Sacred Monster

Flashback 17A

The beach along here, in the fog, was empty, untouched, timeless. It wasn’t even possible to guess the time of day, except to know that it was day, the sun far off somewhere creating a luminous pearlescence in the haze, so that every drop of suspended moisture in the air was distinct and separate, another silver-gray perfect beryl. In this gauzy light, the broad tan beach was as clean as the evening of the first day of creation, while the modestly murmuring sea was a textured charcoal gray with highlights in streaks of white, lapping along the shore. Visibility was down to perhaps eight or ten feet, so it was possible to think of oneself as being alone on the planet; or not even a planet, but some small asteroid, far from the trials of life.

Jack and his Lorraine came striding easily through the luminous fog, dressed in similar laced boots and baggy corduroy slacks and windbreakers with the hoods up around their faces. They walked hand in hand, and the fog condensed on their cheeks, sparkling there. “Gosh, darling,” Jack said, “it’s almost as though it’s the beginning of the world, as though we’re the first humans ever. Do you suppose we’d make the same sort of mistakes?”

Laughing at him with friendly familiarity, Lorraine said, “But, darling, how could you be the first man? You’re so much closer to the last.”

Jack’s smile grew blank. “I don’t think I follow, darling,” he said.

Lorraine shook her head, lovingly amused. “You know,” she said, “it’s fascinating sometimes to see how unaware you remain of your symbolic relationship with the mass audience.”

“Unaware?” Jack asked. “Do you think so?”

“Yes, of course, darling,” Lorraine told him. “Do you have any idea who you really are?”

“I’m a movie star, darling.”

“Yes, but why you?” Lorraine asked him. “Why do millions of people spend money to see you in the movies?”

“Gosh, darling,” Jack said, open-eyed and clear-browed, “I don’t know.”

“You are, of course, wonderfully talented, darling,” Lorraine said, “but honestly, you know, so are others. From the pool of talent in the world, the mass audience always chooses that one person, that tiny group of individuals, who represent the ethos of the age, its quintessence, its spirit and vitals. You are of that band, darling. Your talent launched you, but now it’s the age itself that drives you. Another pilot is at the wheel. You are no longer under your own control.”

“Sounds almost frightening,” Jack said, with a light but respectful laugh.

“The symbolic freight you carry, darling,” Lorraine assured him, “would crush a lesser man.”

Pleased, smiling like a puppy, Jack said, “Do you really think so, darling?”

“Darling,” Lorraine said, holding tightly to his hand as they strode along the beach, “in many ways you’re a monster, a statement of infantile voracious appetite. And yet at the same time you are God’s holy fool, the, the innocent untouched by the harshness of reality. You can be the hero, incredibly strong, and yet even I don’t know the depths of your vulnerability.”

Jack loved to hear talk about himself. He listened as they walked together, nodding, absorbed in what she was saying. “Tell me more,” he said.

Lorraine was willing. “And yet, darling,” she said, “in some ways you can represent evil as well. The innocent and the slayer of innocence all commingled together in one powerfully attractive package. And yet, how lightly you bear this burden.”

With a brave laugh, looking at his Lorraine, Jack said, “Gosh, darling!”

The two walked on, along the beach, beside the whispering ocean, into the fog.

“Never had I known anyone so interested in me.” I smile in contented reverie at my interlocutor. “Do you know what I mean, Michael?” I am remembering his name, even that. I am under control, by God, I am the captain of my fucking fate, I am the master of whatchamacallit. I say, “I don’t mean interested, you know? I mean... interested! You know?”

“I think I do,” he says, gazing at me over his knees and his notebook and his pencil and his nothing nose.

“I mean,” I explain further, “you’re interested in me, right?”

“Yes, I am,” he says.

“Your readers are interested in me,” I say. “People going to the movies are interested in me. Everybody’s interested in me. But not like Lorraine. She really dug down in there. She really wanted to know me. But thank God she didn’t care about the details, you see what I mean?”

He frowns. “No,” he says simply.

“Lorraine wasn’t interested in my biography,” I tell Michael O’Connor. “She was interested in my meaning. My biography is trash, don’t you think I know that? Pop paperback history, a million pretentious movies, the same elements over and over again. The religious interlude, the failed rapprochement with the parents, the ghastly secret in the past, the casting couch, the betrayals, the glitzy locations, the glamorous diseased marriages, the problems with mood enhancers, the whole shmear. Lorraine didn’t care about any of that. Her interest in me went deeper, into why these images are so powerful, why the population sifts itself over and over again for the same histories, the same qualities, the same doomed glamour.”

O’Connor nods but doesn’t write anything. “What conclusion did she come to?” he asks me.

I shake my head, disappointed in him. “Intellectuals do not come to conclusions, Michael,” I tell him. “Intellectuals consider the situation. That’s enough for them.”

“And it was enough for you, too?”

“It was paradise,” I say. “And yet, almost from the beginning, there were these small signs of trouble ahead.”