Steve Erickson - Zeroville

“What press conference?”

“At half past nine tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t want a press conference.”

“At the Palais in the grande salon .”

“No.”

“Someone will take you, it is arranged.”

“That’s not my name, what they said tonight.”

“ Exactement . You can, what is the American? ‘set the record straight.’”

Vikar considers this. “Set the record straight.”

Maria rolls over and runs her hand over Vikar’s belly. “Let us set something else straight.”

“What do you think,” Vikar blurts, “of the films of Irving Rapper?”

“No more cinema for a few minutes, chéri .”

“I …”

“ Chéri . I know what you want.”

201.

He knows where Jean Harlow is buried, or at least where they say she’s buried, but perhaps like Jayne Mansfield she’s buried somewhere else.

Is her tomb empty then, or is someone else buried there? Is everyone who comes to Hollywood so desperate to be Jean or Jayne or Marilyn that she would accept being Jean or Jayne or Marilyn in death if she couldn’t be in life? Are the hills of Hollywood filled with the bodies of doubles, of imposters for legends? Do only dead blondes with large breasts have surrogates for their graves?

It has to have been the older blonde , Vikar feels certain, but as Maria takes him in her mouth, irrational notions skitter across his mind like centipedes. He closes his eyes and thinks of Soledad.

200.

Afterward she says, “Was that what you wanted?”

He stares at the ceiling and feels from across the balcony outside the breeze off the Mediterranean. “How did you know?”

“It is my talent to know,” she says. She wipes her chin very precisely with one finger as she did the juice of the plum. “I like doing it that way. I prefer it to the fucking.”

“Why?”

“Why not. One of those things not to regard so much. It makes me sexy.”

“You mean it makes you feel sexy?”

“That is what I said, non ?”

“I guess.”

“This is over now,” she says to the movie, “it is curious. When Harlow died, you know, she was the fiancée of William Powell, who once was married to Carole Lombard, who married Gable before she died so young, like Harlow. Both men outliving their great loves who died so young. There was a second version of this film … what is the American title?”

“Which one?”

“This one we just watched.”

“ Red Dust .”

“There was a second version twenty years later, with a different title, a funny title, also with Gable, twenty years older, playing the same part as in the first. Bien sûr in cinema the men get to remain young even as they are old.”

“I saw where Carole Lombard is buried. I saw where Clark Gable is buried.”

“Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly were in the second version, with the funny title.”

“I don’t know where Ava Gardner is buried.”

“She is still living.”

“She is?”

“She has made several bad films of late. A few years ago a big shitty earthquake film.”

“ Earthquake .”

“Are there four women less alike?”

“What four women?”

“Gardner and Kelly, Harlow and Astor? Change around all those women, put them in each other’s parts, and the films would be completely different, non ? Five if you count Garbo, who originally was supposed to play the Harlow part in the Red Dust , when John Gilbert was to play the Gable part, because you know Garbo and Gilbert were so popular together from the silent films. But Gable, he was the first true superstar — after cinema had sound? When he killed a man in an auto accident, the studio got someone else to, what is the American? ‘take the fall’? Directors, they make the art, but stars make culture. My country has made too much of the directors. I cannot remember in the second version if Ava Gardner plays the Harlow part and Grace Kelly the Mary Astor part, or the other way around.”

“It’s the way you said first.”

“What is the funny title?”

“ Mogambo . Grace Kelly is a princess now.”

“ Oui, chéri ,” Maria says, changing the TV channel with the remote control, “she is forty kilometers down the coast if you want to go visit her. Watching the Mabom —”

“ Mogambo .”

“Watching that second one, you think the same as in the first, why would Gable give up Ava Gardner for Grace Kelly? Mais bien sûr Gable and Kelly were fucking when they made the film, so how can one argue.” Searching the channels, she comes upon a porn film of two people fucking who don’t look very much like Clark Gable and Grace Kelly. “It is strange that no one seems to make a great film about sex.”

“ Last Tango ,” says Vikar. “Realm of the Senses. Emmanuelle.”

“ Emmanuelle is shit,” Maria scoffs. “In Dernier Tango Brando is great but the film? The Japanese are interesting because about sex they are even more perturbé —crazy, nuts — than Americans. But I mean a film that makes audiences sexy.”

“You mean that makes them feel sexy?”

“That is what I said, non ?”

“I guess.”

“That … turns them on? is the expression? As a porn but also dramatique . In America you have this idea that anything about sex is acceptable only if it absolutely is not, under any circumstances, sexy. It would be the same to say that a comedy is acceptable only if it absolutely is not funny. The Americans are too romantic to make such a film. They are in love with shame.”

“The French are romantic.”

Maria dismisses this with the flick of her fingers. “ Quelle mythe ! No one ever said in a French film, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ Can you imagine Bogart fucking Bergman with a cube of butter on the Champs-Elysées as the Nazis march in?” For a few minutes they watch the two people having sex on TV. “The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with who the characters are. For the pornographer, sex is … spectacle humain sans consequence. It is as they say: you do not pay me — well, not you , in your case — the man does not pay me for the sex, he pays me to leave afterward. For the lack of consequence.”

Vikar says, “He pays you to leave?”

“This is what Brando believes will save him in Dernier Tango ,” says Maria, “sex without consequence.”

“You are paid to leave?”

She changes the channel. “That is what destroys him, because there is no sex without consequence.”

“Perhaps Last Tango in Paris isn’t just about sex.”

“ Chéri ,” she laughs, “ sex is never just about sex.”

199.

“ Mon dieu ,” she says to the TV. For the first time, her French sounds like she means it.

“Positively the same dame!” says Vikar.

“This film!” Maria says with the first delight Vikar has heard from her. On TV, Barbara Stanwyck says to Henry Fonda, “Why, Hopsi, you belong in a cage,” and begins stroking the befuddled Fonda’s hair. Maria curls up behind Vikar and begins stroking his bald head. “Preston Sturges invented a kiss-proof lipstick,” she says.

“When?”

“Before he began writing plays and cinema, before he became a director. He invented things.”

“He invented lipstick?”

“Kiss-proof lipstick.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“He should have made a film about that. Perhaps he did not see the humor in it.”