Memphis Movie

by Corey Mesler

“No, no, the smart people loved it. The smart people are disappearing.”

  “Yes,” Eric said, uncertainly. He thought it best to sit down and dropped into one of the stiff but elegant chairs in the room.

  “Let’s sit over here, can we?” Hope said, gesturing toward a table, on which sat her script.

  “Right,” Eric said. He groaned, standing. His back spoke harshly to his head.

  “Do you want something,” Hope Davis asked, “from the bar?”

  “Yes,” Eric said. “Uh, gin and tonic?”

  “Right. I’ll join you.”

  Once he was seated at the table, so near her, Eric’s face burned. He sipped the drink, which hit his cortex like a jolt of moonshine. He smiled with half his mouth. God, she’s beautiful, he thought.

  “So, my scenes,” Hope Davis said.

  Eric swallowed hard. Oh no. She hates the script. She hates the part. Why did she take it? Sandy will die if she hates the words. Why didn’t I make sure Sandy came?

  “Yes,” Eric said.

  “I love them,” Hope Davis said.

  Music rises. Cymbals clash. There is balm in Gilead. There is Hope!

  “Wonderful,” Eric said. He took a longer sip of his drink. It burned like school.

  “I’m having a stumble, though, in my scene with Paul.” She smiled, sweetly.

  Who the hell is Paul? Eric thought. Was he an actor that Eden had hired without telling him? Was Eric supposed to know Paul? Had they ever worked together, dined together? Oh, God, Paul is someone large, someone Eric, if he knew half of what his work was about, would know immediately and thoroughly.

  “You know, Dan’s character,” Hope Davis continued. “The scene where Dan and I go to the adoption agency and he has to answer for his past, for his drug use. That is a sticking point with me. It’s a powerful scene, pivotal I’d say. I’m having a hard time—I guess, with Dan’s involvement.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” Eric said. He was lost. Had he missed a meeting? Was this movie going on without him while he was left at the starting gate?

  “I just don’t see Dan playing this, I guess is what I’m saying.”

  “Ah,” Eric said, stalling. “You—you’ve never worked with him.”

  “Oh, I love Dan. Yes, we’ve done two films together. You know, Meanwhile in Love? He is wonderful. What I am asking is, will he say these lines? I’m betting not. You know he’s a notorious ad-libber, rewriting his lines at will?”

  “Yes, I know. This is something Sandy and I have discussed. It’ll be fine. But you—you’re lost as to what is going to happen here if Dan goes off on his own?”

  “Yes, I guess that’s a good way of putting it.”

  The meeting went a little smoother after this.

  Eric almost relaxed. They ran lines for a while, Eric, who was no actor, feeding her Dan’s lines, sometimes giving her a couple of options, a couple of maybe lines, some ways Dan Yumont might take his character.

  They drank a bit more. Once Hope Davis laid her hand on Eric’s arm. It was what the character might have done. Yet it hit Eric like the spark Prometheus stole. He wanted her to do it again, he wanted her to do it forever, but the gesture was never repeated.

  He tried to keep his mind on his movie. His movie. Hope Davis was so committed, so professional. He thought that she could see that he was faking it, going through the motions. Perhaps not; perhaps it was only his personal mistrust.

  At the end of the evening, he kissed Hope Davis on the cheek.

  “Tomorrow will be grand,” she said. Was this to comfort him? Did he seem at sea to her, in need of rescuing?

  “Yes,” he answered.

  All the way back to his house his lips were numb as if he had ingested alum.

  He recalled a line he had read once but could not remember where: “Hope has left you like a painted dream.”

  REEL TWO: UNFAITHFULNESS

  I have a lot of tics and phobias. I hate to travel. I hate to go to festivals. I hate it when somebody gets close behind me. I’m scared of the darkness. I hate open doors.

  —Ingmar Bergman

  30.

  There was one long table, where kings of ancient civilizations might have held their summits, a coarse, wooden monstrosity surrounded by folding chairs like suckling pups. Eric sat at one end of it, Sandy just to his right. It was early in the morning and there were a lot of groans and a lot of jokes about coffee.

