Incarnate (4 page)

“I hope you can all understand this Colonial accent. I guess your English weather makes it more of a language barrier.” The microphone squealed, and he sat back while the festival director adjusted it for him. “Okay, well, all I really wanted was to thank you for being kind to my film. I felt good when I’d finished editing, but I never know if I should until I know how people feel.” He paused. .“Any questions?” One timid hand went up. “Yes?”

“How did you set up that shot of the churches? Are the streets really ever that empty?”

“There’s a story behind that,” Martin Wallace said, but Molly wasn’t really listening; she was trying to cope with her sense that something was going to happen. She’d thought she was rid of those feelings and the panic that came with them. She tried to breathe as she prayed she was.

“What about Hollywood?” a girl with rainbow hair said after Wallace had finished his anecdote.

“I did get invited, but I guess I prize my independence too much. But listen, independence can lead you to compromise, it puts so much pressure on you sometimes… .” He wasn’t a slow speaker, once he got going; he just kept running out of breath in the middle of syllables, hyphenating like an inexpert printer. Molly was almost calm now, for she’d managed to explain away her panic: Leon had made her feel conspicuous in exactly the way she was trying to avoid. Of course that must be all.

Wallace fell silent, and sneezed. “Just a few more questions,” the festival director promised, and pointed straight at Molly. “Yes?”

She was opening her mouth with no idea of what she might say when she realized he was pointing at the Australian.

What were you trying to say up there today?” the Australian asked.

“Well,” said Wallace, “I hope the film speaks for itself. If it doesn’t, uh, I’d say I’ve failed.”

“You reckon it’s a failure?”

“I didn’t say that. I’d say it was up to you out there to judge.”

The Australian persisted. “You’re telling us you have no opinion of your stuff?”

“Of course I have an opinion. I’m saying that mine is the least worth knowing.”

Wallace was staring at his shoes as if he hoped the man, who was clearly enjoying his embarrassment, would go away. Perhaps he was trying to keep his temper. Molly’s face was growing hot in sympathy. Wallace looked toward her, and before she knew it she had raised her hand. “Yes?” the festival director said.

What could she ask? “You dedicate all your films to someone, don’t you,” she said, thinking out loud. “This one is for your parents, the one about draft dodging was for Larry.” But that wasn’t a question. “Who’s Larry?”

She would have liked to crawl under the seat when she saw his reaction, a lopsided smile that couldn’t quite mask his pain. “He was my brother,” he said.

“One more question,” the festival director said quickly, and a young man wearing a bowler hat asked about influences. Molly closed her eyes as if that might make her invisible, as she’d thought it would when she was little. She’d made things worse for Martin Wallace than the Australian had, intruded where she shouldn’t have. When Leon squeezed her hand, she clung blindly to him.

“Martin Wallace, thank you very much.” Applause merged into the thunder of upturned seats. A few people made their way to the stage, where Wallace was chatting away from the microphone. “Oh, Leon, I wish I’d kept my mouth shut,” Molly whispered. “I’d apologize if I knew how.”

“Why don’t you? Come on, before we lose him. If you don’t you’ll only go home and brood.” He made for the stage without looking back to see if she were following, and she was so annoyed with him for being right about her that she almost didn’t.

“Martin Wallace? I’m Leon Bardin. And this is Molly Wolfe, the best production assistant I know.”

“Hello, how are you?” He mustn’t recognize her, for he was smiling. “It’s good to meet you,” he told Leon. Close up, his thick eyebrows stood out even more, despite his dark complexion, and so did his large, deep blue eyes. “I hope I can live up to your faith in me.”

“Met’s, not mine. All I did was make them look at your work.”

“It’s lucky they didn’t see me up here today.”

“You were fine. Especially considering the bug.” Leon was leading them past rows of empty seats draped with abandoned program notes. “What you need is a little medicinal alcohol. Let’s take a stroll and avoid the film buffs.”

A neon sculpture stained the misty air above the Hay-ward Gallery; the spotlighted Houses of Parliament looked trapped in amber. Molly accompanied the others as far as Waterloo Underground, and then she blurted, “I’m sorry I asked you that question. I was only trying to shut the cobber up.”

Martin blinked at her. “Which question was that?”

“About your brother.”

