The Flaming Corsage

Edward Visits a Movie Set, June 10, 1910

MISS INNOCENCE OF America. If a headbirth by Aphrodite and The Prince were possible she could have been the progeny: born with passion’s mouth and sacred swath, and wisdom from below. There are lessons to be learned by brushing a wing against such as she, and the lessons continue. In Melissa’s nest of tinder I remembered Rose from tent city: vivacious, talented, driven, exuberant, bright, cunning strumpet. She answered when I wrote that I wanted to talk about Felicity.

Can you remember the dress I wore when we met? It no longer fits me, I’m so thin. The Kinegraph people think I’m ill or dying. They even say it to my face. I still wake up calling your name over and over. You’ve never left me. Some weeks I hardly eat anything. I’m wasting away, they tell me, and you know an actress can’t afford to lose her profile.

Sickness plagues her imagination. She falls mortally ill when life goes awry, when fortune balks, when love loses its luminescence; for if you are ill, God cannot refuse you sustenance. It was because I genuinely believed her inability to either sleep without night sweats, or draw breath without pain, that I was with her when death came at us out of Giles’s pistol. She and I were finished, but I had been unable to reject that face: not beautiful, but so robustly young, and illusory. Believe that face and lose your way. Study the transformation as she applies the powders, rouges, and charcoal stripings. Discover in that colored mouth, in those magnified eyes, the lure of the virgin-into-vixen: kill my innocence and I’ll reward you with my fur.

I’ve made thirty-five films this year and until two months ago nobody knew my name. And I thought I’d be anonymous forever. Of course I’d love to see you. Always. I was supposed to make two films last week and I missed both because of my weakness, but now that we’re leaving the city I’m wonderfully well, for we’re going to a marvelous lake with wild woodland. Do you know where I’m talking about? I can’t believe it. I’m so excited. I told them everything I knew about the place, and my director couldn’t wait. We’ll be at our hotel four weeks, so come, love, please come, and everything will be just as it was.

Her success as my Thisbe had been supreme, she famous overnight, her photo in all the magazines. The play ran five months and when it closed Flo Ziegfeld was ready to put her in his Miss Innocence to replace Anna Held, but along came Giles’s Wild West performance and Ziegfeld said nobody tainted by scandal would ever be in a show of his. For a time no one in theater would hire her, but the scandal faded into gossip and instead of being branded as the vixen she emerged as destiny’s waif, the innocent darling corrupted by the “eater of broken meats,” as the Police Gazette labeled me.

She sought work in the pictures, brought her photographs to Kinegraph, and was hired at fifteen dollars a week. Her salary rose to six hundred a week and is still climbing. She’s become Kinegraph’s chief asset: The Kinegraph Girl, nameless, chameleonic face of sorrow and rapture and fury and terror and wickedness and determination and invitation.

During one of her illnesses rumors spread that she’d been killed by a burglar, or run down by a drunken motorist. The public wondered: Where has our girl gone? Kinegraph publicists advertised in the newspapers to disprove the lies about her death, and announced she was coming to New York for a new picture. Squadrons of police had to hold back fans waiting for her train at Grand Central — a greater crowd than greeted the President the previous week. Kinegraph promptly abandoned its policy of anonymity for actors and agreed the public should know the Kinegraph Girl by name: Melissa Spencer. . Melisssssssssa Ssssssssspenccccccccer, how sweet the sibilance!

My sickness flared up when the police came to talk about Cully Watson. All lies. How can such a man be believed? If they put it in the papers again my career is ruined. Why would he slander me? I never said a word to him, and I swear this on my breasts, which you know how much we both value. Please meet me at Cooperstown and we will erase the horror and relive our loving days there and I’ll be well again just from the sight of you.

