The Marchand Woman

Edith cocked a knowing eyebrow and Carole tried to smile to reassure the girl but she was having trouble dimpling up just now; she turned away before it became a snarl. When Mort hung up the phone she said, “Am I going to have to fight you over every foot of this picture?”

“You’re going to have to fight me over about sixty-five hundred frames, darling. That’s what it’s still got to lose.”

The Movieola rattled. Frames jinked across the screen; underlit by that flickering source, Mort’s narrow-bearded face had the Mephistophelean look of a silent movie villain’s.

“It’s my picture,” she said. “This time it’s mine. I wrote it and directed it—I won’t have it butchered by a clock.”

Mort’s eyes glimmered from the gloom. “You don’t have final cut, darling. Neither do I. I only produced it—the distributors make the decisions. They want a picture they can screen at seven o’clock and nine o’clock. Go over a hundred and five minutes and you’re screwing up their timetables. Look—the studio will cut it if we don’t. Isn’t it better that you and I do the dirty deed ourselves?”

The little cigar glowed briefly and arced to the floor; Mort’s heel crushed the life from it. For a long time they stood in conflicting silences.

Mort gave her a soft smile. He wasn’t using his charm deliberately; the charm was there, that was all. “It’s a low-budget picture, darling. I can’t see the exhibs bending over to let us have the extra five minutes, can you?”

“If I were a man would you browbeat me this way?”

“Darling, I’d be far more ruthless with a man. Sam Gilfillan refuses to speak to me to this day because he insists I ruined Pride Goeth in the cutting room. Face it, Carole, if you were a man you wouldn’t have had a shot at directing this picture at all. They’re going out of their way to accommodate women and minorities right now. So let’s not have any sexist crap, shall we?”

“I’m sorry. It was a cheap shot. I’ve never done that before. It’s nerves.”

“I understand, darling. Sure. I also understand you came to work on purpose. You can go home if you want to, but if you stay here we’re going to cut this picture. That’s what we’re all here for. Now find me four and a half minutes to drop. You pick ’em, I’ll stand aside. But I want four and a half. Minimum. Fair enough?”

Mort left the cutting room; Carole settled down with Edith to feed stock through the sprockets. She had no real quarrel with her producer; these were the games that had to be played. She knew her craft. Felix’s Kingdom would have to sell two million tickets before break-even. She didn’t have to remind herself she was a movie director, not an auteur-artiste defined by the sophomoric Cahiers-du-Cinema fools.

It was her fourth picture. Two of the first three had made money; all three had won awards of one kind or another. What Mort had said was not true—she hadn’t got this job because of her sex; he’d only said it to goad her. Mort would say almost anything to provoke debate, it was his ma

Felix’s Kingdom was an unabashed tearjerker. A man, two women. She’d wanted sentiment, romance: a six-handkerchief movie that would make her cry with heartbreak and cry again with relief and triumph, sappy and trite and wonderful. The critics would lambaste it but screw them. It made her cry.

She hadn’t cried for Robert. The realization shook her. Was she so far gone she could be stimulated to tears only by the synthetic?

She couldn’t keep her mind on the job. Finally she gave vague instructions to Edith and went out, not quite sure where she was bound.

Mort wasn’t in his office. She tracked him to the commissary. He gave her his public smile—a creeping revelation of capped teeth: His party ma

“Sympathy,” Mort said, “is easy to give and embarrassing to receive, but I want you to know that—”

“I know. You don’t need to say it.”

“All the same, darling, if you want a hand to hold.”

She listened abstractedly to the commissary’s rattle of cutlery, the heavy drone of voices. It was such a mundane scene; it made her feel guilt—Robert somewhere in a jungle, perhaps tied hand and foot: perhaps injured, in pain, perhaps in an agony of hunger or thirst. Keeping his upper lip stiff and bucking up the others, not out of any sense of heroics but simply because that was Robert.

She said, “The one thing about you that’s driven me up the wall ever since we first met is that inane Hollywood habit of yours of calling everybody darling.”

“I know. I can’t even remember where I picked it up.” Mort took her elbow and squired her to the cafeteria queue, talking about the picture. Her mind was on Robert and she hardly attended.

When they’d eaten he said abruptly, “Have you ever wanted to get married again?”

“I thought I did once. Briefly thought it. It didn’t work out. Fortunately I’d grown wise enough to look before I jumped in—so I didn’t jump.”

“Cold feet?”

“Yes. Let’s talk about something else, shall we?”

“Tell me about your son. I never met him, you know.”

“Robert,” she said. “Robert the survivor. How he endured the buffeting we gave him I’ll never know. That is the overriding guilt of my life—it’s part of the reason, I suppose, why I’m having such a hard time dealing with this.”

“Nobody could have an easy time with something like this.”

“I used to kidnap him from Howard. Did you know that?”

“No. Must have been a while ago.”

“Fifteen years ago.” She pushed her plate away. “It was one of those asinine custody things. After the divorce I moved out here with Robert and petitioned the court for permanent custody. California court. At the same time Howard was filing petitions in the Virginia courts—we’d been living in Alexandria. Howard still lives there. The upshot was the Virginia courts awarded custody to him and the California courts awarded custody to me. Howard thought I wasn’t a fit mother for him. He was convinced I’d ruin Robert’s life. I hired private detectives—they took him right out of an Alexandria schoolyard and dragged him all the way out here. It happened twice. What a dismal performance it all was—the two of us behaving like animals quarreling over a marrow-bone. I don’t think any of us ever recovered from it. Certainly Robert didn’t.”

“That kind of kidnaping’s not illegal, is it. I mean you can kidnap your own child and it’s not a violation of the law.”

“I’m not talking about that kind of guilt, Mort.”