Хелен Девитт - Some Trick - Thirteen Stories

Gil checked the listings in Time Out . He had saved up a list of films that he wanted to see for the first time in New York ( Jules et Jim ; Breathless ; Battleship Potemkin ; La Dolce Vita ; Bicycle Thieves ; The Leopard ; all of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, because if there is a season you want to be able to immerse yourself in the oeuvre ), holding out, somehow, in the face of often almost irresistible temptation, till the age of 22. [2] There was a second list of films which he had had to downgrade to “Okay to watch in Iowa,” because he did not want to come to New York and look completely uneducated, but he had never felt good about it. He had mental conversations with an interlocutor who said “ Wild Strawberries ? Are you telling me Wild Strawberries doesn’t deserve first-time-viewing-in-New- York ? Are you serious ?” to which Gil would mentally reply that it was not a question of the artistic merit of the film, on which, as someone who hadn’t even seen it, he was unable to comment, but a question of what felt right for the viewing experience. That was the mental reply, but he felt bad about relegating Bob le Flambeur , The Crow , La Ronde , Wings of Desire , La Strada , 8½ , Solaris , plus much of Hitchcock, much of Mamet, all of Tarantino and others too numerous to mention to the Iowa League. He wished he had grown up in New York, so these invidious choices would not have been forced on him, but what was he to do? The third list of films, obviously, was the list of films set in New York. But we digress. And now , by an amazing piece of luck, Jules et Jim was showing at the Tribeca!!!!!

Five hours permitted a preliminary pancake-fueled exploration of the island before box office time.

Gil had never had any desire to go to France, he had simply wanted to watch French films in New York . And when he saw Jeanne Moreau, at last, declaiming “To be or not to be,” he was glad he had waited. He was glad he had held out for something special.

He got back to the loft at ten p.m. or so. Benny was sitting crosslegged on a downtrodden sofa, morosely leafing through the Wall Street Journal .

Gil shared the glad tidings: “Dude!!!!!!!!! I saw Harvey Keitel eating pancakes!!!!!!!!!”

Benny: “Huh.”

It seemed best not to add to the man’s misery by mentioning Jules et Jim.

“Want a beer?” asked Ben.

“Sure,” said Gil. He felt slightly the worse for wear, truth be told, having been up since dawn the previous day, what with all the packing and discarding and fare-thee-welling not to mention actual traveling, not to mention the excitements of the day, but Iowans take their sociability seriously. He took a cold Sam Adams from the case in the fridge and joined Benny on the sofa. Benny lifted his beer-in-progress in downbeat cheer.

Benny, it quickly emerged, did not so much not want to talk about his father as not want to talk about anything else, the problem being, rather, that he did not like having to temper the wind to the shorn lamb.

“See, what happened is,” said Benny, “my dad read a letter from Roald Dahl to Kingsley Amis saying write for kids, that’s where the money is. So he did , and there was , it just wasn’t enough .”

The more money there was, the more thousands of nauseatingly cute letters or, more recently, e-mails poured in from kids, kids who imagined that world peace could be achieved if we all just sat down and popped popcorn together. Or swapped knock-knock jokes. Or played ping pong. Why can’t we all just act like cute little kids?

A fifth of Jack Daniels into the day, Mr. Bergsma could not be guaranteed to ignore and discard. Dear Tommy, he would reply genially, Thank you for your interesting suggestion. I will pass the proposal on to Mr. Milosevic. Yours, J P Bergsma.

Only to get, meanwhile, in a mud- and bloodstained envelope, a heartrendingly charismatic letter from some kid whose whole family had been blown up when he was nine, a kid who had walked 500 miles through a warzone carrying only a battered copy of Automatika for comfort, a kid who had stowed away in a truck and now lived, sans papiers , on the streets of Paris, the whole couched in an uncomplaining stoicism, a nonchalant wit and erudition, which put the luckless Benny to shame. Mr. Bergsma would organize, at immense personal inconvenience and expense, a school, lawyer, bla. Doing irreparable damage to the personal fortune whose accumulation was the whole point of writing for kids in the first place.

The result being that Benny could never have music lessons, go to computer camp, go to private school, anything .

Gil could see why this might be somewhat disillusioning to fans of the series. While somewhat chilling and egotistical as such, anyway, though, it was the kind of thing he would definitely have expected of the embittered alcoholic son of the author of a cult series for kids. Very New York.

“Couldn’t he hire someone?” he asked.

Benny said that his father’s life was a ruined landscape of burned-out deals.

Gil would have been happy to crash at this point, but Benny, far from moving gracefully on, seemed to see a roommate as an economical substitute for a therapist.

Once , for instance, Benny elaborated, when Benny had just been accepted for admission at Choate, Jake Rabinowitz, a top entertainment lawyer, had negotiated a movie deal which included the right to two first-class tickets to the premiere.

Total dealbreaker.

Mr. Bergsma: “What is this. What the fuck is this.”

JR: “I got them to agree to first-class tickets to the premiere.”

Mr. Bergsma: “Look. I don’t want this. I never asked for this. I don’t want to clutter up my head with this crap.”

JR: “The contract does not require you to attend the premiere.”

Mr. Bergsma: “I don’t want to get into all this crap about what I want or do not want. I am trying to write a fucking book . You have now used up bargaining space , you piece of shit, you have squandered leverage , for something about which I do not give a fuck. I want this out of the fucking contract. I want a Crap. Free. Deal.”

Given that the whole issue of the premiere had been raised , given that it was not possible just to get on with the fucking book, given that it was necessary to discuss, Mr. Bergsma discussed the sort of thing he would have discussed had he chosen to discuss. But his lawyer, it evolved, would lose face if he went back to the other side with points the client actually cared about, such as fixing up a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh, rather than issues that were recognized as deal points by his industry peers.

Mr. Bergsma: “Look. I’ve managed a bar. I’ve had to fire people. I never do that without giving people a chance. What I say to people is, I didn’t fire you, you fired yourself.”

So that was that deal.

Benny cracked another beer while Gil made friendly Iowan noises to endorse the mild humor of the story.

Mr. Bergsma had hired all kinds of people — lawyers, agents, accountants, assistants, you name it — and they kept willfully firing themselves. To the point where he would explain the value of a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh from the get-go. You can get a house for as little as ten grand, he would explain. The value of it, obviously, is not simply the monetary value of whatever would otherwise have had to be paid for, the value is the amount of crap Mr. Bergsma’s mind would otherwise have had to be clogged up with at a time when he might otherwise have been writing a fucking book.