Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (42 page)

He was still in Confederate uniform. He had forgotten to change.

On the plane they read the script again. It was awkward to try to balance it on the first-class cabin's wide armrest. Doug's arm was in the way, so he lifted it up, resting it lightly on her shoulders. After a few pages more, she leaned against him. His heart beat with an athlete's low, steady rate.

With the time change, they arrived in Los Angeles at midnight. Uncertain about what the taxi situation would be, Jill had asked the hotel to arrange for a car and driver, and a quiet Mercedes sedan—she did not like limousines—took them directly to the studio.

Cathy had left their names with the night guard at the gate and he waved them on through. The grounds were dark, and Jill was soon disoriented. The park-like campus she had known from her childhood was gone. The curving, palm-shaded walks had been paved over for parking. The low, Spanish-style bungalows had been replaced with mid-rise office buildings. They had to go back to the guard and ask for directions to the vaults.

The studio had dozens of storage vaults for film footage. The sound department had vaults for sound track film and magnetic tape; the stock footage library had its vaults; there were the negative storage vaults and the storage area for library prints, the copies kept for the studio itself to use. There were vaults where bits and pieces of miscellaneous printed matter were kept, such as trailers, costume tests, and foreign language titles. Doug and Jill wanted the nitrate storage vaults.

Not only did nitrate film decompose rapidly, it was also highly flammable. Chemically it was much like dynamite. Burning nearly twenty times as fast as wood, it ignited at half the temperature at which wood ignited, and the older it got, the lower a temperature it would start to burn at. In the New York heat wave of 1949 there was a rash of fires in storage vaults started by rolls of nitrate film spontaneously igniting simply because of the hot weather.

Thus nitrate film had to be stored in fireproof bunkers. Each bunker was divided into small vaults about the size of a prison cell, holding no more than one thousand cans of film. The exterior wall of each vault was fitted with a blow-out panel, a flimsy, loosely fitting sheet of asbestos. If a fire started in an individual vault, the blow-out panel would explode open, drawing the flames and gases outward so that only the material stored in this one vault would be lost, not everything in the whole storage facility.

A guard met their car at a low, flat building that looked like a cinder block chicken coop. He unlocked the steel fire door and curled his hand inside to flick on a light switch. A dusty concrete corridor stretched out in front of them. Pairs of fire doors, each leading into a vault, faced one another along either side of the corridor. There were perhaps thirty vaults in all. "No Smoking" signs were posted every twenty feet.

"Be careful now," the guard cautioned. "This stuff is like gunpowder. Keep all the doors closed, except for the vault you are in, and if something starts to burn, get yourself out. There's no point in trying to put out the fire."

The doors to each vault were latched with steel bolts. Jill turned the heavy metal handle on the one closest to the entrance. A noxious smell slapped at their faces.

Doug drew back. "What's that?"

"Nitrate film decomposing. It really has an awful smell."

They flicked on the light inside the vault. Along the walls were ceiling-high steel shelves. Lying flat on the shelves were rusting cans two inches deep and ten inches in diameter, each able to hold two thousand feet of film, although some, Jill knew from the smell, would now store only fine brownish powder.

The archivists whom Cass had raised money to pay had organized the material alphabetically by decade. The cans were identified by fading adhesive labels. Even the ones put on by the archivists were now almost twenty years old. Neither Doug nor Jill recognized any of the titles. "This must be from the thirties," Jill guessed. "Let's find the forties."

They carefully closed this vault, making sure that the door was latched, so that if a fire started, the door would not explode open. They tried the next vault, and the next, squinting at the titles until Jill recognized
Accommodation,
a film made in the early forties.

The cans were organized alphabetically. Jill scanned through her father's list of suggested titles, picking out
The Living Stream
as the title first in the alphabet. Doug was already moving along the shelves, looking for the "L's." But this bunker ended with
The Good Hereafter.

