Memphis Movie (22 page)

“She's part sprite,” Camel said. “Only part.”

“Huh,” Eric said, as if this was making sense.

“What can I do for you?” Camel said.

“Oh, well, I was in the neighborhood. My driver—friend—my driver-friend Jimbo had to see somebody in the neighborhood. Some music writer. Maybe you know him. Anyway, I was near here and I thought I'd see if you had new pages for me. And,” Eric quickly appended, “I just wanted to, you know, say hi.”

Camel sat there smiling. Eric thought perhaps that soon Camel would begin to fade, leaving only his smile hanging in space. Hanging like a gibbous moon over the little sleeping fairy child.

“So,” Eric said, sidling into a chair, “how are you?”

“The pages are on the stereo there,” Camel said.

“Good, good,” Eric said. He wondered if he was beginning to repeat phrases, à la Eden Forbes. “Listen, we're—that is, Sandy and I are very pleased with what you've done.”

“Huh,” Camel said.

“Yes, yes. It's really helping us along. Helping us to find these characters.”

“Huh,” Camel said.

Eric looked around. The sweet smoke hung in the air like London fog. The walls were peeling. Every surface was as dusty as the tombs of the Pharaohs.

Finally, he rose and picked up the pages. He fingered them briefly, saw a phrase here and there that sounded like Tristan Tzara writing Noel Coward. It wasn't his bailiwick, however. He knew Sandy could merge these warblings with her more concrete work. She was masterful. She was, he thought, the only reason his movies
worked.

“Ok,” he said. “I'm gonna find Jimbo.”

Camel smiled.

“Ok,” Eric repeated. “Thanks, Camel.”

“Ok, bye,” Camel said.

“Bye, Mr. Moviemaker,” Lorax said, seemingly in her sleep.

“Goodbye, Craig,” Camel said.

53.

And so it went for the next week or so. Shooting moved outdoors and back indoors and then back outdoors again. The movie, like most movies, was shot out of sequence. The only one who seemed to keep the story straight in his head was Rica Sash. Yet, there was a momentum created, one that Eric was only too happy to ride. His actors were pulling together, much like a basketball team during a playoff run. What just a week ago had seemed like disparate pieces, imaginary men and women walking around, bumping into each other, now seemed like a troupe, a
cast.

Even the small role players were rising to the occasion. Even Kimberly Winks became part of the whole. She was a little too old to be an ingénue but that didn't keep her from growing a haughty élan that she exhibited around town on the arm of Ike Bana. And when it came to shooting her nude scene, a day Eric had been dreading like holy hell, she came through.

“I didn't think you meant like
all nude
,” she said that morning when Reuben Wickring explained the shot to her.

“You didn't sign for this?” Reuben asked. Reuben was British and had once studied under the great Carol Reed. Nevertheless, he never seemed fazed by finding himself in Memphis, Tennessee, working on a film about which there was no buzz.

“I, I guess I did,” Kimberly hedged. “I guess I thought when it came to it I wouldn't have to, you know, take all my clothes off.”

“Uh-huh,” Reuben said.

“I thought you could, um, what am I thinking of, you know, put it in digitally.”

“Oh. Well, no, we can't do that.”

“Oh. Well, can I talk to Ike for a minute?”

“Certainly.”

The two conferred, nose to nose, for a few minutes and Kimberly returned with a smile on her face.

“Ok,” she said.

They closed the set. Only Rica and Sandy and Eric (and, well, a dozen other people Kimberly wasn't told about) were on the set, a living room. Kimberly was to be seduced by Dan Yumont. She was to undress sitting in a wingback chair, a complex assignment even for a seasoned pro, supposedly daydreaming about a sexual tryst with Dan's character, and then Dan was to enter. On paper it had sounded like a soft porn scenario, except for Camel's left-field sex talk. Yet, Eric trusted Dan to raise the level.

