Flicker (73 page)

Clare claimed to hate it, calling it “our deepest descent to date into the cesspool of adolescent morbidity.” But her critic's conscience obliged her to pay the film a dozen compliments for its wit, skill, daring, and originality before she got around to bum-rapping it. To my surprise, she even praised Simon's distinctly macabre way of handling bullet wounds, each one erupting in slow motion like a small
crimson geyser. She called it “a surrealistic embellishment that actually makes the mayhem less offensively graphic.”

As for Simon's panoramic treatment of American violence—the film is really nothing more than a fast-paced run of bloody holdups and shoot-outs staged by a gang of teenage ghouls on mom-and-pop grocery stores not for money but for cannibal fare—Clare rather blithely described that as something “Samuel Beckett and the Marquis de Sade might have scripted for Mack Sennett.” Of course, for Clare such artistic miscegenation between styles and genres was wholly unacceptable. But she was clearly pitching her rejection at a flatteringly high level.

Rumor has it [she wrote] that writer-director Dunkle is barely eighteen years old. That might lead one to expect that, in time, his underdeveloped moral and aesthetic intelligence will catch up with his technical talent. But in this case that may be a false hope. His films already reveal the sophistication of premature genius when it comes to dealing with the vile and the violent. In that respect, he has prematurely set aside childish things in favor of a malignant virtuosity. He and the rest of us may be stuck with what he so brilliantly is: a terminally deranged sensibility.

The review prompted me to write to Clare about my new connection with Simon. I didn't tell her much, nothing at all about the orphans. Beyond that, I still assumed there was very little I had to say about movies—even about Simon—she didn't already know. I could tell from the review that she'd seen a number of his other films. But I did ask if she recognized the relationship between Simon and Castle. Two months later I got the usual hasty reply. “Of course. Beware! All my love. Really.” And then there was a postscript. “She's cute and she's smart and she's young … and I hate her. But give her a kiss for me anyway. What the hell!”

That had to do with Jeanette who, as I'd already learned, had met Clare briefly at a party in New York soon after she arrived from Paris. They had at once struck up a brisk, friendly conversation that grew still chummier when Jeanette hinted at and then revealed her embittered relations with Saint-Cyr. That led to a long spell of hot gossip. But when Jeanette went on to mention knowing me and said she meant to look me up, everything chilled to subzero. That puzzled Jeanette until she learned from me that Clare and I had been lovers.

“But she is three thousand miles away,” Jeanette protested. “And she does not even answer your letters. Why should she be so jealous? And besides,” she added as if she were scolding me, “she is so old for you. Or perhaps … am I too young?”

No, I said. Everybody was just the right age for everything. And of course Clare had no right to be jealous. But I was secretly gratified that she was.

When Clare's review of
Annihilation Derby
came out, I showed it to Jeanette, who believed it was too permissive. “I would not say anything good about his films, not even about how he makes the bullet holes go
plish.”

I also showed the review to Simon, only to discover that he couldn't read it. The boy was severely dyslexic and struggled as much with the printed as with the spoken word. So I read it to him. He fairly blazed with delight.

“Sh-she Hiked the bul-bul-bul … ”

“The bullet holes. Yes, I guess she did,” I sighed.

Then he asked me to read that part again, “about the cess-cess-cesspool.” I did. He took that as a compliment too.

Finally, I laid the review before Brother Justin, who pondered it carefully. I told him a Clarissa Swann review was a breakthrough. He understood that and was pleased. “Though I gather some of Simon's imagery is too robust for her taste.”

“Well, I suppose you might put it that way.”

“Perhaps after she reads what you have to say about Simon, she will have a more positive opinion.”

“I doubt that. Clare's first opinion is always her final opinion.”

By this time, some six months since my first visit to St. James School, I had to admit that my relationship with Brother Justin, never more than lukewarm at best, was turning frigid. I'd long since discovered he had nothing more to tell me about Max Castle. And when I asked to talk to Brother Marcion, his predecessor, I was treated to a rude surprise.

“Talk
to him? Oh no, that would not be possible.”

“But I thought you said he could answer some of my questions.”

“We may
write
to him.”

“You mean he isn't here … isn't nearby?”

“I never said so. No, he is in Albi. In seclusion. You see, he has become one of our elders. But he may be willing to correspond with you. I cannot guarantee that. However, if you give me a letter, I will
be pleased to forward it and second your request for information.”

I let Brother Justin know that I found this highly disappointing. Nevertheless, I doped out a letter asking Brother Marcion for everything he could remember about Castle. I was given no reason to believe there would be a prompt response. There wasn't. Two months later I was asking Brother Justin to write again for me.

Even more frustrating were our discussions of the Cathars and their connection with the orphans. I almost came to admire how artfully evasive Brother Justin could be at every point. He insisted that there was a long dark period following the crusade during which the Cathar church, or what survived of it, dropped out of sight. This subterranean interval lasted for some four centuries, until the church reemerged in Zurich as an orphanage in the late seventeenth century. After that, orphanages sprang up wherever religious tolerance flourished: Holland, England, some of the enlightened German principalities. Two of the oldest establishments were built in the New World—in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island in the early eighteenth century. Within a century after that, the order had reached the Orient, the Near East, Latin America, India.

“But why orphanages?” I asked, a question that had long been on my mind and for which I thought I'd come up with a plausible answer.

“It is the most obvious charitable endeavor, is it not?” he replied. “To save the children.”

What could I say to that? But I didn't trust his answer. I tried another question. “Are there any second- or third-generation members of your church?”

He played dumb. “Hm?”

“Kids born into the church. You know, their parents were members and their grandparents.”

