B008J4PNHE EBOK (22 page)

Booth’s friend excused himself; he was pretty sure there was something somewhere that needed hammering. “Best of luck,” Tom told Allie. “He’s like this full-time, you know.”

Contingencies never appeared to cross Booth’s mind. Whatever needed to work, he assumed would work, and if it didn’t, he found
another way to make it work. “Coverage!” was his mantra. As far as Allie could make out, coverage meant that he filmed three different angles for every scene if there were two actors, four if there were three actors, and if there were more than that, he shot the crowd and did close-ups for the important ones.

Embarrassment was an emotion Booth seemed constitutionally incapable of suffering. Impatience and anger were strangers to the production. He went around in costume, right eye tucked behind a pince-nez, boater on his head, wearing a fake nose webbed with gin blossoms, while advising the women that they were stunning and yanking down the pants of men who weren’t paying attention. Booth made what must have been complex and taxing—organizing large numbers of people, keeping track of what was going on, being kind on short rest—seem natural and carefree.

 ■ ■ ■ 

In one scene, Allie, as Daughter, was supposed to cry but couldn’t. Her face felt rigid, like a too-tight mask. She was desperate not to disappoint him.

They left the setup in front of the depot to talk in the tall winter wheat that grew along the south embankment overlooking the yard. Below, Tom was tinkering with his track in preparation for sliding the monster of an Arriflex camera alongside Dr. Law’s slow-rolling wagon.

“Maybe I should try and think of something sad?” A fluttering commenced in Allie’s chest, every sort of loss on butterfly wings: her grandfather whom she had adored so much, and the family dog, run over by—

“No!” The huge purplish blob of a fake nose that Booth was wearing to play Dr. Law made him look like an entirely different person, so it was like hearing his voice come from the mouth of a stranger. “We are putting on a show, my love, not plumbing your psychological depths! We are not sadists! Just think about how sad Daughter must feel to be leaving her friends behind, and do your best. That is all I could possibly ask of you.”

“Really?” She peered past the awful nose to his hazel eyes.

“Really,” promised Booth.

Here was the beginning of their problems, Allie later thought, because it established between them an equilibrium based on desire rather than
on need. Booth asked from her only what she felt comfortable giving; there was more there if he demanded it. The gesture of benevolence was planted, like a single post in the middle of a field and knotted with a rag, to show roughly where one property ended and another began. What could really happen if you took a step or two beyond the invisible barrier? Allie never knew, except that it was against the rules. You didn’t go over there. To require something of the person you loved was trespassing.

What wasn’t evident to her then is what every adult comes to understand as the selflessness of infatuation wears away to reveal the bald and homely creature that is our absolute self: dreams are collateral for life, and you must be willing to forfeit them, every last one, for the people you love.

In the background was Buffalo, her blue wallpaper, her cheap little upright piano, the corkboard of her friends and poor beautiful Van Cliburn, and every day of childhood. In front of Allie lay marriage and motherhood and a cottage by a graveyard and a series of fateful allowances.

But in that moment Allie said, “Thank God! I love you, you know.” She tore off his nose and kissed him.

Tom’s hammer clanged against a railroad tie, a warped bell toll. The winter wheat caught a spring breeze—it was spring now—and quivered in mute applause around the lovers on the rise.

Roughly two years later, in the early summer of 1971, the Continental Cinema Association (CCA) ran
New Roman Empire
as the second picture in a double bill (following a horror movie called
Cannibals of the Yukon
) on a hundred screens in the Midwest and Texas. The initial proceeds were better than anticipated and the movie gained a bit of unexpected steam, perhaps in part due to a bemused review by a critic for
The New Yorker
. When the critic’s flight to Los Angeles had engine trouble and she was stranded in Des Moines for the night, she visited a local drive-in. “The obviousness of the parable, the woodenness of the acting, the feeble visual design, near-far-near-far—sensationally terrible! . . . I actually laughed out loud when one poor, brainwashed do-gooder
shoved a simpering Republican patriarch into a bonfire . . . All that tempers my enthusiasm for this comedy is the suspicion that some people might miss the joke . . . The Young Americans are brainwashed, for instance, by CIA Juice! . . . This is funny-dumb, not funny-smart, let alone funny-deep, and if we can’t tell the difference (director-writer Dolan can, I believe), maybe Nixon is the president we deserve.”

