In the Neighbourhood of Fame

by Bridget van der Zijpp

  Lauren

  ‘No need to be nervous,’ Jed’s father says. ‘The numbers look pretty good, Lauren – well, except for this current show. And the forward programme is strong.’

  ‘I know. I’m not nervous.’ You like to try to feign confidence about the quarterly board meetings and, in front of him, about absolutely everything. The formality of the board protocol means that because you are not technically a board member you can’t speak unless invited. You are forced to rely on your father-in-law to chair the discussion in a way that allows your own views to be represented, which is why these pre-meeting reviews are important, and also why you choose to suck it up if he tends towards patronising you.

  On the whole you can depend on him. There is a certain game to the management of the boardroom relationships, and Jed’s father runs the meetings with the earned hauteur of the man with the most vested assets in the room. The two most vocal trustees are directly opposed in their ideas. Bob Hetherington, a senior partner in a large accounting firm, believes that theatre is a simple matter of bums on seats, and that means a programme with popular appeal. He is unfussy about the critical legacy. Miriam Maclean, from the Friends committee, believes theatre has a role in stimulating the intellectualism of a society, that the measure of good theatre is the cultural debate it creates. ‘Entertainment without meaning is empty,’ she frequently pronounces, providing an opening for Bob’s usual rounder: ‘Yes, but a theatre without an audience is a money pit.’ When the board get too carried away fiddling with the programme, your father-in-law reminds them of their governance role. He treats the occasional flops as one of the tolerances of the business, and he believes there should be a degree of elasticity in the programme. So far you have not had three critical and commercial failures in a row, but you worry about what would happen if you did. Into the Vacuum seems to be in the process of failing now, so that puts you on the first riser of that escalator.

  You have always known that this theatre complex was originally conceived by Jed’s father as an appeasement to the local council, to smooth the way for the construction of his ten-storey hotel above the site. Some experimentalism pleases the arts advocates on the council, who like to regard the city as having a vibrant cultural centre. And the populist theatre pleases the council’s tourism team, who use it as a tool to draw audiences from outside the city. Mostly he trusts your judgement, giving you free rein on the programme so long as, without him having to say anything, you understand this dynamic and the personal importance to him of keeping the local council sweet. Anybody on the board who believes they are participating in a democratic process is fooling themselves. There is really only one seat that has any power. And you, more than any of them, are the strangled throat in the room.

  ‘I’m very much looking forward to that touring version of The Magic Flute with that thirties film-era set. That sounds inspired,’ he says.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘So what went wrong with this thing about the boy and the vacuum cleaner? It looked strong on paper.’

  ‘Yes, it did.’ You explain about the bad review and the paper’s new critic, and Jed’s father mentions that he’ll have a chat with Grenville Beckett, the paper’s editor-in-chief. That’s possibly all that needs to happen there, they’re in the same Lodge.

  ‘And what have you ordered for lunch today?’ he wants to know, and you pass him a typed menu. He’s a details man, and you know now to be ready for him.

  ‘Are you coming over for dinner tonight?’ you ask as he studies it.

  ‘Can’t, I’m afraid. Cocktail party at the Chamber of Commerce. And I’m flying back to Sydney first thing in the morning, so you’ll have to just pass my best on to the boys this time round.’ He puts the menu back on your desk. ‘Excellent choice for the wine. Yours?’

  ‘No, I always leave it up to the hotel team. They like to think they can find a way to impress you.’

  He smiles. ‘Who’s on today? In the kitchen?’

  ‘I …’ Damn. Forgot to ask.

  ‘And how is Jed?’ he asks in a way that suggests he is not altogether interested anymore. He enjoys the idea of Jed the musician but less so Jed the boutique farmer. And who could blame him? Frank Jordan likes to think he is living his life receptively, and that means treating what he sees as his son’s faults with tolerance and a measured amusement, and helping pave the way for any achievement of his talents. Even appointing you to this management role may at first have been part of a plan to provide some financial stability on the domestic front, so that Jed was free to flourish as a musician. Now Frank no longer understands how Jed defines himself. There is a harking back through the generations he doesn’t like, and the personal pleasure he can take from Jed’s uncommonness has dissipated.

