The Edge of the Gulf (17 page)
Read The Edge of the Gulf Online
Authors: Hadley Hury
Without further words, the woman then led the way back up the pier toward shore, one arm linked as before in Michael’s, Terry and Joseph behind. They climbed the wooden steps and then descended into the car park. Just as the first fat, round blobs of tropical rain began to pummel them, the woman turned to Michael, took both his hands in hers. Her face glistened with rivulets of rainwater and her eyes welled with tears, but she did not blink and held him fast with her piercing gaze and a slight smile that suggested patient determination and a deeply shared intimacy.
“My cousin and I must return to our work now in Pensacola, Michael. Terry will go over the final details of the mission. We are honored that God has brought you to take such an important role in this glorious revival, this crusade for His truth. And Reverend Oakley and I thank you, too…” she hesitated, closing her eyes for a moment, “…personally. For our little brother Tim. We are with you and we love you, Michael. And until we meet again, you know that God is guiding your every step.”
With that, she got into the car with Joseph, who started the engine and turned on the lights and wipers, smiling diffidently and lifting his hand in farewell. They drove away into the early darkness of the downpour as Terry and Michael, drenched, climbed into Terry’s pickup.
The film, as it turned out, was even smarter and more surprising than Hudson had remembered.
“I hate to resort to a cliché, especially with a movie critic, but that last scene really put my stomach in knots,” said Camilla as they dashed back to the car in the downpour.
“Mine, too,” Hudson said. “Do you think a drink might unknot us?”
They stopped at a funky seafood place renowned for its oysters and clams, on Highway 98 near the turnoff to Santa Rosa. The place was crowded with an amalgam of locals, tourist families, and tables of local laborers stalled by the storm from going on home at the end of a hard day. It was loud and clattery and, quite uncharacteristically for him, that suited Hudson just fine. Is this a date? he had asked himself throughout the day. What’s going on here? He had interrupted the short stories he planned to use with the freshmen and the David Hare play he was considering for AP, interrupted himself, over and over, questioning himself, no matter how absurd he knew he was being.
“You’re a good host. Last night was great fun.”
“Thank you. A little out of practice.”
Her hazel eyes were frank and warm, and when she tilted her head very slightly her blunt-cut brown hair, finely streaked with gray, fell softly along one side of her face, not quite touching her shoulder.
“You’ve been on your own now for—two years did Charlie tell me? I’m very sorry. It must be hell.”
She was taking it head-on. Probably, he thought, very wise.
“Almost two and a half. It has been hell. Just recently I’ve come to think that I’m not in hell anymore. Just rather awkwardly in life. It’s not a lot easier. But I think it may be progress of a sort.”
She smiled gently, and Hudson suddenly knew what had caught his attention the first night he’d met her at 26-A and several times in the course of the previous evening. Her gaze was discreet but steady. Her smile was not brilliant or dazzling, it was slow and sure. She seemed to know something about life. They were the eyes and smile of someone who is not easily fooled, who is judicious and yet who—and this, he realized, was the great thing—manages to be kind.
He relaxed. They behaved shamelessly with the baskets of shellfish and slaw and hushpuppies, and laughed, and talked easily. About Laurel, teaching, the weather, movies, books, food. They lingered over a last cold beer.
***
“I’m on my own, too.
“As of four years ago. Divorced. I was married for sixteen years. My former husband is a cotton merchant and shipper. We divided our time between a wonderful, quaint old house in Mobile, where his offices are, and a place in Seaside; we were among the ‘early settlers.’ We have one wonderful son who is studying in France this summer and will be a sophomore at Sewanee in the fall.
“As I said last night, Charlotte is my home. I went to college in Charleston, then lived in Boston with a friend for a couple of years. Came back south to teach, in Atlanta, and met my husband there. He commuted from Mobile every weekend for nearly a year. I finally gave in. He made me laugh, he was very nice looking, and he had a generous nature and…he meant well.
“Unfortunately, not many years passed before I realized that there simply wasn’t much
there
there. No core, really. I stayed busy teaching and I didn’t want my son not to have a family. And there was actually very little unpleasantness. We just grew apart. There were a series of women. He was discreet. I blame no one, not even myself now, though I did do that for awhile. I was disappointed, and I’ve come to think that living too long with disappointment can eventually make people feel like something less than whoever or whatever disappointed them in the first place.” She smiled.
