Night for Day

by Patrick Flanery

  INT. URSULA’S APARTMENT - NIGHT

  Orph, exhausted, opens the door of Ursula’s Wilshire apartment. He pours himself two fingers of bourbon and knocks it back like it’s lemonade – a little bee sting in the throat but not enough to slow him down.

  He pours another, then opens the curtains and pulls up the venetian blinds to look out on the lights of the city against its black patent sky.

  ORPH (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  Even still, I couldn’t help wondering where Ursula was, if she was at the bottom of that lake or here, lost in these streets. There was nothing I could do that night but hope she was alive, and if she wasn’t, hope that wherever she might be it wasn’t too hot.

  INT. URSULA’S APARTMENT – NEXT MORNING

  Orph wakes on the couch, the bottle of bourbon more than half empty on the floor. He reaches for the phone.

  ORPH

  Operator? Get me the Fresno County Sheriff’s department. ... Hello, Sheriff? It’s Corporal Patterson, I...

  SHERIFF (O.S.)

  I’m sorry, Corporal, but there’s no trace of your wife.

  ORPH

  But did you – ?

  SHERIFF (O.S.)

  Yes, we dredged the lake again.

  ORPH

  And in the woods? No sign of her anywhere?

  SHERIFF (O.S.)

  If you still want to file a missing person’s report then I’ll go ahead and do it, but frankly, it’s not the first time I’ve seen this. Fella comes back from the war and the wife’s moved on. It’s a tough steak but chew on this: she’s got another beau. Either find her and fight for the dame or quit while you can.

  Orph slams down the phone, catches up a framed photograph of Ursula, and smashes it against the corner of the table. The glass shatters, but the photo remains intact, unblemished.

  A knock at the door pulls Orph out of himself. He places the portrait with its broken glass back on the table and goes to answer. Faye is standing in the hallway, as glamorous in her hat and suit as Ursula was in the photo.

  FAYE

  You look like you’ve been to the bottom of the river and forgot to hold your breath.

  ORPH

  Want a drink?

  FAYE

  It’s a little early, Corporal, even for me, but I can make you something that’ll put the dog back in its kennel. Where’s the kitchen?

  ORPH

  Haven’t you been here before?

  FAYE

  Ursula only just – I mean she wasn’t here very long. I didn’t have a chance to see it.

  ORPH

  Through there.

  He points to a hallway off the living room and his eyes follow her, checking what he’s just seen against the photograph on the end table. Carbon copies of each other, so uncanny he has to shake his head.

  ORPH (CONT’D)

  Not sure you’ll find much. Ursula seemed to live on air and I haven’t had a minute to get in anything else but booze.

  FAYE (O.S.)

  (brightly)

  We’ve got eggs, bread, tomato juice, and if you bring the vodka and Worcester sauce I’ll set you upright so the two of us can hit the streets.

  INT. URSULA’S KITCHEN - DAY

  Orph sits at the table eating a plate of eggs and toast and drinking an extra-large Bloody Mary swirled with a celery stick.

  FAYE

  Ursula and I weren’t speaking much in the last few weeks. I don’t know what was going on. Some problem she wouldn’t tell me about. She knew she could come to me but it was like we were strangers for the first time in our lives. I really felt she was keeping something from me, Orph.

  ORPH

  Was she in trouble?

  FAYE

  (hesitating)

  I wish I knew. She’d become so mysterious. Every time I asked what was wrong she’d almost bite my head off. She wasn’t the Ursula I knew. It was as though she’d been replaced by somebody else.

  ~

  Internal Memo

  April 4, 1950

  To: John Marsh and Desmond Frank

  CC: Leo Krug

  From: Porter Cherry

  Gentlemen, have you seen yesterday’s Times? I refer to the case of the gentleman who disappeared from his boat off Catalina, and who, as you may remember, was convicted of treason, had his American citizenship revoked, and was sentenced to prison for aiding a Nazi fugitive.

  I do not suggest that there is any serious similarity between the boat disappearance in SHE TURNED AWAY and this recent affair, but I do think that, given the circumstances and the importance of German markets (you will remember that the apparent suicide was a German national) we consider eliminating any unintentional suggestion that the film is a commentary on such disappearances that might be misinterpreted as supporting the vigilante or extrajudicial punishment of America’s former enemies, or of appearing to take undue pleasure in their demise. I would appreciate your consideration of this matter.

  Also, it has come to my attention that you have not yet corrected two points in particular that Mr. Breen has identified as potentially standing in the way of approval. I must insist that you eliminate any and all suggestion, however arcane, that Ursula Patterson is a prostitute, or that her Wilshire Boulevard apartment is somehow connected to the taking or distribution of narcotics. A great many people no doubt will see nothing sinister in your underworld slang, but those who do recognize it will, as Mr. Breen has rightly noted, find nothing but encouragement and glamorization of that particularly odious lifestyle.

