by Robert Stone
Most ineffable were the frames which featured the dead. The corpses in the film fascinated for reasons beyond the drama and violence they necessarily represented. Strickland pondered the way in which dead people always appeared in complicity with their circumstances, no matter how bizarre the setting or how advanced the state of their decomposition. In a way, he thought, it was almost reassuring. It made you think: If they can have that happen to them and look so cool about it afterward, so can I.
He went into his living loft, brought out his marijuana and rolled a joint. Then, smoking, he ran the footage he had watched earlier with Hersey. The interviews amazed him. People had no discretion. He sat at his machine, hugging his shoulders, rocking in solitary laughter. He kept imagining fade-outs that would bring birds back to the screen, a comment on the babble and confusion on the field of folk. Strickland was encouraged for the work ahead. What a piece of work is man, he thought.
Late that night, lying on his bed smoking the last of the previous summer’s marijuana, he decided to call Pamela Koester. Pamela was a suburban soubrette turned occasional prostitute who had figured prominently in a highly regarded documentary on New York lowlife that Strickland had made three years before. She was his sometime connection and they had entered into a relationship.
“Hello, Pamela,” he said when he had her on the line. “Big Buddy’s back.”
“Hey, Big Buddy,” Pamela called with faint enthusiasm. “When you get back?”
“Just now,” Strickland said. “Today.”
“Just now,” Pamela said, “and you’re calling me already. What a pal.”
“So,” Strickland said, “come over. Bring something.”
“Two, maybe three o’clock, how’s that? I can’t stay long. Can we watch something?”
“We’ll have one of our talks. Can’t you make it earlier?”
“Uh-uh,”
Pamela said. She clicked her tongue reflectively. “Now this is really embarrassing, and please don’t think I’m sordid, but I have to ask you for a credit card number. Isn’t that awful? For appearance’ sake.”
“Chrissakes,” Strickland grumbled. He got out his wallet and read her the number.
He was almost asleep when the downstairs bell rang hours later, half dreaming of all the birds. He rode the elevator down to the street door.
“Hey, you’re constant,” Pamela said to him. She turned and signaled to dismiss the taxi that had brought her. “Calling up your first night back in town.”
She was wearing a black beret, a sheepskin jacket with a woolly collar and expensive cowboy boots with fancy stitching. The beret, together with her large-framed spectacles and the leather portfolio she carried, gave her an appearance of upper bohemian wholesomeness. She had been a sensation in Strickland’s movie because she was so attractive and reasonably well spoken and generally unlike the common representation of a prostitute on film. The film was called Under the Life, from someone’s cute remark.
As they rode upstairs, Strickland asked Pamela what was new.
“I was home,” she said. “I mean in Connecticut. Watching my father like prepare for death.”
“Yeah?” Strickland asked. “What does he do?”
“Well, he gardens. He writes letters to the town zoning board.”
“What a guy,” Strickland said.
“So you were down in South America, huh? How was that? Go dancing? Score coke?”
“The birds were great,” he told her.
She loved the line. She repeated it.
“The birds were great! You’re unreal, Strickland. Hey, I’m really sorry about the card,” she added. “I have to placate Ludmilla.”
Ludmilla, a Russian immigrant, was proprietress of an escort service with which Pamela was presently employed. The service represented some advancement for her. During the period of Strickland’s documentary, she had been the love slave of a feckless pimp called Junior, whom everyone had thought beneath her.
“How’s Junior?” Strickland asked. “I want to hear all about it.”
“Really? O.K.” She laughed, being a good sport about it, and handed Strickland a two-ounce Baggie of marijuana that had been pressed flat in her portfolio. Then she excused herself to go to the bathroom. He could imagine her fingers prowling his medicine cabinet. When she came out they sat down in Strickland’s office. Behind his desk was an enormous round window into which the instrument manufacturer’s corporate coat of arms had been leaded. There was a similar window in the bedroom. Over the rooftops of Clinton and Chelsea they could see the towers of the World Trade Center and even a few faint winter stars. Strickland lighted a joint and turned his tape recorder on.
“Junior’s terminal,” Pamela declared. She spoke to the recorder with a kind of wicked excitement. “He’s paranoid. He thinks everything went bad for him since he was in your movie. He thinks you owe him.”
“That’s funny,” Strickland said.
“He’s part of my past, man. He goes, ‘You have no respect.’” She held her breath on the toke. “I go, ‘Right on. Not for you I don’t.’ So it’s like all over.”
“Poor Junior.”
“I hear he smokes crack. I hear he gets these yeast infections. His bitches say either he’s taking like a lot of antibiotics for syphilis or he’s got AIDS. They don’t like it.”
“Very good, Pamela.”
“He’s a jive nigger. He’s finished!” She raised her voice and sawed the air, pulling the plug on Junior. “Yeah! He’s fucked! We’re talking liberation!” Pamela cried. Then suddenly she seemed to step, as it were, out of character. “How’s that?” she asked Strickland.
Strickland applauded silently, palm to palm. “Wonderful,” he said soothingly. “I wish I had it on film.”
She looked at him sidewise, green-eyed. In the space of the moment it was possible to see how crazy she was.