“My husband has kept the house in Seaside, though he and his new wife who, according to my bemused nineteen-year-old, just celebrated her
thirty-third
birthday, spend less time here than before. They do come into 26-A, of course, from time to time….”
“Hmm.”
She laughed. “Oh, no. That’s nothing. We’re all very amiable and everyone knows I’m happier than I’ve been in years. I know I do. The divorce and his almost immediate remarriage are far beyond their shelf life as local gossip. I’m old news now. I can’t tell you what bliss that is.
“I love my work. Teaching the little ones was great. I did it for eleven years. But I came to a point where I needed a change, and I opened a small retail business with a friend. I learned a lot but it just wasn’t the right fit, so I sold my interest to my partner. I ran into Charlie—we’d known him socially for years—at a party several months after the divorce. He got this funny look on his face when he saw me across the room, and we ended up on this patio discussing all the reasons why I should think seriously about taking over at 26-A. His manager was about to move on to open a place in Key West and he hadn’t found anyone he felt he could really entrust his ‘baby’ with. He was ready to start pulling back. I said yes.” Camilla’s smile grew broader.
“And every minute since I’ve been so happy I did. Charlie’s a good man and he’s created an exceptionally fine place. Victor and Fentry are treasures. I feel at home there, and the work offers me just the right context in which to bring together my interests and skills. I like the routine and I like the unexpectedness: it’s like teaching in that the form remains largely consistent and yet every evening, every moment, really, is in some way new. Plus I get to do things that I just plain like and enjoy and am good at. It suits me.”
***
As they drove through the pitch-black Gulf night, even more seamless than usual in its enveloping rain, Camilla said, “It was good being with Libby last night. I hadn’t seen her in too long a time.”
“As we say back home, isn’t she
something
?”
“Indeed,” she laughed. “I’m crazy about her.”
“Me, too.”
They rode for awhile in silence, staring ahead as the headlights followed the broken center line of the road through the storm.
Then Hudson asked, “Had you met Chaz before?”
“Only briefly in March. Charlie and he were in for dinner. Twice, I think.”
“You and Libby seemed to be keeping him entertained at your end of the table.”
“Mostly Libby—which was just dandy with me. I enjoyed your wonderful pasta and pretty much sat back and watched the show.” Hudson looked over just in time to see her eyes shift to the dark masses of trees hurrying past the windows. “We certainly talked, though.”
“They’re a handsome couple aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Charlie’s very happy for them.”
“Of course.”
After another silence, Camilla said, “I enjoyed meeting Susie. She’s so attractive and bright.”
“A passionate reader and an inquiring mind. Gives me hope that all of America’s youth aren’t turning into passive video heads.” He paused, looking over again for a moment. “Will I retain whatever status I may have as a gentleman if I say I think I just sensed a change of subject?”
“Oh? Chaz, you mean? Well, I don’t know.”
“I’m wondering if Charlie has shared some of the same things with us.”
“About Chaz’s background? Yes. It’s not that exactly.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not interested in prying.”
“No, I know that. And I’m not trying to be mysterious. It’s just that until you brought him up I hadn’t really sorted through some impressions I had last night.” She turned to him, and smiled. “And I’ve enjoyed our evening and don’t want you to think I’m some sort of madwoman.”
“Hadn’t really
occurred
to me.”
“Okay.” She pursed her lips, then said, “I don’t want to be unfair. It’s just that something about him, oddly enough, reminds me of my former husband.”
“Attractive and charming, I think you said.”
“Yes, and that may be part of it. But that’s not what struck me. There was something more intangible yet somehow more specific than that.” She paused. “It was the way he talked about his business, I think. He seemed knowledgeable, had lots of humorous anecdotes. A natural marketer. I remember thinking at some point in the evening that if he really wanted to, he could do very well indeed in Atlanta.”
“And?”
“Well, what I’m remembering now is the precise phrasing of that observation as it formed in my mind. ‘If he really wanted to.’ That seems odd.”
“Is that it, do you think? Did your husband not really care about his business?”
“Well, he cared very much about the idea of it, about the idea of being chairman of the board, about all the trappings that go with it. But I think he cared even more that his father had built it and that his brother, for all intents and purposes, ran it. He talked a good game, he looked involved, and occasionally I think he even wanted to believe himself that he had it in his blood. But I’m relatively certain that for all those years, even the early ones, his office was just a brief stop on the way to the next golf or tennis game, or long lunch. Or, later on, girlfriends.”