  Yours truly,

  Porter Cherry

  Internal Memo

  April 5, 1950

  To: Porter Cherry

  CC: Leo Krug

  From: John Marsh and Desmond Frank

  Porter –

  We have taken into consideration your concerns. We find them unwarranted and are not minded to make any further alteration to a script that has already had more than its share of amendment, emendation, and modification, at the expense of narrative coherence and character plausibility, which we are still, in this very late stage, trying to correct while already in the middle of production. Only if Breen himself insists on a change in relation to the boat disappearance – which as you no doubt remember has already been filmed on location at considerable expense – are we prepared to consider further adaptation. As for the language about whores and junk, that can always be fixed in the rerecording process once shooting has finished.

  Sincerely,

  John and Desmond

  3

  From my bed I can look across the piazza to the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, its modest façade such an unlikely mask for the splendors of the Brancacci Chapel. In the fresco depicting the payment of the tribute money, Masaccio’s portrait of the Apostle John with his bronze skin, soft curls of golden hair, and penetrating whiteness of the eyes, reminds me of you in your youth, Myles. A trembling old man, I go there often to stare at that image, remembering the way you used to gaze at me with a reverence and adoration I hope I deserved. In looking at that portrait, I imagine the possibility that you are aware of me looking now, that the painting opens a portal through which we can regard each other as we were when still young.

  Outside, a group of schoolboys is shouting as they cross the piazza on their way to the Liceo Niccolò Machiavelli a few streets away. I cannot help being amused by the idea of children studying in a shrine to the prophet of state scheming and duplicitousness, mastering the arts of intrigue and expediency. In this season of crisis in Italy, with no government and no pope, one feels that all the fathers have abandoned us by our own volition. I find graffiti that broadcasts the anarchic will of the people, or is it rather the symptom of panicked despair? Contro lo stato dei padroni, they scrawl, or Un giorno senza papa, senza governo, senza capo della polizia slashed in black marker on Renaissance walls. And yet those boys, my Machiavellian acolytes (I imagine they must be the authors of such proclamations, they or their older siblings, mothers or fathers), with the sound of the
ir carefree shouting and laughter, their slouching slenderness and casual affection with one another, their facility with the easy platonic touch, make me think how you and I never managed to live in the world with a comparable sense of freedom. We were too conscious of letting the truth become visible, fearing how the legibility of that truth would imperil us. For the whole of my American life after I began to understand what I was, who I desired, since our country chose to make that desire the sign of my entire identity although I would have preferred to think it only one facet, I never shouted for fear my voice would betray me, become histrionic and feminine, as if either of those qualities were bad, as if either were the mark of attraction to a body as male as my own. We never even risked traveling in those early circles of liberation, the Communists who became Mattachines before the Mattachines decided associations with Communism might imperil the struggle for gay liberation. Letting ourselves be known as ourselves outside our most intimate friendships seemed unduly reckless, a risk not worth taking, even as others dared to be more open. In public you and I made ourselves as little like women as we could in hopes of convincing everyone – men and women alike – that women were the sole focus of our desires. Be unfeminine to suggest exclusive adoration of the feminine. Be masculine to suggest total erotic and affective abhorrence of the masculine. The same for Helen, for Barbara: an exaggerated femininity as denial of attraction to the same, they refused every trope of the masculine lesbian, dared not even wear a violet or an item of clothing with a pattern of violets because Barbara had once heard that flower was an unmistakable sign. It is perverse, this logic of opposed dualities, grotesque how it made us disfigure the ways we inhabited ourselves. Think what we might have been had we lived in a place and time that allowed us freedom to be a man and sound womanly, to proclaim and ring histrionic, to be male and female and both all at once.

  At the moment I try to recall the hours of that day when I last stood in your presence I find the memories evaporating, the effort of recollection forcing memory beyond the reaches of consciousness, and so I have to wait at my window, allowing my mind to refocus on those roving adolescents framed by the piazza and blind to their place in history, thinking their discovery of anarchy, or for some their espousal of fascism, an entirely new historical occurrence. So I sit hoping that the ghostly flash of memory will explode out of darkness and return you to me, the memory of you a specter even if you and I are not yet specters ourselves. Nothing but fear prevents me from asking Alessio to book a flight, drive me to the airport, accompany me across the Atlantic, traverse the continent of North America, a ghost pursuing a ghost. When memories of you – of that day, of the day I am trying to reconstruct – happen to flash out of the dark room of my unconscious, I recognize them as mere fragments of the experiences they encode, which can never be made whole again, never lived fleshly, never bringing me and you together as we once were, and too often they are interrupted by involuntary memories triggered by the chance encounter with a texture, an object, a flavor, or odor. The juice of blood oranges pooling on a white china plate recalls from obscurity a moment I was shaving at the sink in your bathroom and nicked my chin, a drop of blood streaking the porcelain, you lying naked, visible in the mirror, a script propped on your abdomen, the static of some disagreement scorching the air between us, and the memory of feeling I was justified, that you were wrong and failing to see a point I believed to be logical. I do not search for these involuntary memories of discord and still they develop in all their painful granularity, sometimes more distinctly than those happier ones I wish to recall, but which seem always to evade me.

