The Book of Illusions (30 page)

The Inner Life of Martin Frost
.

Why that one and not another?

Because it’s the shortest. We’ll be able to see it through to the end, and if Frieda still isn’t back when we’ve finished, we’ll go on to the next shortest one. I couldn’t think of any other way to go about it.

It’s my fault. I should have come out here a month ago. You can’t believe how stupid I feel.

Frieda’s letters weren’t very forthcoming. If I’d been in your position, I would have hesitated, too.

I couldn’t accept that Hector was alive. And then, once I did accept it, I couldn’t accept that he was dying. Those films have been sitting around for years. If I’d acted right away, I could have seen them all. I could have watched them two or three times, learned them by heart, digested them. Now we’re scrambling to watch just one. It’s absurd.

Don’t beat yourself up, David. It took me months to convince them that you should come to the ranch. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I’m the one who was slow. I’m the one who feels stupid.

Alma opened the door with another one of her keys, and the moment we stepped across the threshold and entered the building, the temperature dropped by ten degrees. The air-conditioning was on, and unless they kept it running all the time (which I doubted), that meant Alma had already come out here earlier in the morning. It seemed like an insignificant fact, but once I’d thought about it for a couple of moments, I felt an immense surge of pity for her. She had watched Frieda drive away with Hector’s body at seven or seven-thirty, and then, instead of going upstairs and waking me, she had gone over to the post-production building and turned on the air conditioner. For the next two and a half hours, she had sat in here alone, mourning Hector as the building gradually cooled off, unable to face me again until she had cried herself out. We could have spent those hours watching a movie, but she hadn’t been ready to begin, and so a part of the day had slipped through our fingers. Alma wasn’t tough. She was braver than I’d thought she was, but she wasn’t tough, and as I followed her down the chilly hallway toward the screening room, I finally understood how terrible this day was going to be for her, how terrible it had already been.

Doors to the left, doors to the right, but no time to open any of them, no time to go in and browse around the editing suite or the sound-mixing studio, no time even to ask if the equipment was still there. At the end of the corridor, we turned left, walked down another corridor with bare cinder-block walls (pale blue, I remember), and then went through a set of double doors into the little theater. There were three rows of cushioned chairs with fold-up seats—approximately eight to ten per row—and a slight downward incline to the floor. The screen was bolted to the wall, with no stage or curtain in front of it, a rectangle of opaque white plastic with tiny perforations and a glossy oxide sheen. Behind us was the projection booth, jutting out from the back wall. The lights were on in there, and when I turned around and looked up, the first thing I noticed was that there were two projectors—and that each one was loaded with a reel of film.

Except for a few dates and numbers, Alma didn’t tell me much about the movie.
The Inner Life of Martin Frost
was the fourth film Hector had made at the ranch, she said, and after completion of photography in March 1946, he had worked on it for another five months before unveiling the final version at a private screening on August twelfth. The running time was forty-one minutes. As with all of Hector’s films, it had been shot in black-and-white, but
Martin
Frost
was somewhat different from the others in that it could be described as a comedy (or a film with comic elements in it) and therefore was the only one of his late works with any connection to the slapstick two-reelers of the twenties. She had chosen it because of its length, she said, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a good place to begin. Her mother had played her first role for Hector in this film, and if it wasn’t the most ambitious work they did together, it was probably the most charming. Alma looked away for a moment. Then, after drawing in a deep breath, she turned back to me and added: Faye was so alive then, so vivid. I never get tired of watching her.

I waited for her to go on, but that was the only comment she made, the only remark that came close to offering a subjective opinion. After another short silence, she opened the picnic basket and pulled out a notebook and a ballpoint pen—which was equipped with a flashlight for writing in the dark. Just in case you want to jot something down, she said. As I took the objects from her, she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek—a little peck, a schoolgirl’s kiss—and then turned and headed for the door. Twenty seconds later, I heard a tapping sound. I looked up, and there she was again, waving at me from the glassed-in projection booth. I waved back—perhaps I even blew her a kiss—and then, just as I was installing myself in the middle seat of the front row, Alma dimmed the lights. She didn’t come down again until the film was over.

