by Robert Stone
Freya shook her head in fond reproach.
“But the shore stuff is important too,” he added. “The corporate creeps.”
“He makes no bones, this fellow,” Freya said. She was speaking of Strickland. “You make no bones of your perspective.”
“No bones whatsoever,” Strickland said.
That evening he got out his Olympus and took Pamela on the town. They started with a drink at the Lion’s Head and then went on to Fran’s, a club below Houston Street on the Lower East Side. Fran’s was no longer in vogue and required a seven-dollar entrance fee but Pamela favored it because she could buy cocaine at wholesale prices there. Strickland took care of it all. He had no use for cocaine himself, but the price of admission and the cocaine together were cheaper than dinner at one of the stately French restaurants Pamela favored.
They went down to the basement where there was a small bar and, in an adjoining space, a dance floor. When Pamela had scored from the dreadlocked Martiniquais barkeep, she wanted to dance.
“Go ahead and dance,” Strickland told her. “You don’t need me.”
That night, a smooth Los Angeles band called Low Density Babylon was performing and the band had brought some of the regulars back to Fran’s. Strickland took his camera out as Pamela kicked into her solo. He had really come to watch her dance. After the first few numbers, she withdrew into the ladies’, only to emerge renewed. Presently she had a would-be partner, a small French magazine correspondent with a balding pate and shoulder-length hair. In general, she ignored him.
Strickland could hardly take his eyes off Pamela as she hot-cha’d it across the floor. She was a fine dancer with true animal grace and an agreeably eccentric style. The Frenchman could not get with her. Pamela had seemed to thrive on the street. She had advanced her station from that of runaway waif to star ho-dom to virtual courtesanship, leaving ruin and wreckage in her train. She was only beginning to run out of energy.
He sat drinking beer and watched her. Her face was long and keen; she had a fey expression and huge green eyes. Panic was the word for her, panic from the Greek, a crazy smile, sudden fear in lonely places. Her eyes were a caution, warning away the faint of loin, the troubled and the poor. She looked capable of anything, at the point of becoming either the perpetrator of a major felony or the victim of one. Looking into the future, Strickland saw the Tower ahead, blood and flaming curtains, slaughter.
Low Density Babylon ground on; the dancers splayed their hands and boogied. It was a weeknight and the weeknight crowd had turned out: a few blacks who could dance, a few of Hersey’s fellow students, a contingent of English media scum. The English imagined themselves and their schemes invisible and danced with abandon, looking goatish and soiled. For some reason, Strickland had observed, they were always the best dancers in the place. Lights played on their toothy faces.
Strickland raised his camera and clicked away. Like the English in the room, Pamela thought nobody saw her tinker’s shuffle. But I do, Strickland thought, and he did. The reflection afforded him poor comfort. He had to wonder what good it did him.
What good does it do me, Strickland asked himself as he peered through the lens, that I see and understand so thoroughly? That my camera never lies? If I’m so smart, why am I not richer, in works, in wisdom, whatever? He had little to learn about the field of folk and its bellyaching and its feeble strategies. He supposed he lacked the will to enjoy it all in solitary splendor. To understand so well had got to be enjoyed for its own sake. Otherwise it was its own punishment.
Fran’s that night suggested the end of the century, the cunning of dice play, the destruction of someone’s world. He raised his camera. In its eye, he framed the dancers. Horrible instrument, he thought, it never lied.
Someone grabbed the camera from him. He slid off the stool and turned angrily to face a skinny bouncer with a shaved head and a dangling earring.
“We don’t need no insurance,” the bouncer explained.
“Don’t put your dirty fingers on that lens,” Strickland told him.
The bartender with the dreadlocks came around to join the bouncer.
“No pictures in here, mon.”
Strickland stepped back and raised his open palms as though someone were pointing a gun at him. It was the stance he always assumed, anywhere in the world, when confronted.