  ‘He’s well,’ you tell him. ‘And Jaspar.’

  ‘Ah, I nearly forgot. On a whim I bought an iPad as I was passing through the airport. Or does Jaspar have one already? I suppose I should have checked.’

  You shake your head. You’d rather he showered Jaspar with affection than expensive presents, but you’d never be able to say so. Your relationship with him is complex. You often have the sense he feels he owns you, and sometimes that he feels you are more his daughter than Jed is his son, and sometimes that his rights of possession over you are greater than Jed’s. Mostly you are uncomfortable in his presence, and unable to express yourself with any lucidity. This is something that he is aware of, and enjoys to some extent – he likes any situation where he has a personal advantage. You are relieved he won’t be coming to dinner tonight, but have wasted most evenings of the week getting the house ready for a possible visit. Only the downstairs, though. He never stays, preferring the hotel, and you suspect that his childhood home makes him uncomfortable. The crisp linen and anonymously tasteful furniture of the penthouse suite above do not contain any reminders of a time when he was less immaculately formed. He was pleased enough to walk away from the house, and you are lucky he feels that way.

  He reaches into his briefcase and takes out a duty-free bag. ‘With my best wishes,’ he says, passing it over. You look in the bag, and along with the iPad is some Dior Homme Age Control Firming Care. You hold it up, inquiring, ‘For Jed?’ and he reaches over and takes it off you.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. He slips the pack back into his briefcase, and you can tell he is discomposed. Does he think you don’t know that since his heart attack he has been doing what he can to keep age at bay? A light tan, a daily habit of early-morning jogs, a restricted diet, a tautness about him. His skin is looking a little landscaped these days, perhaps Botox, fillers, but what he is unable to disguise is the slight loosening in his lower eyelids, the extra show of eyeball, the sag in his lower lip and the greater mileage of exposed lower teeth. All the slow inevitabilities of age and its enemy – gravity’s pull, which money can’t really remedy. Jed, hardly his father’s son, barely puts his face under the flow of the shower in the morning.

  There is a light knock on the door, and Floyd timidly puts his head around to say that the board members are starting to arrive.

  ‘Show time,’ Jed’s father says with relish, straightening the lapels of his bespoke suit. A boardroom is his natural environment.

  Afterwards you leave work – sneak out, really – because there is a feeling in your chest that you’ve been through a long process of underestimation. Not for the first time have you felt the pained struggle to contain yourself as a group of people, some of whom you consider have a slight intellectual deficit, feel the necessity to make free with their views on the culmination of your months of intricate planning.

  Also, there is something in the way your father-in-law behaves, the confident assertions, the assumption of control, that makes you uneasy about your marriage. It’s a difficult, complicated thought that you can’t quite make clear in your mind – but it has to do with the fact that Jed is so determinedly not like that, and perhaps you wouldn’t mind if he could become more like that sometimes. To want this, tho
ugh, is to highlight the idea that it is you, not him, who is the one who has become the most changed.

  You leave the theatre through the back alley and wander aimlessly around the shops, before finding yourself outside a cinema. It is playing a Festival Showcase of seventies films and you buy a ticket for the next showing, Last Tango in Paris. You hope to be shocked by it, moved, appalled, astounded, any strong response. It’s playing in a small side-theatre, and when you arrive there is only one other person there. He is sitting in the back row – there are only six rows – and because you don’t want to sit in front of him for some reason, you sit down in the back row too. It’s strangely intimate, especially for this film, and he must feel it too, because it isn’t long before he attempts to strike up a conversation.

  ‘Have you seen this before?’ he asks, and you register a strong South African accent.

