Bernard answered, I smoked. It was the old wind-up toy routine from the Communiqué. Be still. Spring to life. I was not listening is the truth when Bernard tapped me on the shoulder.
“Said I read somewhere you’re from Italy,” Nathan was saying. He didn’t seem much fazed by our getups.
“That’s right,” I said.
“You tried to scrub it all off. But it’s still there.” He grinned. “Let me tell you, I came over here with nothing. Nada. Now look at me! They call that self-made.” He’d started out as a furrier in Poland, he told us, making three cents a day. “My real name? Nathan Sharpovitch. Now I am the famous Nathan Sharp!”
He grew so animated I was moved to share an anecdote about the time I got thrown off a passenger train for imitating a steward with a whistling S. Lying in this way felt like the opposite of effort. Nathan slapped the table viciously and at the end of the meeting pulled me aside to mutter that we foreigners were the ones who invented this country. “You did all right, Bernie,” he shouted, mentioning the screen test as we left, like an afterthought.
• • •
“Play it low,” the director instructed me in the drafty room. “The surface is calm but underneath’s where we feel it.” When he left, I tried a cig. My face, in the bulb-lined mirror, looked thin and colorless. My hands were cold. “Play it low,” I thought, walking out.
The lot was vast and dark, the size of a hangar and loud with banging doors. The day of the screen test I got lost inside it, finding myself on a gangplank high above a film shoot in which a blonde stabbed a man to death with a letter opener. Later, I ended up in a hall lined with red doors. When I tried one, a ring of tuba players glared back at me, each wearing a bib. Behind a second, a gray, speckled wolf snored fatly. Another revealed a row of actors in feathered headdresses raising their arms before a firing squad. Several more of these doors I tried, witnessing a kaleidoscope of increasingly bizarre scenes, before tumbling out into the afternoon.
The lot recalled the backstage of the Communiqué—labyrinthine and black, but blown up to a grotesque size, a backstage swollen to monstrous dimensions so that the actual site of filming, the purported reason for our being there, shrank to a contested detail. Encircled by craning lights, the set provided the sole zone of illumination, like an unexpected fire deep inside a cave. I hurried toward it.
Normally, I would have taken my time. From Bernard I had learned the art of arrival, but the suit, a heavy wool number, broad in the shoulders, ruined it all.
I thought it would be like the screen test. That day, a thin, long-striding man had handed me a sheet of paper with typed lines of dialogue. One line said, “Now you’re gonna listen to me.” Another: “I’m afraid it’s a little more complicated than that.” I did it all like Bernard, that is to say, as if pushed by the presence of others into an even greater interiority. Soon the picture was under way: Everyman, a spy film about Harry Knott, a master of disguise who through the course of the picture impersonates a slew of characters, among them a Russian diplomat and a British tycoon, to root out a Communist mole inside the government.
But on this, the first day of shooting, I was made to wear this new, double-breasted suit. Then the director ambushed me in the dressing room to discuss my character, Harry, and how he would act “when he’s himself.” I had thought it was agreed that I would just do Bernard, but the director, an excitable and lanky man with a feral rim of red hair around his otherwise bald head, seemed to have other plans. “Don’t use too much wind,” he said. “Not too much wind. He feels something underneath.”
At the set itself I was besieged by attention. The actor Sterling Smith roughhoused my hand, while a chatty makeup artist dabbed my nose. In no time, a long, black microphone materialized inches from my face while someone unseen ordered me to say the words “pepper” and “baby bubble bath,” a pair of disembodied hands straightening the shoulders of the suit. “Pepper,” I said. “Baby bubble bath.” Bernard paced by the police commissioner’s desk. “Looking a bit pale,” Max said, though I couldn’t see his face in the harsh white light.
He sounded worried, as he often did out west. At every opportunity, he encouraged a return to the City, to the stage. Yet it was hard to take these suggestions seriously, as he was so out of place in Fantasma Falls. Months before, we had attended a party at a producer’s house above the canyons. Guests (the men in bathing trunks, the women bikinis) draped themselves on deck chairs in postures submissive to the sun. In these loungers’ hands every task, whether easing onto a bar stool or waist-deep into the pool, was studiously bleached of pace, a slowness like that of bank tellers in cinematic robberies, who, warned against sudden movements, open the cash register with grinding care.
Among these sun people, Max stuck out, to say the least, wearing a straw hat, knee-length bathing suit, and flip-flops over dress socks. Several times and with no clear destination, he circled the pool, stopping briefly to squat on the end of a deck chair and then rising again to pace along the deep end. At some point in these circumnavigations, he kicked over two martini glasses, then righted them anxiously before speeding back to the pool house, from which he did not emerge for several hours. The whole thing was so strange I later imitated his look (as if the sun were a grandmother pinching his cheek) for Frankie and Lou by the car. With time, it even became a private joke. “Do the body again,” they’d say. That’s what we called him: “the body,” shouting, sweating, bumping into things.
“Just fine,” I managed to say.
The director appeared. “You know, as long as it seems natural and right,” he was probably saying, given the way he casually waved his hand and then docked it in his trousers’ pocket. After one final piece of advice, or a warning, he saluted me and stepped off into the surrounding dark. There was a grating sound, like a giant fishhook scraping the floor. Then quiet.
“Giovanni, door!”
I was meant to go back out through the door in order to reenter. I walked out of the door as well as I could. I could not feel my hands or feet.
“Action!” the director shouted.
I walked through the door into the fake office.
“Harry Knott,” the actor said to me in a put-on voice. “That right?” He rested his fists on the desk, apelike. The fake window behind him looked out on absolute darkness. Once you stood in the set, a life-size diorama of a police commissioner’s office, you could see only the set. It was like being trapped inside a window display.
“That right?” he said again.
I was supposed to say, “That’s me.”
“Cut! Everything okay? Try it again,” the director might have said. It had the rhythm of something like that.
I walked out again, no blood in my hands.
“Action! Giovanni? Giovanni—”
• • •
Later I looked down at the set, maybe twenty feet below, where the director kicked imaginary stones. “Okay, you’ll be okay,” a voice above me said. Max, I saw. It seemed I was lying limply in his arms, being transported up a set of cast-iron stairs. Bernard was ahead of us.
I was brought up several flights to a door. Bernard opened it, and Max followed. Inside was a high-ceilinged office, the size of a warehouse. A desk occupied the center of the room where Nathan, of all people, held a preposterous leg of lamb to his mouth, like a piccolo. On both sides of the desk, many men, perhaps twenty in all, stood in the same wool suit, fixing their eyes on me with the incomprehension of animals.