by Irwin Shaw
The images passed before her on the glass screen and she grimaced. The way Kinsella had done the shooting made it difficult to get the tone that she felt the sequence needed. If she couldn’t somehow correct it by more ingenious cutting, or if Kinsella himself couldn’t come up with some ideas on it, she knew that eventually the whole scene would have to be reshot.
She stopped for a cigarette. The film tins she and Ida used for ash trays were always brimming with butts. Here and there stood empty coffee containers, lipstick stained.
Forty years old, she thought, inhaling.
Nobody today had as yet congratulated her. With good reason. Although she had looked for a telegram, at least, in her box at the hotel, from Billy. There had been no telegram. She hadn’t told Ida, now rewinding long strips of film on spools out of a big canvas basket. Ida was past forty herself, why drive in another spike? And she certainly hadn’t told Evans. He was thirty-two. A forty-year-old woman did not remind a thirty-two-year-old lover of her birthday.
She thought of her dead mother, forty years ago today. First born, a girl, to a girl scarcely more than twenty herself. If Mary Pease Jordache had known that day what words were going to pass between herself and the new infant in her arms, what tears would she have shed? And Billy …?
The door opened and Evans Kinsella came in. He was wearing a white, belted raincoat over his corduroy slacks and red polo shirt and cashmere sweater. He made no sartorial concessions to New York. His raincoat was wet. She hadn’t looked out the window for hours and didn’t know it was raining.
“Hi, girls,” Evans said. He was a tall, thin man with tousled black hair and a blue-black beard that made him look as if he needed a shave at all times. His enemies said he looked like a wolf. Gretchen varied between thinking he was alertly handsome and Jewishly ugly, although he was not a Jew. Kinsella was his real name. He had been in analysis for three years. He had already made six pictures, three of which had been very successful. He was a lounger. As soon as he entered a room he leaned against something or sat on a desk, or if there were a couch handy lay down and put his feet up. He was wearing suede desert boots.
He kissed Ida on the cheek, then Gretchen. He had made one picture in Paris and had learned to kiss everybody there. The picture had been disastrous. “A foul day,” he said. He swung himself up on one of the high, metal cutting benches. He made a point of seeming at home wherever he was. “We got in two set-ups this morning and then the rains came. Just as well. Hazen was drunk by noon.” Richard Hazen was the male star of the picture. He was always drunk by noon. “How’s it going here?” Evans asked. “We ready to run?”
“Just about,” Gretchen said. She was sorry she hadn’t realized how late it was. She would have done something about her hair and put on fresh make-up to be ready for Evans. “Ida,” she said, “will you take the last sequence with you and tell Freddy to run it after the rushes?”
They went down the hall to the small projection room at the end of the corridor. Evans pinched her arm secretly. “Gretchen,” he said, “beautiful toiler in the vineyards.”
They sat in the darkened projection room and watched the rushes of the day before, the same scene, from different angles, done over and over again, that would one day, they hoped, be arranged into one harmonious flowing entity and be shown on huge screens in theaters throughout the world. As she watched, Gretchen thought again how Evans’ talent, kinky and oblique, showed in every foot of film he shot. She made mental notes of how she would make the first cut of the material. Richard Hazen had been drunk before noon yesterday, too, she saw. In two years nobody would give him a job.
“What do you think?” Evans asked, when the lights went up.
“You might as well quit every morning by one,” Gretchen said, “if Hazen’s working.”
“It shows, eh?” Evans was sitting slouched low in his chair, his legs over the back of the chair in front of him.
“It shows,” Gretchen said.
“I’ll talk to his agent.”
“Try talking to his bartender,” Gretchen said.
“Drink,” Evans said, “Kinsella’s curse. When drunk by others.”
The room went dark again and they watched the sequence Gretchen had been working on all day. Projected that way, it seemed even worse to Gretchen than it had been on the moviola. But when it was over and the lights went up again, Evans said, “Fine. I like it.”
