A Simple Scale

by David Llewellyn

  “Josef is such a sweetie,” says Tatiana, pausing to stir two lumps of sugar into her tea. “So loyal. I’ll have him write you out a cheque for… shall we say five hundred roubles?”

  He bites his lip. Best not show any emotion. He won’t give her the satisfaction. There’s a cynicism behind her offer, and yet still it moves him almost to tears.

  “Splendid,” says Tatiana. “And please don’t think of it as a loan. It’s a gift, from a dear friend.”

  For a moment, her mask appears to slip; the gap between one performance and the next. Her face becomes expressionless, her eyebrows drop back into place and the lines become less pronounced. Behind her eyes, a flicker of something almost like sympathy or sorrow. For once, he can’t quite read her. If something is communicated by this look, it’s a chime of regret that seems to echo around the room long after they move on to other topics of conversation; Tatiana regaling him with the latest news about one of the sujets, or the recent scandal involving the répétiteur’s wife and a certain high-ranking member of the party.

  “Please,” she says, gesturing to the plate. “Help yourself to the sweets. They’re delicious. From Eliseev. I mustn’t eat too many of them myself. They’re terrible for the figure.”

  When Josef has cleared away the tea tray, Tatiana announces that she must begin dressing for the evening. She’s having dinner with some “Moscow men” – generals, commissars and the like – at the Astoria.

  “Wasn’t that where we had the party for your ballet?”

  Sergey nods.

  “Funny… I hardly saw you that night.”

  Sergey thanks her, and Josef shows him out, all the way to the elevators, giving him his cheque just as the elevator doors open with a single chime.

  “I shan’t imagine we’ll be seeing you for a while, monsieur,” he says, folding the cheque and sliding it into Sergey’s shirt pocket. “Shall we?”

  Chapter 14:

  LOS ANGELES, OCTOBER 1950

  He’s sitting across the table before you even notice him enter the canteen. Flannel suit. Blue tie. Smiling as if he brings glad tidings, though there’s little chance of that. Capitol Pictures’ Head of Security. Roy Carmichael.

  “Mind if I…?” he says, as if he hadn’t already sat down.

  “Not at all.”

  He points to your lunch.

  “What’s that?”

  “Meatloaf.”

  “Any good?”

  “Same as usual.”

  “I never ate it before. Not here, anyhow.”

  “Friday is meatloaf day.”

  “Mrs Carmichael always makes my lunch. Has done ever since we was newlyweds. Except when I was in Europe. You serve during the war?”

  You shake your head.

  “Had a hunch you didn’t. Objector?”

  “4F.”

  “Well. Can’t be helped, I guess. But like I was saying… Mrs Carmichael makes my lunch. The only day I don’t like is Thursday. Thursday is tuna sandwich day, and I don’t like canned tuna. I just don’t have the heart to tell her.”

  You wait a second to make sure he’s finished and you ask him what he wants.

  “I was just wondering,” says Carmichael, “if you could offer me some information. Illumination.”

  “Illumination?”

  “Sure. You see, a little birdy tells me you’re conducting a concert, sometime next year.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Little birdy. But they said you was conducting a concert of Ronald Bernard’s music in New York. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. Now, I won’t bother asking if you was aware that Mr Bernard’s name appeared on the Red Channels list. I know you was, because I told you. So I guess, if I have a question it’s this: Why are you conducting a concert of Ronald Bernard’s music?”

  “Mr Carmichael. As I told you back… whenever it was we had our meeting… Mr Bernard and I were friends. I studied under him. I know his music very well. His widow asked if I could conduct the concert, and I said yes.”

  “Interesting. Interesting. You see, I asked around and somebody told me you and Mr Bernard lived together, in New York.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Again. Little Birdy. Different birdy this time, but… y’know. Anyway. They said you had an apartment overlooking Central Park. Sounded impressive.”

  “Your point being…?”

  “Were Mr and Mrs Bernard divorced at that time?”

