Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  I wave.

  They wave.

  I see Leila punching Billy on the shoulder in playful retaliation for something. They’re having fun already.

  Everyone I love, everything of any meaning to me at the moment, is inside that rented car that is pulling out of the parking lot. And yet, the only true response I feel as I watch them depart is one of relief.

  A relief of some kind.

  It’s as if having people who mean so much to me were a burden. Like a pressure, like a tumor on the brain, which I now feel receding as the distance between us grows.

  How to explain?

  When they’re around me, either one of them, or both, I’m so conscious of them, so conscious of the need to appreciate, and rightly so, the newfound meaning in my life. But appreciating, counting one’s blessings, is hard work. A constant squinting of the psyche to keep it all in focus. A point is reached when you want a sabbatical from meaning.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  IT TOOK A while, after that “working breakfast” with Cromwell, actually to start working on the film. Editing rooms and equipment had to be rented. A team of editors and assistants had to be hired. There was some difficulty in hiring the staff because most of the reputable editors refused to have anything to do with the recutting of Mr. Houseman’s last film. A couple of them showed up for the interview just for the pleasure of telling me what a reprehensible sonovabitch I was to be cooperating with Cromwell in the ruination of a film by a great man. I didn’t need them to tell me this. I knew it better than they did.

  It took almost a month, but a staff of young editors eager to work on a feature was found. Three young men and two young women. Nice kids, all of them. Hard workers. Their first big chance.

  And so we began.

  My recutting of the film was one thing in theory, but something else when the first day came to put the plan into effect.

  A dread accompanied me and everything I did that day. A horror, not an intellectual horror but a physical horror, made me shake like an old drunk when the time came to cut into the first scene and undo the perfection of its form.

  I was sure I wouldn’t be able to continue. I was positive that something within me would recoil and refuse to go on with it. But I was wrong.

  Working was working. Working on the desecration of something required as much dedication, was just as time-consuming, as if one were working on a masterpiece.

  I got lost in the details.

  Undoing was doing too.

  The drive to and from the Burbank studio where our editing facilities were located was exhausting at first, but soon became soothing and reaffirming. Driving in the rush hour in both directions gave me the sensation of being a part of the great tidal movement that swept millions of people away from their homes in the morning and then deposited them back home again in the evening. It was like being a part of some great daily cycle. Of being a working man.

  And having Leila to come home to at the end of the day gave me the feeling of having a home. A family, in fact. I was a working-class family man. I was doing it all for my family.

  We alternated. She spent nights at my hotel suite. I spent nights at her house in Venice. All that was missing was Billy.

  2

  And so one day I picked up the phone in my editing room and called him.

  It was four o’clock in Burbank, seven o’clock at Cambridge when I picked up the phone. The members of my young crew were walking about with strips of film hanging around their necks. They were splicing scenes together. Tearing other scenes apart. They were all around me.

  I hadn’t spoken to Billy since the night of the McNabs’ party and, as I dialed his number, I had no idea what I would say to him.

  He answered the phone on the third ring.

  “Billy,” I said, “please don’t hang up. It’s me.”

  It was a good opening on my part. By putting myself at his mercy, I rendered him speechless. Before he could recover, I continued talking.

  The members of my editing team, not wishing to appear to be overhearing a very painful, private conversation, continued working around me, but I knew that they were listening to every word I said.

  “Listen to me, son, I can imagine what you must be thinking to get this phone call after all this time, but I beg you to …”

  I went on.

  On the Steembach editing machine to my right (we had two of them) I saw a close-up of Leila’s face from one of her cut scenes that we were putting back into the film.

  “I know, believe me, I know, what a miserable father I’ve been. Father, indeed. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t even have the right to use that word anymore, considering the nature of my derelictions, but …”

  I went on.

  I told him how he had every right to hate me for the rest of his life. That what I was doing now was too late. That I neither deserved nor expected another chance.

  Every word I uttered was utterly sincere, but at the same time the confession I was making was a travesty. What I was doing to the film in the editing room, with the help of five assistants, I was now doing to my relationship with my son. I was snipping away at its complexity and integrity and reducing it to something as banal as a bowl of soup. But every word I uttered was sincere.

  I told him that although I neither deserved nor expected another chance, I wished with all my heart that he would give me one, just one more. I told him that hardly a day went by that I didn’t think about him. I told him how hard it was for a man like me to show love for others when, in the deepest recesses of my being, I had no love for myself. I retraced briefly, but without assigning a bit of blame to her, my relationship with Dianah, and how the limbo of that relationship, being neither a marriage nor a divorce, nor even a real separation, had created a limbo in my soul.

  And then I told him about the woman I had met. And how, because of this wonderful woman, I had dared to think that perhaps there was something worthwhile about me after all. Something worthwhile I could do with what was left of my life. And the one thing that was uppermost in my mind right now was to be allowed to love him again.

