Kanata (34 page)

“Let's go,” Marion said. “Let's ride. It's a perfect day.”

They drove to the Lazy J, a somewhat down-at-the-heels ranch, the fencing in need of repair. Marion told the man at the desk, “We'd like two horses for half a day. None of those half-dead tourist nags either.”

The man took them out to the stables, and they walked down the lines of horses. Marion examined them silently.

“That one,” she said, pointing to an elegant grey.

“Can't let you have that one,” the man said.

Marion walked up to the grey and whispered into its ear, stroked its neck. It nuzzled her. Michael had assumed she was an urban girl. She'd been vague about her background, dismissing it as boring. Instead she pried details out of Michael about his Indian mother and the many ways soldiers died in France, which parts did the rats eat first. It was clear she was familiar with horses. The man let her have the grey and they rode toward the mountains.

“So now you know my secret,” she said, looking over at Michael. “A farm girl. Iowa at that. An unbearable cliché.”

“You rode horses on a farm in Iowa.” Michael repeated the thought dumbly. He couldn't imagine her in a checked shirt milking cows, couldn't picture her without a cigarette.

“I rode horses, fed pigs, milked cows, hoed fields, and cut the nasty empty heads off chickens with a rusty hatchet. I'm full of surprises.”

She told Michael that she used to have conversations with movie actors as she did the chores. When it started, they were in her head, but then she began to talk out loud. “Mr. Fairbanks, that's not how you milk a cow, you silly thing. Let me show you.” Her mother heard her one day and prayed for her. When her father heard about her imaginary friends he feared the worst. He was a German immigrant, devout, heavy-set, humourless, a Lutheran whose life closely resembled that of a farm animal. He told her to stop her foolishness, but her conversations became symphonic, talking to Gish and Pickford as confidantes, to Fairbanks as a lover, Harold Lloyd to make her laugh. Her weekly visits to the Rialto theatre in Des Moines (“Temple of the Silent Art”) were cut out, which only intensified her relationship
with the movies. Her father thought the devil was in her and threatened to beat it out of her. He was genuinely afraid. “You can't beat all of us,” Marion said to him smugly. Her father took off his belt and hit her with it and she yelled louder, summoning her allies. Fairbanks! Pickford! Barrymore! Mack Sennett would arrive on a fire truck moving loopily through the hayfield and reach down from a swaying ladder to pluck her up. Her father went to work with the belt, putting his bulk into it, approaching it as he did every chore, strength devoid of imagination. But she wouldn't stop, shouting her faith like a missionary at the stake. He finally threw her against the barn with such force that she lost consciousness. Her mother watched from the house, cringing in horror, and after her father walked deliberately back to his chores, she came out weeping, fearful that her daughter was dead, that her Karl had killed their baby. She wiped her tears with the apron that smelled of onions and knelt down and cleaned the blood from Marion's face and went back to the kitchen and returned with a pitcher of buttermilk and a cloth and bathed her body to keep the welts down. Marion regained consciousness and let her mother bathe her, not listening to the whispered explanation of her father's rage. Her mother tried to find some bridge between the three of them, a logic that would bind them, would preserve the family. Marion offered only a weak heroine's smile that her mother interpreted as forgiveness, but the smile wasn't for her, it was for Douglas Fairbanks, who was looking down at her, brushing a tear away with a monogrammed handkerchief. Three silent days later, Marion got on a bus out of Des Moines.

Marion told Michael about looking out into the pasture at night from her bedroom window as a little girl and seeing a
cow walk in circles in the moonlight. “It had some kind of a disease that made it walk that way,” she said. “In the morning my father took me by the hand and sat me down to watch as he slaughtered the cow with an axe. My first movie.” Her first kiss was with a German Lutheran boy who stood immobile, tensed as if waiting to be hit. “It was like kissing a statue,” she said. She had sex with a man who ran a photography studio in Des Moines. “Only it wasn't really sex. Just him groping me and himself at the same time and then his face looking like he ate something that didn't agree with him and then giving me chocolate. The perfect date.”

5

1929

They got married in the lacuna that formed in the heat of August, an arid gap when everything was still. They went to a party in the hills one night, the home of a director. Michael didn't like parties, they were a burden. He felt like he was underwater, that everything was muffled somehow and he was slowly suffocating. Marion loved parties. She loved conflict, and parties were a good place to find it. Michael walked around the sculpted backyard, a drink in his hand, moving past the periphery of conversations about who was making money, who was addicted to morphine, who had a fifteen-year-old girlfriend. He could feel the suffocation starting in. Marion came up beside him and took his hand and led him to their car parked on the street. She
got in the driver's seat and drove through the hills, not saying anything, then stopped at a graveyard that had a view of the valley. She pushed him gently down onto the fresh earth above Harold Ledbetter (1868–1926 Our Dear Harold). Michael was reluctant at this indignity but caught up in Marion. He stared at the stars while Marion hovered with that sense of predation. She was both aloof and carnal and the combination bewitched him. “I rescued you,” she whispered as she moved faster. “You would have died.” Marion was a wonderful affliction and few men want to be rid of all their demons. It was then that he asked her to marry him.

The next day they went to a justice of the peace. He had the sickly sweet smell of rum on his breath and rushed through the ceremony. He and Marion had been drifting slightly—through the film industry, through the California landscape—and marriage seemed like something that would define them. That was three years ago and now Michael felt himself drifting, wondering who had rescued who.

I
n the fall Marion got a job on a western that was shooting on location in New Mexico (“If there's enough landscape,” she said, “you don't need a story”) and asked Michael to go with her. She disliked being alone, especially in a place that would have few distractions. She could get him work as a stuntman.

