“And for the listeners at home, how might this picture be different from previous Henry Till comedies?”
“Well, the laughs are bigger, the stunts are more dangerous, and Till is dressed in a safari suit.”
“I think it’s fair to say he really lands in the thick of it in this one?”
“It is.”
“Mr. Grand, are the rumors true that some of the picture was actually shot on location in Deepest Darkest?” Beaujolais asks, vocally goosing his listeners.
“We did do some filming in Africa, that’s correct, but it was for a different project.”
“And what, might I ask, made you travel to the other end of the world just to snap some pictures?”
Micah looks around, taking it all in, the night a jigsaw puzzle of his making, everything slotting into place. “I enjoy the work.”
“I understand that this latest comedic effort is a silent picture. With talkies the cat’s pajamas, does Henry Till have any plans to make synchronized-sound pictures?”
Micah is surprised by the directness of the man’s question. He hesitates, drawn to the demolished portion of the radio announcer’s jaw. Illuminated in the photographers’ gun-popping salute, the stratum of scar tissue reveals hidden depths and colors, strains of yellow and blue like veins in an exotic vegetable or a fine smelly cheese. “When you’re being chased by a lion,” he submits, “there’s not much room for dialogue.”
“And that’s Micah Grand, director of the new Henry Till picture Pot of Trouble. This is Johnny Beaujolais, reporting live from the red carpet at tonight’s premiere in New York City for Moving Picture World News.”
An arm crooks into Micah’s as the interview ends, swiftly navigating him past the theater entrance and into the lobby. Sidney Bloat is a man for whom movie premieres might have been invented. Everything about him is polished, everything about him glows: brilliantined hair, mustache, tuxedo, shoes with a reflection you could read by, teeth uniform and white as a Christmas nutcracker’s.
“Ah, the great sadness of the cinema! Much like a wedding, or a funeral, these premiere occurrences,” Bloat says. He acknowledges a nearby light box that frames a Pot of Trouble one-sheet, an illustration of Till in his safari duds surrounded by spear-waving Zulus. “I suspect what happens with every technology will in time be proven true of your motion pictures: What arrive as signs and wonders come to pave paths of boredom. I have to say, though, Mr. Grand, I’m impressed that you were able to salvage the picture. Much like a pastry chef frosting over his mistakes.”
“More like why use a brush when you have a club?”
“And how is Izzy reacclimating?”
“He’s back to making pictures.”
“Then all’s well that ends well.” Bloat removes from his vest a white-haired Moses Pfefferminz dispenser and pops a rectilinear mint into his mouth as the lobby house lights dim and rise, alerting the audience to take their seats. “You know, I wouldn’t dare say this to your brother,” Bloat whispers, tongue encircling the sweet, “but as far as Malwiki is concerned, the misery continues there unabated. I’m afraid symbolic gestures on the part of entertainment people are little cure for that continent’s woes. But then, you’re the brothers Grand, not the Brothers Grimm.” He spreads his arms wide, like a reverend embracing the congregation. “Without a killing there can be no feast. Good luck with the picture!”
FIVE
Izzy didn’t stay for the movie. Though he promised Howard he’d meet up with him afterward, Izzy could never bear watching one of their pictures with an audience, let alone while outfitted in formal wear and feeling like a creature escaped from Barnum’s museum of wonders. Instead he had agreed to meet one of his former crewmates for coffee at a spot nearby.
Baxter’s Diner, on the corner of Forty-Third and Seventh, looks to be an average and inviting enough setting, but it isn’t until he enters and sees Early emerge from the kitchen, drying his hands on a grease-stained apron, that Izzy understands why his former colleague asked that they meet there. Settling into a corner booth, Izzy experiences the pang of pleasure that comes from visiting a place that is also an archetype of itself: on the table, a glass of fountain drink straws like miniature striped barber poles and a pair of laminated red menus; beyond it a great, smooth, lime-green apothecary counter; in the air pleasing smells of fried onions, cooked chicken fat, chocolate syrup, cola, and ammonia.
“You’re late,” Early says after they’ve ordered.
