The Exorcist

  Chris remembered the rats.

  “Where’s Karl?”

  “I am here, Madam!”

  He’d come catting in lithely through a door off the pantry. Commanding and yet deferential, he had a fragment of Kleenex pressed to his chin where he’d nicked himself shaving. “Yes?” Thickly muscled and tall, he breathed by the table with glittering eyes, a hawk nose and bald head.

  “Hey, Karl, we’ve got rats in the attic. Better get us some traps.”

  “There are rats?”

  “I just said that.”

  “But the attic is clean.”

  “Well, okay, we’ve got tidy rats!”

  “No rats.”

  “Karl, I heard them last night.”

  “Maybe plumbing,” Karl probed; “maybe boards.”

  “Maybe rats! Will you buy the damn traps and quit arguing?”

  Bustling away, Karl, said, “Yes! I go now!”

  “No not now, Karl! The stores are all closed!”

  “They are closed!” chided Willie, calling out to him.

  But he was gone.

  Chris and Willie traded glances, and then, shaking her head, Willie returned to her tending of the bacon. Chris sipped at her coffee. Strange. Strange man, she thought. Like Willie, hardworking; very loyal, very discreet. And yet something about him made her vaguely uneasy. What was it? That subtle air of arrogance? No. Something else. But she couldn’t pin it down. The housekeepers had been with her for almost six years, and yet Karl was a mask—a talking, breathing, untranslated hieroglyph running her errands on stilted legs. Behind the mask, though, something moved; she could hear his mechanism ticking like a conscience. The front door creaked open, then shut. “They are closed,” muttered Willie.

  Chris nibbled at bacon, then returned to her room, where she dressed in her costume sweater and skirt. She glanced in a mirror and solemnly stared at her short red hair, which looked perpetually tousled; at the burst of freckles on the small, scrubbed face; and then crossing her eyes and grinning idiotically, she said, Oh, hi, little wonderful girl next door! Can I speak to your husband? Your lover? Your pimp? Oh, your pimp’s in the poorhouse? Tough! She stuck out her tongue at herself. Then sagged. Ah, Christ, what a life! She picked up her wig box, slouched downstairs and walked out to the piquant, tree-lined street.

  For a moment she paused outside the house, breathing in the fresh promise of morning air, the muted everyday sounds of waking life. She turned a wistful look to her right, where, beside the house, a precipitous plunge of old stone steps fell away to M Street far below, while a little beyond were the antique brick rococo turrets and Mediterranean tiled roof of the upper entry to the old Car Barn. Fun. Fun neighborhood, she thought. Dammit, why don’t I stay? Buy the house? Start to live? A deep, booming bell began to toll, the tower clock on the Georgetown University campus. The melancholy resonance shivered on the surface of the mud-brown river and seeped into the actress’s tired heart. She walked toward her work, toward ghastly charade and the straw-stuffed, antic imitation of dust.

  As she entered the main front gates of the campus, her depression diminished; then lessened even more as she looked at the row of trailer dressing rooms aligned along the driveway close to the southern perimeter wall; and by 8 A.M. and the day’s first shot, she was almost herself: she started an argument over the script.

  “Hey, Burke? Take a look at this damned thing, will ya?”

  “Oh, you do have a script, I see! How nice!” Director Burke Dennings, taut and elfin and with a twitching left eye that gleamed with mischief, surgically shaved a narrow strip from a page of her script with quivering fingers, cackling, “I believe I’ll have a bit of munch.”

  They were standing on the esplanade that fronted the university’s main administration building and were knotted in the center of extras, actors and the film’s main crew, while here and there a few spectators dotted the lawn, mostly Jesuit faculty. The cameraman, bored, picked up Daily Variety as Dennings put the paper in his mouth and giggled, his breath reeking faintly of the morning’s first gin.

  “Oh, yes, I’m terribly glad you’ve been given a script!”

