“Quit trying to change the subject!”
“I’m changing the subject?”
Well, at this she launched into her mind-reading thing, which was beginning to resemble Anne Corio at Minsky’s Burlesque, flashing quick, sly peeks at her Two Big Reasons at the start of her act to ensure that her audience was fully attentive and understood the point of the proceedings. “And get this straight, by the way,” Jane lectured. “The reason clichés are said and written over and over again is because what they’re saying is true!” Little Jane then went on and on with this theme as she hammered on my “shameful” dealings with Vera Virago, pointing out that at the end of the day all the thrills of the rides and the taste of creamed popcorn would be nothing but a memory and all I’d have is a bunch of regret and self-recrimination, plus a jillion whispered comments made back of shielding hands. “Joey, aren’t you even just a little bit sorry? And what would your father think if he knew?”
At that, I decided to listen. Really listen.
“Remember that time you were five years old and you found a nickel and a dime in the street in the middle of some thrown-away Alf Landon buttons you picked up because you liked the cheery sunflower on them? You remember what you did then, Joey? You remember? You ran to the five-and-dime,” she said, “to the Woolworth’s right across the street and you bought a little penknife for your father, a tortoise-shell hair comb for your sister, and got nothing for yourself. You remember?”
My God! She knew everything!
I looked out at the ocean.
“Yeah, I remember,” I said.
“And how did you feel that night, Joey?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I guess happy.”
“Was it happy like eating ice cream or even seeing Gunga Din?”
No, it wasn’t. It had filled me up completely.
I said, “No. Not even close.”
Her little eyes were flitting back and forth across my face, and she said, “That’s right. When the ice cream and the chocolate are gone, all of that kind of happy goes with them. That’s the difference. The other kind of happy stays. So as long as you can smile or say a kind word to someone, you can never run out of giving, which means you can never run out of happy.”
A couple of pelicans had flapped their way into the melee of whacko gulls and were dive-bombing vertically into the ocean. Watching them, I nodded my head and said, “True.”
“And now you’re feeling it all over again a little, right, Joey?”
Again I nodded.
“That was you. The real you. It’s still inside you, Joey. See, all you had to do was remember.”
I turned my head to look down at her and saw her looking up at me and so pleased. Then she turned to the sea again and the white-flecked foamy surf rolling in. “You like movies a lot, don’t you, Joey?”
“Oh, well, sure.”
“Did you ever see The Ghost and Mrs. Muir?” she asked, a fond faraway dreaminess in her voice. “Maybe not. Maybe it hasn’t been made yet. It’s about this beautiful young widow who’s played by Gene Tierney and she’s living in a house overlooking the sea that once belonged to a handsome ship’s captain who’s played by Rex Harrison and the Captain’s ghost begins to haunt her and he falls in love with her, but then this smirky snake, this creepo who’s played by George Sanders, he worms his way into her affections. The Captain foresees it will end for her in heartbreak, but he also knows Lucia—that’s the widow—well, she has to live her life and he shouldn’t interfere, and just before the Captain’s ghost disappears for the very last time he looks out through a window at the sea and starts talking emotionally about things they could have done had they met when he was still alive, the great romance and the excitement of the sea and all the faraway places they’d have sailed to together, then at the end of it he breaks your heart when he’s still looking out the window and says, ‘Oh, Lucia, what we’ve missed!’”
“And that’s the end of the movie?”
“No. It’s really the beginning. She grows old and when she dies while she’s napping in a chair the Captain’s ghost comes back, and taking both of her hands in his, he says, ‘And now Lucia you’ll never be tired again,’ and he lifts her ghost to her feet and she’s young and beautiful again and they walk away hand in hand and disappear.”
“So what’s the point? Are you saying you’re a ghost?”
She shook her head.
“Just thinking of what might have been, Joey. That’s all.”
