Zeroville (17 page)

Vikar is standing on the Bowery outside what seems to be a tunnel cut into a bunker. The sidewalk is crowded with more kids like he saw on St. Marks Place, as well as old people sleeping under newspapers and drunks stumbling through the crowd asking for money. A dirty barefooted woman shivers under a yellow awning in nothing but the paper-thin gown that patients wear in hospitals.

The address on the awning is 315. There are nonsensical letters on the awning that spell nothing. A mystifying handwritten cardboard sign on the black glass doors says

HEARTBREAKERS

MAXXI MARASCHINO

SIC FUCKS

SHIRTS

and while nothing about this is comprehensible to him, the illicitly narcotic Sound is irresistible and he goes inside, the doorman eying him with wonder.

Inside, the club isn’t much bigger than Vikar’s hotel suite. There are two stages, the main one in front, a smaller and lower one off to the side. There’s a pool table and a couple of pinball machines. The walls are peeling and needles litter the shadows and wafting clouds of urine collide with clouds of beer. The Sound, made by the band on the main stage, is overwhelming; people at the front fling themselves wildly into each other. Something wells up in Vikar. There’s a break, then a singer who reminds him of Brigitte Bardot or Tuesday Weld.

It was never the Music at all, it was always the Sound; and though there’s no way for him to understand this, perhaps the Sound moves him now because, a little more than twenty years after its birth, the Sound has become about itself, the Sound is about its own truth and corruption in the same way that, a little more than twenty years after the Movies found their sound, there was a wave of movies about the Movies:
Sunset Boulevard
,
Singin’ in the Rain
,
The Big Knife
,
The Bad and the Beautiful
. When the Sound has circled to swallow its tail, it becomes a world of its own, god or no god, or in which Vikar is god—or in any event a god that kills fathers rather than sons.

Vikar returns to the club the next night and the next, and the next five after that. There’s never a moment when he says
God I hate this music
before he admits
God I love this Sound
. By his third night, when he steps over the woman in the hospital gown sleeping in the doorway and walks into the club, everyone turns to look and in the din he catches stray fragments of buzz, “He’s here …” and people part before him. When the audience begins its tribal smash-ups, the thing in him wells up and he lurches into the crowd, slamming into everything and everyone, toppling over the edge of the stage. He feels people’s hands on Liz and Monty. Later behind the club, a feline Asian named Tanya and her “slave” Damitra take turns putting him in their mouths, and as he leans back against the wall he can feel the vibration, like the vibration he felt when he went to the silent-movie theater one night on Fairfax, and Chauncey played the organ to the ride of the Klan in
The Birth of a Nation
. Returning to the editing room in the mornings he glows with a bruised blue, and the secretaries and assistants regard him even more strangely than usual.

For a while he realizes he’s come to care more about the Sound than the Movies, and in his infidelity he’s ashamed, memories washing over him of his first days in Los Angeles when no one seemed to love the movies. I would never betray you, he promises the bathroom mirror, caressing his head. I might cheat on you for Kim or Natalie or Tuesday, but I would never betray you for any sound or music.

One early morning in the dark after returning to the hotel, Vikar sits looking out the window at the park. It’s turned cold again. Christmas decorations go up all over the city. The heat of his night at the club, however, makes him unlatch the window and push it open. The park reflects off the glass of the window in the light from his suite. He keeps pushing the window in and out, the image of the park shifting with its reflection in the glass.

I would never betray you, one lover might say to another in a scene, but by choosing one profile over the other, Vikar can lay bare either credibility or mendacity in the character, irrespective of the actor’s intention or the writer’s or director’s.

As people have right profiles and lefts, so places and moments have them. Vikar looks back and forth from the park below to its image in the window, listening to the image’s stereo. In a movie, every shot is a profile of
something
. By cutting from rights to lefts or vice versa, or from rights to other rights or from lefts to other lefts, Vikar reinforces or sabotages the audience’s perceptions, not to mention the film’s. He sets free from within the false film the true film.

