It takes Vikar a moment to answer. “I haven’t talked to her in a while.”
“She worked on that picture, right?”
“What?”
“That picture,” Rondell says, his eyes cast slightly upward.
“Oh.” Vikar touches his head. “I forget it’s up there.”
“I imagine people remind you.”
“Yes.”
“The truth is that if we can get away with it, we would rather go with someone a bit under the radar than some powerhouse editor who will attract attention — I mean,” he laughs a bit, “a different kind of attention than you attract. Please don’t be offended if I say this may prove to be out of your depth, assuming you take it on. But whether you realize it, and I know you haven’t been in the business long, you’re developing something of a reputation for coming into troubled projects and sorting things out.”
“I’ve only done it two or three times.”
“We understand that. We also understand that this project requires more than just sorting out. This will be the biggest thing you’ve done — it’s not some madman in the south of Spain who thinks he’s making Lawrence of Arabia—and I hope I don’t offend you again if I say that in the long run we may wind up bringing in that powerhouse editor after all, who may wind up doing no better than you. This is not a reflection of any lack of confidence in you. It’s a lack of confidence in the circumstances.”
“I’m not offended.”
“Most of the time we feel like we don’t know what this picture is. We don’t know if it’s a thriller or an art film or—”
“Perhaps it’s a thrilling art film. I’m being wry again.”
“We’ll settle for a thrilling art film at this point,” says Rondell. “We’ll settle for salvaging the situation, forget any sort of actual success.”
“Is there a rough yet?”
“Someone’s assembling one now.”
“I hope not too much footage is being cut. I would like to see it.”
“I appreciate that. Do you appreciate, in turn, that time is of the essence?”
“Yes.” Vikar says, “You need the movie in the can if the movie is going to be in the Cannes.” He laughs.
“Six months from now we need something as close to an answer print as possible. An actual booking print would be a dream.”
“All right.”
“What about terms?”
“Terms?”
“We’ll more than match whatever you’re making now for whatever you’re working on.”
“I’m not working on anything. I’m probably not supposed to say that, am I?”
“I’ll pretend you’re being wry again. Let us know what you made on your last job and we’ll increase it twenty-five percent, if that’s acceptable. How’s the room at the Sherry?”
“It’s nice.”
“We keep it for situations like this. Maybe not lavish, but a month from now you won’t feel like the walls are closing in on you, either. Can you be comfortable there for a while?”
“Yes. There’s something else.”
171.
Rondell says, “What’s that?”
“Old movies.”
“Old movies?”
“I collect old movies.” Vikar believes it sounds better to say he collects them than that he steals them. “Prints of old movies. Can I get prints of old movies you’ve made?”
“Are there any you have in mind?”
“I wouldn’t sell them or anything. I would keep them for myself.”
“It would depend on what you have in mind. You know, Broken Blossoms, probably not.”
“Not that old. The private-eye one at the beach,” he says, “The Long Goodbye. Is that yours?”
“Yes, that’s ours. I might be able to get you that.”
“Kiss Me Deadly. Sweet Smell of Success. Those are yours?”
“Yes.”
“Especially The Long Goodbye.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
172.
He’s in New York through the end of the fall, into winter. The winter reminds him of Pennsylvania, bitter mornings rising in his room back at Mather Divinity. As when he was in Madrid, for a while he doesn’t go out into the city, beyond shuttling between the hotel at Fifty-Ninth and Fifth and the editing room at Forty-Ninth and Seventh, where he works nine, eleven, sometimes fourteen hours a day.
173.
Then one Sunday, the cold breaks and he leaves his suite and walks out into the city. He believes he’s going to cross the street over to the park; instead he turns south, down Fifth past the Empire State Building all the way to Union Square, cutting down Broadway to the Bowery. The afternoon passes and he wanders along St. Marks Place; there aren’t any hippie buckaroos or even many space-age drag queens. People wear motorcycle jackets and jeans with holes in the knees and T-shirts with pictures of Captain America, and Mickey Mouse doing something strange to Minnie, and the words I KILL MOONIES. What are Moonies? Some wear rings in unusual parts of their bodies, and their wrists are wrapped from suicides attempted or postured or postponed.
At one point, Vikar and a girl on the street with cropped, dyed-black hair stop and stare at each other, she at Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, he at the words on her chest. GABBA GABBA HEY, says her shirt. “Hey, man,” she calls to someone across the street, “check this out.” It’s difficult to know who finds the other more mystifying. As these people are nothing like he’s seen, he is nothing like they’ve seen; and then, as dark falls, he hears something for which — he realizes in retrospect — he’s been listening for years.
174.
It’s not just a music, rather it’s the Sound, the real Music everyone has tried to tell him over the years that all the other music was when it wasn’t.
Vikar is standing on the Bowery outside what seems to be a tunnel cut into a bunker. The sidewalk is crowded with more kids like he saw on St. Marks Place, as well as old people sleeping under newspapers and drunks stumbling through the crowd asking for money. A dirty barefooted woman shivers under a yellow awning in nothing but the paper-thin gown that patients wear in hospitals.
The address on the awning is 315. There are nonsensical letters on the awning that spell nothing. A mystifying handwritten cardboard sign on the black glass doors says
HEARTBREAKERS
MAXXI MARASCHINO
SIC FUCKS
SHIRTS
and while nothing about this is comprehensible to him, the illicitly narcotic Sound is irresistible and he goes inside, the doorman eying him with wonder.
175.
Inside, the club isn’t much bigger than Vikar’s hotel suite. There are two stages, the main one in front, a smaller and lower one off to the side. There’s a pool table and a couple of pinball machines. The walls are peeling and needles litter the shadows and wafting clouds of urine collide with clouds of beer. The Sound, made by the band on the main stage, is overwhelming; people at the front fling themselves wildly into each other. Something wells up in Vikar. There’s a break, then a singer who reminds him of Brigitte Bardot or Tuesday Weld.
176.
It was never the Music at all, it was always the Sound; and though there’s no way for him to understand this, perhaps the Sound moves him now because, a little more than twenty years after its birth, the Sound has become about itself, the Sound is about its own truth and corruption in the same way that, a little more than twenty years after the Movies found their sound, there was a wave of movies about the Movies: Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, The Big Knife, The Bad and the Beautiful. When the Sound has circled to swallow its tail, it becomes a world of its own, god or no god, or in which Vikar is god — or in any event a god that kills fathers rather than sons.