I
t took me a while to settle into it, to figure out what was going on. The action was filmed with such deadpan realism, such scrupulous attention to the particulars of everyday life, that I failed to perceive the magic embedded in the heart of the story. The movie began like any other love comedy, and for the first twelve or fifteen minutes Hector stuck to the time-worn conventions of the genre: the accidental meeting between the man and the woman, the misunderstanding that pushes them apart, the sudden turnaround and explosion of desire, the plunge into delirium, the emergence of difficulties, the grappling with doubt and the overcoming of doubt—all of which would lead (or so I thought) to a triumphant resolution. But then, about a third of the way into the narrative, I understood that I had it wrong. In spite of appearances, the setting of the film was not Tierra del Sueño or the grounds of the Blue Stone Ranch. It was the inside of a man’s head—and the woman who had walked into that head was not a real woman. She was a spirit, a figure born of the man’s imagination, an ephemeral being sent to become his muse.

If the film had been shot anywhere else, I might not have been so slow to catch on. The immediacy of the landscape disconcerted me, and for the first couple of minutes I had to struggle against the impression that I was watching some kind of elaborate, highly skilled home movie. The house in the film was Hector and Frieda’s house; the garden was their garden; the road was their road. Even Hector’s trees were there—looking younger and scrawnier than they were now, perhaps, but still, they were the same trees I had passed on my way to the post-production building not ten minutes earlier. There was the bedroom I had slept in the night before, the rock on which I had seen the butterfly land, the kitchen table that Frieda had stood up from to answer the phone. Until the film began to play out on the screen in front of me, all those things had been real. Now, in the black-and-white images of Charlie Grund’s camera, they had been turned into the elements of a fictional world. I was supposed to read them as shadows, but my mind was slow to make the adjustment. Again and again, I saw them as they were, not as they were meant to be.

The credits came on in silence, with no music playing in the background, no auditory signals to prepare the viewer for what was to come. A progression of white-on-black cards announced the salient facts. The Inner Life of Martin Frost. Story and Direction: Hector Spelling. Cast: Norbert Steinhaus and Faye Morrison. Camera: C. P. Grund. Sets and Costumes: Frieda Spelling. The name Steinhaus meant nothing to me, and when the actor appeared on-screen a few moments later, I felt certain that I had never seen him before. He was a tall, lanky fellow in his mid-thirties with sharp, observant eyes and slightly thinning hair. Not especially handsome or heroic, but sympathetic, human, with enough going on in his face to suggest a certain activity of mind. I felt comfortable watching him and didn’t resist believing in his performance, but it was harder for me to do that with Alma’s mother. Not because she wasn’t a good actress, and not because I felt let down (she was lovely to look at, excellent in her role), but simply because she was Alma’s mother. No doubt that added to the dislocation and confusion I experienced at the start of the film. There was Alma’s mother—but Alma’s mother young, fifteen years younger than Alma was now—and I couldn’t help looking for signs of her daughter in her, for traces of resemblance between them. Faye Morrison was darker and taller than Alma, undeniably more beautiful than Alma, but their bodies had a similar shape, and the look in their eyes, the tilt of their heads, and the tone in their voices bore similarities as well. I don’t mean to imply that they were the same, but there were enough parallels, enough genetic echoes for me to imagine that I was watching Alma without the birthmark, Alma before I had met her, Alma as a girl of twenty-two or twenty-three—living through her mother in some alternate version of her own life.

