Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (8 page)

Work commences on the shot that will introduce the figures of Oskar and Liselotte when the film is edited. Marcus, Alliat, and the camera are ensconced on the boom. Marcus signals, and the boom rises into the air. High above Rome, Marcus and Alliat confer in whispers. Far up the street, Oskar and Liselotte begin to walk. Oskar slightly in advance—that is, Oskar walks and Liselotte is pulled. Marcus leans forward. Liselotte teeters on the vanity of her high heels. The camera sights down through the frozen surf of leaves toward Oskar and Liselotte among the pedestrians, speckled like the street with leaf shadows and bits of light, adrift, like the leaf shadows, details of the day, and as transitory. When they come to a place where the shadow is thick and unbroken beneath the trees, Marcus shouts,
“Halt!”
and Oskar, Liselotte, and the extras pause, as still as death, while the camera whirs. Marcus shouts, “March!” and Oskar and Liselotte emerge from the shadow. Oskar points from time to time, and Liselotte nods; on the sound track, Liselotte’s voice, from a distance, will say,
“Ja, ist schön.
” When they pass the chalk marks of the shot before, Marcus shouts,
“Bon!
Stop!
Halt!”
and calls a retake for safety.

On autumn Saturday afternoons, Nanna walked with her cane in the garden. Nanna had a cyst on her leg. Marcus came down in the convertible she had bought him. On the road between college and Scantuate, he left behind the life he led at college—the moods, the self-disgust, the talk, the alcohol, the girls and women, pursued without imagination or
fervor but with indignation; they ought to give in. “Everything’s fine, as usual,” he told Nanna. That meant he was glad to see her. When Sukie and Robin were in Scantuate at Gamma Foster’s, they always came to see Nanna. Nanna had become a member of their group. Nanna, who had never been demonstrative, now kissed Marcus—not frequently: when he arrived and when he left—and she held his arm when they walked in the garden. “I may fall,” she said. There is no old woman among the extras, Marcus realizes, no old Roman women, only an old man in a straw hat.

Oskar tells Marcus through Whitehart’s headset telephone that Liselotte is terrible, and he asks if in the next shot he should play his part as if he is acting according to a conscious plan.

Marcus thinks and says, “No. You plan, you don’t plan. It doesn’t matter. You do what you do anyway. I’ll tell you what it’s like. Excuse me, but it’s like a dog. The expression in the dog’s eyes when he is going to disobey a command. Is he thinking? It is his body. He smells the woods. But plot if you like. Only remember to be innocent at the same time, a man who does not plot. You have a very fine sense of life. Play it with uncertainty.” Marcus, even from the boom, can see the tension in Oskar, and he is pleased. Liselotte crosses her spindly arms stiffly over her large breasts and stands pigeon-toed while Whitehart slips a pebble into her shoe. The shot will follow the ones of Oskar and Liselotte strolling and is to be taken from the boom, from above, to suggest Oskar’s aloofness, his detachment from Liselotte after the disdainful girl has passed. Marcus shouts, “All right, let’s go!” and Oskar tugs Liselotte, who cannot walk very well with the pebble in her shoe. She watches Marcus tearfully, and when Marcus nods, Liselotte halts with stunning suddenness, pulls back, and passes her hand over her forehead and speaks to Oskar. On the sound track her voice will say,
“Meine Fusse”
—a child near tears.
“Gut,
Lise,
gut!
No, don’t look at me!” Marcus shouts. He thinks, Very good and crude: an unimaginative woman. Oskar bends his head over Liselotte woodenly, to hide his confusion about the nature of the man he is playing, and to conceal his wrath with her amateurishness. In the inclination of his head and the way his hand touches her shoulder, he overacts—Oskar wants the scene done with and to be rid of having to deal with Liselotte. The concern he pretends has a vast adamancy, a coldness of spirit, and the grace Oskar cannot help displaying in his attempt to appear a gentleman. Peremptorily the man and the actor merge; he raises his arm and snaps his fingers. A taxi
screeches to a halt in front of Oskar and Liselotte; Oskar helps Liselotte in, and the taxi roars in a U-turn while Marcus shouts to Alliat’s assistant,
“Allez oop!”
and the boom rises and dips to suggest Oskar’s sensation of freedom and release, as if he were flying above the Viale Trinità dei Monti as the taxi vanishes with Liselotte in it.

