The Return of Service

by Baumbach, Jonathan;

  “Dong,” the natives chant. “Dong. Dong. Dong.”

  Dong has taken Lola to his cave, which is strewn with the broken bodies of other “brides.”

  The giant ape holds her in the palm of his hand, studying her, an impassive expression on his wizened face.

  “Me Lola,” she says, pointing to herself. “You Dong.”

  The giant ape nods in apparent understanding, though it may only be a circumstantial gesture. Abruptly, his face is transformed. He is moved by Lola’s beauty and vulnerability, her sexuality and innocence. It is as if nothing in his life mattered until this moment. The sigh that passes from him is almost human. He strokes Lola’s long blond hair with his giant finger, moving down to touch a breast.

  From Dong’s finger we cut to Commander Buck’s pen as he writes in his journal. Once we commandeered the poppy field, we lost all ambition to rescue Lola or indeed even to return to our ship but lay in the field in a stupor of pleasure. Some pygmy girls joined us after a while—a gift apparently from the chief—and although we still intended to rescue Lola, the days passed without a single gesture in that direction. There is something in the atmosphere of this island, some unseen power.

  From the point of Buck’s pen, as if emerging from it like a spurt of ink, we cut to the First Mate rushing pell-mell through the maze of the jungle. He follows Dong’s enormous footsteps, stopping from time to time to call out Lola’s name, the sound echoing back. Impelled by the erotic pull of the landscape, he embraces a tree in desperation. All sense of proportion is lost.

  We discover Lola asleep on a mat of grass at the foot of Dong’s cave. Dong himself is sitting up, though he seems quiescent, on the verge perhaps of going to sleep himself. We see him glance over lovingly at Lola before closing his eyes.

  Lola wakes to find Dong asleep, snoring gently, a complacent hum. What to do? She kisses the sleeping ape on the top of his head, then scratches a note in the ground with a stick, unable to walk out of Dong’s life without some parting communication. “Dear Dong,” she writes, “We are worlds apart.” The message is not quite what she means to say and she erases it and starts again. Her name is called, startling her. It gives her pleasure to have her name in the air, a sense of belonging.

  Lola looks around, unable at first to determine where the voice is coming from, discovering finally the First Mate on the edge of a promontory perhaps a hundred yards away. He signals her to join him. “I can’t,” she mouths.

  Going down the side of a mountain, Lola trips over a root and falls headlong. Fragments of her immediate past flash before her eyes. When she regains consciousness the Mate is holding her head in his lap. “Ambivalence got the better of me,” she says. “I couldn’t bring myself to leave him.”

  Dong lets out an enormous roar of anguish when he discovers Lola has gone. When he comes upon her with the First Mate his grief turns to anger.

  “Leave him to me,” says Lola, interposing herself between her two suitors. “Hide behind something until I tell you to come out.”

  Dong lifts her in his hand, squeezing her just enough to let her know that he is a monster of displeasure.

  “You are making me regret my affection for you,” she shouts at him.

  Dong shakes his head, a tear (perhaps a drop of moisture in the air) poises in an eye. He mumbles something almost human, struggles to make himself understood.

  While Lola tames the beast, soft-talks and scolds him into docility, the Mate looks on from behind a rock. When Dong seems no longer murderous, she introduces him to the Mate. “This is my brother,” she says to Dong. “This is King Dong, the thirteenth wonder of the world,” she says to the Mate. Dong probes the Mate with a finger, knocking him back and over, laughing apishly.

  Lola establishes an uneasy truce between them, a grudging accommodation. “I want you two to be fast friends,” she announces.

  Some time passes—we see pages of calendar flutter in the wind—before we return to Dong, Lola, and the First Mate (Tex) living together in domestic compromise in Dong’s lair.

  Lola sleeps with Dong in the main quarters while the Mate sleeps by himself in a corner on a pallet of leaves.

  “I can’t stand to see you with him,” Tex says to Lola when Dong is away on an errand. “I’ve made up my mind to leave tonight. Whether you go with me or not is up to you.”