Her film-in-progress was The Deerslayer, Cooper’s five-hundred-page Natty Bumppo novel condensed to a twenty-minute movie. Her role was Hetty, the simpleminded daughter of scalp hunter Thomas Hutter. When I found my way to the village and then to the set, there she was, Melissa-into-Herty, lying on her bed beneath a quilt, her face powdered into a death pallor; for Hetty had been shot by a stray bullet as the British troops rescued Deerslayer and Hetty’s sister, Judith, from torture at the hands of the Huron Indians. Hetty was dying, and her secret love, Hurry Harry, another scalp hunter, was by her deathbed, along with Judith, heroic Deerslayer in his fringed buckskins, and his bare-chested Indian friend Chingachgook, noble Delaware chief. The actors mouthed Cooper’s cumbersome dialogue as if it meant something to the film.

“How come they to shoot a poor girl like me and let so many men go unharmed?” Hetty wondered.

“ ’Twas an accident, poor Hetty,” said Judith.

“I’m glad of that — I thought it strange: I am feeble minded, and the red men have never harmed me before. . there’s something the matter with my eyes — you look dim and distant — and so does Hurry, now I look at him. . my mind was feeble — what people call half-witted. . How dark it’s becoming!. . I feel, Deerslayer, though I couldn’t tell you why. . that you and I are not going to part forever. .”

“. . Yes, we shall meet ag’in, though it may be a long time first and in a far-distant land.”

“Sister, where are you? I can’t see now anything but darkness. .”

“Speak, dearest,” said Judith. “Is there anything you wish to say. . in this awful moment?”

Cooper has Hetty blush, which to Judith means Hetty is undergoing “a sort of secret yielding to the instincts of nature,” and, on cue from Judith, Hurry Harry, nature’s lusty pawn, takes Hetty in his arms. She utters her love for him, then dies.

Melissa, no stranger at death’s door, rose up from Hetty’s bed twice, fell back twice to die twice, one of the film’s notable scenes. When it ended and the camera ceased its clatter, she rose up again to embrace me, kiss me lightly but with promise. The director eyed our kiss with disapproval, and I sensed he was Melissa’s new conquest. He was early thirtyish, boyish, and rumpled.

“Our next film’s in California, where we’ll never have to worry about the weather,” he said. “And it gets us away from the patent wars — movie companies suing each other over who owns the camera technology. You know about that, I guess.”

“Of course,” I said, knowing nothing of such wars.

“Melissa has no interest in these things,” said the rumpled boy, “but she’ll thrive in California. Inspiration under the sun. You’ll have that every day, Mel.”

“A life of sunshine,” Melissa said. “What luxury.”

When Rumples ended the day’s filming, Melissa changed clothes, leaving Hetty’s shroud and heavy eye makeup behind, converting that face that launched a thousand nickels (ten thousand thousand nickels) back into its faux pristinity. We went to the hotel and found our way to the rear piazza with its same rockers, same hammock, same view of the lovely lake that Cooper called Glimmerglass, and its vast, lush forests. Here we had spent ten idyllic days in the summer of 1908, convinced life was a dream of sensual indolence.

Melissa took up her familiar position in the hammock, and we ordered the same drinks (gin and quinine water), set them on the same wicker table, and we studied each other as if the 1908 dream had not dissolved in cordite reek and blood spew. Two years gone and the residual bone pain from the bullet (which had entered my left chest where the burning stick pierced Katrina: God’s own symmetry) continued to plague my sleepless nights. Yet it was the forgotten wound, spoken of by neither Katrina nor Melissa; for I’d behaved badly, had not summoned the penitential grace to die from my bullet.

“Tell me about your play,” she said. “Am I in it?”

“Someone like you is in it, but it isn’t you.”

“But I could play the role.”

“You could if I cast you.”

“Of course you’ll cast me.”

“Maybe you won’t want this role.”

“If you wrote it I want it.”

“That’s your only interest, a role. You don’t even know what the play is about.”

“What is it about?”

