The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  He was not alone. I don’t know what I had expected, but I had planned to have him to myself for the duration of his stay in the Bodarks. He had two women with him, both of them younger than I, and he introduced them only as “Gladys” and “Jay,” the former plain enough and efficient enough to be, as indeed she was, merely his hired assistant; the latter, I am sorry to say, I failed to recognize as none other than Jesslyn Fry, whose several movies I had not seen. (Since coming to America, I had scarcely been to any films at all, except for those blue movies that I saw in Pittsburgh with Ingraham.)

  My failure to recognize her caused a moment of embarrassment on the drive to Arcaty, when in response to her conversational question, “How long have you known Kelian, Kat?” I replied, “A very long time. How long have you known Kola, Jay?”

  “He did my last picture, of course,” she said.

  I turned to him. “Oh, do you paint, on the side?” I asked. And when after a moment’s puzzlement all three of them laughed, I thought to correct myself: “Or take photographs?”

  “Yeah, photographs, Dollface,” he said. “Lots of photographs.” When the three of them had finished sniggering, I said to Jay, “I think I understand. You’re an actress in motion pictures.” I felt myself blushing for my ignorance.

  Jay looked out the window and spoke to the Bodarks landscape. “It is so refreshing to discover someone who doesn’t know me and therefore doesn’t fawn all over me.” Then she turned back to me. “I suppose you’ve read Georgie Boy yourself.” It was not a question but an observation, and when I nodded, she asked, “Do you think Kelian could see me as Princess?”

  Of course Jesslyn Fry is a blonde and is famous for a look of tender innocence that far surpasses my own or whatever fragility the reader perceives in Princess. Jesslyn does not resemble me, except for her large, ingenuous, curious eyes and a certain delicacy in the structure of her cheekbones and jaw. I will never forget the moment, in Silvia en route to Arcaty, passing through some hamlet called Hindsville, when the woman who had been Princess and who had written Princess’s story sized up the woman who was destined to win an Academy Award for playing Princess in a motion picture and said, “Probably not. But I ought to make something clear. Mr. Kelian may not see you, period. He is extremely shy. I am under strict instructions not to let you into his presence.”

  “I understand that, Dollface,” Trevor Kola put in, as if he truly did. “Still, we ought to be able to work it out so that if we don’t see him, he can take a good look at Jay and let me know if she fits the part.”

  We worked it out. Once in my (or Kelian’s) penthouse triplex apartment, which I think visibly impressed even Kola himself, I showed the three of them to their rooms, each to a separate one, taxing my limit of three guest rooms, and then assembled them in or around my conversation pit and, acting as servant myself, poured them the drinks of their choice (Kola had only Perrier, Gladys wanted a beer, and Jesslyn Fry drank a Scotch and soda). Morris, whose long tenure at the Halfmoon left him if not affable at least approachable by any stranger, decided he did not like one or more of the three and, after hissing at Kola, disappeared for the duration of their stay.

  The sounds of someone walking the floor overhead were distinctly audible. “Mr. Kelian knows you are here,” I announced. “And he hopes you are very comfortable and that you enjoy your stay in the fabulous Bodarks. His first question to you is, Have any of you been in the Bodarks before?”

  “I’ve been in the boondocks but not the Bodarks,” Kola said, and guffawed at his own wordplay, and thereafter he would always refer to my adopted part of the country as the Boondocks. He moved to the picture window, and looked out, and sized up the sweeping view, until his eye fell upon the enormous statue. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “What is that?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I answered. “It’s called the Christ of the Bodarks and it was erected by a fundamentalist bigot named Smith.”

  “What is he standing in?” Kola asked. “You can’t see him from the knees down.”

  “It is just poorly proportioned, I suppose,” I said. “Mr. Kelian once observed that it looked more like some kind of Bodarkadian Kewpie doll.”

  “What’s a Kewpie doll?” Kola wanted to know, so I showed him one from my collection.

