Applause. The whole table clapped hands and called praise.
Eyes shut, J. C. bowed his head, left and right.
“That’s quite some story,” I murmured.
“Don’t believe a word of it,” said J. C.
The applause stopped. Someone else had arrived.
Doc Phillips stood at the far end of the table.
“My God,” said J. C. in a strong, clear voice. “Here’s Judas now!”
But if the studio doctor heard, it was not evident.
He lingered, studying the room with distaste, fearful of encounters. He resembled one of those lizards you see on the edge of a primeval forest, glinting his eyes around, terribly apprehensive, sniffing the air, touching the wind with probing claws, lashing his tail in little twitches, doom in all directions, no hope, only nervous response, ready to spin, rustle, run. His gaze found Roy and for some reason fixed on him. Roy sat up, stiffened, and smiled a weak smile at the doc.
My God, I thought, someone saw Roy stealing off with his box. Someone—
“Will you say grace?” called Fritz. “The Surgeon’s Prayer— O Lord, deliver us from doctors!”
Doc Phillips glanced away as if only a fly had touched his skin. Roy collapsed back in his chair.
The doc had come, out of habit. Beyond the commissary, out there in the bright high-noon sun, Manny and a few other fleas were doing backflips of anger and frustration. And the doc had come here to get away from it or search for suspects, I could not tell which.
But there he was, Doc Phillips, the fabulous physician to all the studios from the early handcranked cameras to the advent of shrieks and screams in sound to this very noon when the earth shook. If Groc was the eternal jolly Punch, then Doc Phillips was the glum curer of incurable egos, a shadow on the wall, a terrible scowl at the back of theatre previews, diagnosing sick films. He was like those football coaches on the sidelines of victorious teams, refusing to flash their teeth just once in approval. He spoke not in paragraphs or sentences, but clips and chops of shorthand prescription words. Between his ayes and nays lay silence.
He had been on the eighteenth green when the head of Skylark Studios sank his last putt and dropped dead. It was rumored he had sailed off the California coast when that famous publisher threw an equally famous director overboard to “accidentally” drown. I had seen pictures of him at Valentino’s bier, in Jeanne Eagels’s sickroom, at some San Diego yacht race where he was carried as sunstroke protection to a dozen New York movie moguls. It was said he had happy-drugged a whole studio star system and then cured them in his hideaway asylum somewhere in Arizona, near Needles. The irony of the town’s name did not go unsaid. He rarely ate in the commissary; his glance spoiled the food. Dogs barked at him as if he were an infernal mailman. Babies bit his elbows and suffered stomach cramps.
Everyone flinched and pulled back at his arrival.
Doc Phillips fastened his glare here and there along our group. Within instants, some few of them developed tics.
Fritz turned to me. “His work is never done. Too many babies arrived early behind Stage 5. Heart attacks at the New York office. Or that actor in Monaco gets caught with his crazy operatic boyfriend. He—”
The dyspeptic doctor strode behind our chairs, whispered to Stanislau Groc, then turned quickly and hurried out.
Fritz scowled at the far exit and then turned to burn me with his monocle.
“Oh master futurist who sees all, tell us, what the hell is going on?”
The blood burned in my cheeks. My tongue was locked with guilt in my mouth. I lowered my head.
“Musical chairs,” someone shouted. Groc, on his feet, said again, his eyes on me, “Chairs. Chairs!”
Everyone laughed. Everyone moved, which covered my confusion.
When they had done with churning in all directions, I found Stanislau Groc, the man who had polished Lenin’s brow and dressed his goatee for eternity, directly across from me, and Roy at my side.
Groc smiled a great smile, the friend of a lifetime.
I said, “What was Doc’s hurry? What’s going on?”
