he: A Novel(75)

Sorrow falls away.

Only Babe remains, Babe singing.

On his pad, he scribbles ideas for vocals, movements. He also will sing. His voice cannot compare with Babe’s, but he perceives a gag forming as a compound of sight and sound. A song emerging from his mouth, yet not in his voice: first a man’s, very deep; then a woman’s, very high.

But aside from all else, he and Babe will dance. They will step together, and in the face of the misery that is engulfing them they will lose themselves in joyous devices of their own creation.

He waits for Babe to finish his song. Babe receives a spontaneous round of applause from the cast and crew. He calls Babe over, and tells him of what he wishes to concoct.

And Babe understands, because Babe always understands.

– It will be beautiful.

Yes, says Babe, it will be.

Myrtle steps in.

Ben Shipman has warned Babe that the death throes of his marriage will prove unpleasant, but Babe has no idea just how unpleasant until the case finally comes before a judge. Myrtle’s allegations of mental cruelty, her tales of neglect and psychological abuse, her intimations of affairs, wound Babe deeply. Yes, Babe has been unfaithful to Myrtle, and yet, in his way, Babe has been more faithful to her than anyone could have expected. Babe stands by Myrtle as she disappears for days to drink until whatever money she has gathered is gone; as she crashes cars and threatens suicide; as she drifts into and out of the sanitarium; as she screams and pisses and pukes. Even in the arms of other women, Babe has known only fleeting moments of peace. Babe carries his guilt with him always, because Babe still loves something of Myrtle, the better part of her that raises its face to him and smiles after a week of care and attention, when her hair is washed and her face is clean, when her system has briefly purged itself of toxins, when Myrtle begins to recall her better self.

But even then the coil of Myrtle’s alcoholism is already slowly tightening, as the clock winds and the ticking starts to sound.

And as Babe tries to explain all this in a courtroom before the committed and the curious, Babe finds himself weeping. Babe breaks down. A memory, one of recent vintage, comes to Babe unbidden: Iris Adrian, a bit-part actress in Our Relations, but beautiful and funny and clever. Babe asks Iris Adrian to dinner. Iris Adrian accepts. She dresses for him, perfumes herself, and then Babe calls. There will be no dinner.

This is what Babe tells her:

– You don’t want to go out with me. I am only an old fat fellow.

This is what Babe has become. Babe is an old fat fellow, crying in court.

The judge orders Babe to pay Myrtle a thousand dollars a month.

A thousand dollars a month, it seems, is the going rate for misery.

Mae steps in.

God, but he has not seen her in so long. Now only traces of her former self remain, as though her ghost has inhabited the body of another, a revenant returned in unfamiliar flesh. Under her arm Mae carries a scrapbook of their years together: photos, playbills, reviews. She shows it to anyone who will look: the judge, the reporters, the clerks, the gawkers.

You see, Mae says, this is what we were. This is what I was to him.

S.L. and M.L.

Mae displays for the reporters her fingers. They are pitted and marked. She makes her living on a federal sewing project, this woman who was formerly in pictures.

He deserted me, she says. As soon as he became famous, he cast me adrift.

Is this a lie? He can no longer tell. He wanted her to be gone from his life: that much is true. The rest is mere detail.

At the same courthouse in which Babe has recently wept, he takes the stand and talks of this woman from his past, but he will not accept that they were wed, that any ceremony, conventional or otherwise, formalized their relationship.

So why did you share a name with her? he is asked.

Because, he replies, it was the gentlemanly thing to do.

He leaves the courthouse with Ben Shipman.

There’s no proof that a marital agreement existed between you, says Ben Shipman, as they drive away together. Jesus, the woman got married again after she left you, and the subject of a previous common-law bond never came up in the course of that relationship.

He does not reply. He stares out at the streetscape but sees only Mae with her scrapbook, and the pinpricks on her fingers, and how old she has grown.

Will we settle? he asks.

– Only for nickels and dimes.

– No, I want her to be looked after.

– Because it’s the gentlemanly thing to do?

– Because she deserved better than this.

Hal Roach steps in once more.

Hal Roach is not enjoying the newspapers. Hal Roach reads of stars crying on the stand, and wives alleging affairs and enforced incarceration in sanitariums, and common-law spouses claiming compensation for desertion. Hal Roach hears accounts of gambling, and drinking, and fucking around. Hal Roach has spent years protecting these men, and Hal Roach is growing weary of it.

Hal Roach calls Ben Shipman.

Where are we? Hal Roach asks. And don’t bullshit me.

– The Mae business is under control. The Ruth business is under control. The Myrtle business is under control. What more can I tell you? The wheels of justice are turning. ‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.’

– What the hell is that?

– That’s Longfellow.

– And how many wives did Longfellow have?