Steve Erickson - Zeroville

224.

Over the course of the following week the phone doesn’t ring at all, then one morning he receives three calls, the first two from the Los Angeles Times and Variety asking for Vikar’s reaction to the response at Cannes to Your Pale Blue Eyes . “The true movie has been set free from within the false movie,” he says, to silence on the other end of the line. The third call is from Mitch Rondell.

223.

Vikar says, “You found them.”

“What?” says Rondell.

“You found Zazi and her mother.”

Rondell sounds slightly flustered. “I’m at JFK, about to get on a plane for France. Vikar, we need you to come over.”

“To New York?”

“Europe. There’s an Air France flight this evening. We’ve booked you a first-class seat.”

“Newspapers are calling.”

“About the picture?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ve heard.”

“Heard what?”

“It screened in competition at Cannes a week ago. Apparently it was riotous. You didn’t hear?”

“No.”

“Not Rite of Spring tear-up-the-theater riotous, but the sort of commotion one picture in the festival always whips up every year. I gather it was hard to tell whether the applause or boos were louder.”

“Boos?”

“Air France will fly you into Nice and someone will meet you and drive you to Cannes, which is the next town over.”

“People booed?”

“Vikar, it’s the picture everyone’s talking about.”

“They booed.” Vikar is fascinated.

“We’ve booked you a small suite at the Carlton, which at this point was difficult. Truth is we had to move someone else out.”

Vikar says, “Is it farther than Spain?”

“You may have to change planes in Paris …”

“Perhaps I’ll come in a couple of weeks. I just got back to Los Angeles.”

“Vikar, there won’t be a festival in a couple of weeks.” Now the tension in Rondell’s voice is unmistakable. “The closing ceremony is tomorrow night. The driver will take you straight to the Palais.”

“The director of the movie should be there.”

“There is no director of this movie. Literally, at this point there is no ‘Directed by’ in the credits. Until the DGA decides otherwise, this picture directed itself.”

“I don’t want to.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to come.”

222.

Vikar can hear the panic rise in Rondell’s voice.

“Listen to me,” comes the voice on the other end of the line, “three hours ago we got a call in our offices here — I can’t say who — to get you to Cannes. Do you understand? This person wouldn’t say more, he wasn’t even supposed to say that much, but … The head of the festival jury is an American director who just did a Jane Fonda-Jimmy Caan picture for us … modern Western thing he’s nervous about … do you understand what I’m getting at?”

“No.”

“I mean this guy wouldn’t be jerking us around five thousand miles away if there wasn’t something afoot. Listen. What about that French novel you want to film?”

“God, I love that book.”

“That can become a very real possibility, but you have to get to Cannes.”

“You don’t believe Zazi and her mother are there, do you?”

“I’ve got to catch my plane, Vikar. We’re sending a car to pick you up in … what time is it in L.A.?” There’s the sound of the phone on the other end changing hands as Rondell checks his watch. “Eleven-thirty in L.A., right? A car is going to pick you up in five hours. Please tell me you have a passport. You must, because you went to Spain for that madman.”

Vikar says, “I live on a secret street.”

“What?”

“It might be hard to find me.”

“Someone will call you in the next thirty minutes and sort everything out. The driver in Nice will have formal wear for you … you’ll have to change in the limo.” A moment’s pause. “We’ll get a hat for you.” Another moment’s pause. “No, you know what? No hat. Better no hat. We’ll make it work for us. See you tomorrow night on the Red Steps.”

221.

In the limo traveling southwest from Nice, looking at the coast Vikar can almost believe he hasn’t left Los Angeles at all, that the plane flew around in the air twelve hours and returned where it took off. “Is that the Atlantic Ocean?” he asks the driver, who glances at Vikar in the rear-view mirror. “Monsieur, it’s the Mediterranean,” the driver says. In a large plastic bag in the seat next to him, Vikar unwraps the black pants, jacket and tie, white shirt, socks and shoes. In a smaller plastic bag are strange black beads that he lays precisely on the seat side by side, like a series of keys that have failed to start a car.

220.

The limo drives twenty-five kilometers to the outskirts of Cannes, along the rue des Belges before cutting down to the Croisette. In the distance Vikar sees a large round building bathed in a light. Reaching a point where other traffic is being turned back, the limo is waved through and then suddenly it’s in the midst of a throng caught between the sea, where the white beach tents are visible in the night, billowing like parachutes as though everyone has dropped from the sky, and red-carpeted steps on the other side, nearly as wide as they are long, leading up to the Palais. The limo stops and Vikar doesn’t move; someone outside opens his door. “Am I supposed to get out here?” he says to the driver. He’s slightly astonished to find that the shirt has no buttons. He lays the tie on the seat next to him with the black beads.

219.

He gets out of the limo. From out of the throng, Mitch Rondell appears. He has a shirt that buttons. I should have gotten one of those . All around is an explosion of bulbs flashing from cameras that Vikar can’t see. Rondell stares aghast at Vikar’s completely open shirt. “There are no buttons,” Vikar explains. Rondell frantically sticks his hand in the pockets of Vikar’s coat searching, then peers into the limo at the black buttons sitting on the seat. He begins to reach in and scoop them up, and another round of flash bulbs goes off around them. “You know what?” he says to Vikar, withdrawing from the limo, “better without the buttons. We’ll make it work for us,” and then one of the ceremonial escorts leads Rondell and Vikar up the long red steps, camera flashes barraging the man with the unbuttoned shirt and the tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head.

218.

In the yawning theater where the festival’s closing ceremony takes place are more people than Vikar has ever seen. They fill the mezzanine and a grand balcony above him; he didn’t know a building could hold this many people. He stands in the middle looking around, everyone looking back. Everyone looks at him but not the way people used to when they would throw themselves off hillsides and not the way they did in the Bowery when he came into the club. A golden glow settles on the theater, and up onstage in a box to the right are nine people that Rondell explains to Vikar are the festival jury. They include a famous Swedish actress whom Vikar recognizes from several Ingmar Bergman movies he can’t think of because all Ingmar Bergman’s movies are the same to him, and one of the producers of the James Bond movies. Mitch Rondell seems fairly beside himself. “My God,” Rondell says, partly to Vikar, mostly to no one, “do you suppose we might actually win the fucking Palme d’Or?”

217.

The fucking Palme d’Or is presented to a three-hour Italian epic about a peasant boy on a long walk home from school who breaks his shoes. Italians, Vikar believes, like to make movies about things that break or get lost, like shoes and bicycles. Two so-called Grand Prizes are presented to a British movie by a Polish director about a man who’s learned from Aborigines a shout that kills people, which people in the movie insist on hearing anyway, and a French movie by an Italian director with Marcello Mastroianni and Gerard Depardieu about a man who finds the body of King Kong washed up on the beach; the title translates as Bye Bye, Monkey . “That sounds like a very good movie,” says Vikar.