  “You should find a more well-informed birdy. They never got divorced.”

  “But she didn’t live in the apartment with you?”

  “No, she did not.”

  “And how many bedrooms were there, in this apartment?”

  “Three.”

  “A three bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park? Jeez. That must have cost a few bucks. Were you sharing the rent?”

  “Mr Bernard owned the place.”

  “I see. But it’s funny, because when I mentioned Mr Bernard to you the first time, you said you studied under him at Juilliard, that you were friends, but you didn’t mention anything about living with him.”

  “Why is that funny?”

  “I don’t mean funny ‘ha-ha’. I mean funny curious.”

  “Why is it curious?”

  “How long did you and Mr Bernard live in that apartment?”

  “Six years.”

  “Six years? Six years you lived with Mr Bernard and you didn’t mention it the last time we spoke? That’s… that’s curious.”

  “Where is this leading, Mr Carmichael?”

  Carmichael lowers his voice almost to a whisper. The smile doesn’t fade.

  “Mr Conrad. As you know, it is my job to protect this company. Most of the time that involves making sure no-one breaks in, no-one steals nothing, that the press can’t take unflattering pictures of Mona Freeman. That kind of thing. But it also means protecting the studio’s reputation. Now, to do that, I must be the Argus of Capitol Pictures. I got a hundred eyes. I know everything. Which actress had a backstreet abortion. Which actor is liaising with which busboy from the Cocoanut Grove. Keep secrets from your friends and family, by all means, but while you are an employee of Capitol Pictures you do not keep them from me. A secret kept from me is, well… it’s like the little lump you keep hidden from your doctor. You’re embarrassed and a little scared, so you hide it from him, and then it kills you stone dead. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Crystal.”

  “Good. That’s good. Well, I’ll leave you to get on with your meatloaf. Can’t say I’d swap it for one of Mrs Carmichael’s sandwiches. Unless it was a Thursday, you know. Think on what we spoke about, Mr Conrad. I’ll see you around.”

  He goes, taking your appetite with him, and you abandon your lunch half-eaten. You go back to Room 01B. Angela is standing over an open score, humming a melody, something bright and cheerful, conducting an invisible orchestra with a pencil. She keeps humming and conducting long after you enter. An exasperated sigh. She drops the pencil onto her desk.

  “Sorry, I knew I couldn’t work this out in my head, and all the meat lockers are taken. So I’m afraid you’re stuck with my humming.”

  “It’s fine,” you tell her. “I like your humming.”

  Angela smiles, holding your gaze a moment before sitting down and scribbling some notes. Those first few months of working with her, she’d fill every silence with chatter. Lately, when neither of you has anything to say she’ll just smile, all doe-eyed. You can’t pretend you haven’t noticed, and what’s more, she knows you have.

  **

  Again, the canyon road. It’s late, but the last traces of sunlight are still fading over the ridge. You see this road as the spring launcher of a pinball machine, the city its vast playfield. Each location you might go to is another paddle, sending you off across the city at night. Pershing Square, or Griffith Park? Richfield gas station or another bar or club on the Sunset Strip
?

  Oh, city of possibilities! Even at this late hour, the night air is still desert hot with no sign of cooling, and rich with the scent of eucalyptus.

  Half a mile down the road, a woman is ambling along the roadside. Barefoot and wearing a nightgown. Looks like a ghost. You slow to a crawl but you already know who it is.

  “Mary?”

  She looks at you askance, as if you’re a perfect stranger.

  “Mary? Are you okay?”

  She scowls and shakes her head. She won’t be answering any of your damn questions. She carries on walking.

  “Mary.”

  She looks terrible. You can’t remember the last time you saw her, but she looks as if she hasn’t eaten anything or bathed or brushed her hair in weeks. You ease off the brake and allow the car to roll at her speed.

  “What’re you doing out here? It’s late.”

  “I need to get to Goose Creek,” she says. “Momma needs twine.”

  “What’re you talking about? Mary. Do you want me to drive you home?”

