Mount Terminus (22 page)

No, said Gus, I wouldn't recommend it.

Bloom secretly took pleasure when these unmistakable similarities revealed themselves, when, for instance, not very long after Mr. Dershowitz departed the courtyard and the state of affairs on Mount Terminus had normalized, they met in Simon's parlor, in his white room where the furniture and the furnishings resembled his brother's attire—white settees and armchairs, white walls trimmed with white wainscoting, adorned with white filigree, white bookshelves, a white Pleyel grand—and Bloom asked Simon if the farmers' revolt had caused him any further problems, and in a demeanor that was nearly exact to Jacob's, in a display of gestures almost homologous to their father's, Simon contained within him whatever burdensome news he didn't wish to reach his brother's ears; in a pantomime Bloom knew well, Simon drew his hands together, stared at the young Rosenbloom as if he were making an apology, and finishing with a half-formed smile said, You needn't concern yourself with such things. That weight is mine to carry, and mine alone. The accuracy with which Simon reflected the departed Rosenbloom's bearing and diction to deflect Bloom's inquiry gave rise to a prickling of gooseflesh, as Bloom was convinced that Jacob Rosenbloom, however fleetingly, had been raised from the dead for the purpose of inhabiting his son's body.

In the months following, after the studio had gone into production, when the white walls of Simon's parlor had grown cluttered with colorful theatrical posters, productions in which Simon had played roles high and low—
Henry IV
;
Henry V
;
Hamlet
;
Trigorin
;
Gregor, the Straight Man
;
Hollis, the Holy Dunce
;
Favish, the Singing Philologist
;
Calamitous, the Acrobat
;
The Wunderkind, Harvey Plum, Whistler Extraordinaire—
Bloom recognized other reflexive behaviors his brother shared with their father—the way the two rested their chin on the heel of their palm when sitting in an armchair; the habit they both had of rubbing their thumb against their fingers when pausing in the middle of a sentence to search for a lost word or thought; forming the same slight pucker of the lips—as if awaiting a kiss—when they drew a glass above their chin, and Bloom, again and again, would be revisited by the uncanny sensation of déjà vu. It seemed at times, he told Gus, as if Simon had somehow studied his father in the way Bloom imagined an actor would mirror a subject he was to portray on stage.

And Gus said to Bloom, That would be impossible. They spent no more than a few minutes in each other's company. And that was that.

The similitude was never more apparent than the times Bloom watched Simon meticulously attend to the shrine he dedicated to the dead mother he had never known. In a room with thick white lintels framing the canyon road, the basin, the haze hanging at the edge of the sea, Leah, the identical image of Bloom's mother, hung on the walls as the ingénue Eloise, as Medea and Lady Macbeth and Scheherazade, as the subject of paintings and drawings and illustrated songs, blue renditions of
The Little Lost Child
and
After the Ball
, as buxom caricatures captured on cocktail napkins, as a distant figure on a stage enveloped in cigar smoke. Beneath the window's ledge, organized by composer, were shelves neatly stacked with sheet music, some of which, Simon told him, were tunes written for his mother by Joey Haden and Theo Metz, “A Hot Time in the Old Town” his favorite. Then there were the sheets from her childhood, her Bach and Brahms, Chopin and Mozart, her numerous versions of Berlioz's
Symphonie Fantastique
, which, Simon had learned, she devotedly read in silence, claiming to hear in the measures the strings of Berlioz's aching heart. In this same room, at its center, stood an enormous table on which rambled the topography of a raised relief map, Mount Terminus and the valley, the lake, the basin, the reservoir, the aqueduct, an expansion of the studio at the bottom of the switchback road. Like the elder Rosenbloom in his gardens, like the elder Rosenbloom with his shears in hand, Simon often lingered over the rise and fall of the mountains, in the depressions of the valley and the basin, circled it when he talked to Bloom, and, as a small child might, toyed with pins in the shapes of houses and trees, railcars and motorcars, and he would articulate what Bloom was thinking; he would joke about the great tyrants and master builders, about whom he said, All children of one sort or another. Children playing childish games with the lives of men. On the rare occasion Simon visited the estate for dinner, Bloom came to further appreciate the intimacy and continuity he experienced in his brother's company. On these nights, he always visited alone. After Bloom, Simon, and Gus completed their meal, they would sit in the parlor until their conversation lulled, when his brother's gaze would retreat inward as if drawn there by the forces of an interior gravity. On these nights, Bloom would observe the patterns of lines prematurely etching themselves onto the edges of Simon's mouth, across his brow, around the corners of his eyes, onto the otherwise smooth surface of his skin. This sight transported Bloom through time, to the past and the future simultaneously, through whose open doors he could see in what way the ridges and grooves on his elder brother's face would come to resemble the configuration forged on their father's. He easily imagined the direction in which the lines would lengthen their reach and grow more compressed. During these instances of attenuated temporalities, he envisioned his brother aged before his time, becoming the man for whom he felt nothing but bitterness and disappointment, the man whom he had been at odds with in his mind his entire life, and when bearing witness to the ways in which time inscribed its marks into his brother's skin and prematurely salted the roots of his hair, Bloom was often tempted, for the sake of his brother's amelioration, to take Simon by the hand and walk him up to the top of the tower, where, in the company of his birds, they could look out onto the simple wonders of the sky and the sea.

