Straight Cut

by Madison Smartt Bell

  They made pretty good margaritas at the Empire, but it could just as well have been straight Sterno for all I cared. I was still a bit jangled from the mugging — attempted mugging rather. My drink was gone in two good hits, and Kevin was fidgeting with his. Not good.

  “Drink up, son,” I said. “Don’t play with it.”

  Crude, but it worked, Kevin laughed, a little nervously I thought, and finished his glass. I ordered two more and some extra salt. The waiter brought a cutting board with a mound of coarse salt on it. Very nice.

  Kevin took an envelope out of his jacket and slid it over the little ironwork diamonds of the table to me. I dropped my hand on top of it.

  “Why don’t you tell me a little more about this deal?” I said.

  “Oh well,” Kevin said. “It’s pretty simple. Documentary. It’s about drug rehab.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Friends of yours?” Couldn’t resist. He ignored it, however.

  “It’s for RAI,” he said.

  I nodded. That was the Italian state TV network. I’d worked for them, tangentially, before. So had Kevin.

  “See, they’ve still got this heavy heroin problem over there,” Kevin said. “So these people set up the project around that. “Here Kevin dropped a few names. “They shot at some rehab centers in the city and a couple of them upstate. Behavioral therapy is where they’re all at … Anyway, it’s only an hour program. You could cut it in a month. Less if you’re as fast as you used to be. In and out, easy money.”

  “Ratio?”

  “Six to one, maybe a little less.”

  “Sure,” I said. Kevin had possibly just made a little mistake. A six-to-one shooting ratio didn’t really agree with such a fancy price for an editor. I opened the envelope. A certified check, by God and Jesus. On Manufacturers Hanover. They were still solvent, so far as I knew. Kevin was two-thirds down his drink. I’d been mousing around with mine. That was more like I wanted it. I stuck my fingers in the salt and licked them. If I could get Kevin a bit drunker it was conceivable he might drop another card. I put the check back on the table.

  “I booked you a flight,” Kevin said. “Seven P.M. tomorrow. Kennedy.”

  The waiter came by and I ordered more drinks. What’s wrong with this picture? I wasn’t playing the game. The game was playing me.

  “I don’t get it, Kevin,” I said. “Why is it so much money?” Sometimes, when subtlety fails you, you can get somewhere with a direct question. Not this time, however.

  “Oh well,” Kevin said. “The rough cut’s pretty rough, actually.”

  “It’d have to be,” I said. “That’s not the reason, is it, baby?” Already it was time for another margarita. I ordered us a couple. Kevin was beginning to look just a little wobbly around the neck, but he still had his mask on straight.

  “I was thinking of bumping you onto another job if you were interested,” Kevin said. “It would be a trip to Brussels if I can work it out. “

  “I still don’t quite get it,” I said. “You’re not famous for paying for maybes. “

  “Oh, it’s a pretty good budget on the RAI thing,” he said. “Besides, who knows, maybe I owe you one. But I could always pay you less if you prefer.”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. I picked up the check and put it in my pocket. Why was I doing this? Why did the chicken cross the road? Screw it. I seemed to be getting drunk.

  “Oh yeah,” Kevin said. “Lauren says hello back, by the way.”

  I looked at him. My, they were seeing a lot of each other. She was sleeping with him again; I could practically smell it. Kevin looked like he was going to go on with the subject. I put my hand on the knife in my pocket. If he started some sort of weird confessional about Lauren I could always jump across the table and slit his throat. No, no good. Get caught for sure.

  And now Kevin was running down names and numbers of people in Rome. I took out my book and wrote down all the information. Circumstantial evidence indicated that I’d taken this job. Then we were sitting there over our half-empty glasses, without another word to say to each other.

  “So,” Kevin said. “Bon voyage, I guess.” He looked at his watch.

  I pulled the knife out of my pocket and hit the slide. Zot!

  “Jesus, what’s that?” Kevin said.

