Girl of My Dreams (25 page)

Sitting next to me at the writers' table, Yeatsman overheard this exchange and muttered to me, “Hearts will be broken with solutions like that, and they won't be the hearts of producers. It was easier out here when writers could just compose title cards like ‘She was cool in a crisis and warm in a taxi.'”

As I was leaving the commissary I bumped into the actor and actress from the trailer. They entered laughing. No touching now, just a conspiratorial glance between them. I stood at the cash register paying for my lunch as the two stars paused to bask in the recognition they were receiving from the rest of the diners who mostly pretended not to notice them and raised their voices to prove it. The man had outfitted himself in a double breasted powder blue silk shantung jacket and ascot, checked slacks, and brown and white shoes. The woman was costumed in an ecru suit and matching little ecru felt beret, with a playful stem sticking up about as much as, twenty or so minutes earlier, her nipples had stood out from her chest. Carrying a doeskin purse with a gold clasp, she was all lady. Her shoes almost matched his, brown and white pumps. She said to him while they waited for the hostess to seat them, “For a fellow you have the best ass.”

Colonel DeLight wanted a junior writer to test typewriters and make a selection among the Royals and Coronas and Underwoods so he could give all his charges new tools to work with. It was humiliating but since I'd just been fired off a script, which he obviously knew—“If you ain't too busy, boy, I'd like to have your opinion on some typing machines over to the stationers”—I didn't see I had any choice.

As I drove off the lot the crowd of seekers was as large as ever. Extras were milling nervously. To get through the dispossessed throng I had to crawl slowly in my car. “I have an act George Jessel loved.” “Don't they have anything for twins?” “I been building muscles down at the beach, I know I can do one of the Apeman's pals.” Nobodies from Moline come west to make their last stand with their backs to the ocean. One of the scrawny kids ventured to my window, “Hey mister, are you somebody?”

“No,” I said and sped away.

13

A Life in the Day

Part II: Afternoon

Answer: God remains on location.

A little after two o'clock, Yeatsman sat in Mossy's easy chair, deep leather with bronze studs, mulling what he was going to do with
Madame Bovary
. Mossy was not yet back from lunch with Brenda De Baule. When the studio head was out, his office was the quietest spot on the lot, far more private than Yeatsman's own office in the teeming writers building among his harried colleagues always looking for advice or solace.

As a familiar, perhaps the only familiar in Mossy's employ, Yeatsman could use the space for contemplation that many others regarded as a potential torture chamber. In order for it to be transposed to film, any novel had to be stripped, flayed to its bones. Yeatsman wanted to leave out the Bovary background and begin in the convent.

The young farm girl Emma, instead of having her world squelched by life in a nunnery, has her horizons broadened by reading. Millevoix was said not to have liked her own convent, Yeatsman thinks, but she'll love this one, plus looking like a teenager again. Emma devours
La Chanson de Roland
,
Ivanhoe
,
Joan of Arc
. She is chastised, the books confiscated, all but the Bible, where she finds the perfect romance of Adam and Eve. The heroic Crusades and great love stories animate the young girl so much the Mother Superior has her removed from the convent. Back on the farm milking cows, caring for her invalid father, every chore dreary yet enlivened by Emma's yearning: Yeatsman knew he had to show boredom without being boring.

The young doctor, Charles Bovary, arrives. He cures Emma's father and is a little on the earnest side—Brian Aherne?—but good looking and living in a town; he personifies salvation. The wedding is hurried, cheap, not what Emma planned, but at least she's off the farm. Charles adores her; she finds him tedious, his affections bothersome. Tasting Champagne, and the high life, at an aristocrat's provincial ball, Emma gets a whiff of what her life could be. Gossip surrounds her in the little town—we'll skip the move to another town, Yeatsman suggests to himself, which adds little to her character—especially from the meddlesome druggist and his wife. The druggist, however, has potions Emma uses to escape her doldrums, as well as a young boarder who becomes infatuated with her. She resists the boarder and he runs away to study law, leaving her sick and regretful. Why didn't she yield?

