“I thought it was you who had something for me.”
Max laughed with his mouth closed, took a thick nine by twelve envelope from his desk and placed it in Terman’s hands. “Take a look.”
“Must I?”
“You bloody well must,” he said, making an ironic face at the ceiling. “You’ll love it, old son. It’s from the fine Italian hand of the producer’s nephew.”
He knew his line. “I’ve seen the fingerprints before,” he said.
“They want us to go into production in ten days,” Max said casually, watching him out of the side of his eye. “We can’t do that, can we?”
“I thought all the money wasn’t in place.”
Max put his feet up on the desk. “For the sake of argument, let us say the money is there, a proposition we both know to be contrary to fact. If it were all there, could we or could we not begin principal shooting in ten days? Is the screenplay, in your opinion, ready to be shot?”
“Whenever you’re ready to shoot it, it’s ready to be shot,” Terman said, his irritation undisguised. “You’re the director.” He had the sense that they had had this same conversation, almost to a word, six months ago.
“Terman, Terman,” Max said, spoke his name as if he were a recalcitrant child that needed shaking, shook him by his name, loosed his name in the air between them, pointed a finger at him. “If it weren’t your script, Terman, what would you advise? I put myself in your hands.”
Terman looked at his hands. “They’re empty,” he said.
Max pantomimed exasperation, poured them both another brandy. “What are we talking about? Is it your perception of reality, old son, that I don’t want this film to happen? Can you honestly accuse me of faint-heartedness on this project? Have I not been Henry Berger’s most enthusiastic supporter but one from the outset? I issue no blame but the script, which I think is basically terrific, has never been quite on target, has it?”
Terman stood up to say that he disliked being manipulated, was prepared to walk out, though he sat down again with only the barest murmur of complaint. He had the sense that Max understood him, that what wasn’t said was in its own way made known.
The subject changed, or evolved into something else without appearing to change. “I want this film to transcend its apparent occasion,” Max was saying. “This isn’t a genre film we’re making, is it? We’re dealing here, as you know, with a transcendent conspiracy, a cosmic malevolence. Okay? If all the agencies of civilization are corrupt and murderous, we have to offer the viewer some kind of moral counterweight. That’s the missing element. Do you see my point?”
Terman had a sense of déjâ vu comparable to walking into a movie you had dreamed or seen before under another title, though Max often generated that illusion in him. The director made a self-deprecating gesture then laughed at himself.
“Marjorie’s been longing to have you and Isabelle over for a feast,” Max said. That unfulfilled expectation had been in the air between them for months.
“We’ve been waiting to be asked over,” Terman said. “We talk of nothing else.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” Max said. “Some people are coming to the house in Kent for the long weekend and I want you and Isabelle to join the party. It would give you and me the opportunity to make finishing touches on the script mano a mano.”
“Not this weekend, Max,” Terman said. “My son just arrived and I really have to spend some time with him.”
“No problem there,” said Max. “Thing to do is bring the prodigal along.” The director got up, a whimsical finger in the air — some further comment held in abeyance — and went into the bathroom adjoining the office.
Had he been dismissed? Terman got up to go, though not before overhearing the splashes of Max’s disemburdening in some secret place behind the wall.
“You’ll have to give me directions,” he said to the closed door.
“You just follow your nose,” said Max.
Driving back to the Holland Park house, he wondered what Tom was up to in his absence and conceived a scenario.
Even after Tom heard the door close, even after he imagined his father getting into his car and driving off, even then he kept his eyes closed for another ten or fifteen minutes, focusing on a swatch of light that seemed to burn through the blackness. He conceived himself getting out of his chair, his eyes still tightly shut, like a spirit stepping out of its body. His spirit didn’t go far without him, it never had.
The house was even bigger than he had imagined and more bizarre, one inexplicable place moving anomalously into another. He knew from his father’s letters that certain movies had been filmed there, but the odd thing was how different the mood of each of the rooms, how startlingly unrelated to one another. He decided to see it all, to take the full tour, starting on the third floor and working his way down. The room set aside for him was at the far end of the hall — it was the third room he had visited, the only one with a freshly made bed — and looked, he thought, like someone’s idea of a 19th century French whorehouse. The bed was too soft. There were pink cupids on the oval ceiling. The plush carpet was a garish red and with the overhead light on gave the impression of something recently eviscerated. On one of the two desks was a Blue Guide to London, a Nicholson’s London Street Guide, and a map of the underground system. On the other was a set of two keys. He wondered why his father had chosen this particular room for him. Two of the rooms on the floor were more spacious, another had a more interesting view, still another was more appropriately furnished. Of the five unused bedrooms on the third floor, his was, taking a variety of factors into consideration, the third best overall. Who was the best room for, the room with mirrors on the walls and ceiling, an enormous space with a large round bed in the center and a terrace coming off one of the windows? He studied his reflection, reflection within reflection, in the several mirrors (odd, he thought, how unlike myself I am) then moved down to the second floor.
There were five rooms, not including bathrooms, on the second floor: his father’s study, two bedrooms, an empty space, and a storage room with a padlock on the door. In this order, moving from left to right: study, storage room, bedroom, empty room, master bedroom. The first thing that struck him about the study was both waste-baskets were over-filled, a handful of scrunched up papers on the floor. He left the room, then tempted by something else, came back and sat down at his father’s desk, swivelling absent-mindedly in the imitation leather chair. There was a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter. He typed “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” Facing away from the desk, he reached behind him to open a drawer, the middle of three, his hand sidling in while his glance rested elsewhere. He came away with a black fountain pen the thickness of a fat cigar which he scrupulously returned. When he exhausted the middle drawer — there were no discoveries there, nothing but the obvious — he moved on to the drawer below. He worked his way through layers of manuscript to the bottom where he found the very thing he imagined himself looking for. And even then, moving it about with his fingers, grasping it, removing it from its secret place, he disbelieved his intuituion. He had only to turn his head slightly to verify the weapon he held in his hand, to verify that it was something other than a toy, but for the moment he resisted the discovery he would allow himself in the following moment. Having demonstrated a certain self-control, he rewarded himself by looking at the object in his hand. It was new, he thought, pethaps unused. It smelled faintly of oil and had an almost imperceptibly oily aspect. Tom watched himself in the mirror on the far wall, aiming his father’s gun at the opposing figure. The sounds of bullets crashing against glass were only in his head, though from time to time he made small firing sounds in his throat, a muffled simulation of the real thing. It was childish, he knew, and he observed himself ironically pointing a pistol at the ironic observer that confronted him. The question of what the gun was for never asked itself and he was returning it to its place, trying to put it away exactly as it was found, when he was startled by the ringing of a doorbell. He put the gun and a box of shells in his jacket pocket and started down the stairs.