  You know what is required to stitch together the fragments of memory that explode between the closing and opening of the mind’s shutter. You know what acts of imagination and inference. So if I err, if your fragments of that day are not synchronous with or duplicates of mine, I can only beg forgiveness and forbearance. Everything I say here is an attempt to remember you in your fullness, in the moments before you were shattered irrevocably in your own person, shattered irremediably into shards of my own vanishing memory.

  Before I went to meet you at the soundstage, I picked up the duplicated pages of the rewritten scenes and glanced over the stack of correspondence John and I had recently exchanged with Porter. I ought to have left then, without saying goodbye. There was nothing keeping me at the studio except the desire to see finished what I had started, and the hope that the lunch to which I had been summoned might result in a reprieve which would allow me to prolong my life with you. That hope, however misplaced, kept me from telling you sooner. If there was to be no bad news to hear, Myles, better to keep it to myself. You will say again, rightly, that I was withholding knowledge from you, but I feared even on our last day together that the innocence you wore with such lightness might darken and vanish at the first sign of trouble. I wanted to preserve who you were, to keep you young and unblemished.

  If I had been less selfish in my desires, perhaps that day would not have ended as it did.

  From the Writers’ Building I went to the soundstage, determined to spend every minute I could in your presence, watching you even if we could not touch or talk, but when I arrived you were not there and the stage was in chaos. Mary stood in the doorway of her dressing room shouting, demanding to know if anyone had seen her assistant, Mozelle. People froze at the sound of her voice. The electricians and grips, the special effects men, the makeup artists and wardrobe staff and stage guard, the sound boys and camera crew, all stopped what they were doing and looked at her. Then, just as quickly, they turned away again. To be caught in the beam of Mary’s gaze was to risk becoming the object of her anger.

  Someone get that girl on the phone and tell her if she’s not here in five minutes she’s fired, Mary shouted, slamming the door so hard the whole dressing room shook. People looked at one another but no one moved until John stood up from his chair and strode across the stage, opened Mary’s door, walked in, and swung it closed behind him. It was a sad performance of authority. The gaffer and best boy went back to adjusting the lights for the first set-up while the director of photography chewed orders to the camera operator. I was trying to look nonchalant, as if my attention was actually focussed on the pages in my hands, but I must have been doing a poor job because Nick Charles came up behind me and sneered, You look like you got left at the altar, Mr. Frank. Have you seen Mr. Haywood? He’s keeping us waiting.

  The remark was so pointed it made me wonder if Nick knew about us. Perhaps he only recognized my fixation on you and nothing else, but his words brought me out in a sweat. I was about to claim ignorance when Mary’s dressing room door opened again and she stormed out with the latest issue of Vogue in one hand and her ugly acrylic purse in the other. She veered to walk right past me, offering the same sidelong look of suspicion worn by the Vogue cover model, glowering through a black mesh veil. A light swung around, shining in my face, and when I looked away towards the door I noticed Nick at the telephone, cupping his hand around the receiver as if trying to keep from being overheard. After a moment he noticed I was watching and hung up, shooting me a look before following Mary out the stage door.

  Because you still had not arrived I began to panic, imagining you might be in the arms of some other man, younger and more beautiful than me. Even though I claim to have trusted you completely, I ran back to the Star Suites where I had to stand in the hallway collecting myself before I knocked. You answered with such an expression of relief that I hugged you and kissed you while I was still only halfway through the door. You’ll get me in trouble, you said, kicking it closed. I kissed you, sucking your bottom lip between my teeth as you pushed your hips against mine. If I had tried to speak I would have cried with relief, knowing that I could trust you even as I was betraying your trust.

  The phone rang and when you reached to pick it up I pulled your hand away.

  Mr. Marsh will be furious.

  He’s just plain old John to you. Let it ring.

  You proteste
d that he was older and deserved your respect.

  Walk with the weight of your stature, I said.

  What does that mean, you asked, reaching to pull the cord that would close the blinds more tightly than they already were.

  No one can see, not even shapes, not without X-ray vision, I said, and you’re the only superman I know.

  The phone had stopped ringing. I was on the verge of admitting I had already bought a ticket to New York but when I looked into your eyes they were a barricade to confession, your body both detour and destination, and I could not find my way past your chest and arms back to my first intention. I held onto you in hopes that the feeling between us would erase all the pain that was pending.

  When the knock came we both jumped. Whoever it was knocked again but after a few seconds gave up and went back downstairs just as the phone rang once more. You reached for it and I slapped your hand. Then there was another knock, lighter than the first, and Helen whispering Myles, Myles, from the other side. I stood and opened the door. It wasn’t locked. What a risk we had taken. Helen looked at me, looked at you, and smirked. You boys better get straight, there’s a hunt on.

  The image of your body – the image that was your body, your body that was also, I admit, only ever an image to me, lingering in my mind whenever I left you, the image in the flesh – was fixed in my mind as Helen and I walked downstairs while you finished getting ready. I held your image as I suspect others held you, still hold you now, and not just those who knew the feeling of your skin, its perfumes, the touch of your tongue against their own. Your gaze changed me, as mine changes everything I look upon. You changed me each time you looked at me, Myles, as I hope I changed you.