The Unfinished World (30 page)

And so they fall: Inge hard, like a character in a book; Set into something like a spell, a way of being at least caught if not quite in love. And so the trail of their time together grows.

Ticket stubs: Fairbanks' latest picture,
The Thief of Baghdad
. Symphony concerts. Cedric's last film, finally opening without him.

Photographs: Fooling around in the studio's studio after hours, Set in the lens, leaning into the shadow. Fuzzy and indistinct, all light and dark—no hard edges.

Souvenirs: playbills and commissary receipts and napkins filled with his sketches and her doodles and gossip about the guy on the corner stool, the starlet sipping coffee under red raw eyes.

Lists: What he should do about Lana. What she should say to Valentino if she photographs him. Their favorite songs. Their favorite pictures. Where they'd live if they could live anywhere. (Tahiti, L.A., Paris, Kenya. Long Island does not make the list.)
Eventually, Set's earliest memories. Eventually, Inge's memories of Albert. Eventually, their first memories of each other.

Doubts: his, always his. She deserves more than a ghost, more than a half-love. She has no doubts, no doubt a failing too, but possibly a more romantic one. She thinks he might be a little bit unstable, but really, who isn't?

The pull of home: he does not have the benefit of fire, the past torched clean. She is propelled, but he is compelled; he knows he can only stay so long outside the family lines. The only question is, will she come with him when it's time to go? Or maybe also: does he want her to? Or maybe, finally: would it help him to find what's missing?

Set is sitting on a porch stoop on the back lot, flicking cigarette ashes at anyone who gets too close. He is the angriest Inge has ever seen him. Usually he's so implacable. Sometimes so much so that she wants to slap him just to leave a mark on that perfect face. But today that face is red, that smooth brow scrunched. I hate it, Set says. I hate being disappointed by people. I can't think of anything that's worse. His set designer has fled to Mexico with a pregnant sixteen-year-old ingenue. It's caused a smallish scandal and a giant hole in Set's production schedule. And he misses Cedric rather more dreadfully than he thought he would. He has taken very personally the thumb's-width stack of letters stamped “Return to Sender,” the only break in his brother's long silence.

Inge laughs and watches the sun climb down from the sky, a glowing yolk suspended. She lifts her face to catch the last of the rays, and Set watches her with appreciation, momentarily distracted. In these last few months they've come to know each
other so well, yet there is still so much mystery to sift through. They meet for dinner almost every night at the diner shaped like a hat. Lana doesn't know because she doesn't dine until at least ten. Or sometimes at all, depending on how much she's had to drink.

That's why I try to find out ahead of time, Inge says.

Find out what? Set pulls out his cigarettes, lights another, offers one to Inge. She refuses with a face. It's become a ritual already.

Find out if people are going to disappoint you, says Inge. You can tell, usually. So then you know, and you get it out of the way. Then you won't be disappointed later.

Am I the kind of person who disappoints? asks Set.

Inge closes her eyes, considers the question. I don't know, she says. With you, it's hard to say. I suppose, yes, because of what I want from you, she says, and sighs.

What do you want from me? he asks.

She smiles, grabs him by the lapels, and hauls him up and into the plywood doorway to nowhere. She is surprisingly strong.

What are you—?

Shhh, she says. Then she pulls up her skirt and puts his hand on her bare thigh, on the skin above where her stockings stop. He blinks, face locked, and she holds her breath, ready to let him have her right there in the doorway if he wants to, this beautiful, damaged boy. She wants so desperately to make him whole.

What Set likes best about Inge is how utterly human she is. In high heat she breaks out in small blisters across her back and chest, and no matter how she pins her hair it's all escaped by midday. She clears her throat when she grows bored, and loathes opera, and her
front tooth is chipped from a game of blindman's bluff gone wrong when she was ten. She fidgets constantly and eats too quickly, like a starving person, and she drinks too much, and the colors she loves to wear don't suit her at all. She has a slight lisp and dances badly and calls him
dahling
only half in jest and one eye is slightly larger than the other and her toes are bulbous and she mispronounces words with great authority and she's far too fond of garlic and she laughs too loud and she doesn't know how to talk about so many things, like money. She would be, he admits, so easy to make love to, to push up against, to nuzzle and grab at and rub and tickle and cradle and with so much flesh, so much white and pink flesh to take by the armful, the legful, the bellyful.