“Oh, was that you? That’s all right, it was a legitimate question. I mean, I put my feelings up there.” He smiled at her and looked away, murmuring, “That’s all right,” to himself. Of course it wasn’t, and she wanted to reach out and touch him, say she was sorry that way. Instead she turned toward the ticket office. “Thanks very much for the film,” she said to both of them.

“At least have one for the road on a night like this,” Leon cried. “Besides, you wouldn’t leave Martin at my mercy, would you?”

“Yes, please do join us, won’t you?” Martin said, and she wasn’t sure why she felt unable to refuse.

Leon found a pub off Waterloo Road. He was always for walking until he found somewhere new. The barmaid, a squat woman with a yellowing perm and a pugnacious lower lip, took her time in coming to them, though nobody else was waiting to be served. They carried their drinks from the low smoky bar into a back room where workmen in overalls rested their muddy boots on the guard in front of a coal fire, and Molly couldn’t help feeling that the workmen were eavesdropping as Martin began to talk about himself.

He was from Chapel Hill in North Carolina, but he’d attended university in the south of the state—“the Baptist belt,” he said with a jokey shudder. His parents still lived in Chapel Hill and seemed to trouble him, for he went on quickly to describe how he’d become a filmmaker, first making a half-hour fiction film with a group of actor friends before deciding that film was so exacting that it ought to be about something more substantial. He’d made six features now and was satisfied with none of them. “Sometimes I think I need to work with someone who’ll head me off from getting too polemical,” he said.

Something had occurred to Molly. “You were saying you valued your independence and yet you’re going to work for MTV.”

“Well, because they’re giving me total freedom. That’s what won me over, and also I needed to work outside America.”

“Really.”

“Absolutely,” Leon said, a little sharply. “I had to fight for it. I knew we wouldn’t get him otherwise.”

“No,” said Molly, “I meant I wondered why you feel the need to leave America.”

“Because I feel too close to my material. Here maybe I can stand back a ways, not get so worked up about things all the time.”

“But feelings are what your films are about,” Molly said. “That scene in
The Unamericans
where the peace march was attacked, I felt angry for days because I couldn’t do anything.”

“A film about peace made you want to beat up those cops, right? That’s what I mean. I got so angry I made too much of that incident, kept cutting back to it, remember. Well, I’ve made better films since then.”

It seemed to distress him, or perhaps it reminded him of something that did. Sensing so much about him so soon made her feel uneasy, on the edge—of what, she didn’t know. “So what do you plan to make for us?”

“Well, that’s what I have to find out.” He moved a loaded ashtray to another table. “One thing I’d like to look at is how your country has become Americanized. It’s changed a lot in just a few years.”

“You’ve been here before?” she asked.

“For a while. I wasn’t looking for subjects, I just had to get away.”

Again she sensed distress, again she wanted to touch him. “It’ll be good to get away from American subjects,” he went on. “Sometimes I think all I do is take the lid off America’s garbage.”

“So he comes over here to do it to ours,” one of the workmen said.

Martin blinked at the table by the fire. None of the workmen was looking at him, so he wasn’t sure if the remark had been about him. “Well, I didn’t quite mean that,” he said, and sneezed.

“Finish that Scotch and I’ll get you another,” Leon said, breaking his untypical silence at last. He lingered when Martin had drained his glass. “If you need someone to show you round,” he said, “it ought to be whoever assists you on the series. You’ll need a production assistant on the team.”

Martin smiled wryly. “I can use someone who’ll keep an eye on me when I get out of hand.”

“Here she is,” Leon said.

So that was why he hadn’t told her sooner that Martin was to work for MTV. He must have been planning this for weeks, a surprise to make up for Ben Eccles. Martin gazed at her, and she couldn’t grasp what she was feeling, she was growing so tense. “That’s fine with me,” he said.

“Drinks all round,” Leon said, and stood up. “To the start of a fruitful relationship.”

All the workmen burst out laughing, not with humor. “Queer and a pimp as well,” one said.

“I don’t think I care for this pub,” Martin said.

Still the workman, a stocky youth whose hand left muddy fingerprints on his glass, didn’t look at him. “Then fuck off back where you came from.”

