Gillis didn’t know what he was getting into or that he’d never get out of it. It was, in its way, like my marriage to the idea of Katharine. Norma and Katharine were both vampires of the spirit, they’d suck the life out of you to lengthen their own. And I mourned her that day on the set in Gillis’s Sunset Blvd. quarters, mourned her more deeply than I’d done since she took her life.
The mad look in Katharine’s eyes as she told me she was going for a walk on that last night were vulturously revealing. She was already feasting on her own corpse, paying final respects to the self that had lost control of her world.
Yes, I was glad that Michel was dead and not too considerate about the suffering it caused Katharine. But I didn’t believe that I killed him.
The shooting suddenly came to an end. It felt like a short day but everyone else told me that we’d worked twelve hours. On my way out, I bumped into Billy and in an instant, he could tell that my thoughts were in another dimension.
“Alexander, you look like you’ve left the world.” He invited me for a drink to talk about the old days again and I took him up on it. We went to Nickodell’s, the watering spot for the Paramount movie junkies when they’d become too engrossed in the troubles of their jobs and moved over there to talk about the troubles of their personal lives. Mostly, though, the talk was light, the troubles of home and hearth always surrendered to a stiff drink and a warm ear.
Billy and I sat in the furthest corner of the restaurant, ordering Scotch and soda, Gin and tonic, forgiveness and release. As we drank, the conversation inevitably made its way back to the days when we were content, living from woman to woman, drink to drink or, in my case, from painting to painting.
“I remember your work,” Billy said, proffering his condolences that I decided to give it up.
“Well, people weren’t buying,” I told him. “And the paintings I did never left my consciousness. They followed me on my way to work, lurked in the background, waited to get me alone.”
“They sound like thieves.”
I laughed. “I guess in a way they were. They stole my spirit.”
“So, get your spirit back. Try again.”
“I don’t know, Billy. I think I’m happier selling your works of art.”
“Well, if you change your mind, you’ve got all day tomorrow to paint. We don’t start shooting till 6:00 pm.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, in Norma’s garage.” Billy looked at me for a moment, scrutinizing my expression. “Have a rest, Alex, you need it.”
“Alright,” I said obediently. Billy stood up and, on the way out, he stopped with some of his other buddies and had a laugh.
I was thinking how it was a good thing that I didn’t need to be on set till the evening. I had a long trip to make, a journey that would end this idiot Tahitian’s attempts to link me up with the murder of Michel. I still didn’t know if I actually killed my half-brother but I knew that I had no intention of serving time for it either way.
I slept peacefully that night, like a dead man. When I woke up, it was dawn. I got ready to leave, woke up my housekeeper, told her that I needed her to take Mara to school.
I got in the car with the murder weapon in the trunk and began my drive out to Death Valley, to the site where Von Stroheim shot his masterpiece, Greed, so many years before, a movie that was about brothers locked in a battle to the death in the heat of the cruel California sun. But McTeague and Marcus weren’t really blood brothers, their bond was deeper. It was a competitive brotherhood in which two close friends fought over the attentions of a woman and both brothers lost her. It was a film that was butchered by the enfant terrible of the motion picture business, Irving Thalberg, a man whose early death was a tragedy to most people in the business but a cause for celebration to me. This, no doubt, was one of my attractions to Sunset Boulevard, the cast included Von Stroheim, playing an early director that “had shown promise” only to be stripped of his power and, in the film we were shooting, make a morgue-like resurrection as the major domo to Norma Desmond.
Once I arrived in Death Valley, I took a side road, a dirt road with plenty of rocks on it, making my car bounce like a carnival ride.
After two or three miles, I found another road that looked more like a path for horses. I followed it, seven miles, all the way up to the foot of the mountain where there were large boulders seeming to protect the mountain from exploration. I stopped the car and got out. It was one of those fiery days in the desert, the kind that would knock the breath out of you and dry up what moisture you had left.
Behind the many boulders, I found a spot where I could dig. I went into the trunk of my car and got a shovel. I looked around. There wasn’t a soul for miles and miles. I started to dig and then I hit something in the dirt. It was hard, like a rock or a tree trunk. I began to dig around it. Gradually, the heat did its trick – it gave me a hallucination. At least I thought it was a hallucination. I discovered a man’s skeleton, then another one right next to it. When I cleared away more of the dirt, I saw that they were connected by the wrists to an ancient pair of handcuffs.
Why would this be here? How could this be here? These were the two skeletons of the brothers from Von Stroheim’s Greed, how they ended up after their battle to the death. Were they really there or was it another one of my hallucinations? Whether the skeletons were real or not, I buried them again, with my iron-handled umbrella. When I was finished, I put heavy rocks on top of the soil. Soon enough, the heat would make the turf appear the same at the digging border and no one would know any better.
I drove back home with a terrible headache. I imagined DeColette following my tire tracks to the spot where I hid the weapon. The headache got worse. I had to stop over in Barstow. The pain was crippling my thoughts. The headache wouldn’t go away but I was so exhausted, so beaten physically and spiritually that I fell into a painful sleep.
