Night for Day

by Patrick Flanery

  I knew I was junking my time on a fool’s errand that was worse than quixotic. It was the folly of cowards believing they could change the mind of a bully. I followed John because I was cowardly – not for the decision I had made to leave America but because I lacked the courage to tell you what I planned. That was my most egregious cowardice. Perhaps you will say that my refusal to sit before our elected representatives was the greater weakness, but the older I get the more I believe there is nothing cowardly in fleeing certain defeat. I recognize how self-justifying that may seem to those who have never been faced with such a critical moment of danger. I was afraid of what would happen if I stayed, afraid even of what I might do to compromise myself in order to preserve my liberty. You see even here, decades distant, how easily I regret my principled stance, how quickly I start to think that a less ethical response would have been a price worth paying if it meant staying with you.

  You were the first man since college whom I had loved for more than a month at a stretch, and the anticipation of your heartbreak, the twin expectation of my own anguish, knowing I could not possibly leave without speaking to you and giving you the chance to come with me, was enough to hold me in John’s thrall for a time. Distraction, nothing more. Maybe I still hoped that the outcome of my meeting with Krug and Cherry would save me from exile, that those two brutes would offer a solution, but confusion and fear muddled my thinking. The argument with you the night before had not helped, nor the late-night coffee that fueled my revision of scenes which would never arrive unaltered on screen, nor the sense that my capacity to speak an honest word had diminished so precipitously that everything dribbling from my mouth was more than half fiction. It is not that I lied to you, never intentionally, only that I withheld great volumes of truth, afraid at what you would say if you knew.

  John walked quickly, arms pumping at his sides, head bobbing left and right, his lips moving as if he were talking to himself. A few yards into the trees a sign left over from the jungle’s service as an enchanted forest warned us: TURN BACK NOW WHILE YOU STILL HAVE A CHANCE.

  Thick-crowded with ghosts.

  You know I don’t read poetry, Desmond.

  Just a line from an old picture.

  In the heat, trying to function on so little sleep, I began to feel unsure of the boundaries of my body so that objects were both farther and closer than they appeared, as one feels when succumbing to fever or experiencing the vertiginous effects of a dolly zoom. It would not have been the first time my body produced illness to avoid a crisis. I had already been in a car accident that morning, never mind that I blamed it on a bird, and I knew that worse might happen if I did not keep a close watch on every movement I made. Trip over a vine and break a bone, walk into a low-hanging branch and suffer concussion. My subconscious was trying to manufacture ways of making me stay.

  The path was uneven and John stumbled, catching himself on a vine. I called out to see if he was okay but he was so oblivious to my presence I began to feel no more than a shadow at his side. Within a few more paces the path branched and branched again and when I looked around I could no longer see the way back to the lake.

  Which way? John shouted. Don’t you have a compass?

  The Boy Scouts wouldn’t have me. My sense of direction has always been terrible, but I think we should turn left.

  You always think that.

  Better than turning right.

  John squinted back at me. He set his lips, narrowed his eyes. Are you suggesting that’s what I’ve done?

  You said it, not me.

  I never had much in the way of political conviction, Desmond. My father and mother both come from old southern Democrat families and they’re as racist as Brownshirts. Even as a boy I knew that neither of them stood for anything that made sense to me. I couldn’t hate anyone for being a different color or having an accent or speaking another language or believing in some other god or even not believing in a god, but I could also never imagine being a Republican. Most people I know would say that makes me a nutcase.

  No, I think it makes you independent-minded. That’s a quality I’ve often admired in you. That and your willingness not to condemn me for what I am. There are plenty of people who can say what you’ve just said but when it comes to people like Myles and me, all that independence of mind goes out the window and they follow what everyone around them believes.

  I suppose you think that’s what Mary does.

  I don’t really know what Mary thinks. We’ve never had a conversation long enough for me to have any notion of her beliefs apart from what I’ve read in the papers, and that does not persuade me she has much time for people like me. I’m only grateful you’re not like that.

  John unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt and rolled up the sleeves. My brother Lionel was like you. He died back in twenty-eight. Killed by the father of his – what would you call him? The man who was to him as Myles is to you.

  His lover?

  John blushed. Yes, I suppose. His lover’s father killed him when he found out about the two of them. That’s how I understood it.

  What does Mary think of that?

  She thinks Lionel was killed in a bar fight. It was Prohibition, he was a bandleader who worked speakeasies. A bar fight was a natural conclusion even if it wasn’t the truth. It’s what the police report said. He was killed in a bar but it wasn’t a fight. The man’s father came in and shot him three times in the back. As John spoke his voice cracked. He shuffled and came to a stop, leaned against a tree, wiped his face, then started walking again, faster, as if he wanted to outpace the memory.

  I’m sorry, John. I wish I’d known.

  That was twenty-two years ago. It makes me crazy to think I’m more than a decade older than he was when he died. I never thought I’d make it past thirty myself. When Lionel was killed I said to myself: You’ll end up that way, too. It was foolish but somehow it made it easier to take the loss.

  And you’ve never thought to tell Mary the truth?

