The Good Inn Page 7

  There was a long silence as Natan considered this. For a moment it almost seemed like the two men who had come to a church to discuss pornography were actually praying.

  “I fear my exploits abroad might have been greatly exaggerated in your country,” Natan explained. “The French have had a tendency of late to tell fabulous tales about my people, tales that allow for swift superficial justice. I would hate to come all this way to disappoint you.”

  Léar frowned; he didn’t like men who excused their myths, no matter how far from their truth. Whether Natan was or wasn’t all that Léar believed him to be, Léar knew that Natan was his kind of people.

  Léar argued, “We, all of us, have one or two tiny crimes committed in moments of passion fueled by youthful ambition that at the time we had no idea would conjure such ghosts that would haunt us the rest of our lives, implanting a fear that we will be found out and undone. All for naught. But it is only this willingness to cross these invisible lines that made it all possible. These gorgeous ghosts are what make us, but we must not allow ourselves to be undone by them. The true artist never excuses his ghosts.”

  Natan ignored Léar’s musings and responded with a question regarding the thing that most bothered him about Léar’s idea. “Why would you think that these men would want to sit through your ‘story’ when they can go somewhere else and get straight to the point?”

  Léar faced Natan for the first time. Even though Natan was unsure of his new benefactor’s idea, he couldn’t help but be impressed by his passion. Léar was clearly determined.

  Just as the morning sun blasted an ethereal beam through the stained-glass windows that lined the walls, hitting Léar like a spotlight from God Himself, Léar exclaimed, with the enthusiasm and power of a preacher midsermon, “From the moment man picked up the little machine that could turn life into light and make moments immortal, we have been, all of us, experimenting with what we could capture with this magic box. And then one day, they made the magic box capture motion! Men and women, walking. A train, moving. Smoke, blowing. A gun, firing. These first displays of manipulating light were simply an entertainment, an exhibition. Over time, though, we begin to wonder what else might we be able to do with this canvas where light is our pigment. It was only a matter of time before someone would wonder, ‘Can I capture a kiss, can I capture love, can I capture beauty, ahhh, wait a moment, can I capture sex?’ The truth is people would much prefer to watch beauty than decay. A kiss garners more excitement than a train shooting toward you at great speed, primed to run you down. Hidden and forbidden worlds filled with beauty, passion, and sex, to put it simply, sell.

  “And so myself and my contemporaries who were some of the first men to get their hands on this obscure camera asked our subjects to remove their clothes. And for a moment, that was more than enough to blow people’s minds as an extension of that exhibitionism. Even the most impressive magic trick performed with light couldn’t hold a candle to the draw of bare skin. But as time goes on movies will now focus on more and more intricate stories. The first reels were seconds long, then minutes. Soon we will have films that are an hour or longer! How long, I ask you, can one have sex for?”

  Natan saw where Léar was going with this, and he couldn’t help but be impressed. Léar was right. He was crazy, possibly demented, and definitely morally corrupt, but he was also right. Léar wrapped up his call to arms with a manifesto he had been practicing for weeks . . .

  My friend, up until 1905 film was considered merely the work of a machine incapable of intelligence or interpretation. If it happened to catch the light reflecting off something naughty, its operator was not to blame. So what changed? When did the man behind the camera become responsible for what light his contraption captured? I would say that it was when we realized that that light was being controlled by the man and only collected by the machine. Much like a conductor leads his symphony, we are the leaders, if you will, of this visual orchestra, and voilà, that is when exhibition transformed into art. This, my friend, is what makes us artists, and yet, to have this art reach the common man, the only way to compete with what is to come is to make these “blue” movies longer. The only way to make them longer will be to tell a good story.

  Léar pounded his fist down onto the rickety bench in front of him, the sound echoing throughout the hall like the last dramatic note in a musical composition’s grand finale, decades of dust exploding into the air around him. With the light reflecting on the particles, Léar was engulfed in an ethereal glow, the very portrait of a mad angel from hell.

  “What do you need from me, Kirchner?”

  Léar smiled. He knew he had hooked Natan. “Call me Léar.”

  All around them, bells began to ring. Léar looked down at his pocket watch. It was eight thirty A.M. Léar now knew why Natan had wanted to start the meeting when he did. The doors of the church swung open on all four sides of the building and the church parishioners streamed in, crowding around them. Léar looked away for a moment, and when he turned to look back at Natan, he was gone. Despite Natan’s distrust of Léar on their first meeting, he knew that he had made the strange man from Romania a believer. Léar had talent at many things, but above all, this was his most profound. He could make anyone a believer, even if the sermon was being delivered by a new pornographer in an old church. Léar walked out of the church as the morning service began, knowing that he would be hearing from his new business partner very soon.

  Montage: We see the years pass, and times change, on the streets of Paris.

  The next few years were good to both Nickie and George. They had both prospered and, to their relief, had never heard another word about Léar or the film they had made with him.

  Nickie was invited to New York City, where she performed for thousands. For his part, George was becoming one of the biggest stars of stage and film. He played the lead on every stage in Paris. He never had to look for work. Work found him, as did the women.