  I was crazy. Too many drinks, and a bit of trouble focusing my eyes. I looked down my nose at the point of the knife and saw Kevin’s face somewhere beyond it.

  “Present for you,” I said. I thunked the knife into the cutting board where the salt had been. It went in an easy inch, like the wood was butter, and shivered when I took my hand away.

  “Gee whiz,” Kevin said. “What did I do to deserve a nice present like that?”

  “Let’s say you pay the tab,” I said. Not a great exit line, but the best I could come up with on short notice. I got up and touched Kevin lightly on the shoulder and started walking away down Tenth Avenue, no particular destination in mind. Two or three blocks, and I remembered that it’s bad luck to give someone a knife. You’re supposed to give a penny back to ward it off, and Kevin hadn’t done that. Of course, I did have my certified check in my pocket. But somehow I don’t think you can buy out a superstition with a check.

  3

  BACK AROUND 14TH STREET somewhere I walked into a pizza stand and had a slice of Sicilian with a double handful of plastic mushrooms on it and a vicious cup of coffee, about two days old. I was hoping that the big wad of crust might soak up some of all that bourbon and tequila, and it seemed to work. My brain began to come back. And I began to conjure up ideas for getting off the street.

  I still had the master lease on an apartment in Brooklyn. The place was sublet, but I kept keys and couch privileges there, though I was supposed to give more than five minutes’ notice before I showed up. The man in the place was a slight acquaintance, but I didn’t feel much like chatting with him at present. I was strung up fairly tight from the meet with Kevin, and I needed time to uncoil. It was only a little after ten, and I thought I’d rather not go to Brooklyn until there was a more realistic chance that my subtenant might be asleep. That left me two or three hours to kill, and I knew it would be better not to spend the time drinking, though naturally that was an early thought to cross my mind. No, the thing to do was try to visit someone, preferably someone who was innocent of any knowledge of or acquaintance with either Lauren or Kevin. There were several possibilities. I went to a phone booth across the street from the pizza stand and started dropping change. Two no answers, one machine, and then I had Ray, of Harvey and Ray, live and in person at the other end of the line. They were both home and reasonably willing to be dropped in on.

  Harvey and Ray’s loft was practically a carbon copy of Kevin’s, leaving out location and details of decoration. It has often occurred to me that all New York artists’ lofts may well have been designed by the same minimalist moron, though I suppose if that was the case somebody would have burned him at the stake by this time. Their place was down at the west end of Prince Street, an easy distance from numerous hot spots around the Village and the waterfront, but I don’t think either one of them cruised much anymore. Harvey and Ray seemed to stick together better than a lot of straight couples I knew, though I can’t say that I knew them terrifically well.

  Both of them were actors, not terribly famous or successful, but they got by. They did bit parts in plays and movies, and quite a bit of TV commercial work for the rent and sushi money, which latter fact had caused us to blunder across each other at parties fairly frequently, a couple of years back when I still lived in the city. Harvey was a bit of a camera buff, and he liked to talk to technicians, and he used to have me to dinner once in a while to pick my brains about different equipment he was interested in. Both of them were excellent cooks, so it was an even trade.

  The walk down had cleared my head to some degree. Harvey and Ray were drinking Pernod when I got there, but I passed on that and went for a glass of ice water. The opening chitchat seemed to ru
n out fairly quickly, and as I sat in what was dragging into a rather sticky silence, I began to wonder if dropping by here had been a mistake. They weren’t people I usually burst in on without warning; it was late enough to be weird; I might have interrupted something …

  “Oh,” Harvey said then. “I got film from our trip.” One of the catch-up details they’d told me was that they’d been to Italy in April. “You want to watch it?”

  “Sure, set it up,” I said, hoping they hadn’t seen me cringe. Like most amateurs, Harvey was infinitely more interested in the equipment itself than in anything he could possibly do with it. On the other hand, the films of his I’d seen before were as good or better than Thorazine for blunting the sharp edges of a troubled mind. The mood I was in, that might not be so bad, and it would certainly kill time. Harvey was bustling around with a projector and a screen. I knew he would flak me about in-camera editing, which I know nothing and care less about, but I had survived that before.

