Thank You and Good Night

by Ray Succre

  Emery had been quick to complete this irritating assignment, and both scripts had been doctored to what he felt was their liking. Pacific was still not satisfied, however. The trouble with the scripts was now obvious to Emery: Hollywood had asked an Emmy winner to write a few movies for them, but they wanted pure drama, not speculation with moral tale. They had hired a veteran but did not want his war stories. They had hired the writer of The Other Side, but did not want that side. They were sick of Emery, angry at his failure to give them what their paperwork stated he wrote, and they would have likely dropped the whole thing and kicked him out of the arrangement much sooner, had it not been for the fact that his television program had won three more Emmys in the interim, two of which were due to Emery’s writing. His name would have a box-office draw. Some slack had been granted him, but his supposed misfires had now gone beyond the limits of that extra leniency.

  The stage-plays for All the System and Coronach were still daunting him. He had somewhat given up on Coronach, but All the System, his first true success in the television world, would not leave him be. The story wanted a stage and live players. He fed the idea in his mind often, and could not be rid of it. The stage-play for All the System had become a dog that would neither come nor heel, would not even allow him the pleasure of petting its modest coat. What was it about theater that he could not grasp? The essence of stage writing was ostensibly the same format as a teleplay, but without camera directives and with an older nomenclature. The most palpable difference was that the stage-play format was written for actors and a director, while a teleplay was written for directors and producers. It seemed that the auxiliary intent of the latter had trained him away from the stage, and attempting to write for theater was wreaking a small havoc on Emery’s mind.

  The project was out of reach, always. He refused to believe he simply did not understand the medium, or by his basest measure, did not have the chops to work a play into being. Emery had never met a project he could not complete in some way satisfactory to him, if given time. The annoyance of having yet been able to satisfy the play, to transfer All the System into a performance for a live audience, had long ago usurped the position of prowler. The thing would not let him be, and would not permit him to finish. Now that he was actively writing and rewriting the story, the dog of this project no longer ignored him, but had begun to nip and bark and cast dispersions upon its master. The trouble was damn haunting and nothing seemed to work, and now, his trouble with Pacific Pictures only added to this frustration. Had he somehow become a man that couldn’t finish what he started? Only six years ago, he had been notoriously productive and had been considered by many to be prolific. That had been his reputation, but now?

  FADE TO:

  EXT. CARLSON’S BUICK AND MOLDEN - DAY

  A series of shining, new cars on a sunny day. Streamers hang from light poles. There is a film crew setting up for a commercial shoot.

  We see EMERY standing with a handful of cash in the middle of the Molden lot. He sighs and looks off camera.

  UNKNOWN VOICE, O.C.:

  We’re clear, Mr. Asher. All ready. Smile, though.

  We see EMERY frown and then stretch into a phony smile.

  A SECOND VOICE, O.C.:

  Okay, rolling. And... GO.

  EMERY:

  (raising eyebrow, imitating an Other Side monologue)

  Hello folks, I’m Emery Asher, and I’d like to take this time to tell you about the ‘64 Molden Roadster. That’s right, the new Roadster 6. This is a vehicle so smooth and gracious one gets the sensation they’re on the most relaxing of cruises. Until you press down the accelerator. Then you’re in for a real thrill. Whether you’re looking for a reliable car for the family or else an adventure for one, Molden’s newest Roadster has been designed with you in mind. Take the 6 out for a spin, and you’ll see that the luxury of Molden’s Roadsters is unparallel in the automotive world, and once you get behind the wheel, you just might find yourself on ‘another side’ of luxury, a place of imagination from which you won’t want to return. Why, I, myself own one, and you should too. The Molden Roadster 6. America’s pride and America’s passion.

  FADE TO:

  The temporary nature of a daylight buzz slowly rising into drunkenness. A lit cigarette smoldering beside many extinguished ones. Relaxation disrobed life of its many hurdles and strains, but this was only a short con and never survived past its own brevity. At the moment, it had skinned itself to reveal a briefly wooden man beside a lake. Beth pulled up beside the cabin in the roadster. They had been amorous of late, numerous encounters of which he found himself strangely proud. There was no reason to suspect, at the outset of his forties, that he was not a lover to at least a competent degree, but he had somewhat married his work for a time, and the sexual drought he and Beth had undergone in the previous two years had begun to shame him. Being fired had, despite the negative repercussions, had proven to be somewhat of a boon to their love life.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Is your husband around?” Emery asked.

  “He’s away at the moment.”

  “I see. Perhaps you’d enjoy some company.”

  “Oh, how generous of you, sir. I’ll likely be up quite late.”

  “I should keep that in mind and stop in for a visit when your family is asleep.”

