Dream Girl(31)

He feels foolish as soon as the words are out. Aileen has made it very clear that she does not read. “It was a movie, too, although you would have been—” He has no idea how old she would have been. “Much too young to see it, maybe not even born. I was in my twenties when it came out. It had some very famous people in it. Fred Astaire. John Houseman.”

Her face is so stolidly blank at those two names that he kind of wants to throttle her. She must be younger than she looks to be stone-faced at the mention of Astaire. Fred Astaire is a name that brings only joy; one would have to be a soulless, heartless husk of a person not to smile at the very thought of Astaire, even those who (wrongly) preferred Gene Kelly. Wait, was Gene Kelly in Ghost Story? No, but it did have Melvyn Douglas, who indirectly spawned that insanely gorgeous, curvy granddaughter, the one who showed up in some Scorsese films.

It’s interesting, Gerry thinks, the order in which the men die (or don’t die) in Ghost Story, how it aligns with the audience’s natural affections toward the actors. Take Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the first to go. No one remembers him anyway. There’s a logic to Douglas’s death, a culpability in the larger story, but Gerry has forgotten the details. And of course frosty Houseman has to die.

But never Astaire. Astaire survived even the Towering Inferno.

As did O.J.

With Aileen’s help, he navigates the “SmartHub” on the television and finds a version to rent, inviting her to watch with him. She looks dubious. “Seems a bad idea, to watch a scary movie now.” But Gerry assures her that the scares are mostly jump shocks. He screened it for his class at Goucher, after having them read the novel on which it was based. The exercise was intended to make his students see what the written word could do with suggestion, how flat-footed film, with its myriad tricks, could be. He could watch Ghost Story all night long and never feel anything deeper than annoyance. But he wouldn’t read it tonight on a bet. The book was absolutely terrifying and surprisingly erudite. The passages about teaching—an instructor at the height of his powers, his subsequent fall from grace—are outstanding, as good as any Gerry has read. Maybe even written.

And yet, he feels as if this is the scene that has just played out, his own Ghost Story—a woman, face averted, with that beautiful voice.

The voice he stole.

The voice he stole.

Not from the real-life Aubrey, who does not, in fact, exist, not really. When he gave his creation a voice—how had he never realized this before—he had taken the beautiful vowels of the actress in this movie, the one who also had been in Chariots of Fire. For a moment, when he was in his twenties, she had seemed to be everywhere. Then, suddenly, she was nowhere. The culture has such an endless appetite for beautiful young women, like a volcano, requiring sacrifice after sacrifice. Only a few women have long acting careers and they are seldom the great beauties.

But the culture does it to young men, too. And not just handsome ones. Not just actors! Gerry has written better books since Dream Girl, even critics agree on this. But he has never mattered quite as much as he did in that fleeting moment; nothing can be written about him without citing that one particular novel, whereas older writers were allowed to transcend individual titles. Gerry always felt more in step with the writers of the previous generation. They were the little pigs who built their houses of brick, whereas Gerry’s peers tended more to straw and wood.

And, oh, how people loved to blow them down. Everybody huffs and puffs, intent on destruction. What do they call it now? Cancel culture.

Lord, the movie is really terrible, even worse than he remembered. He hopes Straub got a lot of money for it. Yet it’s so naked, so wonderfully literally naked, in a way that movies aren’t anymore. Alice Krige—ah, yes, that’s the actress’s name—has very natural breasts that are on display quite a bit, but there’s also the leading man’s penis. He’s falling to his death from a great height when you see it, but still, it’s an example of equal opportunity nudity.

“The women in this movie have nothing to do but bicker at the men,” Aileen grumbles at one point. “They’re better actresses than that.”

“Alma is a huge part. She’s the center of it all.”

“Not her. The wives. One of them is—well, that one”—she indicates Patricia Neal, on-screen with Astaire—“she’s famous, right?”

“She is, and yet—I couldn’t name a single film which she was in.”

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Aileen says promptly. “Funny because she shouldn’t even be—anyway, she’s in that and she was in The Subject Was Roses.”

She doesn’t know Astaire, but she has seen these films? “How old are you, Aileen?”

She stiffens. “That’s not a question to ask a lady. I’m older than I look, let’s just leave it at that.”

Funny, he would have sworn it went the other way, that her weight and mannerisms aged her. “Did you grow up in Baltimore? Do you remember Picture for a Sunday Afternoon?”

Her eyes are fixed on the screen. The film’s alleged shocks seem to have no effect on her. They are pretty weak and she is, after all, a nurse. But she pays strict attention. She does not answer his question, does not speak again until the end of the film, when she says, “That makes no sense. The woman’s still dead. They still killed her. Why do any of them get to live?”