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The woman said, “No,
Max
Castle.”

Clare turned to Sharkey again, asking in English, “Have you ever heard of a director named Max Castle?”

Sharkey, shrugging, passed the name down the table to his student contingent. “How about it, movie fans? You know of a Max Castle?”

Following Sharkey's inquiry, Clare sent a glance down the table. Her eyes went from Geoff to Irene to … me. A long, blank look. A nothing look. Our first encounter beyond the lobby of The Classic.

How I wished I could be the one to tell her what she wanted to know, to look bright and quick and knowledgeable. But I had no idea who this Castle was. At that point in my life, I had no idea who
D. W. Griffith was. What could I do but smile and stare back? I think I offered a doltish shrug, as if to apologize. But why? If she didn't know who Castle was, why should I?

At my elbow, however, sat someone who did. It was Geoff, as I might have expected. Geoff knew everything about movies right down to the names of the stuntmen who fell off horses in Johnny Mack Brown westerns. If a guy appeared in a minor horror flick wearing an ape suit, Geoff was sure to know who the guy in the suit was and, thanks to his family's connections, had probably been to lunch with him at one of the studios. Geoff may have been the world's first movie trivia master. As I would learn later, Clare despised movie trivia masters. She regarded them as a disease of the art form. But that night her question was right up Geoff's alley: a casual query about cinematic trash. “Sure,” Geoff piped up brightly. He knew who this Max Castle was. He could even rattle off a brief filmography:
“Count Lazarus, Feast of the Undead, Revenge of the Ghoul.”

“Oh yeah,” Sharkey said, now flashing on the name—for he too was an accomplished trivialist. “The vampire guy.
House of Blood,
stuff like that, right?”

“Also
Shadows over Sing Sing,”
Geoff hastened to add. “That's his best.”

Having acquired the information she sought, Clare pulled a supercilious face. “Oh.
That
Castle,” she said, lending her tone an arrogantly dismissive chill. But she dropped the remark as if she might be covering up, still not entirely certain of her ground. Turning back to her friend, she asked a question that brought a long answer in French.

“What's she saying?” Geoff asked Irene.

Irene cocked an ear and translated for the two of us. “She says people are talking about him—this Castle. In Paris. Very important, she says.”

Very important—but not, I could see, to Clare, who was exhaling a dense screen of cigarette smoke to hide the baleful expression she had assumed. She was clearly doubting every word she heard. I liked the way she looked: haughty, blasé, sullen. I wanted to look like that too. So I tried it, and it felt right. Dumb as I was about movies at that stage of my life, I had no trouble understanding her response. Vampires. Even I knew that wasn't
art,
wasn't the least bit like the things we came to The Classic to see: movies about tortured relationships, despair, and the meaninglessness of life—like
La Strada,
The Bicycle Thief,
or
The Seventh Seal.
Really good movies, as I understood it, made you want to go out and drown yourself. Vampire movies didn't do that. They were just junk. True, I liked movies about vampires. Werewolves too. But I knew better than to say so. That much I had learned: when you enjoyed junk, keep your mouth shut about it.

If only by the most tenuous thread of pretense and make-believe, I fancied that I was allied with Clare in her disdain for someone who made movies called
Feast of the Undead, House of Blood.
Imitating her in that small, secret exercise of critical discrimination, I felt intoxicatingly connected with some higher realm of the mind where she stood guard.

That night I fell in love with Clare. I couldn't have said so at the time, for, at nineteen, I didn't know love could attach to an intellectual ideal, let alone an intellectual ideal that came dressed like a woman. But from that evening on, whenever I attended The Classic, I looked forward in high anticipation to taking my ticket from Clare's hand. I even dared from time to time to speak to her—no more than small talk, a fumbling inquiry about the evening's program. “Who directed?” “Is this the uncut version?” “When was it made?” Dumb questions, but the best I could come up with.

Her answer was always the same impatient gesture. She would hand me the notes that went with each program. Price: one cent.

