“How are you, Randy,” she asked. Randy Shank turned to the couple.
“Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Epstein,” he said gushingly, almost falling over himself, “shall I fetch you a taxi?” The woman nodded. With one eye shut she examined Ball. “Aren’t you — yes, you are Ian Ball. I recognized your picture from the newspaper. Congratulations on your new play. Tragic about Jim Minsk,” she said, shaking her head. “He was such a brilliant director.” Randy Shank glanced from Mrs. Epstein to Ian Ball. He was angry. He couldn’t stand it. Rage bristled at his insides.
“He went south to be the guest of some college. We can’t even locate the college to find out what happened. We’re going ahead anyway. You know, the show must go on. They’ve brought in Tremonisha Smarts to take his place,” Ball said.
“Tremendous talent. Tremendous talent,” Mr. Epstein said. “There’s that one scene…” He trailed off and returned to sleeping on his feet.
“Well, good luck on your play,” Mrs. Epstein said, smiling as she followed Shank outside. As the elevator shut behind him, Ball could hear Shank’s whistle.
The door was open, but he knocked anyway. He heard Tremonisha’s voice, “Come in.” He walked into the apartment. Tremonisha was on the phone, pacing up and down, while puffing from the cigarette. She beckoned him to sit in a chair. He sat down. The ambience of the apartment indicated that she was in the upper range of the income distribution. He recognized some paintings and prints by some of the leading black Lower East Side painters. “You could have told me, you still could have told me,” she said to the person on the other end. She was wearing some kind of designer pants with large pockets, a blue blouse. She wore a blue kerchief on her head. She was jangling as usual. Bracelets on her wrists and ankles. “Shit on that, you still could have said something about it before I read it in the papers. And what’s this about my acting surly? You said that about me. You know you did. Gal, I’m not your fucking gal, don’t give me that gal shit.” She hung up. She folded her arms and looked at him. “Men,” she said. He was embarrassed. He glanced toward the table. The New York Pillar,’MONISHA THROWS TANTRUM. A reporter was quoting Towers Bradhurst, producer of the movie version of Wrong-Headed Man, as saying that when Tremonisha Smarts, the black playwright, was told that a white male screenwriter had been hired to “doctor” her screenplay for the movie, Ms. Smarts began throwing ashtrays and furniture in the producer’s office and when she finished the place looked as though the Oakland Raiders had had a training session in there.
“Is anything wrong?”
“Is anything wrong, the nigger says,” she mumbles. “No, everything is just wonderful,” she said, her voice coated with sarcasm. “I need a drink.” She went to the cabinet and removed a bottle of whiskey. She poured herself a large glass. She gulped down some pills. She offered him some. He declined.
“They follow me out to Hollywood only to tell me that my script wasn’t adequate for my movie and so they brought in______.” (She mentioned the name of a white male screen writer who’d been called the Charlie Parker of prose for his “be-bop style.” The fellas had said that if he was the Charlie Parker of prose then Connie Francis was the princess of rock and roll.) She sat down, spread her legs, and leaned forward.
“I knew something was wrong with him. Every time we were supposed to have a script session he would get all tooted up and start talking about how black boys, as he called them, used to beat him at basketball and about how little he was. He wanted to know whether all the unsavory things that happened to the missionary in Wrong-Headed Man had really happened to me. What a voyeur.”
Ball changed the subject. “Have you seen rehearsals for the important play, I mean the play about Eva Braun?” he asked.
“That silly thing,” she said, throwing back her head. “Becky’s still on the white woman as a victim trip. She feels that whatever evil white women do is traceable to some man. That’s why she removed the white women from the lynching scene in your play.”
“She what!” Ball said.
“Oh, didn’t you know? She said that you and what’s-his-name—”
“Jim.”
“Right, Jim. She said that you and Jim had agreed.”
“I certainly didn’t, and Jim’s not here.”
“She feels that the white women who attended those lynchings did so under coercion by their husbands.”
“They could have fooled me. I got those pictures up at the Schomburg. Their eyes are glassy and they wear fixed grins as they watch these poor men dangling from a rope. Drooling over the burnt flesh. I mean, some of them dragged their kids along. She’s saying that they were pretending? Couldn’t they have gotten baby-sitters?”
“She has the same theory about Nazi Germany. She said that Jewish and German women were innocent victims, caught in a battle between men over sexual turf. That the reason Jewish men got into trouble in Germany was because they couldn’t get goyim ass off their minds. They were sexually addicted to white women. She got the idea from this film called Jud Süss. Afterward, during an interview, she said that if someone wrote a play about Nazi Germany from Eva Braun’s point of view she would consider producing it. Mysteriously, a script turned up. It was written by some old biddy who lives in seclusion on Long Island.”
“Yeah. She told me. That’s why I got booted out of the Lord Mountbatten. You say she got the idea from a film?”
“She started to collect all kinds of supporting material. I’ve never seen her so driven. She collected cartoons from Nazi magazines and newspapers that showed Jewish men mugging and raping German women. The Jewish men were always drawn dark. But her main inspiration was the Nazi film. Becky saw it about thirty times.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It rarely plays here in the States. We saw it at one of those bohemian art theaters in the village. You see, the Nazis were paranoid about Jewish men and foreigners diddling their women. It drove Joseph Goebbels crazy. He was the one behind the film. They’d play this movie for German troops before they went to the front. It would get them all steamed up. Some say that Goebbels arranged the film to get Hitler mad. They were always teasing Hitler about the grandfather on his father’s side. Some bourgeois Jewish man impregnated his grandmother, a German who worked in his household. So in the film you have this usurious and dark Jew raping this German girl who goes through the film posing as some kind of idealized Gretel. In pigtails. Some say that this hatred of Jews by German men was the reason for the concentration camps. That’s where Becky got the idea. That the World War Two holocaust was caused by a primal struggle between the Nordic man and the Moorish types.”
“I’ve never heard that before; I thought they sent the Jews to those camps because they were scapegoats.”
“Not a scapegoat. A scapegoat is one who is sacrificed to achieve a larger end. In Germany, the annihilation of the Jews was the end.”
“What about this thing about the Jews killing Christ?”