“These things never start on time.” Izzy hasn’t seen Rose’s brother since the first trip to Africa, and Early looks thinner than before, more drawn, his complexion more matte and muted. The muscles in his sleeveless T-shirt are better defined yet also show the atrophy and indifference of having settled into repetitive, dull work, of belonging to a body that’s prematurely resigned itself to failure.
“Well, I’ve only got about ten minutes left to my break,” Early says, making fork tracks in his rice pudding, a maraschino cherry bleeding syrup into a pompadour of whipped cream.
Izzy takes up the sugar dispenser, tilts it over his cup, and begins counting backward from ten …
“Want some coffee with that?”
“You should’ve come tonight,” Izzy says. “You were an important part of that picture.”
“Nah, have to work. Gotta get paid. Besides, that wasn’t the movie we made. I’ll be sure to catch it, though.”
“Skip it.”
From the kitchen appears a crumpled, heavyset man with a ropy black handlebar mustache, Greek or Russian or Romanian. He parts forearm forestry, consults his wristwatch, and announces “Ten minutes” in Early’s general direction.
“Got it, boss,” Early responds, loud enough to pull the man’s attention toward the table. And it occurs to Izzy as his gaze meets the restaurant owner’s that Early is showing off the cameraman, that he looks upon his association with the tuxedo-clad filmmaker as a source of pride.
“You know, there’s always a spot for you on our crew, whenever we decide to shoot our next picture,” Izzy suggests, uncertain as he says it if he means it. “We could even look into sponsoring you for one of the unions. It’s not unheard of.”
“Thanks, Mr. Grand. I appreciate it, but I think I’m done with pictures. Same with numbers, really. I’m thinking I might try going back to school, learn a trade. Plumbing. Electrics.” And here he presses the fire-hydrant-shaped salt and pepper shakers together and slides them across the table, lining them neatly against the sugar dispenser and the ketchup bottle. Black, white, and red. It is night now, and through the window colors come and go at intervals, like beams from a lighthouse. “In the meantime there’s dignity in all kinds of work.”
“You’re right about that, but you’re good at something,” Izzy says, his voice rising. “It’s not every day a person’s good at something. It’s unusual.”
Early works at picking from the lip of his coffee cup a dried potato peel or a fleck of oatmeal. “You hear Bumpy got eighteen months?”
“Yeah, but Micah’s squared everything away with Madam Queen. We don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“Oh, I never sweated it much with Bumpy anyway. All he asked for before he got sent up were some history books and guides on how to play chess.”
“Chess, huh. How’s Rose?”
“You didn’t see her tonight? Told me she won a pair of tickets from one of the movie magazines, said she was planning on making it.”
“No, I haven’t seen her in months.”
“Not many women friends?”
“Suppose not.”
“You’re a nice-looking man, Mr. Grand. Why don’t you leave that monkey business behind, find yourself a wife?”
“Maybe not for me.”
“Yeah, I hear you. A wife, kids, babies, all the trouble they bring …” Early sounds suddenly older, wearier, than his twenty years, looking into his steaming cup of coffee as if hoping to find there the answer to some impregnable question about how to manage a life. “You kno
w, Rose really wanted something that was part of Micah.”
“You mean the baby?”
“Yeah.”
“The one she lost?”
“Rose lost a baby in Los Angeles, but only one.”
The symmetry dawning on Izzy. “Twins?”
“They should take that quack doctor of Mr. Till’s out back and shoot him, but, yeah, she managed to hold on to one of them.”
“Micah doesn’t know that.”
“She didn’t want to trouble him with all that after they split. It’s for her, you understand? It’s something for her. I wish Rose could have seen him working out there, though. He’s a better man than he pretends to be.”
“Yeah, okay, but the baby belongs to her husband, right? That’s what Micah always believed.”
“Dobie, that old fool?” Early pshaws. “He’s fifty-three! Got his dick halfway blown off in the war. Dobie’s not making any babies with Rose. No, Mr. Grand, it’s Micah’s. Rose is sure of it. The baby is Micah’s.”
