Thank You and Good Night

by Ray Succre

  “I see,” Emery said of the jibe, “Well, having come down on me so hard with that bit of insight, I feel I should reciprocate the gesture, and come down on you as well. With an assignment. And a big one, for a change. I want an Act I that would open a half-hour show. If you’ve been paying attention and doing your reading, you should know what that entails. Now, I’ll be looking for a couple of different things this time around. Stick with the pilot style, for one. Full introductions. Yes?”

  “Do you want a full ten minute act, or trimmed out for commercials?”

  “I want the full ten, so you have room to cut down to eight, which you’ll be doing after you turn it in. Now listen: Last time, I was looking for directives, and most of you were able to get a good hold on the basics. Keep it up. This time, however, I’m going to be looking for some very specific things beyond your dialogue or your directives. For one, your scene details. Everything takes place somewhere, and people need to know the pertinent details of that. I want you to keep an eye on where your act takes place, and I want you to express it simply, with a few crucial details. Only a few. We’ve covered how that occurs, so now I want to see you implement it. Let me see where your scenes take place clearly. Next week, I’m going to be your producer and I’m going to be hard because you’re over-budget. I might tell you that your scenes can’t take place where you have them, and ask you to rewrite them. Hint hint.”

  “Is that going to be an assignment?” one student asked.

  “Yes, but don’t worry about that yet. For this assignment, I want an Act I, strong settings detailed well, and I’ll be looking for your lead-off. You can write whatever you please, but I want to see a lead-off that can effectively summon the second act. Look to your references and keep the two Chayefsky scripts in mind when thinking over your lead-off. Both are good examples done in distinctly different ways. Come up with your own, if you can. That’s it. I’ve got a handout to give you with more details.”

  FADE TO:

  EXT. AN ITHACA STREET - AFTERNOON

  A busy New York street with much commotion and myriad people.

  Freeze-frame of daily commerce. There are cars in mid-motion, several red traffic lights in the distance. There are a few people paused walking along the sidewalk and we can see a small, purposeful tree present in a pre-designated square in the sidewalk’s face, a small grating around its base. We see a SMALL MAN in the distance who is not frozen in time, navigating around people and ceased cars, making his way toward the camera. When he draws closer, we see that the small man is the nine-year-old child of EMERY ASHER, in a miniature black suit, hair slicked back, young and with much energy in his step. He establishes himself in the range of monologue, somewhat near the camera in order that his head and upper body match the frame.

  CHILD ASHER:

  Hi. It’s me. I’m bored, you know. In a way I once would have thought was ridiculous, but boring is okay for adults. I’m 49, and I’ve even outlived my dad. Boring is okay. It’s better than other things. I’m happy that I’m not the same me. I’m Mr. Asher now, a teacher, and I’m not The Other Side guy at all. My skin looks better, did you notice? Los Angeles was hot and weathered me a little. This is better. I don’t know that a person should always live in the sunlight without the yucky weather, too. I could be wrong. But I feel better, and everyone seems okay now.

  We see him turn then and wave a greeting at all of Ithaca.

  CHILD ASHER:

  (returning attention to us)

  I can do that every day. Because I live here.

  We see another ASHER enter frame then, from the left, to stand beside the first. This is an adult Asher, host from The After Hours, in his mid-forties and wearing his brown suit, voice a touch scratchy from smoking.

  AFTER HOURS ASHER:

  New York is nice. It hasn’t changed much in the layout, or even the people, but it’s not the place I know from the past. But why would it be? Beth... well, you should see her. She’s happy, and the girls are doing just fine. Viv doesn’t like her new high school so much. It’s only for a few months, anyway. Teaching isn’t as satisfying as I thought, but I do like it. It’s a new thing for me. Then again, I escaped to it, so it has more value to me than it would have before. Oh, and we’re supposed to be getting snow soon! Beth can’t wait.

  At this, the AFTER HOURS ASHER turns to the CHILD ASHER.

  AFTER HOURS ASHER:

  Say, I’m hungry. You? Let’s go have lunch somewhere.

  We then see a third Asher enter frame on the right. This is The Other Side Asher, dressed just as the CHILD ASHER is, but for his own, adult size. He’s smoking and grinning.

  OTHER SIDE ASHER:

  Are you two heading to lunch? I know a keen place. Near the CBS 30th Street Studio.

  AFTER HOURS ASHER:

  That place is gone.

  OTHER SIDE ASHER:

  Oh. Well, I’m open to ideas. Pick a place. But we should definitely call Beth and see if she wants to go.

  CHILD ASHER:

  She’s so pretty.

  OTHER SIDE ASHER:

  Oh yes, but we really haven’t seen her much lately. She might be a little angry at us.

  AFTER HOURS ASHER:

  She’s not angry. It’s us. We’re the angry ones.