  What good would it do? She never knew Lionel. She’d say he deserved it. John seemed to realize what he had said and chewed his lip like a little boy caught writing obscenities on a chalkboard. You have to understand, Desmond, when I met Mary I had started feeling old, even though I wasn’t yet your age now. I’d been working in this business since I was twenty-one years old. My career was up and down so many times that when Mary came along I thought she might keep me from drifting into obscurity. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love her, but I always admitted to myself how my pursuit had a purpose, to borrow some luster as my own was fading. And now she’s fading too, and trying to fight it in her own way. She must know that in time she’ll disappear like all the other stars people couldn’t live without for as long as they were young and beautiful. She’s just trying to slow down the inevitable. That’s what this is. I don’t think she believes one way or another about anything except herself. She’s her own politics and religion and pantheon.

  John was panting, out of breath. In the years I’d known him he had gone from tall and lean to heavy in the legs and barrel-chested. His back arched forward, brow grew thicker and angrier, upper lip tightening and pushing out, eyes sinking into his skull, his whole person beginning to curl in on itself so that he became monstrous in a way I had never seen him in the past. Perhaps it was all the chemicals in his system, or the catastrophe of waking one morning to the news that his wife was about to betray him.

  For another half hour we wandered in circles until we found ourselves at the castle the studio had used for Frankenstein and Dracula and a dozen other tales of the European night. Revamped with a coat of ivory paint and colorful flags it was, for the span of a few days, the home of an enchanted princess unlucky in love. We found a couple of horses tied up behind the façade and while the director was yelling at his actors John and I galloped off before anyone noticed.

  We rode in silence but I could guess what John might be thinking, that finding Mary was the least of his problems. He must have
known that if he did not name names himself he could, at best, look forward to a life begging for handouts or scrounging for work abroad. At worst, it would probably mean a stint in prison. Was it harder for him to imagine losing everything than it was for me? Did the prospect of abandoning the life he had made for himself terrify him more than the prospect of losing my freedom terrified me?

  I struggled to focus the camera of my mind on the years I had spent as John’s friend and collaborator, trying to capture and develop a few good memories that might redeem him, but the moment they appeared I watched them flash in my vision and disperse into air, combining with the smog that caught in my chest and on bad days made me pant when I mounted a flight of stairs. Imagination is not the same as memory. As I rode alongside him I could certainly imagine moments between us that might reassure me of his loyalty, but I could not recall any that I was certain were genuine.

  I knew I had to go. I could not risk waiting to see what John would decide.

  Alessio enters, removing his tie, sweeping a hand through his dark hair, and his sudden appearance grabs me, this living, breathing man calling me to bed, suggesting that perhaps this weekend he will try out his mother’s recipe for torta pasqualina in anticipation of the Easter party we will host in a few weeks’ time. I let myself be coaxed from my chair. The past has no power except as a storehouse of guilt and bad feeling, an archive of regret, and yet one that has still not exhausted me. Its exploration feels urgent for as long as the question of us, of you and me and the way that we parted, Myles, hangs pendant in my mind. Alessio waits at the door as I stand, push back my chair, walk haphazardly through a grove of books piled like the trunks of so many trees cut off in their prime, past the photographs of you captured in your youth, others that I have clipped from magazines in subsequent years, images of you as I no longer know you staring from the forest of my mind like phantoms, each of them calling, asking me why.

  Come, Desmond, you will hurt your eyes in this light.

  My eyes are nearly gone already, Alessio, and he lets out a puff of air, out of patience with me. I ask why he did not go home with Néstor, our Spanish novelist friend with such strict aesthetic ideas. Alessio blanches, looks at me as if I have really lost it at last. But this is my home, is it not? And anyway, Néstor is just a friend, and really not my type, too macho, too much of a top, and that is all beside the point anyway, because you are my partner and it is you who I love, even if you are still in love with that boy from the past, who is now an old man. You imagine Myles young but look at him now, he is not like me anymore, he is like you. Would you love him so much if he were standing here now?

  I pause in my transit to the door, glance back at my desk, at the light from the corridor falling on your face, Myles, your face as it was in 1949 or early 1950. Poor Alessio, he deserves better than me.

  Of course I would love you as much now, Myles. As much as ever, more than ever before.

  SHE TURNED AWAY

  Part Two

  INT. FAYE’S CAR - DAY

  Ten in the morning and the City of Angels looks like it’s waking from a long night in the bar and two hours’ rough sleep.

  Orph and Faye sit tight in her car. She drives like she sings, as though the road and the note are always in the heart of her range.

  Orph’s gaze strays to Faye’s hands on the steering wheel, the little gold charm bracelet around her wrist, the neat manicure and every other detail that tells him she’s the wife of his half-brother.

  ORPH (V.O.)

  Faye said she’d take me round to see Ursula’s haunts. The car was hot and the perfume coming off Faye’s neck was the same one Ursula wore, a flower that was sweet till it turned rank and started smelling of corpses. It was hard not to think my brother got the better deal, the solid sister who didn’t have a screw loose. Sure, I was in love with Faye. I always had been.

  An oncoming car honks and Faye swerves, smiling as though she enjoys the near miss. In the rearview mirror’s reflection, a dark coupe trails half a block behind her, its bulldog front end snarling in the eye of the mid-morning sun.