Returning to the theater, Izzy finds Micah sitting alone on the lobby stairs, his face cupped in one hand, looking hollowed out, all husk. Micah sits with his lips pursed, as if readying to kiss someone. Though no notes come out, he attempts to whistle, this being an activity that in Izzy’s experience usually indicates a kind of absentminded loneliness, a desire to fill empty spaces with human sound. Crossing the lobby and reaching the staircase, Izzy steps over Micah and sits one rung higher, establishing a couple of inches of superiority over his brother.
“Why are these stairs so cold?” asks Izzy on shifting buttocks.
“Marble,” Micah answers, “stone.”
“Of course. Our frozen asses a fitting tribute. How’s it look inside?”
“I’ve seen worse. How about you?”
“Couldn’t face it. I slipped out soon as the picture got going. Just came from seeing Early.”
“Early?” Perking up at the name. “What kind of trouble has he been getting into these days?”
“Working at a diner.” Izzy passes Micah a book of matches from Baxter’s. “I think he’s finished with movies.”
Micah peels from the stair in front of him a discarded event program and begins shredding its glossy pages into long strips. “Think you’ll ever go back?”
“Where to, Africa? No. You?”
“Can’t see why I would.”
“Here,” Izzy says, leaning over and fixing it, “your tie is crooked.”
“Thanks. Hey, I spotted Howard earlier. He’s looking well. How’s your friendship going?”
“What can I say, Micah, the man makes a mean Tom Collins. How about you? How’ve your friendships been these days?”
“I don’t keep any friends, Izzy, you know that.” Waving the program’s paper legs between them like a hula skirt. “I’ve got collaborators, business associates, admirers, detractors, rivals, dependents, conquests, but I’ve always traveled light in the friends department.”
“You’d like to believe that, but I don’t think it’s true. And I suspect she feels the same.” Izzy nods across the lobby expanse to Rose, who has just emerged from the theater on her way to the ladies’ room. Six or seven months pregnant, Rose looks like herself, only more so. The plain patterned brown maternity dress she’s wearing looks more like a blanket, some shelter safe and warm where you want to take up residence and never leave.
“I have to pee, boys,” she says, thawing an awkward moment. “But if you’ll be around, Micah, it’d be nice to talk to you. Izzy, would you mind making yourself scarce for a minute?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thanks.” Rose’s face a mural of confusion, happiness, and sheer biological relief as she pushes through the restroom doors.
“Izzy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Admitting that there exist large gaps when it comes to my understanding of women, would it be fair to say Rose looks to be in a family way?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Mm-hm, mm-hm. And how might this development be possible?”
“She lost a baby in California, but just one.”
“Twins?”
“Yeah.”
“Figures,” Micah says, tearing the program completely through and allowing the strips to fall across the stairs like ticker tape. “Do me a favor, Itz, go outside and play in traffic for a while, will you?”
“With pleasure.”
Izzy has always made a living with his eyes. For as long as they’ve made movies together, his brother’s nickname for him has been “Eyes.” And for a long time, Izzy’s own eyes—Mediterranean blue, raccoon-rimmed, with a pleasing proportion of white to iris—were the sole physical feature of his person he deemed attractive. Izzy prided himself on being especially attuned to the eyes of actors, on being able to discern in them flickers of feeling that others couldn’t intuit until material proof was amplified and projected before them. All of which is a way of saying that Izzy has never before seen his brother look at another person the way he looked at Rose then, and he knew she was his life.
After the brothers learned of her death—in a grocery-store robbery uptown, two years after they had last seen her—Izzy watched Micah try to transform his sense of shame and heartbreak into something else: some dignified and tragic project, an insupportable position that only left him feeling smaller, more diminished.
Long before they’d stopped making movies, decades before they’d grown old, both brothers knew that their legacy would never take the form of a catalog of films, a record of talent. They recognized that the true, impossible inheritance was one’s secret history: a tangle of relationships, a latticework of touches, missed signals, parting glances. More honest and mysterious than the official docket of biographical data and accomplishment, these were the things, simple things, that made a life. Exchanges, looks, a child’s candy-apple smile, a trinket won at a fair, your lover’s hair shining in the sunlight.