That shot will be succeeded in the movie by the close-up of Oskar standing at the railing atop the Spanish Steps, smiling at Marcus’s joke about Goethe and the statue. The smile will seem to the audience to be expectant—Oskar is waiting to see what reality will emerge for him from the City of the Absolute.

As soon as the shot ends, Oskar hurries toward Marcus, who is standing beside the boom. Oskar says, “That woman! That whore! She is stupid—an amateur.” His mouth assumes a bent, paranoid smile. “You put her in the movie to make me a fool. It is a plot.”

Marcus says, “Oskar, I need her. I need her for the movie.”

“Why?”

Marcus shrugs. “For a touch of innocence. Of soul. She is a symbol of your soul, Oskar,
mein Lieber.
” Oskar relaxes in part. “A symbol,” he says.
“Ja, ich verstehe.
And I cast her off.
Ja,
I see.” Marcus walks away, to end the conversation. Sweating in the sunlight, he thinks, So she’s dead. How could a woman so old know so little? The minnow eyes are stilled—how strange. His heartbeat generates a haze in his chest. Whitehart, on the first landing of the Steps, a sketch in his hand, is arranging extras and instructing them in their attitudes and actions for the next shot. Marcus says to himself, “I must go down.” But he knows Whitehart finds his safety in thinking he is indispensable to Marcus. Marcus tells himself, “I must give him another moment to be important.”

He turns and goes down—not the Spanish Steps but the steep flight of steps that leads to the Via della Carrozze. Marcus’s heart labors. He thinks it will be forty-five minutes before the sun is right for Jehane’s ascent. He wants no shadows when Jehane climbs the Spanish Steps. He turns from the Via della Carrozze into the Piazza di Spagna, a middle-aged, heavyset man moving slowly. He says to himself, “It is the work; I take everything too seriously. The shots went well; if they had gone badly, I wouldn’t grieve for her.”

Clumsily, he bangs open the door of the costume trailer and steps inside. Jehane lies on a couch; her costume, a department-store dress, too short in the waist, too narrow in the shoulders, is bunched across her
hips as she lies. Jehane sits up, her pale eyes like erasures in her face, and immediately, vivaciously cries,
“Mon amour!”
and asks him to pass on her makeup, only to break off with surprise—he has not been fervent with her for many months—when he presses his head into the hollow between her throat and shoulder, and murmurs,
“Tu es belle … tu es belle, belle, belle,
” and then he raises his head, ashamed.
“Ton maquillage?”
he says, and gravely studies the face she holds atilt for his inspection. It seems to him the light whispers and weeps on her skin, and it occurs to him that once, long ago, he was more forgiving of Noreen than of his father, was always more indulgent to women than to men, to the woman in him more than to the man. He does not care now. Jehane and he discuss her makeup. She is well into her part, more than half illusion.

Marcus steps outside. Whitehart is standing near Alliat by the flower stall, and as Marcus walks toward him, the reporter and the photographer from
Réalités,
who are doing a story on Marcus, intercept him. Whitehart signals that the extras are not quite ready. “I can give you a moment,” Marcus says—
a gift.

They ask him for a photograph, and while he poses expressionless in the sun, the Spanish Steps behind him, the reporter, who is a thin young man with a large nose, smiles deferentially, says, “What is the sensation when you begin the movie?”

Marcus bursts out, “It brings death closer,” then he hurries on. “When I was young, it was different,
fai chanté.
I’d waited so long for my chance to speak. It was like when I had my first woman—one isn’t careful—one feels, and then suffers when it goes wrong. The young, you know, are not
educated.
I had no technique. I felt. Though, God knows, I took the technique of feeling seriously enough. Thinking led to dishonesty. But I was wrong. The young are always wrong. They are imbeciles. They have too many lies to defend. They must go blindly or not go at all.” He is embarrassed suddenly and stops, until he notices admiration in the young reporter’s eyes. He goes on, “Now I plot everything. I am no longer innocent. I am corrupt with intentions. Sometimes I am rude when I work. I am rude because the idea insists on it, because I am in a state of ambition—do you understand?”

W
HEN HE
came back from Europe corrupt, he found that with Nanna the corrupt part of him, which she did not know about, became
insignificant. But when she bought him clothes, arranged an expensive room for him at college, a large allowance, a car, he protested, “I don’t need those things. I haven’t earned them.”