“Ok,” Eric said. “Let's try to nail this the first time, people. Kim doesn't wanna have to do this over and over.”

He had actually said
people
. I'm only pretending to be a director, he thought, not for the first time.

He smiled tightly at Kimberly Winks. She seemed oblivious.

But when the camera began to roll her glazed-over expression was exactly what was called for. Her striptease while seated was just offbeat enough to be interesting, and the shot of her open legs Eric thought just might work for the film. Not the way Sharon Stone's did for
Basic Instinct
, but more the way Julianne Moore's did for
Short Cuts
.

And, seeing Kimberly Winks's lovely blonde crotch again, between her pale, strong, softball-player thighs, Eric time-traveled back to their time together. He was lost, staring at it, that hot center of her where he had drunk. She was still a lovely woman.

But the reverie was broken by Dan's entrance, buck naked, his flag already at half-mast. Kimberly gasped (as had many a younger actress before her) at the sight of him. He carried forth the banner handed down to him from Gary Cooper. Dan's thingum was long and dark like a mandrake root. Even Eric was impressed. And when the two actors came together on the floor in front of the chair, Kimberly Winks's acting seemed so unforced as to be engendered by real emotion and real heat. There was a moment when Eric thought he had lost control—were they actually
doing it
? he wondered, as Dan's crotch ground against Kim's—but by the end of the shot, done entirely in one take, due, in no small part to Rica's masterful camera movement, it was captured, like lightning in a bottle. Really, it rivaled
Rope
for the no-cut take. When the actors parted Kimberly held onto Dan's hand just a beat longer than necessary, her eyes wide like a schoolgirl's.

Reuben came over.

“I think they fucked,” he said.

“I know,” Eric answered. “Stay with the money.”

“I mean it. I saw his schlong enter her. She looked like a moon-caught ghost. My God, what a poker he has.”

“Yes. It's one of his many fine attributes,” Eric said.

“Well, what are we gonna do about it? Should we reshoot? I don't really wanna give that bimbo another dose of that thing.”

Eric snorted. “No. No reshoots. We'll edit it the best we can and the rest we'll put on the Director's Cut DVD.” The Director's Cut DVD was secret code for anything outré, anything from mistakes to alternate endings to an extra 11 seconds of sex.

Memphis Movie
had taken on a life of its own. And when asked about the shoot, as Eric was constantly in his peregrinations around his old town, he could actually lay down an articulate storyline, one that sounded compelling even as Eric told it. In other words, Eric himself began to believe in
Memphis Movie
.

Nights for Eric, when he wasn't feted by a host of different Memphians (everyone in Memphis was faking it around the film folks; no one really knew anything about movies here in the Bluff City, but their
enthusiasm
was palpable), or involved in a tricky night shoot, meant Mimsy Borogoves. Their relationship had grown warmer and closer, though there were still nights when Eric couldn't get in touch with her. There was something mysterious about these disappearances, though Eric was so grateful to have Mimsy when he could that he questioned little. And the fog he had been living in, the one in which dead people talked to him, had lifted, and Eric worked. He worked hard at his craft, even while falling in love. A new lightness came to him. He was floating.

Dan Yumont continued his drinking and fucking. Now, he was almost bored if he had only one partner. The threesomes excited him almost to the point at which he felt something. But the feeling was mostly concupiscence. Some nights, though, he reserved for his teen queen. Dudu wanted Dan to attend functions with her like school dances and football games but she settled for rutting in the back seat of a rented Beamer at the drive-in or the occasional visit to Dan's hotel room (she
loved
the porn movies on TV, had never seen anything like them before and often laughed with glee at their physical mummery). Dan, to his credit, didn't try to enlist Dudu in his geometric lovemaking. He didn't attempt to make a quadrilateral out of a triangle.