“Oh yes, yes. All our children are adopted by members of the church.”

“
All
of them?”

“Yes. It is our policy to place them in a sympathetic household.”

“And do any of them have brothers and sisters who were born Cathars?”

“Often the families have other children, yes.”

“Children of their own?”

“Of course.”

“I mean
born
to them?”

“Ah well, that is not the only way to have one's own child.”

“But that's what I mean.”

He stared at me blankly as if he simply couldn't understand. I had to go on tactfully angling the question this way and that several times before I got the picture clear. All the orphans became adopted children of church members around the world. But none of the sons and daughters were the natural offspring of any of the fathers and mothers. Everybody in the church had once been an orphan because nobody in the church ever produced children. Brother Justin wouldn't say as much, but that turned out to be the only possible conclusion. Having elected to become “eunuchs for the sake of the Lord,” the Cathars would have nothing to do with baby-making.

As close-mouthed as Brother Justin might have been, I'm sure Jeanette would have found him a fountain of information in comparison with me. There was so little I felt free to tell her. So I swung back and forth between evasion and lying, lying and evasion. But I was doing neither very effectively. Little wonder her patience was evaporating, and she was letting it show. How much more time did I plan to spend with “that ugly child”? “What can you find to talk so much about?” she wanted to know. “You have seen all of his films three times.”

“Four,” I corrected. “Some of them five.”

“So?”

“I'm learning some interesting new techniques from him,” I lied.

She shrugged helplessly, then uttered a dark warning. “It is not good for you to let so much of his movies inside you.”

Whatever did she mean, I wondered. All she could say was, once again, “It is not good for you.” But she said it with intense conviction. More to the point, she let me know she was beginning to resent the weekends I spent away from her—and the evenings I put in at school with my books. In truth, I was neglecting her shamefully. I could hardly blame her for her discontent. And she was giving me fair notice that there was competition in the field for her idle hours. She made no secret of the fact that her job was putting her on the receiving end of lots of aggressive male interest. From time to time she would give me provocative little bulletins across the breakfast table. “Warren Beatty wanted to drive me home last night.” “Richard Gere asked me to go with him to a preview.”

I believed her. Her stay in California had turned her into a sharp and sexy dresser, enhancing her natural attractiveness. And I knew
she could be superbly flirtatious when she cared to be. No doubt she was turning lots of heads. “But that's not why you came to Hollywood, is it?” I asked, only semifacetiously. “To sleep around with madly handsome movie stars?” She returned a look that told me how dumb that question was. Did I think she'd come to wait up nights for the sort of monkish and obsessive bookworm I was becoming?

If my time at St. James School had been limited to fruitless verbal sparring with Brother Justin, I might have shared Jeanette's frustration and simply given up the project. But something else developed over the months that justified my continued visits. Simon Dunkle found his voice—or at least enough of it to carry on reasonably satisfactory conversations. These matured out of the little whispered exchanges between us while watching his films. Gradually he came to feel more at ease with me and, so I noticed, more relaxed still with me alone than when Sister Helena was standing guard. I came to realize that Simon had a rather exaggerated notion of my stature in the film world. He seemed to feel that the research I was doing would lead to an article of decisive importance for his career. I played along with that, using the opportunity it gave to ask prying questions. So we began to take evening walks around the grounds of the school. I'd call for Simon at his studio after Sister Helena had retired and we'd have an hour or two together during the only time of day he could expose his light-sensitive hide to the out-of-doors.

We must have talked a couple of dozen times over the several months I came visiting. Even though his stutter moderated, Simon wasn't the most communicative of people. He remained shy with me, seldom volunteering more than brief answers to questions. Often he sank into pensive moods, and then I couldn't draw more than a grudging yes or no out of him. Even at his most talkative, Simon had a naïveté and awkwardness about him that belied the intricacy of mind he displayed in his films. I had to remind myself that, as childlike as his conversation might seem, this was the director whose knowledge of “the vile and the violent” revealed a menacing depth. In the most threatening sense of the term, I was dealing with an
enfant terrible.

At first, I wondered if I should keep my conversations with Simon secret from Brother Justin and Sister Helena. But I soon learned that he—and she—knew all about them. That was puzzling, because Simon, though haltingly, was telling me a lot I wanted to know about things that Brother Justin had been withholding for months. Perhaps
the priest misjudged how much I was finding out from Simon. Or, more likely, he felt confident that he could subsequently muddle whatever Simon passed along. And so he did on any number of occasions when I came to him seeking elaboration of some point Simon had raised. What Simon left shadowy Brother Justin could quickly submerge in midnight darkness. For that reason, I soon stopped looking to him for any further illumination of Simon's remarks and settled for what the boy told me, as obscure as that often was.

Here then, in composite form—and with the stutter mercifully deleted—is the gist of those extraordinary conversations as I can recall them now.

I ask, “Do you really believe the world we live in is hell?”

He answers, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“That's what we're taught.”

“But really, actually, literally
hell?'”

“Uh-huh.”

“And that God is really the devil?”

“The
true
God isn't the devil. He's God. Ahriman is the devil.”

“You call him … it … Ahriman?”

“Or sometimes Satan. Or sometimes Yahweh.”

“Yahweh?”

“Like in the Old Testament. The angry God. He made the world like it is.”

“And what is it like?”

“What you see everywhere. All the badness.”

“But there are good things too, good people, happiness.”

“That doesn't last. It's just to tease us. Yahweh crushes it all. Yahweh hates us.”

“Why does he hate us?”

“Because inside, where he can't get, there's a piece of the true God. That makes him wrathful. He's jealous of us.”

“But can't he also be merciful … loving?”