  A sly, frail man in his fifties, he spoke with a charmingly broad British accent so clipped and precise that it lofted even the crudest obscenities to elegance, and when he drank, he seemed always on the verge of a guffaw; seemed constantly struggling to retain his composure.

  “Now then, tell me, my baby. What is it? What’s wrong?”

  The scene in question called for the dean of the mythical college in the script to address a gathering of students in an effort to squelch a threatened sit-in. Chris would then run up the steps to the esplanade, tear the bullhorn away from the dean and then point to the main administration building and shout, “Let’s tear it down!”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Chris told him.

  “Well, it’s perfectly plain,” Dennings lied.

  “Oh, it is? Well, then explain it to me, Burkey-Wurky. Why in freak should they tear down the building? What for? What’s your concept?”

  “Are you sending me up?”

  “No, I’m asking ‘what for?’ ”

  “Because it’s there, love!”

  “In the script?”

  “No, on the grounds!”

  “Oh, come on, Burke, it just isn’t her. It’s not her character at all. She wouldn’t do that.”

  “She would.”

  “No, she wouldn’t.”

  “Shall we summon the writer? I believe he’s in Paris!”

  “Hiding?”

  “Fucking!”

  He’d clipped the word off with impeccable diction, his fox eyes glinting in a face like dough as the word rose crisp to Gothic spires. Chris fell to his shoulders, weak and laughing. “Oh, Burke, you’re impossible, dammit!”

  “Yes.” He said it like Caesar modestly confirming reports of his triple rejection of the crown. “Now then, shall we get on with it?”

  Chris didn’t hear him. Checking to see if he’d heard the obscenity, she’d darted a furtive, embarrassed glance to a Jesuit in his forties standing amid the cordon of spectators. He had a dark, rugged face. Like a boxer’s. Chipped. Something sad about the eyes, something grieving, and yet warm and reassuring as they fastened on hers and as, smiling, he nodded his head. He’d heard it. He glanced at his watch and moved away.

  “I say, shall we get on with it?”

  Chris turned, disconnected. “Yeah, sure, Burke. Let’s do it.”

  “Thank heaven.”

  “No, wait!”

  “Oh, good Christ!”

  She complained about the tag of the scene. She felt that the high point was reached with her line as opposed to her running through the door of the building immediately afterward.

  “It adds nothing,” said Chris. “It’s dumb.”

  “Yes, it is, love, it is,” agreed Burke sincerely. “However, the cutter insists that we do it,” he continued, “so there we are. You see?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “No, of course you don’t, darling, because you’re absolutely right, it is stupid. You see, since the scene right after it”—Dennings giggled—“well, since it begins with Jed coming into the scene through a door, the cutter feels certain of a nomination if the scene before it ends with you moving off through a door.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Oh, I agree with you, love. It’s simply cunting, puking mad! But now why don’t we shoot it and trust me to snip it from the final cut. It should make a rather tasty munch.”

  Chris laughed. And agreed. Burke glanced toward the cutter, who was known to be a temperamental egotist given to time-wasting argumentation. He was busy with the cameraman. The director breathed a sigh of relief.

  Waiting on the lawn at the base of the steps while the lights were warming, Chris looked toward Dennings as he flung an obscenity at a hapless grip and then visibly glowed with satisfaction. He seemed to revel in his eccentricity. Yet at a certain point in h
is drinking, Chris knew, he could suddenly explode into temper, and if it happened at three or four in the morning, he was likely to telephone people in power and viciously abuse them over trifling provocations. Chris remembered a studio chief whose offense had consisted in remarking mildly at a screening that the cuffs of Dennings’s shirt looked slightly frayed, prompting Dennings to awaken him at approximately 3 A.M. to describe him as a “cunting boor” whose father, the founder of the studio, was “more than likely psychotic!” and had “fondled Judy Garland repeatedly” during the filming of The Wizard of Oz, then on the following day would pretend to amnesia and subtly radiate with pleasure when those he’d offended described in detail what he had done. Although, if it suited him, he would remember. Chris smiled and shook her head as she remembered him destroying his studio suite of offices in a ginstoked, mindless rage, and how later, when confronted by the studio’s head of production with an itemized bill and Polaroid photos of the wreckage, he’d archly dismissed them as “obvious fakes” since “the damage was far, far worse than that!” Chris did not believe he was an alcoholic or even a hopeless problem drinker, but rather that he drank and behaved outrageously because it was expected of him: he was living up to his legend.