She paused and looked levelly at him. “And now you’re going to think that I have some sort of sick obsession about my former husband, which I assure you I do not. My passing impression may be utterly wrong, anyway, and it’s incredibly rude of me to be discussing someone I don’t even know like this. I can’t imagine what, as my mother used to say, got into me.”
“I
asked
you. You feel as though something is missing.”
“But that’s incredibly presumptuous. There’s nothing wrong with not loving your work. That’s the natural state of most human beings, isn’t it? I think
we’re
in a very tiny, very fortunate minority.”
“But your husband not loving his work was not, alone, I take it, the only problem. You spoke earlier of ‘no core.’”
“Yes. I suppose less than passionate involvement in the firm might even have been desirable, if there had ever been any real engagement with anything else. An avocation of some kind. Public service. Charities. Faith. Our son. Anything.” She paused. “I was young but I should have known better. I mistook his rather vain expansiveness and animal energy for character and spirit.”
“And you think it’s something like that you may have glimpsed in Chaz?”
“
May have
being the key words. You know, though, this impression may have much more to do with my feelings for Charlie than anything else. I have such high regard for him and am so fond of him, and I know how much his cousin Peter meant to him, that I may be holding this man up to some unrealistic and completely unjustified standard. Chaz is not Charlie. And apparently he’s come through a lot, and that’s admirable. And this is really none of my business. I’m behaving like one of those people I loathe. All that I need to do is wish them the best and be glad that Charlie’s happy.”
Hudson pulled over in front of the cottage, behind Camilla’s car. He turned and looked at her.
“That’s exactly what I told
myself
this morning over coffee. When I found myself wondering what had gone on last night at
my
end of the table. Why, instead of feeling some sort of personal response to Sydney, I went to bed with my film reviewer’s hat apparently sitting squarely on my head. ‘Great performance,’ I thought. And, in order to get to sleep, I finally wrote it off to the fact that she had been an actor and that even when some actors leave the profession they never really retire. But this morning I thought, no, it wasn’t anything that simple. Or that obvious. Oh, she may have been a bit eager, but I’m sure she just wanted to please Charlie’s friends. She’s attractive, charming, intelligent, good-humored, extremely poised but evidently capable of spontaneity.…”
“And?”
“I have no idea. But perhaps almost the opposite of ‘something missing.’ Something more like, like something
extra
. Like a great actor trying not to grandstand, trying to make the harder choices, the most subtle ones. Trying to disappear as an actor and cross that line where they really become the human being, really live it. It’s rare.”
The windows were coated with condensed moisture, and he turned off the engine. They looked at one another in the tree-and-rain-dappled light from the old wooden streetlight down the road. “You were
impressed
with her? Would that be accurate?” asked Camilla.
He looked out into the darkness and they listened for a moment to the sounds of rain and wind. “Exactly.” He turned back to look at her. “I could find no fault with her. But this morning I felt somehow,
disappointed
, may be the word, that that was the best I could do as a response. As you say, perhaps we just have unjustified expectations for Charlie’s sake.”
“And,” said Camilla, “you know he’d be the first to say that Chaz and Sydney are their own people, living their own lives, they obviously are bright and attractive, and they’re not bothering anyone. So who are we to judge?”
“Right. He’s happy enough that Chaz isn’t dead from an overdose or living in a halfway house somewhere. And that he’s found a capable, good-looking woman whom he loves and who loves him.”
Smiling, she asked, “So what’s our problem, do you suppose?”
“We’re idealists?”
“Okay, let’s go with that. It’s so much nicer than busybodies. Frankly, I’m just pleased that you shared your, whatever it is, with me. I certainly never intended to spend the last part of a very pleasant evening doing this rather bizarre post mortem, but at least now I don’t have to go home knowing you must think I’m some sort of, I don’t know,
misanthrope
.”
Hudson laughed. “Misanthropes don’t have smiles like yours.”
***
He couldn’t sleep. He managed to finish off a
New York Times
Saturday crossword puzzle that had frustrated him for three days. From the porch he watched the last of the rain dripping from the eaves and heard it in the silhouettes of the trees. He wandered the cottage. Finally, he decided he might as well work. There was no need to revisit his appraisal of the Julie Christie performance, but the conversation with Camilla brought another film to mind. He took up his station at the desk in the hall, scanned a few files, and began to read.
