Flicker (26 page)

If Zip noticed any of this—and how could he miss it?—he didn't let on. I had the impression he was used to his wife's aggressive flirtatiousness, but that gave me no hint how far he'd be willing to let things go. Probably I could have deflected the overeager Franny indefinitely one way or another if it weren't for the fact that Zip's naps were lasting longer and longer. That sometimes gave Franny as much as a couple of hours with me alone on the days or evenings I came to watch films. She used the time trying, not at all subtly, to move me on to the couch or into one of the empty bedrooms, and then pouting like a real-life Betty Boop when I proved reluctant. My only way of stalling her was to make conversation. But I soon discovered there wasn't much Franny could make conversation about. Could she tell me anything about Max Castle? No, that was before she met Zip, which was just after the war started. All she knew was that Zip just practically worshiped the man, because who else would have given someone like Zip such a big break? What did she think of Castle's movies? Oh, they were so morbid, they made her feel just so depressed, why did anyone want to watch depressing things like that?

“I like love stories,” she was quick to tell me. “Why don't we get some love stories to watch? Wouldn't that be nice? Did you ever see
Autumn Leaves,
where Joan Crawford (she was over fifty when she made that picture, no matter what they say) has this young guy—it was Kirk Douglas, I think, or maybe Cliff Robertson … no, it was Rock Hudson—anyway, he's half her age, and he goes all ga-ga over her.”

Her habit was to prattle away in a squeaky little-girl voice, wrinkling up her nose and making her dimples show. She seemed to think that made her irresistibly charming.

Finally, as a last resort, we got around to talking about the posters on the wall.
“The Perils of Nylana
,” I remarked, “I saw that. Every episode, some twice.”

Franny's eyes popped. “You
did?
But you must of been just a baby.”

“It was still running after the war.”

“I didn't know you cared about things like serials. I thought you were too brainy for that.”

“I was only a kid. Nylana was my first big heartthrob.”

“She
was?”

“I was really crazy about her.”

“You mean like with sexual fantasies and all?”

“It was all very childish of course. But it leaves a mark. I didn't realize Zip ever worked on serials.”

“Silly! Of course he didn't. When
Nylana
was made, Zip was in the big time.”

“Oh. So why does he have these posters … ”

“Well, I live here too. These are
my
posters. That's
me.”

“Who is?”

“Nylana the Jungle Girl. That's me. I mean that
was
me.”

I stared at her in amazement. “Kay Allison is
you?”

“Can't you tell? Oh come on, I haven't changed
that
much.”

My God, I said to myself. “My God,” I said out loud to her. “You're
really
Nylana?” No matter how I reshaped her pudgy, makeup-caked face in my mind, I couldn't find the features of my first love there. Kay Allison had been a lithe brunette beauty, wide-eyed and snub-nosed. Franny Lipsky was nothing like that. She might have been no older than her late forties, but her bulk and her general slovenliness made her seem much older.

Stupidly, I said, “But your name is Franny… .”

“My
real
name is Franny. Frances Louise Dukas. In the movies I was Kay Allison. Did you see
Nylana and The Cobra Cult
too?”

“Sure I did. And
Nylana and the Valley of Doom.”

I should have realized that my answers might be encouraging her. They were, but in my astonishment I failed to notice and blundered on. “That was the one I liked best, where she—you—wore that leopard skin… .”

Giggling with delight, she scooted her chair around the table and jammed her knees into mine. “You saw me in my moment of stardom,” she squealed. “Did you ever write to me for an autographed picture?”

“Yes, I did.” I didn't tell her that I still had that picture carefully hidden away in my parents' basement with my collection of comic books and cereal-box prizes. By now that picture, which I hadn't laid eyes upon for years, was doubtless turning brown and fading. Perhaps the all-devouring Modesto mold had gotten to it. But the woman whose likeness it had once been was before me now, summoning back to life all that the picture had once represented.

