The Almanac Branch (27 page)

“Properly executed the idea can work, I know it. Can work both as film and as a commercial property.”

“Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're right.For the record, I think you're nuts to want a theatrical release and not just go for the video market—it's all very uppity. But more important, have you considered the problem of getting that childhood stuff legally in the can, and out to the theater?”

“I don't understand. What problem?”

“Pretty serious legal jeopardy you've got lurking there in hiring some underage actress to play the part of the girl. Remember the Traci Lords deal—”

Berg countered, “I'll get to that when I get to it, and at any rate it's my problem, just like you say.”

He was going to proceed, it was clear. Not without reluctance, she asked, “So if all these problems are your problems what do you need me for, darling?”

Berg hesitated, and then confessed, “I want you to be the mature Grady.”

Analise laughed, down in her husky smoker's throat. “Mature? What a sensitive euphemism, it's why I love you, but you know I don't do that anymore.”

“There isn't anyone I know who'd be more perfect.”

“I'm flattered, the answer is no. I made a pact with myself about it and there's no going back. Ten years ago I would have sleepwalked through the whole package, but no way now. I've moved from in front to behind the camera and I'll never go back.”

“It's what I want. You think about it.”

“The person who should be thinking about it, giving it some calm, rational, mature consideration is you, dear Berg,” and when, with those last words, she brought the glasses back down to the tip of her nose, he did try to listen to her advice, knowing as he might that her redoubtable and doubtful opinion of his film arose not from a philistine's hostility toward “human need” and its various forms of expression, nor from a rival's jealousy, but from an honest assessment that what he was getting himself into might produce some grim results for him personally and financially.
Human Need
—after all, that was the title of one of herown films. Great piece, too. There was a line in it that Berg would never forget. It was a joke about suicide. “The wages of death is sin,” it went. You had to see it in context. How the Catholics hated that one, all right.

No, she was a true friend, was Analise. Her advice had come too late, however. Try as he might to turn his attention to other things, Berg found that he had conceived an infatuation for the film, which he tentatively had given the title—maybe prompted a bit by the suicide joke that had proved the pivot point in his decision to go ahead—
A Sinner's Almanac
.

The title remained in his mind rather provisional because Berg was uncomfortable with the word sinner, which betrayed, he felt, some interest in a morality system he held in no high regard. But he couldn't think of a worthy replacement. Wrongdoer was stiff. Transgressor seemed foggy and clerical. Malefactor was so clinical, and wordy. Sinner at least had some bite to it, he supposed. It was a good enough working title, and carried some suggestion of the film's episodic nature. Moreover, he explained on the phone to Analise, who finally did agree to act as an advisor, coproducer, on the picture for him but remained resolute in her refusal to act in it, there was an outlandish irony in making the girl Grady a sinner since, as Berg understood the character, all she really wanted to be was a good girl, to be loved by her father and her siblings. The thought was, wouldn't this only heighten the viewer's interest in her moral failures?

Said Analise, “No, anybody who bothers to buy into the idea that they're a sinner wants to be a saint or else they'd know there isn't any useful difference between the one and the other.” Berg jotted that into his tiny book, though he doubted the epigram would stand up to logical analysis.

It was determined that the two segments of the film, girl Grady and adult Grady, would be shot in the same location to keep the budget somewhat under control. If the thing ran longer than three hours—Analise coughed at such anotion but assumed she could talk him into editing it down later—they would release it as two films, though Berg wanted in the worst way to make it a little epic. In order to retain as much artistic independence as he could, Berg wanted to make sure he wouldn't have to depend on any outside financing—he had never tapped into the Gulf Stream kitty as deep as he anticipated he'd have to for this, nor had he ever really risked not being able to replace the funds, as he knew he was with
Almanac
—and so he made several production decisions strictly in anticipation of budget problems. At the same time, he tried to turn every practical constraint into an expression of artistic integrity. Even though the savings would be modest, he thought to shoot the childhood scenes in black and white; it had been done before, but it was a nice effect, he assured himself. He took the position—again, in interior monologues, answering critics who didn't exist—that those early days of Grady's life would be made more evocative if they forwent color, would even be more accurate in a way, since in the early sixties color was still being developed, and black and white was the norm. They would shoot the picture with super-sixteen, which meant smaller crew, lighter-weight equipment; it could be blown up to thirty-five millimeter later on at the lab. Analise appreciated the way he was thinking.

Already the vision of how it was going to look began to shimmer and gain on him. Odd angles, funky miking, rough cutting, grainy footage: none of this, Berg decided, would hurt the film's quality. Quite the contrary. When (Analise said “If”) it went into theatrical release, they could situate themselves in the market through comparisons to Russ Meyer, perhaps, maybe to Lina Wertmüller or some of the French makers, Varda say, or that Spaniard who had such success with his kinky matador, even the beauty of the chaos that was vogue among new music video directors. The aesthetic freedoms granted by unabashed use of amateurish means was, in certain circles in and outside theindustry, the rage and this, he decided, was the posture he would adopt as his own.

All this positive enthusiasm was useful in the face of reality, however. As the
Almanac
script continued to grow through the summer, Berg couldn't resist detailing props, backgrounds, costumes, and stage directions for every scene as he envisioned them, and with every new idea, every foliation the film wanted to make, an awareness grew inside him about how not just the budget but the physical nature of films and making a film would not allow for such a precise rendering of all those details, in practice. The more he developed Grady's life, the more it became important to him to get a complete documentation of how he'd ideally like to have realized his portrait.