“One cent?” I remarked the first time I bought a copy.

“I don't write for nothing,” she answered belligerently.

I knew that friends of mine who were regulars at The Classic treasured these notes and carefully filed them away for later use, often cribbing from them in their film courses. I, on the other hand, had always found them so analytically dense that I rarely troubled to read them. There were never less than several single-spaced paragraphs of mercilessly congested prose on each film, imperfectly typed, mimeographed on both sides, the ink bleeding through from back to front. I'd never found anything in them worth the eyestrain. But now I discovered that these unsigned notes were Clare's work—her special contribution to The Classic and, in the opinion of its more discriminating patrons, the theater's most distinctive feature.

I found out more about The Classic. The theater, it turned out, was rather less than half Sharkey's property and achievement. For all his windy self-importance, he seemed to be in charge of the projectors and the espresso machine and not much else. The truth was,
Sharkey was burning too much hash to be entrusted with more than minimal technical responsibilities, and even these were getting beyond him. The capital in the business was mainly Clare's, and the programs were wholly her choice. She tracked down the films, placed the orders, bargained with the distributors. Finally, when each program was scheduled, she provided the research and criticism that went into the notes. On every film she produced a savagely opinionated discussion, every point supported with scholarly precision. Where old films were concerned, she entered into minute comparisons of the various prints available. As I was soon to learn, in Clare's world, there was no bliss to compare with the discovery of a lost Von Stroheim scene or a Pabst without torn sprockets.

Accordingly, as my secret infatuation with Clare grew more intense, I too began to pore over these notes like The Classic's more addicted patrons. Much of what I found there—the abstruse issues under fierce debate, the historical allusions, the subtle critical nuances—escaped my understanding. Nevertheless, I saved the notes, read and reread them, struggling to appropriate their sophistication, or at least their vocabulary, if for no other reason than to place myself on speaking terms with their intimidating author. For years afterward, these inkstained pages of pink and blue and green remained in a box in my closet, a souvenir as much of my first great romance as of my intellectual initiation into film culture. The box collected dust; the mimeographed sheets inside grew brittle with age; but at last these penny handouts, so often pirated by other film houses but of which I owned the complete original series, became the valued collector's item they deserved to be. At which point I contributed them with no little pride to the University of California film archives. Why should the gift have been so proudly presented and so eagerly received? Because the Clare I speak of, who labored with such love to produce this anonymous treasure trove of scholarship and opinion, was Clarissa Swann, then an unsung talent but destined in less than ten years to become America's premier film critic. It was no less an authority that was to become my private tutor in film.

I suppose, to begin with, I was nothing more to Clare than an amorous interlude during one of her many fallings out with Sharkey. Like most regular patrons of The Classic, I knew that she and Sharkey were more or less lovers who more or less lived together. But their relationship was a stormy one, punctuated as much by financial disaster as by chronic infidelities on both sides. There was no way to
tell if the infidelities were the cause or the result of their business contretemps. In any case, both managed to slot numerous liaisons into their quarrelsome episodes. An eager, good-looking young man who had already begun an amateurish flirtation, I quickly qualified as a possible diversion for Clare. She was hardly one to let the discrepancy in our ages make any difference. The word was that she had taken up with many of the students who frequented The Classic. In my eyes, such gossip only served to envelop her with an enticing mystique of suave, continental promiscuity. By now I was prepared to believe that just possibly, without her glasses on, with her hair a bit fluffed, Clare might, in a dim light and with the benefit of peripheral vision, look enough like the French film beauty Maria Casares to be considered—well, attractive … if you overlooked her rather pudgy build, which the baggy sweater helped you to do.

As for myself, I was then living through the intoxication of Autant-Lara's
Devil in the Flesh.
Fantasies of the boyish Gérard Philipe yielding to the seduction of an older woman dazzled my imagination. I rather fancied I might make do as his blond American counterpart, a tall and slender youth, with the same quick smile and wide-eyed exuberance. I even had it on Irene's authority that in the throes of passion, I took on Gérard's feverish intensity: the trembling brow, the clenching jaw. As for his adolescent gaucherie, which I gathered his older female fans found charming, of this I had a plentiful supply.

