The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  “Gábor, we will know—eventually. Yes, of course we need to know,” Luc said carefully, respectfully. “But this is kind of the point: it doesn’t really matter what the old woman says. He doesn’t know, we don’t know—that’s good: tension, suspense. All we, and he, know is that these other guys think he knows, so they come after him. It’s the MacGuffin. I thought you liked that, the fact that we don’t know.”

  “Yes, yes, of course I like it. I like it. I love it. But will the audience like it? Will my distributors like it? Will they understand that this is a piece of movie cleverness that they must accept? I’m not so sure.”

  “But it’s also what’s existential about this story, Gábor. It plunges Block into a labyrinth of meaningless detail and confusion—I mean, there’s a logic behind it all for Yatsevich and his thugs and we make that clear—but it’s so wild and confusing for Block that he begins to question the structure and meaning of everything in his life. That’s why he changes.”

  “And he gets the girl,” said Szabó.

  “Yes. But that’s not the change,” said Luc, gently. “However, as he changes, she increasingly believes in Block, so she reflects his new view of himself.”

  Szabó laughed. “It’s not that complicated. Is not his new view of himself that she likes. Is his cock.”

  They’d started in Paris, meeting in Szabó’s home, in cafés, over dinners at Brasserie Balzar, where Szabó and Véronique liked to eat several nights a week. Szabó’s wife was nearly always there during their talks, a silent, uninvolved presence who would concentrate on her food or read a book, apparently as unengaged in their discussions as a dog—until she spoke.

  The screenplay was tight before Szabó ever saw it. Luc had struggled to make it work like a watch. There were no extraneous parts. It moved fast from the station bar to the second train, where Block meets the girl and they jump on a bus eluding the man who bought him the Cognac, to the house on the lake and the long rowboat ride through the fog and finally the dingy office and the photographs of the old woman as a young girl holding hands with the man, the industrialist, who was her father. Luc had made the locations purposely vague, bland, unidentifiable—like the chilly Clermont-Ferrand of Éric Rohmer’s Ma Nuit chez Maud that Luc loved so much. Apart from suggesting that this could happen anywhere to anyone, it also meant the film could be made wherever a producer decided to shoot it, wherever he could make his deals and wanted to spend his money. This pragmatic approach had informed every decision Luc had made in constructing his story. This one would get made.

  Szabó loved it. He raved about it. He got it: the existential odyssey that propels Block toward an understanding of the hollowness of his life and a move toward a more authentic one. He had bought an eighteen-month option on the screenplay with an option to renew for a further eighteen months. They talked about cast.

  “I see Roy Scheider,” said Szabó, early on, peering sharply at Luc to convey the acuity of his vision. As they discussed the screenplay, Szabó started calling Block “Roy,” describing how Roy steals a car from the station parking lot at night—

  “But Block doesn’t steal a car,” Luc said. “Block wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t know how to steal a car. That’s not his character. They take the bus—”

  “Luc, Luc.” Szabó waved a forked morsel of veal, smiling indulgently, paternally. They were eating dinner at Balzar. “Roy Scheider doesn’t take the bus. Who takes the bus in the movies? You have to wait in line with women who are bringing home chickens for dinner. With schoolchildren. The action stops. No. It’s impossible. Roy Scheider can’t stop to wait for a bus.”

  “What if it’s not Roy Scheider?” The actor’s hard, angular features were not what Luc had imagined for his softer, more physically vulnerable protagonist, a man with a face that could illuminate doubt and fear.

  “Who, then?”

  “Well,” carefully now, “I don’t know . . . how about Albert Finney?”

  “Albert Finney? Albert Finney doesn’t open a movie. I don’t get my distributors with Albert Finney. Who knows Albert Finney?”

  “He’s a great actor. He’s got a human face.”

