The Almanac Branch (32 page)

Cut to the beach again, where the fire now is burning lower, and a lean-to tent has been erected to keep in abeyance the sea-chill. The party is quieter, and several of the men and women have fallen asleep randomly, it would seem, in one another's arms. The same woman who earlier had passed the bottle to Max is now voicing skepticism about something Max let slip, and we can see that Max is unable to defend what he has claimed to be the truth because he has drunk too much.

She says, “There ain't no such thing as a virgin on this island, on this here earth for that matter. Who you think you're kidding? Virgin!” and she spits—with the same vehemence Max himself had shown earlier, in the orchard—at the crisp sand.

“You think I like being a virgin?”

“You lie. Look here. You come splashing out of your mother's downstairs mouth and she is heaving and grinding like she is riding the biggest stallion in the stable, and she's crying and howling, and it's all just like you were her best lover for then and for ever, and what happens but you start up yelping and howling too, because you must know, like we all must know deep down that, by gum, that was the best time in bed any of us was ever going to have, and everybody's crying and screaming with tears of joy, and there is blood and the oil of afterbirth everywhere, and the rest of it is downhill, man, you sucking your mother'sbreast, and you both maybe get a little bit of joy out of that—she's nurturing and all, and you're getting your milk and all—but nobody's crying with the birth-ecstasy anymore I can tell you that much.”

Max is feeling queasy. Does the woman Meg have to bare her breast, which is grotesquely long and flat, to illustrate?: “See this thing here, this has been the cause of plenty of pleasure to plenty of people I can tell you. But nobody's given me greater pleasure while nuzzling it than my own several darlings.”

“Why don't you shut up, Meg,” says a young woman, who is off in a corner of the lean-to, lying alone. “Don't listen to her, Max. Nobody ever got pleasure off that dead bag.”

“Screw you,” and she leans into Max and whispers loudly, “Screw you, get it? It's a joke. It's a joke because she's never shaken the sheets, get it? So she doesn't even have any idea what we philosophers are philosophizing about over here.”

“You're so vulgar and stupid you make me sick,” offers the young woman.

Max, feeling full of food, wine, words, has begun to wonder whether it wouldn't have been better to accept his shame and go home, rather than to put himself into this awkward situation. He thinks longingly of his bedroom, his bed, the duck-down comforter, so warm, his sheets tucked in tight around him, everything in his room organized and familiar.

“Hey, I got an idea,” proposes a rheumy-eyed man.

“That's news,” Meg chides.

“No, I do. This here kid thinks he's a virgin, right? And she over there is a virgin, and well—one plus one—you tell me.”

Meg pulls on her chin. She warms to this idea. “The moon's up high, the tide's gone out, the seabirds have all gone abed. I think there's merit here somewhere.”

The young woman huddled in the corner darkness says, “Have your fun, but leave me out of it.”

Max is poking the fire with the heel of his shoe, and shifts in the sandy bed. Meg moves in close by the boy, and whispers into his ear, “Max, now listen to me, I'm prepared to believe you, that you're a virgin, and all. But now you must prove yourself to me and Bill here and to the virgin there and everyone else, but above all to yourself Max. Are you ready?”

Max is handed a just-uncorked bottle, and invited to drink “five fingers' worth,” which he obligingly does. The scuffling that seems to be going on back in the dark recess of the lean-to is kept out of the camera's eye, whose central attention remains fixed on Max's face. A lock of hair dangles over his brow and, encouraged by the wine and the talking heads of several men who resemble those faces depicted by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in his painting
Parable of the Blind
(a reproduction of which the observant cinephile will have noticed taped to the refrigerator door back in the kitchen scene), we are almost able to spot the exact moment when Max undergoes his conversion from an innocent to a wholly debauched monster. The moon, playing one of its commonest roles under Berg's meticulous direction, sheds a glowing light upon the lunatic events that unfold under the fluttering, rickety beach tent. Max half-crawls, is half-dragged, to the young woman, whose clothes have been stripped away by the unbridled troupe of misfits. The scene dissolves to mouse-gray as the camera pulls back to show us how much the lean-to has come to resemble a great, black bird flapping aimlessly on the shore, its wings unable to lift it into the wind, its stick legs helpless to walk, its mad human hatchlings squirming like slugs in dung beneath its smutty shadow.