  She is torn by his request, agrees to leave with him, then reneges. “I can’t leave King Dong.” she says. “No matter how it seems, there is something between us. He befriended me at a bad time in my life.”

  “If you stay with him out of pity, you’ll end up hating each other.”

  Lola slaps his face, they fight; he pins her to the earth, they kiss. “You’re bea utiful when you’re angry,” he says. We see the lovers bathed by sunlight screened through the high trees. We see them in a long shot in a variety of attitudes like paintings of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

  “That’s the best it’s ever been for me,” says Tex.

  She pleads with Tex to stay a little longer, promising to make a choice between her two lovers as soon as she knows her own mind.

  Tex agrees grudgingly, though confesses not to understand her relationship to Dong. Sex, he would suppose, is out of the question.

  “Not so,” says Lola, looking off into the distance.

  Tex presses for an explanation. Dong, confides Lola, has a disproportionately small member, which is why he tends to prefer human females to the women of his own species.

  “It’s barely bigger than yours,” she tells the Mate. “Is that so?”

  “It is the reason he is so unsure of himself.”

  This conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Commander Buck and his men. Buck has come, he announces, to take Dong back to the States to make a film star out of him. Lola is at first opposed to the idea—the removal of Dong from his homeland might create an ecological imbalance, she says—but the impresario is a fast and persuasive talker. “I want to do what’s best for all concerned,” says Buck. “Dong will make so much money in films, any lifestyle he wants will be available to him. I don’t think it’s fair to deny him this opportunity. Do you want to be the one to deny him?”

  Lola makes conditions. She will help Commander Buck capture the giant ape on the grounds that if things don’t work out with Dong’s career, or if Dong is unhappy in his new life, Buck will see to it personally that Dong returns to his island.

  “If that’s the way you want it,” says the impresario, “that’s the way it will be.”

  On shipboard—Dong in captivity in the hull of the ship—Commander Buck strides the deck with uncharacteristic swagger, a swagger stick under his arm. When Lola comes by he signals her with his head to follow him. He takes her to his quarters and orders her to remove her clothes and position herself at the foot of his bed. She can see from his obsessive manner that there is no arguing with him. She manages to divert him from his purpose by telling him a succession of stories.

  In another part of the ship, Dong weeps and moans under the burden of his chains. Civilization has already begun to change him. He has taken to smoking a pipe, a comfort to him in his isolation.

  There has been a breakdown in discipline. Buck writes in his journal. To avoid mutiny, I’ve had to put half the crew in chains. The choice of who to chain and who not has been wholly arbitrary. All week I’ve been crazed with sexual longing. I hear whispers of mutiny in my sleep.

  The First Mate, who has been put in irons for insubordination, has fantasies of murdering Commander Buck and taking command of the ship. Lola visits him and encourages him in his ambition to make something of himself;

  In captivity, Dong takes up with the two men who bring him his food, a sublimation of unfulfilled desires. He keeps a picture of Lola on his wall, a pin-up from her modeling days before she got her advanced degree in Anthropomorphology.

  I’ve done what I’ve set out to do, writes Buck in his journal.

  Who can say it hasn’t been worth it?r />
  True to his promise, the impresario stars Dong in a motion picture treating in a semifictional way the ape’s early life on Hong Dong Island. The audience at the premiere gives the film a prolonged standing ovation. King Dong is launched on a brilliant career.

  Commander Buck arranges for the construction of an extraordinary house for Dong overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The interior décor simulates the landscape of Hong Dong Island, and Dong, although puzzled by the unfamiliar similarities, accepts the gift gratefully. Lola lives with him as friend and advisor and there is some gossip in the prints of a secret marriage.

  In real life, however, Lola has become tired of living with someone unable to share the same intellectual interests. She keeps to herself, wears dark glasses, is seen reading difficult books or walking along the ocean’s edge, looking bored and feckless.