  “U-huh. Ain’t s’pposed to talk to strangers. Gotta get to Goose Creek.”

  “Mary, please. It’s late. Will you get in the car?”

  She keeps walking, and when she’s a couple of yards ahead of you she starts to sing.

  “In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,

  There’s a land that’s fair and bright;

  Where the hand-outs grow on bushes,

  And you sleep out every night.”

  You let go of the brake again and drive on, pulling up in front of her and blocking her path. You’re out of the car before she has a chance to walk around it. Around each eye there are heavy smudges of eye shadow. Her hair is like straw. Her skin is just hanging off her.

  “C’mon, Mary.”

  You place an arm around her shoulders and guide her gently towards the car. She’s still singing.

  Where the boxcars all are empty,

  And the sun shines every day.

  And the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees,

  The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings

  In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

  You ease her into the passenger seat. She isn’t injured, she isn’t bleeding. She’s damaged, but in ways you can’t possibly fathom. You have to do something. You fumble with the buckle of her seat belt and when she’s safely strapped in you get behind the wheel and keep driving down the canyon.

  At Cedars of Lebanon they give Mary a shot of sedative, and you’re quizzed by a doctor while a Negro orderly pushes Mary through into a private room.

  The doctor asks how well you know her, and if she’s displayed any symptoms of mental disorder in the past. Mental disorder. Like an unkempt room. Drawers open and books and papers scattered everywhere. You tell him you’re not sure, you don’t think so. She’s been under a lot of stress lately. She was being investigated. He seems to understand exactly what this means.

  “That would suggest some kind of nervous breakdown,” he says. “You were right to bring her in. This isn’t the kind of thing that’ll go away with tea and sympathy, I’m afraid. Does she have any family at all?”

  “No family. Her husband died. They never had any kids.”

  “And does she work?”

  “She’s an actress. Was an actress. At Warner.”

  “I thought the name sounded familiar. Say, wasn’t she in Playboy of Paris?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sure that was her. Shucks. My wife loves that movie.”

  **

  This isn’t the fleapit on Broadway; you wouldn’t dream of taking Angela to a place like that. Besides, the only reason you ever go there is its proximity to Pershing Square. No, this is one of the grand old oriental theatres that sprang up in the 1920s, made to look like some Far Eastern palace. Gold leaf – or at the very least, gold paint – and murals everywhere.

  You wait for the movie to begin. The rustle of popcorn bags. Silhouettes edging their way along each row. Onscreen, a newsreel. Soldiers scrambling across craggy landscapes, between the charred remains of trees. Two soldiers in a machine gun nest; one firing the gun, the other feeding it with ammunition.

  “In Korea, United Nations troops push on in their cautious advance against the communists; an advance whose purpose General Ridgeway states is not to seize ground but to wipe out the enemy!”

  Angela whispers, “You think this could get worse?”

  “I don’t think so,” you whisper back. “Something like this… it’s just sabre-rattling. Us and the Chinese using this tiny little place to prove a point.”

  “What point could they possibly prove?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  After the movie you head to a diner across the way, and drink milkshakes at a table facing out onto the corner of Hollywood and Orange. You’re unsure about the device of a dead narrator; Angie thinks that was the best thing in the whole movie. She thinks Gloria Swanson was playing it too broadly. You wish she could have met Mary.

  “That’s the whole point of the character,” you tell her. “What is it she says? ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’”

  “Okay. That line was great. I’ll give you that.”

  You exchange a smile. Elsewhere in the diner, a young couple hold hands across the table as they share one towering milkshake, and an older couple, out-of-towners by the look of them, eat stacked pancakes without speaking. Out on Orange, two police officers are helping a hobo into the back of a police van. If you look at Angie again, you know she’ll still be smiling at you, that she won’t have taken her eyes off you. She wants you to look at her.