They moved next door.
Life Worth Living
was followed by
Lost Prizes.
No
Living Stream.
On to the next bunker.
Stockings of Blue
was followed by
Stormbound.
No
A Stone of a Heart.

It was a work of moments.
A Terrible Beauty, Too Long a Sacrifice, Wherever Grey Is Worn
—nothing.

"Perhaps it's stored a little out of order," Doug suggested.

That wasn't likely, not if Cass had chosen the archivists. But they looked anyway, searching ahead and behind where each title should be. Still nothing. The archivists had known the alphabet. Then they looked for other key words from each title:
stream, heart, terrible, long, sacrifice, grey.
Nothing. Then they looked at each label of each can in the forties. Nothing again.

So they tried the other decades. They looked in the L's, S's, T's, and W's in every single nitrate vault. Still nothing. They looked again. And again. Every vault had the same acrid odor; the gases released by the decay of the film smelled strong and evil.

Jill had no idea what time it was. Her watch said something, but she couldn't remember if she had reset for California time. And it didn't matter. These dark vaults had nothing to do with the sun and nature's day. The clock ticking down in this underground world recorded only decay.

The cans, the floor, and the shelves were dusty, and Jill herself felt coated with a fine grit. She ran her hands down her face, feeling the dirt ball up under her fingers. She was tired, she was dirty, and she knew that this was pointless. She knew it, and so did Doug.

She went back into the hall, away from the worst smell, and slumped down to the floor, leaning her head back against the cinder block wall, feeling more tired, more dirty, than she had ever felt even in the Peace Corps. She shut her eyes.

Everyone was right. There was nothing. Maybe her father had saved the footage, and someone else had gotten rid of it. Maybe it had decomposed so badly that the archivists had destroyed it without being able to tell what it was. Maybe Cass hadn't saved it. Maybe he had unthinkingly discarded it; maybe he had deliberately destroyed it. She wasn't going to know.

She heard a door swing shut and latch. Then Doug spoke. "So we've wasted two fucking months."

Her eyes opened like a shot. "Oh, Doug, no, we haven't. How can you say that? Think of what we have found, the script, the—"

She stopped. Here it was, happening all over again. Doug was growing angry, and as disappointed as she was, she had set aside all her own feelings and was desperately, frantically, trying to coax him out of his anger. And she could, she knew that. In fact, they could go their whole lives with her stifling and choking off his normal reactions.

She took a breath. She wasn't sure what to do. She, so expert at soothing, did not know how to incite. But she had to try. "Except Charles could have given us that script any time. He knew all along where it was." She said this flatly. She believed it.

"If that's the case, then we've been real jerks."

The consoling answers tumbled into Jill's mind instantly, automatically.
Your family has a myth about Charles, and you accepted it. Family myths are powerful; they can't be gotten around easily.
But she wasn't going to say any of those.

"No, Doug, Charles isn't the issue. If you've wasted two months, if you've been a jerk, it's not because of what you have or haven't found. It's because you're looking for the wrong thing. You're not responsible for Bix's dying. You aren't obligated to clear his reputation. You're so involved in this because you don't want to think about yourself, your own reputation, and your own future."

He was staring at her. She had never spoken like this before. "What's gotten into you?"

"I'm getting sick of it, that's all." She stood up. "You ought to be thinking about yourself and what you're planning on doing with your life; you should be working on that, and instead we've been obsessed with the movie. I'm sick of it. Let's tackle what really matters."

She was lying. Jill, endlessly patient Jill, was not sick of him or the movie or even the unwholesome smell of these vaults. But, as she spoke, she realized that she should be telling the truth. She should be sick of this.

"You're being supportive." Now he was angry with her. "We're all truly grateful."

The rats' feet scuffled as they struggled to break out of their cages, their beady eyes glowing with a harsh yellow light. Jill refused to give in to them. "You're damn right. I'm being more supportive than anyone you've ever known or ever will know. I've been in therapy for more than a year now. Yes, I've read too many stupid self-help books, but I've also read the best psychology written. I know a lot. And if you don't want to take advantage of my help, then you don't deserve it... and you certainly don't deserve to get out of the hole you're in."