Michael didn't want the job, didn't want to dress up as an Indian and ride in mock threat across the desert, shaking a spear.

“Michael,” she said, drawing sharply on her Black Cat. “You could do it for me.”

He wasn't sure that he could.

Marion blew smoke toward the ceiling. “It's a movie, Michael. That's all it is. It's a movie that no one is going to see.”

“That isn't the point.”

“It's a chance to work on the same film, to be together. I think we need that.”

The re-creation of the war was one thing, but the thought of riding in war paint brought back the sour taste of the Stampede parade. She couldn't understand his reluctance, was unable to understand any world that wasn't celluloid, Michael thought. He had enjoyed this work at first, but now it seemed unhealthy, re-creating the world as something its inhabitants could stand.

“Can you do it for me?” she asked.

T
hey left Los Angeles in September, and the New Mexico heat was still a shimmering threat. The star was Vince Fontaine, whose bland face was collapsing into alcoholic ruin. The pancake makeup hid some of it, but his eyes weren't those of a fearless sheriff. They had never been masculine; they had once been the eyes of an ingénue and were now nervous looking, an old man's eyes. Michael was dressed in Fontaine's white hat and white clothes to do his riding, or to manage the leap from horse to stagecoach. Some of the Indians were local Apache and Navajo, and a few were Italian New Yorkers who had moved to Los Angeles to work in the building trades, putting up flimsy houses in Hollywoodland. They oiled their hair and darkened their faces and whooped in pantomime. The Italians were ordered to shave during the course of the day to hide the bluish shadow of their beards.

He and Marion stayed in a hotel on the main street of the faded town, its red brick made pink by the sun. The heat invaded the room during the day and was hard to disperse at night. Marion's mood was sour most of the time.

T
hey were shooting a scene where Fontaine had to ride across a stretch of desert and catch up with a man dressed in black. Michael rode while Fontaine was shot sitting on a saddle mounted behind the truck. He whipped the reins from side to side and tried to look determined. In the afternoon, Michael and the Italians attacked the mocked-up town in war paint.

After they wrapped, Michael went to the white canvas canopy that was attached to Walter Scarth's tent. The director liked Michael, who fit his notion of the masculine ideal. He appreciated Michael's stillness, a quality that was rare on busy sets. It had become a habit to have a drink with some of the men after the day's shoot, and when Michael arrived, a few of the Italian Indians were already sitting, sipping Scarth's excellent whisky. Scarth was in the middle of a story about a fight in a Spanish bar. Michael poured a drink and sat down. He saw Fontaine approach, still in costume—white pants and shirt, a red bandana, his makeup making him look old and eerie.

“Gentlemen,” Fontaine said. “Another overpaid day behind us.”

Fontaine was a type that Michael had seen before on film sets, men publicly courting failure. Fontaine poured four ounces into a glass and sat down, smiling.

Scarth laughed loudly at his own punchlines. He wasn't an artist, he insisted, merely a tailor. They supplied the cloth
and he shaped it into something they could wear. Eight hundred movies were made in Hollywood that year, more than two a day. The Shit Factory, he called it, and he knew his place in the hierarchy: a dependable fifty-eight-year-old man who could tell a story and stay on budget. He worked with marginal actors making marginal movies, fodder that the studios needed to fill their theatres. The Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles had 2,345 seats. Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel was building a 6,200-seat theatre in New York. The national hunger for brave cowboys, tragic waifs, corrupt tycoons, and innocent girls was bottomless. Scarth churned them out at a reliable pace and earned a good living.

Michael remembered that he was supposed to meet Marion at a roadhouse just outside of town for dinner. He was already late, and her anger would be starting to build. She hated the town and Scarth and the asinine star, Fontaine. She was seen by most of the crew as standoffish and had no allies on the set. Michael waited politely for Scarth to finish his story, then stood up.

“Marion's waiting for me at the roadhouse, Walter. I'm late.”

“Never keep a woman waiting, son,” he said, a segue to another story.

Michael walked past Fontaine's still-pancaked face, a drunken doll perched on a crate, feigning attention as Scarth started talking about a woman from Bakersfield.

Marion was sitting in a booth, sipping bourbon and smoking. She appeared not to have eaten. She ate very little anyway, though occasionally, late at night, she would display a ravenous appetite and would grill a steak, or fry eggs and potatoes before coming to bed. Michael was more than an hour late.

“How was the drink with your lovely wife?” she asked.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” Michael said. “Scarth got going on his war stories and it was hard to leave.”

“Of course it was.” Marion wasn't slurring, she almost never did, even when she was very drunk. But her voice was husky and loose and Michael suspected she had had at least three increasingly resentful drinks while she was waiting.

“Fontaine joined us.”

“All the fairies having a drinky after playing in the desert.” This was becoming a standard evening for the two of them. Marion growing bored and drunk, looking for a place to sink the knife in. His resentment at playing cowboys and Indians out here where Sheridan's men had cleared the land was growing every day. “Maybe New Mexico wasn't a good idea,” Michael said.

“Maybe
we're
not a good idea. Maybe you and Walter should settle down. Get a nice place. A pool maybe. Of course there will be the problem of who the man is. Won't there, darling.”

Michael looked around for a waitress and motioned her over. Marion was a train moving down the track, incapable of swerving off her subject. “You could adopt Fontaine. He's like a four-year-old in so many ways. Let's see—his dependencies, his intelligence, his charming child's ego that thinks the world gives a shit about his talentless, embalmed self.”

Michael ordered a steak from the waitress, a girl of maybe nineteen who lingered to hear whatever blasphemies the movie people would utter. “How would you like that done?” she asked Michael, though she was staring at Marion.