When I woke up, there was just enough time for me to make it back to the set in time. I drove straight from Barstow to Norma Desmond’s garage. When I arrived, Billy saw my bedraggled face, my dirty clothes.
“You look like a prospector,” he said.
“Have you been digging for gold?” Erich von Stroheim asked. What did he know, that I had gone back to the location of his famously butchered movie and dug up two skeletons that were the stars of his film? Was his reality as messed up as my own?
We were shooting the scene when Gillis returns the car after a night of writing with Betty, and Max von Mayerling is standing in the garage, waiting for him. He has his regular stern expression. He was there to give Gillis a message, to let him know how deeply he’s got himself involved in “Madame’s” life. When Gillis confronts him with the damage they’re doing by keeping the dark truth of her dead career from her, Max comes back with a confession of what his job is really about – to prevent Norma from discovering that her career will never begin again, that this movie she’s planning to shoot will never be shot. And then he tells Gillis why. Max isn’t just a servant with a protective interest, he’s a man in love with a child that he conquered and molded.
“You must understand. I discovered her when she was sixteen. I made her a star and I can not let her be destroyed.”
“You made her a star?”
“Yes. I directed all her early films. There were three young directors who showed promise in those days: D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and Max von Mayerling.”
“And she’s turned you into a servant.”
“It was I who asked to come back, humiliating as it may seem. I could have continued my career only I found everything unendurable after she had left me. You see, I was her first husband.”
Though we wrapped at sunrise, Billy and I had our regular booze in his office. We drank and stared at the growing light outside his window. I don’t know what Billy’s thoughts were but mine were about Katharine.
When I left the studio that early morning, I left with a piece of Katharine clinging to me. Dead Katharine who depend
ed on me for her life but who I was too in love with to see her illness, the fall into depravity, her clinging to what fantasies she could while the world was collapsing around her, around all of us. She could have had a normal life with a normal love for herself, but she chose to become the adventuress that wanted her freedom while she always wanted me to control her, to help her stand up, only I failed her because she was too infected by the virus of her own drive and the power that she held beneath that drive. Katharine wanted to save the world and wade in it while she was doing so, only Katharine waded in water so deep that she couldn’t get out. She was enveloped by a dream of freedom, a dream that her independence could be an example for the world. She fought demons greater than any single human being could control and, in the end, they controlled her.
After a while, Billy turned to me, “A girl for your thoughts.”
I didn’t want to talk about Katharine right off so I told him about my shrink. I told him the story about when I first brought her one of my paintings.
“It was the box,” Billy chimed in.
“How did you know?”
“What else would you bring to a head shrinker?”
“Yes,” I said, before taking a good gulp of my Scotch and soda, “I brought her Contempt. It looked like a hastily drawn brown box with small-deformed men staring out of it.”
‘You’re in there, Alexander,’ Alice told me, pointing at the unhappy faces, ‘That’s where you’ve always been.’
“It was during this same session that I first confided my hallucinations to her.”
“Strange she never had you locked up,” Billy added.
“They’d occur randomly, with no discernible purpose.”
“Your work always spiced things up.”
“I wanted my work to come alive and play with me, make love to me, hurt me. For years as a child,” I told Billy, “I thought nothing of the fact that I saw new toys suddenly appear inside our apartment. But when characters from my paintings began to emerge and follow me around, I started to worry.”
“When did your characters start coming to life?”
“After my father first started depositing money in my bank account.”
I talked about my fear of meeting my father. Every night was a new hell. While Katharine slept soundly, I would stay up all night, watching objects and characters from my painting simply emerge in another part of the room, still glowing with the patina of paint.
“I remembered one picture, Billy, a work from my jealousy over Michel. It was a painting of a man at his moment of physical triumph, wrestling with an alligator. He held the jaws open and they were about to break apart. The man’s face looked familiar. It was Michel, and the night I finished it, the alligator from my painting was emerging from the ocean front waves, its surface glowing.
“You were totally gone,” Billy said.
“That was in the Seychelles, when Katharine told me it was over.”
I started talking about my breakup with Katharine, the one that happened in the summer of ’34 when we were relaxing in the tropics with Mara. “I was painting and she was photographing,” I went on.
“That was when she told me that she loved my brother more than me, that he was anointed by some dark hand of creativity, that his paintings kept her alive while mine were just an echo of the life that Michel had at his command. Her eyes were out on the water, the reflection of the moon filled her sight. I could see the loneliness there.”
“That’s why I’m leaving you,” she said.
“What about Mara,” I asked.
“What about her? She’ll get accustomed to her new father,” she told me.
“The rage started building up. I was ready to take Mara away but I knew I didn’t have a chance in court.” I put down my drink. “So, I let her go and take Mara with her. I left the Seychelles alone and spent some time in Greece. I tried to get rid of my pain on the island of Crete.”
CRETE
When I got back home that night, the talk about my break-up with Katharine possessed me. I had to get something down on canvas, something about that time when I went to Crete and got a lesson in survival from the writer, Henry Miller.