He’s been working on
Your Pale Blue Eyes
for two months when, going over the previous day’s rushes, he hits the stop button and looks at the face in the frame before him.

He picks up the phone and puts a call through to Mitch Rondell.

“I hear you’re a busy man these nights, Vikar,” Rondell says. The tone of concern is unmistakable. “At some point soon, it would be helpful if we took a look at what you’re doing.”

“It’s better if you trust me,” Vikar says.

“I’ll be honest—that makes us nervous. Why is it better?”

“Because otherwise it would be hard for someone to understand or for me to explain.” There’s silence on the other end of the phone. “Let me finish a little more.” Vikar adds, “Hiring another editor now would be bad.”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” Rondell says. “I didn’t say anything about hiring another editor.”

Vikar doesn’t answer.

“Tell me honestly how you feel it’s going.”

“I don’t know yet. That doesn’t mean,” Vikar says, “it’s not going well.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means I have to finish to know. It’s a matter of faith.”

“The faith feels a bit blind.”

“In one eye, perhaps.”

“This is all very poetic, Vikar, but both eyes would like to see what you’re doing. Take until the end of next week and then you need to show us something.”

“All right.”

“I’m also sending something over to your suite this afternoon. Depending on what I see next week, there will be more where that comes from.” Is it illicit narcotics? Vikar wonders. “You’ll find it when you get back to the hotel. You are going back to the hotel these nights, aren’t you?”

“Sooner or later.”

“They’re your nights, as long as it’s not hurting the picture.”

“All right.”

“We understand and accept that a certain amount of mystery is part of your personality, Vikar. You do understand that sometimes it unsettles people?”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever get unsettled?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“I guess that’s good.”

“I get other things.” Looking at the face in the viewer before him, Vikar says, “But I called about something else.”

When Vikar returns to his suite that evening, a large stack of film canisters waits for him on the table in the front room.
The Long Goodbye
,
Kiss Me Deadly
,
Sweet Smell of Success
,
Body and Soul
,
Monsieur Verdoux
,
To Be or Not to Be
,
A Hard Day’s Night
,
One Million B.C.
(the final movie D. W. Griffith produced, and part of which he may have directed). When I get back to Hollywood, Vikar thinks, I’m going to need a bigger place.

He doesn’t go to the club that night, and the next day he leaves the cutting room early and returns to the suite. He waits for a phone call, or a knock on the door.

She holds her hair, wrapping her hand in it. She wears a black dress like the last time he saw her. “Hello,” he says.

“You are editing my film.” She smiles. “
My
film.”

“Come in.”

“I can’t. But perhaps we can go out Friday night.”

“Do you want to give me your phone number?”

“I will just come over, O.K.?”

“Yes.”

“We can go out and have a drink or go dancing or go to a club.”

Vikar says, “I know a very good club.”

Until the last second, some part of him believes she’ll disappear again. When he answers the door Friday night, she wears a shorter, sexier dress and her lips glisten; she’s slightly flushed, and across her eyes is a mysterious veil, as though the eyes and lips are each of a different face. “I have to make one stop,” she says breezily in the taxi on its way down Fifth Avenue.

The streetlights ripple across her face. A full moon hangs over Grand Central Station. “Is it waxing or waning?” she says. “I’ve been on the set so many nights I don’t know.”

“Which is which?” he says. “Which is becoming and which is begoing?”

“Waxing is becoming.”

“It’s waxing.” He says, “I didn’t know you were in this movie until I saw your face in the viewer.”

“I didn’t know you were on it,” she says, “until they told me.”

“What did they tell you?”

“They told me you were cutting the movie.” She half laughs, “I play the model’s friend.”

“I know.”

“It’s not a big part. I tried out for the part of the model.”

“I saw you in
The Long Goodbye
.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“I did?”

“That afternoon at Paramount. There was a limousine for you and you were going to Spain.” She says, “I was supposed to play the gangster’s girlfriend.”

“The scene with the Coke bottle.”

