Everything Happened to Susan (12 page)

There are not so many dreams as last night and they are not so hideous. In the worst one her father comes to her after the Academy Award ceremony and says that he appreciates the step forward she has made in her career but now it is time to get serious and think about what she is going to do with her life. “I mean, you’re going to have to get married and have a family anyway so you should do it soon so you’ll be vigorous in your sunset years,” he says to her with an admonitory shake of his forefinger. “This is all well and good and you’ve certainly had interesting experiences but now it’s time to be mature and live sensibly.” She turns to him to tell him for the first time what she really thinks of him, holding her Academy Award tightly in her hands. She is ready to demolish him but before she can three celebrities and two major political figures standing near them fall upon her father in the way the technicians had fallen upon Timothy and take him, protesting, into a wing. “You have to live your own life; you must realize that it is a one-way ticket; you must take your life seriously!” her father shouts but Susan is already at the Awards party and cannot listen to him; she is surrounded by hundreds of people who look at her with admiration and come over one by one to fondle her Oscar. They tell her that she has reached the top of her profession. Susan wants to remain level-headed. The Academy Award, after all, has been won in the past by some of the worst actresses in history, but she finds it difficult to maintain her sense of balance. Completely distracted, Susan smiles and talks, gives quick interviews to the press and then suddenly Phil is there wearing a tuxedo and looking at her with a proprietary air. “Come here,” he says to her and she tries to indicate with motions that she cannot. She is too busy with the press, but Phil says, “Get over here and stop that nonsense,” and she cannot deny him any longer. She goes over to him and he seizes her by an arm, drags her out of the room and into a long, long hallway which looks very much like the one outside his office. “I’ll hold that for you,” he says, taking the award from her hand and putting it on the floor behind his back. Then, with enormous facility, he lifts her long skirt, pulls down her pants and tearing open his zipper inserts himself into her, beginning to fuck desperately. Susan protests, says that people will come, tries to back away from him but finds herself against a hard, blank wall on which hang the pictures of dead, great movie stars. She tries to move aside under his battering but is paralyzed and Phil finally says, “Just remember who you are; just remember what you are, just remember how you got here.” He forces his will upon her, has a fierce orgasm spilling upwards and outwards like a flower and filling her chest with a peculiar warmth while he collapses underneath her, falling to the floor and out of sight. His face, turning in upon itself, folds like paper and Susan finds that her picture is being taken by photographers from
Life
Magazine, the
New York Times, Newsweek, Variety, Women’s Wear Daily,
and
Sports Illustrated,
all of whom are using flashbulbs. It is a very embarrassing situation and she does not quite know what to do. Finally she settles for a smile, pulling her hair from her eyes. She realizes that Phil is directing the photographers from the floor, explaining to them about angles of light and her most favorable profile. Despite her justifiable resentment, she feels somewhat grateful for what he is doing. At least she is being kept now before the public.

Much later she dreams that Frank has slipped beside her in bed and is trying to enter her. He acts with a desperate stealth mixed with desire because he is afraid at any instant she will awaken and bring upon him a disastrous failure … and so his gasps are broken by urgent, piteous little moans and muttered urgings to himself to be quiet … Susan finds the whole thing rather funny, not that she would want to laugh and hurt his feelings. At length she feels him inside her, wedged tightly, and he begins to work in a simple rocking gesture aided by his fingernails on her back. He attempts to bite her neck. It is inconceivable, she dreams, that he thinks he could carry on in this fashion and not awaken her, nevertheless she lies quietly, letting him work upon her. She has some curiosity about Frank. Also she knows that he can see that she would let almost anyone have her sexually if he only took the trouble to force the issue. As always she minimizes the role of sex. That has never mattered to her. She finds it ridiculous that men should find this act, this series of motions culminating in a sneeze of such unusual value that they will concentrate their lives upon getting it, warp themselves in strange and complex ways in the getting or the failing … and Frank comes into her slowly with an gasp of pain or maybe simple pleasure. She holds him, rubs a breast against his mouth, whispers to him to be quiet. Throughout he has not touched her breasts; now he buries himself in her bosom and begins to moan. She is now fully awake and knows she has not been dreaming.

Perhaps, Susan finds herself thinking, perhaps it would have been for the best if she had submitted herself to the examination and become an investigator for the Department of Welfare. She would then have been spared mornings like this; whatever else she would have had to go through in the Welfare Department, she would not have had to spend an entire day doing for business what she had been doing the previous night to support her emotional life. On the other hand, she would have most likely only met someone like Timothy.