I started a painting of Henry, enjoying the resurrection of that face that spat at loss and misfortune. As I formed his face on the canvas, the memories of that time took over my thoughts. I recollected that hot afternoon when my indulgence in pain was brought to an end by Henry’s encouragement. I was painting Henry in an outdoor oceanfront café where fate had me encounter him.
I sat at a table, alone, drinking up what remained of my courage when I sat listening to Henry, at another table, enjoying the afternoon with his cultural anthropologist friend, Katsimbalis. Their discussion was about the immortal Greeks and their immortal tragedies.
Plenty of drachmas stood before me on an otherwise empty table. I watched them as if they might try to run away from me, but I should have been more resigned to the suffering that is a necessary ingredient in the Greek experience. Greece once had everything, as I once had when I had Katharine. Now that I’d been sitting in the sun for three hours and had a buzz from the Retsina wine which tasted like urine, tiny fragments of Katharine returned to me in an ethereal form. I could manifest her across the table, drinking with me, flirting with me, pouring the piss wine into my glass and watching me get plastered to remove the memory of having just lost my life’s love. That’s how I began to be healed – Greece is a kind of resting place for the destroyed, a spa for the hopeless and helpless.
An alluring woman, one who would excite me at any other time, came by and grabbed up some of my coins. I looked across the table at Katharine. She was translucent. She looked up at the waitress, asked for water - hallucinations always ask for water, maybe that’s why I came to Crete: There was plenty of crystal green water to serve your hallucinations.
The waitress didn’t answer Katharine of course. The living, breathing and sane people of this world never give into a moment when they can breathe in the life-affirming pain of loss. This young lady couldn’t see Katharine or my desire to be left in my imperturbable hopelessness. She was bent on getting my last drachma, riveted to the practical world and intent on staying there.
“No,” I said, “Today I have no bananas for sale.”
“Come on, then, have another drink. Why else would you come to this God-forsaken island? You have something to forgive yourself for.”
“Does he?” Henry said from across the patio. “Then why don’t you help him,” he insisted. Henry walked over to my table.
“May I sit down?”
I welcomed him. Henry gestured to his friend.
They both sat down.
“Let me take care of this” he said and then Miller spoke a few words in Greek and the Grecian girl was beside herself in hysterics. I had no idea what thought he’d planted in her mind but when she left the table, she no longer looked like an idiot. She became one of those people you can always get along with, one of the “they” everyone else is always talking about. They went to get a drink, they went to take a leak, they went to blow their brains out.
Miller smiled, opened his voluminous trap and explained the history of Crete from beginning to end. Katsimbalis chimed in himself, displaying his own great interest in the Greeks of that day, particularly “the undiscovered cultures of Greek men.”
“He’s out of his mind, you see,” Henry told me, “He thinks there’s some Greek tribe hiding away somewhere on these islands, a group of natives who have never been discovered.”
“It’s possible,” Katsimbalis retorted. “There are clues everywhere.”
“Like what, for example?” Henry turned to me, shaking his head.
“I’ve found recently constructed tools and weapons that were made the same way as they had been 20,000 years ago.”
“So, maybe they’re 20,000 years old.”
“No, they are new. I can tell.”
Henry shook his head. “Then where are the people, Katsimbalis,�
�� Henry said. “Are they in another dimension?”
Katsimbalis would later become the star of Henry’s book, Colossus of Maroussi. He would also become the man I tapped in order to learn about another ancient culture, the one that Hitu came from.
“He’s a past and future warrior of the spirit,” Henry said, patting his friend on the back, “A kind of being who’d worm his way into your veins like a cockroach and thrill you with the horror of being alive, then deliver you back to uncomplacent complacency. But his people, his lost Grecian hunters and gatherers are all in his mind. It’s a very educated mind but it’s still barbaric.”
“Maybe that’s why he knows they’re here,” I suggested, “He has a sixth sense for their barbarism.”
“Maybe he does,” Henry came back, “but he doesn’t have any common sense. He doesn’t realize that today’s hunters and gatherers are out to hunt and gather us.” He turned to Katsimbalis. “They wear swastikas,” he said. “But it’s not just the Nazis, don’t you know, it’s every God damn soul that is eventually drawn to this island. It’s a kingdom that offers the hope of serenity but, in the long run, it just increases your suffering. But that’s not a bad thing,” Miller continued. “You need to suffer here. I could tell, from across the terrace, that you came here to dismember yourself from your life and I was trying to figure out why. And when that girl tried to get you soused, my nose spelled it out for me. A woman, lost forever in your memory glands, she is right this moment secreting her juices into your waking dream, begging to be brought back to life but she’ll never be able to.”
I looked at Henry and wanted to punch him. I liked this man. We knew each other in Paris. He was the happy writer who felt up Katharine under the table while he told us some stories. Now, he feeled me out to see if I could help him succeed in escaping from the war that grew into everyone’s life, artist or poet, publisher or salesman.
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