  “Luc. Albert Finney—who is this? English character actor, good for five minutes in the whole movie, eight seconds at a time, as bureaucrat or heavy, to give a note of class. Everybody in the world knows Roy Scheider. The French Connection. Jaws. For this, they know Roy Scheider in Finland, in Africa, in the jungle towns in Borneo where every week they paint the movie posters badly by hand as mural on the cinema wall and you see this great big Roy Scheider with eyes popping out of his head like a squid being chased by a giant shark. And guess what”—Szabó pushed the forkful of veal into his mouth and smiled knowingly, openmouthed, at Luc as he chewed, audibly grinding the meat to pulp with his molars—“Roy’s cheap. I talk to his agent. He wants his own movie. He doesn’t want to be Gene Hackman’s buddy or second violin to the shark. He wants to be a star all by himself. To get the girl, not the fish! And I guarantee to you that he will read your screenplay and see that it is tailor-made for him, with a few changes. Like he doesn’t sit and wait for a bus. Nobody takes a bus.”

  “Cary Grant took a bus in North by Northwest.”

  “You put Cary Grant in a wheelbarrow and everything in the movie looks fantastic. Not Roy Scheider. He needs a fast car and Raquel Welch in the passenger seat. Then you got a movie.”

  “Raquel Welch?”

  Szabó laughed affectionately. “My dear Luc. Who were you thinking for the girl?”

  “I don’t know. Isabelle Huppert—”

  “Roy Scheider never would go to bed with such a girl. Too neurotic, talking talking all the time—”

  “She has terrible freckles,” said Véronique, without looking up from a thick, atlas-sized magazine, Yacht, with boats the size and shape of buildings on its cover.

  “It’s true,” said Szabó. “They are not running through the jungles of Asia, driving on the highways in America, for Isabelle Huppert covered with freckles, talking, having depressions. My distributors never buy this film with such a girl.”

  Szabó chartered a yacht in Monaco for six weeks. Full crew, chef, plenty of cabins. A quiet cruise along the Riviera with his wife and her sister, very beautiful girl. Luc must come along, Szabó insisted. They would work every day and make a few changes and have the completed draft by the end of the cruise.

  “Um . . .” It sounded like true arrival: cruise the Riviera on a yacht with a film producer, women, write a screenplay. But even after a meal with Szabó and Véronique, Luc couldn’t wait to get away from them and clear his head. “. . . Well, I—”

  “Graham Greene wrote The Third Man on Alexander Korda’s yacht on a cruise in the Mediterranean,” said Szabó, raising bushy eyebrows at Luc.

  Luc hadn’t known this, but he thought The Third Man an exemplar of the power of withholding information from the audience. “I love The Third Man—”

  “So what does she say to him?” asked Szabó. “If we don’t hear what the old woman says to Block, we have the audience wondering what is going on.”

  “But Gábor. Don’t we want the audience to wonder what’s going on? To not know? Like in The Third Man.”

  “No. If they don’t know, they don’t care. The Third Man opened very bad. Now is a classic, then was a big disappointment for Sandy. Casablanca, it’s the letters of transit. You know this immediately. That’s your MacGuffin, but we know what it is. Everybody is running around looking for the letters of transit. Whoever gets them, gets out of Casablanca. Simple. Here, Block doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He looks stupid. We don’t care, nobody cares. We must hear what the old woman tells him in the ear in the station.”

  “But the whole movie is him finding out what she whispered. Who she is, what Yatsevich is looking for. And what the movie’s really about is how Block finds meaning in his life by doing something
right. That’s the mystery, and people will find that more interesting than—”

  “Doesn’t work. My distributors will be saying, ‘What it’s about?’ I can’t tell them it’s about Roy Scheider running around looking for himself to find out who he is. They will think it’s a hippie story and they will say no. Roy Scheider knows who he is. He’s a tough guy. He’s a man. So I have to say to them, it’s about a man finding the paintings taken by the Nazis, that only the old woman whose father took them knows where they are and she tells Roy Scheider, and he goes to find them and kills the bad guys who are chasing him and he gets the girl. That’s a movie.”