  OTHER SIDE ASHER:

  Huh. Well, I might be a little angry, but it’s worth it.

  CHILD ASHER:

  I’m not mad at all. I like myself. Don’t you?

  OTHER SIDE ASHER:

  Of course. A man should like himself, otherwise, why be alive?

  AFTER HOURS ASHER:

  No. Somebody has to like you, but it doesn’t have to be you, yourself. And maybe it shouldn’t be.

  CHILD ASHER:

  (frowns)

  Well, I’m hungry. Let’s call her.

  CUT TO:

  A RESTAURANT INTERIOR. We see current EMERY (the instructor) and BETH eating lunch in fast-forward. We cut to THE SUN rising higher in the sky, then back to the couple walking about in A SHOP. EMERY spots a newer electric typewriter and chats with BETH about it. Still in fast-forward, we then cut to THE SUN going down, behind the horizon. From here, we cut to a LIVING ROOM INTERIOR. This is likely the Asher house. We see the couple watching television. After a short while, BETH exits the frame, not to return. EMERY sits for a while on his own. We then cut to A STUDY. There is a desk and we see EMERY sit down at it. We return to normal time-speed now, and watch as EMERY begins going over a stack of papers that he has extracted from his briefcase. He seems tired.

  MATCH CUT TO:

  The time-honored concern of grading papers. A volume of white pages and black ink that soaked his evenings in both ire and whimsy. The amount of time this act dissolved from his life had been overwhelming at first, but his knack for creating and maintaining a week’s regimen had transposed well enough for his collegiate duties. Sunday night was paper-grading night, though he would also grade the last of these papers during the two-hour break between his courses the following morning, provided office visits by students did not become unwieldy. Having his office hours to himself was seldom the case; his students enjoyed picking his brain about the ‘governs and regale’ of television. They were somewhat able to do this during class, but Emery was more personable and mentor-like in his office. He was able to remove a bit of pretense from himself when outside of a classroom.

  The assignments he was going over were unfinished scripts, required first acts from his class. These scripts were frivolous in general, and often radically misaligned with anything a network would tolerate, but there was talent here and there, and a few possessed an ever-present willingness to be shaped. His students did grasp the technicality involved, and most had taken to directives and marks with swiftness. The usual trouble was in the creative aspect, in scene construction, pacing, the division of characters and behaviors over an arc of three acts, and in how to present a story with a certain detail while not over-detailing, and without falling to that slightly safer realm of
being vague in description. Most of the stories were not interesting, thus far, but two of them had charmed him. Some of these students were built for the short story, and some quite obviously were more suited to live theater, but they were all trying to write the teleplay, and a few were gaining ground. The teleplay system was, at times, a willingness to follow subjective rules and gauges, and teaching a person to recognize those and utilize an imagination was more difficult than barking out what the typewriter needed to know regarding margin, spacing, centering rules, when to use capitalization, and which way it was expected a writer flush left or right.

  He had time to write. In Los Angeles, as a professional writer of the industry, he had found himself buried in commitments, and then cut loose for strange spells of unemployment. He had written through all of this, and heavily, but there had never been enough time to write for himself, to try new things out of contracts and money. That time now existed, and he was using it. He continued working over his attempts at theater, failed as they were, and now considered his difficulty working in that medium as a humorous sort of curse, one he might eventually break to marvelous effect, if he worked at it enough.

  For several terms, he taught and lectured, giving out his assignments and changing them here and there. It was a routine sort of life, but there were always things afoot, events in the making, situations to look forward to and scenarios to get past. Though he had attempted to sever any connection to working in the television industry outside of teaching, he still wrote occasional scripts for television, sending these out from his perch in New York, a small hope in him for the occasional acceptance, but in no means believing he would ever have the reception he had achieved earlier in his life. He had entered into his second year of teaching and still felt utterly new and novice, and he would be fifty years old in but a month. Starting a new career so late felt strange, but he was better off, and his marriage was a new entity. The Asher household seemed fond of its occupants again. While he was not past the age at which his fire felt to have dimmed, either physically or mentally, he was at an age by which he felt secure in his abilities and accepting of his station, which was, after all the heckling and trouble, all the bad contracts and ostracizing opinions, quite amicable and useful.

  He was in good health, as was Beth, and they were enjoying New York, which carried a brisk flavor in its air but without the fight-or-flight eagerness of Hollywood. The difference was in an appetite for business. Both cities had a strong one, but the eastern city seemed well-fed, while the western city reached for every morsel in sight, fat-fingered and groping at every dish on the table. New York was governed by the suit and the briefcase. Los Angeles was governed by presumption and the loudness of rumor.