Frank’s mother is waiting for them in the living room, still doing a crossword puzzle, but otherwise vastly changed from last night. Her entire mood is ebullient as Susan, and Frank, laden with suitcases come into the room. Susan will take them to work and look for a hotel in the evening. “Oh I just feel wonderful this morning,” she says, “I have this feeling going all through my body that everything’s going to work out. Don’t you think so, children?”

“We have to go to work, mother,” Frank says, dropping the suitcases and, as his mother sees them, her mood seems to shift. She says, “Is the young lady leaving? And just when I was feeling so happy.”

“I have to find a place of my own,” Susan says. “This was only temporary.”

“But I thought that you and Frank were working things out so beautifully. I just have the feeling all through my body that things are all working out for the best. You’re not really going to leave, are you?”

“Please, mother,” Frank says. He does not seem to be in a very good mood himself; he seems to have accepted Susan’s decision to leave very well, very matter of factly. Suddenly a look of rage crosses his face; then his expression settles down to a restrained and civilized revulsion. “Please don’t talk any more. I can’t stand to listen to it.”

“Because I thought that everything was going to be fine between you children. I thought that Frank was finally at the end of his quest. There is an end to every journey and I felt that my son had reached his.”

“That’s not necessary, mother.”

“Oh, nothing’s necessary! Nothing’s necessary if you want to look at it that way; you can just lie in bed and waste yourself. But I have hopes for you, Frank. Tell me that you’re not leaving, dear. He needs someone to love and relate to, that’s all. If he can find that, he’d be as normal a man as any you see on the street. He almost had a doctor of letters, you know. He can go back and finish it any time and have a fine career. And you don’t have to see me at all; it’ll be as though I weren’t even living here.”

“I can’t discuss that now,” Susan says. She brushes her damp hair from her forehead, blinks, and tries to look alert. In fact the apartment appears fuzzy to her: fuzzy light is coming through the windows, indistinct figures are moving on the walls, blurred outlines of people in the room are talking to one another. She knows that she could use a real rest, some change of circumstance that would bring her back to herself. Instantaneously she makes a decision: when the film is finished, hopefully today, she will ask Phil for a loan and she will go away for a week. Phil is understanding; he only wants the best for her. Surely now that she has committed herself to him, he will be reasonable. Two hundred dollars will be more than sufficient to take her where she wants to go. Well, three hundred dollars. No more than two weeks and she will come back refreshed, ready to do everything she can in the film business.

“It’s too late, mother,” Frank is saying, meanwhile. He seems to be gripped in an intense dialogue, the sense of which has somehow missed her while she was thinking of other things. “It’s too late for any of that shit.”

“Watch your language. I don’t care what you think of me and what relations have come to, I’m still your mother.”

“I said, stop it! It’s too late! I’m thirty-four years old and an actor in pornographic films, mother. I’ve never held a full-time, responsible paying position in my life and I’ve never finished a single thing I’ve started except this relationship with you which
is
finished. Finished, do you hear me! There is no time for your optimism, no time for your platitudes. It is far too late for any of this and it is time you accepted that fact. You can’t keep on making these demands of me.”

“Well, it’s just because I think so much of you and want only the best,” the old lady says complacently, marking something in the crossword puzzle. “If I didn’t care for you so much, Frank, I wouldn’t have stayed with you all these years. I would have gotten rid of you in pregnancy if I didn’t have plans for you. You can’t shock me, don’t you understand that by now? I dealt with you when you were a wee tot.”

“Do you think,” Susan says, “do you think that we could get going? I think it’s a little late and anyway; I do want to get down there early.”

“Yes,” Frank says. “I’m sorry. All right. I just can’t deal with this woman any more. She is not reasonable. I can’t make her see things.”

“Frank gets caught up, dear,” his mother says. “He’s really very involved with me and he gets distracted; it doesn’t mean that he’s ignoring you or anything like that. It’s just that he’s known me so much longer and I annoy him a great deal. Are you sure you won’t be staying? I do think that things could work out wonderfully for the two of you if you only gave them a chance. You wouldn’t even have to get married for a while; you could just kind of live in sin and have a relationship, as you people put it. Later on if it’s serious you could …”

“It can’t be,” Susan says. “I mean, I don’t have a thing against Frank but it just couldn’t work out. For his sake, it wouldn’t be fair.”