He wanted to teach his elder brother the art of slowing time, so he might ease his anxieties, and prolong his life, but, Bloom suspected, the fiery core of Simon's temperament, his dybbuk, would burn through such a whimsical gesture with the heat of a magician's flash paper. At the very least, he thought, he could insist Simon share his burdens with him, but every time Bloom made further inquiries into his affairs, when he expressed a sincere interest in knowing the particulars about the elaborate plans he'd envisioned for the land on either side of Mount Terminus and the barriers he faced trying to realize them, Simon quietly and patiently redirected his attention elsewhere.

*   *   *

The passage of time at this early stage of Bloom's life could be measured as a collection of dots at the end of a pointillist's brush. Bloom, in his gray years, would be able to relive his rite of passage on the studio lot only as a toilsome series of nonsequential events, a nonlinear pastiche of window treatments and cornices, light riggings and costume changes, painted mattes, dark rooms, and strips of film. Had he ever chosen to revisit these days in any detail, to make any sensible order of them, he would have needed to consult a filmography of Mount Terminus Productions. He could, however, always recall this much: in the time it took for one to see from the peak of Mount Terminus the first glimmer of his brother's metal aqueduct reflect off the eastern range of the valley, in the time it took for his brother to fell the citrus groves across the basin and raze their stumps, in the time it took Gus to arrange and present hundreds of floral bouquets and bowls of fruit to his beloved Meralda, in the time it took Meralda to consent to a dinner out with Gus at the Pico House Hotel, Bloom had worked in various capacities on more than two dozen productions with the unremarkable but kindly Murray Abrams, and two other equally unexceptional but endearing directors, Ned Weiman and Bud Manning. He took part in the making of
The Counterfeiters
;
The Count of No Account
;
The Adventures of Mr. Troubles
;
The Amateur Hypnotist
;
The Hebrew Fugitive
;
The Daughter of the Gods
;
The Gambler
;
Colossus and His Dog
;
Neptune's Daughter
;
The Man Without a Name
;
Beyond Eden
;
A Cry in the Night
;
His Wife, the Acrobat
;
The Muse of the Mews
; and
Master and Man
as well as a multitude of other movies whose titles escaped Bloom not long after they were released to the chain of Freed Theaters, as they weren't worth remembering. In fact, not one of the productions on which Bloom spent his considerable efforts did he think as engaging as those pictures his brother had shown him the day he arrived with his projector and lifted Bloom into the sky on their aeronautical voyage. Not one could compare with the sophistication of Gottlieb's
The Magnetic Eye
, or, for that matter, the half dozen three-reel pictures—
Undine
;
Memento Mei
;
The Face in the Window
;
The Astronomer's Dream
;
A Good Little Devil
;
The Overcoat—
Gottlieb had made since Simon introduced Bloom to his work.

For almost three years, Bloom awoke every morning at sunrise and retired in a state of exhaustion long after the sun had set, and he had still caught only the briefest glimpses of Gottlieb from a distance, as Gottlieb generally kept to himself, except for the occasions he was on stage, when he became a shadow puppet behind the white panels of muslin his minions erected for him. For three years, Bloom waited patiently for Simon to determine that he was ready for Gottlieb's guidance. For three years, he didn't broach the subject. For three years, he waited patiently. But the youngster had become a man. He possessed bushels of black hair under his arms, a woolly nest of black pubis in which a finch could luxuriate with its mate, a face of thickening Semitic stubble that required a daily shave, a ripe musty smell he needed to scrub away after a long day's labor. As he neared his seventeenth birthday, Bloom, looking forlorn, sat across from Murray Abrams on the empty set of a romantic melodrama,
A Long Day in the Sun
.

Why so glum, Rosenbloom?

It's nothing.

You look like you've been fed some bad gefilte fish.

It's a case of disappointment, not indigestion.

Disappointment? In what? In whom?

In the fates? In myself?… In Elias Gottlieb, if truth be told.

Gottlieb?

Yes, Gottlieb. I thought I would have had the opportunity to work with him by now.

