Terra Incognita

by Connie Willis

  But the movies, as I had tried so soddenly to tell Alis, are not Real Life. And all I had done by getting drunk was to wake up in Heada’s dorm room with a two-day hangover and a six-week suspension from the skids.

  Not that I was going anywhere. Andy Hardy learns his lesson, forgets about girls, and settles down to the serious task of Minding His Own Business, a job made easier by the fact that Heada wouldn’t tell me where Alis was because she wasn’t speaking to me.

  And by Heada’s (or Alis’s) pouring all my liquor down the drain like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen and Mayer’s putting a hold on my account till I turned in last week’s dozen. Last week’s dozen consisted of The Philadelphia Story, which I was only halfway through. So it was heigh-ho, heigh-ho, off to work we go to find twelve squeaky-cleans I could claim I’d already edited, and what better place to look than Disney?

  Only Snow White had a cottage full of beer tankards and a dungeon full of wine goblets and deadly potions. Sleeping Beauty was no better—it had a splatted royal steward who’d drunk himself literally under the table—and Pinocchio not only drank beer but smoked cigars the Anti-Smoking League had somehow missed. Even Dumbo got drunk.

  But animation wipes are comparatively easy, and all Alice in Wonderland had was a few smoke rings, so I was able to finish off the dozen and replenish my stock of deadly potions so at least I didn’t have to watch Fantasia cold sober. And a good thing, too. The Pastoral Symphony sequence in Fantasia was so full of wine it took me five days to clean it up, after which I went back to The Philadelphia Story and stared at Jimmy Stewart, trying to think of some way to salvage him, and then gave up and waited for my skids suspension to be over.

  As soon as it was, I went out to Burbank to apologize to Alis, but more time must have gone by than I realized because there was a CG class cramming the unstacked chairs, and when I asked one of the hackates where Michael Caine and the film hist class had gone, he said, “That was last semester.”

  I stocked up on chooch and went to the next party and asked Heada for Alis’s class schedule.

  “I don’t do chooch anymore,” Heada said. She was wearing a tight sweater and skirt and black-framed glasses. Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire. “Why can’t you leave her alone? She’s not hurting anybody.”

  “I want—” I said, but I didn’t know what I wanted. No, that wasn’t true. What I wanted was to find a movie that didn’t have a single AS in it. Only there weren’t any.

  “The Ten Commandments,” I said, back in my room again.

  There was drinking in the golden-calf scene and assorted references to “the wine of violence,” but it was better than The Philadelphia Story. I laid in a supply of grappa and asked for a list of biblical epics, and went to work playing Charlton Heston—deleting vineyards and calling a halt to Roman orgies. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

  SCENE: Exterior of the Hardy house in summer. Picket fence, maple tree, flowers by front door. Slow dissolve to autumn. Leaves falling. Tight focus on a leaf and follow it down.

  La-la-land is a lot like the skids. You stand still and stare at a screen, or, worse, your own reflection, and after a while you’re somewhere else.

  The parties continued, packed with Marilyns and studio execs. Fred Astaire stayed in litigation, Heada avoided me, I drank. In excellent company. Gangsters drank, Navy lieutenants, little old ladies, sweet young things, doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs. Fredric March, Jean Arthur, Spencer Tracy, Susan Hayward, Jimmy Stewart. And not just in The Philadelphia Story. The all-American, “shucks, wah-ah-all,” do-the-honorable-thing boy next door got regularly splatted. Aquavit in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, brandy in Bell, Book and Candle, “likker” straight from the jug in How the West Was Won. In It’s a Wonderful Life, he got drunk enough to get thrown out of a bar and ran his car into a tree. In Harvey, he spent the entire film pleasantly tipsy, and what in hell was I supposed to do when I got to that movie? What in hell was I supposed to do in general?

  Somewhere in there, Heada came to see me. “I’ve got a question,” she said, standing in the door.

  “Does this mean you’re over being mad at me?” I said.