  Emery was, in a sense, retired from television, and had, but one year back, embarked on a more certain career. For this, he discerned there could be no better place for him than his old, early stomping-ground of New York City. He had walked within it much, knew which way the grains fell, and could now relax more, watching the city unfold and alter its form here and there. The city felt as if a foundation for him, somewhat like the university, and had the atmosphere of a menopausal entity that held its occasional wisdoms in high regard. He was thankful that leaving Los Angeles had proven easy. This had been matter of choosing a date and packing for it, a trip east to secure a place in which to live, then a long, long drive.

  He felt to be a different man here. Hollywood’s television sub-species had been rushed and young, thousands upon thousands of people continually trying to reign their city in, keep it’s frantic pace from devouring itself, but New York felt confident in its place and time, and knew when to take a weekend. He was neither retired nor newly embarked, in truth, but the sensations of these things were present, and they gave one a wholesome sense of being. The commercials were over and the final act was beginning. It was based on what had come before it, and to Emery, what had come before this third act in the script of his life had been an excellent and well-lived series of large things.

  What a final act he had been given, a scene construction he had created, and could now have out. Teaching. Being alone again with Beth. Daughters in college. Then retirement. Grandchildren! He was a character with a powerful lead-off, and he was primed for all the culminations to come. Perhaps decades of them.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Emery woke in a dismal state, the tugging of panic from its ream, a gasp dropping from his mouth. Beth stirred beside him, giving her husband an awkward look of confusion before promptly returning to sleep. She had discerned correctly, in her five a.m. blur, that nothing was happening. A hundredth nightmare. Beth knew he disliked being comforted after these, and her habit was now to leave him be, find sleep, and perhaps ask him about it later if he seemed too-long disturbed. Emery sat up in bed a moment, breathing and glancing about the room. There were comforting articles here and there, the usual conglomeration of decoration and materials. Shelves with books and the odd trinket. Bed-stand. Blankets atop sheets atop two people in the spousal arrangement. What time was it?

  He sighed and left the bed, cracking his neck and rotating his shoulders to loosen them. Over the years, these nightmares had become a sort of quiet friend. They were shocking and somewhat horrifying, but they had conjoined with his past and his fears so expertly, that at fifty years old, he would have felt a bit hollow were they to cease.

  The standard approach of these ill dreams was a hungry one. At times, he was simply back in a gulch with the bayonet, beneath the rain while engaging the Japanese. In his dreams, he forgot that he had dreams. The terrible parts of his past were, for a short duration, the present, and his future of marriage, parenting, and working for a living in his trade seemed as if a strange and alternate past. He was married when he stabbed the Japanese man in the gulley, had a daughters in college. He watched Eddie Dodder get crushed by the great crate from the sky, a thing that seemed near instant in occurrence, and he watched this happen not as a soldier, but as a man who wrote stories of speculation. He was fifty in his dreams. A human’s state when the eyes were closed most was a filthy twist of nature, and it did not abide the laws of time or age.

  After breakfast, he left the house for the campus. With no class and a Saturday before him, he needed to use some time playing catch-up on the submissions of his students, and especially rebuilding the system of his office and schedule, which had fallen lax in the previous weeks. Teaching and grading were not enough; these things required measures, and grades required sorting, recording, and ultimately, projecting. Records and filing needed to be settled, and so he had chosen to deplete a portion of the weekend satisfying these things, getting his hobbit hole back into running order. Two or three hours would suffice to finish his grading and reorganize his office.

  He loathed a clumsy workspace, an attitude he had adopted from his years of intense regimen and work. He preferred a familiar, efficient setting, whether it was the opening of a script or an office at the university, and the cleanliness of these things had a smoothing effect over his thoughts, just as palpable as a shot of brandy and just as effective as learning the craft of optimism. He preferred to write and grade while in a contented mood, not a rushed or flustered one.

  As Emery often left the door to his office open while he worked (there was trouble with the circulation of air in the building), Gary Bond noticed him while walking from his own small office. An excitable geologist and outspoken angler, Gary knew more about fish and the Earth’s construction than most mathematicians knew about numbers. This was somewhat all Gary knew, but he was friendly and had been a good person to jabber with from time to time. Emery had, in his first term, begun the process of forming opinions about most of the faculty members he encountered. Opinions on one’s colleagues were necessary nearly so much as fact, and the very fabric of the academic institution could not have survived without such opinions. Emery’s opinion of Gary Bond had begun on a good note, and had only been enriched with time. Unlike many professors, Mr. Bond did
not seem to have his nose so high in the air when in the presence of basic instructors.

  “No life?” Gary asked.

  “You’re one to talk.”

  The two chatted for a few minutes, covering all the inscrutable topics advisable between passing instructors. The approach of examinations. The weather. The school. The small offices. After this bit of cursory hello was over, Gary made a move of friendship that Emery did not expect, and invited the script instructor to visit a ‘hidden lake’ for some prime trout fishing. Emery was touched.