“You really believe this,” the actor says admiringly. “You really are trying to act with conviction.”
“Against the lines. Let’s act against the lines.”
“My name is Murray. I’m — ”
“Against the lines.”
“All right,” Murray says with a sigh. He lifts his head, puts his hands on her, rubs them up and down her arms and Susan feels the damp moving out from his palms to create a kind of perverse warmth. “I’m trying to comfort you, Mrs. Harding,” he says as the lights come on full again. Equipment begins to hum, the director makes a foul comment offstage, and the sound of the technicians’ laughter mixed with the murmurs of the other actors begins to fill the hall.
CHAPTER XXVI
By the end of the day, Susan has acted in seven scenes and witnessed fourteen others while standing off to the side with her script in hand, learning lines. The scenes in which she has acted have involved roles as Mrs. Warren Gamaliel Harding, Marie Antoinette, Madame von Meck, the patroness of Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, the immortal beloved of Ludwig van Beethoven, Isadora Duncan, the dark beloved of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the mistress of Nikolo Paganini. These scenes have been heavily slanted toward the musical, the director explains to her, because they are shooting the unimportant, connective, fringe material first before working into the more basic political and sociological focus of the film as the actors warm up and become more confident in their roles All of the scenes are very short, averaging no more than two to three minutes playing time, and all of them involve sexual activity of some sort, although in the Paganini and Tchaikovsky episodes she has only had to stand to the side and witness the actor simulate masturbation. The purpose of the film is to show the basic sexual obsession of all great lives and events although Susan cannot say that she understands much of it.
Most of her scenes have been with Murray who seems to be basically paired with her throughout, but two or three of them have been with other actors: a thin man named William who played Beethoven with a lisp and an immensely tall, disheveled actor named Frank who under the director’s instruction played Shakespeare as if he were a common drunk in search of rough trade. Frank told her in an intense conversation over the sandwiches brought up for a lunch break that he had never seen anything like this in the history of the world but then he was willing to learn. “I think the point is,” Frank had said, chewing and gesturing violently, the towel thrown modestly over his lower sections functioning as a napkin as well, “that these people are absolutely serious; they may be the last serious people left, they mean business. This is not a gag. You’re a very attractive girl; how did you get into this, you look a little young for it,” and then, without waiting for an answer, he had gone into an analysis of his background which he said made inevitable what had become of him. He had studied for a doctorate in medieval English at the University of Washington but before the orals had found that he had lost the power to read. “I mean, I looked at the page and it was just letters stuck down in different-sized clumps, but I couldn’t make any sense of them at all; I couldn’t make out the meaning. I had to use my index finger just to pick out the letters and that’s the point at which I decided I had better get out of the business. I mean my subconscious was obviously trying to tell me something about taking a doctoral degree in English; so I figured that after hanging around the university for ten years it was time to go. Of course I’m not really interested in acting, I just kind of fell into it.” Susan had found his conversation interesting if distracting. She had wanted to read her script and concentrate on the lines and scenes so that maybe she could get some internal comprehension of what everybody was driving at but everyone wanted to socialize, even the director who had gotten on a parapet toward the end of the lunch break and given them a long harangue in which he had talked about the deeper artistic truth and purposes which he hoped to bring out in this film and how he hoped that they would cooperate with one another to cause their performances to flow together. The talk had been almost incoherent. The director seems to have two modes of speech altogether — one of which (abusing actors) makes perfect sense and the other a more ruminative mode in which he cannot make himself understood at all. Susan knows that she will want to think about all of this later on. She will have to think a great deal. She is really stockpiling a lot of experience. The Marie Antoinette scene had been really difficult to get through what with her head being inserted into a strange contraption that entrapped and choked her while unspeakable things were done to her helpless backside. At that the scene had been nothing compared to what the girl playing Man Of War in another scene had gone through. The girl playing Man of War had been dramatizing the celebrated race in which Man of War, that great thoroughbred, had suffered the only defeat of his magnificent twenty-one race career by losing in a head finish to another two-year-old named Upset, and, in the course of simulating the actions of racing while carrying a jockey, this girl had been the subject of certain demented acts by the small actor playing the jockey which Susan simply did not want to watch. That was the whole point. She did not want to think about anything that had gone on that day. It was a day’s work. That was all there was to it and tomorrow would be another day and in five or six days they would finish the film and then her career would start. But her career was not something about which she could worry under the present circumstances.
The director let them go at six in the evening telling them that the first day’s work had been disgraceful, an absolute abomination and signaled the end of all his hopes if this level of performance continued. He advised them to be back at eight in the morning prepared to act seriously. The technicians, still giggling (they were always giggling) perched now at rest on their equipment like monkeys and sneered at them as one by one they got into their clothing and left the loft. Susan received invitations to go for coffee or drinks from Frank and Murray as well as a third actor whose name she never caught who had played the jockey in the horse racing sequence. She declined them with thanks. Outside, however, turning the corner, she received another invitation from Phil who seemed to have been lying in wait for her, and, for reasons which she could not rationalize, she decided that she better not pass this one up and followed him without a word to the restaurant where he had taken her before, wondering if everybody in New York was looking at her intently, knowing exactly what she had been through that day. She doubted it. You could do absolutely anything at all in New York and then go out on the streets and, for all that it mattered to the people surrounding you, you might not have been there at all because they had been through exactly the same thing. That was why she liked New York and why she hated it.
