Everything Happened to Susan (5 page)

That night she receives a phone call from a man with a strange accent who says that he is the director of the film in which she will appear. He has obtained her number from Phil since he wants to talk to all of the cast before they assemble. “What I am particularly interested to know,” he says, “is your knowledge of American history; we are going to be concentrating in the modern era and also upon some of the major political events and I would like the actors to come to this with a certain familiarity. I would like to suggest that you do some reading immediately; you will want to read Theodore White’s books on the making of presidents and you should read Samuel Eliot Morison’s history of the American people. All of these are out in paperback. Also I would like you to do some reading in the formal American comedy and drama just for background of course; any standard text will do. Do you have any particular familiarity with this era?” Susan says that she has a reading knowledge of some American history. She is, after all, a college graduate, and, for some reason, the man on the phone begins to stutter with rage, becomes even less coherent. “They think, these goddamned people, that just because this is a dirty film we will sacrifice all style and scholarship but this is never to be! We will reconstruct art in the face of the void. Enough of exploitation which even within a rigid format can become a framework of artifice and beauty,” he says. He has been at work on the script all day and on the phone all night. “This script is absolutely miserable; we will have to improvise,” he says. “It seems to have been written by an unintelligent monkey with certain vague perversities in the way of human behavior but we will prove to this monkey that his conceits cannot possibly keep us harnessed,” the director says and then begins to cough. He says that he is sorry but he cannot seem to get over the cigarette habit which appeals to all the latent self-destructiveness in his European temperament and reminds her that he would like to see her reading the recommended books at the earliest possible opportunity. Then he adds that he will of course see her tomorrow morning and hangs up. Susan replaces the phone carefully and goes back to the living room where Timothy, leaning over the typewriter, looks at her incuriously and asks if she is carrying on some kind of relationship behind his back. She starts to explain and then realizes that he is not listening. She only goes to him and rubs his shoulders absently for a time, scanning the row of paperbacks on shelves over his head to see if there is anything useful there. She sees a couple of titles by Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal but suspects that this is nothing like what the director had in mind.

Later that night, after they have violent and perverse sex, Susan falls from Timothy and onto her own side of the bed, falls into sleep that way and has a dream. In the dream the film has opened in first-run theaters throughout the world and is an enormous critical success. Her own performance is praised as being of great delicacy and range, showing not only artistic control but that kind of rare sensitivity and fragility which are almost never combined in newer actresses. She seems to be attending some kind of show business party; virtually every celebrity of whom she has heard is there and seem to be interested in talking to her but she, in a formal, strapless evening gown, is unable to socialize because she is pinned off in a corner by Phil who seems to be talking intensely to her. She cannot understand a word he is saying; he is talking in a strange language, Portuguese perhaps, from the context of which every now and then a familiar word or phrase emerges disconnected, floating like a bird above a swamp. “No percentage,” Phil is saying to her before going off into another flood of Portuguese or “you understand integrity is the key,” and she moves to respond, trying to forestall him with the touch of a hand or even a breast but he will not be stopped. Over his shoulder she can see the faces of people anxious to meet with her and offer her promising opportunities for her career: a famous Hollywood producer is there, three female actresses who she has always admired, the senior senator from the state of New York, and her father as well, with a conciliatory and beckoning expression on his face, motioning for her to come toward him and grant forgiveness. She attempts to move toward them, pick up the strands of her career but she cannot pass Phil; his short, blunt body is in the way and, as she moves to pass him forcibly, she confronts him fully through the eyes, understands, in one glance, that he is in some kind of unspeakable pain and that as much as she wants to she simply cannot hurt him in this way. Perhaps it is not Portuguese which he is speaking at all but a kind of neologistic language which is the product of severe brain damage. Perhaps he is trying to communicate with her in the only way he knows how and she is the only person who can understand him. “Good God grant,” Phil says and whisks his fingers down the underside of her bare arm, across her hand and then caresses her under the chin, “God grant good,” he says and now moves toward her purposefully, his language still somehow incomprehensible but more demanding: he wants something — she can tell this now — there is some unspeakable need at the heart of his purpose and, as her father, the senior senator from New York, the three female actresses, and the Hollywood producer look on, Phil tears his clothes open with a cry and plunges himself into her (she is suddenly and inexplicably naked), begins to fuck her with wild churning motions accompanied by expostulations of Portuguese. The whole thing is very embarrassing to her. He is insistent; there is very little that she can do to put him off; she can feel his turgid prick within her already beginning to spring veins of ascension, and, as his sperm breaks free, he begins to speak once more in his strange language. She understands it perfectly this time. Crying out of his despair and rage and need, Phil has found the perfect language of necessity which she had misinterpreted all the time, and, as the senior senator checks his watch, shakes his head, whispers something to the actresses and the producer and leads them out of the hall, the force of his come moves like a hand into her and she wakes from the dream screaming, completely disoriented, completely frightening Timothy who had gone to bed in the hope that he would be able to get up at four that morning to work fresh on a desperately important epiphany in his novel.