One late night, Clare, minus Sharkey, who was rumored to be living at the beach with a recent coed conquest, wandered into Moishe's and took a lonely seat in a booth. A group of us who had been to The Classic that night—this time for a heavyweight Roberto Rossellini double bill—spotted her, but judged by her vacant and morose look that she preferred to be alone. Clare wasn't much of a mixer. I, however, caught her eye and offered my most boyish smile. At once, without altering her semitragic expression, she moved to sit beside me at our table, strategically segregating me from the others. It was the first time she'd acknowledged my existence as something other than a customer at The Classic.

“You're Alan?” she asked, looking up darkly from under drooping lids.

Why Alan, I wondered. “No, Jonathan. Jonathan Gates.”

“Oh yes,” she said as if remembering, though we'd never been introduced. Then she said nothing but sat staring fixedly into her coffee cup. Gropingly, I made conversation about the Rossellini movies,
staying cautiously close to her program notes. I had gone on for several stumbling minutes before I realized that there were tears on her cheeks. She was crying, silently but tremulously. I shut up and reverted to bashful, attempting my best, ultrasensitive imitation of Gérard. After a long, awkward interval, she looked up.

“Come home with me,” she said.

Close-up of young hero's face. Expression of bewildered delight and eager anticipation. Dissolve and cut.

I never found out why Clare was crying that night. I soon learned it was something she frequently did without any identifiable cause. It was part of her style, a symptom of some deep underground stream of angst that ran through her life, occasionally welling up to the surface. In any case, my curiosity about her secret sorrow was forgotten soon after we returned to her apartment. What followed wasn't my first sexual adventure, but it might as well have been. The quantity, intensity, above all the stunning variety of Clare's lovemaking reduced me to virginal status. I was blithely swept along in the torrent, accepting all that was thrust upon me, yielding all that was demanded. It was a night I never expected to be repeated.

Toward morning, in a condition torn between physical exhaustion and undiminished emotional frenzy, I found myself oddly positioned across Clare's bed, my face sunk between her corpulent thighs, performing as required, when I felt a tug at my hair. Lifting me from my diligent efforts, Clare looked at me quizzically down the length of her naked torso.
“Mother?
Is that what you're thinking of?”

Her juices still warm upon my cheeks, the look I returned was surely more quizzical than her own. For mother was—I hope—the farthest thought from my mind at that moment.

“I mean,” Clare explained, “are you sure you've ever seen a Pudovkin?”

Even this didn't help. Was “pudovkin” perhaps a sexual code word? I was about to answer, yes, I'd seen a pudovkin before, when I realized she was resuming a line of conversation that had broken off some time before. In one of our brief respites, I'd apologetically mentioned my dislike for silent films—for, of course, between bouts of love-making, we talked film. Or rather, Clare talked, I listened. “Surely, that doesn't include the Russians,” she had protested. “Dovzhenko, Eisenstein, Pudovkin … ”

“Pudovkin?” Distractedly, I simply picked up on the last name in the series. “Well, yes, he's all right, I guess. But his movies are so
slow, so heavy… .” Which was what I said about all silent movies that weren't comedies.

Now, some two hours later, Clare was returning to the subject, holding my head unsteadily balanced on her pubic bone.
“Mother,”
she informed me, “is the only Pudovkin you can still rent in this country. And we haven't shown that at The Classic in over four years. The Museum of Modern Art used to have a bad print of
Storm over Asia,
but, God, that hasn't been available since 1948. So where have you seen any Pudovkins?”

“Well,” I said, struggling to dredge up any Russian movies I could remember, “there was that picture about the czar last month—
Ivan the Terrible.”

Her belly shook with laughter beneath my chin. “Silly! That was
Eisenstein!”
And she abruptly returned my head to its salacious assignment. “Lover, you've got lots to learn.”