O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

  “You know why time was invented?” Marblestone asked, mental processes floating from the orchestra to the mezzanine to the balcony. “So that even misery might come to an end.”

  “Oh, gosh,” said Till, the churchgoer having fallen off his seat and now doggy-paddling across the floor. “Oh, golly fucking gosh.”

  “Slip me some happy, Em,” Rose asked with lyric familiarity after Micah had taken his first few puffs.

  “This is what all the fuss is about?” dismissed Micah, passing her the pipe. Turning to his mistress, he began making a close inspection of Rose’s hair, pinching a curl between his forefinger and thumb, straightening it, letting it spring back into a coil, and repeating the procedure, marveling at how this maneuver could be performed all day, that Rose had many, many, many more hairs just like it—thousands of them, tens of thousands, millions—that weeks and months could be spent laboring at this investigation, free-associating on the mysticism of the spiral, the spiritual generosity of that questing circle. From there he began noodling the centrality of snake imagery in Western myth: the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Perseus and Medusa, phallic snakes and vaginal caves, how nothing ever really changes in the stories we tell ourselves. Then the sight of Rose naked, bursting in the California sunshine across white linen this morning, their first deliverance together to an alien bed. Then the fact that for all his years of womanizing (and, it occurred to him in this moment, that he and every pussy hound he knew had a deep and abiding fear and mistrust of women, their sexual power, their secret knowledge of men’s pathos and gratitude), until a few hours before he had never really stopped and taken a moment to really stare at a cunt. And my God!, what a thing it was, the entire inverted temple palpating and exposed! And then the audacity of getting down and licking and lapping its folds like it was an envelope that held within itself life’s very secret! Then the thought that every woman had one of these pulsing between her legs—that no amount of clothing or decorum or propriety could obscure this self-evident fact. And then the syllogism’s terrifying conclusion: If Rose is a woman, and every woman has one of these, why her? Why Rose, who, on paper, when one examined the facts of the thing, was an absolute disaster?

  “Nope, this stuff is doing nothing for me,” Micah said, continuing to play with her hair.

  “Give it time, boychick,” Marblestone said. “Cheech! Milk and cookies, then let’s start this picture, pronto!”

  Marblestone braced himself for a sublime encounter, the realization of his longed-for vision of conquest, the liquid dream of jungle topiary, the African sun as malignant as the Old Testament eye of God. Instead, as the image flickered to life, he found himself watching a pith-helmeted Till skipping over a hundred-meter dash of hot coals, cheered on by white actors in blackface, a painted scrim pinned behind them a synecdoche for everything cheap and ignoble about their banana-peel art. “What is this shit?” Marblestone snorted.

  “That’s a mistake,” Micah said, springing from his seat and barreling into the projection booth. “Cheech, where are the cans that arrived yesterday?” Micah went to inspect the first, then the second, then the third of the aluminum containers, garbage-can lids that cast their own visual verdict on their junkyard art. Izzy had done a sloppy job of relabeling, the words “Africa B-roll” appearing in grease pencil on little strips of masking tape that, once peeled off, revealed the words “Pot of Trouble” written in permanent marker on the metal disks themselves. Micah unspooled one of the reels and examined its introductory length. Izzy had even swapped out the film leads.

  “That’s it, just those three cans?”

  “Sí.”

  Putting in a long-distance call to his brother as the agreeable projectionist looked on, Micah received no answer at the editing suite. “I’m calling home,” he announced through the projection-booth portal, watching as Rose used an emery board to work a fingernail into a dagger. Micah listened as his wife relayed that, no, she hadn’t seen her brother-in-law in days but that Izzy had packed a bag the other night and explained he’d be working around the clock during Micah’s trip and also that she hoped Micah was having a wonderful time in Los Angeles with all of his friends and colleagues and could not wait for her husband’s return.

  “Why is Margaret such a cunt?!” Micah demanded of Cheech, bringing the heavy black phone down with a clang.

