“Come on, Frank. We’ve got to get downtown.”
“She uses every excuse to humiliate me and she doesn’t understand that life is circular. Do you understand that? Life is a circle. I go downtown to act in pornographic films; I come home to my mother. What could be more reasonable than that?”
“Frank,” Susan says with enormous calm, “Frank, now you’re getting hysterical,” and steps from the sidewalk, waving her arm, hoping for a cab. In the kind of novels which Timothy writes, characters who go into the street to hail a cab always seem to get one immediately, thereby enabling a smooth shift of scene, but she knows that nothing so easy happens in real life; she imagines that she will be standing helplessly in the street for a quarter of an hour, trying to seduce a taxicab while Frank stands amidst her bags on the sidewalk, mumbling about his mother. But, because this is indeed an exceptional day, maybe the first day of an entirely new era for Susan, a cab does come, swaying dangerously toward the curb. It is an old cab with a short driver and a door swings open in readiness. She is on her way, then. She is on her way at last. The trunk is opened, her suitcases are inserted, and she and Frank go off to the studio for another day of filmmaking. In a sulk, he sits at a far corner and holds the spread fingers of a hand over his face. Susan thinks of several possible topics of conversation but she decides that she likes none of them and there is really very little to say. This is Susan’s final day of work in the film business.
CHAPTER XLVI
“This is it,” Phil says to the assembled, naked cast. The director is off to the side, his head bowed, studying a script, not really in the situation at all and now Phil at last seems to have become the person he always wanted to be. His gestures are assured, he is exuberant, his face glows with vitality. “We’re going to wrap this one up today. For some of you this will be good news; for some of you perhaps not because when you work closely together on a project of this sort there is always a feeling of loss when it is over. But today is the day. We’re going to do the big scene.”
He stops, turns, kneels, and picks up some mimeographed sheets beside him. “I’ve held this one back until the last minute,” he says, “because it was touch and go until this morning whether we’d actually do it or not. Whether we’d get the green light to do this big, controversial stuff. But I’m happy to say that they’ve decided to go all the way. No holds barred. We’re going to have a big film here, a big film. I’m going to pass these scripts out now and let you look at them for a few minutes and then we’ll shoot it,” he says. “Don’t study them too hard, don’t worry about line readings, don’t worry about anything except getting the general sense of it. What they’re looking for here is a sense of spontaneity and truth, that’s all, and you should just dive right into it.” A curious formality overcomes him, a strange shyness seems to peep at the edges. “I wish you good luck,” he says, handing out the sheets “and much happiness.” Handing Susan her script he whispers, “You’ve got the key part here; stop by after filming and we’ll talk about a lot of things,” and then he disappears, probably once again into the equipment. Phil’s comings and goings have always been obscure but there is a definite whisk, even an élan to his means of disappearance this time.
Susan looks over her script without much interest. Her role has been circled throughout with red pencil and seems to have something to do with an argument she is having with her husband. She can hardly make sense of it; she stopped trying yesterday to make anything of these scripts at all. The thing to do in the dirty picture business, she has decided, is simply to go along with the situation. Take the positions assigned, say the lines given, and leave the rest of it to one side. It is a good policy to follow and, now that she has committed herself to the business totally just for this last day, she is glad that she discovered it before it was too late. Murray, the short actor, comes over to her and whispers something about him having just looked over the script and that this is too much, but Susan simply shrugs. Her valises are safely stored in a closet down the hall; the director having given his special permission for this. She will finish the film and have her talk with Phil and find a hotel and then a studio apartment and go on to other things. There is nothing going on here any more that can touch her. Murray says that he cannot believe it; he is an experienced man and has seen almost everything in his time but this is too much, too raw; this, he admits, goes beyond him. Susan says that the work is very interesting and Murray gives her a puzzled look, moves away from her. There is no reason to act with Murray as if there had been any intimacy between them. That too she has learned. She has learned a great deal. Frank squats in a corner, looking at his script, smoking a cigarette and giving her furious looks while he taps ashes onto the floor. Now she is able to look at and beyond him. Frank means nothing whatsoever to her. She has gone as far with him as she needs to go. Once in a psychology class she recalls having learned about something called a disassociate phenomenon. As the symptoms come vaguely back to her Susan decides that that is what she has. Definitely. She has disassociative tendencies. That is perfectly all right with her. She has been through worse. She giggles. Frank looks at her sullenly.