She marched out of the bunker, letting the fire door crash shut behind her. She blinked against the harsh glare of the morning sun, then marched on, flipping her hair back over her shoulders. She didn't stop; she didn't listen to see if the door was opening, if his footsteps were following.

The sidewalk turned at a stand of palm trees. In their long shadows the harsh July light was cool, muted. Jill stopped, the combative energy draining from her. She leaned back against a tree, her hand to her throat, trying to catch her breath.

She had never done anything like that, provoked a confrontation, let someone be angry with her, then walked away, knowing that his anger would fester and intensify. It had been horrible; she had hated it.

But she could do it again if she had to. She could hate anger, but she didn't need to be afraid of it. She was going back to her therapy group. She was going to face their anger, she was really going to work, and she was going to learn how to do this.

She started toward the car, but she was barely to the parking lot when she heard her name. She turned. Doug was coming out of the building. At the sight of her he broke into a run.

She watched. His run was magnificent, the effortless, long-legged lope of an athlete. The grey battle jacket of his Confederate uniform was open, swinging free. He was in front of her in moments, breathing harder than this exertion required. He gripped her shoulders, his arms and hands as dirty as hers, his eyes glowing with life.

"It's not you I'm angry at."

How wonderful he was, how sane, how normal. Other people took years to get to this point. It had taken him four minutes. "I know that," she answered.

"I don't know who it is, but it's not you."

"It doesn't have to be anyone." As bad as she might be at the practice, Jill did know the theory. "You can just be mad because it's a lousy situation."

"Oh, no." He turned her toward the car, starting to walk with one arm loosely around her. "There're villains in this piece. There're plenty of them."

"So get mad at them."

A light rap on the window woke their driver, who brushed aside their apologies. He was, he said, happy to have people pay him for sleeping.

Doug said little on the ride back to the hotel, but there was an energy about him, an alertness, a growing purpose. Until this moment Jill had known only negative things to come from anger, but Doug wasn't stewing, he wasn't fretting—he was getting ready to act. He was using his anger as a signal, a sign that it was time to do something. It was remarkable, thrilling.

The hotel was ready for them. The concierge hurried from behind her desk, ringing for a bellman, gesturing to registration for Jill's key. Jill took the key, murmuring Doug's name. And she knew that, within moments, someone on the hotel staff would be trying to find out who this man in dirty Confederate battle dress was.

The bungalow was fresh with bowls of flowers and a basket of fruit. "I need to clean up," she said to Doug as soon as they were inside.

"I should, too."

She had not taken a bath the whole time she had been at Aunt Carrie's; the morning's deposit of "caraway seeds" had restricted her to showers. She filled the hotel's large whirlpool with hot water, and the pounding jets left her so relaxed and limp that she could hardly put on her own almost-forgotten bathrobe. She found Doug in the living room, hanging up the phone, still unshowered, his chin stubbly. But his eyes were sparkling.

"This is great. The Lynx is in town; he'll be over in twenty minutes."

"That's great. I've wanted to meet him." That was true. She had wanted to meet Doug's best friend. She just didn't want to do it now. She was so tired. She approved of Doug's anger in theory; she was confident that, by working in her group, she would get better at it herself; but in the meantime, it was hard.

Doug hardly noticed how quietly she spoke. He was flying, a man brought back to life. "I ought to change. But I kind of like this, meeting him in a Confederate uniform. He can call me Massa; it will be good for him."

"He can call you whatever you want." It was wonderful to see him like this. She was sorry she couldn't share his exuberance, but it didn't matter. There would be so many other times. "But if we're talking about one person buying and selling another," she pointed out, "he's the one who could buy and sell you."

"That's true," Doug admitted cheerfully. "They are paying him a ton of money."

Jill roused herself enough to order breakfast, which arrived at the same time as the Lynx, a very tall, very quiet, very black man. The room-service waiter recognized him instantly.