  Nickie had not changed much despite her celebrated status as “the Queen of the Cancan” and Paris’s “dancing darling of the Pigalle.” She burned through men and money like they were kindling for a much bigger fire.

  George never forgot his beginnings and saved every penny he made, only spending the amount he needed to keep up appearances. Somewhere in his darkest fears was the idea that it could all go away with the blink of an eye.

  George was always a little nervous. He felt that one day, he would be found out for who he really was. The most terrifying part was that he himself had gotten so far along that he wasn’t even sure anymore what exactly it was he would be found out to be.

  He never bumped into Nickie; he made a point of it. He knew of her and of her success. He saw her on posters plastered on walls along city streets but never went to her shows. It was actually easy to avoid Nickie Willy. Everyone knew where she would be each night.

  Nickie had no reason to seek out George. He was part of a different world, one that she and her friends were not interested in.

  In the end, time would be kind to George and less so to Nickie Willy.

  Over the next few years, Léar, with the guidance of Bernard Natan and his innovative ideas on distribution, would begin to build a secret empire.

  Men were dispatched with briefcases into the night to deliver reels to brothels and underground clubs around Paris. He promoted late-night events and after-hours screenings in theaters across the city. It had begun.

  It was dusk, and the last blue of the sky was turning black. Standing on a street corner in front of an aging and dilapidated Moulin Rouge was a haggard woman. No one would possibly recognize her as anything else but a street vendor of peanuts and cigarettes, let alone “the Queen of the Cancan and Princess of the Pigalle.” No, this couldn’t be . . . Nickie Willy?

  A string tied a box she held in her hands around her neck; it contained a sparse selection of offerings. Her clothes were ripped and dirty, her face black with street soot.

  She noticed a man, m
uch older than he had been, his boyish face now more distinguished, lined with handsome wrinkles down his cheeks. He still very much looked like George, and how could he not? His face had grown up with his public. The face he had now was still and always had been that of the famous stage and screen star.

  Nickie recognized him immediately and watched as he nervously entered an alleyway, in what was once her part of town. Why would he be here? Like Nickie, the show district had seen much better days and what had once been the place to be was no longer.

  Nickie knew this alley well; she had used it to avoid the crowds, escaping out of the back of her theater so she could arrive before all others at her favorite drinking spots and second-tier showhouses. Now it just led to dark storefronts and darker characters, whose homes lay in the shadows of abandoned theaters.

  Nickie followed George into the dark alley, through the winding side street that led out into a courtyard in the heart of the back side of the Pigalle district.

  On one side of these old buildings was the nightlife of now. A new Paris had grown out of the old, as it always seemed to do, as it had done before and as it would again. The decay of Nickie’s Paris, which she had left years ago, was clear. This Paris was unrecognizable and forgotten to her. A world war had been fought and won. Although Paris had been spared from the front lines, over a million men had gone off to fight and had not returned.

  A man called Fernand Jacopozzi had built a second Paris toward the end of the war to confuse enemy bomber pilots into attacking empty fields with his amazingly engineered light tricks that mimicked an overhead view of a city alive in night’s blanket of darkness. After the war, this “Fake City of Light” had been disassembled by Jacopozzi, who in turn had illuminated the real Paris, starting with Eiffel’s tower, taking his unused light tricks and turning them into what would come to define the city for all future generations. In this unintentional world of light, no one’s name shined brighter than that of George, the star of stage and screen.

  Why was George on a side of Paris he had no use for anymore? The other side, shining and sparkling with electricity, knew him so well. Why would he risk even being seen in a neighborhood shrouded in darkness and inhabited by the city’s most anonymous denizens? Those in the circle that George now ran in would only be here for the most scandalous of reasons for sure. Not to mention his past, which he had always been sure would come back to haunt him one day, somewhere in time.

  Nickie no longer knew anyone in Paris. She had spent the years since her return from America haunting the banks of the Rhône from the villages outside of Versailles to the port of Arles, selling secondhand cigarettes as well as her body. It seemed the only person she’d recognized since her return was George, and here he was.

  She came off a winding path into an open street she knew. George stood in front of an old movie house silhouetted by its marquee that read:

  ACT III:

  The City of Light

  Somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

  —LUIS BUÑUEL

  I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams . . . Man . . . is above all the plaything of his memory.

  —ANDRÉ BRETON

  CHAPTER 5

  The Mouth of the Rhône

  The darkness expands in all directions as Soldier Boy walks aimlessly through a black expanse of nothingness.

  On the distant horizon, the black sky seems to end. He stumbles in the dark toward it and comes upon the edge of an intricate forest upside down, in the sky. It is not like any forest he has ever seen. It’s made of paper and wood, glowing an ethereal white. A strange thought enters his head as he stares up at it.

  “What if I am actually in the sky?”

  As soon as that thought enters his head, another follows just behind it.

  “Perhaps the ground is right side up, and I am upside down?”

  The next thing that Soldier Boy knows, he is walking across the horizontal plane, until the sky becomes the ground, and the ground becomes the sky.