L.A. Confidential From Noir to Neo-Puritanism –Catching the American Conscience at a very specific moment
There has been much comment about
L.A. Confidential
’s style, particularly the palpable authenticity of its sense of time—it is set in the early 1950s—and deservedly so. From the upholstery on a diner’s banquettes to the bands on men’s hats, from the snout-nosed Ford coupes on the streets to Kay Starr crooning on the airwaves, the production design by Jeannine Oppwall and costumes by Ruth Myers are seamlessly accurate. The idiom of the dialogue, refashioned from James Ellroy’s thriller by Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland, snaps with the breezy be-bop slang of the ’50s, punctuated here and there by monosyllabic tough-guyisms still in post-War favor. Hanson, who also directs, and cinematographer Dante Spinotti unfurl the movie with a perfect texture and pace, equal parts seedy
film noir
and brassy “Show of Shows,” that catch that very instant when America, and most emblematically, Hollywood, were poised between the school of hard knocks (the Depression and the War) and a jarring array of social revolutions (the ’60s and beyond). If the 1950s may be described as a period for self-satisfaction, a time simply to keep up with the Joneses and contemplate our blessings, then certainly no one aided and abetted our strictly enforced sentimentality more avidly than did Hollywood. The conformist morality of its product was never more sanctioning, or hypocritical. The world of
Written on the Wind
and
Magnificent Obsession
did not invite an introspective splitting of the fine hairs of conscience; it was a broad-brush canvas, a midnight or noon world of fraught but tight-lipped consensus.
In the 1952 of
L.A. Confidential,
the facade of the American Dream is getting a good buff everywhere, but nowhere as energetically as in the city that has become the western outpost of that dream, where people get off the bus to do, well, they may not even know, but something better than from whence they came. You can eat oranges right off the trees and stars are born every day. And if the American Dream, like any great dream of mankind’s, needs a face in order to move the masses, then Hollywood is the place that gave it to us. L.A. is the Face Capital of the World. Through the depths of the Depression, the movies reflected an American public that had grit and sentiment, laughter, and even glamour, whether the mirror was accurate or not. And during the War years, they showed us all together on the home front, waiting for victory, in one homey back lot hometown, as often as not, singing and dancing. After the boys came home, Hollywood (almost despite itself) gave us some faces more troubled, less certain, less composed, faces that had seen some trust, whether with the American Dream or a buddy or a dame, broken. Hollywood, however, doesn’t ever flirt too long with the dark side. So now it’s 1952, and Ike’s been elected and McCarthy’s going to get rid of the Communists, and we’re all learning How To Win Friends and Influence People. We’re putting on a happy face and a busily moral face, and if you can’t be happy and be moral, you sure as hell better
look
that way.
L.A. Confidential
is not merely appropriately named, it is, like many a fine film or novel, so steeped in its sense of place that it is impossible to imagine the story coming to life anywhere else. Its themes—appearance vs. reality, corruption, heroism, and love’s redemption—are universal. And the fact that these forces are at war for the soul of an urban police department seems broadly applicable: after decades of serial television and investigative news stories, the institution has become one of our most visible moral battlegrounds, a microcosm of society’s fault lines. Not only is
L.A. Confidential
not just an easily transplantable
NYPD
episode or
Serpico
gone south, its title city transcends its function of background to become one of the primary characters. Not one of the film’s intricately woven plot lines could breathe anywhere but in the hothouse atmosphere of La La Land; none of the story’s central characters would confront their demons or their dreams as they do here, interacting with the schizophrenic entity that has become the church and state of illusory values.
L.A. Confidential
brings us face to face with Los Angeles, home to human expatriates in exile from themselves, city of angels rising and descending, improbable earth mother, waterless, glamorous, putrefied. This unique city is as uniquely inescapable in a consideration of this film’s impact as it was in such memorably L.A.-centric works as
In a Lonely Place, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful
,
Day of the Locust, Chinatown, Tequila Sunrise,
and
The Player
. Not to mention that Jacobean soap opera, the O.J. Simpson case.
At the heart of
L.A. Confidential
is the relationship between Bud White (Russell Crowe), a tough, sad-eyed, loyal young cop, who wants to do the right thing but is painfully suspended in a state of suppressed fury by department superiors who use his brawn for their back-room intimidation sessions, and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), a rule-book model officer whose ambition and unyielding standards do not make him popular with the rank and file. There’s plenty not to like about both. One of the beauties of the film is that it never rushes our sympathies; it gives us just enough about each man to
interest
us as the film’s convoluted plot lines slowly come together for full gallop to the finish. Only in the final scenes of the film do we experience, all the more powerfully for it being something of a surprise, a depth of feeling and of respect for them both.