  Luc had always believed he would be successful and make money as a writer. His father, Bernard Franklin, of Walpole, Massachusetts, was a longtime Paris-based journalist with the Herald Tribune who had written books about French exceptionalism and Anglo-European interests. Luc had seen his father write them, one after another, published only to vanish into the black holes of bookshops, never to be seen again. Luc found his father’s books dull—nobody read them on airplanes or in cafés—and they made almost no money at all. Luc wanted to write novels. Like Hemingway and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald, and later like Kerouac, that would sell better than his father’s earnest efforts and be made into movies.

  When the novel he’d written at twenty-seven had been turned down by every publisher he’d sent it to, he sank into prolonged shock. He started writing another but, sundered by doubt, put it aside. One day in Paris he met a friend at Le Select who was having a drink with a film producer named Claude. Luc’s friend introduced him to the producer, describing him as a writer. Claude talked about a story he’d read in a newspaper about a refugee who had tried to swim from an outlying Albanian island to the heel of Italy, a distance of fifty miles. He’d been picked up at sea close to the Italian coast, with no sign of a boat or raft nearby, and taken back to Albania. “Can you imagine?” said Claude, looking at them both. “The dream, the bravery, the disappointment!” Luc mentioned the John Cheever story “The Swimmer.” Claude remembered the movie, which he had loved. “Ah, Burt Longcastaire.” He hadn’t known it was adapted from the Cheever story. He called Luc the next day, and they met and talked again about the story of an Albanian trying to swim to Italy. Was it possible, Claude wondered, that anyone could stay afloat for so long? Luc told him about the high salinity of the Mediterranean, which would help any swimmer, and how he himself had spent much of his childhood swimming around Mallorca. Claude offered Luc twenty thousand francs—about five thousand dollars—if he would write the screenplay of the story they would outline together. Luc agreed. Claude gave him a book of screenplays written by Jean-Claude Carrière to show him how they were written. Luc wrote the screenplay in a month. Then Claude became wrapped up making another film, but Luc had been paid to write a screenplay. He was a screenwriter. He was hired to write more. Since he was bilingual, he could write screenplays in French or English—he wrote several in both languages so producers could show a property to both French and American distributors. He wrote spec screenplays to offer for sale—people in Hollywood were making fantastic sums selling spec screenplays; Luc even thought of going to Los Angeles, to the Mountaintop—and for several years went with a producer to the Cannes Film Festival. Eventually, little by little, nothing happened. He was thirty. The creeping sense of disjunction between what was supposed to happen in his life and what was actually happening, began to terrify him. He saw himself sinking into oblivion.

  Szabó looked like a life raft.

  The Szabós, with Véronique’s sister, boarded the yacht in Monaco. Luc was to join them two weeks later. Since his plane ticket was to Nice, Szabó told him to meet the yacht in the little port of St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, between Nice and Monaco. Although he’d never been there, Luc knew of it: it was where Somerset Maugham had bought a fabulous villa and lived much of his long life.

  The yacht was not there when he arrived by taxi in midafternoon—they would be out sailing during the day, Szabó had told him over the phone, back in port by sunset. Luc left his bag at the capitainerie, and walked uphill along the narrow lanes of the Cap, between high hedges of pine and cypress and dense bulwark copses of flowers that allowed only partial views of the great pastel-hued, frosted, and crenellated villas. These were the homes of the rich and the not famous: disenfranchised European nobility; Nazi profiteers; modern industrialists; and some genuine, unimpeachable strains of old money. Not writers.

  He was looking for Maugham’s Villa Mauresque. He’d read Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, the story of a young man seeking truth amid the trappings of European luxury, many times. Just as many times he’d seen the glossy black-and-white 1946 Oscar-nominated movie adaptation, starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney—whose nipples visibly harden beneath her gossamer-sheer silk blouse in the final climactic scene as she parts from her lost love, played by Tyrone Power, for the last time—in a villa on the French Riviera.

  With his millions made from writing, Somerset Maugham bought the Villa Mauresque, and lived out his days there in luxury, writing in the mornings, playing bridge through the afternoons, entertaining some very fortunate guests. One of them, Luc read in some biography of the writer, had walked through the house and gardens, marveling: “All of it from writing!”