“Pay no attention.”Groc calmly eyed the commissary doors. “I felt a shudder at eleven this morning, as if the rear of the studio had struck an iceberg. Madmen have been rushing around ever since, bailing out. It makes me happy to see so many people upset. It makes me forget my melancholy job of turning Bronx mud ducks into Brooklyn swans.” He stopped for a bite of his fruit salad. “What do you guess? What iceberg has our dear Titanic struck?”
Roy leaned back in his chair and said, “There’s some calamity at the prop and carpenters’ shop.”
I shot Roy a scowl. Stanislau Groc stiffened.
“Ah, yes,” he said slowly. “A small problem with the manatee, the woman’s figure, carved from wood, to go on the Bounty.”
I kicked Roy under the table, but he leaned forward:
“Surely that wasn’t the iceberg you mentioned?”
“Ah, no,” said Groc, laughing. “Not an Arctic collision but a hot-air balloon race, all the gas-bag producers and yes-men of the studio are being called into Manny’s office. Someone will be fired. And then—” Groc gestured toward the ceiling with his tiny doll hands—“falling upward!”
“What?”
“A man is fired from Warner’s and falls upward to MGM. A man at MGM is fired and falls upward to 20th. Falling upward! Isaac Newton’s reverse law!” Groc paused to smile at his own wit. “Ah, but you, poor writer, will never be able, when fired, to fall upward, only down. I—”
He stopped, because …
I was studying him as I must have studied my grandfather, dead forever, in his upstairs bedroom thirty years ago. The stubble on my grandpa’s pale waxen skin, the eyelids that threatened to crack and fix me with the angry glare that had frozen Grandma like a snow queen in the parlor for a lifetime, all, all of it as clean and clear as this moment with Lenin’s necrologist/cosmetician seated across from me like a jumping jack, mouse-nibbling his fruit salad.
“Are you,” he asked, politely, “looking for the stitch marks over my ears?”
“No, no!”
“Yes, yes!” he replied, amused. “Everyone looks! So!” He leaned forward, turning his head to left and right, skinning his hairline and then his temples.
“Lord,” I said, “what fine work.”
“No. Perfect!”
For the thin lines were mere shadows, and if there were fleabite stitch scars, they had long since healed.
“Did you—?” I said.
“Operate on myself ? Cut out my own appendix? Perhaps I am like that woman who fled Shangri-La and shriveled into a Mongol prune!”
Groc laughed, and I was fascinated with his laughter. There was no minute when he was not merry. It was as though if he ever stopped laughing he would gasp and die. Always the happy bark, the fixed grin.
“Yes?” he asked, seeing that I was studying his teeth, his lips.
“What’s there so funny to laugh at,” I said, “always?”
“Everything! Did you ever see a film with Conrad Veidt—?”
“The Man Who Laughs?”
That stopped Groc in mid-dust. “Impossible! You lie!”
“My ma was nuts for films. After school, she’d pick me up from first, second, third grade to go see Pickford, Chaney, Chaplin. And … Conrad Veidt! The gypsies sliced his mouth so it could never stop smiling all the rest of his life, and he falls in love with a blind girl who can’t see the awful smile and he is unfaithful to her but, scorned by a princess, crawls back to his blind girl, weeping, to be comforted by her unseeing hands. And you sit in your aisle seat in the dark at the Elite Cinema and weep. The End.”
“My God!” exclaimed Groc, and almost not laughing. “What a dazzling child you are. Yes!” He grinned. “I am that Veidt character, but I was not carved into smiles by gypsies. Suicides, murders, assassinations did it. When you are locked in a mass grave with ten thousand corpses and fight upward for air in nausea,
shot to death but not dead. I have never touched meat since, for it smells of the lime pit, the carcass, and the unburied slaughter. So,” he gestured, “fruit. Salads. Bread, fresh butter, and wine. And, along the way, I sewed on this smile. I fight the true world with a false mouth. In the face of death, why not these teeth, the lascivious tongue, and the laugh? Anyway, I am responsible for you!”
“Me?”
