The Almanac Branch (26 page)

“You don't know a house until you've spent some time in its basement, you don't know a house till you've lived in its attic,” one of my teachers at school said once. We were reading Emily Brontë or Mary Shelley, or one of those old Gothicists, where these two extremities of the house are the loci of mystery and where the key to understanding those who have dwelled in the house is hidden. Cellars are dark, and dug into the earth, where the chthonian spirits venture through fissures in the loam to blow their noxious air into the intruder's gaping mouth. Attics, the other extremity,are where we store things we no longer want to look at or live with on a daily basis—worn-out furniture, dated clothing, broken typewriters, and back in the olden days, insane relatives. Everything between them is where we live and would just as soon keep living.

At Scrub Farm the cellar was merely a place to put things if you secretly wanted them to be destroyed by rust or mildew. Erin told me in one of her letters (it made me think she wanted to come home, that she missed us and simply had lost the way back), told me that she believed Faw stored her suitcases in the cellar because deep down he never wanted her to leave. It is possible; he, like me, has never remarried, is something of a monk from what I can tell. And given that he works so much by intuition I'd not put it past him to have “thought” that far ahead, when we first moved into the house out on Shelter.

So what about the attic? Am I stretching my metaphor out of form to look on the attic as a place of exposure, as an analogue to this film of Berg's that Djuna has called me, all in hysterics, to tell me about? Maybe so, but if I hadn't had those experiences with intimacy and its estimable, if often bloodless, procedures and ends, then I might have a narrower-minded reaction to this film that my brother is in the midst of making. My reaction is not narrow, though. And it has everything to do with attics, with doing things that we think of as dark and damp as cellars can be, but revealed in a lightness and warmth we associate—or, at least I do—with attics. Moreover, attics have windows, often architecturally whimsical affairs shaped like half moons, or triangles, and if I were in an attic I would be able to look down upon his gestures, and watch him putting other people, actors, through the paces he seems to think might explain our own, and I would open that window and cry out “It's all a lie” to the lot of them moving about like Gumby's ant enemies, descended from the widow's walk to the orchard to prey upon its fruit, below.

The rite of passage—call it a rite, call it passage—from producer to writer-director had been simple for Berg, though he knew it might be more difficult for his colleagues to accept. Berg had lost his creative impulse, as we all are susceptible to doing, in his early twenties, and if Faw had intended to sterilize him, redirect him a little, by sending him to that private school, limit him, and hone him in a bit so that he would loop back into the Sprawl, take up with its activities, be his father's son, he succeeded handily. At least for a while. Why leave flighty things unsecured, was a phrase I once heard postmidnight on the box. The baseball player who said it might have said it in other words—the subject was loans, second mortgages to be exact—but I thought it was an appropriate epigraph in general. Faw had secured Berg as you secure a kite to a stake when you run inside to get another ball of string because the wind high up is running so nicely, and the kite is already out as far as the lead you've got on it will go. The only problem is you can come back outside, full of anticipation, excited at the prospect of tying on the extra length of string with the hope of letting your kite up higher and higher, and find that in the short time you were away the wind had died, and the kite fluttered down. Or else, as in the case of Berg, that the wind had picked up, and the string had broken.

This gnarled world of the art film was governed by fewer laws and forces than that of commercial film making. Money here was, as elsewhere, the prime motivator when people or things resisted movement, and was the most effective tranquilizer when they moved either too fast or in the wrong direction. It was, good old money, usually the ultimate purpose, the end in view of making an art film, as well as a commercial one. So, Berg's access to pure, clean money, his willingness to provide the capital that could push matters along, then swing right around again to bringback home to the sugar shack more nice sugar was only one of the assets he knew he could bring to the project he had in mind. The great green leverager was how he'd thought of himself before. Now he could be something more. Granted, money was an idea, but there were worlds of ideas out there that were valuable in and of themselves, and Berg had reached down into his past and brought one forth, all viscous and shivering with promise, wanting to breathe, waiting only for a surgeon with green eyes and a paper-thin, green blade to cut it loose and let it go off on its own. Berg—it was as if he'd been hit on the head so clearly the whole thing had come to him—was going to be mother, surgeon, blade, and baby all at once. Hell if he wasn't going to make a masterpiece.

He'd had enough experience as a producer and enough financial success with the films he had helped to get made—few of which he had bothered to see, in fact. His taste for such stuff had been worn out by the time he was in his early thirties, his aspirations ran to higher ground. When he told Analise he had a script idea he wanted to develop and shoot himself, he had reason to believe her response would not be pessimistic. Analise was like a sibyl to him, and her advice was cherished; the two of them had been on and off lovers for years, and now they were in an off-period, which meant they were collaborators in making money, and nothing else. It took him a couple of weeks to work up the courage to present her his idea, in part because he predicted that there would be aspects of the proposal she wouldn't like, and he was averse to disappointing her.

She did say, “You don't know what you're getting yourself in for,” and she might have even said, “You don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about,” and yet he knew these words were a sure sign of interest, as was the fact she remained seated across the table from him in the darkish downstairs hole on Sheridan Square.

Analise removed her incorrigible white-framed sunglasses—which were so retro—as she filled her role ofdevil's advocate. This delighted him, and he might even have made a note of her penchant for doing this whenever she wanted to emphasize her point (indeed, he
had
written a few words about it in the pocket notebook he carried with him just for the purpose of cataloguing interesting tics that he could use to liven up characterizations he hadn't gotten around to developing)—and, well—Analise both withheld and didn't withhold her opinion.

He wondered whether all this might have gone better if they were in an on-period, but then remembered that she was even more straight with her opinions when they were sleeping together than not. She proceeded, “Like, what kind of story do you have in mind?” which gave him the opening to tell her what he thought to do.

