City of God (26 page)

Pem had chosen the hospice across the East River as an appropriate dead end for his professional life. He was already working around in his thinking to a meaningful transition, to what he did not yet know, but he felt himself changing, and if he had any faith left, it was his conviction that when the brass cross of St. Tim's appeared on the roof of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, something momentous was announced. This was not a proposition he was prepared to argue with anyone—he had regretted mentioning it to me because, on the one hand, it belonged to a mode of thought characteristic of the ancient prophetic communications which he could no longer countenance and, on the other, because he felt, with the stunning power of superstition, that to discuss it, to speak of it, was for it to lose its light. He did not think of the sign as necessarily unearthly but as so cryptic as to render the motives of the human beings who had arranged it entirely beside the point.

Betrayable in speech, and positioned on the edge of unreason, his given sign was a challenge to his behavior. He must keep his own counsel, even as far as Sarah Blumenthal was concerned. His sign was ambiguous, he had recognized it for what it was but not for what it was instructing him to do. He felt that when he should confide in her he would know it without question, but in the meantime he had to be patient and attentive and alive to his life, the person on whom nothing is lost. He could hope that a revelation was evolving, that it was a slow process, and it might be manifest even in the moans of the dying. From the very beginning, even before the cross had been stolen, the events at St. Tim's had turned him into a detective of sorts, and that's what he'd decided his life must seriously become, a truly humble, dogged act of detection.

After hearing Pem's letter to Sarah, I wonder if revelation comes not like light to the eye but as an imposed ordering of that part of the self so deeply interior that it is anonymous.

—I've a pretty good idea of the father's walking routes now, today I begin at Union Square Park, I see the rat-poison skull-and-crossbones warnings planted in the grass. . . and on its west side, down the steps, is the truer park, the farmers' market, with its banks of potted flowers, office trees, truck farm produce from New Jersey. . . brilliant color fields of pears and apples, spinach, kale, carrots in the sunlight. . . anything organic in Manhattan draws crowds. . . the brisk, unsentimental exchanges between buyer and seller rehashing the first act of civilization. . . and west along Fourteenth, the venue for cheap clothes hanging from pipe racks on the sidewalk, big hand-crayoned sale signs in the windows, tables with hats and gloves for the coming winter, the ceilings of the stores strung with luggage. . . the traffic crawling by, big fumy buses, the smells of pizza, sidewalk incense free for the breathing. . . down Seventh past the double-parked parameds of St. Vincent's, with distant sirens on their way tolling the truth of eternal emergency. . . and, slanting eastward along Greenwich Avenue, Mexican and Indian restaurants, coffee ritual places. . . long-gray-haired man with little dog on a leash, three black kids, their voluminous jeans falling off their hips, thin blond young woman kneeling to tend to baby in stroller, stopped-in-traffic truck driver looking down at her, his arm dangling over his cab door. . . across the street one of the paranoidally fenced community gardens behind which soars the towered Romanesque strawberry-red Jefferson Market Courthouse, recalling the last century, when, given the great identity problem of the new world, every conceivable architecture rose from the sidewalks of New York, Romanesque, Gothic, Moorish, Belle Epoque, and Tenement. . . and across arterial Sixth Avenue along miserable, wretched Eighth Street once the glory of bohemian intellect, with the best bookstore in New York, now the venue of shoes and phony antique clothing, the boomboxed hatchbacks from New Jersey zooming up to the curb. . . south on sedate lower Fifth to Washington Square, with
its competing performers, a limber black comedian in the center ring, he's brought his own sound system and, at the edges, sideshows of various strumming adenoidally voiced Dylan clones, each with his loyal group around him. . . and so in and out of the city's lightness and darkness, each neighborhood its own truth, with another kind of life to give you. . . and finally up Second, typically wide avenue of the East Side, past the Ukrainian hall and restaurant, I turn right down this sunless East Village street to have a look at what's become of St. Timothy's, Episcopal. A piously aspiring brownstone steeple that was probably the tallest thing in the neighborhood when it was built. Recessed behind its tiny churchyard and all jammed in now between the tenements, the street at each end colored up with the signs of rent-payers—cleaners, bodega, bar, checks cashed. . . the few gravestones in the patchy grass have sagged over the years like shoulders bowed in grief. . . and all of it, including the graves, now a theater company.

Gothic lettering over the doors, Theater of St. Tim's. They're playing Chekhov's
The Seagull.

“Well, after all,” I remember Pem saying, “wasn't drama born from religion? Exit gods, enter ordinary Greeks. Not to scant the polytheists of the mystery cults, they knew a thing or two, among which was how to put on a good show, with lots of music to go with the fucking and drinking. But over the long haul, we've probably done better with Sophocles.”