  Here it is, Eric thought as he surveyed the table. Here is my movie.

  Even saying it he didn’t believe it. Didn’t believe it was his. Didn’t believe it would ever get made. It had been a rough road getting here.

  The missing chair just next to Sandy’s was Dan Yumont’s. The places weren’t marked but it was left empty anyway, in deference to him, the wayward star.

  Eric rose reluctantly.

  He had no prepared words. These read-throughs—how many had he managed in his long career? They were tiresome, being the first step, the baby step before the movie learned how to walk, much less dance.

  “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you that we are about to begin the long and arduous process of dragging this movie into the light.”

  There were smiles. He was being breezy, he thought. Perhaps breezy was beyond him. Perhaps it was behind him.

  “Ok, so Dan’s not here yet. I’ll read for him. Any questions before we begin? I’ve talked to all of you individually so you know the score here. The script is almost finished. If it seems that we’re on a road to nowhere, fret not. Sandy has written some pages that are shimmeringly beautiful. And, many of you may already know this: we’ve hired Camel Eros, the famous beat poet, to punch up the story, to add Memphis Mojo. His blues—that is, his blue sheets, should be with us in the coming days.”

  Sandy added: “The story hasn’t completely come together yet but I’ve got a visual concept, at least that, a good visual concept.”

  He looked up and down the table. These were pros. They knew the score. They recognized the bullshit for bullshit. They knew that they were working at the thin end of Eric’s career, his last gasp perhaps. Yet, they showed up here in Memphis enthusiastic and prepared. Eric caught Hope’s eye and her smile was cool suasion, a reason to continue. They were all pros, Eric kept saying to himself. Except, of course, Kimberly, who wouldn’t meet Eric’s eye. She sat in gleaming silence next to Ike Bana, who, in a sleeveless shirt, looked like the preening, egotistical tennis star, Rafael Nadal. (And like Nadal, Bana was forever picking the back of his pants out of his ass. Was this a nervous tic, or just bad grooming?) Who was Bana preening for? Eric wondered. Could it be Kimberly? Let him do it. Let him open up her head full of snakes.

  The reading went as well as these things go. There were many questions about lines. They tried to wrestle with them, make them all cohere. Sandy was a tigress when working. She defended her words, yet was always open to questions, to the struggle to make it work. And Eric was reminded of her hard-nut intelligence, how she could twist language as if it were her own thick hair and she making a French braid.

  Eric’s own reading of Dan’s lines was stiff. He was no actor. Hence, the scenes he attempted to limn were going poorly. Then, suddenly, right before they broke for lunch Dan Yumont strode in. His face was a dark path. His attempted smile a poor approximation. He looked as if the complicated geometry of dressing was beyond him.

  “Hello, Dan,” Eric said, without inflection.

  “Hello, people,” Dan said. “Sorry. Traffic.”

  A ridiculous statement, of course. Perhaps Dan had forgotten he was in Memphis. Perhaps he didn’t know he was in Memphis.

  Dan bussed Hope Davis and she laid a sweet hand on his whiskered cheek. He greeted a few others in friendly terms. Many of those gathered were in awe of Dan a bit, despite his dishevelment, or maybe the dishevelment was part and parcel of his image, his animal power. This was, after all, the creator of Pat Lucy in Harmon’s Dilemma, of Bob Canaletto in Bob Canaletto, of Johnny Niagara in Bible of Dre
ams. And his Iago was still the textbook Iago, the one that would be studied forever. Ditto his Rodya Ralskonikov. Ditto his Pozzo.

  Eric was temporarily befuddled. He had lost his place, seriously lost his place. He started to introduce his wayward star as if he had to both apologize for him and explain who he was. Absurd, Eric thought, and caught himself.

  Then, before Dan sat down, he spoke as if from a dream: “The bus that used to stop at this stop does not stop at this stop anymore. You can stand there all day and no one, I mean no one, will even tip his hat. The rain is the most insistent thing about this place. We give it another name.”

  Everyone held their collective breath. Kimberly Wink’s eyes welled.

  It was a line from the movie, unmistakably one of Sandy’s lines that helped shape Dan’s character. He recited it now as both a mollifying agent and as a warning: do not underestimate me. I do what I do well.