  “I do not know this woman,” Cheech noncommitted, continuing to arrange chocolate-chip cookies on a silver tray in the pattern of a Jewish star.

  “Ahhhhh, you’re just being a gentleman, Cheech!” Micah said, already dialing Shago Moody, the night doorman at the editing facility.

  “Remember that steak dinner?” Micah began. “There’s a whole cow in it for you if you can tell me where my brother’s hiding.”

  “Keep Mabel in the stable, Mr. Grand. I ain’t seen Mr. Isidor for days,” Shago reported. “Cleared the place out from the looks of it, though.”

  “That’s what I’m calling about: There were some reels of film he was in charge of shipping to California while I made my way out here. Did anyone else get their hands on them?”

  “No, Mr. Izzy arranged the shipping of them cans with me, personal. That having been said, some of Bumpy’s crew were sniffing around here the day after you left. Mr. Grand, that gang is on your backside like a tick on a bloodhound.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “Those that know don’t tell, and those that tell don’t know.”

  “I’d say that’s largely true.” Nodding to the worldly-wise Cheech and hanging up the phone. Lifting a ribbon of celluloid to the light, Micah held by his fingertips an image of Till in blackface, attempting an escape from death by boiling chicken soup. He disgustedly jammed a fistful of baked goods into his gob.

  “Where’s my footage, boychick?” Marblestone boomed at the moviemaker as he emerged from the projection booth coated in sweat. “Where are my lions and tigers?”

  “Screw your footage, Arthur,” Micah said, spraying cookie crumbs across the screening room. “Izzy’s gone missing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s gone! He’s run off with the Africa footage and is who-knows-where.”

  “Any leads where he might be? Any contacts at the bathhouses?”

  “I’ll make some more calls, but, no, not really.…”

  The boss allowed the note to hang suspended, determining whether the moment might break comic or tragic.

  “I don’t think Izzy would do himself in, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s too self-dramatizing for that—he’d only kill himself if he could be around to see your reaction.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because he hates your fucking guts! I have a brother—I know about these things.”

  “Arthur, I don’t know what to do. I can’t make a move.”

  “That’s just the grass talking, Em,” Rose contributed.

  “Look, Micah,” Marblestone continued, “you’re a long way from home. The city’s a big place, and Izzy’s a big boy. If the faygeleh wants to disappear for a while, he chose the right place to do it, and there’s not much you can do about it from here. Is the footage as good as you say it is?”

  “Better.”

  “Izzy won’t harm it, then. He’s the only one of us who mistakes this schlock for something like art.”

  “What would you have me do, Arthur?”

  “Do your job, Micah. It’s called ‘show business,’ Micah, not ‘show fucking nice.’ Not ‘show me all about your fucking family problems.’ Showing is the first prerogative. And showing is what’s required of us tonight. This thing now is a few hours away. It doesn’t matter if the footage is here, or in New York, or lost at sea. Our job is to get out there tonight and sell, boychick. Sell!”

  “Yeah, like the big man says, Coop, the footage is jake,” Micah says, retrieving himself from flashback. “Much more colorful than your Siamese coolies.”

  “Well, I look forward to seeing it,” Coope
r says diplomatically.

  Onstage, Fairbanks has just presented a special award of merit to Charles Chaplin for producing, directing, writing, and starring in The Circus. Silver-haired and already past forty, trademarked baggy pants replaced by black tails, Chaplin is as slender and elegant as a figure lifted from a chessboard. The Little Tramp has declared his allegiance to silent cinema, and the trades have reported his commitment to shooting his next picture—something familiarly Dickensian about a millionaire, a hobo, and a blind girl—without dialogue. Chaplin is perhaps the only film-world persona powerful enough to press against the sonic tide, and indeed there is something grave and militaristic about the man in person, the suggestion of comedy eked out in thumbscrew increments.