A piece of coal exploded in the fireplace. “Let’s find somewhere else,” Molly murmured. Leon nodded, Martin picked up his gabardine and slipped one arm into the sleeve. “Let’s do that,” he said.

“Let’s do it,” the stocky workman said, “before I have to show you ladies where to go.”

“It’s okay,” Martin said to Molly, but she saw he was trembling. “We have these in America too.”

The workman swung round, and the fireguard clanged on the bare boards of the overheated room. “What have you got in America, honeybunch?”

“Assholes. Arseholes, you’d call them. People, who, when they open their mouths, shit comes out because that’s all that’s in their heads.”

The workman stood up with a thud that shook the boards. His stool fell like an echo. Martin got up slowly, his gabardine dangling by one sleeve, and Molly made to step between them just as the barmaid got there. “I’ll not have language like that in my place,” she told Martin. “Get out and take your friends with you or I’ll call the police.”

She blocked the doorway of the snug when the workman tried to get past her. “They’re not worth dirtying your hands on, Bobby. Go and sit down quietly now and there’ll be a drink on the house.”

A chill wind that tasted of fog blustered along Waterloo Road, jingling the streetlamps. Molly and Leon linked arms with Martin as they strode into the gusts, and after a while he stopped trembling. “You see what I mean about getting out of hand,” he muttered. “I get people thrown out of pubs.”

“I’m surprised you kept your temper as long as you did,” Molly protested.

“Sometimes I don’t. Anyway, now you’ve some idea of what you’ll have to put up with if you work with me.”

She took time to think what to say; she had already distressed him enough. “I do appreciate being asked, and I do think I could be some use. It’s just that I didn’t know Leon was going to suggest me. Would you mind if I thought about it for a day or two?”

Leon stared at her. “What’s there to think about?”

“Call it female indecision.”

“Christ preserve us from stereotypes.”

“All right, it was a stupid thing to say.”

Leon rushed them into the wind and it snatched at her breath. She had to slow down, she couldn’t think. “All the same, I need time to decide,” she said.

“What’s the problem? You aren’t sure if you want to leave Ben Eccles?” Leon was growing angry. “This is your big chance, Molly. You don’t want to work for this outfit for the rest of your life.”

“You ought to take your time, Molly,” Martin said. “I don’t want to feel you were forced into anything.”

She felt so grateful that she almost blurted out that she would work with him. She headed for the Underground instead, before she could. Trains squealed in their burrows, and at last one emerged. She had to change at the next station, and so she was on the Circle line, in an empty carriage lit like a hospital corridor, before she was able to think.

Perhaps she could work with Martin. He would be the perfect reason to leave Ben, since it would be clear that she was moving on to better things rather than away from Ben. Yet the idea made her nervous, perhaps because she already seemed so much in tune with Martin, almost as if she had met him before—as if she had dreamed of him. If she had, she didn’t want to know. Surely the explanation was that she’d sensed what Leon had in mind. A good night’s sleep would cure her nervousness.

She came out onto Bayswater Road a couple of miles west of MTV. A sodden oak leaf flapped on the railing above the steps. She turned left at the estate agent’s and up the hill. A minute’s climb past the white four-story Victorian terraces brought her home. She closed the gate in the railings and went down the glassy steps. She found her key in the dark niche that the pavement walled in. A car door slammed farther up the hill, a disco light pulsed red and green at a fourth-floor party across the street. She slipped the key into the lock and then hesitated. For a moment she had expected someone to open the door from within.

She switched on the light in the hall. Nobody there, nobody in the mirrors that faced each other across the hall but her own twin image striding forward: wide mouth, high cheekbones, bright greenish eyes, clipped blond hair. Wind chimes tinkled as she entered her flat. Nobody in the living room with its thick rugs, its plump seats snug in the corners of the room, the shelves and table she had built from kits with incomprehensible instructions; nobody had stolen her video recorder. Nobody in the compact kitchen with its serving hatch, nobody in the bathroom that smelled of Sea Jade talcum powder, nobody in her bedroom except her old toy monkey on the pillow. His behind was ragged and shiny now; he looked more like the real thing than he had when she was little. She drew the curtains to shut out the pulsing party light, then she lay beside him on the bed. Nobody had been in her flat. No time to wonder why she should have thought someone had. She still had to decide what to do about Martin Wallace.