Remake

SCENE:Exterior of the Hardy house in summer. Picket fence, maple tree, flowers by front door. Slow dissolve to Autumn. Leaves falling. Tight focus on a leaf and follow it down.

La-la-land is a lot like the skids. You stand still and stare at a screen, or, worse, your own reflection, and after a while you’re somewhere else.

The parties continued, packed with Marilyns and studio execs. Fred Astaire stayed in litigation, Heada avoided me, I drank. In excellent company. Gangsters drank, Navy lieutenants, little old ladies, sweet young things, doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs. Fredric March, Jean Arthur, Spencer Tracy, Susan Hayward, Jimmy Stewart. And not just in The Philadelphia Story. The all-American, “shucks, wah-ah-all,” do-the-honorable-thing boy next door got regularly splatted. Aquavit in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, brandy in Bell, Book, and Candle, “likker” straight from the jug in How the West Was Won. In It’s a Wonderful Life, he got drunk enough to get thrown out of a bar and ran his car into a tree. In Harvey, he spent the entire film pleasantly tipsy, and what in hell was I supposed to do when I got to that movie? What in hell was I supposed to do in general?

Somewhere in there, Heada came to see me. “I’ve got a question,” she said, standing in the door.

“Does this mean you’re over being mad at me?” I said.

“Because you practically broke my arms? Because you thought the whole time you were popping me I was somebody else? What’s to be mad about?”

“Heada…” I said.

“It’s okay. Happens to me all the time. I should open a simsex parlor.” She came in and sat down on the bunk. “I’ve got a question.”

“I’ll answer yours if you answer mine,” I said.

“I don’t know where she is.”

“You know everything.”

“She dropped out. The word is, she’s working down on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know. Probably not dancing in the movies, which should make you happy. You were always trying to talk her out of—”

I cut in with, “What’s your question?”

“I watched that movie you told me I was playing a part in. Rear Window? Thelma Ritter? And all the meddling you said she did, telling him to mind his own business, telling him not to get involved. It was good advice. She was just trying to help.”

“What’s your question?”

“I watched this other movie. Casablanca. It’s about this guy who has a bar in Africa someplace during World War II, and his old girlfriend shows up, only she’s married to this other guy—”

“I know the plot,” I said. “What part don’t you understand?”

“All of it,” she said. “Why the bar guy—”

“Humphrey Bogart,” I said.

“Why Humphrey Bogart drinks all the time, why he says he won’t help her and then he does, why he tells her she can’t stay. If the two of them are so splatted about each other, why can’t she stay?”

“There was a war on,” I said. “They both had work to do.”

“And this work was more important than the two of them?”

“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t believe it, in spite of Rick’s whole “hill of beans” speech. Ilsa’s lending moral support to her husband, Rick’s fighting in the Resistance weren’t more important. They were a substitute. They were what you did when you couldn’t have what you wanted. “The Nazis would get them,” I said.

“Okay,” she said doubtfully. “So they can’t stay together. But why can’t he still pop her before she leaves?”

“Standing there at the airport?”

“No,” she said, very serious. “Before. Back at the bar.”

Because he can’t have her, I thought. And he knows it.

“Because of the Hays Office,” I said.

“In real life she would have given him a pop.”

“That’s a comforting thought,” I said. “But the movies aren’t real life. And they can’t tell you how people feel. They’ve got to show you. Valentino rolling his eyes, Rhett sweeping Scarlett off her feet, Lillian Gish clutching her heart. Bogie loves Ingrid and can’t have her.” I could see her looking blank again. “The bar owner loves his old girlfriend, so they have to show you by not letting him touch her or even give her a good-bye kiss. He has to just stand there and look at her.”

“Like you drinking all the time and falling off the skids,” she said.

Now it was my turn to look blank.

“The night Alis brought you back to my room, the night you were so splatted.”

I still didn’t get it.

“Showing the feelings,” Heada said. “You trying to walk through the skids screen and nearly getting killed and Alis pulling you out.”

SCENE: Exterior. The Hardy house. Wind whirls the dead leaves. Slow dissolve to a bare-branched tree. Snow. Winter.