CHAPTER XXVII
“The industry is at a turning point,” Phil says to her, stirring his coffee. He looks down at the table, inscribes small circles with the free hand. “It is at a crucial instance. The next year will turn the tide. This is something that I firmly believe.”
“Yes,” Susan says, taking some more coffee of her own and trying to look attentive for Phil although he has not looked her in the eyes yet even once. “I think I know what you mean.”
“Pornography will either become an art form within the next year or it will collapse,” Phil says. “The market has been overextended, it has been overexploited by the worst kind of people, and now it is being reduced again to its natural audience which, as we all know, is composed of freaks. It will not be legislated against; it will merely wither away like the leaves on the branches from winter trees. Unless it can find and hold the larger audience which is now its opportunity. If it can break the limits.”
“I agree with you absolutely. I know just what you mean.”
“These people for whom I’m working believe that the ship will not sink. They are not along for a fast buck, they are serious, they wish to do meaningful work. Pornography can be a meaningful art form and can break forth into new areas of experience. That is the intention of this film on which you’re working.”
“Yes,” Susan says. She feels dr
owsiness overtake her, shakes her head, braces herself in the seat. What she wants is to go to sleep but this is impossible; she is in no position, after this day, to risk Phil’s disapproval. “I happen to agree with you.”
“The first reports, however, are not good. They are extremely discouraging, in fact. The level of performances are not what they should be. Needless to say, it is hard to find and develop a good level of talent in this kind of film. Nevertheless, there are standards and we try to meet them.”
“Well, I tried — ”
“They are not good at all and in particular you are not acting up to your potential. I hear unhappy news about you. I am extremely disappointed.” Phil rubs his hands together, looks at her for the first time, lowers his eyes and switches the gears of his rhetoric so that once again he talks as he did when she first met him. “This can’t be,” he says. “We got to keep up to standards. You are a particular disappointment because you begged me for this chance.”
“I didn’t beg you.”
“Don’t argue with me!” Phil says and waves his arm with a flourish. A glass of water is upset. Two waitresses, murmuring, appear from the sides to wipe up the water. He says nothing, sits sullenly, hands folded until they are gone. “Trouble is we can’t teach you kids nothing these days,” he says. “You think you know it all.”
“I’m tired. I’m so tired — ”
“Don’t give me your problems! I got problems; I got to get this thing out. The hell with it,” Phil says. “I could tell you things that would make you sit up straight but your whole generation is so selfish that you won’t even listen. What do you care? All you can do is take your clothes off and get in front of a camera. You think that’s acting? I’ll tell you what acting is. Incidentally, I’m not trying to put the make on you. Get that right out of your mind, if you think that that’s why I’m seeing you tonight. There is nothing going that way at all because I got other plans. This is purely business and, to tell you the truth, I’m not so hot to put the make on you, if you know what I mean. Of course, if you want to come up to my place to talk — ”
“Please,” Susan says. She feels that her personality is slowly being pulverized under his weight. She has the peculiar feeling of seeing oneself running out like water upon the table. Of course her father used to make her feel that way; so she has some familiarity with the sensation. “I’m just so tired — ”
“I didn’t force you to come along. If you don’t want to go up to my place, that’s perfectly all right; it doesn’t make any difference to me at all. Of course I don’t know how long we can keep you going in this film. You don’t even show any interest in getting advice. You can’t even take direction. How long can we ride with you? So it’s your decision,” Phil says and takes his wallet out of his pocket, beginning to lay bills upon the table. He stops at three, looks at the clock behind them and stands. “So I guess that’s it,” he says. “You come around tomorrow morning and we’ll see if we got anything for you or not. Of course if we don’t, we can’t guarantee any pay for today because we’ll have to scrap everything in which you’ve appeared; it would be ridiculous to have an actress in a couple of scenes who wasn’t woven through the film. I can’t tell you people how to live; it’s a wholly different life-style.”
“You remind me of my father,” Susan says. “In many ways, you’re just like him.”
“That’s an old problem. It don’t mean nothing to me.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I got no time to lose,” Phil says standing ponderously, weaving behind the table. “I got things to do so you got to make your move now and not later.”
“All right,” Susan says. “All right. I’ll go to your place if you want me to.”