  “That’s all I ask,” I told him. “I’m not asking you to love me, son. I have not earned the right to ask you that. All I’m asking of you now is to allow me to love you again. Maybe I have forfeited the rights to that privilege. Maybe …”

  I got so moved by my own words, or whoever’s words they were, that I started crying. I could hardly go on.

  “Maybe I won’t get a second chance. It’s up to you. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll understand. Good night, son.”

  “Good night, Dad,” he stammered.

  When I put down the phone, the members of my editing team reached to embrace me in that support-group kind of way. Then we all went out for pizza.

  3

  From that day on, Billy and I talked on the telephone almost every other day. I called him from my editing room, with my young crew now listening freely.

  I called him from my hotel suite, with Leila listening from the other room.

  With Leila listening from the other room, I told him how much I loved him, how much I loved her, how much they both meant to me, and how I hoped when they met they would like each other.

  There were at least two separate occasions when, after talking to Billy on the phone and putting down the receiver, I saw Leila, returning from the bedroom where she had been listening, with tears in her eyes.

  “Oh, Saul.” She walked toward me, her face contorted with grief and joy. “Oh, Saul,” she sobbed my name.

  And there were times when, drunk out of her mind, she wept that her father had not been a man like me.

  Over and over again she told me—without knowing, of course, that she was speaking about her own child—how lucky Billy was to have a father like me.

  All that remained was to bring the two of them together. To introduce them to each other.

  4

  Billy still had over a month of school left, b
ut he had no classes on Fridays and so he jumped at the chance to have a long weekend in LA.

  Days before his arrival, Leila was in a complete tizzy. It was the only time that she ever reminded me of Dianah. The same nervousness. The same excitement. The identical rush of anticipation. It was like that time many years ago, when Dianah and I were waiting for the little and as yet unnamed baby to arrive in our apartment.

  Leila was terrified that she wouldn’t make a good impression. That she didn’t look right. That her hairdo was all wrong. That she didn’t have the right dress to wear, as if there were a right dress for such an occasion. Not the least of her terrors was the prospect of meeting a boy from Harvard, because Leila was positive that kids who went to Harvard “knew everything, absolutely everything, there is to know.”

  In the end, I also got caught up in the excitement and the terror.

  There were two of us again, waiting for a child to enter our lives, only now the child was a young man. The same moment, but with a different woman.

  We stayed at my suite at the Beverly Wilshire, where a guest bed awaited Billy in the living room.

  The whole time that he was there, on his first visit, Leila religiously refrained from turning on the TV, because she was positive that kids from Harvard didn’t watch TV. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that some of the best and the brightest Harvard graduates were in LA writing episodes and pilots for TV series.

  When Billy came back for another long weekend two weeks later, he and Leila simply picked up where they had left off and went on from there.

  They started playing tennis.

  The trip to Spain was my idea.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  I TOOK A long, aimless stroll around Sotogrande and then returned to my room.

  Leila had left a mess behind. Her things were all over the floor. Never exactly neat to begin with, she was getting messier and messier the longer we stayed in Spain. The ratio of things that got scattered around the room to the things that she packed in her suitcase was about five to one.

  I didn’t mind picking up after her. It was exactly the kind of mindless activity I enjoyed doing.

  I put her tennis dress into the dirty laundry hamper.

  There were several skirts and blouses she had considered taking to Ronda but at the last minute had decided to leave behind. I hung the skirts on skirt hangers in her closet and folded and put away the blouses in the dresser where she kept them.

  I picked up the crumpled wet towels from the floor, which she had used after her shower, and hung them on the towel racks to dry. There were blood red stains on the white towels.

  Sotogrande was a very expensive hotel, luxurious in many respects, but the red tiles in our room were not glazed properly and bled into anything wet that was left on the floor.

  I thought about the two of them, on their road to Ronda. The words had a nice alliterative sound. The two of them on their road to Ronda.

  When I finally told them, how would I explain having waited so long to tell them?

  The logistics of telling the truth were getting ever more complex and the right time to tell it harder and harder to define.

  The room looked better now. Everything in need of folding or putting away was folded and put away. I even found Leila’s sunglasses, which she couldn’t find and had to leave without. I put them on top of her dresser, next to a small wooden bowl full of Spanish coins.

  They always called me when they got to where they were going. I checked my watch. I knew where and how far away Ronda was. They should be getting there soon. I lay down on the bed and began waiting for my phone call from Ronda.

  2

  I’m not a man who believes in premonitions or forebodings. So when I lay on the bed and after a while began to worry that Leila and Billy might have had a car accident, it was not the presentiment of a disaster of any kind, it was simply the worry of a worry-prone mind. All those who stay behind while the ones they love leave on a journey know what it’s like to wait for a confirmation of safe arrival, and the worries that are loosened when that confirmation becomes overdue.

