Rocks, The (11 page)

“And this is yours?” Luc asked.

The kid moved behind Aegina when he saw Luc looking at him.

“Yes. This is Charlie. Charlie, will you say hello to Luc? He’s an old friend of mine.”

The little boy remained behind his mother, clutching her thigh.

“He’s beautiful, what I can see of him. Which is that he looks like you.”

“Luc, I’m so sorry about your father,” she said. Earlier in the year, Luc had sent her a letter, addressed to C’an Cabrer in Mallorca because he didn’t know her London address, telling her that his father had died of metastasized prostate cancer, a day before his sixty-first birthday. “I liked him very much when we met in Paris. I’m so sorry.”

“He liked you too,” Luc said. “And you heard about Teddy?” One of their cohort of childhood friends whose parents lived in or returned seasonally to Mallorca, whom they’d known and played with most summers as long as they could remember, Teddy Trelawney had overdosed on smack and died in New York that winter.

“Yes, I heard,” said Aegina, glancing down at Charlie, who started pulling his mother’s arm, holding on to her hand with both of his. “I can’t believe that, how he got to such a place. Teddy had a such a sweet and beautiful nature.”

“I’m sure he was sweet to the end,” said Luc. Her hair was shorter, shoulder length now, still deeply dark, black except in the sun, and otherwise she looked much as she had the last time he’d seen her, like this on the street four years ago—better, he decided: there was more of her in that face now. “You look good,” he said.

“You do too. You look thinner.”

“I’ve been running. I ran a marathon in April.”

“I can’t imagine that.”

Charlie was now tugging hard. “Wait a minute, Charlie,” she said. “Are you still in Paris?”

“Yeah.”

Her arm was stretched sideways, Charlie was leaning perilously away from her. “I want to go,” he said.

“Yes, we’re going, Charlie,” said Aegina. She looked at Luc, the kind of look that conveyed in less than a second an acknowledgment of the bildungsroman of their shared history.

“It’s good to see you. Bye.”

“Bye,” he said, feeling something like a bowling ball in his chest. He watched them walk away down the checker-textured sidewalk. Charlie had let her hand go, but now Luc saw Aegina’s hand and the boy’s move toward each other reflexively until they clasped.

Luc stuffed the cigarettes into his shirt pocket and climbed aboard the Rieju and rode away. It was after five, people were coming off the beaches. The streets were mobbed with strangers, British, Scandinavian, German tourists familiar with the town, owning it as if it were now theirs as it had once been his.

A man named Block traveling with his wife steps off a train while it’s stopped in a station somewhere in Europe. He enters the station café to buy a newspaper. Inside, an elderly woman stumbles. Block catches her, she clings to him, saying something he can’t quite hear. People in the bar crowd around them to help. Block tries to get away—his train is leaving—but now the elderly woman is clutching fiercely at his lapels, babbling something into his ear with feverish insistence. Others support the woman, lay her down, and Block pulls free. He runs outside into pelting rain, but his train pulls away without him.

Soaking wet, he goes into the station, asks the woman in the ticket booth if he can get word to his wife on the train. She shrugs, she doesn’t think so. Block asks when the next train leaves. Not for another two hours. He walks back into the café. The old woman has died—she lies on the ground, quiet and still. People have pulled back, buzzing about what has happened, waiting for the police, ambulance. Block orders a coffee. As he drinks it, shivering in his wet clothes, a man appears at his elbow to thank him for trying to help the old woman. He did nothing, says Block, he was simply there when she stumbled. The man sees Block is cold and wet and buys him a Cognac. Gratefully, Block sips it. She appeared to be saying something to you, says the man who bought him the Cognac. I wasn’t listening, says Block, I was trying to get back out to my train. You must have heard something, the man says. Now Block looks at him, sensing, for the first time, something other than friendliness—

“But really, come on, Luc. We need to know,” Szabó said. “The whole movie turns on this, what she says to him. We don’t need to know this?”

“Gábor, we
will
know—
eventually
. Yes, of course we need to know,” Luc said carefully, respectfully. “But this is kind of the point: it doesn’t really matter what the old woman says. He doesn’t know, we don’t know—that’s good: tension, suspense. All we, and he, know is that these other guys
think
he knows, so they come after him. It’s the MacGuffin. I thought you liked that, the fact that we don’t know.”

“Yes, yes, of course I like it.
I
like it. I
love
it. But will the audience like it? Will my distributors like it? Will
they
understand that this is a piece of movie cleverness that they must accept? I’m not so sure.”

“But it’s also what’s existential about this story, Gábor. It plunges Block into a labyrinth of meaningless detail and confusion—I mean, there’s a logic behind it all for Yatsevich and his thugs and we make that clear—but it’s so wild and confusing for Block that he begins to question the structure and meaning of everything in his life. That’s why he changes.”

“And he gets the girl,” said Szabó.

“Yes. But that’s not the change,” said Luc, gently. “However,
as
he changes, she increasingly believes in Block, so she
reflects
his new view of himself.”

Szabó laughed. “It’s not that complicated. Is not his new view of himself that she likes. Is his cock.”