Over the bouncer’s shoulder, he saw Billie Bayliss, the club’s proprietor, rushing toward him. Billie was a short cockney woman whose pancake makeup tinged her face the color of lemon peel. Costumed in a red hunting jacket and an antique hobble skirt, she approached in short angry steps.
“Oy!” she shouted.
Billie was panting and puffy-eyed. In her perturbation she resembled a fat youth done up for drag comedy in the school play. Her left arm was in a sling.
“People get all funny about cameras, darlin’,” she told Strickland.
Strickland noticed for the first time that there was a scar that ran along her jawbone, disappeared beneath her jowly chin and emerged on the side of her neck. The flashing lights from above the dance floor caught it.
“How about telling your waiters to give me my camera back,” Strickland said to Billie.
“Paparazzos don’t make it, motherfucker,” the young man with his camera said.
“Do take it easy, will you, Ron?” Billie said to Strickland. “These lads are too young to know who you are.”
Strickland had gotten to know Billie Bayliss a few years earlier when he was researching Under the Life, and the sight of him, camera in hand, would have annoyed her in the best of times. The best of times, for Billie and her club, were over.
“They don’t,” she told him, “go to films at the museum.”
“So tell them to give me back my c . . c . . .” Having said so much, Strickland failed of the next word. Billie Bayless watched with satisfaction as he struggled to complete his sentence. A dirty smile lit her thick features.
“Give him his camera back, Leon,” she told the bouncer.
Pamela had spied the encounter from the dance floor and hurried over in a state.
“How can you think he’s a paparazzo?” she nearly shrieked. “He’s only the greatest fucking film maker of our time!”
“Course he is,” cooed smiling Billie.
Leon shoved Strickland’s camera back at him.
“If you’re going to come here,” Billie said sweetly, “go ahead and come here. But don’t bring a camera, there’s a good lad.” She waved a hand toward Pamela without looking at her. “And don’t bring her, will you?”
In the taxi on the way uptown Strickland told Pamela he was going to Finland. The news seemed to make her unhappy. When they were up in the studio, she was still pouting. Finally she said, “Oh, Ronnie, I would love to go to Finland.”
“Don’t call me Ronnie.”
“Strickland,” she said urgently. “We could have such a bitching good time.”
She was sprawled on his bed. Strickland was in the next room, making a list of the equipment he would have to bring.
“You wouldn’t like Finland, Pamela.”
“The fuck I wouldn’t,” she replied. “I’d adore it.”
“Nonsense,” he said.
Coming into his sleeping quarters, Strickland saw that her eyes were flooding, her lips compressed with anger.
“Don’t be silly,” he said to her. “You don’t want anything to do with a country like Finland. You’d find it . . . uptight.”
“I wouldn’t,” she insisted.
“Come on,” he said, sitting down beside her. “You want to go to the islands, don’t you? Maui? Aruba? You want the sound of the sea and the s-sun on your golden hair, right? So forget about Finland.”
“Please,” she sang to Strickland, “please, please.”
“O.K.,” Strickland said. “If you come for free.”
His words seemed to increase her anguish.
“You know I can’t do that,” she said bitterly. “How can I go p
laces for free?”
“Pamela,” Strickland said patiently, “I can’t have you on my credit card ticking away like some kind of crazy taxi meter. You don’t really want to go to Finland anyway.”
“I do!” she declared. “And you could make it all expenses. If you made that movie about me you could have a Finland sequence. That would open it up.”
Strickland found himself wishing he had her antic mood on film. Her tantrum amused him and made him feel strangely indulgent. He sat down on the bed beside her.
“Look, baby,” he said softly, and took Pamela by the hand, “you don’t want to go to Finland. It’s the land of the noon moon. There are wolf packs. People go insane from the cold and dark.”
She closed her eyes and clenched her fists.
“But that’s just why I would adore it there!” she cried. “Because it would be so wild and interesting!”
“Out of the question,” Strickland told her.