  He watched as she went into the cabin with her small, brown bag of products, stopping for a moment to give him a goofy wiggle before closing the door behind her. He was happy with family, with the bare nature of it, the unceasing sense of connection it offered. He was pleased knowing he would feel the spilling of each season into this deepening kinship he had fostered with his wife and his daughters. Family was gumption, and it thrived in his bones as much as it did beyond him. They would keep coming, the years, and the family would continue changing and refining, and he felt lucky for this. It was an excellent way to live any sort of life. He needed only to keep providing, and if he could do this, his life with Beth and the girls would remain, to his rare, optimistic sense, inviolable.

  The small, embarrassing breaches into the world of commercial endorsement brought in enough money to get by, and one of them had paid him with a new car. This had turned out well, as the Ashers already had two cars in their possession, Emery’s Roadster 5 and Beth’s Skylark. With Emery being given a Roadster 6 and a fair sum of money, they had been able to sell one of the older cars. While the nature of the advertising beast was a salivating and obvious one, the financial sense of doing the spots was beyond his ability to decline. He simply tried to accept the lesser of humiliations.

  His promotion of Crest was a touch vain, he thought, but acceptable. He had been given more than one humorous comment on the whiteness of his teeth by reviewers in the past. It had become a jibe over the course of the five seasons, but a toothpaste commercial was not so obnoxious to him. Neither obnoxious were his appearances endorsing the University of Los Angeles, something in which he had been pleased to take part, though the pay for this was but good cheer, a value one might have trouble writing a check against. The job for Molden Automotive was tolerable to him, as it not only paid him quite well, but was a product he did, in fact, use and enjoy. When given the 6 model, he had sold his 5 model, making a bit more money out of the arrangement. Beth had chosen which of the older cars to sell, and she had opted to keep the Skylark, though it would have fetched more money were they to sell it.

  Some of the commercials were tolerable to him. Not so acceptable, however, was his smiling face on the air preaching Liden’s Hair Tonic (a product he knew to be garbage), an endorsement made worse by being aired almost exclusively on NBC during Hitchcock’s show. This made Emery seem like an utter washout and he regretted having signed on to do it. He understood the company’s stance on why the spots were aired during Hitchcock, but had he known he would be pandering that silly product during his previous competitor’s program, Emery would have declined. Another disagreeable endorsement was the constantly-aired spot he did for Finch Bran
d Diapers, which was asinine. A peculiar facet of doing the commercial with Finch was that he was asked to write it. This had been a new endeavor for him, and one he enjoyed a little, brief as it was. It was all supposed to be good sport and humorous, and he supposed the diaper commercial did get him a laugh or two, but he still regretted taking the deal.

  The offers for further commercial work came often, about two each week, and he did not enjoy being forced into taking some of them, but he had to pick his poisons. He had saved, been not been frugal with his money from The Other Side (though had he not purchased the house outright, the Asher family would have had to move out in the near future). He had saved much, yes, but no amount of saving could have sufficed to support his eventual retirement and the tuition his daughters would soon enough require. The idea of a regular job outside of writing, after all that had happened, would have been a horrid and final admittance of failure-to-thrive in the very place in which he had learned to hunt. He had a skill, a significant and unique one, and not utilizing this personal science would be a deadening affair, one that would feel as if it were trying to pull his soul from his bones and toss it into the municipal dump.

  The commercials would be taken, here and there, enough to keep saving. He did this in expectation of the particular sort of winter for which he was beginning to suspect the Asher family was due. He would, if all went well, rid himself of endorsement fallbacks eventually. If people could so quickly forget his show in the wake of its cancellation, as they seemed to, they could also forget his jocular, dull appearance advertising toothpaste and hair products.

  Beth entered the realm of his lake-side reading, having exited the cabin. She dragged another wooden chair toward him, worked it beside his own, and sat down. He tapped his cigarette onto the ashtray and she reached for his whiskey, had a small drink.

  “It’s cold out. I should get my coat,” she said before rising and leaving him again. A few moments passed and she returned in the light coat she had packed. There were three coats Beth had decided she needed. There was the thick coat, in case the snow was present, the stealthy coat, which was one for appearances, in the event they were to do much in public, and the light coat, more the indoor variety and an article she could wear in either slight cold or bare warmth. The cost of these coats now bore more meaning to him than when they were purchased. The Ashers would need to better scrutinize their expenses in the near future. Emery smiled at the over-preparedness of her and continued smoking his cigarette and reading the letters. She grew bored with sitting still however, and was in the mood for spoken exchange, rather than tepid, lake-side beingness.

  “I’ve decided ‘no’ on the hot dogs tonight,” she said.

  “Oh, that tone is excellent. You’ve made the hot dog conclusion sound of great import.”

  “It is. You are what you eat. I don’t want to become a hot dog.”

  “I would always refer to you as a frankfurter. I respect you.”

