“Like Mailer?” I might not pass many tests, but I recalled a recent Tooth History of New York.
“Sure, but Mailer had it all fouled up, he still bought the romance of Marilyn Monroe, all that Andy Warhol crap. Brando was pure because he’d been out there, had Marilyn, knew it didn’t matter. He was our captain. Maybe it’s not too late.”
“Not too late-?” To lure Brando here to run for mayor? I hesitated to complete the thought aloud, fearing I’d lead Perkus to this conclusion if he hadn’t reached it already. I wasn’t sure which was more worrisome, Perkus’s careening logic or that I’d mostly been able to follow it.
“No, Brando’s keeping faith. That’s what I realized, Chase. He’s still out there, sending up flares, if anyone’s paying attention.”
“What flares?”
“His most recent film, that spy movie, Footholds-you know how it was supposedly ruined by his battles with the director, Florian Ib, the guy who made The Gnuppet Movie? There’s this one anecdote from the set, seems like typical Hollywood gossip, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
“Yes?”
“So, there’s a scene they’re shooting, Ib’s setup calls for a wide shot, but Brando demands a close-up. They argue over it, but neither backs down, and then Brando goes back to his trailer, and when he comes out for the shot, he’s wearing only the top half of his costume. Right there, with the whole crew watching, Brando’s nude from the waist down. He’s basically daring Florian Ib to shoot the wide shot.”
“I’m somehow guessing Marlon got his close-up.”
He tried to contain his impatience with me. “Sure, but if that was the whole point it wouldn’t be more than showbiz vanity. The thing is, by that time Brando’s figured out Footholds won’t be much of a vehicle for what he needs to say, so he sends out this message.”
“What message?”
“It took me a while to decipher it, but think, Chase-what’s the Platonic form of a Gnuppet?” My baffled look told Perkus not to wait for my guess this time. “Your quintessential Gnuppet stands behind a wall, right? You only ever see them from the waist up. Remove the wall, or the edge of the frame, and you’d see the hands of the operators, making them move. I’ve been studying Brando’s scene in The Gnuppet Movie, there’s a reason he’s pointing us back to that work-the key is the relation between the actors and the Gnuppets. We’re players in a Gnuppet realm, reading from the same script. We’re All Gnuppets. Brando was saying: abolish this boundary, tear down the wall or the curtain, and let’s have a look at the Gnuppeteers.”
“Or at his genitals.”
“Haven’t you wondered why the average consumer is uncomfortable with letterboxed movies? It isn’t because most people are programmed to be Philistines, though they are. Cable channels go on offering scan-and-pan versions to keep people from having to consider that frame’s edge, which reminds them of all they’re not seeing. That glimpse is intolerable. When your gaze slips beyond the edge of a book or magazine, you notice the ostensible texture of everyday reality, the table beneath the magazine, say, or the knee of your pants. When your eye slips past the limit of the letterboxed screen, you’re faced with what’s framed and projected in that margin-it ought to be something, but instead it’s nothing, a terrifying murk, a zone of nullity. But the real reason it’s so terrifying is because it begs the question of whether they’re the same thing. Maybe the tabletop or the knee of your pants bears no more relation to the contents of the magazine than the images on the screen do to the void above and below.”
I rinsed a glass and handed Perkus some cold tap water, wanting to see something going in besides coffee.
“I think I ought to put up a broadside,” he said.
“It’s been a long time.” I spoke cautiously, not wanting to jar him, and anyway uncertain of my facts.
“Yes.”
We both glanced in at the paperscape of his living-room floor, the unreconstructed epiphany. Was it a broadside in progress? That groping collage seemed a kind of wan parody of the maniacal hand-scrawled rants of his heyday. It dawned on me that by lighting on a champion whose triumph was in declining to appear, Perkus might elaborately forgive his own years of inactivity, his hide-and-seek muse. That Brando had frittered away much of his prime gave them something in common. (Me, too, if I bothered to think in those terms.) Even better, absence could form a statement, especially if punctuated with a well-timed and phantasmal return, the broadside equivalent of Sacheen Littlefeather. Manhattan might have forgotten Perkus and his broadsides, but never mind. He’d send up a flare.
“Would you help me put it up?” he asked.
“Like Oona Laszlo?” I joked. “You want me for your glue-girl?”
“Seriously.”
This figure before me-with bare-knuckly shoulders, cheek sinews tensed beneath beard bristles, fingernails mooned with newsprint dirt, unmoored eye careening-I’d sooner chaperone to Bellevue’s intake door myself than allow onto the street to be swept up by Mayor Arnheim’s quality-of-life squad. “On one condition,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll let me make an appointment for you with my Chinese practitioner.”
I didn’t kid myself that Perkus felt obligated. Rather, he’d agreed out of a kind of pity for me that I pitied him, and out of embarrassment at my worry. Plus I saw I’d made him curious, with my wild claims for Strabo Blandiana’s visionary and remedial powers. What if Perkus could be freed of the cluster headaches? How much more ellipsis would that leave time for? Any gambit might be worth that chance. Some rare medical gift might come shrouded in the mystical wrapping paper.
So here he was, pocked with needles, a Saint Sebastian of aromatherapy and pan-flute solos, when he could have been home studying Brando’s Gnuppet moment frame by frame, like it was the Zapruder film. Well, it was relaxing, at least. Obediently breathing all the way to the pit of his stomach, he expected to feel sleepy. Instead experienced the opposite effect, grew strangely excited inside his total stillness, whether creditable to needles, the somatic tones dwelling underneath the fake-Asian music, residual traces of coffee and pot, or Strabo’s uncanny pronouncements. The loss you felt was already real. Something in living memory, but not adequately remembered. You know what you need to do to continue your work. These phrases continued to sink through Perkus. He couldn’t feel Strabo’s needles at all, but if he closed his eyes his body seemed to float toward the ceiling, a disconcerting sensation he avoided by opening his eyes instead. There at the center of vision was the framed photograph he’d passingly noted before, of the orange ceramic vase glowing, as if lit from within, against the minimal white backdrop. The line of the table on which the vase sat was barely detectable, so near was the tone of the tabletop to the wall behind it. The vase was lit to throw no shadow against either wall or table. It had a translucence, perhaps opalescence would be the word, like something hewn from marble the color of a Creamsicle. Under the circumstances, the vase seemed to have its own message for Perkus: Have you neglected Beauty? Even as he believed he contemplated the photograph with idle curiosity, killing time as he would with a copy of Sports Illustrated in a dentist’s waiting room, Perkus felt the tears begin to seep across his cheeks, toward his ears, the salt stinging tiny fresh cuts that edged his sideburns, cuts he’d incurred shaving with shaky hands.