  In my case, the potential for some disaster on the road was enhanced by years spent rewriting other people’s screenplays. In those rewrites, I had more or less perfected the use of certain hackneyed devices, the primary one being the setup and the payoff. By focusing on a seemingly innocuous object or event, I imbued it with consequence as a way of picking up the tension in a sagging story line.

  I now found myself falling prey to that same device.

  Leila’s sunglasses.

  She hated driving in a car without them. The glare of the sun in sunny Spain exhausted her and made her irritable if she didn’t wear her

  And today she had left without them. Billy was wearing his when they drove off.

  I could easily imagine Leila reaching over and trying to snatch away Billy’s sunglasses from his face. Playfully, of course. And Billy, just as playfully, resisting. And the car, while their playful tussle continued, going its own way.

  It was of no help at all to remind myself, while I waited for that phone call from Ronda, that my disaster scenario was too contrived and far too improbable to ever occur in real life.

  It was this very improbability that was worrying me. Because anything was possible.

  PART FOUR

  Pittsburgh

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  WHO KNOWS HOW long I might have remained in Sotogrande had it not been for Billy. August was winding down. His school year was to begin in a few weeks and he wanted to get back to New York so he could spend some time with Dianah before he left for Harvard.

  From Sotogrande we drove to Malaga. From Malaga we flew to Madrid and caught a connecting flight to New York.

  Billy and Leila sat in the nonsmoking section of the first-class cabin. I sat four rows behind them, smoking the last of my Spanish Fortunas.

  There were still a few hours of daylight left. The sky was blue. The Atlantic below looked even bluer than the sky.

  The father I got away from Spain, the better I felt. There was something unreal about vacations in general, as if nothing that happened on vacations really mattered.

  There was nobody sitting next to me, so I let my body sprawl over both seats. When the stewardess offered me a drink, I asked for a coffee.

  It was your run-of-the-mill airplane coffee and lukewarm at that, but it did me more good than all those countless demitasses of espresso I had drunk at Sotogrande. I felt the caffeine elbowing its way through my sluggish system and a long-dormant, almost forgotten, sense of alertness returning.

  I ordered another cup and lit another cigarette, and sip by sip and puff by puff I enjoyed the sensation of becoming wide awake for the first time in a couple of months. Open for business again.

  But nothing, apparently, was all benefits and no drawbacks. The more coffee I drank (I ordered yet another cup) and the more I enjoyed feeling like a fully functioning human being, the more it seemed to me that I had neglected taking care of some business during my semicomatose stay in Spain.

  I found myself in the strange position of feeling anxious and worrying about something without knowing what it was.

  A couple of hours later, we had our in-flight meal. Leila stood up at her seat with a champagne glass in her hand and toasted me.

  “Cheers,” she chirped, smiling.

  The heads of the passengers between us turned to look at me.

  “Cheers,” I toasted her back.

  After the meal, the stewardess announced that our in-flight movie would begin shortly. For some reason she asked us to pull down our window shades although it was now dark outside, and for some reason we all obeyed and pulled them down. The cabin lights were turned off.

  It was during that brief interval of sitting there in darkness and waiting for the movie to begin that I realized the cause of my anxiety. It was so obvious, I was dumbfounded that I could have blocked it out for so long.

&n
bsp; And then the movie began.

  2

  It had taken me over three months, working long hours with five young and energetic assistants, to recut the Old Man’s film to my satisfaction. I discovered in the end that it had taken me longer to destroy his film than it had taken him to create it.

  When the three of us left for Spain, there was still a lot of work to be done. The classical music choices I had picked out for various scenes had to be arranged and scored. Opticals had to be added. The film had to be mixed. A title sequence, if any, had to be designed and shot by an expert in this field. But my job was over. What work there remained was in the hands of technical experts of one kind or another.

  Before I left, Cromwell wanted to see what the new version looked like, with allowances, of course, for all the missing technical elements.

  We saw the film in the same screening room where I had seen Leila’s cut footage for the first time.

  Just the two of us.

  I was very nervous.

  The film had no musical score yet, but I had asked my editing team to underscore several scenes with a put-together temp track.

  When Cromwell started roaring with laughter during the “Waltz of the Working Man” sequence, I relaxed.

  Cromwell kept laughing out loud throughout the film and I, relieved that he liked it, laughed right along with him.

  All those scenes that had meant so much to Leila, that she had found so moving or heartbreaking, were now hilarious. A couple of times, I heard the projectionist laughing.

  What can I say about my version of the Old Man’s film?

  That it was a travesty? A desecration? A lobotomy of a work of art?

  Those denunciations, although accurate, did not go far enough.

  It wasn’t merely that I had taken a masterpiece and, for motives of my own, turned it into a banality. I had taken something and turned it into nothing.

  The only just description of what I had done was that I had created nothingness, but a nothingness of such accessible and broad appeal that it could pass for anything.