Flicker (83 page)

She put her drink down carefully, turned and crawled awkwardly toward me across the bedclothes. Very tenderly, she buried her face in my shoulder, embracing me tightly. “I got you tangled up in all this. Believe me, I didn't see it coming. I really didn't. I just wanted to share … I wanted to …” Her voice was washing away into little sobs.

“Clare,” I said, “please tell me, do you think …”

“
Yes,
” she answered, hissing it out. “I think it's true. There. Happy?”

“My God,” I said and hugged her to me. “So Angelotti convinced you.”

“Oh shit, no. I didn't need him. In here …” She pulled back and rubbed her hand over her breast. “I knew it was true years ago—when I heard it from Rosenzweig in Paris.”

“Rosenzweig? But you always said he was a nut.”

“Yes, an obnoxious, smelly, little old nut. But I listened to what he was saying. I read his miserable little pamphlet. And I knew.”

“But how could you be sure? I mean there's still no good evidence… .”

She slumped back, but stayed in my arms, letting me cradle her. “Evidence! What does that mean? In
here,
that's where I knew. Pure
instinct. Because they're so beautiful and so exciting … movies. They have a life, more real than our so-called real lives. They have a power. I knew that power went deep. It wasn't just the stories or the stars or camera angles or anything like that. Something underneath all that, something that
connects.
I always knew it was there, but I didn't know what it was, how to talk about it. Then I read this thing of Rosenzweig's. It was half gibberish, but only half. The rest got through. Or let's say I heard it in my own way. I didn't care if Rosenzweig had all the details right. I was ready to believe there was something uncanny about movies, a charm, a magic, something demonic. They capture the attention so fiercely, they eat you alive. Movies aren't
just
movies.

“Then along comes this ranting old crackpot … maybe it takes a crackpot to recognize the demonic, or maybe that's how he got to be a crackpot, from staring the awful truth in the eye. Anyway, he was saying … what? That there was an echo of some cosmic encounter in this art. Between
what
and
what,
who knows? It didn't matter to me what names you used—Good and Evil, Being and Nothingness, Abbott and Costello. The main idea clicked, it just … clicked. Not that I wanted to believe it. But I knew I'd felt it, in between the frames, getting through to me. I never tried to put it in words, never wanted to talk about it. But I knew.” She had been wiping away the tears with the heel of her hand. Now she gave a defiant toss of her head. “I decided to rise above it.”

“How can you do that?”

“Art, Jonny. Believe in the art. Art conquers all. It does. Homer turned war into art, Dante turned all the terrors of hell into art, Kafka turned nightmares into art. Same with the orphans' demon machine. Fuck it, I said, fuck the flicker and all the optical illusions. In the hands of Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, it's all redeemed. Because these are beautiful souls. I don't give a damn who invented the film sprocket and the Maltese cross gear and the arclight, or for what nefarious purpose. What we've got is forty or fifty great works. I decided to go on loving those works and enjoying them. That's the only way to deal with the orphans. Just live right through them. That's what I intend to keep on doing. And so should you. Don't burn yourself out raking this muck.”

“But what about 2014? What about the rest of the story?”

“You mean all that about the wars and the weapons?”

“Of course.”

She nodded gravely, reached to pour out more liquor, straight this time, and swallowed it down fast. “That is a kick in the ass, isn't it? That was new to me. I don't know, I don't know … Eddy made it sound convincing. Oh, probably he's right. Frankly, I didn't really try to follow him. I found it all rather grubby. Part of some other world, not mine.”

“You can just ignore what they're planning?”

“What they're planning is forty years off. Not likely I'll be around to see how things turn out.”

“But they're going to destroy the world … Eduardo says.”

“Well,
somebody
sure as hell is. I've known that since Hiroshima. There was the power to do it. And the human perversity. If the orphans don't do it, somebody else will.”

“But that's the point. There isn't any ‘somebody else.' The orphans are
everybody
else, the Russians, the Americans, the Nazis, the Jews, the Arabs. They're all the enemies, both sides, all sides.
They're
the perversity.
They're
the power too. They've been inching us along toward their final solution for seven hundred years. All our little wars have been rehearsals for their one big war. If Eduardo's right about that, I don't think I'm going to be able to let go of this thing. Can't you see that, Clare?”