  You don’t think so but are not absolutely sure. You’ve certainly seen some parts of it: a tortured Marlon Brando in the streets of Paris, a claustrophobic apartment and perhaps a suicide in a bath? If you have seen it before, it must have been so long ago that you can’t remember what happened. ‘No,’ you reply, avoiding looking directly at him, but a quick sideways glance gives the impression of a roundish head, a body that is slouched down into the seat in a softish way. The lights dip and the reel starts. Saved, you think.

  At first, in the dark, phrases come repeating back to you. Well, a play about something as silly as vacuum cleaners was never likely to have broad appeal, was it? And your swallowing of the inclination to point out that it wasn’t actually about vacuum cleaners. Now you can only think of the scathing responses you should have made. But as you are drawn into the film, you begin to think about how strange it is to see this now, with all its art-house stiltedness. It occurs to you that viewers at the time of the film’s release were presented with a Marlon Brando who was just beginning to age through his handsome period, while to see it now is to have difficulty separating this Brando, with all his purposeful self-pity, from the monstrously obese man he later became.

  You start to lose yourself in the plot, and then there is the scene, the famous scene, that makes you realise that you’ve never seen it before, because surely you wouldn’t have forgotten this? Marlon Brando with butter on his fingers, the girl’s naked arse, and then him forcing her down, the shot from above with him splayed uneasily on top of her, still with his red jersey tucked into his grey pants, still with his dress shoes on, fucking her from behind, forcing her to repeat after him, ‘Holy family, church of good citizens …’ as she cries to be freed.

  You find this scene grotesquely, unspeakably erotic. An involuntary pulse starts within you, and you cross your legs, feeling as if you might be emanating a palpable charge. You hear the rustle of the South African shifting in his seat. How awful to be watching this with a stranger, in the confined intimacy of this theatre.

  The heat remains all throughout the rest of the film, throughout the sad, jarring, overblown ending. Somehow it has affected you, though, that ending. You are awash with melancholic feelings. You begin to have ridiculous regrets that there isn’t any kind of steamy, near-suicidal passion in your marriage.

  As the credits roll, the South African startles you by speaking again. ‘I read somewhere that after that came out, Brando didn’t speak to Bertolucci for fifteen years. It’s weird now to think how groundbreaking it was when it first opened.’

  You smile at each other. You’re surprised to find an intelligent, piercing quality in his eyes, and for an instant it is hard to disengage yourself. He might actually be quite interesting, you think.

  You’re conscious of him following you out of the row of seats, and as you are exiting down the corridor he steps up beside you and says, ‘I know how this sounds, but I was wondering if you’d like to get a coffee. We could discuss the film, or something else if you prefer.’

  You don’t immediately reply.

  ‘It’s just that I’m here on an assignment,’ he continues, ‘and you look like the kind of person I’d like to know. No pressure. Only I’ve hardly had a conversation that isn’t about work for days now, and … Of course this is only something a man can do when he is a stranger in town, otherwise it might be … weird.’ There is a small uplift on the last word, as if he is turning it into a question: Is this too weird?

  A stranger in town. ‘Why not?’ you say.

  Outside, you notice he is expensively dressed but has some minor acne scarring on his cheeks. His hair has thinned, his complexion is pale. He could be bordering on unattractive even, but he has a compelling air about him – that could almost be borrowed from the film – of interesting inner depth.

  ‘There’s a nice café just around the corner from here,’ he says. Then adds lightly, ‘Or perhaps?’

  A version of you that is slightly alien to your usual self says, ‘Perhaps?’

  ‘Well, I’m renting a serviced apartment in that building just over there … and I have a nice bottle of wine in the fridge …’

  You understand what he is really suggesting, and you know too that watching something so profane together in that small space has already made you partners in the morbid intensity of it. You have in common, in this moment, the inability to shake off the willingness to strap yourselves into the cockpit of a waiting kamikaze plane, just to see what happens.

  When you get to the apartment building, he stops to collect his key from a reception counter near the door. You stand beside him and comment to the girl that you like her hair. You want her to remember you. It’s a small and perhaps foolish precaution, but it makes you feel more at ease to believe that you’ve been noted going in.

