Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (5 page)

“Well, greetings old friend,” she said leaping up.

“Hi Dotty.”

“Where you going? Don’t tell me: uranium mining near Wendover. I’m game.”

“I know you are. All right, here we go.”

“Still onto ‘Adventures?’”

“Mildly.”

“Where
are
you going.” She said, swinging her bag over onto the seat.

“To do some cinematic research.”

“I’m game. I don’t have a class until this afternoon.”

She sat up cross-legged on the seat, in what couldn’t have been a comfortable position, but that was all right because it was all to show the proper disregard for her skirt, an openness that she assumed dancers all shared.

“How’s old age?” This is the way she referred to my being engaged.

“Like everything else.”

“Anything I can do?”

“N-O.”

When we got to Higgins Film Co., she hopped out and opened the door for me, saying as we went in, “Easy there old fella, you really oughta get a checkup, you know, arteries, heart, things like that.”

Old Higgins was sitting at his desk sorting scraps of film into Mason jars, smiling as he stared up through each strip.

“Hello, Mr. Higgins.” I’d rented films from him before.

“Ah,” he said turning, “hello.” He’d recognized his name, not me.

“I’d like to rent a science-fiction film like before, remember, when I got,
It Came from Beneath the Sea
.”

“Ah. Yes.” He stood out of his wooden swivel chair. He was always shorter than I expected. “Now, would you like an Earth Monster or an Alien Visitor type film?” He rubbed his pale hands together.

“Well, I don’t know, but I think,” I looked at Dotty, “I’d like an Alien Visitor type film.”

“Hmmm. An Alien Visitor film …” His eyes narrowed in thought, and he led us into the back. Dotty followed close, rubbing what breast she could against my arms. A dark row of closets lined the back room, and in the dark, dust filtered down off of the first copies of
Intolerance
. Mr. Higgins opened a closet with a creak and a groan, one from the closet, the other from him, and a dust-coated film can rolled out and around the floor like a coin. He ignored it, peering deeper into the crypt. I couldn’t see a thing.

“Ahh, hmm.” He said stretching the exploratory humming into a minute. “Ah. Hah.” And he jumped back as a rumble started in the closet, and he quickly handed me a reel, then two others. We could still hear things falling down back there as we stood in the front office and he blew balloons of dust off the three reels. Mr. Higgins wrote a receipt on the back of an old grocery list on his desk, saying, “This, my boy, is a great film.”

“What is it?”

“Twenty Million Miles from Earth
.”

In the truck, Dotty held the reels up to her like schoolbooks, showing either a great love for the cinema or no fear of getting dirty.

“Sounds like a good film. What time is the showing?”

“Eight.”

“I’m game.”

I let her off in front of Sorenson, the stately old administration building, whose upper floors were dance and yoga studios. Arcs of dust reached across the purple crescents of her unsubtle artillery, and in a scene designed to send Archimedes into the arms of Freud, she stood there a moment brushing herself off, liberally. “Later,” she said slamming the door and running up the hundred marble steps.

Oliver Grinmaster’s most salient characteristic was his unending mercantile irony. For instance, he named the ancient white brick market he owns and runs, “The Taj Mahal Food Center.” He really hadn’t done it jokingly. When his wife came back from the tour he’d sent her on with the university, he’d had an epiphany one evening in their den looking at the slides. He told me he looked at the Taj Mahal for two hours after his wife had gone to bed, burning the projector light up, melting the slide, and scorching the veneer on the coffee table in the heat of his vision. The next morning he had pulled down the neon-lettered
PALACE GROCERIES
sign and ordered the new revolving electric dome that sat upon his empire even now. Eldon and I owed the Taj Mahal forty bucks from its “Palace Grocery” days, and going in there was always some kind of trial. I threw three cases of Coors up on the counter.

“Morning, sahib.” He liked me to call him that.

“Why Boosinger, it’s you. Purchasing some items from the Taj Mahal.”

“Seems to be.”

“Don’t you want to charge it?” The huge hand-lettered cardboard mobile spelling out
NO CREDIT
swung back and forth above his head.