She pulled away from me petulantly and curled up against her mound of pillows, her knees tucked under her chin. “I think I'll disown you anyway, even if you don't publish your miserable article.”

“Why?”

“Because you came to me for advice and now you won't take it.”

“I will about the article. I'll trim it down to a commentary on Simon, hold back on the rest. But about Eduardo's proposition … it's tempting.”

Clare's eyes were getting colder, more remote. And the liquor was beginning to affect her, lending a meaner edge to her words. “Save the world, that's what you have in mind?”

“Well, maybe.”

“That's grubby too. People who set out to save the world always do more harm than good. Remember, Pope Innocent's crusade was supposed to make the world safe for Catholicism. Look what came of that. Oh, Jonny, can't you understand? Everything about politics, even apocalyptic politics, is just shit. It's dealing dirty, and plotting plots, and telling lies, and kicking ass … and none of it makes anybody one bit nobler or wiser.”

I felt myself getting angry with Clare, though I couldn't bring myself to show it. I simply couldn't tell if her withdrawal was honorable or just cowardly. “So what's worth doing, then?” I asked with a visible sulk.

At that she lit up and leaned toward me, as if she might pounce. “Jesus, you haven't learned a thing from me, have you? Let your heart answer that question. Do you remember how, at the end of
Les Enfants,
Garance gives up Baptiste? The whole scene from where Nathalie enters the room. Oh God, the architecture of that scene! Every word, every gesture. And then, how Garance melts into the crowd, that long, slow track back and back, until the crowd becomes the river. And Baptiste tries to find her, tries to make the crowd give her back, but it won't. It tears your heart out. Yet you know it must be that way. The camera is telling you it
must,
because it won't stop tracking back. And you say, yes, yes … because the crowd is the river, and the river rolls on. Nothing lasts longer than a moment. Oh, but there are some moments, like that shot …” Her tears had returned now, not the tears of sorrow, but of some stronger, more savage emotion. “If saving the world means anything, it means creating a moment like that before the lights go out. Because the lights will go out, if not in 2014, then in 20,014. Those moments are the real stars in the darkness. They're all we've got. And if that's not enough to teach people what's what, to make them a little kinder, a little more human …” She wanted to stop there, I could tell. But the words kept coming, spat out in anger. “… then maybe the orphans deserve to win. After all, just because Pope Innocent called them heretics doesn't mean they can't be right … in some sense.”

In some sense . .
. Clare and I would hardly be the ones to say in
what
sense. Neither of us could have formulated the metaphysics. But we knew that ever since we'd seen Castle's
Judas Everyman,
there was something compelling about the Great Heresy. A teaching so grim—and yet it had survived for centuries in the teeth of fierce persecution. Why, unless it had spoken the truth to thousands of people?

“I've wondered about that,” I said. “Sometimes it's pretty easy to believe we're living in hell. Just read the front pages. The cruelty, the bloodshed, the endless, senseless violence …”

Clare nodded, but then was quick to add, “Of course, that's only half the story.” She didn't want to wander too far along this path.

I reminded her, “Half is all the orphans need in order to be right. Half light, half dark, the constant struggle.”

She shrugged me off, impatient now. “It's such a damned childish explanation. There's evil because an evil god is out to get us.”

“Except if you try to explain things any other way, it gets nearly absurd. Why do the innocent suffer? Why do any of us suffer? Or doesn't life make any moral sense at all?”

Clare interrupted with a throaty laugh. “Jesus! I do believe this is the absolute first time I've talked theology in bed. And with you—the best lover I ever had.”

That stopped me dead in my tracks. “Do you mean that?”

“Why else would I say it? Of course, I taught you everything you know. Admit it.”

“I admit it. But, oh, Clare, it might not be true anymore. I told you in the letter, Dunkle's films … I think they've done me some damage, where it hurts most.”

Clare came a little closer across the bed, stretching her hand out to stroke my arm and draw me to her. “That's what worried me,” she said. “I didn't want to see you hurt that way. How bad is it?”

“Very—according to someone who was in a position to know.”