“It’s about a marriage that fails and the partners stay together but take lovers, not very original. Then the husband is caught with his mistress in a love nest, there’s a shooting and two die. The husband is shot but doesn’t die. People wish he had. He is condemned as a lecherous cad by priests, newspaper editors, and other custodians of the high moral ground. His son abandons college to escape his father’s scandal. Thoughtless of the father not to perish from shame. To spite others, the man lives on. His life grows bleak. He can’t understand why this tragedy happened, why people died. It’s a mystery. He begins a journal, fills ledgers with ruminations, theories, then decides writing a play will combat the lethal determinism of the universe. He fills his imagined stage with a riot of scenes that synthesize events, discover answers. He discovers little and falls depressed at the pointlessness of wild endeavor. In time he humbleheartedly reunites with his estranged wife as a way of saving his soul. Magnanimous woman, she doesn’t loathe him. She has her own sorrows. She has always loved him and he her. This is such a commonplace story. It happens to everybody, don’t you think? Finally, as he’s framing a conclusion on the cause of the killings, he turns up facts that dramatically contradict his conclusion, so he visits his old paramour to confront her with the news. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”

“When he goes back to his wife, do they make love?”

“I haven’t decided if love is what they make.”

“But they do sexual things.”

“I haven’t decided if what they do is sexual.”

“You’ve forgotten what’s sexual.”

“Not at all.”

“Do you remember me making myself sexual in this hammock?”

“I do.”

“Shall I do it again?”

She was nuding herself belowskirts. She could do this expeditiously.

“Is anybody watching?”

“I am.”

“I mean others.”

“No.”

“Is anybody coming?”

“No.”

“You see how I still love you?”

“I see the contour of a sunrise.”

“Shall we go to the room?”

“If you like.”

“You’re not enticed.”

“I seem to be.”

“Then say it.”

“The room. Yes.”

We went to her rustic chamber: bed, dresser, commode, basin and pitcher, wallpaper with pink roses on a field of mattress ticking. We shed our garments and I remembered vividly what I felt whenever I took this journey; but I felt none of that now, could not invest my movement with the pelvic arrhythmia she would remember, if she could differentiate mine from others. She perceived the problem and initiated variations on the theme, but while I remained full-blooded, I did so with ice in my heart.

“You’re like a hanged man,” she said. “Erect but dead.”

“I am a hanged man. At the end of my rope.”

“You don’t look dead. You look wonderful. You look like the man I fell in love with at your dinner party.”

“That man is dead. Did you fall in love with your director? And what would he say if he saw you now?”

She was, just then, a moving picture, stirring the air with my verticality as if it were the tiller of a boat in a rowdy sea. My question becalmed her.

“Ah, you’re jealous. How silly.”

She always viewed my objection to her flirtations as the fettering of her soul.

“He knows about us,” she said, “but he assumes we’re a thing of the past.”

“Would this scene convince him otherwise?”

“He’s not important to me the way you are, and he’s not very good at this.” She jostled the tiller. “I told him we had a legal matter to discuss.”

“And so we do.”

“Not now.”

She went to the dresser and found a long strand of pearls, put it around her neck and knotted it so the knot lay in the deep fallaway of her breasts. She straddled the tiller and let the pearls caress my chest, my face.

“Those look like Felicity’s pearls,” I said, and she reacted as if I’d lashed her with a bullwhip.

“Why would you say such a thing?” She knelt up straight, then put one foot on the floor, so beautiful in her angularity, her pudendal equipoise. “You think I stole them?”

“Cully Watson says he didn’t take them, yet they did vanish. Odd he admits the money but denies the pearls.”

“Maybe the police stole them. What do I care? How could you think I took them?”

“I never saw you wear pearls like these before.”

“I loved Felicity’s pearls, so I got my own.”

“Saved your pennies, did you? Giles paid five thousand dollars for Felicity’s.”

“Mine were a gift from an extremely wealthy gentleman. You’re being rotten.”

