The Same River Twice (8 page)

“Did you give your actors any special guidance or exercises to prepare for their roles?” The speaker was a woman in her thirties wearing violet lipstick with a matching scarf tied close about her neck. “And if so, what did you intend?”

“In general I prefer my actors to sink or swim without my interference. For
Fireflies
, though, because my cast insisted on it, I did give them an exercise. I asked them to walk to the location each day, rather than take the subway or a taxi.” Max began to enjoy himself a little. “And my intention? It was just to make them wonder what my intention might be. As a result they became more thoughtful, more alert to possibility. Also, they absorbed the city more deeply. New York’s like a character in this film.”

A tall man in a black turtleneck asked about the shooting ratio in
Fireflies
.

“I was very fast when I started out,” said Max. “About three to one for
Fireflies
. But with my most recent film,
White Room/Black Room
, I shot close to ten feet for every foot that made the final cut. The more one learns, it seems, the more film one wastes. Or, alternatively: I’ve forgotten what I knew.”

There was laughter, then an interval of silence. A woman in her twenties, her glossy hair hennaed red almost to magenta, stood up and smiled at him. She seemed to be referring to some private understanding between the two of them, and he smiled back.

“It is something of an open secret,” the woman began, “at least among your more devoted admirers, that there exists an alternate ending to
Fireflies
.
In that version a boat is tied up at the end of the pier, waiting for the two lovers. They argue about what to do, then board the boat. Something is thrown overboard, and the boat sets out. The lovers escape together. Obviously, this ending changes the meaning of the film radically. My question is: do you favor one ending over the other, and why did you choose this one today?”

The woman sat back down, looking pleased with herself. She seemed eager to hear his answer, and he was fleetingly sorry not to have one.

“Unfortunately, you’ve been misinformed. There is no alternative ending to
Fireflies
, because, among many other reasons, I didn’t shoot one.”

“But one does exist,” she replied from her seat. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”

He hesitated. “Then you are ahead of me,” he decided to say. “Thank you for your question, though. You’ve given me something to think about.”

The woman acknowledged these words with a nod. She didn’t seem the least bit discouraged; rather, it was as if her earlier air of complicity had been shown to be justified. And though Max had dealt before with unsound or misguided students of his work, people who felt personally addressed by his films and unduly intimate with him, their maker, this woman was not at all like them. It would be desirable, he thought, to avoid her on the way out.

He continued to take questions for the better part of an hour. His audience was intelligent and well informed; he tried to give them worthy answers. Yet the more he talked, summoning up and consulting his younger self, so confident, even arrogant, the more he wished to be rid of this and all his other films. By the time he cut off further questions, he was fatigued—if grateful for the applause.

“That was really super good,” Jacques assured him as they walked back up the aisle together to the lobby. “And,” he added, brandishing a fist-sized vidcam, “I’ve got it all on disk. You really have to publish it as an interview.”

“What about the film?” Max asked. “Do you think it holds up?”

“You’re joking, right? It’s a classic.” He eyed his employer suspiciously. “What is this, a test?”

In the lobby they found, to Max’s discomfort, that a modest reception had been prepared for the occasion. The program director at once reattached himself to his distinguished guest and resumed his critical musings while Max pretended to listen, nodding thoughtfully from time to time. Several members of the audience waited politely to engage his attention, but at last he felt his patience exhausted.

“Jacques,” he said, catching his assistant by the elbow, “this gentle man”—he
pulled the program director firmly forward—“has quite a lot to say about film. You two really ought to get to know each other better.”

Jacques shot him an indignant look, but already it was too late for protest.

This handoff effected, Max turned toward the exit but instead found himself face-to-face with the henna-haired young woman. He supposed the encounter had been inevitable.

“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you just now,” she said. “That wasn’t my intention.”

“You didn’t embarrass me,” he replied.

She held out her hand. “Marie-Claire.”

“Hello, Marie-Claire. Pleased to meet you.”