“The little French girl.”

“Yes.” And haltingly I told her about my amorous misadventures with Jeanette. As I did, Clare gathered me still nearer. She was more caring than I could remember at any time in the past. “Maybe that's why I'm so anxious to have it all out with the orphans. I want to hit back.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” she was saying as she nuzzled me. “I warned you about this, remember? When we saw Castle's films at Zip Lipsky's?”

“I know.”

“Poor baby. But it's nothing that can't be fixed.”

“You think so?”

She leaned to brush a kiss across my lips. “I got you into this. I owe you something.”

“Don't think of it that way.”

“But I do. I don't know why I've been so cold toward you for so long. Trying to put my much-regretted past behind me, I guess. But not you. You were the good part. Did you know, when we met, I was about ready to chuck it all away?”

“How do you mean?”

Quite casually she answered, “Knock myself off, dear friend.”

“No!”

“It was on my mind.” That shocked me. I remembered how often Clare had been morose; but there had always been an underlying vitality about her, a cantankerous sense of high purpose. I couldn't imagine she'd ever contemplated anything so extreme. “I was sick of Sharkey and The Classic. I didn't see any future ahead of me. The quicksand was up to my chin. But then having you as a student—that's what kept me going. You were just so beautifully naive and impressionable. You still are, do you know? Oh, I used you for all I was worth. Every time you lit up with a new idea, you added a year to my life. I rediscovered a lot while we were together. And it kept my head above the mire just long enough for better things to come my way. You saved my life, lover.”

My heart glowed to hear her say it. And meanwhile, Clare's old erotic magic was beginning to take effect, stirring the cold ashes, finding an ember that was still barely alive. I felt myself slipping into the boyish passivity that I always assumed with her. I could tell she found that arousing. Would she have called this “seduction–? If so, it was the way a fly seduces a spider, for Clare came at me with an appetite that seemed to have been stored up for years. Yet, as insistent as she was, she was patient and gentle. It took a long time, but it was exactly what I needed.

Afterward, as the night glided into dawn, Clare lit a cigarette, and settled back into the pillows. “Christ! I'll have to reschedule the whole day. We're going to sleep till noon, aren't we?”

Judging by our mutual exhaustion, I would have guessed longer. “Hope you don't mind,” I said.

But she ignored the remark, her eyes staring off across the now dimly lit city beyond the windows. “I'm getting married. Later this year. In the summer probably.”

She delivered the news in so melancholy a voice, I wondered if I should offer condolences. “Anyone I know?” I asked lamely.

“Not unless you're into world-class money. He's a broker. One of the ten biggest, five biggest, three biggest, depending on which financial journal you take from.”

“You don't sound overjoyed.”

She sighed pensively. “Right now, with you here, it seems like a defeat. Harold—imagine marrying somebody named Harold!—Harold isn't going to light any fires in my boudoir, I can tell you that.”

“Then why?”

“It's the easy way out, I don't see why I shouldn't take it. I'm going stale at the
Times,
turning in fewer reviews, enjoying each one less. Movies really are getting shitty, you know. Ten years from now, there isn't going to be a filmgoer older than thirteen, but they'll be making more money than ever. As it is, all the talk about movies is becoming talk about deals, big bucks, careers, who's going up, who's going down. Our whole bloody culture's just an extension of high finance. Harold can save me from the grind. We've come close to marriage twice before, but I scared off. Why, I can't say. I have no idea what I'm defending. We're comfortable together. Frictionless, nonpossessive, both of a certain battle-scarred age. He's a nice man. Very cultivated in that utterly dutiful, Ivy League seminar way that comes with fourth-generation wealth.” She laughed. “Such are the circles I move in now, Jonny. The sons of the sons of the Robber Barons, trying to make amends for their forebears' philistine ways. Harold spends more time these days sitting on museum boards than on the stock exchange. Philanthropy and yachting—would you believe it?—his grand passions. I suspect I would come third on the list. But who knows, maybe I can help put his ill-gotten gains to some good use. I come across young filmmakers all the time who tell me all they need is a grubstake to produce the next
Birth of a Nation.
Probably most of them can't get a movie past the talking stage. But what the hell!”