Indeed, one night—humidity and August heat seeping through the walls and windows of the hotel room where he lived those months, reclusive, channeling every waking hour into the script—he wondered whether the film ought to be shot at all. He'd just sketched out a scene where the ghostly brother enters the girl's bedroom and seduces her in such a way that it would be physically impossible to stage. This bit of whimsy, based as best he could recollect on what Grace had confessed to him that once (or had she? the vodka that was constantly at hand through these nights and days sometimes bowed reality like an old board; because, no, he knew he'd sneakily read it in her childhood diary)—of course broke the first rule in any practical handbook on how to write or act. So already he'd have to settle for something less than his vision demanded. What could two actors and a director work out as a substitute to the ghost's penetrating his sister with his head? It was depressing, the knowledge that whatever they would finally come up with would in no way match his idea as laid out in the script.

Another matter began to worry him. He had drawn so directly from his own life that he knew if by some miraculous piece of bad luck the film ever came to the attentionof Charles or Grace, or even Erin, they would recognize themselves easily, and all the anonymity he'd worked so hard to maintain regarding his other films (he'd been nothing short of criminal, he had to admit, in the way he habitually withdrew monies from this already sensitive account, unauthorized, in order to invest in films that would make up for money he lost in other parts of the Sprawl—what a mess!), those films he was rather less proud of, all anonymity would be forfeited. And that might, no, it
would
mean serious trouble for him. His father would be forced to cut him off completely, if only to protect his own life's project. Faw would never be able to admit to much regarding the Gulf Stream Trust, since it was such a compromising and anomalous piece of work, in any case; but if it came out that his son had been borrowing freely from its Caribbean church account to make profitable not to mention seedy films, there would be no end of nightmares. Gulf Stream was the only place where all the entities that made up Geiger connected. This Berg surmised, because he had yet to see a tax return for any of Geiger's network of corporations that didn't show at least in one year or another a “donation” to the Trust. It was distinctly possible Charles would sue him through some legal mechanism inside the Sprawl. But it would be too late for any of them, by then; if war came to pass (Berg knew Charles would have every right to sue) between himself and his father there was no question who would emerge the victor, though it wouldn't be much of a war worth winning. Very probably all sides would be destroyed, as the government would have a field day. Yet, every time he attempted to invent, to move away from events in their lives as he remembered them, and as he remembered Grace telling them, the script went sour, or flat, or altogether astray, and began to smack of the same falsity he detested in other people's uninspired and hackneyed films.

Thus it happened that the more he meditated about it and the deeper involved he found himself in it, the morethere appeared to be so many reasons to abandon the project before it had gone any further. Still, he knew he had to go ahead. For him, there seemed now to be no choosing because—and perhaps for the first time in his life—he felt sure about the importance of his understanding his own needs, and fulfilling them. What he needed was to see what it would
look
like on screen. And after so many years, he told himself, of deferring his to the needs of others, namely his father's, he was determined to see this one vision through.

I was both heartened and ashamed by how promptly Mother returned Djuna's call. Djuna had left a message with Segredo, on my behalf, and he told her that he and Erin would discuss the matter. When Mother called back, not a full hour later, she said they would welcome me if I wanted to come visit. In light of her openness, I felt a little ashamed that I hadn't shown the courage to make that call myself. My excuse that I didn't want to risk being put in the position of having to explain why I wanted to see them, after so many years, seemed indolent, and thoughtless.

But I had reasons, at least, for feeling backward. I wasn't even sure what I was going to tell them, or rather, how much I was going to let them in on the Almanac branch. There was also my desire not to betray any emotion over the telephone, nor state anything explicit about what I had begun to suspect. For all I knew, the telephone line at Scrub Farm was tapped. My knowledge of detective dramas had taught me to register paranoia about some things I barely understood; but even if I was being absurdly cautious, better to err on the “siker's side”—the safer side, one of mother's phrases, not Irish, Scottish and perennial with her—than be sorry. Given the jaundiced clouds that were gathering out on the horizons of the Gulf Stream Trust, perhaps she had erred on the siker's side in leavingus for the quiet of Coecles Inlet and its rusted, innocent goliaths. There was good reason for me to begin to feel that things I thought I knew, I didn't know as well as I'd imagined. For one, how wise had I really been, all this time, to have laid the blame for Desmond's death at my mother's feet, and Segredo's? I wasn't so sure of my judgment in this as I used to be.

What I did know was Berg had done one thing I had failed, indeed had not so much as tried, to do: he had maintained a relationship with Mother, and her Gabriel Segredo. If Berg had never done anything else to earn my respect, this would suffice, I now began to think. I remembered back to the times when he and I would be out at Scrub Farm with Faw, and at the end of dinner he would excuse himself, and drive over to pay them a visit. He didn't even have to say where he was going, we knew. Faw made no comment; without exception he never betrayed his silence, never once revised his original decision to neither chastise Mother nor acknowledge her existence. It was a telling act of will, I thought, my father's flawless indifference. It makes me wonder now if this ability to display such prodigious apathy toward his estranged wife came from the same part of his spirit that allowed him to ignore the legal and moral questions that were raised by the Trust and its bogus ghost church down in the shadows of Morne Vitet. Surely, I decided, he knew about all the imputable activities of the Gulf Stream Trust. It was not in his nature not to know things. All I could think was there must be some explanation that I didn't understand. Not wanting to approach Berg, not yet—given how tied up in bending the Almanac branch to his own purposes he was—and knowing that I needn't harbor any hopes of a response from Faw if I brought it up with him, my hope was that Erin might be able to enlighten me. She was there the night of the dinner at Scrub Farm when Faw discussed the Trust with some of his colleagues. There was some chance she had caught sight of its real purpose. Although I knew it wasn'tvery fair of me to show up, after so long a time limited to sporadic letters—I could add selfishness to my list of faults—there were no alternatives. None, at least, that I could see.