Karoo Page 5

  In addition to working on screenplays that were taken away from their original writers, I have also been employed, thanks to what somebody called my “facility with celluloid,” in fixing completed films that were taken away from their directors.

  The work is essentially the same. I sit in the screening room with a producer or studio executives and watch the film. I do what I always do. I follow the story line. I suggest cuts, reversal in the order of scenes. I look at the outtakes and rummage through them for bits and pieces that could be put back. I recommend pieces of music with which to underscore certain scenes and, in extreme situations, when no other mean of giving a film cohesion are available, I recommend voice-over narration, which I then write. Sometimes the powers that be follow my advice and make the changes I suggest. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they hire another fixer. Sometimes they hire a whole team of fixers. If the film I’ve worked on succeeds commercially, I get a lot of credit in the so-called film community, and my reputation grows. If the film I’ve worked on does not succeed commercially, even if it fails completely, I’m never the one who is blamed. That film joins the ranks of those films that “even Doc Karoo could not fix.”

  I am paid extremely well for what I do. Thanks to Arnold, my former accountant, who now manages Dianah’s financial affairs, thanks to him and his conservative but relentless management of my money, I am a wealthy man. If I’m not independent in any other way, I am financially independent. I don’t have to worry about paying the outrageous rent for my office on West Fifty-seventh Street. I only have to worry about what I do when I get there.

  One other worry has emerged recently. It seems to me at times that all the so-called fat that I cut from all those screenplays and films is beginning to wreak its revenge on me. There is mounting evidence that my personal life is now composed almost exclusively of those very fat, unnecessary scenes that I so skillfully eliminated from the films and screenplays of other people.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  Dear Dad,

  Even before I begin this letter, I’m afraid of what might happen to it. I have observed you over the years and seen how you make little distinction between what’s private and personal and what’s not. I have watched you repeatedly betray the confidence of your former friends over dinner in some restaurant by converting their sometimes painful affairs into witty stories with which you entertain others. I don’t know why you do this, but I do know, because I have seen it happen over and over again, that when the energy drops at one of those dinners, and the chatter starts to fade, you will dredge up and say anything just to pick things up again. I beg you to make an exception this one time with this letter. Don’t tell others about it, not even Mom. Don’t quote me, don’t paraphrase me to others. Please. If we can have nothing else that’s strictly private, just between the two of us, then let this letter serve as our one and only private event. I will continue this letter as an act of faith that you will respect my wish and not betray me as you have done so often in the past. So, with that out of the way, let me begin again:

  Dear Dad,

  I have not been keeping track of time, but both of us are aware, I’m sure, that for years now, a paralysis of some kind has set in between us. I’m not sure when it started, because it’s taken me this long just to accept the fact of its existence. No, we’re not drifting apart, to use a phrase my friends use when talking about their own parents. It would be better if we were, because then the possibility would exist that eventually I would drift far enough from you to no longer feel the pain of proximity without contact.

  But we’re not drifting, Dad. There is no motion of any kind. There is only the sad spectacle of a father and a son frozen in time.

  I have thought about this a lot and in my opinion it has nothing to do with the fact that, biologically speaking, you’re not my real father. The issue here, Dad, is not blood and biology. What’s missing between us is something that should exist between any two human beings who have known each other as long as we have. There either was, or I chose to believe there was, an unspoken promise which I took to heart when I was very young. It was a promise of wonderful things to come. Some test awaited me, or a series of tests, and if I successfully negotiated them, that would eventually lead to a loving relationship between us. In a way, I’ve had a very happy childhood because I believed so blindly in the promise of things to come.

  I am now neither young enough anymore to go on believing blindly, nor old and cynical enough to dismiss the possibility of your love and move on to other things.

  Tell me the truth, Dad. Please, if you know the truth, tell it to me.

  To learn the truth, that I can never have what I want from you, would probably be very painful, but not nearly as debilitating as this wondering and waiting. I’m held in check, Dad. While I wait for your love, close ties with others are held in abeyance. Lovely girls come and go, friends come and go, love comes and goes and I never ask it to stay because I’m waiting for you.

  At the risk of oversimplifying the situation, let me remind you that what I need from you is not all that much. You need not fear that I want to take over your life, or that I have some dark, forbidding agenda.

  Until you sensed that I had no use for it anymore, you were always willing to be with me in public. To take me to a play or premiere or sneak preview or some other public event, and then afterwards, with others, to dine in some restaurant where the event we had just attended became the event again. I die in public as if upon a stage. I play the part of a public son bodly.