The fraternity room in which Susan had been deflowered had been plastered with pictures of naked women from the more popular men’s magazines; not only the walls but the ceiling were covered with photographs of breasts and thighs and the occupant of the room, whoever it was (it was not the boy who was working on her) had, out of some demented cunning, removed the faces from the pictures and cut up the breasts and thighs in such a way that in perfect dismemberment they glinted from all sides of the room. Susan had found herself being laid directly under enlarged pictures of two enormous breasts; the breasts were not similar and had obviously been taken from two separate women. She had been able to inspect them with unusual intensity, even abstraction, while far inside of her, in some area which seemed sealed off, massive burrowings were going on, burrowings surrounded by seizure; the boy reared over her, snorted and disappeared again as if on a mission of excavation from which he would appear sporadically to make quick reports; Susan ran absent fingers over the back of his head, feeling the harshness of his hair and tried to keep her mind on other things, things like the breasts which swum above her angle of vision, appearing under the stress of the moment to take on not only mythic dimensions but a kind of movement. This abstraction was difficult, the boy being so insistent, and so Susan closed her eyes against the breasts, closed her eyes against the aspect of all the walls and worked into herself instead; far beneath her the deep sound of his orgasm began (she knew exactly what it was; she had always known what it would feel like when finally they came) and she, beginning to split apart in his fury, had a sudden sensation. She was no longer herself but had been dismembered, cut to pieces so to speak, and these pieces — her breasts, her thighs, angles of her mouth, her eyes, her cunt — were being hung to dry along the various ropes of his memory: many years later those parts would have frozen into artifact, totally separate from the girl she had been they would still dangle from the ropes of recollection within him and now and then he would probe, inspect, stroll through those alleyways or courtyards and look at the parts of her that would be displayed within. It was something to think about. It was really something to think about; that that was what she was coming to. She wondered if the girls who had their pictures taken for the centerfold had any similar apprehension; if, at the very instant that the camera caught their picture, they could feel themselves being split apart into the many small pieces which they would become. She had learned in an anthropology course recently that savages feared the camera because they thought it could entrap the spirit: similarly, she found that she feared what the boy was doing to her because, through this wedge driven above her thighs, pieces of her were being taken away forever. But she got over all of that just as soon as she learned that it was characteristic for virgins to have a lousy time the first time out. At least this was what the boy told her shortly afterward and she found out that every bit of it was true. Two or three years later, in fact, and just for the hell of it she allowed one of her dates to send a nude picture of her to one of the men’s magazines saying in a letter that she would like to pose but nothing came of that. Susan was then in the process of finding out that sex could be used for purposes other than merely its own sake so the way she had first had intercourse really wasn’t that significant after all…. despite the meanings she had put onto it when she was actually involved. On the other hand, she was only twenty-three and like everything else so far, she feared the episode might only come back to haunt her someday.

Later in the night it seems that Timothy has some kind of nightmare because he begins to talk loudly in his sleep and Susan, who has given up any hope of rest and is sitting quietly drinking coffee, can hear every word distinctly. “The lousy dirty stinking sons of bitches,” Timothy says with perfect clarity and a certain conviction which seems less declamatory than merely pedagogical, “they’re out to get me, every single one. I tell you; I can’t stand this anymore.” He sits up in the bed, closed eyelids masking an intent stare toward the ceiling and, using a finger, he points in the direction of a window. “I’ll tell you who you are,” he says and Susan leans forward; she is always interested in learning something, even at four in the morning she will take knowledge where she can get it. “I’m going to tell you right here who you are, I’m going to nail you to the wall,” Timothy says in a voice now faintly musical; Susan attends closely, she does not want to miss any of this. Timothy motions with a forefinger; it pushes the air trembling; it turns and cuts through areas of light. “You, Mrs. Morales,” Timothy says, “you, Stella Smith, you Ramon Perez. You George Washington Williams III and you Mrs. Mendoza. All of you, all of you,” he says and hurls himself down on the bed, perhaps to sleep again. There is no further information that night and eventually Susan returns to sleep, sinking this time into an effortless doze where she receives, in 1981, the Academy Award for best supporting actress. The citation notes her struggles against early adversity but does not give details, which is fine with her. A man sitting next to her might be her father but she does not dare to turn to take a full look; there is always a chance that he might merely be some leading member of the academy.