“I'll tell you a secret,” Franny whispered, leaning close. “I didn't sign those pictures myself. The studio did. Even way after my contract ended. But I got to see the letters. Oh, there were lots of boys who
wrote to me. You should see some of the mash notes I got. Woo! Did they send you the one of me in the leopard skin? I hope they sent you that one.”

“Yes, they did.”

“Say, wasn't I something to see? That leopard skin, the way it fit—so tight, I could hardly move.” She let out a flutter of giggles. “I musta fell outa that thing a dozen times. We had guys from all over the studio just standing around the set, waiting for me to fall out. Because you know, I did all my own stunts. God! I musta been out of my mind. That's really why I got the part, I think. They didn't have to hire a stunt girl. Whatever they told me to do, I just did it. Like once when I was being chased by that ape (that was Beany Wybrowsky, the football player, in the suit, you know), I had to swing by this rope over the crocodiles. And halfway across, guess what?” Another run of giggles. “Boom, boom. Out they came. Both barrels. I got so shook up, I missed my landing. So there I was like Gypsy Rose Lee hanging in midair. They didn't have enough money to reshoot, so they just made a quick cut. But, if you watch real close just at the end of that chapter, you can see me starting to show. Just a little flash there. Boy, I bet I gave some little boys out there a big thrill.”

Oh God, I remembered! I remembered! I had stayed through three shows that day to see if my eyes had betrayed me.

“You know,” Franny went on, “somebody did a real mean thing. They cut a frame outa that episode with me hanging out, and sold it around town as a naughty picture. Bet you'd like to see that, wouldn't ja? Huh? Well, I got a copy of that upstairs. What'y say? You wanna come up and see?”

I'd spent the years of my boyhood hoping there was a picture like that somewhere in the world. But of course I wouldn't admit that to her, even though she was now mussing my hair and maneuvering as if to sit down in my lap. “Whatever became of you?” I asked. “I mean … in Hollywood?”

She gave a sad little wincing smile and shrugged. It was the most genuine look she'd given me so far. “That was it. My whole career. I made all those serials in about one year. God, I can't even remember one from the other anymore. Then, they just stopped making serials. But after that, wherever I went for a job, I was always the Jungle Girl. And nobody wanted Jungle Girls anymore. Do you know, when I was first discovered—that's what they called it, you know, when
some sleaze-ball took you home from one of those parties and rolled you in the hay: being
discovered
—this bald old geezer who said he was a producer said, 'You're gonna be a second Betty Grable.' You know.” She spun around, hiked her skirt to mid-thigh, pulled it tight across the ample contours of her bottom, and smiled winsomely over her shoulder. The classic pinup-girl image. “I still got the gams, haven't I? Huh? Well, not bad for an old gal anyway. Every time I got discovered, I was gonna be a second somebody. Rita Hayworth. Linda Darnell. Maria Montez. Imagine—the second Maria Montez. What was that to be? That's when I knew I was sinking fast. Good ol' Zippy. He was a great one for taking people in.”

“You met him when you were making the serials?”

“No, before that. When I was just a starlet. Starlet. You know what that means. It means showing up at a lot of parties and … you know. We met at some studio shindig. There was this real creep of a guy trying to proposition me into doing some skin flicks. Zippy could see how green I was. He warned me off and promised to get me a bit part in the movie he was shooting. That's how I got started. Once I had a scene with Barbara Stanwyck.
Lady of Burlesque.
You can see me over her shoulder. Zip got me the test for Nylana too. He was just this runty little guy, but he had a heart of gold. Lucky for me he concerned himself, because after Nylana, I was really getting desperate. You see, I always had this weight problem, boy did I! I just wasn't gonna be a starlet too much longer. And anyway, Zippy was getting pretty sick and needed somebody to look after him. So … but listen, this is the same bust you saw in that leopard skin. Forty inches. I haven't put on one fraction more. It's just … all the rest of me sort of caught up with my boobies.”

She was standing over me, waggling the bosom that had haunted my boyhood. And in spite of myself, I was responding. Not to the bizarre woman who was disporting herself in front of me. I was being seduced by my own childhood fantasies.