  Above him is the black void of sky that once was his ground, and Soldier Boy is standing in a gigantic black-and-white glowing forest set piece.

  As he moves through this new world, the pieces that it’s composed of move with him, reconfiguring to create new scenery and paths for his benefit alone. The dense two-dimensional forest breaks apart and Soldier Boy finds himself on a riverbank. The water is made up of wood cutouts in the shape of lapping waves and they move mechanically, as if operated by cranks and pulleys.

  EXTERIOR/RIVER RHÔNE/NIGHT

  Standing on the edge of the strange waters, he looks across to the other shore.

  On the other side of the river is an older woman. She looks familiar to Soldier Boy. He waves to her.

  She opens her mouth and speaks but no sound comes out. Soldier Boy puts his hand to his ear, but it is no use. The sound does not travel across the water. Instead . . .

  All goes black and . . .

  The blackness disappears and Soldier Boy loses his balance from the effect. He tumbles backward, losing his footing, and falls in between the churning wooden water slats that make up this expressionistic river Rhône. He holds on for dear life as they bob him comically and mechanically up and down. He reaches his hand up to the woman on the other side of the river. It feels like he is being eaten alive by the river, and as he goes under, there is blackness . . .

  . . . and he sinks under and disappears.

  INTERIOR/UNDER THE WOODEN WATER/SAME

  Soldier Boy is holding his breath as he flails about under the churning wood-carved waves. However, he is not floating downward underneath the waves, but instead is slowly falling a few feet at a time onto moving panels on turning wheels attached to cranks. As the wheels turn, the wooden slats drop him farther downward. He is caught up in a machine that is operating the wooden waves above. He finally falls to solid ground and looks up.

  INTERIOR/BACKSTAGE SET/SAME

  Standing over Soldier Boy with an outreached hand is a MERMAID. She is beautiful. She glistens and sparkles, and as she takes his hand into hers, she speaks.

  MERMAID: It’s all right, you’re safe now.

  This short serene moment is interrupted by a voice barking orders in her direction.

  STAGE MANAGER: Violet! The mermaid scene is over, you have three minutes to change into the pig costume. If you miss another quick-change cue you’re out on the street!

  As she hurries off, Soldier Boy realizes there are two men in work clothes on either side of him. A third turns the crank that has been operating the set piece Soldier Boy has just fallen down.

  Still holding his breath and turning blue, he lets it out and finds that he is not underwater at all. He appears to be under a stage.

  SOLDIER BOY: Where am I?

  STAGEHAND 1: Where are you? Not where you’re supposed to be, I’m pretty sure of that! How did you get back here?

  SOLDIER BOY (pointing up): From up there!

  STAGEHAND 2: How did you get up there? You’re not supposed to be up there! The show has already started! Who let you in? Did you come in through the stage door?

  STAGEHAND 1: I told you we needed to put a man at the stage door.

  SOLDIER BOY: I thought I was drowning! I was sure I would perish!

  STAGEHAND 1 (laughing): Well that’s what’s supposed to happen when you fall into water. So I guess we’re doing something right. Of course, you’re supposed to be feeling like you’re drowning from the safety of the audience.

  SOLDIER BOY: The audience?

  STAGEHAND 2: Yeah, and leaving the actual “drowning” to the actors.

  SOLDIER BOY: The actors?!

  The stagehands help Soldier Boy stand up and they lead him over to a small winding staircase, up it, and to a giant
red curtain. The two stagehands part it in the middle and Soldier Boy stares out into a sea of people, all of whom seem to be staring directly at him. But they are not.

  The first stagehand points out to the sea of people.

  STAGEHAND 1: Audience.

  STAGEHAND 2: Where you’re supposed to be!

  And then to the stage.

  STAGEHAND 1: Actors.

  STAGEHAND 2: I think he might have bumped his head.

  Behind Soldier Boy are SET PIECES FROM HIS ENTIRE JOURNEY THUS FAR. They seem to be a part of the show and ready to roll on- and offstage. From behind Soldier Boy, a voice yells out with a sharp whisper.

  STAGE MANAGER: There you are! You’re on in three minutes! What are you doing in the soldier’s costume? That scene isn’t until after the intermission!

  He grabs Soldier Boy and leads him down a hall to a dressing room. The name on the dressing room reads, “GEORGE.”

  SOLDIER BOY (stopping short in front of the door): You’re confusing me with someone else. This isn’t my room.

  STAGE MANAGER: Of course it is, George!

  SOLDIER BOY: I’m not George!

  STAGE MANAGER: Don’t be ridiculous, of course you are. We don’t have time for this today. Have you been drinking again? You made a deal!

  Soldier Boy frees himself of the Stage Manager’s grasp and backs away from him.

  STAGE MANAGER: What are you doing? Get back here!

  The door marked “GEORGE” opens and the Stage Manager looks inside, and then back at Soldier Boy. He looks extremely confused and frightened.

  Soldier Boy steps back. He doesn’t want to see what the Stage Manager has seen. He knows it can’t be good.