Emma's daughter is born, and the more the baby clings to her mother, the more Emma sends her off to a wet nurse. Charles is a proud father, Emma an unwilling mother. Now comes the suave, stylish Rodolphe—Adolphe Menjou, Yeatsman thought, possibly Charles Boyer—to have one of his servants cured by Charles. Emma takes up with him, is soon running out of the town at dawn for trysts at Rodolphe's castle. The Code Nazis will hate this, Yeatsman knows, but we'll make the wages of sin just what they want, as Flaubert did. Rodolphe is so elegant; Emma must live up to his luxury, and the druggist introduces her to a conniving merchant who is soon selling her clothes far beyond her husband's means. And then furniture to fit out the home not of a provincial doctor's wife but of a duchess. She and Rodolphe exchange passionate letters. Her smothering domestic life, made even worse by the townspeople's gossip and intrusions, contrasts with the joyous transports of her affair with Rodolphe. Emma pleads with Rodolphe to take her away; we can tell even as he agrees that he's planning his own escape.

Rejected on the very night Rodolphe was to spirit her to Venice, Emma takes to her bed, sick with lost love, recoiling from her husband and daughter. She dresses her daughter in fancy clothes the Bovarys can't afford, tells her romantic stories of the rich life in Paris—stories she is really telling herself—but avoids any real affection. Emma is plunging deeper into debt, and the conniving merchant is taking most of Charles Bovary's income. Recovered from her illness, Emma goes to the larger town where the druggist's former boarder is now a young lawyer. Gary Cooper? Yeatsman wonders; we don't need another Frenchman. He becomes her lover, she brings him expensive presents, draining the last of her gullible husband's money. More passionate letters between the lovers, read over Emma's humdrum housewife existence. Charles is patient, naïve; he wants Emma to have anything she wants even if he is ruined.

When the conniving merchant finally demands full payment of all Emma owes him, she has a tantrum. She returns humbly to the wealthy Rodolphe to beg for a loan. He refuses and when Emma has an even more violent tantrum—Millevoix will love this, Yeatsman thinks—Rodolphe has his servant throw her out. She runs through the rain across fields and stumbles several times. The music is building. Reaching the druggist's house in the middle of the night, she searches for the key to his pharmacy, finds it, and in a fury of self-pity and self-hatred—Bernhardt would have been superb in a silent version of this, Yeatsman is thinking—she swallows several mouthfuls of arsenic.

As Madame Bovary lies in bed, poisoned, her bewildered husband and weeping daughter plead with her to remain with them. A priest comes. Dissolve to a month later as the grieving Charles goes through Emma's belongings. He finds the letters from her lovers. He collapses on the spot. In the final scene, Madame Bovary's daughter is in the convent where her mother discovered her own yearnings, and she is reading
Ivanhoe
.

“As much as a dollar for your thoughts,” Mossy said smiling wanly as he dragged his deboned wasted drained body into his office and, unable to stagger as far as his desk, plunged backward into his favorite chair as his favorite writer reluctantly vacated it.

“‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams,'” Yeatsman quoted his master.

So normally abnormally active, hopping with such agility from place to place and subject to subject, so filled with nervous energy that even his hands couldn't stay still, Mossy was hard to envisage in his present enervated state. The image itself would not form. Yet Brenda De Baule had apparently left him, for once, slack. He could not even open a note Elena had handed him.

Mossy's exhaustion derived from lunching at the Brown Derby with Brenda De Baule, brought over from France, sort of, by way of Brooklyn to become Jubilee's answer to Greta Garbo. This was not a fixed destiny since, Mossy confided to Yeatsman, she was worth couching but not casting. Mossy's eastern scouts had found Bogdana Deccabalu in the kickline at the Brooklyn Paramount, given her half a day to say goodbye to her family in Flatbush—she hated her milkman father for abusing her in the predawn before his delivery route, hated her mother for letting this occur, promised to send for one younger sister before the same thing happened to her—and shipped her to Paris for six months. In Paris Jubilee's representative arranged for her to have French lessons and, more importantly, French
accent
lessons, while he went about officially changing her name and acquiring a French passport for her. Jubilee then re-immigrated her to the United States and had photographers and columnists waiting on the West Thirty-ninth Street pier when she voyaged in on the
Île de France
. She was a Continental starlet.