  Ah, well, she thought; I guess it’s a kind of immortality.

  She turned, looking over her shoulder for the Jesuit who had smiled when Burke had uttered the obscenity. He was walking in the distance, head lowered despondently, a lone black cloud in search of the rain. She had never liked priests. So assured. So secure. And yet this one…

  “All ready, Chris?”

  “Ready.”

  “All right, absolute quiet!” the assistant director called out.

  “Roll the film,” ordered Burke.

  “Rolling!”

  “Speed!”

  “Now action!”

  Chris ran up the steps while extras cheered and Dennings watched her, wondering what was on her mind. She’d given up the arguments far too quickly. He turned a significant look to the dialogue coach, who immediately padded up to him dutifully and proffered his open script to him like an aging altar boy handing the missal to his priest at solemn Mass.

  They had worked with only intermittent sun, and by four, the sky was dark and thick with roiling clouds.

  “Burke, we’re losing the light,” the AD observed worriedly.

  “Yes, they’re going out all across the fucking world.”

  On Dennings’s instruction the assistant director dismissed the company for the day and now Chris was walking homeward, her eyes on the sidewalk, and feeling very tired. At the corner of Thirty-sixth and O she stopped to sign an autograph for an aging Italian grocery clerk who had hailed her from the doorway of his shop. She wrote her name and “Warm Best Wishes” on a brown paper bag. Waiting for a car to pass before crossing the road at N Street, she glanced diagonally across the street to a Catholic church. Holy Something-or-other. Staffed by Jesuits. John F. Kennedy had married Jackie there, she had heard, and had worshiped there. She tried to imagine it: John F. Kennedy among the votive lights and the pious, wrinkled women; John F. Kennedy with his head bowed down in prayer; I believe … a détente with the Russians; I believe, I believe … Apollo IV amid the rattlings of the rosary beads; I believe in the resurrection and the life ever—

  That. That’s it. That’s the grabber.

  Chris watched as a Gunther beer truck lumbered by on the cobbled street with a sound of quivering, warm, wet promises.

  She crossed, and as she walked down O and passed the Holy Trinity grade school auditorium, a priest rushed by from behind her, hands in the pockets of a nylon windbreaker. Young. Very tense. In need of a shave. Up ahead, he took a right, turning into an easement that opened to a courtyard behind the church.

  Chris paused by the easement, watching him, curious. He seemed to be heading for a white frame cottage. An old screen door creaked open and still another priest emerged. He nodded curtly toward the young man, and with lowered eyes, he moved quickly toward a door that led into the church. Once again the cottage door was pushed open from within. Another priest. It looked—Hey, it is! Yeah, the one who was smiling when Burke said “fucking”! Only now he looked grave as he silently greeted the new arrival, putting his arm around his shoulder in a gesture that was gentle and somehow parental. He led him inside and the screen door closed with a slow, faint squeak.

  Chris stared at her shoes. She was puzzled. What’s the drill? She wondered if Jesuits went to confession.

  Faint rumble of thunder. She looked up at the sky. Would it rain? … the resurrection and the life ever…

  Yeah. Yeah, sure. Next Tuesday. Flashes of lightning crackled in the distance. Don’t call us, kid, we’ll call you.

  She tugged up her coat collar and slowly moved on.

  She hoped it would pour.

  A minute later she was home. She made a dash for the bathroom. After that, she walked into the kitchen.

  “Hi, Chris, how’d it go?”