They’d started in Paris, meeting in Szabó’s home, in cafés, over dinners at Brasserie Balzar, where Szabó and Véronique liked to eat several nights a week. Szabó’s wife was nearly always there during their talks, a silent, uninvolved presence who would concentrate on her food or read a book, apparently as unengaged in their discussions as a dog—until she spoke.

The screenplay was tight before Szabó ever saw it. Luc had struggled to make it work like a watch. There were no extraneous parts. It moved fast from the station bar to the second train, where Block meets the girl and they jump on a bus eluding the man who bought him the Cognac, to the house on the lake and the long rowboat ride through the fog and finally the dingy office and the photographs of the old woman as a young girl holding hands with the man, the industrialist, who was her father. Luc had made the locations purposely vague, bland, unidentifiable—like the chilly Clermont-Ferrand of Éric Rohmer’s
Ma Nuit chez Maud
that Luc loved so much. Apart from suggesting that this could happen anywhere to anyone, it also meant the film could be made wherever a producer decided to shoot it, wherever he could make his deals and wanted to spend his money. This pragmatic approach had informed every decision Luc had made in constructing his story. This one would get made.

Szabó loved it. He raved about it. He
got
it: the existential odyssey that propels Block toward an understanding of the hollowness of his life and a move toward a more authentic one. He had bought an eighteen-month option on the screenplay with an option to renew for a further eighteen months. They talked about cast.

“I see Roy Scheider,” said Szabó, early on, peering sharply at Luc to convey the acuity of his vision. As they discussed the screenplay, Szabó started calling Block “Roy,” describing how Roy steals a car from the station parking lot at night—

“But Block doesn’t steal a car,” Luc said. “Block wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t know
how
to steal a car. That’s not his character. They take the bus—”

“Luc, Luc.” Szabó waved a forked morsel of veal, smiling indulgently, paternally. They were eating dinner at Balzar. “Roy Scheider doesn’t take the bus. Who takes the bus in the movies? You have to wait in line with women who are bringing home chickens for dinner. With schoolchildren. The action stops. No. It’s impossible. Roy Scheider can’t stop to wait for a bus.”

“What if it’s not Roy Scheider?” The actor’s hard, angular features were not what Luc had imagined for his softer, more physically vulnerable protagonist, a man with a face that could illuminate doubt and fear.

“Who, then?”

“Well,” carefully now, “I don’t know . . . how about Albert Finney?”

“Albert Finney? Albert Finney doesn’t open a movie. I don’t get my distributors with Albert Finney. Who knows Albert Finney?”

“He’s a great actor. He’s got a human face.”

“Luc. Albert Finney—who is this? English character actor, good for five minutes in the whole movie, eight seconds at a time, as bureaucrat or heavy, to give a note of class. Everybody in the world knows Roy Scheider.
The French Connection. Jaws.
For this, they know Roy Scheider in Finland, in Africa, in the jungle towns in Borneo where every week they paint the movie posters badly by hand as mural on the cinema wall and you see this great big Roy Scheider with eyes popping out of his head like a squid being chased by a giant shark. And guess what”—Szabó pushed the forkful of veal into his mouth and smiled knowingly, openmouthed, at Luc as he chewed, audibly grinding the meat to pulp with his molars—“Roy’s cheap. I talk to his agent. He wants his own movie. He doesn’t want to be Gene Hackman’s buddy or second violin to the shark. He wants to be a star all by himself. To get the
girl
, not the fish! And I guarantee to you that he will read your screenplay and see that it is tailor-made for him, with a few changes. Like he doesn’t sit and wait for a bus. Nobody takes a bus.”

“Cary Grant took a bus in
North by Northwest
.”

“You put Cary Grant in a wheelbarrow and everything in the movie looks fantastic. Not Roy Scheider. He needs a fast car and Raquel Welch in the passenger seat. Then you got a movie.”

“Raquel Welch?”

Szabó laughed affectionately. “My dear Luc. Who were you thinking for the girl?”

“I don’t know. Isabelle Huppert—”

“Roy Scheider never would go to bed with such a girl. Too neurotic, talking talking all the time—”

“She has terrible freckles,” said Véronique, without looking up from a thick, atlas-sized magazine,
Yacht
, with boats the size and shape of buildings on its cover.

“It’s true,” said Szabó. “They are not running through the jungles of Asia, driving on the highways in America, for Isabelle Huppert covered with freckles, talking, having depressions. My distributors never buy this film with such a girl.”

Szabó chartered a yacht in Monaco for six weeks. Full crew, chef, plenty of cabins. A quiet cruise along the Riviera with his wife and her sister, very beautiful girl. Luc must come along, Szabó insisted. They would work every day and make a few changes and have the completed draft by the end of the cruise.

“Um . . .” It sounded like true arrival: cruise the Riviera on a yacht with a film producer, women, write a screenplay. But even after a meal with Szabó and Véronique, Luc couldn’t wait to get away from them and clear his head. “. . . Well, I—”

“Graham Greene wrote
The Third Man
on Alexander Korda’s yacht on a cruise in the Mediterranean,” said Szabó, raising bushy eyebrows at Luc.