Gretchen had known Evans for two years and had already done a picture with him before this one and she had come to recognize that he was too easily pleased with his own work. Somewhere in his analysis he had come to the conclusion that arrogance was good for his ego and it was dangerous to criticize him openly. “I’m not so sure,” Gretchen said. “I’d like to fiddle with it some more.”
“A waste of time,” Evans said. “I tell you it’s okay.”
Unlike most directors he was impatient in the cutting room and careless about details.
“I don’t know,” Gretchen said. “It seems to me to drag.”
“That’s just what I want right there,” Evans said. “I want it to drag.” He argued like a stubborn child.
“All those people going in and out of doors,” Gretchen persisted, “with those ominous shadows with nothing ominous happening …”
“Stop trying to make me into Colin Burke.” Evans stood up abruptly. “My name is Evans Kinsella, in case it slipped your mind, and Evans Kinsella it will remain. Please remember that.”
“Oh, stop being an infant,” Gretchen snapped at him. Sometimes the two functions she served for Evans became confused.
“Where’s my coat? Where did I leave my goddamn coat?” he said loudly.
“You left it in the cutting room.”
They went back to the cutting room together, Evans allowing her to carry the cans of film they had just run and which she picked up from the projectionist. Evans put on his coat, roughly. Ida was making out the sheet for the film they had handled that day. Evans started out of the door, then stopped and came back to Gretchen. “I had intended to ask you to have dinner with me and take in a movie,” he said. “Can you make it?” He smiled placatingly. He dreaded the thought of being disliked, even for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said. “My brother’s coming to pick me up. I’m going up to his place for the weekend.”
Evans looked forlorn. He was capable of sixty moods a minute. “I’m free as a bird this weekend. I’d hoped we could …” He looked over at Ida, as though he wished she were out of the room. Ida continued working stolidly on her sheets.
“I’ll be back Sunday night in time for dinner,” Gretchen said.
“Okay,” Evans said. “I suppose I’ll have to settle for that. Give my regards to your brother. And congratulate him for me.”
“For what?”
“Didn’t you see his picture in Look? He’s famous all over America. This week.”
“Oh, that,” Gretchen said. The magazine had run a piece under the title “Ten Political Hopefuls Under Forty,” and there had been two photographs of Rudolph, one with Jean in the living room of their house, one at his desk in the town hall. Rising fast in Republican councils, the article had said about handsome young Mayor with beautiful, rich young wife. Moderate liberal thinker, energetic administrator. Was not just another theoretical politician; had met a payroll all his life. Had streamlined town government, integrated housing, cracked down on industrial pollution, jailed former police chief and three patrolmen for accepting bribes, raised a bond issue for new schools; as influential trustee of Whitby University had been instrumental in making it a co-educational institution; far-seeing town-planner, had experimented with closing off center of town to traffic on Saturday afternoons and evenings so that people could stroll about in a neighborly fashion while they did their shopping; had used the Whitby Sentinel, of which he was the publisher, as a platform for hardhitting articles on honest government, both local and national, and had won awards for newspapers in cities of under fif
ty thousand population; had made a forceful speech at a convention of mayors in Atlantic City and had been enthusiastically applauded; had been invited to the White House for thirty minutes with a select committee of other mayors.
“Reading that piece,” Gretchen said, “you’d think he’s done everything but raise the dead in Whitby. It must have been written by a lady journalist who’s wildly in love with him. He knows how to turn on the charm, my brother.”
Evans laughed. “You don’t let emotional attachments cloud your opinions of your near and dear ones, do you?”
“I just hope my near and dear ones don’t believe all the gush people write about them.”
“The barb has found its mark, sweetie,” Evans said. “I now am going home to burn all my scrapbooks.” He kissed Ida good-bye first, then Gretchen, and said, “I’ll pick you up at your hotel at seven Sunday night.”
“I’ll be there,” Gretchen said.
“Out into the lonely night,” Evans said, as he left, pulling the belt of his white raincoat tight around his slim waist, young double agent playing his dangerous game in a low-budget movie.