  **

  The house never felt this empty before. Each sound is amplified. Its rooms seem bigger. Maybe you should go back. Go east. LA bores you. You miss the seasons. Even the occasional tremor doesn’t spice things up enough to make this place interesting. You’d swap the Village for West Hollywood any day. Wouldn’t you?

  Easy to get nostalgic, now it’s over a year since you were in New York. Those final months feel fuzzier, less distinct. Easy to forget what it was really like when Ron was ill, when he was dying, and in the days and weeks after he was gone. Naïve to think you’d be allowed any part in all that; the pageant of a Great Man’s death. Margaret Bernard was centre stage: The Widow. At the funeral she was seated with Ron’s sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, at the front of the church, while you sat three rows back, with his colleagues from Juilliard.

  ‘Friend’ was a euphemism you could just about bear, but when someone referred to you as Ron’s ‘amanuensis’ you thought you might spit blood.

  LA made sense. Copland was writing scores. Stravinsky was living here. Even Schoenberg – of all people – was teaching at UCLA. And then there was Bernstein, the wunderkind, hot off the success of On the Town, and blessed with matinee idol good looks. Didn’t you hear a rumour they once asked him to screen test for a picture?

  Bernstein. If you were to develop a malignant tumour and give it a name, a personality, you would call it Leonard Bernstein. The Harvard piano prodigy, when you were still starting out at Juilliard. Comparisons were made. You both played piano, both wanted to conduct. And Bernstein worked hard to play the Street Kid Made Good. Never mind that everyone knew the truth: His father was a businessman who bought his son his own radio show (a radio show!) when he was still in his teens. Went to the same Boston school as half the founding fathers. Got himself a classical education. Was studying at fucking Harvard.

  Bernstein is the other motorist you look at, sideways, from the driver’s seat of your own career; always watchful of how fast he’s going, how nimbly he manoeuvres from lane to lane. Same age as you – several months younger, in fact – but with two symphonies, a handful of ballets and a Broadway show under his belt; not to mention the concerts he’s conducted in New York, Boston, Cincinnati and London… London!

  You haven’t spoken to your parents in years, but it’s a good thing they never knew much
about music. Imagine the comparisons they would make.

  “That Bernstein boy was on the radio again. They say a second symphony he’s written.”

  But if Bernstein (and Copland, and Stravinsky) were working either in or with Hollywood it was possible to come here and retain some integrity. And okay, in doing so you might have to make sacrifices, play by their rules, but if you do that, the world is yours. At least, that’s how it was sold to you. But you’ve been here over a year, and have nothing to show for it except an empty house.

  What will it take to make this work?

  Chapter 15:

  LENINGRAD, JULY 1938

  The afternoon is sultry, the tram’s windows ochre with the summer dust. Beneath an angry sky, Leningrad waits for purifying thunderstorms and cleansing rain. Sergey steps off near the Alexander Garden and walks the rest of his journey to the building where Vikor Remizov lives. He’s waiting for Sergey by the elevator.

  “So good to see you, comrade. This way.”

  He shows Sergey to his apartment, a few rooms facing out over a busy junction. It’s smaller than his last place, which was cavernous, almost extravagant. The Union Secretary has lived here since his divorce, the causes of which remain mysterious. Sergey knows only that Anya Remizova was allowed to remain, while Viktor Remizov moved here.

  Remizov was, at one time, a composer. Studied piano and composition with Yavorsky. He wrote a few chamber pieces that still get played from time to time, but by thirty he’d already begun manoeuvring his way through the union, his career gathering momentum each time a senior name was scratched off an office door.

  He’s forty-two now, though if he didn’t already know this Sergey might struggle to pinpoint his age. Bald, what’s left of his hair dyed the colour of Indian ink. Paunchy, but with a certain imposing heft, like a retired boxer.

  “Would you care for a drink?” Remizov asks. “It’s such a hot day. Iced tea, perhaps?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  He wants this over as quickly as possible.

  “Are you sure?” says Remizov. “A glass of water?”

  Sergey’s mouth is suddenly very dry.