  “Because you practically broke my arms? Because you thought the whole time you were popping me I was somebody else? What’s to be mad about?”

  “Heada…” I said.

  “It’s okay. Happens to me all the time. I should open a simsex parlor.” She came in and sat down on the bunk. “I’ve got a question.”

  “I’ll answer yours if you answer mine,” I said.

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “You know everything.”

  “She dropped out. The word is, she’s working down on Hollywood Boulevard.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not dancing in the movies, which should make you happy. You were always trying to talk her out of—”

  I cut in with, “What’s your question?”

  “I watched that movie you told me I was playing a part in. Rear Window with Thelma Ritter? And all the meddling you said she did, telling him to mind his own business, telling him not to get involved. It was good advice. She was just trying to help.”

  “What’s your question?”

  “I watched this other movie. Casablanca. It’s about this guy who has a bar in Africa someplace during World War II, and his old girlfriend shows up, only she’s married to this other guy—”

  “I know the plot,” I said. “What part don’t you understand?”

  “All of it,” she said. “Why the bar guy—”

  “Humphrey Bogart,” I said.

  “Why Humphrey Bogart drinks all the time, why he says he won’t help her and then he does, why he tells her she can’t stay. If the two of them are so splatted about each other, why can’t she stay?”

  “There was a war on,” I said. “They both had work to do.”

  “And this work was more important than the two of them?”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t believe it, in spite of Rick’s whole “hill of beans” speech. Ilsa’s lending moral support to her husband, Rick’s fighting in the Resistance weren’t more important. They were a substitute. They were what you did when you couldn’t have what you wanted. “The Nazis would get them,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said doubtfully. “So they can’t stay together. But why can’t he still pop her before she leaves?”

  “Standing there at the airport?”

  “No,” she said, very serious. “Before. Back at the bar.”

  Because he can’t have her, I thought. And he knows it.

  “Because of the Hays Office,” I said.

  “In real life, she would have given him a pop.”

  “That’s a comforting thought,” I said. “But the movies aren’t real life. And they can’t tell you how people feel. They’ve got to show you. Valentino rolling his eyes, Rhett sweeping Scarlett off her feet, Lillian Gish clutching her heart. Bogie loves Ingrid and can’t have her.” I could see her looking blank again. “The bar owner loves his old girlfriend, so they have to show you by not letting him touch her or even give her a good-bye kiss. He has to just stand there and look at her.”

  “Like you drinking all the time and falling off the skids,” she said.

  Now it was my turn to look blank.

  “The night Alis brought you back to my room, the night you were so splatted.”

  I still didn’t get it.

  “Showing the feelings,” Heada said. “You trying to walk through the skids screen and nearly getting killed and Alis pulling you out.”

  SCENE: Exterior. The Hardy house. Wind whirls the dead leaves. Slow dissolve to a bare-branched tree. Snow. Winter.

  I’d apparently had quite a night that night. I had tried to walk through the skids wall like a druggate on too much rave
and then popped the wrong person. A wonderful performance, Andrew.

  And Alis had saved me. I took the skids down to Hollywood Boulevard to look for her, checking at Screen Test City and at A Star Is Born, which had a River Phoenix look-alike working there. The Happy Endings booth had changed its name to Happily Ever After and was featuring Doctor Zhivago, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in the field of flowers, smiling and holding a baby. A knot of half-interested tourates were watching it.

  “I’m looking for a face,” I said.

  “Take your pick,” the guy said. “Lara, Scarlett, Marilyn—”

  “We were down here a few months ago,” I said, trying to jog his memory. “We talked about Casablanca….”

  “I got Casablanca,” he said. “I got Wuthering Heights, Love Story—”

  “This face,” I interrupted. “She’s about so high, light brown hair—”

  “Freelancer?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Never mind.”

  I walked on. There was nothing else on this side except VR caves. I stood there and thought about them, and about the simsex parlors farther down and the freelancers hustling out in front of them in torn net leotards, and then went back to Happily Ever After.