  Ray shut off the light, and here came the fresh marvels from Harvey’s latest super-8 wonder box. Italy. Well, I would be there in about thirty hours, after all. Maybe I could learn something.

  Picturesque natives in the Piazza Navona, the Washington Square of Rome. A shot of Ray walking past the Bernini fountain there.

  Exteriors of several Roman churches. The courtyard of St. Peter’s: Harvey and Ray together, arms linked; the shot taken by some cooperative bystander, possibly the pope.

  A big bird’s-eye view of Vatican City, shot from the dome of St. Peter’s, I would guess. Then Harvey in close-up, framed against the sky. Harvey had the sort of looks advertisers like to call rugged. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. Ray, on the other hand, was more the Woody Allen type, though he brought home a lot of bacon playing klutzy roles in commercials: the guy who can’t handle washing the dog and so forth. He practically worshiped Harvey’s beauty. The shot held for a long time.

  “That would make a nice head shot,” I said, for the sake of moving my mouth.

  “Oh no, never,” Ray said. Such modesty.

  “Don’t know how it would print,” Harvey said. The reel ran out and Harvey got up and loaded another one. I could see that there were plenty more, enough to last me till time to go home, easy.

  Venice. Ray propped in the bow of a gondola in a sort of sultan’s pose, laughing. Harvey in the Piazza San Marco with pigeons sitting all over him.

  More of much the same.

  The third reel: Florence. Ray contemplating the Michelangelo slave sculptures. A jouncing shot across the Ponte Vecchio. What seemed to be a communist rally in front of the Uffizi, red rags in abundance and much gesticulation. My God, these two had the luck of fools and little children. I didn’t think tourists were supposed to film things like that.

  Florence from the Belvedere. Here my interest was somewhat roused. The view of the city was magnificent from the old fort; also, I had certain associations. Harvey had done a more tolerable job than usual on a long slow pan over the city. He seemed to be using a tripod for once, or maybe he’d braced his arms on the wall. The city moved slowly through the frame from right to left. At around a hundred eighty degrees the shot flicked briefly over a knot of people who must have been up on the Belvedere with Harvey, so close they were out of focus. Harvey panned around to San Miniato on the hill behind and zoomed in on the façade.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Can we run that back?” Ten thousand hours of editing gives you a certain responsiveness to the subliminal.

  “You like that one?” Harvey said. He was rewinding the film.

  “It’s worth seeing twice,” I said. There, I’d squeezed out another compliment. Here came the pan again. Ninety degrees. One twenty. One seventy. I leaned forward.

  There. Extreme close-up, a hair too close for the depth of field. Lauren. On screen for possibly a third of a second, and gone. Two degrees to the right and in slightly better focus: Kevin.

  On to San Miniato. I sat back in my chair.

  “Would have been a nice one if those people hadn’t walked through it,” Harvey said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “Huh?” Ray said.

  “It’s an interesting effect, “I said. Utter foolishness, but since I was supposed to be the expert I could get away with it. The effect on me personally was certainly interesting enough. The next hour of film clips was absolutely meaningless. I had regressed to the point where I couldn’t read the image, couldn’t resolve the lines and shadows on the screen into representations of anything at all.

  Around midnight they ran out of film and put the lights back on. I looked at my watch, faked surprise and dismay at the time, and said good-bye, not too abruptly I hoped. When I got back to the street I was stone cold sober, which had been part of the plan. Otherwise, the scheme of cooling out with Harvey and Ray might fairly be said to have backfired.

  That being the case, I decided to walk to Brooklyn. It was a straight shot east to the bridge, and at that time of night I had an even chance of beating the train. I hitched up my bag and started across Prince Street. At West Broadway I crossed down to Spring.