“Sure put it on the account.” I handed him the exact change for the beer.

“Fine, Fine. You know, you guys can pay me any day now if you’d care to. I mean not that I want to pay any of my own bills with the money you’ve been holding out on me, I just would like to see things that I don’t think really exist.”

“Yeah. Well we’re getting the money together now. We should be clearing it all up at any minute.”

“In the meantime,” he said leaning over the beer, “are you sure you need all this?”

“You’re right, I might need some more. Got any?” I looked back toward the cooler.

“Just a minute, there, my dear debtor, if you’ve got coins for beer, you got coins for past debts.”

“No way, Mr. Grinmaster, we’re entertaining some important dignitaries tonight.”

“Oh, why didn’t you say so? That’s entirely different.” He didn’t move off the beer.

“I’ll say it is,” I growled, jerking the three cases out from under his pointed elbows, heading out. “They’re from India visiting, hoping to sue this weevil pit for libel!”

I fell over a sandwich sign announcing a new low on cat food on my way back to the truck, but reached it and tossed the beer in the back. He came out the door of the Taj Mahal and, rubbing his nervous hands in his apron, said, “If I’m dead by the time you pay that bill, Boossinger, just donate it to a fund for rehabilitating the young idiots who are dragging this country down, will you!” See what I mean about irony. Regardless, I kept on going there because it was several billion times better than Seven-Eleven. I like Grinmaster, and, in a way, the attention he pays to me.

The sunrise adrenalin now started to ebb, and I was on my own for the last errand. Fortunately it lay in sympathetic territory: the dormitory office. Christine, my thirty-year-old, onetime typist, and assistant dean of housing was in.

“Larry! Great to see you. Back prowling the old home turf? How’s your lady?’”

“Perfect,” I said. Everybody called Lenore “the lady.”

“How are you?”

“Imperfect. That is the same, but that’s immaterial. I have come to invite you to a film that could change your life.”

“What? You mean it would make Roily propose?”

“No. I mean change your life for the better. Forget that freak. But you can invite him too if he pays his own way.”

“What is it this time?”

“Twenty Million Miles from Earth.
”

“Huh?”

“An informative intergalactic travelogue.”

“Well,” she said, clasping her hands behind her head, sitting back, hoisting her pendulous twin mammalian timekeepers, “the projector is in the same cupboard as when you were here.” She pointed. “How’s the degree coming? Got any papers for me to type?”

“A wrong question.”

“Sorry. Listen, I’ll try and make it.” She prepared to go back to her paperwork.

“Good.” I gripped the projector.

“Oh, Larry,” she said, going for her desk drawer as if it was a holster, pulling out a loaded folder, “your final bills came, for the last two months and cleaning.”

At home I avoided all the Ellises and found the little yellow sign outside our apartment door that said: “Movies Tonite, Yippie!!” in Eldon’s elementary school script. Inside he was rigging the cord onto our tapestry, so that when he pulled on it, the whole thing rolled up revealing the bare wall: our screen. A showman’s touch. The tapestry was predominantly of snorting horses and the huntsmen they carried, and way back on a hill in the green and sepia distance, was a little red fox. The huntsmen were looking the wrong way as their spotted dogs went berserk at the horses’ feet.

“Get everything?”

“Everything. Grinmaster sends his best wishes.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Want a beer?”

“Sure.” We sat down on the couch looking out at the traffic.

“Who’s coming?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. Some of the Student Political Alliance people, and their candidate—Harmon, I think. Ribbo and the freaks. A Black Heron contingent. Assorted females.”

“Sordid?”

“Probably, who’d you invite?”

“Wesson. Virgil Benson. I think Dotty Everest is coming.”

“Why’d you ask Wesson and Everest?”

“Why do people do things in this world?”

“Is Lenore coming?”

“I don’t know.” My instinctual phrase.

“Well it sounds like a great party, I just hope we raise some money. I’ll have to do my DAV Speech, number four. The one about some people having advantages others don’t.”