  “Casablanca,” I said, pushing in front of the tourates, who’d decided to get in line. I slapped down my card.

  The guy led me inside. “You got a happy ending for it?” he asked.

  “You bet.”

  He sat me down in front of the comp, an ancient-looking Wang. “Now what you do is push this button, and your choices’ll come up on the screen. Push the one you want. Good luck.”

  I rotated the airplane forty degrees, flattened it to two-dimensional, and made it look like the cardboard it had been. I’d never seen a fog machine. I settled for a steam engine, spewing out great belching puffs of cloud, and ff’d to the three-quarter shot of Bogie telling Ingrid, “We’ll always have Paris.”

  “Expand frame perimeter,” I said, and started filling in their feet, Ingrid in flats and Bogie in lifts, big, chunky blocks of wood strapped to his shoes with pieces of—

  “What in hell do you think you’re doing?” the guy said, bursting in.

  “Just trying to inject a little reality into the proceedings,” I said.

  He shoved me out of the chair and started pushing keys. “Get out of here.”

  The tourates who’d been ahead of me were standing in front of the screen, and a little crowd had formed around them.

  “The plane was cardboard and the airplane mechanics were midgets,” I said. “Bogie was only five four. Fred Astaire was the son of an immigrant brewery worker. He only had a sixth-grade education.”

  The guy emerged from the booth steaming like my fog machine.

  “ ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ took seventeen takes,” I said, heading toward the skids. “None of it’s real. It’s all done with mirrors.”

  SCENE: Exterior. The Hardy house in winter. Dirty snow on roof, lawn, piled on either side of front walk. Slow dissolve to spring.

  I don’t remember whether I went back down to Hollywood Boulevard again. I know I went to the parties, hoping Alis would show up in the doorway again, but not even Heada was there.

  In between, I raped and pillaged and looked for something easy to fix. There wasn’t anything. Sobering up the doctor in Stagecoach ruined the giving birth scene. D.O.A. went dead on arrival without Edmond O’Brien slugging back shots of bourbon, and The Thin Man disappeared altogether.

  I called up the menu again, looking for something AS-free, something clean-cut and all-American. Like Alis’s musicals.

  “Musicals,” I said, and the menu chopped itself into categories and put up a list. I scrolled through it.

  Not Carousel. Billy Bigelow was a lush. So were Ava Gardner in Show Boat and Van Johnson in Brigadoon. Guys and Dolls? No dice. Marlon Brando’d gotten a missionary splatted on rum. Gigi? It was full of liquor and cigars, not to mention “The Night They Invented Champagne.”

  Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? Maybe. It didn’t have any saloon scenes or “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys” numbers. Maybe some applejack at the barnraising or in the cabin, nothing that couldn’t be taken out with a simple wipe.

  “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” I said to the comp, and poured myself some of the bourbon I’d bought for Giant. Howard Keel rode into town, married Jane Powell, and they started up into the mountains in his wagon. I could ff over this whole section—Howard was hardly likely to pull out a jug and offer Jane a swig, but I let it run at regular speed while she twittered on to Howard about her hopes and plans. Which were going to be smashed as soon as she found out she was supposed to cook and clean for his six mangy brothers. Howard giddyapped the make-believe horses and looked uncomfortable.

  “That’s right, Howard. Don’t tell her,” I said. “She won’t listen to you anyway. She’s got to find out for herself.”

  They arrived at the cabin. I’d expected at least one of the brothers to have a corncob pipe, but they didn’t. There was some roughhousing, another song, and then a long stretch of pure wholesomeness till the barnraising.

  I poured myself another bourbon and leaned forward, watching for homespun dissipation. Jane Powell handed pies and cakes out of the wagon, and a straw-covered jug I’d have to turn into a pot of beans or something, and they went into the barnraising number Alis had asked for the night I met her. “Ff to end of music,” I said, and then, “Wait,” which wasn’t a command, and they continued galloping through the dance, finished, and started in on raising the barn in record time.