  “He’s not what I expected at all,” says Rose, powdering the sides of her nose, the white particles leaving a fine, chalky dusting, like Turkish delight. “Sounds like he’s got a plum in his mouth.”

  “That voice,” Till says quietly, “will have audiences dumping tea in Boston Harbor.”

  The table of twelve agrees. Seated with Micah and Rose are Marblestone and his wife, Masha; Till and his five-months-pregnant wife, Emily Davies; Merian Cooper and his date, a dimpled redhead who looks like she’s just stepped off the Mayflower; the screenwriter, former Chicago newspaperman, and Broadway playwright Ben Hecht, whom everyone finds agreeably hard-boiled and sour; Hecht’s wife, another Rose; and the starlet and socialite Fay Wray, along with her movie-star-handsome screenwriter fiancé, John Monk Saunders.

  It’s a good table at which to be seated, the group acknowledged with unspoken nods upon first taking their chairs. While there are bigger stars in attendance—Errol Flynn and Myrna Loy, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell—Wray is one of the best-liked ingenues in Hollywood. The soft-spoken midwestern Saunders, meanwhile, is credited with the story for Wings, the Great War aviation epic that has won the top award of the night. Plainly smitten with each other, the two are set to be married in a month, the wedding earmarked as one of the biggest events on Hollywood’s summer social calendar.

  For his part the kind-eyed, broad-nosed Hecht picked up an award earlier in the evening for the original story to Sternberg’s brutish Underworld. During the course of the year the writer has earned a reputation for savaging the industry that has made him rich, and he doesn’t disappoint tonight. The scenarist plants the trophy in the middle of the table; with the two placed side by side, it’s difficult to discern which is the award and which its candy double. To Hecht, who’d scored the trophy and ten thousand dollars for one week’s work, they’re both false idols. Years before, the screenwriter had received a telegram from another writer friend, Herman Mankiewicz, imploring him to try his luck out west:

  MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE

  AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS.

  DON’T LET THIS GET AROUND.

  Hecht keeps the telegram on his person during business meetings and script readings and finds the words burning a hole in his dinner jacket tonight.

  “When tonight’s over,” Hecht says, “we’ll have to go home and wring the personality out of our clothes.”

  “Mayer really pulled it off,” Marblestone agrees, making eyeball revolutions around the room, flitting on Schenck, Swanson, DeMille, Gary Cooper, Clara Bow. He looks over at the next table, where Jesse Lasky looms above a young actress like a construction crane at a building site. As the kingmaker admonishes her, impressing upon her some vital career guidance, life lesson, or sexual tutelage, she blinks slowly and tries to absorb the information, darkly shadowed eyes framed like mollusks in a shell. The girl’s tongue protrudes from her slightly parted lips, upon the lower of which rests a tiny baby’s bubble, the secrets of the universe shimmering and bouncing across this stretched skin of spittle. Staring at her lips, Lasky is momentarily silenced. This, then, the secret of beauty: You don’t really want it to do anything; you don’t really need anything from it other than to be allowed into its hypnotic proximity. The secret of beauty residing in its childlike certainty of itself: You just want it to be.

  “It’s worth remembering, everyone,” Marblestone says, “that the world is run by grown-ups, who are just children, grown up.” A colored waiter, cocoa skin beautifully offset by formal white dress, stands at the head of the table and asks Hecht, “Water for the table, or would anyone prefer one of tonight’s other offerings?”

  “This is Los Angeles.” Hecht chuckles. “Don’t go spending water like it’s money.”

  The waiter looks at him confusedly.

  “Yeah, sure, kid, water all around.”