And Camel and Lorax kept their distance from the movie folks. Camel's part was all but done now; he had added his last fillip to the script. Even so, Eric stopped by sometimes, with gifts for him and for Lorax. He gave Camel a computer that sat in the corner of the room, about as useful as a rocket ship for a monkey. He brought Lorax food baskets and toys, like Slinkys and Silly Putty and vintage board games. She was particularly taken with
the Addams Family Board Game. She said this to Eric, more than once: “Wow.”

Camel spent all his time in his garden or in front of his TV. Some nights, while Lorax colored in her coloring books (she told him that was her art just as writing was his)—she said, really, Camel, all the original painting has been done, so all that's left is for the rest of us to color in the previously drawn lines, Camel even returned to poetry. He wrote some new poems.

Lorax, it seemed, had permanently moved into Camel's house and Camel's life. They shared the big bed most nights and she never talked again about hitching out west. California had been her destination when she first came to Camel, many weeks ago now, but it had become only something to talk about, a dream state, like a place in a storybook. And no one ever knew if Lorax had really come to Memphis to see a boyfriend. The boyfriend became another kind of ghost, one that leads you in and then disappears, ploink, like a daydream. Now, Lorax was learning to garden, learning to cook, learning that sex sometimes meant helping her partner reach the end with whatever means necessary and sometimes telling him the end is not the goal. Lorax, bless her, was learning how to be in love.

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.

—Alfred Hitchcock

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

—Alfred Hitchcock

54.

Dan Yumont lay in his luxurious hotel bed with the TV on and foodstuffs spread around him on the sheets. Dudu lay asleep across his thighs, her snores tickling Dan's little hairs. She had fallen asleep immediately after orally gratifying Dan. Her face seemed innocent in sleep, a drunken angel.

The basketball game Dan was watching broke for commercials. Dan was wide awake. He didn't need much sleep and preferred the long middle-of-the-night hours, when the rest of the world was gone. And so he loved the basketball games from the west coast, which trickled on into the early morning hours. Here the Nets were visiting the Kings. Now, abruptly, Dan's attention was drawn to the actress in a Lexus commercial. She was onscreen for maybe 10 seconds. Her face was puckish and as lovely as a September peach. Dan had never seen her before but his heart was stirred, if it was his heart that stirred when beautiful women crossed his ken.

He picked up the phone and called his agent.

“Roger,” Dan said.

“What time is it, Dan?”

“I don't know. Roger. Look, you have to do something for me.”

“Anything, Dan. You know . . .”

“I just saw a Lexus commercial. Maybe you've seen it. I think there was a forest. Or a mountain road. Something like that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You've seen it?”

“I don't know. What do you want me to do?”

“There's an actress in the commercial.”

“Ah.”

“Find her. She's a brunette. Got a face like—what's her name in
Lost,
Lilly something. A face like a beautiful pixie. Dimples, Roger. She has dimples.”

“Ok.”

“Get her for me, Roger.”

“Get her for you.”

“Right. Find out who she is. And fly her to Memphis.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh. You're on it?”

“Yes, Dan. I'm on it. I've written down what you said. I'll see what I can do. Should I promise her a part in the movie?”

“Yes. Get her here.”

“Ok, Dan.”

After he hung up Dan couldn't figure out how the Nets had blown a 12-point lead. Dudu stirred from her slumber.

“Who you talking to, Dan?”

“My agent, Baby.”

“Oh.” Dudu opened an eye. “Did I already blow you, Dan?” she asked.

“Yes, Baby. Go back to sleep.”

“Ok, Dan.”

55.

Eric and Mimsy were holding hands, walking along the river. It was just past sunset and the filming that day had broken early because the location they had planned on using called at the last minute to say there was some kind of flooding there, a toilet, a sink overflowing. The call came as Eric had just finally wrapped a scene in the Pyramid, the one in which Hope Davis, Deni Kohut and Suze Everingham first realized they were all in love with the same man. It was some of Sandy's finest writing, though its best line, perhaps, came from Camel: “Maybe your calm needed disrupting.”