We moved the furniture into the small bedroom, stacking the couch and the overstuffed on the bed, knocking the phone over as usual. We decided to leave the desk this time and put the projector on it instead of in the bathroom as we had in the past. Putting the projector back in the bathroom gave us a larger picture, but also forty thousand intermissions. There was a knock on the door.

“Evelyn! Come in.” A woman came into the room looking more like Jean Arthur than I could believe. “Evelyn, this is Larry; Larry, my sister Evelyn. And this is Zeke.” I shook hands with the dark-haired boy. He was three or four, and really liked shaking hands.

“Glad to make your acquaintance, I’m sure.” he said.

“Gosh, Eldon, don’t you boys have any furniture?”

We all sat on the floor and I got two more beers and a glass of wine for Eldon’s sister. She had taken the bus from Nephi that morning and she and Zeke told us the wonders of central Utah, until darkness closed in on the orange end of Eldon’s cigarette.

Then I set up the projector and the first reel, and people started arriving. Dotty arrived first, of course, towing some “Sandy,” the best male dancer in the company. Then Simpson and his new bride. Wesson, who helpfully gave Virgil Benson a ride. Most of the Student Political Alliance looking serious and talked out, pamphlets hanging from their back pockets like tails. Edith, and Jannie, and Sharon, all friends of Eldon’s. A whole crowd of sophomore “chicks,” which in this case is the right, most charitable word for them. I think one of them was a cheerleader. Two hard-looking Black Heron regulars, one already drunk. Johnny Harmon, candidate for student body president in tomorrow’s election, along with two groupies. Every time the door opened my heart yawned, in Lenore expectation. Eldon handed out drinks for a while and kept Wesson away from me. I knew Wesson was just churning to know what I’d done to give Banks such a negative coronary thrill, and then chime in with too-late warnings and codes of conduct for the future. Then Eldon made a very brief and moving fundraising speech, during which he removed his glasses twice, emphasizing the word “privileges.” His helmet, as I have indicated earlier, was awesome. He then pulled the cord raising the eternally frustrated fox hunters in a roll, as I turned on the switch and a black and white
Scrappy
cartoon danced on the wall.

As soon as the cartoon was over, I left my post and helped Evelyn put Zeke to bed across the hall in our neighbor, Bunny’s apartment. Bunny, an entertainer in a way herself, always came to our parties and left her apartment open as a measure of convenience.

“You have some interesting friends.” Evelyn said pulling the sheet up to Zeke’s chin.

“Wherever they may be.” I shouldn’t have said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Goodnight, Old Zeke.”

“Goodnight, Old Larry.”

Back at the theater, the rocket carrying the Alien Visitor had just arrived on earth from twenty million miles in outer space, and Dotty came over and edged between Evelyn and myself.

“Really a great film.”

“Cease perturbing the projectionist please.”

“Old man.”

She rejoined Sandy. Eldon sat on the window sill with Jannie, whispering occasionally, his helmet reflecting the antic light from the wall, the trees behind him growing quietly greener. Outside, lilacs.

After the Italian boy took the capsule home to amaze his father, a tremendous shadow appeared on the screen. Simpson and his bride, she rising first, stood up and exchanged one too many edged words while silhouetted in the small Italian house trailer where the Alien Visitor would grow up. Stepping over bodies, they left. Marriage. This science-fiction must be strong stuff. Simpson had once been a famous friend of ours.

Ribbo and the freaks arrived stoned. He handed me the joint as he came in saying, “Where’s Simpson going?”

“Home.”

“Far out. He said the movie is about a lizard, is that right?”

“That lizard,” I pointed out of the projection booth, which I wore like a mask, at the Alien Visitor.

“Wow!” he noted in a breath and headed for the kitchen.

The relatively scaly Alien Visitor, reminiscent of the creature of the black lagoon from the film of the same name (though the special effects in
Twenty Million Miles
are much better) was now being scrutinized as he went through many Disneyesque, that is to say anthropomorphic, movements, in a small glass case. And the reel clack-clacked to a close.