This scene haunted Berg, and he haunted it right back. While he was trying to edit the passage something he couldn't verbalize pricked his curiosity. It nagged, and he ran it over and over, studying the frames one by one, running it through speeded-up, freeze-framing whenever he sensed he was close to identifying what it was that bothered him. Here he had written the scene. He had directed it, had sent someone by car to the lab in New York so that it could be processed overnight and returned to him midmorning the next day. And now, as he projected it in the moviola, he didn't know what it was he was seeing. That is, he seemed to be witnessing something
through
the images and sounds, and it occurred to him that he might be near an understanding of why it was that making this
Almanac
had been so important to him.

Analise saw he was beginning to be obsessed with the dailies (nights he passed in the library, days when not shooting, in his room since the library was not private enough for his needs). He had managed in two weeks to convert his simple bedroom, with its few pieces of childhood memorabilia on the walls, into a private hell of sorts, with equipment, cables, canisters, clothes, bottles half empty and glasses half full, strewn throughout its interior. Cast and crew were showing signs of edginess, which Analise advised him risked more than just poor performances on the set, more than just losing money in paying out wages to people who were forced to blow off the day in some roadhouse—began to risk losing the whole project before it was so much as half shot.

“I may want to remake this scene,” was what Berg explained, knowing how hopelessly perfectionist or dilettantish the statement might have made him look in her eyes. Art film, indeed—the way she left, livid was what it looked like to Berg, though he'd not so much as looked up from the gun-metal-gray moviola box when She'd been there, dressing him down. The spool holder carried this one length ofwork print back and forth, chirruping a bit, as it could have used some oil, and Berg simply spoke to himself, admitted aloud in the room that there didn't seem to be anything the matter with the scene itself. The scene was crisp, evocative, read on the luminous window of the projection machine as being, visually, even stronger than Berg had written it. He knew he could tinker with the rough cuts, change the order of things around a little, edit together spots with a rather different sense of rhythm. It wasn't a matter of editing, though. What nagged him was the sense—a sense that grew through the hours of that particular night into absolute conviction—that he had lived this thing he was looking at, lived it himself, sometime in his life; whereas, of course, he knew that he hadn't.

As obsessively focussed on the passage as he had gotten, Berg was not lacking in discipline. His colleagues' worry, while surely understandable, need not, he told himself, have gone beyond a concern that this perfectionism would blow the production budget through the roof. But when the youngish actor who was playing Dante up and quit, demanding his pay for the several days of shooting he had been in on, Berg woke up to the problems he was causing. He was the one who was supposed to be solving problems, not creating and fomenting them, and at once he was back to work.

“Where'd he go?” Berg asked Analise.

“He said it was none of my business.”

“He signed a release, though, yes?”

“Of course. Before we ran a single frame on him.”

“You pay him?”

“I told him if he wanted his money he'd have to talk to you about it.”

“Well, he didn't and I don't pay AWOLs.”

Analise thought the better of explaining to Berg that an AWOL was precisely what everyone on the film had begun to think he himself had become, including the actor whoquit. Instead she asked, “What do you want to do about recasting? You realize we're going to have to shoot that whole sequence again.”

“Hell no we're not. This problem is easy.”

Every appearance of the Dante character in the film henceforward would be played by a new actor, it didn't matter what he looked like, whether he was stout or tall, black-eyed or hazel. Grady's entire life with Dante was going to be a fantasy. That her figment of a man should change his appearance didn't much matter, as he wasn't a reality anyway. Grady and Max in fact would have no real brother, and Grady would come over the course of the film to understand that.

The seduction was to be followed with a sequence of intercuts in which the various members of the party on the beach are being interrogated by the police. This was shot indoors, in the kitchen in fact, with a vast sheet of white cloth hung as a backdrop to the action. We only see the faces of the detainees. They are sitting at the table. All the blinds in the kitchen are down, and the glass windows in the back door are covered with black construction paper. The lighting is stage left intensive, and obvious in its artifice.