One of their colleagues is Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a guy who’s gotten so smooth he can’t stop himself from outrageous displays of verbal smarminess, even though we can see there’s an acrid taste of self-loathing, or at least self-fatigue, when he does it. Vincennes is adviser to the TV cop show “Badge of Honor” and something of a minor celebrity. He takes small pay-offs and we sense that his inner barometer about what’s too small to bother with or too vile to touch is less reliable that it used to be. He turns his head so often it’s in a perpetual swivel. Spacey is extraordinarily adroit at making Vincennes, at once, faintly disgusting and touchingly sympathetic. When he tries to turn what we know could be a big corner in his life, we root for him; and it hurts when he answers Exley’s question about why he became a cop. It’s Spacey’s most galvanizing moment: there’s an attempt at the usual glibness, followed by a wide-eyed, wordless straining at truth; followed by the actual, crushing truth: “I don’t remember.” Vincennes is the perfect cop for a world founded on duplicity; he’s acting, and he’s been acting for so long that he’s forgotten to remember where all the bodies are buried. Too late he realizes that among them is his own.
Danny DeVito is exuberantly trashy as Sid Hudgens, verminish reporter for
Hush-Hush
magazine. He and Vincennes occasionally trade favors: Jack’ll set up the vice bust of a starlet and tip Sid to be there with his cameras. James Cromwell plays Lieutenant Dudley Smith as a benign Irish patriarch and, amazingly, does so without resorting to cliché. It’s a cunningly crafted performance and should dispel the notion, held in some quarters, that his Oscar nomination three years ago for his role as the farmer in
Babe
was a fluke. As Pierce Patchett, an elegantly tailored Brentwood gentleman who runs a high-class string of hookers, whom he sends to hairdressers or even plastic surgeons to heighten their resemblance to stars of the day, David Straitharn continues a string of low-key but vividly eccentric performances that are mesmerizing in their variety.
It’s hard to imagine any two actors being more suited, more innately
right
, than Crowe and Pearce for the two leads. Which is precisely the point. In one of the smarter moves made on any major film this year, Hanson wisely avoided using better-known stars (and managed to talk the producers into it). The pay-off for the audience is enormous; we are allowed to experience fully our seduction by the film’s suspense, its sensuousness, its ideas, because we are not distracted with projecting star expectations onto the personas on the screen. There’s nothing to get in the way of the good work here, and it’s very good, indeed; the characterizations are finely drawn. Even the physical opposition of the actors’ good looks have room to work: Crowe’s heaviness of experience sits uneasily on his brow; Pearce’s chiseled righteousness is matched by his cheekbones.
In another instance, it’s hard to imagine how what the audience
does know
about an actor’s historical baggage could add more to a performance. The face that is most familiar among the cast of
L.A. Confidential
belongs to Kim Basinger. Her performance as Lynn Bracken, a Veronica Lake look-alike from Patchett’s agency, accrues its emotional heft precisely because moviegoers have watched her migration in recent years from blonde sexpot to would-be dramatic and comedic actor, to owner of a small town in Georgia, to bankruptcy and box office poison after being sued for conduct deemed unbecoming by a major studio, to marriage to Alec Baldwin, motherhood, and a measured, modest comeback. It’s all there. And it makes her love for Officer White nearly unbearable in its wounded tough-cookie need.
Hanson and Helgeland have handled the neat convolutions of Ellroy’s crime thriller with cinematic finesse, and even though Hanson’s sense of pace and stylistic integrity are sinuous and sophisticated, the real fuel here, as in the
noir
classics of the ’40s and early ’50s, is emotion. Last week, speaking at the fifth Film Preservation Festival, director Martin Scorsese said of those films: “They were about descending into a labyrinth where anything can happen, including the death of the protagonist.”
For 135 minutes,
L.A. Confidential
takes us with it on such a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes—one of whom, not long before, we’d taken to be a psychotic thug and the other a reptilian prig—to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of integrity.
Odd that for many who see this movie, in which the city of movies looms so large, its white hot light streaked with the shadows of palm trees and ghosted with celluloid shadows, it may be, in the end, not other movies about L.A. or the movies that are recalled first to mind. It might well be a film made in 1952,
High Noon—
another exploration of the American Dream, violent evil, and our constantly reforming need to find a face, however unlikely, we can trust.