Pamela burst into tears. She eased her legs off the bed and slowly crumpled to the floor where she curled in a fetal position and sobbed as though her heart would break. Strickland turned onto his stomach, reached down and stroked her hair. His gaze was on the city lights beyond the great window.
“There, there,” he said softly. “You see, it has nothing to do with Finland.”
Pamela moaned.
“It’s your life, Pamela. It’s very disorderly. It lacks cohesion.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“If you look into the center,” he asked her, “what do you see?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
The thought of it made him shudder.
“Visualize, Pamela. What’s in there?”
Infantile reprobation, he thought. A Third World of the mind, full of snakes and fever. He had almost gotten that much on film, for those who knew how to look.
“Nothing,” she insisted. “Me.”
When she stopped crying he let her do a line and put her in a taxi. As it drove off, she turned her pale pretty face toward him through the rear window. She had said nothing to the driver in Strickland’s presence. He had no idea where she would go.
Back upstairs, Strickland sat before the Steenbeck and looked into its blank monitor. He had no regrets about solitude, of that he was certain. It was the only way to get things done and loneliness was an illusion. He had surrounded himself with a requisite silence and within it he could thrive. Outside was the swarm, the birds and the confusion. He had no serious connections there. All the same he was quite at home. Even strangling on his own words in that contaminated air, he could make them spread, make them dance. There were those who trusted him for the stammer, as though it should somehow keep him honest, and there were those, the stupider ones, who patronized him as a half-wit. His infirmity seemed to encourage people toward boasting and indiscretion. He had noticed it even as a child. It was they who came to him and impaled themselves.
But he had to admit that in the weeks since his return from Central America he had experienced a wavering of confidence. It had come out of nowhere, dogging his decisions on the Central American footage, making him increasingly wary of the strange Hylan project. Hardly since adolescence, it seemed to him, had he felt that hateful quiver of the gut, that tremor in the good right hand. But how familiar it was all the same, instantly recognizable over time. It waited, he supposed, for everyone. And perhaps there was such a thing as knowing too much. He was fast to his perception like some flying creature to its paralyzed wings. Once tiring he could never rest.
He had an urge to play the tape he had found of himself and his mother on the fifties Times Square radio show. He picked up the spool and turned it over. He could only wonder what had possessed him to play it for Pamela. What had he been trying to prove?
Strickland put the spool aside. He took a beer from his refrigerator and walked to the great round window to smoke a cigarette. The Hylan job was a good thing, he decided. It would allow him to let the Central American material settle so that he could cut it at his leisure. Moreover it was interesting. And the people involved were just like all the others. Pilgrims. Sleepwalkers.
Two days later, Strickland received a Hylan press kit and a set of travel agency vouchers. He spent the afternoon arranging to air freight his equipment. On the following day, he was in another taxi on the way to the airport. Passing Flushing Meadow, he let his eye fall on the detritus of the old World’s Fairs. It was a place he often went by in his comings and goings. Most of the time, he passed it with hardly a thought.
Strickland understood that his mother had worked back of Eat Alley during the 1939 fair, with some attraction the city had closed down. He could remember her cursing the mayor, La Guardia, years after—also a picture postcard stuck in a mirror somewhere. The mirror would have been in their ancient Willys trailer, a prewar wonder they’d had when he was small. The postcard showed the totems of the fair, the Trylon and Perisphere.
Years later, living in New York and having taken New York as his subject, he came to read a history of the 1939 fair. War had broken out in the course of it. One by one, nations whose pavilions stood along the main concourse had passed under enemy occupation or even out of existence. In the end, the Trylon and Perisphere, the fair’s symbols of progress, had been reduced to scrap—melted down, in effect, for weaponry. The fact had afforded him some vague satisfaction, a sensation completely divorced from reason, that had to do with his mother’s rage. Strickland had become skilled at detecting and recording his own dumb reactions. About them he was not sentimental. His made no more sense than anyone else’s but, unlike many people, he felt no compulsion to deny them. Your own shit, he thought, that sort of thing. It could be useful.
