he: A Novel(9)

To marry the wrong woman once may be regarded as a misfortune.

To marry her twice looks like carelessness.

To marry her three times is madness.

The Santa Monica apartment in which he lives rents for $80 a month. His name is in the phone book. If he was ever a star – and he remembers being a star, so this must have been the case – the light of it has long since faded, and what remains is only a gentle senescence.

A plot requires constancy, a through line. Where is the through line here?

He knows the answer, of course.

Babe. Babe is the through line.

And where is Babe?

Babe is forfeit to the shadows.





20


Mae, now his common-law wife, lies beside him in their common-law bed. His eyes are very blue, and Mae’s eyes are very black. Later, during the agonies of their uncoupling, he will think of Mae’s eyes as polluted, and wonder, had he stayed with her, if his eyes might slowly have muddied to match her own.

Earlier, they watch Chaplin on screen. The Pawnshop. Chaplin is good, better even than he remembers.

So good. So very good.

You could be like Chaplin, Mae tells him.

I was like Chaplin, he wants to say, but does not. I tried to be Chaplin. I could imitate his steps, pantomime his gestures, mimic his every expression, but I was not Chaplin.

You are as good as Chaplin, Mae tells him.

He was as good as Chaplin, he tells himself, when he could smell Chaplin, and touch Chaplin, and break bread with Chaplin. But Chaplin on screen is different. Chaplin has left the world of mortals. Chaplin is divine.

It is said that Mutual is paying Chaplin almost $700,000 a year. It is wealth beyond imagining.

Mae’s nipples are hard, child-darkened. They leave marks on the skin of his chest. Her breasts are veined, her belly soft.

He cannot marry Mae because she is already married. He cannot leave her because he is bound to her. They work well together. Mae is a trouper, and trusts his instincts on stage.

In bed, he trusts hers.

This is vaudeville, and on the vaudeville circuit a blind eye is turned to who is sleeping with whom, but performing together, and traveling together, and rooming together, bring a different kind of attention. There are still laws against fornication and adultery. Mae cannot be his wife because she is already Mrs Cuthbert. If she remains Miss Dahlberg, problems will arise.

He stirs, and takes in the room. The furniture is chipped. The carpet is a lattice of cigarette burns. The mattress is iron, the pillows slabs, the sheets stained like mortuary shrouds. Chaplin, at $700,000 a year, would not even deign to step across its threshold.

The first time I came to America, he tells her, I left my shoes outside the door of the rooming house to be polished. When I woke up the next morning, they were gone.

He shares this story often. By now, it may even be true.

Mae laughs, although she has heard the tale before. It is told whenever they stay in the same place for more than a night or two. He speaks it aloud to remind himself of his own foolishness. He speaks it aloud in the hope that, one day, he will stay in the kind of hotel in which his shoes are no longer in danger of being stolen.

He does not ask Mae about her husband. He does not ask Mae about her son. But he thinks about both of them, often. Rupert William Cuthbert, spouse. Rupert Clifton Saxe Cuthbert, son. Their unseen presence stretches across every bed.

Chaplin, he tells her, is the best that has ever been.

– Chaplin is good, but Chaplin is not that good. You are his equal.

Mae is wrong, but he loves her for being so. For all the darkness and all the doubts, for all the falsehoods and all the flesh, Mae sees in him what he sees in Chaplin.

Mae sees greatness.

Or perhaps Mae sees money.

Even years later, at the Oceana Apartments, he cannot be sure.





21


He feels that he is anchored to a post by a chain; he can only advance so far before his progress is arrested.

Carl Laemmle is Universal Studios. Isadore Bernstein looks after Carl Laemmle’s business affairs on the West Coast. Isadore Bernstein builds Universal City. But Isadore Bernstein has ambitions beyond signing another man’s checks. Isadore Bernstein wants to found his own studio. Isadore Bernstein smells success in comedy.

It is 1917, and Isadore Bernstein offers him his own series of films. He has waited. He has been patient. Now he is being rewarded, and Mae also: they sign together.

The picture is called Nuts in May.

An Isadore Bernstein Production.

Written by Isadore Bernstein.

Filmed at Bernstein Studios.

Isadore Bernstein talks of a possible collaboration with Chaplin.

He should have known better. He plays a book salesman who becomes convinced that he is the Emperor Napoleon. He plays a deluded individual.

There is one preview at the Hippodrome. He sees himself on the screen at last. He sees Mae. Cigars are lit. Toasts are made.

It is the only showing of the picture.

It is the first and last comedy in his series.

Someone tells him that Chaplin was sitting at the back of the Hippodrome for the screening. It may be a lie, because there is no sign of Chaplin afterward. He hopes that it is a lie, because if Chaplin departed without exchanging a greeting it can only be for one of two reasons: either Chaplin saw the picture and viewed his old understudy as competition, and Chaplin dislikes competition; or the picture was so bad – and he so bad in it – that Chaplin wished only to spare him the shame of an encounter.