But of course he can't do anything of the sort. Not just because of Lana. Because of his hollow place—what he knows, now, must be his inability to love. He pulls back, straightens his shirt, breathes. You know I can't, he says.

You see, she says, and sighs. Disappointing.

Photograph: Close-up of a neon sign, a pair of godly hands in prayer. The sign is smeared against the night sky like a garish constellation
.

Inside the tent, a preacher in a spotless linen suit is singing,
Praise, praise Him, praise to the Lord
. The bleachers are crowded with people waving paper programs in front of sweating bodies and waiting to be saved. Set finds them creepy, dough-faced and blank. Inge winks at him, asks, Don't you want to be saved, my son?

I don't think I can be, he says, and he means it. She frowns and tries to smooth her frizzy hair, with the usual failure. They thought it would be funny, sneaking off to the revival. But now they're both reminded of the thing Set lacks. He's told her about the bear, about the way he's sure he died and didn't quite come all the way back. He's told her about everything, almost. He's not sure what he's doing here with Inge, why he's let her into his life. I think I died when I was small, he tells her. I think I'm stuck in two worlds now.

Like Tam Lin, she says, smiling. The Queen of the Faeries has your soul.

Who's Tam Lin? he asks.

Just a very old story, love, about a boy who belongs to two places, two women. Never mind, she says, I'll save you. How
do
I save you, anyway? She says it as a joke, but they both understand, instantly, that she will do it, will do anything he asks. He may not be dead but it's clear he's lost, and Inge is haplessly in love with him, and suddenly the revival doesn't seem so strange after all. Miracles for sale. All these people sweating through their hope, pinning the impossible on a suave old man in a cheap suit, on a plywood stage and their Sunday best and the wild dream that their lives could be different if the neon hand of god was pointing down at them.

You make everything look so easy, love, says Inge. That's a very attractive thing. Life is struggle enough—people want to admire someone who seems to be doing it better than the rest of us. Coming through it swimmingly.

Set didn't want to say so, but swimming was the wrong word; it was more floating, really. He floated along, caught in the wake
of his family's vast ship. Wherever they sailed, he drifted behind, content to splash about in their eddies, then bobbing aimlessly on his own in California until Lana towed him one way and then Inge another. No wonder it looked easy. He had no soul to anchor him. He was air, was water, was as elemental as the wind. He was something much darker, too. His hollow was a great chest pain, and he suffered sometimes from world-blackening headaches. He was unable to pin down his melancholy. He half-wished he'd stayed dead after the bear. At least he would be worth something, weigh something. Bones and earth. At least he would belong to himself.

I'll save you, said Inge. I'll find a way. We'll get away from here, go to Kenya. We'll film a lion pride, live in a house by the lake there. I'll build it for you with my own two hands. Your Faerie Queen will never find you, and she kissed him, threw her ridiculous little arms around him, and he found himself kissing her back and he didn't know why but he kept on kissing her—
Praise the lord
—and she tasted like strawberries and yes, honey, manna from heaven—
Praise the lord
,
praise the lord of heaven above
—and Lana would set fire to his bed if she knew—
Praise and glory to the highest
—and he wondered, wildly, if maybe she actually could save him, impossible Inge. He wanted so much to let her try.

Dearest Unbending Hannah
,

There are no anchor points here in Hollywood. I do not understand why we try to describe this fixed place, this telescoped speck in the universe—why we try to drape this world in words, as if that could hold or encompass it. I suppose we must try because how else to say what we long for? And that is perhaps
what is hardest of all: to be full of such longing—for stone, for onions, for soap, for dawn, for familiar skies, for the dreams of others. Don't you yearn, most desperately, to know if other people's dreams resemble yours? I dream sometimes of an ash, an oak, and a hawthorn, circling a bright green patch of overgrown grass. The green is brilliant, dazzling, like emeralds, yet no sun shines—the light comes from within. What does this mean? Is it something I saw in childhood? Is it some vision sent by the daoine sídhe? A secret mound of the faerie folk?