“Say, Manny,” I said, ambling over, “I haven’t signed your cast yet.”
“That’s right, you haven’t,” he said.
“May I borrow your pen, Alice?”
“Hello, Peter,” she said, and batted her lashes at me the way Max the violinist was batting his at David. She unclipped a ballpoint pen from the scooped throat of the blouse where it had been snuggled warm and deep, and I accepted it gratefully.
“Well, now,” I said. “Let me see.”
“Make it something funny,” Alice said.
“Would you like something funny?” I asked Schwartz.
“Why not?” he said. “We could use a little humor in this farchadat world.”
“How about ‘I love Alice. Signed, Peter.’?”
“That’s funny?” Schwartz asked, and shrugged.
“It’s nice,” Alice said, and smiled.
“I’ll think of something while we dance,” I said. “Be right back, Manny.”
“Take your time,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Better tuck this back in there,” I said, handing Alice the pen.
“You can hold onto it,” she said.
“Which one?”
“Fresh,” she said, and smiled again, and I thought, Ah yes, we are moving into that rarefied atmosphere where intellectuals flit on gossamer wings and wit is batted about like a badminton bird.
Bittner didn’t like my dancing with his waitress. He was sitting with the Trates, telling them all about the pleasures of skiing deep powder, grinning as we glided by, and suddenly the grin dropped from his face. Gaping, blinking, he silently debated whether rebuking an employee was tantamount to rebuking a guest, weighed in the positive value of my best friend having finally brought this mortuary to life, and apparently decided a dancing waitress was better than nobody dancing at all. Delighted by his good business sense, I pulled Alice a little closer.
The movie started along about then.
It was exactly what David, Sandy, and I had been discussing in the bar that afternoon. About things not seeming real sometimes. About everything suddenly looking and feeling like a movie. I don’t understand it completely. I don’t understand, for example, why whenever I go to a play, even though there are real people on the stage, moving in a real set with real furniture, I always know they’re actors, a small part of my mind always reminds me that it’s all make-believe. But when I’m in a movie theater watching the filmed images of people who are forty-seven times bigger than I am, they somehow get reduced to proper scale and the whole thing (it’s only film, it’s only celluloid) takes on a dimension closer to reality than either a stage play or real life. That’s the part that gets me. That a film should seem more real than life itself.
The opposite of that phenomenon was exactly what began happening the moment I pulled Alice in against me. The reality started going by too fast, things began happening on the periphery of my vision and my consciousness, so that actual happenings seemed projected on multiple screens in a new technique that enabled me to be a part of the action without really being a part of it, a simultaneous observer and participant, a voyeur spying on himself over closed-circuit television in a locked closet.
I once read a book by a writer whose name I forget, where he had one of his characters lapse into third-person present whenever he thought about himself, and always in terms of a movie in which he was the star. After I finished the book, I realized why the author had done that. He had the hero talking in first-person past throughout the book (except during those movie fantasies), but he had him die at the end of the book, you see, and a man who’s dead can’t be writing about himself in the first person, past or otherwise. The writer used this film technique at the end, so that his hero could step out of and away from himself (and also out of the first-person narrative) while he was getting killed. It sounds very complicated, but it was no less complicated than what I was feeling at that very moment in time and space — that I was in a film and watching it at the same time.
Dr. Krakauer has suggested that this is not unusual in my generation, which was brought up on visual images. Sitting glued to the boob tube, we watched the products of other men’s imaginations, and maybe, just maybe, thought we were exercising our own imaginations, and maybe, just maybe, thought we were a part of what was happening on the screen. Maybe that screen, because it was in the familiar environment of our own living room or playroom, became real to us — as real as the cooking smells coming from the kitchen. Dr. Krakauer holds forth at great length on topics that interest him (I suspect he’s an inveterate movie buff), but he rarely clarifies for me feelings that are puzzling and sometimes, to tell the truth, quite frightening. As I danced around the room with Alice’s breasts pressed hard and soft against me and my right hand sliding down toward her buttocks, I think I was a little frightened by the movie snippets flashing on those multiple screens everywhere around me. It was like losing control. I hate to lose control.
Max, the expert Austrian skier and amateur violinist, is apparently inspired by David’s tootling, moves closer to him at the microphone, and in response to his just-completed lick, unleashes a violin response that is not half bad. David, as startled by the outburst as he might be if his toy poodle began reciting Chaucer, picks up on the string solo, and tries to encourage a musical dialogue reminiscent of those great old trumpet duels between Elman and James. Were Max a better musician, the result might be electrifying, recorder and violin bouncing ideas off each other, nourishing each other, hand-in-glove, so to speak. Max being what he is, however, the result is more like tongue-in-cheek, even though he plays as if possessed of a musical demon, frantically fingering, bowing, plucking, and echoing David’s intricate work.
David seems grateful to be bouncing his music off anything at all, even Max, who is only slightly less dense than a brick wall. He keeps encouraging Max with little appreciative nods of the head and little beckoning dips of the recorder in his hands. Max reaches the climax of his career when the audience bursts into sudden applause. He almost collapses in tears, bows from the waist, grins sheepishly, and stands by sweating as David polishes off the one-sided duel with a wildly extravagant cadenza that almost brings down the roof. Max bursts into laughter. David laughs with him, and then they hug each other cheerily, like a pair of Russian wrestlers who have just thrown six Chinese out of the ring and into third row center. Assuming undisputed leadership of the band, David signals for Volkmar and Helmut to continue playing (wonderful little musical aggravation you’ve got there, David) while he and Max wander over to the bar to celebrate the success of their debut.
“Oh, I’m sorry they’re not playing any more,” Alice said.
“Well, the other fellows are playing,” I said.
“Yes, but they’re not as good.”
“Who needs music anyway?” I said.
“Mmm, hey, uh, listen,” she said.
“Mmm?”
“I work here, you know.”
“That’s right.”
“So, uh, like, take it easy, okay?”
“What time do you quit?”
“Why?”
“Thought we’d take a little moonlight stroll.”
“There isn’t any moon,” Alice reminded me. “It’s snowing.”