And this is the cause of your dyspepsia?

Yes.

Better you should consider yourself fortunate. Blessed!

Why?

It's
Gottlieb
! Even when he works
with
people, he works with no one other than Gottlieb, as there is no other human being on the face of the planet when Gottlieb is around, as there is no man more in love with Gottlieb than Gottlieb.
Gottlieb.
The man is a creature. A cretin. Too deformed in body and spirit to be loved by anyone
other than himself
. No one has ever told you this?

No.

And now that
I've
told you, you still sit there like a matzo ball?

What can I say, Mr. Abrams, I think he's brilliant.

Gottlieb?
Uhch. He's unruly. Unpleasant. A grotesque. An unintended—unacceptable—consequence of your brother's generosity.

How is that?

Like the punch line of a joke that gets no laughs, he wandered out of the desert while the company was between locations, and your brother, he takes him in as one would a stray dog.
Gottlieb!
He claimed to be a painter and a photographer, considered himself some sort of Plato or Aristotle, or some such
mishegas
. All I know is this, Rosenbloom: he never spent a day of his life working in the theater, knows nothing of production decorum, of human decorum, he's unproductive, unprofitable, and your brother treats him like the fucking messiah. Trust me, Rosenbloom, you want nothing to do with this imp. Gottlieb's concern is only for Gottlieb. To Gottlieb, everyone else is a shadow in a cave.

I would settle for being a shadow in Gottlieb's cave, thought Bloom.

He didn't have the heart to say this to Mr. Abrams, who continued to say
Gottlieb
as if the man's name were a sneeze or a cough or a curse. If it's what you want, go on, I won't be offended. Get up off your ass and talk to your brother. Just stop with the moping and the acting like the love of your life was some Ophelia.

Mr. Abrams …

Go on! Go. You think I want to look at that long face any longer?

Bloom apologized to Murray Abrams and walked to his brother's house. He paced the planks of his porch for a half hour until Simon peeked his head out the front door. Aren't you going to come in?

No.

Would you like me to come out?

No.

Then what would have me do?

I would have you talk to Gottlieb.

I see.

I'm ready. I have long been ready.

From within the shadows of his foyer, Simon said, I know.

He knows, said Bloom.

Yes, I know. But it's slightly more complicated than that.

What is?

Everything. Gottlieb included. Stay right there. Simon disappeared for a moment, and when he reappeared, he stepped out under the overhang, took Bloom by the arm, and walked him to his roadster. He opened the passenger door and commanded Bloom to get in.

Where are we going?

You'll see when we get there.

That afternoon, they drove off the lot and down Mount Terminus's winding road. At the bottom of the switchback they turned in the direction of town, traversed the hills of the boulevard for a little under an hour, and not long after they passed the heights of the Griffith subdivision, the dusty clay haze of the city's asymmetrical grid came into view, the shallow channel of the river running through it, the lines of swaying palms and slow-moving trolleys drifting between them. A composite of architecture had risen up since Bloom first arrived at La Grande Station those many years ago. More and more buildings now towered over shaggy palm crowns, shouldered together along Broadway, stretched outward in the direction of Mount Terminus, and with them, people, hordes of them, had crowded there in greater numbers. They motored past old Sonora town, skirted around bicyclists, pushed through packs of pedestrians crossing the avenues, turned onto Broadway, and then into an alley behind a Freed Theater whose Moorish marquee read
Master and Man.
Simon parked beside the back door and told Bloom to follow him. From the bright light of the day, Simon delivered Bloom into a cool darkness choked with tobacco smoke, filled with the melodic vibration of organ music descending its scale to the lower octaves. They walked the length of a curtained corridor, at the end of which they arrived at an enormous screen flickering full of the snow-specked beards of Shelby Riordan and Hollis Grant playing the roles of Vasili Andreevich and his servant, Nikita. Master. Man. The picture was reaching its conclusion, when the two men were caught in a blizzard, unable to find the road to take them home. Bloom watched on as Vasili Andreevich, the selfish, self-important man of privilege, experienced an awakening, a revelation; he covered Nikita's body from the cold, sacrificing himself for his humble but loyal peasant; Vasili, in that instant, becoming noble for the first time in the story, not only in name but also in the manner he conducted himself, in the face of death. Bloom and his brother stood at the edge of the curtain, beside the image of snowy tundra Bloom and Hannah Edelstein had painted together, and as the organ music began to swoon in a dramatic thrum, Simon said, Don't look there. Look at the audience. Look at their faces. Bloom saw through the billows of smoke wet eyes glimmering in the flashes of light, women and men alike moved to tears by the unexpected change in Vasili's character.