She had the pasty white complexion of a film enthusiast and was modishly dressed in a black-and-white-print miniskirt, a tailored denim jacket buttoned to her neck, and red patent-leather pumps. Max scanned her oval face for signs of madness.

“I admire your work very much,” she said. “I didn’t know that the other version of
Fireflies
was … unauthorized, if that’s the word. What happened? Did you have trouble with your backers?”

“I always have trouble with my backers,” Max answered, looking belligerently around the room as if one or two might be present. “Tell me, Marie-Claire. Where did you see this other version of the film, with the ending you describe?”

“At university. In Bordeaux.” She frowned. “But also it’s in the video stores, though you can’t tell from the packaging. You just get what you get. I’ve rented both.”

“Really?” He looked at her anew. “So my films interest you?”

She blushed and with her fingertips hooked her hair back behind her ears. “Yes, very much. I am writing my thesis on you.”

Max received this news as gracefully as he could. “Oh. Well, I’m honored. Prematurely, I hope, but definitely honored.” After looking thoughtfully at her, he inspected his cigar, then let his gaze float away. “And who knows? Maybe you’ll be the one to clear up this confusion over
Fireflies
. If that’s what it is.”

Encouraged, she started to ask another question, but he cut her off. “Look, Marie-Claire. There’s only one version of
Fireflies
, and you just saw it. Anything else is horse manure, okay?”

She stared at him.

“If you’re going to write about film, you have to start with the facts.” His anger embarrassed him. The conversation was over. He left the theater.

Dusk had settled over Paris, and the rain had stopped, leaving the air fresh and cutting. He walked south on rue Claude Bernard past the technical schools for which the area was known, toward Gobelins. The streetlamps came on. Reflections from the rain-slick pavement twinned the passing traffic—headlights, taillights, white and red.

It annoyed and discouraged Max that already, at mid-career, he was the subject of an academic paper, let alone one written by somebody as demonstrably misguided, even disturbed, as the girl he’d just encountered.

A gloom settled over him, frustration at having wasted the day and its possibilities. He thought of his daughter, struggling to make a place for herself, and of Odile, never fully predictable but also, since the break-in, tense and preoccupied, inclined to brood. He felt keenly the fragility of their intermingled lives, of other people’s lives. Something like pity welled up in him, so enveloping that it soon encompassed everything and was all he felt. Then, abruptly, it left him, and he knew only exhaustion.

Making a right on Glacière, just blocks from home, he noticed the local video store was still open. He glanced at the cardboard promotionals in the window—most of them for an American space-epic remake—but kept on walking.

The store didn’t even stock his films.

BALAKIAN HAD HIRED a publicist for the opening, a Congo-born Belgian blonde who stood just inside the gallery entrance monitoring arrivals and pouncing triumphantly on those she believed useful to her. Young female journalists circled behind her, notepads in hand, while photographers jockeyed for position.

Turner’s first impulse was to step back into the night, but the Belgian gleefully called out his name, kissed him hello, then asked loudly in French whether he still provided intimate services for his preferred clients. He knew what she was referring to, and though the incident, years past, had been largely her invention, considerable trouble had ensued from the brief account of it she had managed to place in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids. He was careful now to appease her before plunging ahead into the crowd.

It was largely an art-world crowd, ambitious people imaginatively dressed and coiffed, but there was also a scattering of foreign nationals, men in suits, demi-celebrities, and downtown hipsters—notables of the sort that routinely appeared at the Belgian’s events. They milled around the soaring exhibition space, a former trucking depot whose interior had been gutted and elegantly refurbished, drinking wine from plastic cups, conversing in small groups, discreetly vigilant for company more desirable than their own.

