Duplicitous

by Nicholas James

  “Very good, Madame.”

  Gillis gets out of the pool. “You really going to send that script to DeMille?”

  “Yes, I am,” Norma says, “This is the day. Here’s the chart from my astrologer. She read DeMille’s horoscope, she read mine.”

  “She read the script?”

  “De Mille is Leo, I’m Scorpio. Mars has been transiting Jupiter for weeks. Today is the day of the greatest conjunction!” Gillis is drying himself. “Turn around, darling. Let me dry you.”

  She started drying Gillis when he said, “I hope you realize, Norma, that scripts don’t sell on Astrologer’s charts?”

  “I’m not just selling the script. I’m selling me. DeMille always said that I was his greatest star.”

  “When did he say it, Norma?”

  “All right, it was quite a few years ago. But the point is I never looked better in my life. You know why? Because I’ve never been as happy in my life.” Norma wrapped the blanket around Gillis. She was all smiles. Gillis on the other hand, looked grim and trapped in the game he was playing to maintain his survival. He reminded me of my own mendacity and I went home that night to a restless sleep.

  THE MIRACULOUS MEDICATIONS

  The next morning, I drove to my appointment with Alice, someone who watched suffering and knew the right moment to speak, which was rarely. I was relieved when she closed the door and turned to face me, and then took her seat across the sea of troubles that separated me from her sanity.

  “I want more Provenance.”

  “Not now, Alex.”

  “Don’t play me. I’m tense up to here,” I said as I touched the top of my head.

  “Any hallucinations?”

  “Not at this minute.”

  “Then, I think we should wait on the Provenance.”

  “Why? Did they discover some side effect?”

  Pause.

  “I want to see how you do without it.”

  I was having hallucinations then, hallucinations about storming through her office like a whirlwind cartoon character until I could get my hands on some more of those blue pills. They closed my mind to the suffering I was always in and, besides, they did make me a little high. They put me on top of a wave of experience. I could do my daily tasks on top of a rocket. I didn’t need Alice. I didn’t need anyone when the medications opened the locked doors in my brain (or closed them). But my shrink wanted to see how I do without it? How would she know? Is she in my head? Is she the one who is suffering from a lifetime of madness?

  “Would you rather have me in the hospital? You tried that before and it didn’t get us anywhere.”

  Alice sat there, writing me a prescription. She handed it to me.

  “I want you to try these.”

  “Benzedrine? I’ve had them before.”

  “And it helped didn’t it?”

  I folded her generous gift in my hands and put it away in my pocket. This stuff was like gold. It got me higher than the Provenance and it smoothed my perceptions out like a nice bottle of Scotch. That was when I began to realize that my psychiatrist, for all her gifts in helping me with talk therapy, was little more than a drug dealer. She passed out street drugs with an air of respectability. I loved her for it. Now, I could quiet my head.

  “How is Sabrina?”

  “Sabrina’s a gem.”

  “What’s going on between the two of you?”

  “You mean will I marry her?”

  Alice smiled like the Cheshire cat and, just like the Cheshire cat, her smiled stayed in the air after I stopped seeing her. I was alone again. I couldn’t see the complete Alice anywhere. But I did hear her. “I think she can help you out. She sounds stable to me.”

  Stable, I thought. How could anyone stable be attracted to me? I lay on the couch, in my prone psychiatric pose. I kept my eyes closed and decided to play the free association game. My father and Hitu came up. I imagined them together in Bora Bora, plotting to put me into a psychotic state of guilt. “My father’s come back to life.”

  “Did he?”

  “He’s working through a person named Hitu.”

  “Who is Hitu?”

  “Hitu is a genuine cave man. He was one of Katharine’s lovers when we were on the island.”

  “I never heard you mention him before.”

  “He’s trying to blackmail me.”

  “Blackmail you?”

  I told her about the painting I received; the blood enriched Tahitian lagoon waters, the boat where Michel lay after he was bludgeoned to death.

  “A painting of your dream.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I thought. This goon from the past sends me new evidence of the killing. I’m surprised I wasn’t in the painting myself with that iron handled umbrella.”

  “You said he’s blackmailing you. What does he want?”

  “He didn’t tell me yet. He just sent me a painting done in the style of Michel’s work.”

  “Maybe he has a collection of Michel’s paintings, work you’d never seen before.”

  “No, this is a new painting. It’s one Michel painted after his death.”

  Pause.

  “Maybe you should go back to the Provenance.” Alice pulled a nice full bottle out of her drawer. “You don’t need any more fantasies right now.”

  “The Provenance and the Bennies? You really do want me in the hospital again, don’t you?”

  “Take two red pills in the morning and take a Provenance every four hours for your hallucinations.”

  I sat up. My time was over.

  “Alex, I’m trying to keep you out of the hospital. I think it’s best now if you go on this new regime.”

  “Whatever you say, Doc.”

  I walked out of her office and drove to Paramount. I stopped on the way, of course, just long enough to fill my Benzedrine prescription. I swallowed them with some help from the whiskey flask I kept in the glove compartment.