We're not sure whether these people have been charged with anything or not. We begin to suspect that just as we seem to be sitting in the interrogator's seat; we wonder whether we weren't somehow involved in the surveillance that preceded the arrests the night before. We, the camera, have become some kind of scrutinizing eye. Not only do we assume the role of “voyeur,” but we now are participating in the investigation of a crime.

We offer the young woman a cigarette, and she takes it. She looks tired, and not very grateful to us for our littlekindness. No matter. We recognize her. She was the one who was the victim of the attack.

“The others,” the interrogator says, after lighting the fag for her, “claim they're innocent—every last one of them.”

“They're not.”

“They say you invited that kid, what's his name, Max, that you invited him to—”

“It's a lie.” She's awfully matter-of-fact. Maybe we ought to make a note of it. She could be in shock, or something.

“Can you tell me what you were doing there in the first place?”

“They invited me to a party. It sounded like fun. So I went.”

A pause. We see her face now, for the first time, having followed the cigarette up to her lips. We see her face is drawn. She has full lips, a prominent nose, tall forehead, dark quick eyes. She looks like Gina Marie behind the lace curtain in the famous scene from Jean Epstein's
Coeur Fidèle
, or Mona, the tragic wanderer in Agnes Varda's
Vagabond
. Berg would certainly want us to make such comparisons. She also happens to look quite a lot like Grace Brush, though of course she isn't.

“It sounded like fun, and you went.”

“I went. Big deal. There's no crime in that is there?”

“A crime may or may not have taken place as a result of your decision to go.”

This gets a rise out of her. “Hey, man, the crime was committed against me, all right?”

“The crime was allegedly committed, allegedly against you.”

“I don't get it. You're making it sound like I'm the one who did something wrong.”

“Nothing of the sort. What would you possibly be guilty of?” The interrogator has said this with such heavy irony that we, along with the young woman herself perhaps, are clearly supposed to begin to doubt the veracity of her accusation, even though we were witness to her violation ourselves.

Fade to this. Max's face against the same indistinct smoky background as the scene before. The interrogator's voice asks him, “What makes you think you could get away with something like what you've done?”

“I haven't—”

“Stow it, my friend, I don't want to hear it. All you people are the same. You think you can get away with anything that comes into your head. But you can't. You don't realize that an island is the worst place on earth to commit a crime. You can't get away.”

“I'm not trying to get away. I haven't done anything. I was just doing what the others said I was supposed to do.”

The interrogator allows a low, conventional, knowing laugh. “You say you haven't done anything and then the very next thing that comes out of your mouth is a confession.”

“That's not a confession.”

“Would you mind putting on record what it was the others told you to do, then?”

“Hey, look, I'm not interested in being Nero's fiddle here,” argues Max, suddenly rather more mature in his response than we might have expected. “If they want to go out and burn the town down they can do it without musical accompaniment.”

Another laugh. “You kids think you know it all, don't you? You spend half your lives glued to the TV, and the other half acting as if you're on it. Well, I've got all the time in the world to wait. I'm on wage, see, so it don't make a bit of difference to me whether you sing now or next year.”

Max hesitates before he says, “Yeah, right. I wonder how many cruddy cop shows I've seen where I've heard that same line.”

“Don't push me, son.”

“And that line, too.”

“That does it.”

“And that line, too!”

The interrogator's hand, a pulpy pink slab we would not want to claim for our own, now appears on the right side of the screen, as if it were our own, and the cigarette that is in it, the cigarette that has obviously been the source of all the smoke in the dark interrogation room, has been turned around so that it is held between the thumb and forefinger. Max shrinks down in his chair. As always in these kinds of situations, we find ourselves wondering, Why doesn't the kid just get up and flee? In the same way we are often spared the sight of the hapless girl after she has stumbled on the path in her failed flight from the murderer or the monster, here it is left to our imaginations what may or may not happen next to Max.