2
On deck, out of sight, Ray had his notebook open and was trying to concentrate, to collect. It was difficult. The ship’s engines were loud and the wind thumped off the Atlantic making the corners of the pages buzz and blur. Ray became engrossed in that sight. When he was beat, which in the army was most of the time, he found these small impressions dilating in his mind and filling his attention. Often they brought with them forgotten things of his childhood. Back in training, at night, his body tired and tight, twitching into sleep, the blanket he lay under brought back exactly one he’d seen in a cowboy picture when he was small. In the scene, a cowboy placed the blanket over a sleeping boy, a small courageous boy who had followed him out on a journey and now lay in front of a fire. Ray had in his mind the exact weight of the blanket, the rounded, smooth solidity where it was folded over at the top and rested on the boy’s shoulder. Those few seconds of that movie had obviously gone deeply into him. He remembered how he’d imagined himself as that boy after he’d seen it — achieving that perfection of sleep, eyelids perfectly still, the blanket heavy and calm, the fire’s busy, watchful light in all that dark space. Sometimes waking in the Quonset hut he found himself lost in a still earlier time. He expected to see in front of him his brother’s face puffed out with sleep or the hollow in the back of his neck, his sharp shoulder blades, before he woke up and got mean. Ray remembered waking in a new day and lying there in the peace before his brother was up, hearing his father pissing in the bathroom before leaving for the leather workshop, the husky sound of his sister Monica brushing her hair in the hallway, shouts and early traffic outside, pigeons grumbling on the window ledge, their shadows shifting.
In Ray’s notebook were written his ideas for movies, sometimes whole stories, sometimes single scenes or images, things he’d put in if he were making a movie. On some pages were drawings of exactly what he wanted to see on the screen, profiles of faces against backgrounds, landscapes, men walking between streetcars, between skyscrapers. He didn’t expect he ever could or would be but he loved inventing, was susceptible to deep reveries in which things occurred with the glossy smoothness and sureness of movies. He kept having these ideas, ideas he’d wanted to hang on to. Sometimes he wrote down actors’ names, people with the right mood in their faces for the characters. A while ago he’d bought this particular small notebook with a blue and white hardboard cover and he’d brought it with him to war where he expected many ideas to come to him. He held it open at a blank page beneath the left side of which he could see the ink of his last jottings. There was a complete scenario that he was pleased with, an idea for a picture about a boxer, a scrappy kid from the neighbourhood, maybe one of the tough kids his brother hung around with on the corners getting into trouble until one day he wandered into a gym and found discipline, focus, ambition. Of course the boxer couldn’t separate himself entirely from his old ways and friends. In the lead-up to the big fight he gets caught up in a robbery and his trainer, an old guy, a real father figure, gives up on him and quits. The boxer almost gives up on himself also and has a wild night on the booze before pulling himself together, going it alone with guts and determination, and winning. Ray hadn’t yet decided if that was it or maybe even better would be that the old trainer is there at the fight, appearing in his corner after a brutal round, and tells him that he hadn’t given up on him but had said so to shake the kid into showing his real spirit and decency.
Ray liked that story because it was so complete, a very satisfying tale of a bad kid turning out to be good and kind. Every scene fell into place as soon as he started thinking about it. He had the entire picture in his head and could run it any time. That was the only place it would ever be. He had no idea how a picture got made and certainly didn’t think that someone like him would get to make one. He just loved the movies. Lots of people did, for sure, but not like him. Ray didn’t think they really got them in the same way. He’d sneak in through a fire escape and sit with his whole soul wide open in the darkness and filling with the characters, the silver and black, the music, the streets, interiors and landscapes, the camera winding its way through the world, seeing things. Other people there, eating and fooling around and puffing the projector beam full with curling smoke, didn’t seem to get it. They were moved all right and they laughed but the scale of the magic, its possibilities, they didn’t think about that.
The other idea he’d had in his mind recently was a love story but for this he only had a scene, a beginning. He wanted to work out where it would go. All he had was this guy, a Fifth Avenue office type, smalltime and hard-working. Every day he eats his lunch in the same city park, on the same bench. This young secretary appears each day at the next bench, takes her sandwich out of a paper bag and eats it. They start greeting each other, little nods. They sit separately and take quick furtive glances. And one day they say hello and another day the young man plucks up courage and sits on her bench and they talk. Ray could see the girl, her face in the soft light of a close-up: chalk-white skin, sculpted hair, large intimate hopeful shining eyes. The man is handsome but not too handsome, ordinary really. They sit together and sparrows peck around their feet and old ladies with little dogs walk by. All the possibilities of the future surround them, leaning in close. It’s in the way they’re photographed, a hazy brightness, summer light hitting off them. She smiles and turns her head a half-inch and it means the whole world.
That was all he had.
Ray inhaled sharply. The cold ocean air shocked him awake. Now he was in the army, there was a moment of panic when he caught himself sinking into his imagination. He came to and was in actual fact on a warship heading for battle. True and unbelievable.
He’d opened his notebook because he thought he might use it like a journal, to record historic things and make observations about the characters he was meeting. There were plenty that fascinated him. The army had taken him from the cramped, complicated, disorderly world of his Italian neighbourhood and introduced him to the rest of America, to people like George.
Usually Ray kept himself to himself, hiding in the dark, preferring invisibility. He liked to be quiet and think. The army, then, was not a natural place for him. He could be seen all the time. Powerful, watching people shouted at him, making him run and crawl and stand thrusting himself upwards at attention and repeat things after them. Just shouting, ‘Yes, sir!’ was difficult for Ray. Flinging his voice out loud and clear made his heart race. Every day in the army there were terrors to confront. At night he fell fast asleep.
Back home, Ray’s brother was unpredictable and not a pleasant person and much more at home in the neighbourhood than Ray was. He had tough and aimless friends whose attention you did not want to attract. They knew precise ways to twist your skin and take your money from you. They would encircle you and dare you to do something. ‘Dare’ was not the right word — you had to do it or suffer some penalty. They enjoyed themselves. They were street life and that meant they were out there, in places you needed to be. Walking past, Ray could get from his own brother a cold, empty stare, sometimes a kind of malevolent indifference that was the best of it, other times an annihilation, a threat that made him sick to his stomach. Ray hid from his brother and his friends, in different places and inside himself. Until the draft came and he was taken out of that place and put into one so raw and unfamiliar he started to miss home.