Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220) (13 page)

“Taxi!” Connie shouted.

Naturally I assumed Connie would instruct the Yellow Cab driver to take us to our respective apartments, so we might try for a full night's sleep before raising the curtain on our teleplay. Instead she specified Rockefeller Center. “After this evening's broadcast of
The Original Amateur Hour
,” she explained, squeezing my hand, “we can appropriate Studio Two at nine o'clock, aim the cameras at the
Bread Alone
set, and do a slapdash tech rehearsal.”

“Isn't Sid Caesar in Studio Two at nine?” I asked, dandling the Zorningorg Prize on my knee.

“Nope, One—and then comes
Your Hit Parade
in Three,” said Connie. “This will be fun, Kurt. You'll get to play all the parts, and I'll get to pretend I'm Ida Lupino.”

By the time we'd gone through a security check and made our way to Studio Two,
The Original Amateur Hour
had wrapped: lights off, control room dark, cameras inert. We hurried to the
Bread Alone 
set. As conceived by the network's art director, Lazarus's dining room boasted an elegant simplicity: white stucco walls, brown amphorae, potted palm tree, wooden table holding a bowl filled with plastic grapes and wax figs, picture window opening onto Jesus's tomb. A somber young man in a goatee and black turtleneck darted about, gripping a six-pigment palette and touching up the décor. He paused in his labors long enough to introduce himself as Marshall Crompton, then added, “I don't dig workin' for such a square show, but I gotta buy groceries.”

“You're an atheist?” I suggested.

“More of an agnostic anarchist gadfly,” Marshall explained. “My path in life was blazed by Pablo Picasso, Allen Ginsberg, and Ernie Kovacs.”

“You'll enjoy tonight's tech rehearsal,” I said. “We're preparing for our annual tribute to blasphemy.”

“Blasphemy?”

“Think Saturnalia. Once a year on this show, we worship the Lord of Misrule.”

“Smooth.”

Come Sunday morning, of course, Connie would compose each image by relaying orders to the cameramen through their headsets, but for now she and I had to wheel the rigs around ourselves, positioning camera one to deliver a longshot of the set, camera two to cover Jesus's tomb, and three to focus on Mary seated at the table. After passing me a script and stationing the boom mike above the fruit bowl, Connie retreated to the control room, where she fired up the console, drenched the set in klieg illumination, and cued me over the public-address system. Teleplay in hand, I launched into the opening speeches, taking the parts of both Mary and Peter. Marshall seemed amused by the dialogue, especially the apostle explaining how he and his confrère had rescued Jesus with an opiate, and when the time came for the stone to roll away from the tomb, he was happy to show me which off-stage lever to push.

“Here's an idea,” I told Marshall. “For the rest of the tech rehearsal, let's have you be Jesus.”

“Crazy, man,” he replied, then proceeded to enact the teleplay's first big visual moment: the buried-alive Galilean rabbi escaping his crypt.

“A word of friendly advice,” I said. “Don't watch the broadcast tomorrow.”

“But I'm diggin' it,” said Marshall.

“We have reason to believe the navigator of an orbiting alien spaceship intends to retrofit a death-ray onto the
Bread Alone
carrier wave.”

“Cool.”

For the next three hours, Marshall and I ran through the script (variously incarnating the perplexed Mary, the conniving Peter, the mad Jesus, the bitter leper, the chivalrous Brock, the facetious Ducky, the unflappable robot, and the philosophical gorilla), while Connie stayed in the control room and jotted down ideas for lighting effects, dolly moves, and camera angles. Bringing “The Madonna and the Starship” to its jeopardized audience would be less like directing a teleplay than covering a Dodgers game or the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but I sensed that Connie was unwilling to settle for tedious longshots and bland midshots. When a given moment called for a close-up, she would by-God deliver the goods.

The rehearsal ended shortly after 11:00 P.M. I bid Marshall good night, gave him ten bucks for his troubles, and, taking hold of my valise, climbed the stairs to Connie's sanctum. I entered quietly, knowing she might be in the midst of a creative meditation, but instead I found her talking on the phone.

With a wary eye I surveyed the console, a science-fictional installation comprising the switching device, the audio mixing board, and a bank of small monitors labeled camera 1, camera 2, camera 3, preview, air, and film chain. Everything seemed fully functional. Connie cradled the handset. Having discarded Lenny's motorcycle jacket, which now hung over the back of the technical director's chair, she presented herself to me in the same maroon silk blouse she'd been wearing since we left the studio on Friday afternoon.

“I just told Donna Dain that under no circumstances should anyone at the Saint Francis House watch tomorrow's
Bread Alone
broadcast,” she explained.

“I'm too tired to know if I had fun tonight or not,” I said. “Was it fun for you?”

A rapturous expression lit Connie's face, and for an instant she radiated the same caliber of sensuality as our Demivirgin Mary. “This is going to work, Kurt! Our masquerade will save the world—I can
feel
it!” She gestured toward my trophy. “Hey, friend, don't you think it's high time I got a good look at that thing?”

I opened my valise, removed the award, and yanked away the cardigan. Connie donned the goggles, then contemplated the nearest facet, breathing deeply as the artifact romanced her gray matter. She reported seeing a lambent river swirling around a crystalline palace, a fire-breathing gryphon wheeling above an active volcano, and a fountain spouting “the primordial juices of multicellular life.”

“And now we can go home and sleep,” I said, cloaking the trophy.

“Vita brevis, ars longa!”
Connie pulled off the goggles and tapped me on the shoulder. “Home? I have a better idea. Instead of rushing back to Rockefeller Center at the crack of dawn, let's spend the night here. On Thursday they did
The Fourposter
on
Producers Showcase
. The bed's still in Studio Three, and I'm sure we can scare up a cot for you. Ogden keeps an alarm clock in his office.”