“You, Strickland,” she recited in a childish croon, “always looking at me. I see your ass.”
“Know what I see?” Strickland asked. “I see how cold your eyes are.”
She covered her eyes with her hand.
“Don’t say that,” she said.
Like a predatory fish, he thought. Dangerous work but he felt in control.
“How about letting me shoot you, Pamela?”
“No,” she whimpered. “Come on.”
“Just with the video camera.”
“What would it be?” she asked plaintively. “Look at the ho? No!” she said.
“You see what is, Pamela. You take all those drugs together and your mind’s a fucking omelet. I want to put you on film again, man.”
She laughed and pouted.
“No.”
“Maybe I should intimidate you. Maybe I should call you bitch.”
Pamela clenched her teeth and shook her head.
“Maybe I should say, ‘Let’s roll ’em, bitch!’ Yell at you. Maybe then we could work.”
She looked away.
“Tie you up or something. Because you like that.”
Childlike again, her anguish dissolved in a giggle. He had made her laugh.
“Strickland!” Exasperated but affectionate. “Ron, goddam it.”
“What you refuse to understand, Pamela, is that I propose a flick that is you entirely. I mean, I would like to do a whole mixed-media thing. All you. To be entitled Pamela. Don’t you think that would be radical?”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Ah,” Strickland said, “then you’re mistaken. Because I don’t make jokes about my projects.”
“Really?”
“Pamela, how can I persuade you?”
“Listen, Ron,” she said suddenly, “I’m really sorry about carding you. I’m with these awful people.”
“I’m never reluctant to pay for conversation,” Strickland assured her. “It’s sex I won’t pay for.”
She was at the stage of making faces. She put out her lip, a tragic masker.
“Don’t you like sex, Ron?�
�
“Hey,” Strickland said, “this is sex.”
Then she went to the bathroom again. While she was doing whatever she did, Strickland looked through his stores for something to catch her fancy. In the bottom drawer of a file cabinet he found the ancient reel-to-reel tape recording of a radio talk show in which he had participated as a child. It was an item he had gone to much trouble to obtain the previous year. Hell, he thought, I’ll squander it. He dusted the spool and put it on.
Pamela came out of the bathroom looking flushed and wetlipped.
“I have to go,” she cried. But in a moment she cocked an ear. “Hey, what’s this, Strickland?”
They listened to the dulcet tones of Strickland’s late mother as she described her dedication to the education of youth. The host replied in an old-time carny accent, a vanished mode of speech full of secret inflections. Strickland heard his own adolescent voice. He sounded a little like the carny and that was all wrong because he and his mother were supposed to be straight citizens.
Pamela was quite taken with what she heard.
“What is that?” she asked happily.
“It takes a little explaining,” he told her.
“I want to thank all the p . . . p . . people out there for helping us,” Strickland heard his own adolescent voice say.
“Who is it, Ron?”
“It’s old radio, Pamela. The voice is mine. The woman is my late mother.”
“Wha?” she demanded.
Suddenly he was tired of hearing it. It had not really been such a good idea. Only high had he imagined her an appropriate audience. He turned it off.
“That was made in an old studio up above the New Amsterdam,” he explained wearily. “Right up the b . . . b . . block there. My mother and I were begging. We were being the deserving poor. It was The Max Lewis Show. People would call in one- and two-dollar pledges.”
She was looking at him, mouth agape.
“I mean,” he said, “what can I tell you? It all happened before you were born.”
“But that’s terrific, Strickland. You and your mom, huh?”
“Me and Mom.”
“That’s so sweet. The two of you on the radio. Who would of thought you had a mother?”
“You know, Pamela,” Strickland said, “there’s an old theatrical adage: Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
She stared at him. “That’s a threat!” She seemed delighted. “You threatened me.”
“Nonsense.”
“I’m not scared of you, you know.”
“Yes,” he said, “I know.”
Her quivering smile defied him.
“Would you really make a movie with just me in it?”
“Yes,” he said patiently. “It would be my next venture.”
“Just me? Long shots? Close-ups? Nothing in this picture but me?”
“They’d call it Pamela.”
“It sounds avant-garde.”
Strickland shrugged modestly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. Can I look at footage of myself?”
“I thought you had t . . . t . . to go.”
“Please, please,” she said.
So he set up a collection of outtakes from Under the Life which had been synched for her perusal. He left her in the office, watching herself on the Steenbeck.
Back in the living loft he took his shoes off and lay back on the bed. From the editing room where Pamela was watching herself, barks and whoops resounded, together with loud groans that rose in crescendo and dissolved in ululation.
He was wondering whether it might really be feasible to make another documentary feature around Pamela alone. He had always wanted to try making a one-person film. With her, he thought, it would be knotty work. How to penetrate that busy swarm of verbiage and gesture and find the shiny animal within? How to bring it stunned and dripping into light? But what a worthy lesson for the world to glimpse what thrived in the airless inner life of just one particular whore. It would be every bit as striking as your pet cemetery films. There would be the same uneasiness at what teemed there, under the crust. They would see its shadows cast upon her pleasant face.