  His apartment is basic, functional, as impersonal as a hotel room. There are papers and a laptop on the desk, and he immediately goes to them, shuts the lid of the computer and sweeps the papers up into a folder. Now there is nothing to know about him on show. You watch his chunky tank of a body move about the stingy little kitchen, opening the wine.

  ‘Do you think Brando made that film before or after The Godfather?’ you ask to fill the silence.

  ‘I’m pretty sure he did it after. I think it was after Last Tango that he more or less went into exile. He only did a handful of cameos until he popped up again in Apocalypse Now.’

  ‘Do you think it was making that movie that put him off for so long? Why didn’t he speak to Bertolucci afterwards?’

  ‘He felt exploited. So did Maria Schneider, the girl. She later came out and said she wished she’d never done it, and that Bertolucci had robbed her of her youth.’

  He crosses the room and hands you a glass. You take a sip. ‘Thank you,’ you hear yourself say, and it’s as if your gravity has come under some interference in that movie theatre and you are now completely ungrounded. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Don’t ask me that,’ he says with a half-smile. ‘No names.’

  In using Brando’s words, is he now drawing up the contract? Are the afternoon’s game-rules being set?

  ‘Okay then. No names.’

  He keeps his eyes on yours as he takes the first sip of his wine and places his spare hand on your hip. You feel yourself go rigid, but don’t flinch or resist. This kind of fear feels crisp and new and bracing. His hand begins sliding slowly down the side of your skirt.

  ‘This isn’t quite Paris, and I am not such a tortured brute, but we could try those rules. No names, no outside life, no talk of work,’ he says quietly. His deep, shrewd eyes are becoming a mooring from which you can’t unlatch yourself. You are finding him quite surprising, and you haven’t even had time, yet, to get yourself drunk.

  ‘And no using household consumables, nothing as monstrous as that?’

  His nod of assent is brief, almost imperceptible. His hand reaches the hem of your skirt and changes direction, dangerously inching its way up your inner thigh. You give him no sign that you’ve noticed. You take in the smell of him, his subtle aftershave.

  ‘But how far will this g
o?’ you ask, bending your head to the side so he can put his lips to your neck. Your heart has taken on a fast new rhythm – two beats panic, one beat thrill.

  ‘I’ll give you what you’re asking for,’ he murmurs as his lips touch down on you, and you are not sure you have asked for anything exactly. His journeying hand reaches the lace edge of your underwear. Very experimentally, he slips a finger inside the elastic, causing you to shiver, and he smiles at your reaction and says, ‘Now, is it time we get you out of these, my lovely stranger?’

  Hesitation and repulsion whisper at the edges, but you are overcome by a surge of anarchistic rebellion against your known self. For a plain-faced man, he has a certain suave confidence. The most enticing thing of all is that as he removes each piece of your clothing he folds it carefully, as if it is a precious extension of you, places it on the arm of a chair, and then returns to examining the newly exposed parts of your body in a way your husband has not felt inclined to do for years. With lush, surprised, carnal desire.

  You also find it arousing that he doesn’t take his own clothes off, only going as far as unzipping his fly, Brando style. He pushes you down onto the carpet – not even the bed, not even the sofa – sheathes himself with a condom from his pocket, and enters you, not very gently. He fucks you, holding your arms out to the sides by the wrists, and it feels vulnerable and dangerous. Sacrificial.

  It doesn’t last long, but in that short time you lose who you are completely. You’ve become his creation, his possession. Here you are – an offering of flesh, a child-bride, a slave. His accent makes it all the more arousing, drawing adjacent the distant possibility of moral corruption and cruelty. He grunts as he comes. At this moment, if he offered you money, you didn’t think you would mind.

  You like that you didn’t really talk, not about anything meaningful, not even afterwards. But in that after-moment, a new feeling starts to come over you. There is something animal in what you’ve just done. Something so foreign that you don’t know what to think. How could you have done that? Was it simply a kind of Brando-fever – a roused-up willingness to enter into some kind of seedy debasement?