“I'll sleep better in my own bed.”

“What I meant, Kurt Jastrow, is that I have a
really
better idea.” She crossed to the technical director's chair, reached inside Lenny's jacket, and removed a cardboard container no larger than a cigarette pack. “Look what your roommate left in his pocket. At first I thought it was his Chesterfields.”

I stared at the box in question, with its famous logo of a plumed Trojan helmet against a red background. My pulse performed a paradiddle. “I taught him how to buy those things,” I said, inanely.

“Then you must be familiar with their application.”

“I suppose so,” I croaked—though not as familiar as I might have wished, my experience with rubbers being limited to the actress who'd played the villainous lady botanist in “She Demons of Io,” plus a nymphomaniac who worked as a receptionist at
Planet Stories
and twice lured me to the office after hours for a roll in the slush.

“I am likewise prophylactically literate. At Barnard I fell head over heels for a Columbia grad student who understood Spinoza.” Connie slipped on the visor once more. “Look at this! It's better than an
Andromeda
cover!”

She passed me the goggles, and I put them on in time to behold a pasture vibrating with iridescent dragonflies and carpeted with coruscating crimson poppies.

“‘O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more,'” I said, quoting Tennyson's
The Lotos-Eaters
but thinking of Connie's secondary sex characteristics.

“‘They're side by side, they're glorified, where the underworld can meet the elite'!” she sang. “Take me to the fourposter, Kurt. Stay me with flagons. Comfort me with apples. Buck Roger me.”

Mesmerized by alien dragonflies, extraterrestrial poppies, and the primordial juices of multicellular life, to say nothing of the imminent masquerade, I careened into Studio Three, Connie at my side, my valise weighed down with my award plus Ogden's alarm clock and the four remaining scripts. Zipped back into Lenny's motorcycle jacket, still muttering song lyrics, Connie headed for the curtain. She pulled it away to reveal the promised bed.
Your Hit Parade
had wrapped a half-hour earlier. The airwaves belonged to local stations. We had the place to ourselves.

“What will your analyst say about this?” I asked.

“‘Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty Forty-Second Street,'” Connie sang.

Until that night my favorite twentieth-century drama had been
Death of a Salesman
, but now it was
The Fourposter
by Jan de Hartog. We scrambled aboard the mattress. The zippers of Connie's jacket parted melodiously. The buttons of her maroon blouse yielded to my trembling fingers. Briefly her bra-clasps challenged my dexterity, but at last the silken chrysalises dropped away.

“‘Though wise men at their end know dark is right,'” Connie recited, undressing me in turn, “‘because their words had forked no lightning, they do not go gentle into that good night.'”

“Tomorrow we fork the lightning!” I exclaimed, though I had no idea what it meant to treat an electrical discharge in that fashion. (If I tried it on
Uncle Wonder's Attic
, I would probably burn down Rockefeller Center.) “Tomorrow we cleave the sun!”

The woman with no use for pulp fiction had a pulp fiction sort of body,
Amazing Stories
hips,
Astounding
thighs,
Fantastic
breasts. My appreciation manifested itself as a boner that could sink an eight ball. Inhaling the sharp medicinal scent, I sheathed my lust in latex. Would I live to see the day when these sublime commodities were advertised on TV? Buy Trojan condoms, with the lubrication already on 'em?

Not surprisingly, I came in less time than it took Buffalo Bob to do a Colgate commercial. Connie proved understanding. Things went better the second time around. Although for us the phenomenon of simultaneous orgasm belonged to some distant
Brock Barton
future, we managed to serve that ideal through successive approximations, whereupon, satiated at last, we fumbled for Ogden's alarm clock.

Connie found it first. She wound it up, setting the bell for seven-thirty. We interlaced our limbs and closed our eyes. Man did not live by bread alone, and neither did woman, but at that moment it seemed as if we might sustain ourselves forever on eros.

But sleep, that fickle physician, refused to visit my side of the bed. Dr. Hypnos paid no house calls to Studio Three. Like a machine shorn of its flywheel, my mind raced uncontrollably. Evidently I'd entered a zone beyond exhaustion, a realm where weariness stimulates a person's brain even as it numbs his flesh.

Monday would mark the beginning of the Brock Barton adventure called “The Space Pirates of Callisto,” each chapter followed by an
Uncle Wonder's Attic
installment for which I was reasonably well prepared. The subsequent week would bring “The Phantom Asteroid,” the teleplay I'd workshopped on Tuesday morning with the Underwood Milkers. I remained fond of the basic conceit: Prince Nihil, the last Nonextant, imprisoning the
Triton
's crew inside the nightmares of his ethereal ancestors. Nihil. Nihilism. Nothingness. The jejune glamour of the void. The adolescent allure of the abyss.

And suddenly I understood how we might give our visiting invertebrates some ethical backbone.

I rolled over, kissed Connie awake, and cried, “I've got it!”

“Jesus, Kurt, I just fell asleep.”

“I see what has to happen in the second half-hour!”

“What has to happen is
Corporal Rex
,” said Connie dryly.

“No, that whole series is on celluloid,” I noted. “Tomorrow morning we'll tamper with the film chain. They'll repair it later in the week and run the preempted episode
next
Sunday.”

“
Corporal Rex
is a
sponsored
show,” Connie protested. “Ralston Purina will not go gentle into that good night.”

“I don't want to talk about dog food. I want to talk about philosophy.” Climbing off the fourposter, I retrieved my boxer shorts. “Remember my script about the Nonextants? You're the expert, but it seems to me our crustaceans aren't really logical positivists at all. Nor are they atheists, Darwinists, doubters, rationalists, skeptics, sages, or atomists. They're simply—”