Walter Williams: The Picture Business

“Escort,” Paulie said. “Yeah.”

“Wow.”

“And could you, uh…” Paulie was embarrassed to continue.

“Could I what?”

Nothing to do but plunge on. “Could you tell everyone that you’re my girlfriend?” he said.

Gloria gave a low laugh. “I’m already your girlfriend, sugar,” she said.

Paulie called a caterer and had them send food—ham, chicken, cold cuts, and various salads—and he fully stocked the bar. He got a bowl of cocaine for the younger guys and their dates, and put some bottles of Bollinger on ice. Gloria turned up in a print summer dress that made her look just like a girlfriend. And she surprised him by wearing a blonde wig.

“Don’t all wise guys have blonde girlfriends?” she asked.

The other guests arrived. Raimundo brought his new squeeze, and Paulie was surprised to see that she was Sondra, the actress/model he’d met in Santa Monica. She had a new, shorter haircut, and was blonder, if possible, than before.

“Nice haircut,” he said.

“I told her she should get it done that way,” Raimundo said. He started caressing her hair from behind, like a hairdresser. “She has pretty ears, don’t you think? So we agreed that she should sweep her hair back above the ears so that everyone could see them, and keep it short in back, so that the diamond necklace I was going to buy her would show.”

Paulie looked at the necklace. “Nice,” he said.

“The links are little gold flowers in the shape of chrysanthemums,” Raimundo said. “With a diamond in the center of each one. We considered a lot of them, though. We thought about this kind of interlaced rope design, and there was this other one where each hnk was a bird in flight, but we decided we liked the chrysanthemums best.”

“Nice necklace,” said Pauhe.

He was glad he hadn’t called Sondra again, otherwise he’d be babbling about her fashion choices just like Raimundo.

Before they could get to Sondra’s dress and shoes, Paulie asked if they wanted drinks, and when he brought Sondra hers, he suggested that she maybe not tell Raimundo about the night she and Paulie had spent together.

“You think I’m stupid or something?” Sondra asked.

The answer to that was a big Yes, but Paulie protested that he had meant no such thing. When everyone had arrived and had drinks—or a toot, depending—Pauhe showed them into the office, where he’d set up the buffet and some comfortable chairs, and he ran How Gangsters Got Invented.

As soon as the opening titles came up, Raimundo started to complain. “Does it haveta be black-and-white? I hate black-and-white.”

“Just watch,” Helio said firmly, and what Heho said went, so they all settled down.

Pauhe found as the movie went on that he was nervous. His heart beat hard and perspiration broke out on his forehead. Gloria noticed his nervousness and took his hand and held it in her lap.

He held his breath through much of the grapefruit scene, though he heard shouts of “Yeah!” and “Give it to her!” from Marcio and Raimundo, so it seemed to be going all right.

During the end he held his breath and clutched at Gloria’s hand. He could hear little grunts and exclamations from the others in the audience at the point where each realized that the movie was shifting into color. During the last few minutes of violence, with explosions and chases and Cagney machine-gunning everyone in sight, he heard shouts and cheers. At the end, there was applause.

Gloria turned to him and whispered into his ear. “I was wrong,” she said. “You are a poet. I don’t know what Norman Vincent Peale or those other poets would think of you, exactly, but you’re a poet, absolutely for sure.”

That made Paulie feel good. He turned the lights on and saw that everyone was grinning. “That was terrific!” Marcio told him. “I hardly ever like flatscreen any more, but that was a good movie.”

“Real triff!” said Raimundo. “That ending, with all those people getting shot, that was great!”

“It’s called montage, see,” Pauhe explained. “That’s where you have a lot of different pictures, only you edit them together in kind of like a rhythm—”

“It’s the only gangster movie I ever liked,” Helio pronounced.

Paulie looked at Gloria. “It was Gloria’s idea, really.”

“Smart lady,” said Helio.

“I didn’t like all the color at the end,” said Leo. Paulie felt himself tense.

“Well, see, I thought I would bring it into modern times,” he said. “Yeah!” Marcio agreed, “like from the time of black-and-white into the time of color!”

“I see what you mean,” Leo said, “but I still didn’t like it changing that way. It was too much like The Wizard of Oz. ”

Paulie wanted to punch Leo in the face. “Well, see—”

“Too bad,” Marcio went on, “that you couldn’t bring it into the virts. Everyone could become Cagney, see, and shoot all the bad guys.”

“That grapefruit scene was disgusting,” Sondra said.

Everyone looked at her.

“Beating up his girlfriend, then bringing in some hooker?” Sondra said. “Nobody should treat a woman like that.”

Paulie wanted to rip her throat out.

“Well, see…” Raimundo said, uncomfortably.

“She deserved it,” said Marcio. “She was just whining all the time, and…”

“Nobody deserves treatment like that!” Sondra said. “Nobody deserves to get hit!”

The men all looked at each other. Nobody deserves to get hit was a concept alien to their world-view.

Raimundo went up to Sondra and patted her shoulders in an ineffectual way as he tried to explain. “No, darling, but see,” he said, “she was asking for it, she was complaining and he just…”

“So if somebody complains, she deserves to get hit?” Sondra’s voice was shrill.

Paulie saw a nasty grin on Marcio’s face as he said, “When she don’t got nothing to complain about, darlin’,” he said. “I mean, it’s not like he was married to her.”

So then Sondra started to yell about how bad it was to hit people and how it shouldn’t make any difference if they were married or not, and so of course Raimundo, in order to demonstrate that he could keep his woman under control in front of his friends, was forced to hit her; and that just made her louder, so Raimundo hit her again, and she ran crying to the bathroom, and a couple of the other girlfriends rolled their eyes and went to join her.

Raimundo stood there in the middle of the room, his face bright red, flexing his hands over and over. Helio put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You had to do that,” Helio said. “It’s time she learned what’s what.”

“Yeah,” Raimundo said, and flexed his hands some more.

Paulie pictured to himself Raimundo explaining to people that he and Sondra decided that she needed two bruised eyes in order to call attention to the subtle purple stripe on her new outfit.

Marcio just smirked and poured himself some more Bollinger.

“Well,” Gloria said, as she handed Pauhe a glass, “the critics have had their say, but I think your movie’s still a hit.”

“Yeah?” Pauhe asked.

“Yeah.”

Pauhe scowled. “I think critics should get killed.”

Gloria patted him on the arm. “Not now, big man. Be gracious on your big night.”

The rest of the party turned out okay. Sondra sat in a corner and sulked, but everyone else was high on the movie, on violence, or on something else.

“So what’s your next project?” Heho asked Pauhe as he was leaving.

“Whatever you want me to do, Heho.”

“No, I mean, your next movie.”

Pauhe had to stop and think for a moment. He hadn’t considered this. “Maybe Godfather Part II,” he said. ‘You know that scene where Corleone goes back to Sicily to get revenge on the guy who killed his family? And he just shts the guy up the middle with a butcher knife? That doesn’t make any sense—I mean, hasn’t anyone in this movie ever heard about ribs? ”