During the days I spent in the Lipsky household, I learned a great deal about the magic of Max Castle's films. But, in her own way, Franny also taught me something about the delusionary power of the movies. For I did finally follow her upstairs to examine her photo of Nylana Unbound. And even if I'd protested (which I didn't), Franny would have insisted upon me making a critical comparison with the picture's unclad original. Yes, I had to agree, forty naked inches were forty naked inches and every bit as arousing. Because, though Franny
was overweight and overaged and overbearing, some intangible part of her, more a property of my vestigial pubescent imagination than of the woman before me, was still
my
Nylana. Wrestling awkwardly with her across the bed in one of the abandoned upstairs rooms, I realized I was tunneling through the dark landscape of my own psyche, reconnecting with subterranean fountains of juvenile lust that I thought had long since run dry. But no, they were there, as effervescent as ever, the obsessive and utterly unreal images of desire that the movies implant in the adolescent mind. The beauty that never fades, the kiss that never ends, the night of passion that swells to crescendo on a Max Steiner theme and ends the film balanced forever on a pinnacle of undying intensity.

At the age of eleven, every boy becomes a demon driven by insatiable hungers. The picture shows of childhood feed that demon a feast of sexual expectations that can't possibly survive the messy, graceless ordinariness of their fulfillment. In every grown man, that demon lives on, secretly turning sullen and ugly with its disappointment, fighting off the maturity that it knows is nothing more than resignation. We spend our youth hunting for the reality we think lies on the other side of our illusions. What we find at the end of our search is what lies on the other side of the movie screen: a dark and desolate space that only reveals the unreality of what we pursued. So we spend our adulthood trying to recapture the illusions. Few of us do. But I was privileged to relive what others lose forever. Franny made that possible. Would she have been hurt to know that the moments we spent in ungainly and overheated intercourse were a private fantasy trip for me, that I was using her too-too-solid flesh to resurrect the phantom of Nylana? I don't think so. Because I was giving her the chance to be Nylana all over again. Her moment of stardom regained.

I could never tell if Zip suspected what Franny and I had gotten up to—not that it amounted to more than two or three steamy sessions before the fantasy wore thin for me and I became as evasive with her as before. I think Zip was beyond caring. Even in the course of the few months I spent with him, his blood was running slower and colder each time we met. Sometimes, as I sat beside him in the dark, the intervals between his labored wheezing grew so long, I wondered if he'd stopped breathing and would bend to listen closely until his gruff respiration sounded again.

Or if he did know about my interludes with Franny, he might
actually have been grateful. As Franny once confided to me, “Zip and me, we aren't
really
married, I mean the way regular people are. See, he's mostly been so awful sick, poor little guy. I'm more his sort of nurse, you know?”

As I understood it, Zip had spent the last twenty years of his life struggling to squeeze the oxygen through his moribund tissues. Perhaps it would have relieved him to know that Franny hadn't been condemned to a life of total abstinence. Or so I preferred to think.

By the time we'd gone through his collection of Castle films three times, I'd arrived at a disheartening conclusion. Zip simply didn't have much to tell me about the man he admired so greatly. Castle had clearly enveloped Zip with his charismatic charm; but he'd created that charm by holding back a lot and so cloaking himself with an air of mystery. Zip, for example, knew very little about Castle's work at UFA. “Water under the bridge,” Zip reported more than once when I asked about Castle's early career. “Never said a word about it.” Even for the Hollywood years when they were close associates, there were blank spots all through Zip's recollection—especially for several extended periods in the thirties, months at a time that Castle had spent in Europe trying to raise money for his independent productions. Zip had accompanied him on only one of these jaunts. On that trip—Zip remembered it as the summer of 1938—some scattered filming had actually been done in France, in Denmark, in Switzerland. It was while he was sorting through his dim memory of the trip that “the orphans” came up again.

“I guess the orphans were a big problem for Castle.” I dropped the remark as if we'd talked about all this before.

“You can say that again.” Zip fairly spat out the words. “Especially that Von Pull-zig dame. She really screwed up the works for us, the old bloodsucker.”