“Cully contradicts everything you and Felicity told me.”

“Cully!” she screamed. “I’m sick of Cully. He’s a murderer. You take his word over mine?”

“Have you seen his statement?”

“Yes, and he’s a maniac. It’s all lies. all lies! all lies!”

She was kneeling on a pillow. She stood up, grabbed the pillow, and threw it at me.

“You son of a bitch, you believe him, don’t you! You think I had sex with him! You think I was in the bathtub with Felicity! YOU’RE A MANIAC TOO IF YOU BELIEVE THAT!”

She threw a box of body powder at me. It missed my head, hit the wall, and showered talcum over the bedclothes. She reached for the toilet water but I wrapped her fury in a bear hug and made her put it down.

“That cape Felicity wore,” I said. “I found the costumier where you bought it. I saw a similar cloak in his display window. He remembered you.”

Her body went limp in my arms. I eased her backward so she could sit on the bed, and she blanched, summoning a stroke, or the black plague, anything to solve this crisis of contradiction. She buried her face in her hands as she had when she wept for the dead horse on the Fourth of July.

“You don’t know anything,” she said.

“I agree with that. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

She fell backward on the bed and stretched her arms over her head, eyes closed, her cave of opulent nuances assisting her in negotiating a new reality.

“I gave Felicity the mask and cloak to wear for you.”

“For me?”

“She wanted you. Wanted to be with you.”

“Felicity wanted me?”

“For years. She could never tell you.”

“Did it occur to her I might not want her?”

“You’d have wanted her if you saw her in that cloak.”

“I did see her in it. Alive and dead.”

“She had a beautiful body and she wanted to give it to you. I thought you’d like that. I said I’d arrange it. We made a game of how we’d both dress up for you.”

“You never mentioned such a thing.”

“It was new. We talked about it the week before. We wanted to surprise you.”

“But Cully was the surprise.”

“Yes.”

“And he, not I, put you both in the tub.”

“NEVER!”

She fumed in silence, stoking herself for an explosion of logic that would defy all argument. I pacified her with gin and in the ensuing half hour she cobbled together her story.

She bought the cloak for Felicity a week before the famous day, she said, kept it in a closet in our apartment (ours for the previous two months; but we were finished, for I’d wearied of her feigned illnesses, her absurd jealousies — over an actress who smiled at me at the theater, or a buxom waitress where we breakfasted — and her rage over these imagined dalliances. That rage would end as irrationally as it had begun: she on her knees asking forgiveness, I touching away her tears and reaffirming my loyalty with prolonged vaginal stroking). Melissa, having seen Felicity arrive in the hotel that morning, took cloak and mask to Felicity’s room, the proposed site of our ménage. She put the garments on a chair but saw no Felicity; nor was she in the bedroom. Melissa called out, “Your wardrobe mistress has arrived,” and from the bathroom came male and female voices, then Felicity’s voice saying she would see Melissa later.

“I left immediately,” Melissa said to me, “telling myself she was always something of a tart.”

“You didn’t hear any fear in her voice?”

“I suppose I should have.”

“Wasn’t that the bathtub rape in progress?”

“If he raped her. He said he raped me too, but I never set eyes on the man.”

“You never told me any of this.”

“She came to our door in that cloak, crying and carrying her clothes, hiding behind that mask. She cried rape and I let her in. She lied to you about the cloak, but how could she tell you what it was really for? Maybe she still hoped to charm you with it. Tarts are tarts. And yet how could I doubt her? She said he held a knife to her throat, that she even feared for my life when I was outside that bathroom door. I couldn’t tell you this.”

“Not even after her death, to get at the truth?”

“This is the truth!”

Melissa stood up and began to dress herself and I too stepped into my clothing, told her I was going back to Albany.

“You make it quite credible,” I said. “I don’t doubt any part of your story. But I’m absolutely certain you’re a virtuoso liar.”