And I had plenty to choose from. If there’s anything the movies are good at, it’s good-byes. From “Be careful, darling!” to “Don’t let’s ask for the moon when we have the stars,” to “Come back, Shane!” Even, “Hasta la vista, baby.”
But I didn’t say them. I stood there and looked at her, with her beautiful, backlit hair and her unforgettable face. At what I wanted and couldn’t have, not even for a few minutes.
And what if I said “Stay"? What if I promised to find her a teacher, get her a part, put on a show? Right. With a Cray that had maybe ten minutes of memory, a Cray I wouldn’t have as soon as Mayer found out what I’d been doing?
Behind me on the screen, Bogart was saying, “There’s no place for you here,” and looking at Ingrid, trying to make the moment last forever. In the background, the plane’s propellers were starting to turn, and in a minute the Nazis would show up.
They stood there, looking at each other, and tears welled up in Ingrid’s eyes, and Vincent could mess with his tears program forever and never get it right. Or maybe he would. They had made Casablanca out of dry ice and cardboard. And it was the real thing. “I have to go,” Alis said.
“I know,” I said, and smiled at her. “We’ll always have Paris.” And according to the script, she was supposed to give me one last longing look and get on the plane with Paul Henreid, and why is it I still haven’t learned that Heada is always right?
“Good-bye,” Alis said, and then she was in my arms, and I was kissing her, kissing her, and she was unbuttoning the lab coat, taking down her hair, unbuttoning the pink gingham dress, and some part of me was thinking, “This is important,” but she had the dress off, and the pantaloons, and I had her on the bed, and she didn’t fade, she didn’t morph into Heada, I was on her and in her, and we were moving together, easily, effortlessly, our outstretched hands almost but not quite touching on the tangled sheets.
I kept my gaze on her hands, flexing and stretching in passion, knowing if I looked at her face it would be freeze-framed on my brain forever, klieg or no klieg, afraid if I did she might be looking at me kindly, or, worse, not be looking at me at all. Looking through me, past me, at two dancers on a starry floor.
“Tom!” she said, coming, and I looked down at her. Her hair was spread out on the pillow, backlit and beautiful, and her face was intent, the way it had been that night at the party, watching Fred and Ginge on the freescreen, rapt and beautiful and sad. And focused, finally, on me.
MOVIE CLICHE #1: The Happy Ending. Self-explanatory.
SEE: An Officer and a Gentleman, An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Shall We Dance, Great Expectations.
It’s been three years, during which time China has gone through four provincial uprisings and six student riots, and Mayer has gone through three takeovers and eight bosses, the next to last of whom moved him up to Executive Vice-President.
Mayer didn’t tumble to my putting the AS’s back in for nearly three months, by which time I’d finished the whole Thin Man series, The Maltese Falcon, and all the Westerns, and Arthurton was on his way out.
Heada, still costarring as Joan Blondell, talked Mayer out of killing me and into making a stirring speech about Censorship and Deep Love for the Movies and getting himself spectacularly fired just in time for the new boss to hire him back as “the only moral person in this whole pop-pated town.”
Heada got promoted to set director and then (that next-to-last boss) to Assistant Producer in Charge of New Projects, and promptly hired me to direct a remake. Happy endings all around.
In the meantime, I programmed happy endings for Happily Ever After and graduated and looked for Alis. I found her in Pennies from Heaven, and in Into the Woods, the last musical ever made, and in Small Town Girl. I thought I’d found them all. Until tonight.
I watched the scene in the Indy again, looking at the silver tap shoes and the platinum wig and thinking about musicals. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom isn’t one. “Anything Goes” is the only number in it, and it’s only there because one of the scenes takes place in a nightclub, and they’re the floor show.
And maybe that’s the way to go. The remake I’m working on isn’t a musical either — it’s a weeper about a couple of star-crossed lovers — but I could change the hotel dining room scene into a nightclub. And then, the boss after next, do a remake with a nightclub setting, and put Fred (who’s bound to be out of litigation by then) in it, just in one featured number. That was all he was in Flying Down to Rio, a featured number, thirtyish, slightly balding, who could dance a little. And look what happened.
And before you know it, Mayer will be telling everybody the musical’s coming back, and I’ll get assigned the remake of 42nd Street and find out where Alis is and book the skids and we’ll put on a show. Anything’s possible.
Even time travel.
I accessed Vincent the other day to borrow his edit program, and he told me time travel’s a bust. “We were this close,” he said, his thumb and forefinger almost touching. “Theoretically, the Casimir effect should work for time as well as space, but they’ve sent image after image into a negative-matter region, and nothing. No overlap at all. I guess maybe there are some things that just aren’t possible.”
He’s wrong. The night Alis left, she said, “After what you said the other night, I thought maybe I could use a data harness for the lifts,” and I had wondered what it was I’d said, and when I showed her the opdisk, she’d said, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? Are you sure?”
“It’s not on the disk,” I’d said, “it’s in litigation,” and it had stayed in litigation till the next day. And when I checked, it had been in litigation the whole time I looked for her.
And for eight months before that, in a National Treasure suit the Film Preservation Society had brought. The night I saw Brides, it had been out of litigation exactly two hours. And had gone back in an hour later.
Alis had only been working at A Star Is Born for six months. Brides had been in litigation the whole time. Until after I found her. Until after I told her I’d seen her in it. And when I told her, she’d said, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? Are you sure?” and I’d thought she was surprised because the jumps and lifts were so hard, surprised because she hadn’t been trying to superimpose her image on the screen.
Brides hadn’t come out of litigation till the next day.
And a week and a half later Alis came to me. She came straight from the skids, straight from practicing with the harness and the armature that she’d thought might work, “after what you said the other night.” And it had worked. ” — I guess,” she’d said. “I mean—”
She’d come straight from practice, wearing Virginia Gibson’s pink gingham dress, Virginia Gibson’s pantaloons, wearing her costume for the barnraising dance she’d just done. The barnraising dance I’d seen her in six weeks before she ever did it. And my theory about her having somehow gone back in time was right after all, even if it was only her image, only pixels on a screen. She hadn’t been trying to discover time travel either. She had only been trying to learn routines, but the screen she’d been rehearsing in front of wasn’t a screen. It was a negative-matter region, full of randomized electrons and potential overlaps. Full of possibilities.
Nothing’s impossible, Vincent, I think, watching Alis do kick-turns in her sequined leotard. Not if you know what you want.
Heada is accessing me. “I was wrong. The Ford Tri-Motor’s at the beginning of the second one. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Beginning with frame—”