“Yes, that’s what they all say. They always leave him for his sake, not theirs. Frank brings out all the unselfishness in young ladies, don’t you Frank?”

Frank, however, is already out the door, struggling with suitcases, mumbling and cursing to himself. Susan picks up the two that are left on the floor and follows him. At the door she wants to say good-bye to the old lady but she cannot hold her baggage and turn around. Also Frank seems to be having a great deal of difficulty on the steps and his curses fill the hallway. She settles for a quick nod which she hopes will be interpreted from the rear as being a friendly, if a definite parting and negotiates her way down, to find Frank on the sidewalk sweating in the spring cold and wiping his forehead with a palm. “I can’t stand it,” he says. “I just can’t stand it any more.”

“Come on, Frank. We’ve got to get downtown.”

“She uses every excuse to humiliate me and she doesn’t understand that life is circular. Do you understand that? Life is a circle. I go downtown to act in pornographic films; I come home to my mother. What could be more reasonable than that?”

“Frank,” Susan says with enormous calm, “Frank, now you’re getting hysterical,” and steps from the sidewalk, waving her arm, hoping for a cab. In the kind of novels which Timothy writes, characters who go into the street to hail a cab always seem to get one immediately, thereby enabling a smooth shift of scene, but she knows that nothing so easy happens in real life; she imagines that she will be standing helplessly in the street for a quarter of an hour, trying to seduce a taxicab while Frank stands amidst her bags on the sidewalk, mumbling about his mother. But, because this is indeed an exceptional day, maybe the first day of an entirely new era for Susan, a cab does come, swaying dangerously toward the curb. It is an old cab with a short driver and a door swings open in readiness. She is on her way, then. She is on her way at last. The trunk is opened, her suitcases are inserted, and she and Frank go off to the studio for another day of filmmaking. In a sulk, he sits at a far corner and holds the spread fingers of a hand over his face. Susan thinks of several possible topics of conversation but she decides that she likes none of them and there is really very little to say. This is Susan’s final day of work in the film business.

“This is it,” Phil says to the assembled, naked cast. The director is off to the side, his head bowed, studying a script, not really in the situation at all and now Phil at last seems to have become the person he always wanted to be. His gestures are assured, he is exuberant, his face glows with vitality. “We’re going to wrap this one up today. For some of you this will be good news; for some of you perhaps not because when you work closely together on a project of this sort there is always a feeling of loss when it is over. But today is the day. We’re going to do the big scene.”

He stops, turns, kneels, and picks up some mimeographed sheets beside him. “I’ve held this one back until the last minute,” he says, “because it was touch and go until this morning whether we’d actually do it or not. Whether we’d get the green light to do this big, controversial stuff. But I’m happy to say that they’ve decided to go all the way. No holds barred. We’re going to have a big film here, a big film. I’m going to pass these scripts out now and let you look at them for a few minutes and then we’ll shoot it,” he says. “Don’t study them too hard, don’t worry about line readings, don’t worry about anything except getting the general sense of it. What they’re looking for here is a sense of spontaneity and truth, that’s all, and you should just dive right into it.” A curious formality overcomes him, a strange shyness seems to peep at the edges. “I wish you good luck,” he says, handing out the sheets “and much happiness.” Handing Susan her script he whispers, “You’ve got the key part here; stop by after filming and we’ll talk about a lot of things,” and then he disappears, probably once again into the equipment. Phil’s comings and goings have always been obscure but there is a definite whisk, even an élan to his means of disappearance this time.

Susan looks over her script without much interest. Her role has been circled throughout with red pencil and seems to have something to do with an argument she is having with her husband. She can hardly make sense of it; she stopped trying yesterday to make anything of these scripts at all. The thing to do in the dirty picture business, she has decided, is simply to go along with the situation. Take the positions assigned, say the lines given, and leave the rest of it to one side. It is a good policy to follow and, now that she has committed herself to the business totally just for this last day, she is glad that she discovered it before it was too late. Murray, the short actor, comes over to her and whispers something about him having just looked over the script and that this is too much, but Susan simply shrugs. Her valises are safely stored in a closet down the hall; the director having given his special permission for this. She will finish the film and have her talk with Phil and find a hotel and then a studio apartment and go on to other things. There is nothing going on here any more that can touch her. Murray says that he cannot believe it; he is an experienced man and has seen almost everything in his time but this is too much, too raw; this, he admits, goes beyond him. Susan says that the work is very interesting and Murray gives her a puzzled look, moves away from her. There is no reason to act with Murray as if there had been any intimacy between them. That too she has learned. She has learned a great deal. Frank squats in a corner, looking at his script, smoking a cigarette and giving her furious looks while he taps ashes onto the floor. Now she is able to look at and beyond him. Frank means nothing whatsoever to her. She has gone as far with him as she needs to go. Once in a psychology class she recalls having learned about something called a disassociate phenomenon. As the symptoms come vaguely back to her Susan decides that that is what she has. Definitely. She has disassociative tendencies. That is perfectly all right with her. She has been through worse. She giggles. Frank looks at her sullenly.