“It's going to be a film about a family, it'll have the old crossbones rating but I want it to be so subtly psychological, and the production qualities unique and fresh enough that it could win a prize at Cannes. So, the family is made up of a father, mother, and three children—”

She opened her mouth to say something, interject a sarcasm like, Win a prize at Cannes? but allowed, “Yes, so?” instead.

“One of the three children—the younger boy—he isn't alive anymore except in these hyper constructs of the girl.”

“His sister.”

“Right, the sister. So the boy has died in a freak accident, drowned in a riptide, you see they live on the ocean, and there's the possibility behind all this that the sister was responsible, I haven't bothered to work that through yet, not sure it'll be useful. But anyway you see how these constructs of the girl, who is very devoted to the family—devoted for sure to the dead brother because he's so easy for her to manipulate, being dead and everything, kind of repressed but a bundle of energies, you see how these fantasies of hers make absolutely perfect vehicles for the graphic stuff? Family disintegrates. Mother runs off with some artist, say, a guy who wouldn't mind tagging in to the husband's wealth in some kind of way that has to do with his knowing something about an operation in the man's business that isn't altogether on the up and up. The husband married to his work. Ignores all this, keeps building and building. And his daughter, Grady I think I'm going to call her, driven to the edge by this combination of a kind of need to make a family for herself, and all this anger at her own family for having burned itself down, what happens with her is that she has all this fantasy life as a child and then runs face first into the real world, gets married, the marriage doesn't work out, and then she goes on through a series of escapades trying to find the Holy Grail in the guise of a lover.”

“Pretty complicated. Too complicated.”

“Could be, but it could work for us, for instance it could go into sequels, one, two, threes. I want at least to make it so we see her at two different stages of her life—both when she's going through this adolescent trauma of the brother's death and parental split, and then later when she's somewhere in her mid-thirties, is divorced herself, and she's carrying on with her best friend's husband—”

Analise interrupted now. She had waited just long enough to identify what she perceived to be her cue. Berg was important to her and she wanted to let him down as easily as possible while not jeopardizing her relationship with him. She had seen this before, the producers wanting to move into the art itself; everybody wants to be a star, to write, direct, nobody is content to have the real power, the soft-spoken money power behind the scenes. Why would anybody want to write if he didn't have to make a living? It wasn't even that uncommon for the money to want to get out there in front of the camera—and, she always wondered, to what end? What was it in backers' minds that made them want to parade their stories or their bottoms out there with the others, half of whom—the others, that is—would give anything to leave behind the heavy breathing, the creative thinking, all the alcoholic battles withthemselves in front of the dailies, and spend their days reading scripts, shouting into the telephone at delinquent accounts, and letting someone else bring them the lime, the mineral water, the Marblehead bowl filled with organic trail mix. “You realize this is going to cost a king's ransom? There's too much plot to it. Plot means sets, means actors who can act, can remember lines, means technicians who can do lighting and props and on and on.”

“It'll cost. That's right. I want it to cost. I want it to cause not a ripple but a wave.” He shifted in his seat when this came out, the grandiloquence having sounded a bit pompous even to his own ear. But Analise would forgive him his zealousness, he thought.

“No, listen to me. It can't even be attempted within the numbers you're accustomed to spending, you hear me?”

“I don't care what it costs.”

“He doesn't care what it costs.” What could she say?

She must have known that he would not be thrown by a display of self-interest. “How is it you never said that about any of my projects?”—This was, of course, how they had met. She was one of the very few female directors in the industry, and was looked on as something of a pioneer, a phenomenon to be admired, even studied. Her work was hardly pornographic, in fact, which was part of the attraction since Berg had ever been more interested in the profitability of the industry than the sensational aspects of the films themselves—most of what Analise had accomplished was done through innuendo, versus the standard, established modes of behavior on the screen, which she dismissed as antiquated. In Analise's films—as in those made by Candida Royallie, her mentor and Brooklyn idol—women were the focus, their pleasure, their interests, their lives. Her women tended to be enigmatic, and capable of handling themselves in difficult situations. Her men were prudent and backward, as a rule. It was quite a flip.

“Analise.” He drew his hand across his eyes, knowing that the person he was addressing was in a position to lookon his as the words of an ingenue, “I think this could be a breakthrough for the art film, could help legitimize the form. It's what you've been doing right along, and it's why I've supported you in it.”

“You have supported me in it because I have earned out.”

“I would have supported your work even if I lost my socks doing it, and you know it.”

Much as she adored Berg she had to demur. She studied her fingertips for a moment. “Look, you make the decision to implement an artistic vision—”(give him
that
much if not his rumpled beret and cold-water garret)“—this vision of tracing the sister, Grady you called her, Grady's sexual fantasies from childhood on forward into when she's an adult, and what you're going to wind up doing is pushing the project over into like a different area in terms of distribution. What you're proposing here is going to limit the thing's commercial viability.” Try that angle.

“I don't see why.”

“Here you cut out your number one ticket buyer, your regular who doesn't want his honest enjoyment all gummed up by psychological complication, who doesn't give one goddamn that some director is going to try to win a Purple Heart for refining the medium, and where will that land you? They don't have debtor's prisons anymore, but you get my drift. Your story line is great but I can see right now how it's going to get in the way. It's too much menu not enough meat.” She'd got her sunglasses back on by then, because she could see that Berg was not hearing what he wanted to hear. Indeed, he found himself wondering whether these weren't exactly the words he'd spoken to her once, back when they first met, and she had approached him needing backing with a similarly improbable narrative.