214.
Vikar takes a cab to the parking lot on Thirty-Fourth Street. Soledad’s Mustang is gone from where it was parked; the space still glimmers with broken glass. He walks up and down the aisles and up and down the structure from one level to the next, but the car is gone.
215.
He arranges with the hotel to stay in New York another forty-eight hours. In his inertia he manages to ship to Los Angeles the stack of movies: I’m not giving them back. The night before he is to catch his plane, he shakes himself from his torpor for one more trip down to the Bowery.
216.
He finds himself watching the band without seeing it, listening to them without hearing, until someone pulls at his elbow. There in the dark he almost can’t register her; she’s shorter than everyone else. He says, “What are you doing here?”
“Mom told me about it,” she says. “The more she talked about how disgusting it was, the cooler it sounded.”
217.
He says, “How did you get in here? You’re nine.”
“I’m eleven,” Zazi says, “almost twelve.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I’m not drinking or anything.” She says, “Everyone seems to know who you are.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“You missed this great band. They’re from England and the lead singer’s this little fat chick with braces and I can’t tell if she’s black or white or what, and get this, the sax player is a chick too.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“There are ten million fucks in the naked city, and she’s with one of them. Or maybe,” Zazi shrugs, “three or four.” She sees the look on Vikar’s face. “Sorry,” she says.
“You’re nine,” he says, “you shouldn’t say things like that.” He gives her fifty dollars and the key to his suite. “Do you need a place to sleep? Do you remember where my hotel is?”
She looks at the money and key for a moment. “Thanks,” she finally says. “Aren’t you staying?”
“No.”
218.
Back at the hotel he gets another key from the front desk, goes up to his suite and packs and leaves a folded blanket on the couch in the sitting room. He goes to bed and sometime in the night hears the door open and close. In the morning the couch is empty, the blanket draped over the end.
219.
When Vikar reaches the TWA ticket counter at JFK, Mitch Rondell is waiting with an assistant. “Can I talk to you?” he says to Vikar. He wants his movies back. Vikar imagines an armed struggle there in the terminal. “Don’t check him in yet,” Rondell says to the woman behind the counter.
220.
Vikar says, “I’ve already shipped them.”
“What?”
“I’ve already shipped the movies back to Los Angeles.”
“What movies?”
“The ones you gave me. The Long Goodbye.”
“The movies are yours, Vikar. I want to talk to you about what happened.”
“It’s all right. I saw the Variety article.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“Can we go into the lounge and talk?”
“I’ll miss my flight.”
“We’ll put you on another flight, if it comes to that. In first class. I need to talk to you.” Rondell puts his hand on Vikar’s shoulder and the assistant picks up Vikar’s bag.
221.
In the lounge Vikar and Rondell sit at one table and the assistant with Vikar’s bag sits at another on the other side of the room. “We would like you to come back,” Rondell says.
“What happened to the respected Academy Award-nominated editor?” Vikar asks. From anyone else, it would sound sarcastic.
Rondell leans across the table, speaking with more intensity than Vikar has heard from him. “No one understands you or what you’re doing,” he says. “No one understands what this picture is as you’ve cut it. I don’t understand it. It’s not an art film and it’s not a thriller and maybe it’s a thrilling art film but I’m not getting it.”
“It would be better if it were finished.”
“Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. I’m accepting that I may never get it. That’s O.K., I don’t have to get it, not at this point. We brought in a very smart editor, very hip, he did the sound edit on Coppola’s last two pictures and just cut Zinnemann’s last picture, two Oscar nominations in the last four years. He looked at what you’ve done and we talked about it.”
“Is it faster in first class?”
“What?”
“Is it faster in first class, back to Hollywood?”
“It’s the same, Vikar. Listen, this guy didn’t understand what you’re doing either. But he was more or less convinced you’re doing something. He said the first ten minutes he thought you were completely incompetent but by the time he got to the end he knew that wasn’t it. He said he has no idea whether the picture is working or any good but that every decision you’re making is original at best and counterintuitive at the least.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Me neither. But the way he explained it is that most editors, if they’re cutting from a shot where the action is going on at the right of the frame, then they cut to another shot where the action is at the right so the audience can follow it, unless the picture wants to unsettle the audience at that moment, then they do it the other way around. I gather you’re doing everything upside down, not to mention you’ve taken the central murder plot about the artist and the nightclub and framed it with the sub-plot about the supermodel rather than vice-versa, which is also backward from what anyone else would do.”
“Scenes have profiles like people and things. All stories are in the time and all time is in the stories.”
Rondell blinks. “If you say so, Vikar. So I asked this guy, ‘What are you telling me, he’s some kind of genius?’ and the guy says of course not, there are no geniuses other than Bach and Rita Hayworth, but I am telling you, the guy says, that he’s editing in a way I haven’t seen before and now there’s an internal logic to this picture that you would be better to follow through on rather than try to fix, if that’s the word. The die is cast and we should go with it. Make it work for us. Is what he said. Otherwise we’re messing with the aesthetic continuity of the thing. Is what he said.”
Vikar says, “Continuity is one of the myths of film. In film, time is round like a reel. Fuck continuity. In every false movie is the true movie that must be set free.”
Rondell sighs heavily.
222.
“That, vicar,” Viking Man will explain a few months later, “is the sound of a studio executive, God love him, staring into the Nietzschean abyss of his own ignorance, venality and spinelessness,” but Viking Man isn’t here to say it now.
“No,” says Vikar.
“Pardon me?” says Rondell.
“I don’t want to anymore.”
“We have an agreement.”
“You fired me.”
“Does this have anything to do with Ms. Palladin?” Rondell rubs his brow with both hands. “Vikar, the company is going through a great deal at the moment. All the top people have left to go form another company, including the man who’s headed ours more than a quarter century. They’ll take talent with them, Woody Allen, others. We need to salvage whatever of this picture can be salvaged. Cannes is in seven and a half weeks. All the principal shooting is done, we’re down to a few final establishing shots, pick-up stuff. We don’t need to absolutely lock the picture but we do need something more than a fine cut. It may still be we can make Cannes work for us. I don’t want to withdraw the picture. We can’t withdraw the picture. Very bad if we withdraw the picture. What do you want? We’ll raise your pay and I’ll take you down to the archive at midnight myself, as many pictures as you can carry out. Do you want to make a picture of your own?”