Gretchen had an idea of just how lonely the night and the weekend were likely to be. He had two other mistresses in New York. That she knew of.
“I can never make up my mind,” Ida said, “whether he’s a jerk or a genius.”
“Neither,” Gretchen said and began putting the sequence that displeased her on the moviola again, to see if there was anything she could do with it.
Rudolph came into the cutting room at six-thirty, looking politically hopeful in a dark-blue raincoat and a beige cotton rain hat. Next door a train was going over a trestle on the sound track and farther down the hall an augmented orchestra was playing the 1812 Overture. Gretchen was rewinding the sequence she was working on and the dialogue was coming out in whistling, loud, incomprehensible gibberish.
“Holy man,” Rudolph said. “How can you stand it?”
“The sounds of honest labor,” Gretchen said. She finished rewinding and gave the spool to Ida. “Go home immediately,” she said to her. If you didn’t watch her, and if she didn’t have a meeting to go to, Ida would stay every night until ten or eleven o’clock, working. She dreaded leisure, Ida.
Rudolph didn’t say Happy Birthday when they went down in the elevator and out onto Broadway. Gretchen didn’t remind him. Rudolph carried the small valise Gretchen had packed in the morning for the weekend. It was still raining and there wasn’t a cab to be had, so they started walking in the direction of Park Avenue. It hadn’t been raining when she had come to work and she didn’t have an umbrella. She was soaked by the time they reached Sixth Avenue.
“This town,” Rudolph said, “needs ten thousand more taxis. It’s insane, what people will put up with to live in a city.”
“Energetic administrator,” Gretchen said. “Moderate liberal thinker, far-seeing town-planner.”
Rudolph laughed. “Oh, you read that article. What crap.” But she thought he sounded pleased.
They were on Fifty-second Street and the rain was coming down harder than ever. In front of Twenty-One he stopped her and said, “Let’s duck in here and have a drink. The doorman’ll get us a taxi later.”
Gretchen’s hair was lank with the rain and the backs of her stockings were splattered and she didn’t relish the idea of going into a place like Twenty-One looking bedraggled and wearing a Ban the Bomb button on her coat, but Rudolph was already pulling her to the door.
Inside, four or five different door guarders, hatcheck girls, managers, and head waiters said, “Good evening, Mr. Jordache,” and there was considerable handshaking. There was nothing much that Gretchen could do to repair the ruin of her hair and stockings, so she didn’t bother to go to the ladies’ room, but went into the bar with Rudolph. Because they weren’t having dinner, they didn’t ask for a table, but went to the far corner of the bar, which was empty. Near the entrance there were people grouped three deep, men with booming advertising and oil voices who almost certainly did not want to ban the bomb, and women who had obviously just come from Elizabeth Arden and who always found taxis. The lighting was low and artful and was designed to make it worthwhile for women to spend the afternoon getting their hair done and their faces massaged at Elizabeth Arden.
“This’ll destroy your reputation in this place,” Gretchen said. “Coming in with someone who looks the way I look tonight.”
“They’ve seen worse,” Rudolph said. “Much worse.”
“Thanks, brother.”
“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” Rudolph said. “Actually, you’re beautiful.”
She didn’t feel beautiful. She felt wet and shabby and old and tired and lonely and wounded. “This is my night for self-pity,” she said. “Pay no heed.”
“How’s Jean?” Gretchen asked. Jean had had a miscarriage with her second child and had taken it hard and the times Gretchen had seen her she had seemed remote and subdued, dropping suddenly out of conversations or getting up in the middle of a sentence and walking off into another room. She had quit her photography and when Gretchen had asked her once when she was going back to it she had merely shaken her head.
“Jean?” Rudolph said shortly. “She’s improving.”
A barman came up and Rudolph ordered a Scotch and Gretchen a martini.
Rudolph lifted his glass to her. “Happy birthday,” he said.
He had remembered. “Don’t be nice to me,” she said, “or I’ll cry.”