  Success has gone to Dong’s head and he has of late become extremely careless of Lola’s feelings. Other women, starlets and would-be starlets, the famous and the infamous, come to the exotic Malibu residence at all hours of the day and night to pay homage to the beast. Lola keeps his appointment book and warns him of the implication of social diseases.

  Dong had a certain integrity when they found him, a kind of primitive innocence, while now he is a creature governed solely by his pleasures.

  Montage of Dong on his back like a fallen colossus being licked in a variety of formations by five or six starlets at once, his small hairy tower smoldering like some apprentice volcano.

  Dong growls and beats his chest, his eyes rolling out of his head in ecstasy. Lola stands on a parapet, overlooking the scene, her hand shielding her eyes from the full brunt of her naked sight. When the starlets (or whoever—it is rumored that the daughter of a former President is one of the ape’s visitors) are gone, Lola chides Dong in a gentle voice. “If you keep this up, you’ll ruin your health,” she says.

  It goes on this way for a while. The more successful Dong’s public life becomes, the more vile is his private behavior. For those who love him for himself, there is nothing but ashes and grief.

  Dong does not seem particularly happy with himself and is short-tempered and sulky, prey to every passing vice. Sex, marijuana, amphetamines, cocaine, heroin, alcohol—a classic downfall. Dong drinks heavily, downing gallon bottles as if they were shot glasses. The beast carries it well, but is always a little out of focus these days, his eyes exceptionally glassy.

  At Lola’s urging, Commander Buck has a fatherly talk with Dong about his unacknowledged drinking problem. Dong has a way of going non compos mentis when there’s something he doesn’t want to hear, his normally intelligent face lapsing into bestial stolidity. The impresario warns Dong that unless he shapes up, he will sell his contract to the syndicate and go off on another expedition. “I made you,” says the impresario, “and if I have to, I can unmake you.”

  When Lola threatens to leave Dong, the beast turns maudlin, moaning and weeping in a heartbreaking way. Lola says she will continue to live with him if he promises to give up boozing and womanizing. The ape agrees or seems to, but we can see it is only a ruse to get her to stay.

  Dong becomes increasingly tempermental at the studio, refusing to shoot certain scenes when not in the mood. One director quits the picture rather than be undermined by his erratic star. In a fit of pique—one or two details not to his liking—Dong tears down a million-dollar set.

  Lola has to plead with the studio head to take him back. Only if she agrees to appear with him in the picture, says the head, will he work with Dong again.

  Lola keeps Dong in line for the completion of the film, and just as it seems as if things are working out in their lives, Dong learns that Lola has gotten the lion’s share of the press—she has become a star in her own right—and he hits the sauce again.

  One day, working in his first B film, Dong collapses on the set and has to be taken home and put to bed. The studio doctor comes to examine him and we can see from the doctor’s face that there is something gravely wrong with the ape.

  “Is it very serious?” Lola asks.

  “I assure you that I’ll do the best I can,” says the doctor. “New discoveries are being made every day. The important thing is that he want to live. Without the will to live, there is nothing modern medicine can do for him.”

  After the doctor leaves, Tex comes to the house to renew his plea to Lola to run off with him. He has become a successful Hollywood writer (five straight hits in a row, including Lola’s latest picture) and can offer Lola everything she wants.

  Lola looks away, unable to speak, but we can see (or sense) that she wishes she were free to go.

  “I want you to tell me that you don’t love me,” says Tex. “I want to hear you tell me that from your own lips.”

  “I don’t…,” she says, but can’t finish the sentence. “I don’t love you.”

  They came together irresistibly. We see their lovemaking in slow motion through a dark red filter; it is as if they were dancing at the center of a fire.

  Some intuition (or perhaps it is the noise) wakes Dong from his stupor and he staggers to his feet. He knows something is wrong, but is unable to perceive what it is. We notice the naked figures of Lola and Tex in reflection in the overhead mirror moments before Dong himself becomes aware of them.

  Dong overhears the following conversation.

  “You don’t love him, do you?”