  The day went better from there. Even the lunch was good, some Memphis barbecue thrown in with the requisite chicken and vegetarian dishes, and the conversation during it lively and warm. This quickly they were becoming a troupe. Eric was grateful. At the end of the day he was more than grateful; he was almost pleased.

  Late in the day, when weariness began to set in, Eric called for a break. Dan’s reading was the talk of the troupe; it was rough, unmannered and so meticulously thought out that the character Sandy had seemingly only sketched had sprung magnificently to life. And this was only the first day.

  Then there was a commotion at the entrance. One of the security people was trying to catch someone’s eye, anyone who could tell him what to do with a madwoman who was trying to break in.

  Just as Eric rose to go see what he could do, a female voice cut through the air like a cat in heat.

  “I’m in this goddamned picture!” it howled.

  And Dudu Orr broke from the guard’s grasp and headed toward the illuminated table where the kings and queens of make-believe were holding their meeting. The glittering gathering seemed to stop Dudu Orr dead.

  Everyone at the table looked lost. Slowly, some of the faces turned inevitably toward Dan Yumont.

  It dawned on Dan, gradually, that something was expected of him.

  He looked toward Dudu Orr, standing there in her high school finery, a cheerleader frozen in the headlights, and turned back toward the actors.

  “I’ve never seen her before,” he said.

  31.

  That morning Camel told himself he was ready to work. He had fallen asleep the night before with rain gently falling on his cabbages and lines from Sandy’s script dancing in his head like psychedelic mushrooms in an off-Broadway Fantasia. When he awoke he was mildly surprised to find that it had not rained the night before.

  After a wheat-germ shake and his handful of medicaments, some prescribed, some experimental, Camel sat on the sprung couch with a legal pad and a rollerball pen. His back ached from the activity he and Lorax had practically invented the day before. He watched her sleep now, curled on the rug like a dog, thumb in mouth, hair stuck to her pretty forehead with sweat. Ah, youth, Camel thought, and his mind went back to the day, to the time when he and his friends wanted to change the world. The world changed with or without them. Had they done any good? Camel thought so, if only in the small spark of individualism that still lived in the lunatic youth like Lorax.

  Camel smiled one sad smile at Lorax’s nakedness. Her perfect little nuciform body only vaguely stirred him. Something deep inside him turned over once. His engine did not engage. Yet, he knew she was beautiful. He still knew that.

  To work:

  Camel put the pen point to the paper. A small dot appeared. A beginning.

  Camel looked deeply into the dot. He imagined it was a hole, and he was traveling downward. Or was it upward? A wormhole in space. He was traveling; that was the key. Then, abruptly the dot was an egg, a black egg, the future Leda’s child. The egg that held the key to the story Camel had to write. But how to break in? How to break the shell, peacefully, nonviolently? He stared long and hard at the egg.

  Process. That’s what this was.

  He had to remind himself that writing was a process. This seemingly pointless woolgathering was writing, too. Not writing was writing, too.

  He thought Gary Snyder had told him that.

  Now, the pen was poised above the pad again. Just to the right of the egg.

  Camel thought that a pretty name for a poem. Just to the Right of the Egg. He could see it laid out on the page, could see it in a small chapbook of poems, a letterpress edition. It would be the collection’s cornerstone. The edition would quickly sell out and reestablish Camel as a force in poetic circles. Were there still poetic circles? Camel thought of them as the circles that were still spreading outward from the stones that he and Brautigan and Snyder and Corso had thrown into the jade pool.

  A word. That was what was called for. Camel had it now.

  When Lorax awoke she thought Camel had died and rigor mortis had set in. She was preparing in her head the story of his death, how he died doing what he loved, pen in hand, poised to spill his guts, unaware that the Angel of Death was his final editor.

  Then he blinked.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “I thought you were dead.”

  Camel blinked a few more times.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “How would I know?” Lorax said, kindly.

  “Could you look at the clock for me? It’s on the table behind me.”

  Lorax sighed. She stood up. Her pubic hair glistened like ambergris in front of Camel. Camel managed another sad smile.