The movie continued on to brief runs in Los Angeles, New York, a dozen cities in the Rust Belt, and eventually, a handful of stops in Europe. While it played in mostly downmarket theaters—the ones with the floors tacky enough to rip the soles right off your sneakers if you stayed flat-footed for too long—that didn’t change the fact that it was now in the black.

There was a trickle of additional reviews: the
Voice
heartily approved; it was “a clown-stumble insult to the bloated transparent spasmodics that pass for ‘important’ cinema these days.” The third-string critic at the
Times
thought it was abominable. “Dolan is absurd, his lead actress appears to have been lobotomized, and the supporting players are either diseased or strung-out or both . . . The sideshow has a place, one reluctantly concedes, but must it be this sideshow, and must it be this place?” A Catholic priest in Pittsburgh read about the movie in the newspaper, then demanded that his congregation boycott it. A notoriously liberal pastor in Cincinnati recommended it to his parishioners. In
Cahiers du Cinema,
a renowned critic-director mentioned
New Roman Empire
in passing, as part of a letter in defense of popular entertainment:
“Le film est primitif, soit; mais M. Dolan offre en même temps une vision singulièrement américaine. Les gentlemen sont des traitres lâches; les idéalistes sont des enfants bêtes, et le criminel est un gros élégant.”

Among the letters of the legendary Irish theater impresario and wit
Micheál MacLiammóir was the opinion of Orson Welles, who caught a showing of
New Roman Empire
that fall:

“I watched a movie today that I suspect I may have filmed during some extended blackout period while I was inebriated or in a fugue state. It is called
New Roman Empire
. I perform under the alias Booth Dolan and declaim ad nauseum, like a horrible fat Punch doll. Most of the filming appears to have taken place in a junkyard. Delightful. Sent me off like a belt of nitrous oxide.” (From Los Angeles, dated 9/27/71.)

MacLiammóir’s response to the picture fell along similar lines:

“As fate would have it, the picture you mentioned in your letter showed up at the local. It was the most pitiable thing I’ve ever witnessed. You were right: a delight.” (From Dublin, dated 12/28/71.)

 ■ ■ ■ 

The wagon shakes along a dusty road. Daughter leans her head against Dr. Law’s shoulder. There are chapped patches on her cheeks and gruesome moons under her eyes. Her hair is the color of old newspaper; she is ancient. Dr. Law appears unchanged. He whistles a familiar tune.

“Where are we going?” Daughter asks.

“The next place,” he says.

“What’s happening to me?” she asks.

“You’re growing up,” he says.

“Why are you doing this to me, Horsefeathers?” asks Daughter.

“You know, that’s only a nickname.” Horsefeathers chuckles. “Seeing as how we’re such good friends now, you might as well know, my real name is—”

The image of the smiling con man freezes and flips away, end over end, like a playing card on a spring. The first credit appears:
Directed by Booth Dolan
.

QUINLAN

Have you forgotten your old friend—hmmm?

TANYA

I told you we were closed.

QUINLAN

I’m Hank Quinlan.

TANYA

I didn’t recognize you.

(beat)

You should lay off those candy bars.

QUINLAN

Ah—it’s either the candy or the hooch. I must say I wish it was your chili I was getting fat on. Anyway, you’re sure looking good.

TANYA

You’re a mess, honey.

—Orson Welles,
Touch of Evil
(dialogue between Welles and Marlene Dietrich)

The wedding was officiated by, of all things, a poet. It was a marriage between two university professors, held at a DUMBO restaurant and event space called the Stables, a designation that referred to the building’s original incarnation as a residence for the horses of Brooklyn. From the mullioned windows on the second floor, the Brooklyn Bridge could be seen arching toward Manhattan in the September dusk. The steel beams were gargantuan and gray, the traffic a jerking ticker tape of headlights.