The flags upstaged them all. Unframed, suspended from clear plastic
clips high on the walls, the crimson banners charged the gallery with their presence. After inspecting the initial seven that Turner had sent him, Balakian had requested three more, and they now hung two or three to a wall, positioned so that each commanded enough surrounding space to be seen for itself without appearing isolated. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Kosygin, Brezhnev—all looked perfectly at home in the quasi-industrial setting, as if they were reviewing yet another May Day rally. Taken as an ensemble, though, the blazing monochrome fields with their iconic figures—figures once recognizable to virtually anyone, anywhere—strongly resembled an Andy Warhol exhibition of the late 1960s or early ’70s, the time of his Marilyns and Jackies and Maos. The same mix of adulation and irony, awe and indifference, suffused both bodies of work. Such had been the zeitgeist, big faces for impossible times, as much a force in the Soviet Union as in the U.S., and Turner rejoiced at his perspicacity. A serious man didn’t become less so just because he was attempting to turn a profit.

Turner made the rounds, greeting clients, colleagues, acquaintances, and friends, taking care not to appear connected to the show, which was being presented as a Balakian production pure and simple, but when talking to critics or journalists he allowed himself to share his Warholian insight. These people would be writing about the exhibition, and it was only sound practice to point them in the correct direction. Positive reviews in the art press could double the price of the flags, and a magazine cover could do even more.

Quartz lights came on, a TV crew began taping. He dodged them and hurried on to Balakian’s office in the back. There, variously disposed around a bowl of caviar, a plate of blinis, and two liter bottles of vodka on ice, were four men with whom he was well acquainted: Balakian himself; a Swiss collector named Wieselhoff; a corporate art consultant called Baxter; and Nikolai Kukushkin, known to his friends as Kolya, a Russian banker with a number of entrepreneurial sidelines, creatively incorporated and managed. A mood of relaxed complicity prevailed. Turner shut the door behind him.

“The man of the hour,” announced Balakian, pouring drinks all around.

“Very good,” Wieselhoff said to Turner. “Very provocative. Are there more?”

“Glad you like them, Horst. And Ron, the installation’s superb. You were right about adding those extra three.”

Balakian accepted the compliment with a nod. “It works, doesn’t it.”

Kukushkin, who had been grinning craftily at Turner since his arrival,
now raised his glass in greeting. “We are all of us in new world,” he pronounced. “We will wreck it like old world. Is scientific certainty.
Na zdorovie!”

“Na zdorovie!”
repeated the others. All drank.

“You know what I keep thinking?” said Baxter. “From a humanist point of view? Nothing’s handmade anymore. On a daily basis you don’t really notice it, or at least you get used to everything being manufactured or computer generated. But then you see something like these flags that just radiates the human touch, and it makes you want to weep. They’re imperfect, they’re poignant, they’re beautiful. And, face it, they’re rare, which is good for business.”

Balakian smiled. “Watch out for this guy,” he advised, helping himself to more caviar. “I think he just said that painting’s the next big thing.”

Everyone seemed amused. Turner poured himself another glass of vodka, raised it in toast, and drank it down.

“Excuse my bad manners,” Wieselhoff told him, “but I am curious, and we are colleagues here together. How did you come into possession of these flags?”

Turner smiled and shook his head. “Sorry, Horst. Anyway, you know how it is. People bring me things. I facilitate.”

“Ja
, okay.” The Swiss drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “But if more of them turn up, I would like to be informed. I am much excited by these objects.”

Turner exchanged glances with Balakian. “Better talk to Ron about that,” he said.

“And do watch the resale market,” Baxter added drily. “I know I would.”

As the talk turned to gossip—a dealer they all knew was said to have begun blacklisting collectors who put her artists’ works up for auction—Turner’s eye kept coming back to Kukushkin. Compactly built, dressed in a boxy British suit, oxford shirt, no tie, the Russian exuded an authority from which all visible signs of striving had been purged. Although Turner had known him for some time, they had done little business together, instead exchanging the occasional favor in token of their mutual regard and possible future association. When Turner sought to pay off Belarussian customs to get the flags through passport control, it was Kukushkin he’d called, and at once the necessary doors had opened. Secretly, though, and for these very reasons, Turner feared the man to an inconvenient degree.

As if guessing his thoughts, Kukushkin nodded sympathetically and refilled Turner’s glass, then his own. “Business is good?” he asked.