In the morning, Susan reports once again to the loft. It is very much the way it was the first and only time she has been there except that areas have now been cleared and she is confronted by a huge, unbroken aspect which sweeps the full length and width of the building uncluttered by furniture or equipment. On the perimeter along all four sides of the loft are batteries of cameras, strobe lights, sound equipment and technicians, dwarfish men who seem to swing through the jumble of machinery with the greatest of ease and reach positions of adjustment from which they perch to look at the actors with expressions of gloom. There are twelve of them altogether, Susan counts, including the director who is seated uncomfortably in a heavy chair in the center of a chalk-marked circle; the actors are clustered around them, and, feeling ill at ease for being one of the last ones to arrive, Susan goes to the rear of the clump and sits down rather gracelessly, folding her skirt around her knees. She has decided to come to this first session in a skirt and sweater, elaborately made up and carefully coiffured although she is not sure exactly why she is doing this; it can only be a waste of time. The actors, some of whom she recognizes from the other day, look at her without interest and return their gaze to the director who seems to be in the middle of an impassioned speech. She can barely make out a word that he is saying although he pauses now and then to make gestures
expressivo
in the air and fasten his gaze intently upon individual actors. The boy with whom she had scenes yesterday is seated next to her and he gives her a wink, moves closer, runs a hand up her arm in a protective fashion which Susan decides she does not like. “Hello,” he says. “I was hoping you’d be here.”

“No,” Susan says, “nothing like that at all. Really, I won’t discuss that.” This does not make too much sense to her but it connects to something in his eyes. He lowers them, shrugs, drops his arm, and continues to stare at the director who is now in a high-pitched full mumble. “Artistic integrity,” the director is saying. “We must apply ourselves with unusual dedication. This is no ordinary enterprise. Crucial matters are being undergone here if you can understand that.”

“When do we start?” a girl in the near row asks. Her voice wavers on the word
start;
the others begin to mumble and she shrinks below Susan’s eye-level. “Well, I only wanted to
know.
”

“Familiarization lecture,” the director says. “Matters of primacy, acculturation. We are taking a group of strangers, hardly amateurs, and trying to weld them together into a cohesive group which can produce at least a simulacre of art. I should have known it was hopeless, however. Was trying a little backgrounding.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl says. “I just thought — ”

“No thought. Actors must be schooled against all thought. Was speaking of the sociopathic elements of the script, those which will contraindicate to a certain extent rationalized interpretation; but there is no patience here for a rigorous format. Corrupt country, absolutely corrupt,” the director who has now become quite comprehensible says; his accent having slid away from him and left him in a ponderous drawl; he stands unsteadily and, raising his fist, seems at the point of making some serious declaration, which will, perhaps, accomplish the task of familiarization satisfactorily, but he is interrupted by one of the technicians, a red-headed dwarf with a long cane and piercing eyes who scuttles over to him, whispers something meaningful in his ear and then departs, giving the actors a rather horrid wave behind his back, an absent twitch or two of the fingers charged with significances which Susan can hardly bear. All of her senses seem keyed up this morning; maybe it is the active night’s sleep she has had; maybe it is knowing that at last she is going to begin to act seriously. “I understand,” the director says, “that the equipment is now prepared and that, therefore, we can go to work. Because of extrinsic factors we must shape our efforts and our, schedule to the limits of the technicians; rates are quite high and overtime cannot be tolerated. Unfortunately, in our consumer culture, there is no time for rigorous application or scholarship but this is, possibly, for the very best, inasmuch as I think that all of you are idiots. You will, please, disrobe at once.

“I do not think you heard me,” he says as the actors remain frozen in their postures, Susan particularly beginning to feel a certain chill at the edges. “It is that kind of film; it is necessary that your clothing be removed throughout. All of you are experienced. All of you have been informed. You will move in and out of various scenes. Some of you will be acting in three or four consecutively, then will be sitting out as many, but the flux of the film is remarkable and essentially you are a company, a disciplined company rather than a passel of actors. You must be on call all the time. It is far faster and easier for all of you to disrobe and remain that way. The loft is not chilly. Of course, if any of you object,” the director says and pauses — he really has no speech trouble at all now — his voice is distinct, even the drawl has left his rhetoric, now he sounds like Phil (for whom Susan has been looking but does not appear to be present) making a serious point. “I will not have this,” the director says, “I will not have any question about this issue,” and now the actors do begin to undress; by twos and threes they get to their feet and stand uncomfortably, the men already yanking at their belts, the girls fumbling for their brassieres or those without brassieres already pulling off the sleeves of their sweaters. Susan feels her breasts come free, feels the gaze of the actor and director upon her, hopes that she is not, at this particular stage of her life, becoming some kind of a moralist because this is certainly not the time or the circumstances for anything of that sort.