“I told Manny Leiber to hire Roy, your tyrannosaurus buddy. And I said we needed someone who wrote as well as Roy dreamed. Voilà! You!”
“Thanks,” I said, slowly.
Groc preened over his food, glad that I was staring at his chin, his mouth, his brow.
“You could make a fortune—” I said.
“I already do.” He cut a slice of pineapple. “The studio pays me excessively. Their stars are always booze-wrinkling their faces, or smashing their heads through car windows. Maximus Films lives in fear that I might depart. Nonsense! I will stay. And grow younger, each year, as I cut and stitch, and stitch again, until my skin is so tight that when I smile my eyes pop! So!” He demonstrated. “For I can never go back. Lenin chased me out of Russia.”
“A dead man chased you?”
Fritz Wong leaned forward, listening, mightily pleased.
“Groc,” he said, gently, “explain. Lenin with new roses in his cheeks. Lenin with brand-new teeth, a smile under the mouth. Lenin with new eyeballs, crystal, under the lids. Lenin with his mole gone and his goatee trimmed. Lenin, Lenin. Tell.”
“Very simply,” said Groc, “Lenin was to be a miraculous saint, immortal in his crystal tomb.
“But Groc? Who was he? Did Groc rouge Lenin’s smile, clear his complexion? No! Lenin, even in death, improved himself ! So? Kill Groc!
“So Groc ran! And Groc today is where? Falling upward … with you.”
At the far end of the long table, Doc Phillips had come back. He advanced no further but, with a sharp jerk of his head, indicated that he wanted Groc to follow.
Groc took his time tapping his napkin on his little rosebud smile, took another swig of cold milk, crossed his knife and fork on his plate, and scrambled down. He paused and thought, then said, “Not Titanic, Ozymandias is more like it!” and ran out.
“Why,” said Roy, after a moment, “did he make up all that guff about manatees and woodcarving?”
“He’s good,” said Fritz Wong. “Conrad Veidt, small size. I’ll use that little son of a bitch in my next film.”
“What did he mean by Ozymandias?” I asked.
16
All the rest of the afternoon Roy kept shoving his head into my office, showing me his clay-covered fingers.
“Empty!” he cried. “No Beast!”
I yanked paper from my typewriter. “Empty! Also no Beast!”
But at last, at ten o’clock that night, Roy drove us to the Brown Derby.
On the way I read aloud the first half of “Ozymandias.”
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
Shadows moved over Roy’s face.
“Read the rest,” he said.
I read:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
When I finished, Roy let two or three long dark blocks pass.
“Turn around, let’s go home,” I said.
“Why?”
“This poem sounds just like the studio and the graveyard. You ever have one of those crystal balls you shook and the snow lifted in blizzards inside? That’s how my bones feel now.”
“Bushwah,” was Roy’s comment.
I glanced over at his great hawk’s profile, which cleaved the night air, full of that optimism that only craftsmen seem to have about being able to build a world just the way they want it, no matter what.
I remembered that when we were both thirteen King Kong fell off the Empire State and landed on us. When we got up, we were never the same. We told each other that one day we would write and move a Beast as great, as magnificent, as beautiful as Kong, or simply die.
“Beast,” whispered Roy. “Here we are.”
And we pulled up near the Brown Derby, a restaurant with no huge Brown Derby on top, like a similar restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, five miles across town, capped with a derby large enough to fit God at Easter, or any studio bigwig on Friday afternoon. The only way you knew this Brown Derby was important was by the 999 cartoon-caricature portraits on every wall inside. Outside was quasi-Spanish nothing. We braved the nothing to step in and face the 999.
The maître d’ of the Brown Derby lifted his left eyebrow as we arrived. A former dog lover, he now only loved cats. We smelled funny.
“Of course you have no reservations?” he observed, languidly.
“About this place?” said Roy. “Plenty.”
That rippled the fur on the maître d’s neck, but he let us in anyway.