In later years, when Micah would gather around him a gallery of ghosts and reminiscences and regrets, it was with the knowledge that Rose would forever occupy for him a place first, last, always, and alone. That she was the best person he had known: the toughest, the most honest, the best and most loved. That the girl with the water pistol had held truest aim. And he had let her go. Though the remaining decades were rich and full with good, exciting work in movies and the early days of television—satisfying years filled with travel and material possessions and, later, delight in knowing his sons as adults and the joys of being a grandfather—this chorus of self-recrimination was the uninterrupted song of Micah’s private thoughts.
Those were different times, Izzy would tell Micah over coffee and cake in the various bachelor apartments he kept through the years in New York and Los Angeles. Those were different times, Izzy would say, and Micah would repeat those meaningless, forgiving words to himself when she would visit him during the night. It was better to forget. He had held briefly the bright balloon of happiness and should be grateful. One had to forget.
Forward and back across the decades from that night, she smiles at him with her pomegranate mouth, slowly lowering herself onto a shared step like a crane moving a container off a ship. Looking at her, even entrancingly happy to see her, he knows she is already a ghost.
“Truce?” she says, pressing the plastic water pistol into his hand.
“Okay, we’ll hold fire,” Micah says, brandishing the toy like a baby rattle. “You look like a lightbulb.”
“Gee, thanks, Micah. You always knew what to say to a girl.” Unconsciously twirling her pointer finger around thick coils of hair that had exploded Rapunzel-like during her pregnancy. “Thanks for pointing out that I’m waddling around like a duck.”
“I don’t mean your shape. Your color, your skin: You look all lit up.”
“Well, I try to make an effort for special occasions.”
“Doesn’t go unnoticed, miss.… How’ve you been, Rose? How’s your time been?”
“I’ve been okay. Still able to work. Haven’t been too uncomfortable so far. Eating a lot of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs.”
“Christ, can I give you something?” His unarmed hand rummaging around in his jacket pocket. “Some money?”
“You can take that up with my husband.”
“Fair enough.” Stilling himself. “And how’s Jacob doing these days?”
“He’s a barber. The baby will just mean more bibs for him.”
A high pop of laughter reaches them from inside the theater, a quick, sharp sound like a baseball player hitting a foul. Then echoey silence. After a while Micah breaks it.
“How’d we do, you and I?”
“Depends who’s asking, who’s doing the telling.”
Micah fiddles with the toy gun and finds himself pointing it at his chest halfheartedly, wishing it were real. “It’s like cards,” he says finally. “The loss has to hurt if it’s to mean anything. I didn’t know that before.”
Rose sighs, relieves him of the water pistol, and places it in her handbag. “We did all right. I think we did as well as anyone might have done given the circumstances. But you know, Micah, you promised me something once.”
“I know.” Holding her hands now.
“That if you went, you’d bring back something good.”
“You’re right.”
“And the picture’s terrible, Micah.”
“I know.”
“I mean really, really terrible.”
“Thanks, Rose, I get it. I know. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep my promise to you.”
“Well,” she says, withdrawing her hands and placing them across her stomach, “I think your best work might still be ahead of you. Come on, Em, let’s go in. I want to show you something.”
She rises with some difficulty. Micah follows, supporting her in sequence by the wrist, upper arm, back. Standing firm now, she leads him by the hand, waltzing along a sea of red carpet until the theater doors silently swing open and their silhouettes find themselves joined in the back of the auditorium by Izzy, who greets the couple with a shrug.
The three of them stand and watch the projector booth’s beam cleave the dark, light baptizing the audience, whirring machinery music the sound of memory itself. Before them the screen stretches wide as a ship’s sail, as open to possibility as a parchment across which any history might be written. They would never grow tired of this procession of enchantment: a lightstorm of imagery flooding from behind that unearths the hidden and unimagined as from an archaeological dig. The Grand brothers stand in the back of the theater and watch their work, able to appreciate that their efforts—their good and brave efforts, their historic efforts in a youthful and brazen art form—were neither good enough nor brave enough. They watch, knowing that for now it would have to do for the audience and the nation that birthed it to be briefly, magically united in the pitch of its wild collective dream. Lit from without and within, the Grand brothers watch their work and try to forgive themselves at last for being in concord with their era and conversant with time, that most rarefied and ineffable thing. Time.
O, Africa! Page 35