Machineries of Joy Page 4

“A little goombah,” he muttered. “A touch of mazash.”

  They ran the first film test on the animated monster a week later.

  When it was over, Clarence sat in darkness and nodded imperceptibly.

  “Better. But … more horrorific, bloodcurdling. Let’s scare the hell out of Aunt Jane. Back to the drawing board!”

  “I’m a week behind schedule now,” Terwilliger protested. “You keep coming in, change this, change that, you say, so I change it, one day the tail’s all wrong, next day it’s the claws—”

  “You’ll find a way to make me happy,” said Clarence. “Get in there and fight the old aesthetic fight!”

  At the end of the month they ran the second test.

  “A near miss! Close!” said Clarence. “The face is just almost right. Try again, Terwilliger!”

  Terwilliger went back. He animated the dinosaur’s mouth so that it said obscene things which only a lip reader might catch, while the rest of the audience thought the beast was only shrieking. Then he got the clay and worked until 3A.M. on the awful face.

  “That’s it!” cried Clarence in the projection room the next week. “Perfect! Now that’s what I call a monster!”

  He leaned toward the old man, his lawyer, Mr. Glass, and Maury Poole, his production assistant.

  “You like my creature?” He beamed.

  Terwilliger, slumped in the back row, his skeleton as long as the monsters he built, could feel the old lawyer shrug.

  “You seen one monster, you seen ‘em all.”

  “Sure, sure, but this one’s special!” shouted Clarence happily. “Even I got to admit Terwilliger’s a genius!”

  They all turned back to watch the beast on the screen, in a titanic waltz, throw its razor tail wide in a vicious harvesting that cut grass and clipped flowers. The beast paused now to gaze pensively off into mists, gnawing a red bone.

  “That monster,” said Mr. Glass at last, squinting. “He sure looks familiar.”

  “Familiar?” Terwilliger stirred, alert.

  “It’s got such a look,” drawled Mr. Glass in the dark, “I couldn’t forget, from someplace.”

  “Natural Museum exhibits?”

  “No, no.”

  “Maybe,” laughed Clarence, “you read a book once, Glass?”

  “Funny …” Glass, unperturbed, cocked his head, closed one eye. “Like detectives, I don’t forget a face. But, that Tyrannosaurus Rex—where before did I meet him?”

  “Who cares?” Clarence sprinted. “He’s great. And all because I booted Terwilliger’s behind to make him do it right. Come on, Maury!”

  When the door shut, Mr. Glass turned to gaze steadily at Terwilliger. Not taking his eyes away, he called softly to the projectionist, “Walt? Walter? Could you favor us with that beast again?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Terwilliger shifted uncomfortably, aware of some bleak force gathering in blackness, in the sharp light that shot forth once more to ricochet terror off the screen.

  “Yeah. Sure,” mused Mr. Glass. “I almost remember. I almost know him. But … who?”

  The brute, as if answering, turned and for a disdainful moment stared across one hundred thousand million years at two small men hidden in a small dark room. The tyrant machine named itself in thunder.

  Mr. Glass quickened forward, as if to cup his ear.

  Darkness swallowed all.

  With the film half finished, in the tenth week, Clarence summoned thirty of the office staff, technicians and a few friends to see a rough cut of the picture.

  The film had been running fifteen minutes when a gasp ran through the small audience.

  Clarence glanced swiftly about.

  Mr. Glass, next to him, stiffened.

  Terwilliger, scenting danger, lingered near the exit, not knowing why; his nervousness was compulsive and intuitive. Hand on the door, he watched.

  Another gasp ran through the crowd.

  Someone laughed quietly. A woman secretary giggled. Then there was instantaneous silence.

  For Joe Clarence had jumped to his feet.

  His tiny figure sliced across the light on the screen. For a moment, two images gesticulated in the dark: Tyrannosaurus, ripping the leg from a Pteranodon, and Clarence, yelling, jumping forward as if to grapple with these fantastic wrestlers.

  “Stop! Freeze it right there!”

  The film stopped. The image held.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Mr. Glass.