The trouble was, he thought, that he might be accused of repeating himself. They might say, Whores again. Half the time they had no idea what they were looking at.
Strickland’s half-stoned reverie eased him into fragile sleep. Within minutes he woke to see Pamela in his living room. She stood by the window, her face close to the glass. The sky above New York was growing light. On her face, caught perfectly by the morning’s faint radiance, was an expression like a child’s. Standing there, he thought, she looked for all the world as though the morning light could somehow save her. She seemed, through the homely offices of shadow and line, hopeful and expectant. It was fetching, and he thought a little about how to nail down such a look.
Pamela turned and caught him watching her.
“Look,” she said, “it’s light. Could we have some music?”
He looked at her without answering.
“I’m cold,” she said. “Could I come and sit on the bed?”
“No,” he said gently. “And it’s not cold.”
“Oh,” she said, “you’re a rat, Strickland.”
She was showing him her streaked druggy face, that rapt, snotty, cotton-candy smile. All the same, he saw real desperation there. The whore in the morning, facing bed in earnest.
“You’re a rat, Ron.” She was playing at playing games. “Aren’t you going to come and hold my hand?”
“Pamela, doll, what do you want from me?”
“I want someone to hold my hand,” she said.
No doubt she does, he thought. Her eyes were vacant. She looked mournful and lost and, indeed, vulnerable, everybody’s little sister Sue. It was that time of day.
“Gimme a break,” he said to her.
5
BROWNE spent his Sunday afternoon at the shop, reading amid the comfortable clutter of his office. He was the local brokerage division’s second-senior man and its chief literary figure. Everything the office required in the way of prose composition, from advertising brochures to dunning letters, was written by Browne. He wrote the text of promotional videos and, being particularly presentable, appeared in them. He also represented the company at expositions and boat shows around the country. He was paid a higher salary than his associates in brokerage because he made much less in commissions. Nevertheless, Browne worried. Sometimes he imagined that his work would one day appear superfluous to higher management.
The book he read was a 1920s edition of To the Source of the Oxus by Captain John Wood, originally published in London in 1875. He got altogether lost in it.
Early the next morning, a working day, his car was first in the parking lot. The Altan offices and showroom stood in an industrial park a short distance from the Sound. In the showroom’s window, a sixty-foot powerboat with burnished brightwork was on display. Browne opened the place and went to his office.
Ross, the branch manager, was due back at noon and Browne had to take over his portfolio until then. Quite early on, he found himself running interference between the owner and the prospective buyer of a fifty-foot yawl. About eleven o’clock the calls stopped. His messages were not returned. Then the owner called to lower his price by twenty thousand.
“Why?” Browne asked. “You’ve already come down twenty. You don’t have to go lower. I’m sure they’ll pay at this stage.”
“I guess you don’t understand,” the man said. His voice had a strange gaiety, a note of whimsy. “Well, you don’t have to understand. Just move the fucking boat, O.K.?”
Browne was offended. It was profanity as an exercise in vulgar machismo, yet another yuppie playing pirate in the salty world of big boats. It disgusted him. When he called the buyer’s office, the switchboard was busy and it stayed that way right through lunchtime. At one o’clock Ross telephoned to ask if Browne would keep an appointment he had made with th
e buyer at City Island. Browne agreed to do so. He took some notes over the phone, pulled the necessary paper and prepared to drive down. As he was putting his jacket on, it occurred to him that something might have gone wrong in the market. Friday’s comeback had been so reassuring. He had chosen not to worry about it as a matter of discipline.
He put in a call to his stockbroker. The switchboard there was busy as well. Wandering the corridor, he met Dave Jernigan, one of the younger salesmen, coming from the assembly room. Jernigan’s wife was a trader; Browne had once met her. He and Anne had gone to dinner with the Jernigans, and Edie Jernigan had introduced their four-year-old son. He was a nice little boy with a lisp and a staccato giggle, and Edie had asked the Brownes helplessly, “What do you do for a kid with a terrible laugh?”
The Brownes had gone home joking about laughing lessons, laughing academies, French laughing masters. But Browne was truly horrified.
“Sums up the spirit of the age,” he had said to Anne.
“Heard anything about the market?” he asked the young man.
“Funny you should ask,” Jernigan said. He was blond and round-faced; his reaction to every stimulus was an embarrassed smile. “It’s been an interesting morning.”
“Down?”
“Definitely. The tape’s behind.”
“That’s unusual.”
Jernigan’s smile increased its dimensions. He looked pale and our of breath. Words seemed to fail him for a moment.
“Yes,” he told Browne. “It’s unusual.”
At the City Island marina, Ross’s customer was nowhere in sight. It was a mild, sunny winter day. A pair of soiled swans floated among the mooring buoys. He paced the deck in front of the clubhouse for an hour before giving up. Finally, he bought a hot dog from a vendor in front of the projects and drove back to the office. On the way up he listened to WQXR. The hourly news broadcast reported a drop of fifty points in the Dow, with the tapes still behind.
In the office only Jernigan remained. He was talking on the phone. When he hung up, he wandered into Browne’s office. “Your wife called.”