  He finally found the entrance to the Villa Mauresque. Maugham had been dead for almost twenty years, but the Moorish symbol he had adopted to ward off the evil eye, monogrammed into the cover of all his hardcover books, was still engraved in stone at the entrance to the villa’s driveway.

  • • •

  They worked mornings in a quiet spot on the forward deck of the yacht, sitting in folding teak director’s chairs with their coffee, while the crew prepared breakfast, and Mireille, Véronique’s sister, slept late in the aft cabin. As they talked, Véronique stood behind Szabó, a tray beside her, squeezing and lancing and wiping with alcohol and cotton balls the dense new crop of acne cysts that had boiled up through the skin across Szabó’s back and shoulders during the night. It took her at least half an hour every morning. Szabó ignored her as he would a manicurist and concentrated on their story. Luc tried not to look at the pile of blood-and-pus-soaked cotton balls mounting on the tray.

  Since fleeing Hungary as a documentary filmmaker after the 1956 uprising, Szabó’s attenuated commercial instincts had been honed by producing soft-core pornography for the German and Scandinavian markets, before moving successfully into increasingly less lurid mainstream features. As they pulled apart and reconstructed Luc’s story to reflect the requirements of his distributors, Szabó’s tone, his approach to the project, shifted. Before, he had been confident, amused by Luc’s naiveté, but respectful of his ideas, his story. Now, he became visibly less happy. “I don’t know,” he began to say, clicking his tongue in his mouth as he worried a gap in his molars, “we’re losing focus.” Their morning work sessions grew irregular. Szabó, a chronic insomniac, always up early to work and chase away nocturnal demons, began to appear late. Or to sit in the yacht’s teak-paneled saloon, sipping coffee and looking distractedly at the charts of the nearby coasts. He grew bored.

  The wide square sail, emblazoned with a coat of arms that incorporated a leaping delphinus, was rarely used. The engine propelled the yacht, and the generator ran all day and most of the night. They motored to Antibes and ate dinner at Chez Félix in the old town. Szabó had heard that Graham Greene dined there every night and he hoped to meet him. He had greatly admired Greene’s brief performance as a film distributor in Truffaut’s film La Nuit Américaine, but they failed to spot the elusive author on two consecutive nights.

  “I want to sail in the sea,” Szabó told the yacht’s captain, Tony Clement, a weathered, laconic Englishman with a good accent, dressed in white shirt and shorts. “Not this back-and-forth between boat parking lots. I want to sail across the sea to another country. I want a voyage.”

  “Quite right too,” sa
id Tony agreeably.

  “Where can we go?”

  Tony spread a chart of the western Mediterranean across the saloon table. “Well, Corsica—”

  “How long?” cut in Szabó.

  “Calvi in a day—”

  “Farther,” said Szabó. “A voyage. Out of sight of land. Sailing all night. Across the sea.”

  “How about the Balearics?” said Luc to no one in particular.

  “Where?” asked Szabó.

  Luc touched the chart, more than a foot across the paper below the French coast.

  “What is there?”

  “Islands belonging to Spain,” said Tony. “A day and a night and a day perhaps to get there.”

  “Do they have charm?”

  “Well, it’s not the Côte d’Azur.”

  “Actually,” said Luc, “I more or less grew up there.”

  Szabó looked at him in surprise. “Where?”

  Luc placed his finger on the chart again. “Right there. The east end of Mallorca. My mother has a small hotel there.”

  “Really? Is it charming?” said Szabó.

  Luc was suddenly full of inspiration again. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  Four

  Luc slept aboard the yacht, but rode his motorcycle early to the Rocks to catch his mother at breakfast.

  “Darling, I don’t go aboard boats,” said Lulu, “except ferries. You know that.”

  Yes, yes, he knew. So she always said, and he couldn’t recall her aboard a boat in all the years they’d lived beside the sea and a port full of yachts and friends who came and went in them. But Szabó was taken with her. She had impressed him, and Szabó wanted to impress her back in his own arena aboard his fancy rented ship. People had been impressed by Luc’s mother all his life and he knew the power of her reflected glory.

  “Mother, the boat’s not leaving port. It’s the size of a building. You won’t feel any movement—”