  “Wrong?” Clarence crept up on the image. He thrust his baby hand to the screen, stabbed the tyrant jaw, the lizard eye, the fangs, the brow, then turned blindly to the projector light so that reptilian flesh was printed on his furious cheeks. “What goes? What is this?”

  “Only a monster, Chief.”

  “Monster, hell!” Clarence pounded the screen with his tiny fist. “That’s me!”

  Half the people leaned forward, half the people fell back, two people jumped up, one of them Mr. Glass, who fumbled for his other spectacles, flexed his eyes and moaned, “So that’s where I saw him before!”

  “That’s where you what?”

  Mr. Glass shook his head, eyes shut. “That face, I knew it was familiar.”

  A wind blew in the room.

  Everyone turned. The door stood open.

  Terwilliger was gone.

  They found Terwilliger in his animation studio cleaning out his desk, dumping everything into a large cardboard box, the Tyrannosaurus machine-toy model under his arm. He looked up as the mob swirled in, Clarence at the head.

  “What did I do to deserve this!” he cried.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Clarence.”

  “You’re sorry?! Didn’t I pay you well?”

  “No, as a matter of fact.”

  “I took you to lunches—”

  “Once. I picked up the tab.”

  “I gave you dinner at home, you swam in my pool, and now this! You’re fired!”

  “You can’t fire me, Mr. Clarence. I’ve worked the last week free and overtime, you forgot my check—”

  “You’re fired anyway, oh, you’re really fired! You’re blackballed in Hollywood. Mr. Glass!” He whirled to find the old man. “Sue him!”

  “There is nothing,” said Terwilliger, not looking up any more, just looking down, packing, keeping in motion, “nothing you can sue me for. Money? You never paid enough to save on. A house? Could never afford that. A wife? I’ve worked for people like you all my life. So wives are out. I’m an unencumbered man. There’s nothing you can do to me. If you attach my dinosaurs, I’ll just go hole up in a small town somewhere, get me a can of latex rubber, some clay from the river, some old steel pipe, and make new monsters. I’ll buy stock film raw and cheap. I’ve got an old beat-up stop-motion camera. Take that away, and I’ll build one with my own hands. I can do anything. And that’s why you’ll never hurt me again.”

  “You’re fired!” cried Clarence. “Look at me. Don’t look away. You’re fired! You’re fired!”

  “Mr. Clarence,” said Mr. Glass, quietly, edging forward. “Let me talk to him just a moment”

  “So talk to him!” said Clarence. “What’s the use? He just stands there with that monster under his arm and the goddam thing looks like me, so get out of the way!”

  Clarence stormed out the door. The others followed.

  Mr. Glass shut the door, walked over to the window and looked out at the absolutely clear twilight sky.

  “I wish it would rain,” he said. “That’s one thing about California I can’t forgive. It never really lets go and cries. Right now, what wouldn’t I give for a little something from that sky? A bolt of lightning, even.”

  He stood silent, and Terwilliger slowed in his packing. Mr. Glass sagged down into a chair and doodled on a pad with a pencil, talking sadly, half aloud, to himself.

  “Six reels of film shot, pretty good reels, half the film done, three hundred thousand dollars down the drain, hail and farewell. Out the window all the jobs. Who feeds the starvin
g mouths of boys and girls? Who will face the stockholders? Who chucks the Bank of America under the chin? Anyone for Russian roulette?”

  He turned to watch Terwilliger snap the locks on a briefcase.

  “What hath God wrought?”

  Terwilliger, looking down at his hands, turning them over to examine their texture, said, “I didn’t know I was doing it, I swear. It came out in my fingers. It was all subconscious. My fingers do everything for me. They did this.”

  “Better the fingers had come in my office and taken me direct by the throat,” said Glass. “I was never one for slow motion. The Keystone Kops, at triple speed, was my idea of living, or dying. To think a rubber monster has stepped on us all. We are now so much tomato mush, ripe for canning!”

  “Don’t make me feel any guiltier than I feel,” said Terwilliger.

  “What do you want, I should take you dancing?”

  “It’s just,” cried Terwilliger. “He kept at me. Do this. Do that. Do it the other way. Turn it inside out, upside down, he said. I swallowed my bile. I was angry all the time. Without knowing, I must’ve changed the face. But right up till five minutes ago, when Mr. Clarence yelled, I didn’t see it. I’ll take all the blame.”