She fell quiet, a soft and sad kind of quiet, and I folded my arms across my chest and had joined her in staring out at the sea when a much louder squawking arose among the gulls, infuriated now because one of the pelicans had scooped up a fish and was flying a victory lap around them. “Come on, Jane,” I pleaded. “What the heck is going on here! My head’s about to split in two!”
“Oh, well, who knows?” she said, sighing, her eyes still on the sea. “Maybe somebody’s dreaming us. Maybe it’s God: God dreaming this world, this bench, those gulls with their blasé, happy-go-lucky, ‘What do we care who we crap on just so long as it’s fun’ way of thinking. They’re just freaking flying sociopaths with beaks.” She turned her head and looked up at me intently. “Well, there’s one thing that I do know,” she said, “and it’s that the world you’re in now isn’t the real one. The real one’s waiting patiently for you while you make yourself fit to be there and be able to enjoy what it’s got to offer. Maybe heaven and hell are the same place, Joey. If it were a restaurant and everything they served had lots of garlic, if you love the taste of garlic it’s heaven, but if garlic makes you vomit, it’s hell. Life is learning to develop a taste for what heaven’s got to offer, and then growing that taste to the max. You know, ‘soul formation’? That’s really just learning how to be happy, which is learning how to love, really love, which is by giving. And then maybe, Joey, one day we’ll both be in heaven eating blueberry pie with chocolate ice cream and knowing that we’ll never run out of either one, which is just a way of saying we’ll have a happiness we know won’t ever end. That’s the world that you’ve got to be in training for, Joey, and you get there like Kurt Vonnegut says, which is, ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”
“Who’s Kurt Vonnegut?”
She turned to me now with a warm little smile of bemusement. “One day you’ll find out for yourself,” she said. “In the meantime, just do like he says.”
“Okay. Also who’s this Rex Harrison?”
“An actor.”
“Never heard of him.”
“You will.”
And it was then I remembered the weird thing that she’d said about that movie, that maybe it hadn’t been made yet, and at that a kind of answer to her mystery came to me, the Peerless El Bueno, avid reader of not only Doc Savage, The Avenger and The Shadow while standing for hours by the magazine rack in Boshnack’s, but also of Astounding and Amazing magazines!
“Are you saying you’re from the future?” I gasped.
She gave a shrug. “Future. Past. What’s the diff?”
“Yes, I see,” I said, nodding and looking thoughtful. “Good point.”
The little Jane creature eyed me inscrutably, doubtlessly gauging me as brimmingly full of hot peaches, which so often I’ve been and am and will be. Then she gave a little sigh and leaned back.
“Tell me, Joey,” she asked, “are you praying?”
“Yes, I’m praying,” I answered her truthfully.
“Every night?”
“Every night.”
“‘Now I lay me down to sleep’? The ‘Our Father’? ‘Hail Mary’?”
“The works.”
“You’re being good to your father?”
“I’m trying.”
At this she nodded, big dimples appearing as she smiled and said, “I know. And didn’t it feel wonderful, Joey? Didn’t it? Just like handing out the gifts that you bought with the fifteen cents that you found.”
I blinked. “How did you kno
w about that?”
She shrugged and turned again to the sea. A gentle breeze was drifting in, lightly ruffling her hair as she softly replied, “I just know.”
This was now feeling spooky. I felt a fluttering in my chest.
“Jane, what are you? I can’t talk about this to anyone else, ’cause if I did they’d want to put me away somewhere. Please, I mean it! It’s beginning to make me nervous now. Very nervous. Am I dead? Is that it? Am I dead and I just don’t know it?”
A warm glint of amusement in her eyes, she turned back to me and fondly sighed, “Oh, Joey.” Then she slowly shook her head. “No, Joey, you’re not dead,” she said, “No way.”
But then she had to add, “Not exactly.”
I started losing it again.
“Not exactly, Jane? Not exactly?”
Still bemused, she flipped her Lilliputian hand in dismissal.
“Oh, don’t worry. It isn’t anything bad. In fact, it’s good.”
“Being not exactly dead is something good?”