“At the last minute, the director decided no one would smash my face with a Coke bottle. They needed a more … disposable actress with a more disposable face. I lost the lead in
L’Avventura
for the same reason.”

“The woman who disappears on the island.”

“She was the second lead,” Soledad corrects herself, “she was a disposable character too. As with Altman, Antonioni said, ‘No one would lose
you
on an island.’ Driver, turn left here please.”

The taxi turns on Thirty-Fourth Street. “Another block and a half,” Soledad says to the driver.

The taxi crosses Park Avenue.

“Pull over here please.” The taxi pulls in front of a parking structure. “I will be right back,” she says to Vikar, opening the door.

“Where are you going?” Vikar says.

“I will be right back.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Stay and hold the taxi. I will be back.”

Inside the club, Soledad says, “What is this?”

“Why did we stop at that parking structure?” asks Vikar.

She gazes around her. “I thought we were going to a club.”

“I believe this is a very good club.”

“I thought we were going to a disco, I thought we were going dancing.” She’s stricken by the spectacle; for a moment, her accent flares. “Everyone is looking at me,” in her short sexy dress, there among the ripped jeans and leather.

“They’re looking at me,” Vikar says. They’re both right.

“I don’t like this club.”

“I believe it’s a very good—”

“I hate this music. It’s not even music.”

“No,” Vikar agrees, “it’s the Sound.”

“It’s …” she thinks, “
bárbaro
. Barbaric.”

“Yes,” he says, “that’s it, barbaric,” and throws himself into the roiling pit of the audience.

Outside, he tries to hail a cab while she waits under the awning. Standing in the empty street he turns to see Soledad gazing down at the sidewalk and the dirty barefooted woman in the hospital gown who always sleeps in the club doorway.

To Vikar’s astonishment, Soledad pulls off over her head her flimsy black dress, laying it over the woman as though it could keep her warm, and stands on the freezing New York sidewalk in nothing but her panties, high heels and a glimmer of recognition rooted seven years before and three thousand miles away, on Pacific Coast Highway.

Vikar looks around to see if anyone is watching. Some people stop to stare at the nearly naked woman but others just pass by; finally flagging the attention of a distant taxi, Vikar dashes to Soledad and removes his coat, draping it around her shoulders.

“As we get older,” Soledad says in the cab back to the hotel, shivering in Vikar’s coat, “does the wall between youth and madness become higher? Or do we just learn how to … better stay on our side of the wall?”

“I don’t know,” Vikar answers.

“That club,” she says softly. “There was no wall.”

“No.”

“The bathroom was a cesspool.”

After a while Vikar says, “How is Zazi?” Soledad turns to him in the backseat; her breasts fall out of his open coat and press against his sweat-soaked shirt. “I wonder if I know what you mean, Mister Film Editor,” she says, and this time he knows she doesn’t wonder at all. “I wonder why you ask about that. She’s in L.A. With friends. With her father.” She whispers, “You want to get
bárbaro
, Mister Film Editor?” inches from his mouth, the passing lights from the street outside rolling across her face. She pulls his belt out of the loops of his pants and unbuttons the front and takes him in her hand.

Back at his suite in the hotel, she says, “What’s this?” She holds it up before her eyes. In her other hand she still has his belt, carried defiantly through the hotel lobby.

“Something I made,” he says, “a long time ago.”

She examines it. “A toy house?”

“It’s not a toy, it’s not a house.” Vikar takes two small bottles of vodka and red wine from the mini-bar. Is this the moment for such autobiography? Is there any moment for such autobiography? “It’s a model of a church.”

She turns the model in her hand. “You take it with you wherever you go?”

“I was an architecture student.”

“I remember.” She points at one wall. “It’s bent.”

“From the earthquake. The big one, seven years ago.”

She studies the small steeple with its crowned lion holding a gold axe. “There is,” her eyes narrow at the other tiny walls, “no way out.”

“That’s what I believed. The review committee,” he says, “saw it as no way in.”