“I want you to have them,” she said. He said to himself, “I am a person who has these things.” His car and the money he had to spend helped make him popular, except that he was not welcome in certain places or to certain girls after they heard his name. His classmates admired him, because he was moody, and knowledgeable about vice. He attached himself to the dramatic group and persuaded them that the way to raise money was to make a movie. “A silent. A joke. A parody of a movie. People like to be swindled.” The movie had as characters Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin as a petty crook, Keaton as a pickpocket; the hero was a plainclothes detective disguised as an old-clothes man; the heroine, played by a boy, was, according to the subtitles, a mistress-criminal, killer, and left-wing deviate, and at the end was revealed to be Princess Margaret, bored with palace life. The college-student audiences laughed, and the profits from the movie paid for a production of
Richard II,
Marcus as Bolingbroke. Nanna came to a performance and said jealously, “Do you intend to make acting your life?” Sweaty and covered with makeup, Marcus cried, “I don’t know! Don’t be a snob, Nanna.” She said, “You still have some lipstick on.” She said, “I’ve missed you the last several weeks.” She touched his arm.

Marcus lost interest in being one of a troupe of actors. He met a fierce-beaked young man named Rappaport, overweeningly stoop-shouldered, a clever, militant Jew.

“Weill? Ah,” Rappaport said when he was introduced to Marcus, and smiled.

“Half and half,” Marcus said, smiling back, sarcastically.

“Half and half? A half Jew is a Jew who’s ashamed of being Jewish.” Rappaport said, “Always some of our best people get drawn away from us—Einstein, Marx, Freud. Renegades. And what did they gain? Nothing. Nothing plus nothing. They weren’t treated like Jews. Did they finally feel they were the equals of the
goyim
? My God, tell me, were they equals before they started or not? Anyway, why talk about it with you—you’re not a Jew. You’re a half-and-half.”

Marcus said, “My God, why make a fuss about it?”

“They
make a fuss,” Rappaport said. “Well, to be honest, we make a fuss, too.”

“What’s a Jew?” Marcus said.

“A Jew? A Jew is a kind of man who believes in God and believes that everything is a matter of religion. You can’t hide or lie about it. No saints. No divine prophets. Just prophets, and they’re not always right. You have the Ten Commandments. Money can’t be a God. Art can’t be a God. Only God is God.”

Marcus shrugged. “So what?”

“Ah,” said Rappaport. “So it’s the truth, that’s what. Listen, you think a
goy
can ever know the truth? You think Jesus is the Son of God? Mary was a virgin? Listen, you believe that when you’re a child and you do something to your mind. A Christian could discover the Oedipus complex? Don’t make me laugh. They want to be Jews, Christians; that’s the direction: from Catholic to Protestant to Unitarian. What’s a Unitarian? A Jew who can get into a country club. What’s a Communist? A man trying to act like a Jew without getting mixed up with God. Listen,” Rappaport said, “a Jew can suffer and a Jew can think—you don’t think those are advantages?” He told Marcus the Jewish hagiology.

Marcus decided to take Rappaport to Scantuate to open Nanna’s eyes. Rappaport talked about the concupiscence of art: “Anything sensual is an advertisement for sex, let’s face it. Take those bronze things over there. They arouse the senses.” About comparative religion: “Christianity is a debased form of Judaism; the early Christians were uneducated people and added a lot of superstition. That’s why we make them nervous. There they stand with the forgery in their hands.” Marcus explained to Nanna, “Rappaport likes to
épater les goyim.
” At dinner, Marcus, who thought that intellectual excitement improved Rappaport and made him almost beautiful, encouraged him to talk about the Jewish God. Nanna interrupted Rappaport. “I am not a believer.” Rappaport said, “Don’t you believe God’s weight rests on the world?” “I strongly doubt it.” “But think of God as the principles of physics.” Marcus said, “Do, Nanna.” “When I was a girl,” Nanna said, “it was considered bad form to discuss religion. Perhaps it has become quite common nowadays, but I, for one, am unaccustomed to it.”

Rappaport said, “Your grandmother doesn’t like me. Nobody’s as anti-Semitic as some of these old Jewish ladies.”

The next weekend, when Marcus was in Scantuate, Nanna asked him, “Are you cross because I didn’t get on with your friend?”

“He’s odd,” Marcus said. “But you have to realize he’s free to think whatever he wants—he hasn’t anything to lose.”

“What he thinks seems to me to redound generally to his advantage,” Nanna said dryly.

“That’s the ego—but the superego—”

Nanna said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” She said, “I’m rather an old woman and a little behind the times.”