  “It’s almost noon,” Lorax said. And then, in Pavlovian response, “I’m hungry.”

  “Feed your head,” Camel said.

  Almost noon. A full morning’s work, Camel thought.

  He laid the pen down and followed Lorax into the kitchen.

  “Want me to pick some tomatoes?” he asked her.

  “For breakfast?” she asked, squinching up her little animal face.

  “Yes!” Camel said. “Omelets!” And he hustled out the front door.

  When he returned with three tomatoes the size of softballs Lorax had dressed, if by dressing you mean she had shrugged on a T-shirt.

  “How’s the movie?” she asked, her bright, chattery brain awake now.

  “Ah, the movie,” Camel said, slicing his bright vegetables. “I’ll tell you about the movie.”

  Lorax sat on a tall stool. She was a good audience.

  “Movie exists because it exists. There is no reason for Movie any more than there is reason for housefly or pond. Movie is. So, where does Camel come in? How does Camel approach Movie? That’s the question. And here’s what I have figured out. Camel comes to Movie with hat in hand, the outsider, the beggar. See? So, how to be beggar and still contribute? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Lorax was already getting drowsy again. She loved Camel. She didn’t care if he made sense because the world didn’t make sense.

  “So, have you, like, written any lines for them?”

  Camel looked at his guest as if she had just invented physics.

  “My dear, Camel always does what Camel says he’ll do.”

  “You’re a sweet Camel,” Lorax said, her smile as soft as the place where her neck met her shoulder. “How’s that omelet coming?”

  “I am about,” Camel said, raising one finger like Archimedes, “to break some eggs.”

  32.

  Eric and Mimsy Borogoves met for dinner that night at a Midtown eatery called Tsunami. They sat at an outdoor table and relished the Memphis evening, so cool you could hold it in your hand or rub your cheek against it. The surrounding Cooper-Young neighborhood was like a liminal space made of color, kites and butterflies and music, music so solid it stood straight up on its stalk.

  Mimsy had not come to the set that day as planned. Eric had forgotten, in his boyish excitement at seeing her again, to ask why she hadn’t.

 
“Hello, Mr. Director,” Mimsy said, holding his hand.

  “Hello, My Lover,” Eric said. The day’s problems, the entire, overwhelming problem of the movie, seemed miles away.

  “Tell me about your day.”

  And it all came back. Such a brief respite.

  “Ach,” Eric said. He was hoping that said it all.

  “Not going well?”

  “Oh, it’s going well enough. I mean, the first read-through went well enough. Dan—well, hell, he’s Dan Yumont. And despite one of his illegal consorts breaking into the set he was—almost professional. Jesus, what he can do with a single line. I mean, he can make it his own so quickly. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” Mimsy Borogoves said. “I loved him in Godot.”

  “You saw that?”

  “Yes, I did. I was in New York meeting some old girlfriends and one of them got us all tickets. He was—well, masterful.”

  “Yes. Yes. I mean, I didn’t see it, but, yes, I can imagine it.”

  “So, what is it? What’s bothering you?”

  “I can’t—” and here Eric came up against it. What was bothering him? Suddenly, honesty came from him like nausea. He was sick with honesty.

  “I can’t direct anymore,” he said. His head felt heavy. His hands thick.

  “Oh, Eric,” Mimsy said. “Of course you can.”

  “No, really. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “All artists feel that way.”

  “At the outset, yes. At the beginning of their careers, everyone feels like a phony. But, Mimsy, I—I’m dried up. This is why Hollywood spit me out.”

  “No, I don’t accept that. You’re in an unforgiving business, in some ways, an unappreciative business. But, dammit, you’ve got moviemaking skills that make most directors look like pikers. Come on. You can direct this in your sleep.”

  “That’s what I’m doing. I’m somnambulating through the damn thing. And, Mimsy, listen to me now. This movie—there’s nothing there. Sandy hasn’t written a story. She’s written a set of snappy scenes, some worthwhile dialogue—but Sandy’s gone, too. She and I do not touch, even tangentially. There is no connection between what she’s written and me. We might as well be doing different projects.”