  “No,” sighed Mr. Glass, “we should all have seen. Maybe we did and couldn’t admit. Maybe we did and laughed all night in our sleep, when we couldn’t hear. So where are we now? Mr. Clarence, he’s got investments he can’t throw out. You got your career from this day forward, for better or worse, you can’t throw out. Mr. Clarence right now is aching to be convinced it was all some horrible dream. Part of his ache, ninety-nine per cent, is in his wallet. If you could put one per cent of your time in the next hour convincing him of what I’m going to tell you next, tomorrow morning there will be no orphan children staring out of the want ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. If you would go tell him—”

  “Tell me what?”

  Joe Clarence, returned, stood in the door, his cheeks still inflamed.

  “What he just told me.” Mr. Glass turned calmly. “A touching story.”

  “I’m listening!” said Clarence.

  “Mr. Clarence.” The old lawyer weighed his words carefully. “This film you just saw is Mr. Terwilliger’s solemn and silent tribute to you.”

  “It’s what?” shouted Clarence.

  Both men, Clarence and Terwilliger, dropped their jaws.

  The old lawyer gazed only at the wall and in a shy voice said, “Shall I go on?”

  The animator closed his jaw. “If you want to.”

  “This film—” the lawyer arose and pointed in a single motion toward the projection room—“was done from a feeling of honor and friendship for you, Joe Clarence. Behind your desk, an unsung hero of the motion picture industry, unknown, unseen, you sweat out your lonely little life while who gets the glory? The stars. How often does a man in Atawanda Springs, Idaho, tell his wife, ‘Say, I was thinking the other night about Joe Clarence—a great producer, that man’? How often? Should I tell? Never! So Terwilliger brooded. How could he present the real Clarence to the world? The dinosaur is there; boom! it hits him! This is it! he thought, the very thing to strike terror to the world, here’s a lonely, proud, wonderful, awful symbol of independence, power, strength, shrewd animal cunning, the true democrat, the individual brought to its peak, all thunder and big lightning. Dinosaur: Joe Clarence. Joe Clarence: Dinosaur. Man embodied in Tyrant Lizard!”

  Mr. Glass sat down, panting quietly.

  Terwilliger said nothing.

  Clarence moved at last, walked across the room, circled Glass slowly, then came to stand in front of Terwilliger, his face pale. His eyes were uneasy, shifting up along Terwilliger’s tall skeleton frame.

  “You said that?” he asked faintly.

  Terwilliger swallowed.

  “To me he said it. He’s shy,” said Mr. Glass. “You ever hear him say much, ever talk back, swear? anything? He likes people, he can’t say. But, immortalize them? That he can do!”

  “Immortalize?” said Clarence.

  “What else?” said the old man. “Like a statue, only moving. Years from now people will say, ‘Remember that film, The Monster from the Pleistocene?’ And people will say, ‘Sure! why?’ ‘Because,’ the others say, ‘it was the one monster, the one brute, in all Hollywood history had real guts, real personality. And why is this? Because one genius had enough imagination to base the creature on a real-life, hard-hitting, fast-thinking businessman of A-one caliber.’ You’re one with history, Mr. Clarence. Film libraries will carry you in good supply. Cinema societies will ask for you. How lucky can you get? Nothing like this will ever happen to Immanuel Glass, a lawyer. Every day for the next two hundred, five hundred years, you’ll be starring somewhere in the world!”

  “Every day?” asked Clarence softly. “For the next—”

  “Eight hundred, even; why not?”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “Think of it!”

  Clarence walked over to the window and looked out at the Hollywood Hills, and nodded at last.

  “My God, Terwilliger,” he said. “You really like me that much?”

  “It’s hard to put in words,” said Terwilliger, with difficulty.

  “So do we finish the mighty spectacle?” asked Glass. “Starring the tyrant terror striding the earth and making all quake before him, none other than Mr. Joseph J. Clarence?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Clarence wandered off, stunned, to the door, where he said, “You know? I always wanted to be an actor!”

  Then he went quietly out into the hall and shut the door.