  Pretty blonde in her twenties sitting at the table. Sharon Spencer. Fresh. From Oregon. For the last three years, she’d been tutor to Regan and social secretary to Chris.

  “Oh, the usual crock.” Chris sauntered to the table and began to sift messages. “Anything exciting?”

  “Do you want to have dinner next week at the White House?”

  “Oh, I dunno, Marty; whadda you feel like doin’?”

  “Eating candy and getting sick.”

  “Where’s Rags?”

  “Downstairs in the playroom.”

  “What doin’?”

  “Sculpting. She’s making a bird, I think. It’s for you.”

  “Yeah, I need one,” Chris murmured. She moved to the stove and poured a cup of hot coffee. “Were you kidding me about that dinner?” she asked.

  “No, of course not,” answered Sharon. “It’s Thursday.”

  “Big dinner party?”

  “No, I gather it’s just five or six people.”

  “Hey, neat-o!”

  She was pleased but not really surprised. They courted her company: cabdrivers; poets; professors; kings. What was it they liked about her? Life?

  Chris sat at the table. “How’d the lesson go?”

  Sharon lit a cigarette, frowning. “Had a bad time with math again.”

  “Really? That’s strange.”

  “Yeah, I know; it’s her favorite subject.”

  “Oh, well, this ‘new math.’ Christ, I couldn’t make change for the bus if—”

  “Hi, Mom!”

  Her slim arms outstretched, Chris’s young daughter had come bounding through the door toward her mother. Red pigtails. A soft, shining face full of freckles.

  “Hi ya, stinkpot!” Beaming, Chris caught her in a bear hug and kissed her pink cheek with smacking ardor; she could not repress the full flood of her love. “Mmum-mmum-mmum!” More kisses. Then she held Regan out and probed her face with eager eyes. “So what’djya do today? Anything exciting?”

  “Oh, stuff.”

  “So what kinda stuff? Good stuff? Huh?”

  “Oh, lemme see.” She had her knees against her mother’s, swaying gently back and forth. “Well, of course, I studied.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “An’ I painted.”

  “Wha’djya paint?”

  “Oh, well, flowers, ya know. Daisies? Only pink. An’ then—oh, yeah! This horse!” She grew suddenly excited, eyes widening. “This man had a horse, ya know, down by the river? We were walking, see, Mom, and then along came this horse, he was beautiful! Oh, Mom, ya should’ve seen him, and the man let me sit on him! Really! I mean, practically a minute!”

  Chris twinkled at Sharon with secret amusement. “Himself?” she asked, lifting an eyebrow. On moving to Washington for the shooting of the film, the blonde secretary, who was now virtually one of the family, had lived in the house, occupying an extra bedroom upstairs. Until she’d met the “horseman” at a nearby stable, at which point Chris decided that Sharon
needed a place to be alone, and had moved her to a suite in an expensive hotel and insisted on paying the bill.

  “Yes, himself,” Sharon answered with a smile.

  “It was a gray horse!” added Regan. “Mother, can’t we get a horse? I mean, could we?”

  “We’ll see, baby.”

  “When could I have one?”

  “We’ll see. Where’s the bird you made?”

  At first Regan looked blank, then she turned around to Sharon and grinned with a mouth full of braces and shy rebuke. “You told!” she said before turning to her mother and snickering, “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “You mean…?”

  “With the long funny nose, like you wanted!”

  “Oh, Rags, you’re so sweet. Can I see it?”

  “No, I still have to paint it. When’s dinner, Mom?”

  “Hungry?”

  “I’m starving.”

  “Gee, it’s not even five. When was lunch?” Chris asked Sharon.

  “Oh, twelvish,” Sharon answered.

  “When are Willie and Karl coming back?”

  Chris had given them the afternoon off.

  “I think seven,” said Sharon.

  “Mom, can’t we go Hot Shoppe?” Regan pleaded. “Could we?”

  Chris lifted her daughter’s hand; smiled fondly, kissed it, then answered, “Run upstairs and get dressed and we’ll go.”