“Not exactly my place,” Phil says, putting his arm on her. “No, not my place. There are reasons I can’t take you there. We’re going to the same place as the other time, the hotel. But I think of it as my place because I’ve had that room for years and I even sleep in it sometimes and once for three months I even lived there due to certain circumstances which I won’t go into now. At a different period of my life now best forgotten. Actually, I am a very complex man.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
Under Phil she momentarily forgets the day: he is heavy, he is insistent, there are polarities to his need which force her to split high and low. Bisected she feels like two Susans driven on different courses toward simultaneous ends but as his climax nears it becomes fucking again, simple fucking, heavy and necessitous like everything she has ever known and the feeling of partition goes away. Life is becoming routine, she finds herself thinking: just two days in the film business and she is already in a rut: appear at the loft, participate in scenes of sex for eight hours, fuck Phil, and go back to Timothy. She has always been a person of regular habits; it is astonishing how under any circumstances they seem to reestablish themselves. Phil, predictably, falls away from her in the aftermath, all of him turning inward. He breathes shallowly, looks at his hands, sits. “Well,” he says. “I got things to do; I guess I’d better be going.”
“I thought you wanted to talk to me.”
“We already talked,” Phil says. “Listen,” he says after a pause, “don’t think that you got any claims on me just because of this thing. I go my own way. I’m an independent operator; I got responsibilities and I can’t afford to get tied up in any involvements. Your performances are unsatisfactory, you’re going to have to do better.”
“All right.”
“Everything has to be sacrificed for the film, which is the important thing. If you can do the job you stay; otherwise you have to go. I have business,” Phil says. “I got to be going. I already spent more time here than I should.”
Mumbling he pulls on his clothes, his back toward Susan. Reconstituted he turns toward her, adjusts his tie, says that he guesses that he will see her tomorrow and without any further words goes out the door, reminding Susan to lock up when she leaves. “And don’t touch anything around here,” he adds. “Don’t disturb any of the arrangements. I got things set up a certain way here.”
Lying naked on the bed Susan wonders what she could possibly touch; what arrangements Phil could have made in this room. It is spare, ascetic: it contains a bed, a dressing table with a chipped mirror, two chairs, and a tattered rug on the floor. It looks like any one of the rooms she remembers vaguely from college; the kind of motel rooms that dates would take her to although those, for the most part, were much cleaner and had a television console built into the wall. This is definitely an older-generation room. It has no pretensions whatsoever; it appears to be a place for sex and nothing else. She stands, goes curiously to the dresser, and begins to pull open drawers. Under a number of papers with figures jotted on them under columns saying INVENTORY and PRODUCTION SCHEDULE, she finds a stack of pornographic pictures; couples posed in positions of simulated sex, their eyes staring through the camera. The couples appear to have taken little interest in their work; on the back of the pictures Phil or someone else has scribbled names, addresses, and telephone numbers, none of which are familiar to her. She thinks that she may recognize a couple of people in the pictures but on the other hand, people in sexual positions have a way of looking pretty much the same. She replaces the photographs underneath the inventory reports, closes the drawer, puts on her clothes and leaves. She resolves that she will never come back to this room again but, by the time she has reached the lobby, fortunately empty, the edge of that resolve is already blunted and without any strong convictions she takes the subway home.
CHAPTER XXIX
In the subway, hunched into a seat in the corner she is afflicted by a fantasy: everyone in the car is similarly an actor in a pornographic film. As ugly or expressionless as most of them are, they have specialty roles and are coming back from a hard day’s work promoting sexual liberalism and an extended consciousness. The tall man carrying a suitcase and mumbling to himself at the edge of the car is a whipmaster in a sadistic film; the hea
vy old lady banging intermittently on her left elbow is a seamstress for a pornographic film company and makes occasional appearances in perverse segments. Three adolescent girls, chewing gum have performed as a triumvirate in someone’s extended fantasy; the conductor, almost invisible his damp cell, specializes in buggery. It is much easier for her to come to terms with the world in this fashion; it may even be true, for all she knows. The car rockets in darkness through the thin, spreading tube of the underground opening before them; it is all lights and mystery, signals flickering in the void, workmen scuttling like technicians on the tracks to clear-the way for the train as it surges uptown.
CHAPTER XXX
At home she finds Timothy in an ugly mood, eager to talk. They are, it seems, on the verge of an emotional crisis. He has done some serious thinking during the day and has decided that they must define their relationship to make some commitment to one another once and for all. Also, he has arrived at the decision that he does not want her acting in the pornographic film business after all; for reasons, which he will not go into, he finds it threatening to his masculinity. “I won’t have it any more,” he says gesturing rather wildly, knocking some manuscript pages of his novel from the desk top behind which he has been sitting. “We can’t just drift and drift! We have to decide right now what we’re going to do for the rest of our lives and whether these lives involve one another.”
“I’m tired, Timothy,” she says. “Can’t we talk about it later on or tomorrow?”
“No, we can’t talk about it later on or tomorrow. I know why you’re tired; I can imagine exactly what you’ve been doing today. We have to make decisions, Susan, decisions! We must come to grips with our lives.”
“Do you want to get married?”
“Married? Who said anything about getting married? Marriage is an archaism; it’s only a device through which society entraps us by putting a label on a natural state. I don’t think there have been any marriages between intelligent people for five years. I’m talking about an emotional commitment, a commitment to oneness, a feeling of union — ”
Everything Happened to Susan Page 6