  Neither I nor Travis had been prepared to serve dinner. I considered taking them to the Plaza, or even Bubba’s Barbecue, but decided, for the first evening at least (and I had no idea at that point how long they intended to stay), to take them downstairs to the Crystal Room, where the menu was suitably diverse and the atmosphere, with great chandeliers and enormous windows providing the glass that gave the dining hall its name, more elegant than the rest of the hotel, which, Kola had observed, was “down at the heel.”

  The Crystal Room was not crowded; the few other guests scrutinized us as we were seated, and a woman came over with her menu and handed it to Jesslyn.

  Jesslyn waved it away. “No, just bring me your best steak, very rare,” she said.

  “No, no, no,” the woman said. “I don’t work here. I just wonder if I could get your autograph.”

  Jesslyn borrowed a pen from Kola and autographed the woman’s menu. Later, two other women, a man, and a couple of teenagers would appear at our table, requesting Jesslyn’s autograph on assorted scraps of paper if not their menus. I, who had never been asked for my autograph, felt somewhat curious if not envious about how it felt to receive the homage, if that was what it was.

  One guest who did not approach our table but remained at his own table in the darkest corner of the large room was a small, thin man in an elegant white three-piece suit and white straw hat, wearing dark eyeglasses above a bushy mustache; he was dining alone on a cheeseburger. I faulted myself for not having told him to order something less adolescent than a cheeseburger.

  I looked at Kola, Jesslyn Fry, and Gladys, each in their turn, and said, sotto voce, “Please do not look now, but Mr. Kelian is sitting over there.” Kola, Jesslyn Fry, and Gladys each looked nervously at one another, as if waiting to see who would have the honor of being the first to turn slowly, inconspicuously, and cast a covert glance across the room. As if by unspoken agreement among them, this honor or duty fell upon Gladys, who coughed and very, very slowly turned her head, took a good look, dropped her mouth open, and slowly turned her head back to her boss.

  “Well?” Kola said peremptorily to her. He had not dared to turn his own head.

  “He’s young,” Gladys announced. “I think. And he looks quite mysterious.”

  Kola announced, “I think I’ll take a peek.” And he very slowly turned his own head until he could see the figure on the opposite side of the room. He took a quick look, blinked involuntarily, and returned his gaze to us. “Yes,” he said, as if confirming not his assistant’s estimate but his own unformulated one. Then he whispered to me, “If he’s so shy, why is he eating in public like this?”

  “He wished, as you suggested, to have a look at her.” I inclined my head toward Jesslyn Fry.

  Jay asked, “Do you think he’d be offended if I just, sort of, maybe sauntered over there so he could have a closer look?”

  “No need for that,” I said. “V. Kelian can see you very clearly.” And indeed V. Kelian could.

  “What does the V stand for, by the way?” Kola asked.

  “It’s like the S in ‘Harry S Truman,’” I said.

  Jay asked, “What did the S in ‘Harry S Truman’ stand for?”

  “Nothing,” Kola said to her. “It was just there because he needed a middle initial. He didn’t have a middle name.” Then Kola asked me, “Didn’t Truman come from these Boondocks?”

  “Not these,” I said. “He came from a part of Missouri about two hundred miles north of here.”

  “I can’t help noticing, Dollface,” he said, “that you have an unusual accent. You’re not American, are you?”

  “I haven’t been naturalized,” I declared. “Not yet.”

  “So where are you from?
”

  “Svanetia,” I said.

  “Phoenicia?” he said. “Didn’t the Phoenicians invent astronomy or the alphabet or something like that?”

  “Svanetia.” I pronounced it as clearly as I could.

  “Where’s that?”

  “The Caucasus Mountains.”

  The mildly interested but blank look he gave me, matched by the looks of Gladys and Jesslyn, told me that none of them knew where the Caucasus Mountains were.

  “Is that where Kelian is from too?” Kola asked.

  I glanced across the room at Travis, who was finishing his cheeseburger and making a rather hammy acting job of wiping his big mustache delicately with his linen handkerchief. “No, he’s from the Bodarks…or the Boondocks,” I said, with a smile to acknowledge Kola’s nicknaming them.