  Terwilliger and Glass collided at the desk, both clawing at a drawer.

  “Age before beauty,” said the lawyer, and quickly pulled forth a bottle of whiskey.

  At midnight on the night of the first preview of Monster from the Stone Age, Mr. Glass came back to the studio, where everyone was gathering for a celebration, and found Terwilliger seated alone in his office, his dinosaur on his lap.

  “You weren’t there?” asked Mr. Glass.

  “I couldn’t face it. Was there a riot?”

  “A riot? The preview cards are all superdandy extra plus! A lovelier monster nobody saw before! So now we’re talking sequels! Joe Clarence as the Tyrant Lizard in Return of the Stone Age Monster, Joe Clarence and/or Tyrannosaurus Rex in, maybe, Beast from the Old Country—”

  The phone rang. Terwilliger got it.

  “Terwilliger, this is Clarence! Be there in five minutes! We’ve done it! Your animal! Great! Is he mine now? I mean, to hell with the contract, as a favor, can I have him for the mantel?”

  “Mr. Clarence, the monster’s yours.”

  “Better than an Oscar! So long!”

  Terwilliger stared at the dead phone.

  “God bless us all, said Tiny Tim. He’s laughing, almost hysterical with relief.”

  “So maybe I know why,” said Mr. Glass. “A little girl, after the preview, asked him for an autograph.”

  “An autograph?”

  “Right there in the street. Made him sign. First autograph he ever gave in his life. He laughed all the while he wrote his name. Somebody knew him. There he was, in front of the theater, big as life, Rex Himself, so sign the name. So he did.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Terwilliger slowly, pouring drinks. “That little girl …?”

  “My youngest daughter,” said Glass. “So who knows? And who will tell?”

  They drank.

  “Not me,” said Terwilliger.

  Then, carrying the rubber dinosaur between them, and bringing the whisky, they went to stand by the studio gate, waiting for the limousines to arrive all lights, horns and annunciations.

  The Vacation

  It was a day as fresh as grass growing up and clouds going over and butterflies coming down can make it. It was a day compounded from silences of bee and flower and ocean and land, which were not silences at all, but motions, stirs, flutters, risings, fallings, each in its own
time and matchless rhythm. The land did not move, but moved. The sea was not still, yet was still. Paradox flowed into paradox, stillness mixed with stillness, sound with sound. The flowers vibrated and the bees fell in separate and small showers of golden rain on the clover. The seas of hill and the seas of ocean were divided, each from the other’s motion, by a railroad track, empty, compounded of rust and iron marrow, a track on which, quite obviously, no train had run in many years. Thirty miles north it swirled on away to further mists of distance, thirty miles south it tunneled islands of cloud-shadow that changed their continental positions on the sides of far mountains as you watched.

  Now, suddenly, the railroad track began to tremble.

  A blackbird, standing on the rail, felt a rhythm grow faintly, miles away, like a heart beginning to beat.

  The blackbird leaped up over the sea.

  The rail continued to vibrate softly until, at long last, around a curve and along the shore came a small workman’s handcar, its two-cylinder engine popping and spluttering in the great silence.

  On top of this small four-wheeled car, on a double-sided bench facing in two directions and with a little surrey roof above for shade, sat a man, his wife and their small seven-year-old son. As the handcar traveled through lonely stretch after lonely stretch, the wind whipped their eyes and blew their hair, but they did not look back but only ahead. Sometimes they looked eagerly as a curve unwound itself, sometimes with great sadness, but always watchful, ready for the next scene.

  As they hit a level straightaway, the machine engine gasped and stopped abruptly. In the now crushing silence, it seemed that the quiet of earth, sky and sea itself, by its friction, brought the car to a wheeling halt.

  “Out of gas.”

  The man, sighing, reached for the extra can in the small storage bin and began to pour it into the tank.

  His wife and son sat quietly looking at the sea, listening to the muted thunder, the whisper, the drawing back of huge tapestries of sand, gravel, green weed, and foam.

  “Isn’t the sea nice?” said the woman.

  “I like it,” said the boy.

  “Shall we picnic here, while we’re at it?”

  The man focused some binoculars on the green peninsula ahead.