His cab shot by the tattered globe of the 1964 fair. Every inch of chrome had been stripped; ribbons of wire frame rattled around the supporting stanchions. Vietnam had been gathering around that one. Fairs were obviously bad luck and also bad business.
One day, he thought, he might make a film of the fairgrounds and its ghosts. He had never used old photographs and the music would be fun. No one would claim he was repeating himself. When his taxi pulled up in front of the Finnair terminal, he was deep in contemplation.
Stepping up to first class check-in, he found himself reluctant to part with the fantasy of a different film. The ones unmade were always pure. But in his heart he knew that there would never be such a venture, that he would never celebrate old fairgrounds or migrating salmon, threatened rain forests or Ojibway pictographs, or any of the other worthy subjects that sometimes occupied his daydreams. Strickland was devoted to the human factor. It was people he required.
10
“YOU HAVE an Academy ring,” the woman at the stall opposite said to Browne. She was dark and slim, wearing sneakers and jeans. Her booth advertised a patented star-finder for the northern hemisphere.
Browne turned the class ring on his finger.
“Yes. Class of sixty-eight.”
It was opening day at the Maritime Exposition at the 42nd Regiment Armory in New York. The crowds were sparse. All day he had been sitting beside a screen on which he himself appeared, extolling the virtues of Altan boats. He was heartily tired of hearing himself.
“My ex-husband graduated from the Academy. His name is Charlie Bloodworth. Ever run into him?”
“Never,” Browne said.
“He’s at Green Cove Springs now. That’s where they make the old ships into razor blades.”
“So I’ve heard,” Browne said.
“We lived in Atsugi,” she said. “Guam, too.”
Looming above them were the hulls of two Altan stock boats. One was the Highlander Forty-five, which from his own experience Browne knew was badly made. The second was the Altan Forty, which he regarded highly. Before sailing south, Browne had actually made a tape on which he praised the Highlander Forty-five. He did not play it. Instead he played his pitch for the Altan Forty. A stand-up sign beside the Forty proclaimed it to be the stock v
ersion of the boat Matty Hylan would sail around the world. There was a picture of Hylan on the stand-up.
“I like your tape,” the slim dark woman said. She was deeply suntanned. “I’m really hung over.”
In the stuffy, humming air of the armor, he could not be sure he had heard her correctly.
“Too bad,” he said politely.
“Know any cures?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t drink much.”
The woman laughed.
“How about watching my booth?” she asked.
Browne agreed and she walked away, still laughing.
As the afternoon wore on, the crowds became even smaller. The woman did not return to her star-finder booth. Browne had brought along a volume of naval history. That afternoon, he read about Trafalgar, Nelson and Collingwood advancing in separate columns toward the Franco-Spanish fleet, breaking the line.
At some point, he decided to get up and take an aspirin. Well over an hour had passed since the woman at the stall opposite had disappeared. Browne set out in pursuit of a drinking fountain.
Searching for water, he passed through the wing in which the powerboats were displayed. It was much more crowded than the sailing section. There were overweight matrons in yachting caps and couples with matching tattoos. There were cabin cruisers and sleek cigarette boats with gleaming fins. Model interiors blazed with chrome and tiger-striped upholstery. Browne walked through it all feeling light-headed. When he came to the beige curtain that divided the displays from the storage and receiving section, he slipped past it into the gloom.
The storage area was a wilderness of crates and cardboard boxes piled to the forty-foot ceiling. Beyond the crates, on a buffed concrete floor, stood two armored personnel carriers of the New York National Guard. Near them was a drinking fountain.
On his way to the fountain, Browne heard something like a sensual moan from the area behind the crates. Looking more closely, he saw the balding head of a middle-aged man above one rank of boxes. Extending from the boxes along the floor was a woman’s foot with a tanned ankle and sneaker. Between one thing and another, Browne formed the impression that a sexual act was taking place. Drinking from the fountain, downing his aspirin, he felt angry and revolted. He avoided the area on his way back.