  “Answer me this, if you will,” Kola said. “Is he really Georgie? Was his mother a shrink?”

  My smile shaded into a mysterious grin. “Who can say?”

  Abruptly both Kola and his beautiful star illuminated their faces with expressions of dawning realization. Jay tried to speak, but Kola waved her silent while he asked me his next question: “So he really didn’t get killed in the end, did he?” And without waiting for my reply, he continued, “Because one of the main things I need to discuss with him is that. I don’t want my picture downbeat. I don’t want Georgie to die in the end of my picture.”

  “It’s your picture,” I said. “Nobody has to die in one’s own picture.”

  Jay was allowed to speak. “Don’t you get it?” she asked Kola, tugging on his arm like a child trying to get her father’s attention. “It just hit me. Don’t you get it? Not only is that Georgie sitting right over there, but this is Princess sitting right here.” And although it is rude to point, she pointed her finger within touching distance of my nose.

  Kola’s mouth fell open. “Dollface, is that true?”

  “Would you mind,” I requested, “calling me something other than Dollface?”

  II

  Kola and Gladys stayed several nights. Jesslyn Fry had to be back on the coast the next day for a guest appearance on something called “Johnny Carson,” and she took a taxicab back to the Fateville airport. Before she left, having unsuccessfully dropped a number of hints that she would truly appreciate a moment alone with V. Kelian, she said to Kola, in my presence, “Trev, you’re an Oh Tour, aren’t you? You don’t have to have his say-so to cast me.”

  “Yeah, baby, I’m a real Oh Tour, but this property won’t play if the man doesn’t think you’re Princess.” I would hear Kola’s mention of Oh Tour several more times before it occurred to me he was saying auteur, and I would not find the cinematic meaning of that “author” in Daniel Lyam Montross’s dictionary. “Listen, Dolph-Kat,” he said to me (the first of several times he’d address me that way before I realized he was starting to call me Dollface and interrupting himself halfway through the first name to substitute the latter), “Jay’s gotta catch a plane. Could you go ask your boyfriend what he truly thinks of her?”

  I already knew what my boyfriend thought of her. Late the night before, after my guests had retired to their rooms (I had expected Kola to sleep with Jay and/or Gladys but apparently he had not). Travis climbed into my bed and began to babble. “Don’t ye know who that is? That’s Jesslyn Fry, and she’s a real movie star! And she’s sleepin right downstairs!”

  I told Travis I was beginning to get the impression that she was somebody very important. I asked him if he’d seen any of her movies, and he was able to name at least three of them that he’d seen. “Is she really good?” I asked him. He said she was terrific. Then I asked him, “Does she at all resemble the mental image you received of Princess when you were reading Georgie Boy?”

  He had to think about that for a while. And then, bless his heart, he said, “Not as much as you do, I reckon. But I doubt you could play Princess in a movie, now, could you?”

  I could not. And we both laughed over that.

  To Kola I said, “Mr. Kelian wishes me to tell you that he considers Miss Fry perfectly acceptable for the role.”

  Jay threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug. “Oh, thank you!” she said. “Tell him I’ve never wanted a part more than this one! Tell him I’ll make him proud of me! Tell him I love him!”

  “I will,” I said, and she kissed me, and that was the last time I saw Jesslyn Fry until she was dragged by two attendants down the hall of the Laboratory in the second scene of the film Georgie Boy.

  After Jay left, Kola and I settled down to the first of several working sessions on the treatment that I (or Kelian) had written. “Let’s take a meeting,” Kola would say, and Gladys would sit at his elbow writing meticulous notes on a yellow legal pad. Kola would point out something in the treatment, raise a challenge, and send me upstairs into the penthouse to confer with “Kelian” and then report back to Kola on Kelian’s opinion. In order to appear to have spent some time conferring with Kelian, I would make a game of actually talking with Travis, who was enjoying himself sprawled out on my bed reading a Jackie Collins novel, Sinner. “Kola wants Bolshakov to be heavy,” I told Travis. “But the real Bolshakov is bony, scrawny, skinny like a scarecrow.”