  Today was a Hollywood road day for “Sunset.” We were standing on the truck that was pulling the Isotta-Fraschini as Norma and Joe were being chauffeured along Mulholland Drive. In this scene, Norma instructs Max to take them to the best men’s shop in town. In the afternoon, we were on location at Bullock’s Wilshire as Joe was fitted for one expensive suit after another, as he fell into the clutches of Norma’s silent movie talons.

  The day had been normal, no dancing paintings floating over my bed when I came home. But no message from Sabrina either. And I didn’t have time to call her myself during the day. I was too well adjusted to need her. I walked into my bedroom and fell into a quiet, medicated sleep.

  THE VOICES

  While I was taking Mara to school, she sensed my anxiety and told me that I needed to take a rest. But it wasn’t a rest I needed, it was some answers. I didn’t have to be on the set until after dark so I had plenty of time to see Alice.

  I sat on the couch, legs crossed, displaying a comfort I didn’t have. I’d done this on the night before Katharine had sunk to the bottom of the bay. I had turned this over in my mind a thousand times but, this morning, I had to examine it again. Was there something I said or did that was any different from our other fights? Was I really the reason that Katharine had fallen over the edge?

  “The job has helped, Yes.” I told Alice. “I think it’s going to be a great picture. Billy really has something there, his scalpel like carving up of the world of silent pictures.”

  I put out my cigarette. “That’s how I feel now, Alice. I’ve run out of options. I can’t see any way to straighten out this problem…and the dream I had last night didn’t help. I remembered the whole thing.”

  “Katharine’s…”

  “No, well, yes, that too. I still don’t have a good reason to let myself off, to tell myself that I couldn’t have stopped her. But, the dream I had last night was about Michel’s death. I was in the boat. We thought we were alone but in the dream, there was someone else there. I’m certain of it. But I can’t make out who it was.”


  “Anything new you remember this time?”

  “Well…yes, there were some paintings in his cabin, some work like I’d never seen before. They were all scenes from the backside of the island and there were the indigenous people, the ones we always heard rumors about when we were shooting but never actually laid eyes on. It was Michel’s work but the subject matter was radically different. I was trying to figure them out in my drunken state but I couldn’t understand how or why Michel’s perspective had changed. And that’s when I heard those voices!”

  “What voices?”

  I paused for a moment, and then they came back. “I told you never to…”

  “Never to what?”

  Pause.

  “That’s it. I was too smashed,” Then, I looked at Alice. “But what difference does it make? This was in a dream.”

  “Things visit you in your dreams,” my psychiatrist told me. “This might be your only way of finding out what really happened.”

  “Well, that’s the only difference. I heard another man’s voice, a strong voice…and he had an accent I couldn’t make out.”

  “Try again,” she prompted me.

  The voice became clearer then, “never to take one of these. That’s it, the man was telling Michel that he should have never taken something from him.”

  “But what? What should he have never taken?”

  I sat back again, picked up my pack of cigarettes but I didn’t want to smoke then, smoking couldn’t help, nothing could help my memory.

  And then the time was up.

  “We’ll have to continue this,” Alice said.

  I left her office and went back to the gallery. Sabrina was there, talking to a customer. She was doing her usual great job of selling, making the artist out to be someone bigger than he really was, and someone important, vital.

  I sat down in my chair, watched Sabrina at work. She brought me back to the Potala in the early days, the days when Katharine and I had separated. I would work on my own for a while until Margaret came to stay. The older woman, the mother figure, the creature from the black lagoon that hid the truth from my conscious mind, the truth about how much I wanted to murder Michel.

  THE CONFESSION

  In the middle of the night, I got up with a purpose. I crossed the room and prepared my painting materials. I had a new, large canvas and I attacked it with an intensity that surprised even me. I hadn’t painted anything this abstract in a long time. Streams of blood red paint dripped down the face of the canvas. It was Michel’s blood. And it was covering a DeKooning type of face, a face that was deformed by its own pain. It was my face, though nobody but me would ever be able to tell – the face and its expression were too swollen with regret and helplessness to show anyone but a generic man who had been accustomed to suffering for many years.

  After work that day, I drove through the rain to Sabrina’s apartment, rang her bell and was received with open arms. I was, in Sabrina’s mind at least, the man who could provide her with the security of companionship and passion. She enjoyed playing the role of a woman who falls into a love that supported her like the net beneath a trapeze artist.

  We went out to The Players, director Preston Sturges’s Hollywood in-spot in the 1940’s. On the evening we went, our booth was next to the one occupied by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. There was a dance floor that was filled with Hollywood extras and Hollywood elite, democratically joined by the music, the food, and mostly, the drink.

  I sat there with Sabrina, looking at the crowd and tossing back Manhattans as quickly as they could be served to me.

  “What’s with you, tonight?” Sabrina asked as she put her hand in mine.

  “Old business.”

  “Yeah, what old business?” she asked.

  Sabrina’s expectant face leaned toward the candlelight on the table. She needed the light to warm her features, to hide realities, to soothe herself by discovering that everything was all right. “Is it Katharine business,” Sabrina inquired with hope. Katharine business could be handled – she was dead after all and no threat to Sabrina’s burgeoning romance with me.

