The production’s been up and running for about three weeks now. The cast and crew are set up at the Essex Hotel on Argyle Street. Definitely something perverse in that choice, since that’s where Lizzy was murdered. “The hotel manager, Mr. Isherwood, was disgusted, but the hotel’s owner gave us the best rates,” Istvakson’s assistant, Lily Svetgartot, told me on the telephone. “He figured having a film crew and all those actors and actresses around would help soften what happened to Elizabeth in the public’s conscience. Well, a hotel is a business, after all.”
Just yesterday, Lily Svetgartot telephoned again. “Mr. Istvakson prays you’ll soon visit the shoot,” she said. I immediately arranged for an unlisted phone number for my cottage. The “shoot,” I’m told, is any location at which the movie is being filmed. Prays, does he?
Night has fallen; full moon; the tide is out. What makes me feel homicidal toward Istvakson is something else he told the Halifax Chronicle-Herald: “I no longer think in sentences.” Like he’s transcended language and risen to a higher plane of regard — cinematic images. Gulls tonight are ghosting the shore, along with the occasional petrel. I’ve been studying the field guide, but I don’t know the birds around Port Medway all that well yet. The ones I’m looking at outside my kitchen window might be Franklin’s gulls, little gulls, laughing gulls, or black-headed gulls. Bonaparte’s gulls, mew gulls, ring-billed gulls, herring gulls, Iceland gulls, great black-backed gulls, glaucous gulls, Sabine’s gulls, or ivory gulls. Because all of these frequent Nova Scotia.
Anyway, in just a short while, my sweater and buckled fisherman’s boots on — purchased at a church yard sale, perfect fit — I’ll walk down to the beach and wait for Elizabeth.
Based on a True Story
“I WANTED YOU TO know,” Peter Istvakson said one evening at Cyrano’s Last Night before the movie started production, “publicity is planning to advertise our film as being ‘based on a true story.’” He set out a mock-up of the poster. The title of the movie was apparently Next Life. “You haven’t even started making this movie and there’s already a poster?” I said.
“No final decision’s been made,” he said. “I have final approval.”
In conversations leading up to principal photography — the first day of actual film production — Istvakson used certain pet phrases, and besides making me cringe, these phrases struck me as being encoded: they sounded one way but meant something else, and they seemed to have a deep hostility toward language itself. I suppose they were the standard-issue currency of the movie business, since finally these phrases conveyed nothing. My favorite example of this, which I wrote down in a notebook, was “It’s not a yes but it’s not a no.” He said that one a lot. At various times it applied to (1) whether the recently famous Canadian actress Emily Kalman had accepted the role of Elizabeth (she had); (2) whether Next Life Might Be Kinder would be the title (no); (3) whether Matsuo Akutagawa, who had won international awards, would sign on to work with Istvakson again as cinematographer or remain in a rest hospital on the Sea of Japan (he did sign on); and (4) whether I would, as I had requested, be granted leave of my contractual obligation to “provide additional dialogue upon request” (an attorney got me out of that).
“What ‘based on a true story’ means,” Istvakson said, “is my film will tell what really happened, only better.”
A Writer Has to Have an Address
A WRITER HAS TO have an address, a place to put a desk, a typewriter, stamps, and envelopes, a place to cook a meal in the middle of the night. It is as simple as that. Thirteen months ago, I committed to purchasing this cottage pretty much sight unseen, except that I’d studied the photographs of the interior and the surrounding five acres which Philip and Cynthia sent after I had seen their advertisement in the Chronicle-Herald and telephoned them to express definite interest. Four days after that conversation, I telephoned them a second time, from the Essex Hotel, and spoke with Philip for a few minutes, at which point he said, “Why not drive out today and have a look?”
“I already know I want it,” I said. “I can meet your price.”
“All this just from the photographs?”
“Yes. I hope I don’t sound like a nut case.”
“Let’s just say you’re decisive. Still, why not drive out?”
“I’m on my way. Just give me the directions.”
I shifted the phone to my other ear, to make it easier to write.
“Ready? Take 103 East,” he said. “You’ll be on 103 for more than an hour. Get off 103 at exit 5. The exit sign will say Route 213, Peggy’s Cove and St. Margaret’s Bay. I think one of the signs preceding it mentions the airport. When you get off at exit 5, you come to a stop sign. Take a left back over 103. It may be marked with an airplane symbol. Take 213 for nine or ten miles. Turn left onto 102 North. Just before you arrive at the turn, there’s a sign saying 102 South, Halifax. You don’t want that. You continue under the viaduct and take a left on 102 North. Be careful when you make this turn — there are often cars coming toward you. Take 102 North for about fifteen miles. Get off at exit 6. In case you get lost, our telephone number is 646-354-1110.”
Tonight I saw Elizabeth again. At about ten o’clock I had walked across the road and down to the horseshoe-shaped beach. There was enough moonlight to illuminate the shoreline. Though the far end of the beach, at the start of the tree-filled peninsula, was in shadow, a stretch of about thirty meters was clearly visible. Looking behind me, I could see Cynthia and Philip sitting close to each other on their sofa. I could see the bookshelves behind them. I could see they were drinking wine. I could see the flickering of the television screen reflected in the wide bay window. Turning back to the water, I saw that Elizabeth was on the beach.
We Are Married
ELIZABETH AND I were married on January 14, 1972. We got a marriage license from a deputy issuer, found a justice of the peace, Irwin Abershall, and arranged for a room in the city hall, 1841 Argyle Street. It was a bitterly cold day, snowing lightly, and the wind, up from the harbor, found even the side streets. Still, on our walk to city hall Lizzy and I held bare hands inside her coat pocket. “I love this old building,” she said when we walked up the stairs. “But there are pigeons on the roof, which means the insulation up there isn’t as good as it should be. On the other hand, that’s nice for the pigeons.”
We needed a legal witness, so we asked Marie Ligget, Lizzy’s dear friend, a waitress at Cyrano’s Last Night, and she was there right on time, four-thirty P.M., and was more dressed up than Elizabeth and I. After the exchange of mismatched antique rings (bought at Harborfront Pawn) and vows, Marie Ligget went directly back to work, and Elizabeth and I checked into room 50 at the Essex Hotel. We had already secured room 58—a four-room suite — where we would begin our life together. But we felt that it would be more romantic to spend our wedding night in a different room, even though it was at the other end of the same floor. We had a light dinner, soup and a baguette, and polished off a bottle of wine, in the small restaurant off the lobby. The only customers. Late that evening, after we had made love, I was reclining in the bathtub. Elizabeth appeared naked in the bathroom doorway, holding a lit candle in an old-fashioned candle holder, with a curved handle and wax catcher at the base, and after what she said, I thought I’d lose my breath from laughing. Nodding her head toward the bedroom, then languorously moving her free hand across her breasts, then down along her hips, she said, in her best Mae West imitation, “That was very nice. But next time, let’s try it without all the mistakes.”