“Yes, it’s good. Now, Joey, do something for me, would you please?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“I’d love a stick of cotton candy. I want a pink one, not the blue. Would you get it for me, please?”
I just stared. I was “not exactly dead” and she wanted cotton candy. Oh, well, certainly! Right! I mean of course! We’d passed a cotton candy cart on our way and I turned and saw the guy and the cart were still there, so I stood up and said, “Sure” just as Jane was slipping a five-dollar bill from somewhere, maybe from behind her ear for all I knew.
I said, “No, Jane. On me. I’m buying.”
For a second she just stared. I couldn’t tell if she looked pleased or was about to pass out, but then she smiled and said, “Thank you, Joey. Thank you so much!”
I’d started walking toward the cotton candy cart when I heard her calling to me and I stopped and looked back. She was facing me and kneeling on the bench, her little hands on the back of it and with her head slightly tilted to the side and the strangest expression clouding her face. Was it wistful? Sad? That old look of adoration when we met?
I couldn’t tell.
“You’re going to take care of Vera Virago?” she called out.
For a second I was quiet and still. This was heavy.
Then, “Yeah. Yeah, I will,” I said at last. “I promise.”
She blew me a kiss and as I turned and kept walking I could still feel her eyes on my back. At the cotton candy cart I picked out a pink one, paid, took the stick, turned around and took some steps toward the bench and then stopped. The bench was empty.
Jane wasn’t there.
I hurried back to the bench, looking out at the empty beach and then up and down the boardwalk, and then finally went into Not Nathan’s, guessing maybe she’d had to “go baffoom” for real. I didn’t see the owner around, so I rapped on the restroom door and when nobody spoke I pulled it open.
No one there.
The owner came out from the back.
“Who are looking for?” he weepily asked me.
I stared blankly, then looked off and said softly, “I don’t know.”
Outside the shop I stood pensively examining the cotton candy stick I was holding, then looked up at the guy with the cart, assessing chances of getting my nickel back:
So help me, God, I never licked it even once!
I decided I’d give it to Vera Virago.
11
Click click click…click……click….……click……….….…. click.
Like some hideously ugly Romulan mother ship silently scouring the surface of Earth to finish off any moaning, wounded survivors of their initial annihilating attack, Bloor’s shadow fell over my laptop computer.
“So I hear that you used to write movies.”
I lifted my fingers from the keyboard. “Who told you that?” I asked, not daring to turn because I couldn’t risk her interpreting my stare for a challenge just as you’d have to with a lion you just happened to run into at a waterhole out on the Serengeti. This was something I’d learned just by staring intently at Frank Buck eating.
I heard Bloor answer, “Someone.”
“Someone,” I echoed dully. “Like my chart?”
“Don’t be smart.” Then, “What was that?” she said. “You got gas?” I’d quietly groaned because I knew what was coming: an idea for a movie. I’d heard them for most of my adult life: from cabdrivers, barbers, doctors, anyone who’s got you trapped for a while, like this dentist in Van Nuys who once tried to get me jazzed about writing a movie about the romance of dentistry, this as he was sharpening a #6 drill and with my mouth propped open as I stared with bulging eyes at the dental horror photos that were plastered all over the wall in front of me: gaping red mouths with rotted and broken yellow teeth, which was what the angry dental god Flosseidon was going to smite you with if you didn’t brush twice a day and also come to this dentist’s Tupperware parties.
“Tell me, what’s your idea?” I asked Bloor miserably.
I wasn’t looking for electroshock that morning.
“You’ve got an idea for a movie script,” I added, “right?”
Bloor’s eyebrows lifted. “What are you, a mind reader, pal?”
I nodded and blandly answered, “Yes.”
This was insolence plain, which she was used to.
“Okay, I’m thinking of a number,” she said.
Ah, God! I lowered my forehead into a hand.
“I was kidding,” I muttered.
