Steve Erickson - Zeroville

160.

He can — he’s still thinking to himself a week later, on the plane home — expose the side that punishes and the side that receives, the side that dominates and the side that submits. It’s different with each person and each profile: what’s represented by one actor’s right might be represented by another’s left. George Stevens understood this in A Place in the Sun ; Vikar remembers what Dotty said about the close-ups of Taylor and Clift on the terrace, how Stevens had no regard for continuity in cutting from one profile to the other. As Vikar begins to decipher which profile is which — although he can’t articulate it to himself let alone anyone else — a new visual vocabulary of meaning becomes available to him.

161.

Variety , January 5, 1976: “LOS ANGELES — Long-time motion-picture veteran Dorothy Langer is leaving the studio after more than 25 years as editor and vice president, effective immediately, it was announced today by Paramount Pictures. Neither Ms. Langer nor a spokesman for the studio could be reached for comment.”

162.

Back in Los Angeles, Vikar goes by Dotty’s office on the chance she’s still there. He tries phoning her once, to no answer.

Over the coming weeks and months, he walks out to the Paramount Gate looking for Soledad against the fountain, arms folded. He searches everywhere and asks anyone who might know her; he calls information over and over for her number, but there never is one.

163.

Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon . Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well . Penn’s Night Moves . Warhol’s Heat . Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King . Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales . Meyer’s Up! Sarre’s The Death of Marat . Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth . In The Story of Adele H , the daughter of a famous nineteenth-century author falls in love with a soldier. She follows the soldier from France to Nova Scotia and haunts the streets of Halifax looking for him; everything she believes or has believed has collapsed into his form. She is Joan of Arc but without a god; she becomes so pure in her crusade that, by the end of the movie, the soldier himself means nothing to her and is unrecognizable to her. She’s beyond love, beyond the pettiness of her own heart; she’s beyond God. By the end of the movie, she’s gone somewhere God can’t reach her.

164.

Later he’ll tell himself it’s for Dotty, but he doesn’t really believe that. Deep in the bowels of the Paramount archives one afternoon he sees it, there on a shelf like this week’s disposable magazine: place in the sun / stevens scrawled on the edge of the canister; and he stands looking at it a long time as if deciding whether to steal it rather than how. But really he’s deciding how.

If they hadn’t fired Dotty, I wouldn’t , but he knows he would and feels no guilt. He also knows he cherishes this movie more than its owners ever could. Finally he simply carries the cans out of the building under his arm in broad daylight, making no attempt to hide them; when no one stops or questions him, the theft is only validated. Back in his apartment on Pauline Boulevard, he makes a shrine for it.

165.

Dietrich and Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman is next. As the pirated movie collection grows, the shrine grows; soon it’s filled a wall. I’m going to need more walls .

166.

He goes to the Fox Venice one night to see an Antonioni double bill. In the first film, a group of vacationers visits an island where one of them vanishes; the woman is never found, and by the end of the movie she is all but forgotten. In the second film, the private eye from Chinatown has become a foreign correspondent who changes places with a dead man, leaving in his wake a successful career and an estranged wife. So really the second half of the double bill solves the mystery of the first, and of the vanished woman on the island, who clearly also has exchanged places with someone. Vikar knows she has become Soledad Palladin, who was originally supposed to play the part. By the end of the double bill the foreign correspondent has assumed not only the dead man’s itinerary but his destiny, and a growing hush falls over not just these movies but all movies — the hush of looming cataclysm, the slow pan of the camera across an empty town square outside a hotel room, where a body lies.

167.

Vikar returns to Jayne Mansfield’s headstone at Hollywood Memorial one night and lies on the headstone waiting for her. But she doesn’t come.

168.

After three projects as an assistant editor, Vikar hasn’t worked for eight months when he gets a phone call.

“Mr. Jerome?” The voice on the other line is pleasant and self-assured. “Mitch Rondell with United Artists in New York. How are you?”

“I’m all right.”

“I’m wondering if we can fly you back here to discuss a project. It would be on our dime, of course.”

“When?” says Vikar.

“I don’t mean to be pushy, but as soon as possible. This afternoon or, if that’s not feasible, tomorrow.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“I would rather talk about it in person. It’s pressing and a little delicate.”

“It doesn’t take thirteen hours, does it?”

“To New York?”

“The last plane I flew took thirteen hours.”

“You must have gone farther than New York.”

“Spain.”

“That’s farther than New York. Have you ever been to New York?”

“No. I’ve been to Philadelphia.”

“Well, that’s close to New York. It didn’t take you thirteen hours to fly to Philadelphia, did it?”

“I took a bus from Philadelphia. That took longer than thirteen hours.”

“I would think so. Can I have my assistant call you back in twenty minutes or so to make the arrangements?”

“Someone will need to drive me to the airport.”

“Of course. Someone will be waiting for you at JFK as well, and bring you to a hotel here in the city, probably the Sherry-Netherland, and we’ll take things from there. Everything will be handled on our end.”

“Thank you.”

“See you in the next day or two, Mr. Jerome.”

“You may call me Vikar. With a k.”

“You can call me Mitch with an M,” although Vikar can’t imagine how else he would spell it.

169.

The sign the driver holds the next evening when Vikar arrives at JFK doesn’t say “Vikar” by any spelling, but MR. JEROME. The car takes Vikar to his hotel; he has a small suite overlooking the park.

The next morning Vikar is driven to the company offices at Forty-Ninth and Seventh. It’s the worst neighborhood he’s ever seen; a porn theater is across the street. He’s wandering the building’s twelfth floor, lost, when someone says, “Vikar Jerome?”

“Yes,” Vikar says.

“Your head precedes you,” the man laughs. He looks like one of the actors in Carnal Knowledge , who also was half of a singing duo Vikar once saw on television, with the same blond brillo hair except thinning. “I’m Mitch.”

“Hello.” Vikar shakes his hand.

“How was your flight?”

“All right, thank you.”

“Not thirteen hours.”

“No.” Vikar says, “I know New York is closer than Spain.”

“How is the hotel?”

“It’s nice. Thank you.”

“Have you had lunch?”

“No.”

“Let’s go have lunch.”

170.

The two walk along Forty-Ninth to a restaurant called Vesuvio’s, where Rondell has a salad and Vikar orders a pizza.