  Micah has been drinking for the entire table, hoping that the alcohol would neutralize the effects of the marijuana. In the event, the booze only compounds with interest the filmmaker’s panic and self-loathing. Worse, the teacups of medicinal-smelling gin remind Micah of his father’s doctor’s bag, that depthless black leather satchel with its vials and syringes and bottles nobly clanking against one another. Thoughts of his hardworking, responsible, abstemious father cast in relief against his own self-congratulatory nonsense work send Micah deeper into a funk. What would Dr. Julius Grand make of the evening’s proceedings? Imagine Dad’s reaction to a bunch of bums pinning medals on their chests for making easy lays and earning a million bucks. Fancy Dr. Grand coming home with a trophy for Best Strep Throat Culture, Finest Earwax Removal, Noblest Vertebra Realignment. Surveying the table’s bounty, Micah wishes he were a maker of things, real objects of material substance: airplane engines and X-ray machines, horseshoes and barrels, bowling pins and spools of yarn, candlesticks and blown glass. This shame and self-pity make him drink more.

  But the real reason Micah keeps signaling waiters over to whisper illicit orders into their ears is to confirm his certainty that he knows them. From the Cotton Club, from the Paradise Club, from card games played around Mr. Waldo’s poker table, from the halls of Madam Queen’s mansion, from Rose’s apartment-building stoop and nighttime strolls down Harlem’s wide boulevards. It is impossible, it is preposterous, but it’s true. Micah is convinced that every shrugging, loping black threat he has ever encountered on the streets of New York City has assembled in this festive hall, that the entire service staff is composed of Madam Queen’s emissaries posing as waiters, watching for a signal to strike. As a team of invisible black servers encircle his table and begin plating entrées, Micah believes that his ears have tuned in to some higher, rarefied, secret frequency.

  “They’re here to kill me,” Micah says, too loudly, to Rose, who directs her response to the table.

  “We know you didn’t win,” says Rose, “but no one’s trying to kill you.”

  “Waiter, I can’t eat this,” Marblestone announces about the jumbo squab Périgueux, admitting, for the tenth time today, that despite his every best effort the therapy has robbed him of his appetite. “Listen, do me a favor, bring me a couple of slices of plain Wonder Bread, a sour pickle, and a glass of chocolate milk.” Then, after the waiter departs: “When Masha and I first passed through Ellis Island, they put new arrivals in holding pens where they fed us hot soup and bread. Only everyone was used to the hard, dark stuff, like pumpernickel and rye. We’d never seen anything like spongy white bread before, so at first we mistook if for cake. Imagine that—being served birthday cake your very first meal in this country! Cake! Gold bricks would pave the streets! All the stories were true!”

  “Wonder Bread.” Hecht chuckles. “An appropriately named product.”

  “They’re here to kill me,” Micah repeats, a wishbone dangling from his mouth.

  “Keep it together, Em,” Rose whispers. “Two puffs from a cigarette, I swear.”

  “And you?!” Turning on her. “How could you have done that to your hair?”

  “I thought I’d try something different for tonight. I thought you’d like it.”

  “It’s fucking awful!” he says, reaching for it and being repelled by the aerated, frozen mass.

  “Okay, leave my hairstyle out of
it.”

  “No, I needed your hair tonight. It has answers, goddamn it. It’s like Samson … all my strength comes from it. I needed that glorious fucking Brillo pad.”

  “You’re having a bad reaction, is all. Calm down. Focus on something nice,” she says, planting the table’s centerpiece in front of him. “Here, look at this.”

  “Bee-you-ti-ful!” cries cotton-mouthed Micah at the ridiculous explosion of floral sexuality, blushing petals and reaching stamens like some fantasy out of H. G. Wells. Under closer inspection the plant begins to turn malignant and mean. Whatever the drug was doing to Micah, he didn’t approve. Too much naked exposure to the potentialities of things beneath the visible. You enter a room and it looks safe, but who’s to say the arrangement on the table isn’t deadly poisonous, that its flowers won’t spray you in the face, that its vines won’t wrap around your neck, that your mistress doesn’t hate you, that the waiters aren’t all secret agents, that every space one enters isn’t charged with murderous threat? “Flowers! Such beautiful … Gah!”