It was a dangerous miscalculation.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Bloor answered in this unnervingly deadly and quiet tone. I squelched an impulse to shout, “No, I shouldn’t!” and then maybe “And Dreyfus was guilty as hell!” inasmuch as I pictured her with laser beams shooting from her eyes and her hand upraised to plunge a hypodermic needle into my back that was filled with the venom of the Dead Sea anemone which made you say, “Shittier than you by far” whenever somebody asked you how you were feeling. This didn’t happen. Instead I said, “Come on! I mean actually I’d love to hear your idea.”
There was a pause and a silence thicker than tar deeply thinking about freeways and the Problem of Evil. Then I heard the dull click of a stiletto heel as Bloor shifted her weight to her other leg. A good sign. It meant she was relaxing. I had read this in a book about buffaloes.
“Yeah, all I need is a writer to help me with the technical stuff,” I heard her say. I turned and faced her. She was standing with her arms akimbo.
“What technical stuff? You mean the screenplay format?”
“No, the words,” she said.
I wanted to bury my forehead in my hand.
“And so what movies did you write?” she went on. “Would I know them?”
“Maybe not,” I said. “They’re really pretty old.”
“Well, for instance.”
I decided to live dangerously.
“Well, Tilt,” I said.
“What was that?”
“A sort of theological thriller. These Italian villagers across from the town of Pisa are jealous as hell because Pisa has the Leaning Tower, which gets all the tourists and the trade, so they kidnap this structural engineering genius and then threaten to throw him and his lucky slide rule into the deepest part of the Tiber tied to “Cement Blocks Marinara con Basilico” unless he figures out a way that they can straighten up the Tower of Pisa.”
“Is there a girl?”
“Yeah, Gina. She’s the mayor of Pisa’s daughter.”
Bloor nodded. “Not bad. So what else did you write?”
“The Fly Six.”
Bloor’s brow furrowed up in surprise. “They made a Six?”
“Oh, well, sure! It’s the one where by day the Fly is a restaurant inspector for the New York Board of Health.”
“That the one with Jeff Goldblum?”
“No. Dolly Parton. I made the Fly a woman for that one.”
“Wow
!”
“Yeah, that’s why I got paid the big bucks.”
“No kidding! So now listen,” Bloor began as she took a step closer. “About my movie idea. I mean, you really want to hear it?”
“God, yes!”
Too much, you think? No. She bought it.
“Well, okay then,” she launched. “The plot’s about Adolf Hitler. Big name recognition, kapiche? Plus I’ve also got a way to put the story in the twenty-first century, which saves you mucho dinero on the budget. No historical sets you’d have to deal with. You couldn’t. They’ve got McDonald’s now all over Berlin.”
“Yeah, too many.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Just a feeling.”
Arms akimbo, head lowered, Bloor inscrutably searched my face for any hint of a dark intent, while in the depths of her eyes rows of slumbering bats hanging upside down began restlessly twitching.
The moment passed.
“Yeah, I get those too,” she said, nodding.
“So how does Hitler wind up in this century?” I asked her.
“Well, at first I thought reincarnation.”
“Intriguing.”
“Doesn’t work. Hitler can’t be reborn as someone else. He’s got to really be Hitler.”
“What are you getting at? Demonic possession?”
“Kid stuff. The plot’s about Hitler’s disembodied brain.”
“About Hitler’s—?”
“Let me finish. What we say is there’s these sore-loser Nazi scientists and after Hitler dies they grab his brain and they ice it and they wait for the perfect time to transplant it into the body of an American presidential candidate. In the meantime, while these scientists are twiddling their thumbs they turn into a bizarro kind of ritualistic secret society, wearing monk-type hooded robes and holding lighted candles in the dead of night while they parade in a circle around this freezer containing Hitler’s brain and all singing ‘I Guess He’d Rather Be in Colorado.’ The song’s a temp track, by the way. We’ll pick one later. In the meantime, this is all taking place in the Arctic, where they’ve built a base where they can guard the brain. Making sense so far, kiddo?”
“Why the Arctic?”