  Most immediately on my mind was the infamous chicken theory of the cinema. Marshall McLuhan thought it up, and it goes more or less like this: Some anthropologists go to the jungle with their movie cameras and wander until they find an appropriately pristine tribe of natives. They make friends and spend weeks filming the normal activities and special ceremonies of this tribe. All goes well.

  The anthropologists depart to process, cut and print their film; then they return to show it. With native helpers they construct a special hut for the screening. Night falls, the tribe assembles, and the show begins. And ends.

  The natives are singularly unimpressed. In fact, they seem quite bored.

  “Well, how did you like the movie?” say the anthropologists, or words to that effect.

  “What are you referring to?” the natives inquire.

  “Why, you,” the anthropologists say. “Your daily lives, hunting, farming, dancing, and so forth. Yourselves, up there on the screen.”

  “The august visitors must be crazy,” the natives say. “There was nothing on the screen but lights and shadows.”

  At this point the anthropologists become annoyed. They barricade the hut and announce their intention to run the film again and again, until someone sees something.

  Which they do. The film is run and rerun many times.

  At last a perspicacious native raises his hand. The anthropologists stop the film and ask with some excitement what he has seen.

  “I saw a chicken,” the native says.

  The anthropologists are now, if possible, even more perplexed and annoyed than before. So far as they know, there are no chickens in this particular shot: a big village dance scene full of activity. But the native insists that he saw a chicken and nothing more. The anthropologists adjourn the screening and examine the relevant section of film on hand rewinds. At length they discover that a chicken does indeed appear on about twelve frames of the film, for approximately half a second, deep in the shot and obscured by two lines of vigorous masked dancers, scurrying between two huts in the background.

  So the anthropologists gather the natives again and once more they screen the film. The native who originally saw the chicken still sees the chicken, in the precise spot where the anthropologists now know that the chicken is located, and he sees nothing more.

  They run and rerun the film. Eventually more natives begin to see the chicken, and only the chicken. Then they begin to perceive other isolated and improbable items until they are seeing the entire movie. At last, they have been successfully initiated into a whole new culture of illusion.

  But what does it all mean? No one knows for sure. Though the legend has it that all commercially successful films in the West do have a chicken in them somewhere; be it only for half a second …

  An apocryphal story, in all probability. But I like it. So much so that I kept telli
ng it to myself, elaborating the details over and over, all the way east, across the long, barren, and ever so slightly dangerous section of Delancey Street just before the bridge. Then up the stairs and the first interminable leg of the walkway, still pushing, still rehearsing the chicken theory, until I reached the center of the main span, where I felt that I could stop. After drinking so much and walking so far, I had to be in control. Downhill the rest of the way, and I had pushed myself up within sight of the limit of my physical endurance, my shoulder bag growing a little heavier with each step, as though it had translated into weight the thousand-odd miles I’d traveled so far that day and the few thousand more I’d travel tomorrow. The walkway was even more dilapidated than it had been the last time I’d been up there, and at the place where I stopped the rail was broken off on the north side, so that with a good running start I might have cleared the roadway and landed just in the wake of that tug and barge shoving slowly up the East River, to sink and perhaps be dissolved in the poisoned water even before I could drown.

  If I wanted to. But I didn’t care for that or for anything else in particular, except for a quietus to be set upon my consciousness. To not think of possible applications of the chicken theory, so beautiful in the abstract, to my own predicament. To not consider that, of the long procession of images I had witnessed, only the presence of two people, however fleeting, had made the whole thing visible for me. That of the two, I could not tell which one had made the image real and brought the monster of memory back up whole and alive into my life.

  4

  FLORENCE FROM THE BELVEDERE. It is no more possible truly to describe a landscape than it is to describe a face. And if a landscape such as that, or any other, were by some miracle to discover a mouth and speak for itself, it would have such a burden of history to unfold that it would not be done with it before the end of the world. But for my own little story, the scene was not much more than a background.