The only trouble was the former Bogdana Deccabalu could not act. She couldn't even act Brenda De Baule. Her French accent had too little Left Bank, too much Sheepshead Bay. She was, however, adept at Mossy's luncheon plans, and then some. Fatigued from his postprandial labors, the poor man had to give a rude précis before proceeding to something he wanted to ask from Yeatsman. The drawback of using the studio head's office for study and reflection was he made himself handy for favors.

“Mouth like a Hoover,” Mossy said as he free-associated and gradually regained strength. “The woman could suck a basketball through a straw, dancer's ass twisting on you, she pants like a starved dog I find it adds to the whole event don't you, Packard's getting messy though, listen I got a miserable third act on
Escapade in Acapulco
out of Benges and Spighorr who must be drunk all day, you did the treatment, fix it by Friday so we can shoot Monday I'll let you have anything you want next, I need less talktalk, more on the jewel robbery and castanet girls, put in a fatal accident at the mine, coupla three yuks then the kid winds up with the
other
guy's girl like I told Spighorr who paid no attention, which was what everybody in the seats wants and we all go home happy, New York included, once more with Brenda De Baule I'm turning her over to Dunster Clapp if you don't exercise your option, any skirt on this lot is yours if I get my script Friday.”

“You know, Mossy, you give responsible infidelity a bad name. You're a setback for all us occasionals.”

“I got to have these other jobs, my wife doesn't understand my needs.” When he said “my wife” instead of “Esther Leah,” Mossy was always a little ashamed.

“I'll warrant,” said Yeatsman affecting Edwardian propriety, “that precisely what Esther Leah does understand are your needs. Only too well.”

“Friday then on the script so I can tell my director what I want on Saturday and he can shoot it Monday.”

“Just a goddam minute, will you, or as my bard put it, ‘The stallion Eternity Mounted the mare of Time, 'Gat the foal of the world.'”

“So he must have, Yeatsman, and that mare says we have a script Friday.”

“Don't expect too much here, Mossy. Death and sex and money are all any sane audience has a right to.”

“Even in Mexico, no horses for the chase. I don't want no Western.”

Mossy ordered Chinese tea as a restorative and cancelled his afternoon fellatio as well as his shoeshine. No calls, he told Elena. He stayed by himself and, with rare quiet descending on him, gave consideration to what he needed to do. Idly, he opened the note he had been holding since Elena handed it to him. “Tell this to Orville,” Pammy had scribbled, “maybe he'll bend a little. Imagination is not real, Mr. Wright, yet surely its fruits are. The romance of flying was possibly all you needed, but the audience needs the other kind too. Let us celebrate you with both kinds.” Underneath that she wrote:

The brothers Wright

Thought about flight,

Thought about it day and night;

Dreamin', buildin', cogitatin'

In the garage they had in Dayton.

They had nothing but an image;

This wasn't the game, just a scrimmage—

Until they saw the contraption working

The brothers stayed at it, never shirking.

Neighbors came to gape and gawk:

Next thing you knew was Kitty Hawk.

Mossy stared at the note for a moment. Hmp, maybe after all, he said to himself.

He returned to his own plight. All his work was merely a way of going down into the town and seeking forgiveness—forgiveness for sin original only in that it belonged to him alone and he both valued and apprehended its persistence. On Sunday mornings as a boy he would head out to the open spaces of the Grand Concourse holding his mother's hand. They would survey the wider world. On their way to Mossy's grandmother, which was the only reason his mother would have him wearing a yarmulke, they looked at all creation. “Things you don't know about yet,” she often said to him, “those things you can see here, a bigger map for you, Mossy darling, that has Italians, Irish, Armenians, Germans, Poles, the Coloreds in it, Chinese too, with problems like we got and some of their own. A world you'll live in one day when you finish with your old
bubbe
, sweet as she is, and your
schnorrer
of a papa, unbearable as he can be. Me, too, Mossala, though I hope wherever you land you'll send for your tender loving Ma, eh?”

Mossy regarded her in a quizzical manner that suggested he would not be sending for anybody, especially not anybody who leaned on her perception of herself as helpless. “But you may, Amos,” she added, reading his determined little eight-year-old squint. “You don't know yet what you'll do when you get out there, but whatever it is, you're going.” She was not giving her son a philosophy, only a direction, and the direction was: out-of-the-Bronx. Horace Greeley couldn't have put it better.