  “Stop,” I said. “Back at 96,” I said, and rew’d to the beginning of the dance. “Forward realtime,” I said, and there she was. Alis. In a pink gingham dress and white stockings, with her backlit hair pulled back into a bun.

  “Freeze,” I said.

  It’s the booze, I thought. Ray Milland in Lost Weekend, seeing pink elephants. Or some effect of the klieg, a delayed flash or something, superimposing Alis’s face over the dancers like it had been over the figures of Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell dancing on the polished floor.

  And how often was this going to happen? Every time somebody went into a dance routine? Every time a face or a hair ribbon or a flaring skirt reminded me of that first flash? Deboozing Mayer’s movies was bad enough. I didn’t think I could take it if I had to look at Alis, too.

  I turned the screen off and then on again, like I was trying to debug a program, but she was still there.

  I watched the dance again, looking at her face carefully, and then triple-timed to the scene where the brides get kidnapped. The dancer, her light brown hair covered by a bonnet, looked like Alis but not like her. I triple-timed to the next dance number, the girls doing ballet steps in their pantaloons and white stockings this time, no bonnets, but whatever it was, her hair or the music or the flare of her skirt, had passed, and she was just a girl who looked like Alis. A girl, who, unlike Alis, had gotten to dance in the movies.

  I ff’d through the rest of the movie, but there weren’t any more dance numbers and no sign of Alis, and this was all Another Lesson, Andrew, in not mixing bourbon with Rio Bravo tequila.

  “Beginning credits,” I said, and went back and wiped the bottle in the boardinghouse scene and then triple-timed to the barnraising again to turn the jug into a pan of cornbread, and then thought I’d better watch the rest of the scene to make sure the jug wasn’t visible in any of the other shots.

  “Print and send,” I said, “and forward realtime.”

  And there she was again. Dancing in the movies.

  MOVIE CLICHE #15: The Hangover. (Usually follows #14: The Party.)

  Headache, jumping at loud noises, flinching at daylight.

  SEE: The Thin Man, The Tender Trap, After the Thin Man, McLintock!, Another Thin Man, The Philadelphia Story, Song of the Thi
n Man.

  I accessed Heada, no visual. “Do you know of anything that can sober me up?”

  “Fast or painless?”

  “Fast.”

  “Ridigaine,” she said promptly. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing’s up,” I said. “Mayer’s bugging me to work harder on his movies, and I decided the AS’s are slowing me down. Do you have any?”

  “I’ll have to ask around,” she said. “I’ll get some and bring it over.”

  That’s not necessary, I wanted to say, which would only make her more suspicious. “Thanks,” I said.

  While I was waiting for her, I called up the credits. They weren’t much help. There were seven brides, after all, and the only ones I knew were Jane Powell and Ruta Lee, who’d been in every B picture made in the seventies. Dorcas was Julie Newmeyer, who’d later changed her name to Julie Newmar. When I went back and looked at the barnraising scene again, it was obvious which one she was.

  I watched it, listening for the other characters’ names. The little blonde Russ Tamblyn was in love with was named Alice, and Dorcas was the tall brunette. I ff’d to the kidnapping scene and matched the other girls to their characters’ names. The one in the pink dress was Virginia Gibson.

  Virginia Gibson. “Screen Actors Guild directory,” I said, and gave it the name.

  Virginia Gibson had been in an assortment of movies, including Athena and something called I Killed Wild Bill Hickok.

  “Musicals,” I said, and the list shrank to five. No, four. Funny Face had Fred Astaire in it, which meant it was in litigation.

  There was a knock on the door. I blanked the screen, then decided that would be a dead giveaway. “Notorious,” I said, and then chickened out. What if Ingrid Bergman had Alis’s face, too? “Cancel,” I said, and tried to think of another movie, any movie. Except Athena.

  “Tom, are you okay?” Heada called through the door.