Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

“It’s funny, Perry,” she says, “but I honestly think I can live with it better than you. I can live with the idea of greaseballs from coast to coast renting the video of us-at-the-drive-in. Every night, horny little guys from L.A. and Chicago and Detroit forking over three bucks for a peek at the real thing. I think I can accept it better than you can, Perry. ’Cause you’re such a vain son of a bitch. And you look like shit up there.”

He’s breathing heavy. He loosens his tie, trying to figure out how to play her as if she was one more tough customer at a Walpole & Lewis conference table.

“We’ve got to get out of here, Sylvia.”

“You get out—”

“We can talk at home—”

“We don’t have a home, you bastard.”

He takes her arm and she rips it away from him, gets ready to punch and kick if she has to.

“Look,” he says, getting frantic, “this thing is about to get out of hand, okay? When your friend there called me—”

“Her name’s Leni.”

“—We were just finishing up the logistics for tonight’s march.”

“We’ll save a seat for Eddie Meade and the good Reverend Boetell,” she says and nods her head toward the screen. “God, Perry, look at the way you’re clawing my back there. I hadn’t noticed what a real savage you were. Does Candice like it on top, too?”

“Sylvia,” he says, “They’re on their way here right now. All of them. Paige Beatty and WAR, Boetell and the FUD people. They’re going to make some headlines tonight.”

“And Schick is going to do them all one better tomorrow morning. This is the public’s favorite story — self-righteous scumbag hypocrites caught in the sins they’ve screamed about. They’ll probably make a movie of the week—”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he yells.

“Outside of betraying me, you mean. Is Candice coming tonight? I know how much she loves a good party.”

“I’ll get an injunction,” he babbles, “I’ll impound every film, every photo—”

“You’re a goddamn idiot, you know that, Perry,” and she genuinely wants to laugh at him. “Hugo doesn’t play by your rules. You’ve already lost. You’re a lightweight with bad instincts, Perry. Your first time out in the big leagues and you pick the wrong scapegoat. You were a joke to Hugo. Your credibility is gone. You’re an insult to family values. All the bad ink is going to piss off Walpole & Lewis in a big corporate way. Boetell is just going to have to take his account elsewhere.”

“I’m not going to let this happen, Sylvia. I’m—”

“It’s already happened, Perry. For Christ’s sake.”

“We have to go now.”

They stare at each other. She watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows.

“Get out of here, Perry. My movie isn’t over yet.”

And after a minute, with the sputter from the projection booth the only sound in the theatre, he surprises her by giving up, just turning and walking toward the exit. No need for any slapping or kneeing. No need for a big, cheesy finish.

She watches him disappear through the swinging doors. When she looks back to the screen, the lovers in the back of the Buick have finished up and lie in a pile of flesh and sweat. But the camera stays on them. It’s a static, boring shot. An aggravating picture.

There’s no motion. No progression.

Jakob stands in a doorway across the street from the Hotel St. Vitus. He’s not sure what to do with his hands, having given the Seitz to Vera Gottwald for safekeeping. He looks up at his home of the past year, its cold, castle-like facade seeming to lean out over Belvedere Street even more then usual, the angles seeming sharper than normal, the spires somehow appearing taller than before. Even the heads of the gargoyles seem to have grown larger over the course of the past week.

He sits down on the stoop and wonders how his family managed to arrive at this point. He thinks back on the last days in Maisel that now seem like a fading dream, more myth than truth.

He remembers Papa’s supper-table talk of emigration seeming to increase. But Jakob wasn’t really paying much attention. Not even the attack on Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill could dampen the boy’s passions. He was thinking of Felice, dreaming of Felice, fantasizing the lewd story lines about the woman round-the-clock. As she placed a bowl of Cockova’ on the table, he gritted his teeth and stared at the curves of her breasts under her bib apron. As she sat by the night’s dying fire and finished the last of the mending, he imagined his hand taking in the warmth and smoothness of her thigh, his fingers rolling over the small mole on her left shoulder.

He began to perspire continually. His concentration deteriorated to a single, obsessive longing. His notebook screenplay dissolved into both soft-and hard-core musings about his governess- cum -lover. He’d be scribbling a scene intended to culminate in a prolonged gun battle only to find the doomed hero undressing an older mystery woman on a speeding train while the other passengers appeared to sleep. In the night, Jakob would cry out at the climax of a lascivious dream, loud enough to wake Felix. And all the while his anxiety grew in proportion to his lust. Because he couldn’t determine where this erotic madness would end. Because he was the fifteen-year-old son of the busiest gangster in central Maisel. Felice was a thirty-year-old washerwoman from the Schiller ghetto. Just the thought of this union had an unreal quality to it, required a fantastic leap of faith to traverse its improbability. Were Jakob watching this affair unfold on the screen of the Kierling, he’d shake his head at the inconsistencies of the script, the logic glitches, the lack of foreshadowing and back-story buildup. But as the passion transpired in the mundane commonality of his real life, he could only go along with it, give in to the most primal and elemental impulses he’s ever experienced.

Then came the week the Kierling managed to secure a print of The Big Sleep. And the rumor spread among the regulars that the theatre was closing. That Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill, now blind and broken, was selling the cinema and emigrating to Jerusalem.

Felice left another note to arrange a rendezvous in Devetsil Park. She wrote that she’d be wearing the black stockings and the red lipstick the boy loved so much. Jakob was wheezing from anticipation as he ran down Havetta Boulevard. But when he saw Gustav Weltsch pulling a steamer trunk through Loew Square, his lungs began to labor from dread rather than expectation. And when he entered the Park and found their usual bench empty, his heart began to pump as if he’d overdosed on his camphor injections. He sat and waited until nightfall, but Felice never arrived. He waited an hour after sundown, after the horrible, haunting supper bells from St. Wenceslas Abbey had rung. He waited as the first-showing crowd filed out of the Kierling and into the cafés as the second-showing crowd replaced the first. He waited until the cafés had dispatched the last of the drunken, credo-spewing students back to their dormitories.

He tried to pray, but could not, and so instead repeated dialogue from random films, sometimes mouthing entire scenes, reciting all the parts, whispering the scripted words as if they were sacred petitions in some ancient and holy language.

As he spoke, he stared at the second-rate marble Pietà at the rear of the park, the mother cradling the limp body of a martyred son, mourning a loss that will never go away, grieving an absence that can never be relieved.

And when he finally ran out of the movie-prayer, Jakob got up from the lovers’ bench and walked across the park to the statue, stepped up to the base of this stone testament to the relentless tragedy of this life, and peered behind the statue where he saw the body of Felice Fabri.