV show
Night Gallery.
One night, when very stoned, I watched a plant-loving Elsa Lanchester grow out of the ground after she refuses a developer's insistence that she move. He kills her, and her revenge is to come back as one of her plants. It terrified me and I had to sneak into his room. I startled him as he slept. My plan was to sleep near him, not wake him. But his breath caught and he sputtered awake.

“What's wrong?” he said in a stern rasp.

“Nothing, I'm sorry.”

“It's the middle of the night, Meadow.” He sighed.

“I'm so sorry.”

“You can't do this to me. I'll be up for hours.” He hoisted himself up on his pillows and rubbed his eyes.

“I was scared,” I said, and I detested my own words as if someone else had spoken them. Then I stood there and waited for him to soften or explain. Instead he pulled the chain on his fringed reading lamp and picked up a book from his bed table. He opened it and
began to read. I waited for him to look up or speak but he did not. Finally I went to my own room. That was the only time I remember him getting angry with me. Or that is the angriest he ever got, as far as I was concerned.

I'm not complaining, though. He was a great companion. He recited Shakespeare. He spoke it so beautifully in his deep, resonant voice. Words seemed to linger in the air after he stopped speaking. He had a precise, actor-trained memory—nothing I said to him was ever forgotten. He wove every moment into the last moment, never stopped connecting things. I think I will never get over what it was like to be with someone who remembered everything. He could make a fork disappear into the air with a wave of a napkin and the lift of an eyebrow. He talked as he worked his magic and he revealed his trickery, which only makes the trick work better. He never bored me.

One of the best things about him was his letters. He wrote love letters to me. I found them in my books. He would leave for the day, and I would read about my lips, my laugh, my gentle touch. My long legs in shorts and loose socks. Yes, mostly they were about my body, but a body is part of you, there is no getting around it even if you want to. Besides, I liked the attention to my body details. Strange as it seems, I hadn't had that before. All my life I had felt like a brain with two incidental arms and two useful legs growing out of it. For whatever reason, boys my age never approached me.

He wrote me letters nearly every day. Sometimes I wrote back. I reported on what I had read or seen or thought about that day. What I liked and why. I saved his letters in a small wicker box under my bed. I have no idea what he did with my letters.

We did this for nine months, the watching and the books and the tricks and the letters. I swam in the pool. I didn't rush into the future.

Once a week I took a deep breath and called my parents, spinning
a story of a cross-country trip leading to the factory in Gloversville where I spent my summer and then winter making films. No, thank you, I didn't need more money, I had told them in late August, but I did need to defer college for a year so I could finish making these films. They protested feebly about delaying school but then insisted on sending money. (This is the type of parents they were.) Instead of making films, I lived with my enormous boyfriend. I inhaled filmmaking in the air I breathed. I ingested it; I took it inside me. I spent my days imagining films that I wanted to make while at night I loved my boyfriend.

Sometimes I wanted to go out into the world with him. To dinner or to a party. I was reckless like that. But he didn't let me. He did not want anyone to know about us, because he felt it would be misunderstood. He knew how people can be, and how much it can cost a person. “You have no idea what it feels like,” he said, “I want to spare you that,” and I believed it.

“I'm stronger than you think,” I said, but I wasn't so sure. I tried out the idea as I spoke it. Maybe I really was.

Mostly we were happy, in the way you can be happy when you know something won't last forever. The way you can clutch the moment deeply and without holding back. “I love you,” I whispered to him. “And I love you, darling,” he said. “That is what this is, love,” he said, as if he couldn't quite believe it.

Then the last day came—ready or not—but of course I didn't know it was the last day at the time.

* * *

We have lunch by the pool. The sunlight sparkles on the water. He looks pale, and somehow almost frail. He hardly eats or drinks, and lately his face has become gaunt, as though his full cheeks were hang
ing down from his bones. I should have guessed what was coming, for he surely does.

“Wonderful news,” he says.

“What?”

“My picture will be financed. Things are falling into place. I just have to stay alive long enough to make the damn thing.”

“Stop that—you'll be able to do it. You are ready.”

“Yes, I am. I feel as if I can make my greatest film. I know exactly how I want to do it. I've been dreaming of it for years. And at last, I get a chance.”

I see him momentarily perk up, excited at the thought.

“After all this time, I am finally making another film,” he says. But as he exhales, I can see something else, some trickery below the surface.

He never made the movie. We all know that now. But about that very last day, the very last night:

He is going on
The Merv Griffin Show
. He will talk about the new project, get things heated up. He has some backing, but he still needs more. They use him, the wonderfully witty and entertaining old has-been, and he will use them back, sneak in his agitprop on his own behalf. “That,” he says, “is how this town works, and I have always understood how this fucking town works.”

