he: A Novel(77)

– Maybe I should just have married you.

– Do I look that dumb?

No, he thinks, Alyce Ardell does not look that dumb.

Alyce Ardell climbs from the bed. She is naked.

He reaches for her, but she is already gone.





146


He is a vespertine creature, a being of light and shade. He tilts and rises according to the ailerons of his moods.

His eyes are very blue. The intensity of their color surprises those who meet him for the first time. They know him only as a gray man, a flickering in the dark.

He thinks those eyes are why he can so often pass unrecognized on the street.

He thinks those eyes are why women want to fuck him.





147


Babe calls to wish him a merry Christmas, but he can barely bring himself to speak.

He holds in his hands the interlocutory decree turning another marriage to ash.

He should be with his daughter.

He should be with Lois.

He cannot be alone.





148


Ruth stands before him. Her clothes are haphazardly packed. They spill like afterthoughts from her case. She asks: – Why did you do this to me?

This is what he has done: He has taken Ruth to New York.

He has promised a reconciliation.

He has fucked Ruth, over and over.

And he has cast Ruth aside once more.

Why do you hate me? Ruth asks, just as she asked him once before.

He is dizzied by repetition.

– I don’t hate you.

But perhaps he does. He can no longer tell. Ruth has taken his money. She has called him an abuser in the press. She has interfered in his career. He has heard half-truths and untruths spoken in her name, all in an effort to bleed him dry. Perhaps he has set out to hurt her in return, but he does not believe so. Being with her just seemed better than being alone.

– But you could only do this to someone you hate.

Ruth does not cry. He would prefer it if she did. It is her incomprehension that distresses him, her desire to understand what cannot be understood because it cannot be explained.

– You treated me like your whore.

He gazes at the lights of Manhattan. He wishes he could smother them all, one by one.

He should be working. He has not worked in months.

Goddamn Hal Roach and his contracts, and his cheapness, and his fascist friends.

Goddamn Hal Roach and his aspirations to class, his talk of musicals and drawing-room comedies, when the only Academy Awards Hal Roach has won are for short pictures, and the best of those is The Music Box, which he created for the studio – he, and Babe.

Goddamn Hal Roach.

All the sweat and effort, all the compromises, only so that his reputation may be traduced, so that these women can live in the houses he buys and spend the money he earns.

– How many others did you fuck during our marriage?

He cannot remember. None that mattered, he wants to say, except Alyce Ardell, and she matters only because she has no desire to be of consequence to him.

Ruth joins him at the window. His presence in the city is known. Crowds have gathered to catch a glimpse, to seek an autograph. She stares down on the figures below. The waning moon of his features hangs gibbous before her.

– What would they think of you, if they knew the truth: that the man they love is a fornicator, that he does not exist beyond a name on a screen, a name that is not even his own?

Her voice is very small, a bitter whisper.

– Why don’t you tell them?

– I believe you’d almost like that. You’re too much of a coward to destroy yourself. You want someone else to do it for you.

No, he says, that is not true.

She laughs.

– It’s your selfishness that’s so strange to me. I see you hurting me. I see you hurting your daughter. I even see you hurting Babe. What kind of man are you, to inflict such pain on those who care for you?

This he knows: Babe is tiring of the battles with Hal Roach, the incessant squabbles over money and influence, over who made what and who owes whom. Babe has no interest in script credits. Babe does not concern himself with the ownership of ideas. Babe wishes only to work, and then to play.

But he cannot bring himself to be angry with Babe.

Ruth walks to the bed, the bed in which he has so recently fucked her, fucked all the love from her. She rearranges her clothing, and closes the case.

– You want to be rid of me?

– Yes.

– Say it.

– I want you out of my life.

She picks up the case.

– You’re just a child. You have no idea what you really want at all.





149


Hal Roach calls Ben Shipman. Ben Shipman has been anticipating the communication, although with no great enthusiasm. Ben Shipman has even considered asking his secretary to inform Hal Roach that her employer is currently indisposed, or traveling, or dead.

You do know what he’s supposed to be doing right now, don’t you? Hal Roach asks.

Yes, says Ben Shipman, but Hal Roach continues as though Ben Shipman has not spoken.

– He is supposed to be here, on the lot, getting ready to make Swiss Cheese.

Ben Shipman does not tell Hal Roach that Swiss Cheese is a terrible title for a picture. Ben Shipman particularly does not tell Hal Roach that Swiss Cheese is a terrible title for a picture because Ben Shipman is afraid of revealing that it is his missing client who has expressed this opinion, and with some force, even though his missing client has just signed the latest unsatisfactory contract (at least, unsatisfactory to him, each contract by now functioning as a symbol of a greater existential querulousness), of which Swiss Cheese constitutes the first production. What is most peculiar about Swiss Cheese is that Ben Shipman’s missing client is not alone in his dissatisfaction with the picture, for his missing client and Hal Roach have this much in common. Hal Roach would rather be making Rigoletto than Swiss Cheese, but Hal Roach’s hopes of filming operas have died following the implosion of his relationship with Mussolini’s son.