The restaurant was almost empty. People sat at a few tables, finishing dessert and cognac. The waiters had already begun to renapkin and reutensil some of the tables.
There was a sound of laughter ahead, and we saw three women standing near a table, bending toward a man who was obviously leafing out cash to pay the night’s bills. The young women laughed, saying they would be outside window-shopping while he paid up, then, in a flourish of perfume, they turned and ran past me and Roy, who stood nailed in place, staring at the man in the booth.
Stanislau Groc.
“God,” cried Roy. “You!”
“Me?!”
Groc’s eternal flame snapped shut.
“What are you doing here?” he exclaimed.
“We were invited.”
“We were looking for someone,” I said.
“And found me and were severely put out,” observed Groc.
Roy was edging back, suffering from his Siegfried syndrome, dearly remembered. Promised a dragon, he beheld a mosquito. He could not take his eyes off Groc.
“Why do you look at me that way?” snapped the little man.
“Roy,” I warned.
For I could see that Roy was thinking my thought. It was all a joke. Someone, knowing that Groc ate here some nights, had sent us on a fool’s errand. To embarrass us, and Groc. Still, Roy was eying the little man’s ears and nose and chin.
“Naw,” said Roy, “you won’t do.”
“For what? Hold on! Yes! Is it the Search?” A quiet little machine gun of laughter started in his chest and at last erupted from his thin lips.
“But why the Brown Derby? The people who come here are not your kind of fright. Nightmares, yes. And myself, this patchwork monkey’s paw? Who could I scare?”
“Not to worry,” said Roy. “The scare comes later, when I think about you at three A.M.”
That did it. Groc ripped off the greatest laugh of all and waved us down in the booth.
“Since your night is ruined, drink!”
Roy and I glanced nervously around the restaurant.
No Beast.
When the champagne was poured, Groc toasted us.
“May you never have to curl a dead man’s eyelashes, clean a dead man’s teeth, rewax his beard, or rearrange his syphilitic lips.” Groc rose and looked at the door through which his women had run.
“Did you see their faces?” Groc smiled after them. “Mine! Do you know why those girls are wildly in love
with me and will never leave? I am the high lama of the Valley of the Blue Moon. Should they depart, a door would slam, mine, and their faces fall. I have warned them also that I have hooked fine wires below their chins and eyes. Should they run too far too fast to the end of the wire—their flesh would unravel. And instead of being thirty, they would be forty-two!”
“Fafner,” growled Roy. His fingers clutched the table as if he might leap up.
“What?”
“A friend,” I said. “We thought we might see him tonight.”
“Tonight is over,” said Groc. “But stay. Finish my champagne. Order more, charge me. Would you like a salad before the kitchen shuts?”
“I’m not hungry,” said Roy, the wild disappointed Shrine Opera Siegfried look in his eyes.
“Yes!” I said.
“Two salads,” Groc said to the waiter. “Blue cheese dressing?”
Roy shut his eyes. “Yes!” I said.
Groc turned to the waiter and thrust an unnecessarily large tip into his hand.
“Spoil my friends,” he said, grinning. Then, glancing at the door where his women had trotted out on their pony hooves, he shook his head. “I must go. It’s raining. All that water on my girls’ faces. They will melt! So long. Arrivederci!”
And he was gone. The front doors whispered shut.
“Let’s get out. I feel like a fool!” said Roy.
He moved and spilled his champagne. He cursed and cleaned it up. I poured him another and watched him take it slowly and calm down.
Five minutes later, in the back of the restaurant, it happened.
The headwaiter was unfolding a screen around the farthermost table. It had slipped and half folded back together, with a sharp crack. The waiter said something to himself. And then there was a movement from the kitchen doorway, where, I realized, a man and woman had been standing for some few seconds. Now, as the waiter realigned the folding screen, they stepped out into the light and hurried, looking only ahead at that screen, toward the table.