9
If I were the central figure of my own narrative, I might have conceived some final reckoning with the three punks. It would have been a different story: gunfire, spilled blood, violent deaths, an end once and for all to the claims of rebellion. They might even kill my father, stab him with a knife or beat him over the head with a tire iron. It would make my position clearer, give me traditional cause for vengeance. The one with the purple streaks in his hair might hold a gun to my head and fire an empty chamber. When I survive it’s as if I’ve already lived one life and gone into another. I would roll over on to my side, pull out my father’s gun, come up firing. The gun makes a final statement, as they say, has the last word.
The punks have been hired by Max Kirstner, who wants the writer, L. Terman, out of his way.
Or they have been hired by Terman, at Max Kirstner’s advice, and have taken matters into their own hands, have double-crossed their employer.
The final episode would be between Max and Tom on one of the balconies at St. Paul’s Catherdral. Max would try to push Tom off but Tom would step aside, and Max, propelled by his own thrust, would fall headlong to his death.
Sometimes the teller of the story has few prerogatives of his own, is carried along by (the logic of) events. In real life, heroism is just getting through the day.
My father is in a phone box, attempting connection with the outside world. As I can’t hear him, I can only imagine his conversation. I imagine the phone ringing without respite. My father, thinking he has dialed the wrong number, hangs up, rests his head against the side of the booth. He thinks: each gesture is more pointless than the last. Or rather I am thinking it for him, imagine the language passing through his consciousness like rats in the stays of a canal. (He’s not so bad when you get to know him.) He will dial again holding the two pence piece in his other hand, holding it between thumb and forefinger of that hand. There is an answer this time and the coin is inserted in the slot. A voice appears.
Terman felt a spasm in the muscle of his left arm, a dull spasmodic pain from elbow to shoulder. He flexed his arm a few times, massaged his shoulder, trying not to call attention to his concern. If he were dying, if his heart were failing him, he intended nevertheless to finish out the day.
“What are we going to do when we leave here?” Tom asked.
“We could go to a movie if that interests you.”
“Yeah, I’d like that,” Tom said.
They walked over to the National Film Theater — they had been heading toward it all along — to see if there was anything worth seeing. It had been Terman’s recollection that The Conversation was playing, though he turned out to be mistaken. At the NFT 2, there was a 4:00 showing of something called Bright Eyes, part of a series on child stars, and at the NFT 1 (at 4:15) was Brian De Palma’s Obsession which he had seen twice before.
Tom said Obsession interested him but he didn’t want to press his father to see something he had already seen. Terman said he was curious to see how well it stood up. They got on the end of a queue that extended outside the door and wound, two and three deep, around the side of the building.
Tom said he thought the English couldn’t live without queues, that they lined up in their own homes to go to the bathroom, his voice carrying, attracting a few stares.
Terman felt the time pass as they inched forward in the disorderly queue, felt that his life would be almost over by the time they reached the window at which the leftover tickets were being sold.
“I have two together in Row A,” said the icy young woman behind the glass, “and a single in Row B. Those are the last three I have.”
“I’ll take the two in Row A,” Terman said, taking a five pound note from his wallet.
“May I see your card?” she said.
He knew his card had been missing for weeks and he made the obligatory show of searching for it in his wallet. “I can’t seem to find it,” he said, “but I promise you I have one.”
The young woman, who wore large tinted glasses, seemed impervious to human appeal, said you’re supposed to show your membership card when you purchase tickets.
Tom produced a dog-eared card, palming it so his father couldn’t read the name on it, and the tickets were issued.
“I didn’t know you had a membership,” Terman said. Tom shrugged, started to explain, ended up nodding his head.
The auditorium was already dark when they reached their seats, which were in the far left-hand corner of the first row. The movie was starting, had started, flickering images above them and to the right. An elegant, dreamlike party ends in a bizarre kidnapping. The wife and small daughter of the wealthy and sympathetic (and complacent) protagonist are held for ransom. The police are brought in, mishandle their pursuit. The kidnappers’ car runs into a gas truck and explodes. The wife and daughter are apparently killed.
It was hard to see things clearly when you were sitting right under the screen. Tom was breathing noisily as if in a crisis of anxiety. Years pass and the hero, still grieving the loss of his wife, vacations in Italy where he meets an art student who bears an extraordinary resemblance (they are both played by the same actress) to the woman he mourns. He falls for this ghostly double of his former wife, believing (at some level, one suspects) that it is the dead wife herself miraculously restored. The obsession is with restoration, with the illusion of immortality.
Tom took something out of his jacket and held it guardedly in his lap, both hands over the undefined object.
The girl has a history distinct from his own and is much too young to be the lost wife. No matter her apparent history, the resemblance is irresistible. He proposes to bring this youthful incarnation of his dead wife back to America and marry her. If he distrusts his own motives — this fixation with an image a kind of madness — he must also believe that their circumstantial meeting, like his wife’s circumstantial death, is an aspect of divine providence. Taken away arbitrarily, the woman he loves is mysteriously returned to him. Not the woman, but the image of the woman. Something is wrong, which it serves him to ignore.
His eyes on the screen, Tom transferred whatever he had in his hands to his father’s lap. It had the weight of a heavy stone, and Terman’s first conflicted impression was that Tom meant him some harm by it. His unpursued impulse was to stand up and let it fall to the floor. A glance was sufficient to identify the object as a revolver similar to the one taken from the desk in his study, and he put his program notes over it to keep it out of sight.
Using his left hand, he moved the gun (sandwiched inside the program notes) from his lap to the side pocket of his corduroy jacket.
When he looked up again at the screen his eyes burned from the proximity of the image. The presence of the gun in his pocket, its unexplained return, distracted him from the illusory action of the movie, an action that tended, despite his familiarity with it, to take him by surprise.
The mystery resolves itself through flashback. The woman who resembles the hero’s wife turns out to be his lost, presumed dead daughter. (The exposition seemed beside the point, the demystifying of a dream.) There is the reprise of a dance at the end, father and daughter whirling around and around.
When they were outside Tom said, “It was fantastic. Very strange.” The experience of the movie seemed to exhilarate him. “It doesn’t really make sense, does it?”
Terman didn’t like to talk about films immediately afterward, liked to be haunted by them for as long as possible. “It makes its own sense,” he said to no one.
They walked across a footbridge to the Charing Cross tube stop and took the Bakerloo to Oxford Circus where they changed for the Central Line. In transit between stops, Terman had the premonition that the train would never arrive at its next destination, that the shadow zone between stations was the real world stripped of illusion.