I watch him on TV. He is eloquent and generous. I watch him and feel lucky.

It doesn't go the way he expected. He comes home from the studio, white-faced and damp. He shambles in on his cane, falls back onto the couch with a moan.

“How did it go?” I ask.

“A disaster. I went in to do my song and dance, but instead I was a dignified old man, elegiac and stinking of the grave.”

“Nonsense,” I say. “I thought you were magnificent.” I sit down on the floor at his feet. I undo his shoes. His heavy wide feet are white and swollen. I take one foot in my hand: I feel tender toward this heavy small thing, the weight of a lifetime always pushing down on it. I press it with my palm for a minute, one and then the other. His feet are oddly soft and uncallused, but they also seem useless, abandoned somehow. I wrap my arm across his legs and push my face against his knees.

“I am sorry,” he says.

I pull back from his legs and look up at him. His face is barely visible across the landscape of his body.

“What?”

“I have nothing I can give you, no money. I have ex-wives and a wife, actually, and children. And very little I haven't spent. It is possible you will get a window of attention, and you can do something with that. Believe me, the attention can hurt, so you must make sure you get something out of it.”

I start to cry. He stops talking and places his hand on my head.

“Can you shut up? Please?” I say. He sighs and I help him to his bed.

You can guess the rest. What happened to him was on the news.

The housekeeper comes into my room and wakes me up. Her face is sweaty, and she seems to tremble as she speaks. She tells me she has called 911, and that the ambulance is about to take him away. I scramble out of bed and stop at the doorway, unsure what to do. I watch them take him out on a gurney. He is white and nonresponsive, his massive body already collapsing into itself, looking passed and dead to me. The housekeeper says, “I am calling his family.” And she disappears into his room, closing the door behind her. Soon—within an hour—people will go to the hospital. Then they will descend on
this place: a relative, an agent, the press. I pull on my jeans. I had slept in an oversized Mercury Theatre jersey, which I now use as a tunic shirt. I need, it seems to me, to get out of there fast. I pull a suitcase from the closet, the very same one I had brought over after a few days of living with him.

I look around my room. Here is what I take: my clothes, my videotapes, my notebooks, and a few little souvenirs he gave me (some lacquered balls for juggling, a deck of cards, a lobby card for the last of his great films, an annotated copy of
King Lear
with his small neat notes in the margins along with the
King Lear
screenplay he wrote but never shot, a long Nubian dress, and a vintage Mark IV viewfinder on a lanyard). I also take the wicker box filled with his love letters. Of course I do. I make the bed. I close the closet door. There is no sign of me in the bedroom or anywhere in the house. I walk to the back door in case someone is arriving. I hesitate as I pass his room. I push open the door. The bed is a mess; as they pulled him onto the gurney they must have dragged all the bedclothes off. I look at his dresser where he left his watch and his pocket notebook. His vest and scarf hang from a chair back, just as he left them last night. I pick up the scarf and hold it to my face. I can smell his hair oil and aftershave. I drape it gently across the dresser. I ought to leave. A tumbler of liquor on the end table by the bed. He couldn't sleep so he drank and read. Next to the book are some scribbled notes and his sturdy fountain pen. I pick up the pen—it is green resin, fat and substantial in my hand. Just one small thing of his. I put it in my pocket. I slip out the sliding back door to the patio. I open the garage, throw my suitcase into the backseat of my Rabbit, and go.

I drive to Brentwood Village and call my parents on a pay phone. “Everything is fine,” I say. “I just wanted to say hello.” The radio in my car is already reporting that my boyfriend was pronounced dead
at UCLA Medical Center. I stare out the window and listen to the valedictory obituary, something carefully constructed long ago and updated each year until it would finally be read on the air. Nobody had really wanted to see him lumber onto TV sets to talk. They had been waiting to pronounce him dead, to bring to a proper close his long American story.

I head straight to the camera supply store with my father's wad of cash and pick out some gear. Then onto Route 15 and then 40, by myself, driving to New York. I drive until I reach a motel just over the New Mexico border. It isn't until I collapse on the motel bed and switch on the TV that I feel it. I watch the special report, and I see him young and beautiful. Close to my age, in fact. And out of that young man comes my boyfriend's voice. I cry and hold the motel pillow against my face. I see his face as he lay on the gurney, and it is that image that makes me feel how lost he is to me. How much I will miss him. How much I will always love him. I sleep.