  “I pity him,” she says. “He had the world in his hand and threw it away. But I can’t leave him, Tex, not while he’s ill I can’t. I’ll nurse him back to health and then when he’s on his feet again tell him about us.”

  We see the dawn of comprehension on the stricken gorilla’s face. He mouths Lola’s name—it is almost as if he could speak it—and stumbles wearily from the house onto the terraced beach that leads to the ocean.

  In four steps he is at the water’s edge. And then, hesitating a moment—perhaps only to locate his destination—he enters the water.

  Inside Dong’s palatial Hollywood estate: Lola has just discovered that the giant ape is missing. She goes from room to room looking for him, overrun by panic. Tex tries to calm her but she pushes him away and rushes from the house.

  “Dong,” she calls, but he is already several miles out into the ocean, shrinking as he moves further and further from our view.

  “Dong,” she calls, running to the water’s edge. “It’s Lola, honey.”

  “He’s going home,” Tex says. “Let him go.”

  A helicopter circles over Dong’s head and he swats at it as he would a large fly.

  “Come back, Dong,” Lola calls. “Please come back.”

  If he can hear her, he gives no indication of it, continuing determinedly on his way, a relentless figure.

  A second helicopter joins the first and lets out a stream of machine-gun fire, kicking up the water around Dong.

  Lola and Tex stand at the water’s edge, looking out at Dong, who is now almost imperceptible in the distance, a shadowy head above the waves.

  A crowd has gathered. Concessionaires have sprung up like a plague of weeds.

  A silver-gray limousine drives up. Commander Buck and the head of the studio that owns Dong’s contract get out of the car.

  “Where the hell is he?” says the studio head.

  A bystander, an Oriental boy about seven years old, points toward the ocean.

  “He’s gone,” says Buck. “I can feel his loss as if some piece of me had gone with him. That ape brought the gift of love to this town.”

  “I’m out a million bucks,” says the studio head. “That’s the last ape I ever put into pictures at your advice.”

  The limousine drives off as precipitously as it had arrived.

  The sun is setting. Onlookers leave in groups or one at a time, some lamenting the loss of Dong, others looking for a new thrill, anything to deflect the boredom and emptiness of their lives.

  “Let’s go home,” says Tex.

  Lola pushes his hand aw
ay when he tries to move her. There are tears in her eyes. “I’ll see you at the house,” she says.

  It is almost completely dark now, the moon a knife slash in the gray flesh of the sky, Lola is alone on the beach. She reels with exhaustion, falls, staggers to her feet.

  She is lying in the sand, weeping bitter tears.

  She is sitting up, her hands covering her face, a reprise of voices in her memory. The chanting of pygmies. That ape brought the gift of love to this town.

  The night is black like an ape. Lola perceives Dong coming to her in the night, her arms out, her legs apart. Whatever it is—the night, an imagined lover, a dream—it takes her by force, enters her. A groan of acceptance or pain. She takes him to her. “Dong,” she is heard to cry. The lovers thrash in the wet sand, barely illuminated by the slash of moonlight. Dong is with her; she is alone. It is being filmed by a giant camera.

  The great ape has left his footprint on the imagination.

  The Fields of Obscurity

  His wife was the first up that morning. She looked at him asleep and said. “Oh Rocco, my sweet man, if you don’t go after what you want, you’re never going to get past first base.”

  On the field, waking or sleepless, picking his nose under cover of glove, he would hear or remember it, the same touchingly useless advice.

  “Okay,” he said or he said nothing.

  “You don’t mean it,” she said. “If you wanted to be successful, you would be.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Okay.”

  He had married a thin pretty woman who kept the world from moving too quickly by having a theory for everything. “You get what you want,” she would say when he complained about not getting what he wanted, “and if you don’t get it then you don’t really want it.”

  He had difficulty, which kept him from rising to the top of his profession, making contact with the low curve ball on the outside quarter of the plate.

  She would not make love to him, she said, perhaps implied rather than said, unless he demonstrably wanted what he said he wanted. She had come from two generations of failed perfectionists and had no patience with anything more or less.