It was a view Sam Dolan knew well. He had filmed several wedding-ographies at the Stables. The bridge was a perfect punctuation mark for a weddingography, a metaphor that made sense to everyone and never failed to please the clientele. That the metaphor’s obviousness made it worthless in his own eyes—a Pavlovian trick of the heart—didn’t matter. It wasn’t for him.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Sam shot the ceremony from the center of the half-moon balcony that overlooked the hall. By sitting on the balcony floor and slipping the camera between two newels, he could capture a slightly tilted view of the troika at the altar. This placement kept bobbing heads out of the frame while maintaining an angle gentle enough to suggest the notion of loving relatives passed on, observing unseen, hovering mere inches above the heads of the living like phantasmagoric mistletoe.

He did his best to think these things through, to approach the endeavor with care, and to treat weddingography as an art form—a predictable, maudlin, shitty art form, perhaps (okay, definitely)—but an art form still.

As the weddingographer, he recorded the ceremony and the reception, then molded the raw materials into a preordained narrative:
harried preparation, holy union, raucous party, romantic escape along a bridge to the shining city of the future. The last things to disappear from the video would be the stars twinkling in the suspension cables. That was what they wanted, and that was what he gave them. If Sam did it right, performed like a pro, the story should always come out the same, happily ever after.

You had to do something. He did this. He went through the motions; he got the coverage.

What taxed was the ritual of the event itself.

The weddings gave Sam a sense of déjà vu, like a low-grade fever. Toasts would be raised. People would cry. There would be food smothered in brown sauce. “Brick House” would be played. People who shouldn’t dance would dance. A child would mess in its tiny trousers. Nearly everyone would enjoy themselves, and whoever didn’t could be edited out. The faces changed, the religions changed, and once in a while the bride didn’t wear white, but it always came out the same way. Once you saw it enough, a union of perfectly matched hearts started to seem like a recurring nightmare.

“So,” announced the poet. “This is it. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

“Well, what do you expect?” Polly had asked him. “Weddings are happy. They don’t usually have weddings for people who hate each other.”

Polly had been the one who started him in weddingography. Three years before, she had insisted that he film her marriage. At the time Sam was employed at an independent video store in Park Slope, renting Cassavetes films, and sometimes dreaming about murdering the kind of people who rented Cassavetes films. The wedding gig, he had to concede, seemed a thrilling departure by comparison. One job led to another, and so on. He had retired his position at the video store—liberating their copy of
Opening Night
on his way out the door—and taken up weddingography full-time.

In a way, his career was all Polly’s fault, and when he was feeling particularly repressed, he gave himself license to bitch to her about it. Down from Westchester on this gritty, blustery afternoon in late August, a few weeks prior to the wedding at the Stables, they had met off Union Square at the City Bakery for hot chocolate. “I’m just saying that it gets
to be a drag. Anyway, the busy season is almost over. The wedding factory only operates at half capacity during the winter.”

“I’d go to a wedding every weekend if I could,” said Polly.

“You think you would, but you wouldn’t,” said Sam.

“Sammy, please. What’s so awful about people being happy?”

He refused to dignify this question with a response.

“I think the reason is that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be happy,” she went on. “Whatever, though. You can sit there and say that true love sucks, but that won’t stop it. You’ll find out one of these days.” Polly reached over the table to pat one of his unshaven cheeks.

The occasion of her trip was an appointment to see her therapist, and she had brought along her son, Rainer. He was an infant, staring out from the nest of his carrier with wide, shifty brown eyes. The carrier rested on a chair between them, and as they talked, Rainer’s eyes darted back and forth between them, like a tennis judge’s. The baby’s watchful presence felt accusatory; although Polly had married and given birth, she and Sam had never stopped sleeping together.

“I’m curious. What exactly would you like to happen? What would raise a wedding to your aesthetic standards?”

Sam asked if she was teasing. He distrusted her use of the word “aesthetic.”