  “In a way,” I said. Then, I sighed, the sigh of awareness that I couldn’t keep my uncertainty about Michel’s death to myself.

  “What is it?” Sabrina asked with an earnestness that meant she was waiting to take on all my troubles.

  I looked at her face, at the future wrinkles that would develop once she’d grown accustomed to the issues she’d face as her hopeful eyes grew older and blinder.

  “What would you say if I told you I had killed Michel?”

  This was Sabrina’s chance for escape, I thought. Instead, it grew into a deeper devotion. “I wouldn’t believe it.”

  “What if it were true?”

  “Then, I’d know there had to be a good reason.”

  “A good reason to murder,” I mused. I looked away, at the large boat façade on the wall of the establishment. I began to remember being on the boat with Michel on the afternoon he was murdered. I told Sabrina about the brutal death, how I was a witness – and more than a witness, the comfortable suspect for such a murder. I had the means, the motive and the opportunity to murder the man who had been having a ten-year affair with my wife.

  Sabrina’s face grew even more consoling. When was she going to reject me for my unforgivable thoughts?

  “I don’t believe that you’d do it.”

  “I do.”

  “Michel’s boat looked a lot like that prop,” I said as I pointed to the huge sail that took up half the wall. “Michel and I had been fighting about Katharine and we parted company. I went into the boat’s cabin and Michel went back to the helm. There were enough good reasons I had to commit the crime.”

  Sabrina was nervous now, nervous but strangely confident. “You didn’t do it.”

  I tilted my eyes down. She squeezed my hand. How could she know that? How could I know that? I always maintained that my murdering Michel was a fiction but the realities of the case continually pointed to me and I began to realize that memory can play tricks with the reality of a situation.

  Our plate of caviar arrived. I looked at the cold, dead fish eggs.

  “The last time I saw Michel alive was when we had that fight.”

  Sabrina stared at me with an unwavering faith in my innocence.

  “I can’t remember too much but I can remember seeing him lying dead on the deck of his sailboat.”

  She put both her hands around my hand, as if to bring warmth back to my chilling memories. I could hear laughter in the background, swing music that organized the process of errant thought, music that brought forgiveness to even the worst culprits, even war criminals. And wasn’t love the greatest war of all, the war in which you won back your mother from your father, the war that lingered on long after it was over and done with?

  Sabrina leaned forward and kissed the potential murderer’s lips. She understood an act of vengeance. She was from Sicily and the murders that took place there were done for the reasonable cause of avenging a man’s pain and shame.

  The table was soon empty. Sabrina and I had left some food on the plates but no drinks in the glasses. I drove my car as if I were driving in a long tunnel, with a feeling that I’d never come out the other end. We didn’t make love that night, there was no sex lurking beneath our bared souls. I took Sabrina into her apartment and we embraced tightly before I left.

  When I got home, the Buick seemed to park itself. I took my camera equipment into the house, put it down in my bedroom. I switched on the lights and could see the DeKooning face that I had painted the night before. I wanted to add to it, to bring some kind of closure to the face but I resisted because I was superstitious.

  The bed I lay in was like a boat, rocking ominously in an afternoon squall. Neither the Bennies nor the Provenance were about to keep me from this experience. And, besides, it was only a dream.

  I was holding my iron handle umbrella. I couldn’t decide whether to put it down or no
t. Michel was at the helm, angry. We had just had our final argument for the day. He wouldn’t stay away from my wife.

  “If you weren’t my brother, I could be less disgusted,” Michel said, yelling over the wind and water.

  “What’s it that’s disgusting you, our sharing things as brothers?”

  “Your deceitfulness.”

  “My deceitfulness!”

  “The way that you’ve been hiding this from yourself, always giving off the impression that we had an arrangement.”

  “Which arrangement was that, Michel?

  He didn’t respond.

  I went downstairs, into the guts of the boat. I no longer had my umbrella with me. I was going to make a drink, something that would isolate me from the haranguing voices that had been coming out of our mouths. But the drink, even though it was a stiff one, wouldn’t silence the words in my head.

  There were footsteps that seemed to be coming from the deck of the boat as though some entity began to inhabit the craft, someone or something even coarser and more trapped in the crosswinds than Michel and I.

  I took my drink and swallowed it in one gulp, a nice Scotch that had been tamed by soda water. A few moments later, I could see the hard iron handle strike Michel again and again but it wasn’t my hand doing it. It was a hand that had more strength to it, more brutality and a clearer intent to murder.

  Then there was a silence. I knew he was dead even before I saw his head, half bashed-in, and his warm blood as it groped in the tropical air. He was trying to put his own blood back into his skull.

  Someone cried “full throttle.” What throttle? There was no engine on this boat. But I wasn’t at sea any longer and I wasn’t hearing someone from the Bora Bora Aura, Michel’s name for his yacht. I got out of the cabin and saw a powerboat charging out of the marina. I could barely make out its crew through the fog of Scotch that had softened my senses. What did it matter? Soon they were gone and I was left in the peaceful lagoon, the scene of Katharine’s betrayal, the beach that slid my thoughts around as I tried to make sense of what I was doing.