The film begins with a slow, methodical tracking shot through the interior of the house. The camera skims along the walls, floats above the furniture in the living room, and eventually comes to a stop in front of the door.
The house was empty
, an offscreen voice tells us, and a moment later the door opens and in steps Martin Frost, carrying a suitcase in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other. As he kicks the door shut behind him, the voice-over narration continues.
I had just spent three
years writing a novel, and I was feeling tired, in need of a rest.
When the Spellings decided to go to Mexico for the winter, they
offered me the use of their place. Hector and Frieda were close
friends, and they both knew how much the book had taken out
of me. I figured that a couple of weeks in the desert might do
me some good, and so one morning I climbed into my car and
drove from San Francisco to Tierra del Sueño. I had no plans.
All I wanted was to be there and do nothing, to live the life of
a stone
.

As we listen to Martin’s narration, we see him wandering around in various parts of the house. He carries the groceries into the kitchen, but the moment the bag touches the counter, the scene cuts to the living room, where we find him inspecting the books on the shelves. As his hand reaches for one of the books, we jump upstairs to the bedroom, where Martin is opening and closing the drawers of the bureau, putting away his things. A drawer bangs shut, and an instant later he is sitting on the bed, testing the bounce of the mattress. It is a jagged, efficiently orchestrated montage, combining close and medium shots in a succession of slightly off-kilter angles, varied tempos, and small visual surprises. Normally, one would expect music to be playing under such a sequence, but Hector dispenses with instruments in favor of natural sound: the creaking bedsprings, Martin’s footsteps on the tile floor, the rustling of the paper bag. The camera fixes on the hands of a clock, and as we listen to the last words of the opening monologue (
All I
wanted was to be there and do nothing, to live the life of a stone
), the image begins to blur. Silence follows. For a beat or two, it is as if everything has stopped—the voice, the sounds, the images—and then, very abruptly, the scene shifts to the outdoors. Martin is walking in the garden. A long shot is followed by a close shot; Martin’s face, and then a languid perusal of the things around him: trees and scrub, sky, a crow settling onto the branch of a cottonwood. When the camera finds him again, Martin is crouching down to observe a procession of ants. We hear the wind rush through the trees—a prolonged sibilance, roaring like the sound of surf. Martin looks up, shielding his eyes from the sun, and again we cut away from him to another part of the landscape: a rock with a lizard crawling over it. The camera tilts up an inch or two, and at the top of the frame we see a cloud floating past the rock.
But what did
I know?
Martin says.
A few hours of silence, a few gulps of desert
air, and all of a sudden an idea for a story was turning around
in my head. That’s how it always seems to work with stories
.
One minute there’s nothing. And the next minute it’s there
,
already sitting inside you
.

The camera pans from a close-up of Martin’s face to a wide shot of the trees. The wind is blowing again, and as the leaves and branches tremble under the assault, the sound amplifies into a pulsing, breathlike wave of percussiveness, an airborne clamor of sighs. The shot lasts three or four seconds longer than we think it will. It has a strangely ethereal effect, but just when we are about to ask ourselves what this curious emphasis could signify, we are thrown back into the house. It is a harsh, sudden transition. Martin is sitting at a desk in one of the upstairs rooms, pounding away at a typewriter. We listen to the clatter of the keys, watch him work on his story from a variety of angles and distances.
It wasn’t going to be long, he says
.
Twenty-five or thirty pages, forty at the most. I didn’t know how
much time I would need to write it, but I decided to stay in the
 
house until it was finished. That was the new plan. I would write
the story, and I wouldn’t leave until it was finished
.

The picture fades to black. When the action resumes, it is morning. A tight shot of Martin’s face shows him to be asleep, his head resting on a pillow. Sunlight pours through the slatted shutters, and as we watch him open his eyes and struggle to wake up, the camera pulls back to reveal something that cannot be true, that defies the laws of common sense. Martin has not spent the night alone. There is a woman in bed with him, and as the camera continues dollying back into the room, we see that she is asleep under the covers, curled up on her side and turned toward Martin—her left arm flung casually across his chest, her long dark hair spilling out over the adjacent pillow. As Martin gradually emerges from his torpor, he notices the bare arm lying across his chest, then realizes that the arm is attached to a body, and then sits up straight in bed, looking like someone who’s just been given an electric shock.