—B. the film director in New York to get me to write a screenplay for him. We went to dinner and this was the story he wanted me to write—it was, he said, a story from “life,” in fact his life, which is why he felt it had such authority: A couple of years before, he'd cast an actress in a movie in which she was to be badly mutilated by a sociopath who ranged through the neighborhood climbing fire escapes and opening windows to prey on beautiful unattached young women. Women who'd come to the big city to find a job and make a life—sad, winsome girls leaving a small town of grief behind them, having
perhaps lost a soldier boyfriend to a war, or a pair of parents on a small farm. . . but anyway in the city now, the film being an homage to the forties film noir. B. wanted that forties deep-shadow black and white that told you how dark and inhospitable the world was.

And this actress, a lissome, long-legged, almost pretty girl, a little vague in a sexy way, with a good head of hair, she tested well and was cheap, she was just out of one of the New York acting programs, and this was her first movie and he gave her the role of the woman who lives to tell the tale, becoming romantically involved with the detective on the case who visits her in the hospital, and so on. B. cast this actress from some instinct having nothing to do with practicality, she felt right to him for this part in a way he didn't bother to analyze. He is not analytical in any event. And, well, they shoot the scene, the sociopath climbs up the fire escape and into the window of her boardinghouse room, because this is a past-tense movie, you see, when there were boardinghouses and poor neat clean girls took rooms in them. . . and the guy looms over her bed and she screams in terror and he doesn't rape her because that's not what the sex is in these movies, the sex is the horror, and he bends over her and begins to chew up her face with his big sharpened teeth and. . . a couple of takes and it's a wrap, it's gone so well and they don't have any budget to speak of, B. shoots the film in eight weeks. When it opens the critics notice her, though not crazy about B.'s work, he has done some respectable things, they tax him for wasting his time.

The actress pins everything on her good notices in this bad film, she can go to New York and do some Off Broadway thing, but her agent tells her to stick it out, there's work out here, film, TV.. . . So she stays, she's dating this one or that one, getting her name in a column every once in a while, but she misses out on one thing after another, not much happens, her agent not able to land her jobs. . . and one night she comes home just a little tipsy, she's got an apartment in West Hollywood, and a maniac is inside waiting for her, a real one. He pins her down on the floor and bites off her nose.

“I mean, this is no movie,” B. tells me, “this is what actually happens! She screams, someone hears her, they get the guy, pull him off her, but the poor kid never recovers her sanity, she is today living with her prosthetic nose in a state asylum!” For a while it was a private
sanitarium, but then the studio decided they'd done all they could, an in-house lawyer figured they are not finally responsible if some creep sees her mutilated in a film and decides this is her karma. But, B. tells me, and this is important, that it was never established that the maniac had seen the film! “Knowing what I know now,” he says, “I'll guarantee that he didn't see the film! I mean, are these crazies capable of sitting still for two hours to watch a movie? I send the kid flowers every week, I worry about her, that it's not over yet. For all I know the guy's in the same institution, male psycho division, separated from her only by a dormitory fence. For all I know he's biding his time till he can get to her again.”

So, B. asks me, what was the instinct that told him to cast the girl in the role—some specific vulnerability she flashed, a genome of her own doom, what? What did he see in her without even thinking about it—that's what bothers him. Earlier in his career he'd cast an actor to die of a heart attack who'd gone and done just that, and once, for a western, an Indian war thing, an actor he cast as a cavalry officer skewered by an Indian spear impaled himself on an iron fence-post in front of his apartment house after he fell drunk out of his third-floor window.

“I must foresee things,” B. tells me with that Hollywood gift for effortless self-anointment. “I must have foreseen the fate of that poor girl.” He shakes his head, stares at the tablecloth. “But how? What is my moral scorecard here? What do I know and when do I know it?”

“So, let's see if I have this right,” I say. “You want to make a movie about a man who makes a movie with an actress whose fate in the movie is repeated in her real life, except that her real life is a movie that you are making with another actress about how your movies foretell real life—is that the idea?”

“It is positively occult, isn't it. A genuine occult mystery. Like it's screening right here in my own soul. I can't tell you how strange this is. It's the biggest picture of my career.”

“Well, it could be something, all right, but—”

“I came right to you. With your philosophical bent, how could I think of anyone else?”

“I'm sorry, I don't want anything to do with it.”

“Why not?”

“And put another nose in harm's way?”

“Oh. Oh. . .” Ruminating. “I see what you're saying. Not to worry. I'll find someone who isn't right for the part: I'll cast against type.”

“That's only what you'll think you're doing,” I tell him.

—Back to my waterside village on the Sound, the light of late September coming in at a slant, a golden beneficent light, placid, unrustled by wind, but like a ripening, with clear intimations of the year now harvested, the sere winter coming. A sad season, the Canadian geese thinking of flying south, flocking in their serious squadrons but circling indecisively, a honking false prophet among them wheeling them back down to skid-land on the coves. When they are fed by well-meaning people, they stay beyond their time and freeze to death.