“Places,” the director says. “I call for places and no nonsense. This is a crucial scene as you have been told, the most important scene of the entire project and it must be gotten right the first time. Therefore, there will be no nonsense.”

“When have you ever done a retake?” someone asks and the director glowers, slams the script against his thigh and says, “There is no time now for nonsense. We are in serious business now. This scene is very close to my heart; it redeems my identification with this project. Do you understand that? The crowd will fall on the perimeter; the four principals please, in the center.”

Susan supposes that she is one of the four principals. She moves over, naked, to a group of four chairs under the equipment, sits, folding her legs, still looking over the script. There is a lot more to her part here than she has had thus far; she has always been a quick study but this is difficult. Three naked actors, two men and a girl sit themselves around her. Frank is one of the actors. He sits to her right. The two others sit in front of them, backs facing. “You are represented to be in a car,” the director says. “A limousine. This is all highly surrealistic and impressionistic, however, so there is no need to make driving motions. Crowd noises, please.”

The surrounding actors begin to groan in a desultory fashion; Susan’s view of them is cut off when the lights throughout the loft are knocked out completely. Then the four of them are pinned by a dazzling high spot which arches in from a great distance, blinding her. She raises an arm to her face, trying to block the light and hears the director curse. “Stop this!” he says. “Ignore the lights. Play to one another.”

“Listen,” Frank says, “we haven’t even had a chance to look these scripts over. I don’t even think I know the lines.”

“Shut up,” the director says. Invisible, his voice becomes larger, more threatening, omnipotent as if sounding in an arena. “I have no time for nonsense. You are all professionals. You have studied these parts and they cannot be released further. Music. Commence.”

Music comes into the loft. It is the first time that it has been used during filming; Susan supposes that it is dubbed in later for the most part but there is most definitely music here: loud, thundering martial music, in the back of which can be heard the faint sound of strings. “Music down!” says the director and the light becomes even brighter, as harsh as the sun. The actress in front of Susan turns, leaning an elbow over her chair and says, “Well, I guess you can’t say that the city of Dallas doesn’t love you now, Mr. President.”

“That’s right,” Frank says, “that’s right,” and then the scene begins, it truly commences: it is a long scene full of colors and screams and many lines for Susan and she says them all, finds it surprising how well she knows the lines right up to the end. At a certain point there is a call for blood, one of them mentions blood and from a great height the technicians toss a bag of something toward the chairs where it explodes with a dull roar and covers them with smears of red. There are screams for this too, screams not wholly in the script, and finally the scene ends. Susan, crawling away from Frank, has only one thought fixed in her mind: if she can make it to the wall, just to the wall and her clothing, she will be perfectly all right; the thing is to get there and from then on she will be able to manage the rest herself but it is very hard, very hard to make this short distance which she has made so easily so many times before. For a while she thinks that she will not succeed, realizes that she cannot somehow stop screaming. Bodies lean over her to talk comfortingly: Frank is there and Murray and the actresses and the director and finally there is Phil … it is Phil who is the one who calms her, throwing something over her shoulders. Once again he takes her on the long walk to his office where he closes the door. Suddenly it is as if everything is behind her and she will not have to think any more. Phil tells her what a good person she is, what a good actress, how much he appreciates what she has been doing for them and she turns to him to thank him for showing this compassion for her finally. Although she only wants to thank him in the flattest and least emotional terms, she cannot stop laughing. There is no way that she can stop laughing. Then Phil shakes his head and leaves her there, laughing against a wall, and lumbers out of the office, down the hall. Phil is an intelligent man and has been around long enough to recognize what has happened. Susan laughs and laughs. She laughs for six hours but three months later she is much better and when her father comes to take her home she tells him solemnly that she has decided a career in the theatre is not really for her. Her father nods. He says that it is good to hear her finally say that of her own accord. Her father is, like Phil, a sensible man and will do what he can for reason’s sake.