Luc hadn’t known this, but he thought
The Third Man
an exemplar of the power of withholding information from the audience. “I love
The Third Man
—”

“So what does she say to him?” asked Szabó. “If we don’t hear what the old woman says to Block, we have the audience wondering what is going on.”

“But Gábor. Don’t we
want
the audience to wonder what’s going on? To
not
know? Like in
The Third Man
.”

“No. If they don’t know, they don’t care.
The Third Man
opened very bad. Now is a classic, then was a big disappointment for Sandy.
Casablanca
, it’s the letters of transit. You know this immediately. That’s your MacGuffin, but we know what it is. Everybody is running around looking for the letters of transit. Whoever gets them, gets out of Casablanca. Simple. Here, Block doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He looks stupid. We don’t care, nobody cares. We must hear what the old woman tells him in the ear in the station.”

“But the
whole movie
is him
finding out
what she whispered. Who she is, what Yatsevich is looking for. And what the movie’s
really
about is how Block finds meaning in his life by doing something right.
That’s
the mystery, and people will find that more interesting than—”

“Doesn’t work. My distributors will be saying, ‘What it’s about?’ I can’t tell them it’s about Roy Scheider running around looking for himself to find out who he is. They will think it’s a hippie story and they will say no. Roy Scheider knows who he is. He’s a tough guy. He’s a man. So I have to say to them, it’s about a man finding the paintings taken by the Nazis, that only the old woman whose father took them knows where they are and she tells Roy Scheider, and he goes to find them and kills the bad guys who are chasing him and he gets the girl.
That’s
a
movie
.”

Luc had always believed he would be successful and make money as a writer. His father, Bernard Franklin, of Walpole, Massachusetts, was a longtime Paris-based journalist with the
Herald Tribune
who had written books about French exceptionalism and Anglo-European interests. Luc had seen his father write them, one after another, published only to vanish into the black holes of bookshops, never to be seen again. Luc found his father’s books dull—nobody read them on airplanes or in cafés—and they made almost no money at all. Luc wanted to write novels. Like Hemingway and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald, and later like Kerouac, that would sell better than his father’s earnest efforts and be made into movies.

When the novel he’d written at twenty-seven had been turned down by every publisher he’d sent it to, he sank into prolonged shock. He started writing another but, sundered by doubt, put it aside. One day in Paris he met a friend at Le Select who was having a drink with a film producer named Claude. Luc’s friend introduced him to the producer, describing him as a writer. Claude talked about a story he’d read in a newspaper about a refugee who had tried to swim from an outlying Albanian island to the heel of Italy, a distance of fifty miles. He’d been picked up at sea close to the Italian coast, with no sign of a boat or raft nearby, and taken back to Albania. “Can you imagine?” said Claude, looking at them both. “The dream, the bravery, the
disappointment
!” Luc mentioned the John Cheever story “The Swimmer.” Claude remembered the movie, which he had loved.
“Ah, Burt Longcastaire.”
He hadn’t known it was adapted from the Cheever story. He called Luc the next day, and they met and talked again about the story of an Albanian trying to swim to Italy. Was it possible, Claude wondered, that anyone could stay afloat for so long? Luc told him about the high salinity of the Mediterranean, which would help any swimmer, and how he himself had spent much of his childhood swimming around Mallorca. Claude offered Luc twenty thousand francs—about five thousand dollars—if he would write the screenplay of the story they would outline together. Luc agreed. Claude gave him a book of screenplays written by Jean-Claude Carrière to show him how they were written. Luc wrote the screenplay in a month. Then Claude became wrapped up making another film, but Luc had been paid to write a screenplay. He was a screenwriter. He was hired to write more. Since he was bilingual, he could write screenplays in French or English—he wrote several in both languages so producers could show a property to both French and American distributors. He wrote spec screenplays to offer for sale—people in Hollywood were making fantastic sums selling spec screenplays; Luc even thought of going to Los Angeles, to the Mountaintop—and for several years went with a producer to the Cannes Film Festival. Eventually, little by little, nothing happened. He was thirty. The creeping sense of disjunction between what was supposed to happen in his life and what was actually happening, began to terrify him. He saw himself sinking into oblivion.

Szabó looked like a life raft.

The Szabós, with Véronique’s sister, boarded the yacht in Monaco. Luc was to join them two weeks later. Since his plane ticket was to Nice, Szabó told him to meet the yacht in the little port of St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, between Nice and Monaco. Although he’d never been there, Luc knew of it: it was where Somerset Maugham had bought a fabulous villa and lived much of his long life.

The yacht was not there when he arrived by taxi in midafternoon—they would be out sailing during the day, Szabó had told him over the phone, back in port by sunset. Luc left his bag at the
capitainerie
, and walked uphill along the narrow lanes of the Cap, between high hedges of pine and cypress and dense bulwark copses of flowers that allowed only partial views of the great pastel-hued, frosted, and crenellated villas. These were the homes of the rich and the not famous: disenfranchised European nobility; Nazi profiteers; modern industrialists; and some genuine, unimpeachable strains of old money. Not writers.