  Faye runs her tongue over her lips and glances at Orph before turning her eyes back to the road, whites glinting through dark glasses. What she does with the car is less like driving than sorcery, hands sliding off the steering wheel as if testing how far she can go.

  FAYE

  Who’d you kill to earn those stripes, soldier?

  ORPH

  You know I didn’t kill anyone. I was in the medical corps.

  FAYE

  That mean you’re a doctor now?

  Faye swerves hard into the right lane as they careen through one of the tunnels of the Arroyo Seco Parkway and Orph has to brace himself against the door. The shift is threatening and purposeful, as if Faye were daring the door to fly open and let Orph fall to his death.

  Faye checks Orph’s reaction and lets the car drift back into the left lane. A truck honks its horn and Faye swerves right, tossing her blonde curls as if each near miss is part of the fun.

  ORPH

  Just means I can tie a bandage and hold a man’s hand when he’s dying without he gets the idea he’s on his way out.

  FAYE

  So you’re more like the grim reaper? What are they called? Ferrymen.

  ORPH

  Been working the crosswords, huh?

  FAYE

  Try to expand my vocabulary when I can.

  She checks the mirror again and the dark coupe is closer this time. As they arrive in downtown Pasadena Faye accelerates through a yellow light and the coupe gets caught at the red. A smile skews her mouth deadly and she stretches her fingers, wrapping them tighter around the wheel.

  ORPH

  Not all of them died. I applied pressure to stop the gushing, doused wounds in sulfa, kept airways open. I swabbed cuts and held a man’s head together in my hands. I wrapped fellows in dressings and bandages when there wasn’t much left to bandage.

  Faye makes a little shiver but if anything, she likes the idea of violence.

  FAYE

  So you have touched death.

  ORPH

  What is it with you? I was trying to save lives, sister. I was looking after my buddies and helping put ’em back together after the Japs got done with them. Some of the fellas in my platoon weren’t so lucky. Not enough tape and glue and medicine to save them in a hundred years. Death’s no nursery rhyme.

  When she comes to a stop at an intersection Faye turns to look at Orph, catching a drape of blonde hair with two fingers and pushing it behind one ear. Her lips keep drying out. She rolls them in on each other, wets them, checks the mirror. The coupe has caught up with her.

  FAYE

  If you’re not a doctor does that mean you’re a nurse?

  ORPH

  You’ve got funny ideas.

  FAYE

  Just that I’ve never heard of a male nurse before, except in a mental hospital.

  ORPH

  I wasn’t a nurse. I don’t know what I was. A medic I guess. They called me an aid-man. I served my country.

  FAYE

  But you didn’t kill anyone.

  ORPH

  What is it with you and killing?

  FAYE

  Girl likes to know what the man next to her might have done... Or be capable of doing. Do you have a gun?

  ORPH

  Sure I’ve got a gun, locked safe in a drawer where I don’t have to think about it.

  FAYE

  But you’d know how to use it. You’ve used it before. You must have...

  ORPH

  I didn’t kill anyone, you hear? I saved lives and I was good at what I did. I came back and now I want to get on with my own.

  The light changes and Faye doesn’t move until the coupe honks its horn. She makes a face, thumps the car into gear, and veers to the left, racing the turn.

  FAYE

  Didn’t mean to suggest anything, Corporal.

  ORPH

  Cut it out with th
e Corporal stuff.

  FAYE

  Cut out too much and you’ve got nothing left. First rule of seamstressing. Every housewife should know.

  ORPH

  Cut out too little and the suit won’t fit.

  FAYE

  Didn’t know you were here for a fitting.

  ORPH

  Maybe I’m in the market for a new look.

  FAYE

  Trust me, Corporal, you could never afford my tailor.

  Faye smirks as she pulls the car to a stop outside a bungalow in the Craftsman style. A stubby ten-yearold Dodge sits in the driveway.

  FAYE (CONT’D)

  First stop. No bleeding to staunch, Corporal.

  ORPH

  Whose is it?

  FAYE

  Friend of Ursula’s called Rose Zapatero. Used to dance at Malavita until – well, until she had an accident when her husband was on shore leave. Now he’s dead and she’s stuck with the kid and an inadequate Navy widow’s pension. Tough little character, but she might point us down the right road. I have a hunch Ursula confided in her but I don’t like Rose myself. I think she’s cheap. You’ll see what I mean.

  EXT. ZAPATERO BUNGALOW - DAY

  Faye rings the doorbell and a second later ROSE, a tired young woman with a LITTLE GIRL propped on her waist opens the door.

  ROSE

  Ursula! Sweetheart, I’m so –

  FAYE

  It’s Faye, Rose. I’d like to introduce you to Ursula’s husband, Corporal Orph Patterson.

  ROSE

  (simpering)

  Oh! Oh, a pleasure I’m sure. Won’t you come in?

  As the three of them enter the house the little dark coupe pulls to a stop down the street and we see the driver for the first time. It’s Shade’s fat right hand, Eddie Majestic. He pulls down the brim of his hat to block the sun and slumps in the seat to keep watch.