  “He seemed like a fat slob to me,” Travis said, so I returned to Kola to tell him that it was all right to make Bolshakov fat.

  Kola laughed. “No, I’ve already cast Sert Reichert in that part, and he’s anything but fat.”

  “But you said you wanted him to be heavy…?”

  “The heavy,” Kola said. “‘Heavy’ as in the bad guy, the villain.”

  “Oh.” Often in these “story conferences” I did not understand the language that Kola and Gladys used in the terminology of motion pictures. Listening to them speak to each other was like sitting in a dentist’s chair eavesdropping on a technical conversation between the dentist and his hygienist. I had no inkling of the meanings of dolly, gag, jump cut, pre-production, day player, crane, match cut, on spec, second unit, two-shot, swish pan, wipe, or even the ubiquitous zoom.

  Kola would say something like, “For the teaser I want a rack focus on Princess in her cell with Georgie watching her play with herself.” Gladys would dutifully write this down, and then Kola would condescendingly explain to me that teaser refers to the opening sequences of the movie before the titles and credits or beneath them, and rack focus means changing the camera’s focus from one person to another within the same shot. I would go upstairs and trade places with Travis and act this out with him, and he would do a remarkable job of pretending to be Georgie outside the door of my cell spying on me while I simulated masturbation.

  “Yeah!” Travis would exclaim, with his eyes getting as wide as Georgie’s would have been. “He wants the whole show to open with me getting bug-eyed like this.”

  I had no inkling, then, that the “me” he was calling himself as stand-in for Georgie would become so literally Travis Coe.

  I would go back downstairs to Kola and announce, “V. thinks it will play.” Kola would smack his lips in satisfaction and say to Gladys, “Flag that, then.”

  Gladys and I, by the way, became good friends during the course of the visit. She was an uncommonly intelligent woman, indispensable to Kola, very efficient and devoted, and she was genuinely interested in learning from me the customs of Svanetia, the character of the Svanetian landscape, and even some Svanetian recipes, which she intended to try when she got back to L.A.

  I had only one uncomfortable moment with Gladys, when, as we were sitting alone together in the chess nook (we had time to relax with a few games, and she was not a bad player), she remarked, “You know, this is your apartment, isn’t it? Not Kelian’s.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked, taken aback.

  “Everything in it,” she said, sweeping her arms, “is womanly.”

  All I could say was, “Kelian likes it that way.”

  The “story conference” went on for three working days, scene by scene, and
I was beginning to have much fun, acting out with Travis the various possibilities of shooting; and for his part he took to it like a duck to water—or, to use his own expression, “This here movie play-like is easy as shootin fish in a rain barrel.”

  It was clear that Kola intended to “Americanize” the film in every way he could. He had already contracted to use an old Victorian warehouse in San Francisco as the Laboratory, and to use a California woman’s penal institution, Frontera, for the “establishing shots” and some of the interiors of the concluding prison-camp portion. From what I could gather, there would be nothing in the movie to indicate that its scenes or people had derived from Soviet Russia.

  The only serious disagreement Kola had with Kelian was over the matter of some scenes toward the end when Bolshakov and Georgie’s mother are driving one car in pursuit of the car that Georgie has stolen. “But Georgie was on foot!” I protested on behalf of Kelian. “In the book, he steals a prison truck at the very end, but he never steals a car to get to the prison.”

  “Yeah, Dolph-Kat, I know,” Kola admitted, almost as if some power greater than himself was bossing him around, “but we’ve got to have a car chase to keep the front office happy.”

  “A car chase?”

  “Everybody does it, babe,” Kola said.

  Few experiences in my life have moved me as much as the morning, the last morning of Kola’s visit, when Travis and I were in my bedroom, converted in our imaginations into the yard of the prison camp, acting out the last meeting between Princess and Georgie. Kola had hinted to me that the film should follow the novel very closely in that part of the movie, and he had asked me at breakfast, “Do you think Kelian would mind if we used the book’s dialogue between Princess and Georgie, word for word, in the last shots?”