He took an oblong jeweler’s box from his pocket and put it on the bar in front of her. “Try it on for size,” he said.
She opened the box, which had Cartier inscribed on it. Inside was a beautiful gold watch. She took off the heavy steel watch she was wearing and clipped on the slim gold band. Time, jeweled and fleeing, exquisitely. The day’s one gift. She kissed Rudolph’s cheek, managed not to cry. I must make myself think better of him, she thought. She ordered another martini.
“What other loot did you get today?” Rudolph asked.
“Nothing.”
“Did Billy call?” He said it too casually.
“No.”
“I ran into him two days ago on the campus and reminded him,” Rudolph said.
“He’s awfully busy,” Gretchen said defensively.
“Maybe he resented my telling him about it and suggesting he call you,” Rudolph said. “He’s not too fond of his Uncle Rudolph.”
“He’s not too fond of anybody,” Gretchen said.
Billy had matriculated at Whitby because when he finished high school in California he said he wanted to go East to college. Gretchen had hoped he would go to UCLA or the University of Southern California, so that he could still live at home, but Billy had made it clear that he didn’t want to live at home any more. Although he was very intelligent, he didn’t work, and his marks weren’t good enough to get him into any of the prestige schools in the East. Gretchen had asked Rudolph to use his influence to have him accepted at Whitby. Billy’s letters were rare—sometimes she wouldn’t hear from him for two months at a time. And when they did come they were short and consisted mostly of lists of courses he was taking and projects for the summer holidays, always in the East. She had been working more than a month now in New York, just a few hours away from Whitby, but he hadn’t come down once. Until this weekend she had been too proud to go up to see him but she finally couldn’t bear it any longer.
“What is it with that kid?” Rudolph said.
“He’s making me suffer,” Gretchen said.
“What for?”
“For Evans. I tried to be as discreet as possible—Evans never stayed overnight at the house and I always came home to sleep, myself, and I never went on weekends with him, but, of course, Billy caught on right away and the freeze was on. Maybe women ought to have fits of melancholy when they have babies, not when they lose them.”
“He’ll get over it,” Rudolph said. “It’s a kid’s jealousy. That’s all.”
&
nbsp; “I hope so. He despises Evans. He calls him a phoney.”
“Is he?”
Gretchen shrugged. “I don’t think so. He doesn’t measure up to Colin, but then, neither did I.”
“Don’t run yourself down,” Rudolph said gently.
“What better occupation could a lady find on her fortieth birthday?”
“You look thirty,” Rudolph said. “A beautiful, desirable thirty.”
“Dear brother.”
“Is Evans going to marry you?”
“In Hollywood,” Gretchen said, “successful directors of thirty-two don’t marry widows of forty, unless they’re famous or rich or both. And I’m neither.”
“Does he love you?”
“Who knows?”
“Do you love him?”
“Same answer. Who knows? I like to sleep with him, I like to work for him, I like to be attached to him. He fulfills me. I have to be attached to a man and feel useful to him and somehow Evans turned out to be the lucky man. If he asked me to marry him, I’d do it like a shot. But he won’t ask.”
“Happy days,” Rudolph said thoughtfully. “Finish your drink. We’d better be getting on. Jean’s waiting for us in the apartment.”
Gretchen looked at her watch. “It’s now exactly eighteen minutes past seven, according to Mr. Cartier.”
It was still raining outside, but a taxi drove up and a couple got out and the doorman protected Gretchen with a big umbrella as she ran for the cab. Outside Twenty-One, you’d never guess that the city needed ten thousand more taxis.
When Rudolph let them into the apartment, they heard the violent sound of metal on metal. Rudolph ran into the living room with Gretchen on his heels. Jean sat on the floor, in the middle of the room, with her legs spread apart, like a child playing with blocks. She had a hammer in her hand and she was methodically destroying a pile of cameras and lenses and camera equipment that lay between her knees. She was wearing a pair of slacks and a dirty sweater and her unwashed hair hung down, masking her face, as she bent over her work.