  “Go kill us a cow,” she said. He laughed then.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Buy a gun. A mobster gun. And then find us a cow. Shoot steaks from its hide.” He laughed harder at this, and nodded his head.

  “You were just in town,” he said.

  “I know. I should have picked some up.” Emery sighed with no real irritation.

  “All right, I’ll go the store shortly. I’ll need cigarettes anyway. Maybe we should all go?”

  “Well, I started up a fire inside and I don’t trust leaving it. Someone should stay. But the girls could go. They’d like that.”

  “Done. Would you like a treat while I’m out? I know the girls will.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want? There’s a bait shop on the way that sells salt water taffy. I know about you and taffy.”

  “Oh god, it’ll smell like fish, though. No.”

  “I’m sure it won’t.”

  “I might think it does, though. It’s the power of the mind.”

  “Red licorice, then,” he suggested.

  “Maybe for the girls.”

  “Ice cream?”

  “That’s it.”

  “All right, then. What sort? It has to be a small one; we don’t have a freezer out here.”

  “Oh, you’re so full of questions. Just get me whatever sophisticated, intellectual people would eat. Elitist ice cream. That’s what I want.”

  “Elitist ice cream... I’m intrigued,” Emery said.

  “What do you imagine the ice cream critics would say? What’s their choice?”

  “Well, let me think… if it’s ice-creaming with the Rockefellers, I think we’re talking pistachio. It’s a choice, robust ice cream, relegated to the more old-money, European society. Also, some of the powerful, American families. Good reviews all around.”

  “Yes. That’s what I want, then.”

  “Done. Just remember to never be seen at parties that serve spumoni.”

  “No? I like spumoni.”

  “Spumoni is a damned crook. A corrupted whore and loudmouth. Spumoni is the social pariah of ice creams and not even fit for the troughs of pigs.”

  “How could you?!”

  “Because I’m a realist, you; it’s no coincidence that spumoni is the flavor of ice cream most often asked for by convicts on death row.”

  CUT TO:

  EXT. CAYUGA LAKE, 1965 - LATE AFTERNOON

  Undercranked clockwise pan, full circle, about 6 FPS, of the tall grasses beyond the edge of Cayuga Lake, the affectation of wind picking up and the staunch effect of late Spring upon the color of the world. We continue panning, still in lapse, past those cabins and their occupants, people walking into and out of frame, the occasional car floating by in the distance. We hear the normal-speed, overlaid calls of numerous birds, each heard with a slight echo. HIGH ANGLE SHOT from the boughs of a black walnut tree as three people enter frame. We see a boy of about twelve, a slightly younger girl, and an even younger girl of about six years old, walking from the cabin area into the nearby field. The three are without the company of adults.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  The twelve-year-old EMERY ASHER, being followed into the field by sisters REBECCA and VIVIAN ASHER. The three wear uniforms of the Confederacy, with the two girls being infantry, and EMERY wearing the uniform of a cavalry lieutenant. As the afternoon lifts at their hair and moves them into the field, the three appear comfortable with one another, soldiers on a hunt, and with much confidence. The leader of this group is the young boy, EMERY.

  FADE TO:

  Late Spring. The grasses in the breeze. There were animals about, but these remained hidden. No creature that still held life would come near the three, so revered was the skill of these interlopers with a hunt. Emery crouched in the grass and motioned the girls near him, his eyes fierce with the pleasure of an expected kill, and the momentous truth of teaching his great skill to the two young soldiers. With a slow but menacing motion, he withdrew his saber and held it out for examination.

  “It’s sharp,” Rebecca said. Vivian’s eyes widened as she viewed the instrument of death.

  “Let me hold it,” she said. Emery shook his head strongly.

  “When the coldness of the eve reaches us, and the coming dark takes the field, there will be a moment when night first touches the exact edge of this blade. When that happens, we’ll have our kill, and you, little one, will finally be given your saber.”

  “I’m scared,” Rebecca stated.

  The mastodon stood near the trees, aroused from his nap and now ripping leaves from the tall foliage with his trunk. Stuffing these into his maw, the beast closed his eyes and let the great teeth render this green into a mash of sustenance, swallowing after much work. A machine did this. A machine of muscle and little thought, great in size and formidable in spirit. The mastodon knew Emery well, for the boy had once killed the beast’s mother.

  Creeping up on the monster would be no matter of mere stealth. The goliath would have anticipated
the old tactic, and so Lieutenant Asher had designed a new approach to the hunt. As the Sun fell into the swayback of the mountains, Emery made this new gambit known.

  “Private Vivian Asher, you will secure us our meal, today,” he said.

  “Me?” Vivian asked.

  “A braver six-year old there has never been. You see, my girl, dusk approaches. Its fingers witch down your back even now. Night’s skin is the cold of passing. Do you feel it?”