“Places,” the director says. “I call for places and no nonsense. This is a crucial scene as you have been told, the most important scene of the entire project and it must be gotten right the first time. Therefore, there will be no nonsense.”
“When have you ever done a retake?” someone asks and the director glowers, slams the script against his thigh and says, “There is no time now for nonsense. We are in serious business now. This scene is very close to my heart; it redeems my identification with this project. Do you understand that? The crowd will fall on the perimeter; the four principals please, in the center.”
Susan supposes that she is one of the four principals. She moves over, naked, to a group of four chairs under the equipment, sits, folding her legs, still looking over the script. There is a lot more to her part here than she has had thus far; she has always been a quick study but this is difficult. Three naked actors, two men and a girl sit themselves around her. Frank is one of the actors. He sits to her right. The two others sit in front of them, backs facing. “You are represented to be in a car,” the director says. “A limousine. This is all highly surrealistic and impressionistic, however, so there is no need to make driving motions. Crowd noises, please.”
The surrounding actors begin to groan in a desultory fashion; Susan’s view of them is cut off when the lights throughout the loft are knocked out completely. Then the four of them are pinned by a dazzling high spot which arches in from a great distance, blinding her. She raises an arm to her face, trying to block the light and hears the director curse. “Stop this!” he says. “Ignore the lights. Play to one another.”
“Listen,” Frank says, “we haven’t even had a chance to look these scripts over. I don’t even think I know the lines.”
“Shut up,” the director says. Invisible, his voice becomes larger, more threatening, omnipotent as if sounding in an arena. “I have no time for nonsense. You are all professionals. You have studied these parts and they cannot be released further. Music. Commence.”
Music comes into the loft. It is the first time that it has been used during filming; Susan supposes that it is dubbed in later for the most part but there is most definitely music here: loud, thundering martial music, in the back of which can be heard the faint sound of strings. “Music down!” says the director and the light becomes even brighter, as harsh as the sun. The actress in front of Susan turns, leaning an elbow over her chair and says, “Well, I guess you can’t say that the city of Dallas doesn’t love you now, Mr. President.”
“That’s right,” Frank says, “that’s right,” and then the scene begins, it truly commences: it is a long scene full of colors and screams and many lines for Susan and she says them all, finds it surprising how well she knows the lines right up to the end. At a certain point there is a call for blood, one of them mentions blood and from a great height
the technicians toss a bag of something toward the chairs where it explodes with a dull roar and covers them with smears of red. There are screams for this too, screams not wholly in the script, and finally the scene ends. Susan, crawling away from Frank, has only one thought fixed in her mind: if she can make it to the wall, just to the wall and her clothing, she will be perfectly all right; the thing is to get there and from then on she will be able to manage the rest herself but it is very hard, very hard to make this short distance which she has made so easily so many times before. For a while she thinks that she will not succeed, realizes that she cannot somehow stop screaming. Bodies lean over her to talk comfortingly: Frank is there and Murray and the actresses and the director and finally there is Phil … it is Phil who is the one who calms her, throwing something over her shoulders. Once again he takes her on the long walk to his office where he closes the door. Suddenly it is as if everything is behind her and she will not have to think any more. Phil tells her what a good person she is, what a good actress, how much he appreciates what she has been doing for them and she turns to him to thank him for showing this compassion for her finally. Although she only wants to thank him in the flattest and least emotional terms, she cannot stop laughing. There is no way that she can stop laughing. Then Phil shakes his head and leaves her there, laughing against a wall, and lumbers out of the office, down the hall. Phil is an intelligent man and has been around long enough to recognize what has happened. Susan laughs and laughs. She laughs for six hours but three months later she is much better and when her father comes to take her home she tells him solemnly that she has decided a career in the theatre is not really for her. Her father nods. He says that it is good to hear her finally say that of her own accord. Her father is, like Phil, a sensible man and will do what he can for reason’s sake.
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Copyright © 1972 by Barry Malzberg
All rights reserved.
Cover Images ©123RF/Andrey Guryanov; ©istockphoto/Natalia Aleksandrova
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 10: 1-4405-4568-5
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4568-9
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4418-2
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4418-7
Everything Happened to Susan Page 12