  Let me, not always, but every now and then, let me be the event. Please understand that I have no specific scene in mind that I want to play with you. It’s the very absence of a scene I yearn for. My daydreams of being alone with you are all of an inconsequential sharing of time, of basking in ease and inadvertence.

  I know I’m taking a chance by writing this letter. I don’t know you well, Dad, but I do know you well enough to know that you might find it easier to sever all ties with me rather than address the issues in this letter: If you must do that, then you must. It will be better than the position in which the two of us find ourselves in now, where we languish like two chess pieces of an abandoned game.

  Your loving son,

  Billy.

  PS. I hope you don’t find this postscript patronizing but please, if nothing else, get yourself some health insurance. For my peace of mind, if not yours.

  2

  It was neither warm nor cold. The sun was shining, but something in the air prevented it from being a sunny day.

  Folded New York Times under my arm, my son’s letter in the inside pocket of my sport coat, I waited on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Broadway for a cab.

  A brand-new yellow cab lunged to pick me up. It could not have been newer or yellower. I put out my cigarette, got in, and we headed downtown.

  The interior of the cab was overheated. There were two large, dangling car deodorizers in the back, one on my left and one on my right. They were green and shaped like Christmas trees, dispensing a sickening pine scent.

  I rolled down the window.

  The traffic moved slowly but steadily. I loved motion. I loved the feeling that I was getting somewhere.

  I crossed my legs and thought once again about Billy’s letter. I had already thought about it Monday, and yesterday, but in the fatherly mood that I was in, nothing was too good for my son. Not even putting in overtime and thinking about his letter three days in a row.

  His letter truly moved me when I received it on Monday. I was moved by it off and on for almost the entire day. On Tuesday, I decided to do something about it, and the issue I chose to address in his letter was in his postscript to me.

  He was worried about my having no health insurance. If I got health insurance, I reasoned, I could then call him and tell him not to worry. I could tell him that I had become insured again because he had advised me to do it. The way I saw it, he would feel flattered that I had taken his advice. The tw
o of us could then have a nice chat on the phone about the whole thing and, in the process, disregard everything in his letter that had preceded it.

  Therefore, yesterday, first thing in the morning, I called my new accountant, Jerry Fry, and told him to get me reinstated with Fidelity Health, my former carrier. Jerry congratulated me on coming to my senses finally. I told him I was doing it for my son, whom, as he knew, I loved very much. He congratulated me on my fatherly feelings and told me to leave it all to him.

  “Leave it to me, Saul,” he said, “You’ll be all set by tomorrow.”

  Today, I would call Jerry from my office or he would call me from his office, and another one of life’s little problems would be resolved. I considered several opening lines to Billy when I called him tonight and opted for “Billy? It’s Dad. Guess what, Big Guy? I’m covered again …”

  I lit a cigarette.

  “No smoking,” the driver said. There was an edge to his voice, as if he had warned me once before not to smoke. “I have asthma,” he added with authority.

  I took one last, quick puff and put out the cigarette in the shiny new ashtray.

  Judging by the number of cab drivers who suddenly claimed to have asthma or some other respiratory disease, one might easily assume that the large cab companies had made it company policy to hire only the hard of breathing. Even Afghan and Pakistani drivers, who spoke not a word of English and had no idea where Lincoln Center was located, knew how to say, “No smoking. I have asthma.”

  My driver looked like a combination lumberjack and linebacker for the Chicago Bears. He took up three-quarters of the space in the front of the brand-new Peugeot he was driving. The windshield, had it been just a little smaller and just a little bit more curved, could have been a pair of goggles he was wearing.

  There was something festive about this cab ride. It was my farewell tour as The Uninsured Man. In honor of which, I decided to befriend the hulk who was driving me.

  “What kind of asthma do you have?” I asked him. I knew he was lying, by the sound of his voice. There was always a melody to the sound of lies, which I recognized as a tune I sang myself.

  He pondered the question.

  “What do you mean, what kind?” He checked me out in the rearview mirror. “What kind of asthmas are there?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the one who’s got it.”

  “It’s just asthma,” he said, rolling his big shoulders. “Regular asthma. Haven’t you ever heard of people with asthma?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Well, that’s what I’ve got. Asthma. I smell smoke and bingo!” He snapped his fingers. “I get an attack just like that.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, and it’s no joke, believe you me.”

  I nodded as if I did.

  “What’s it like?” I couldn’t resist asking him.

  “What’s what like?”

  “To have an attack.”

  “Of asthma?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s terrible. Positively terrible,” he said, wagging his head slowly.

  He had a neck like a Sunday pot roast. When he wagged his head, a nature show on PBS flashed through my mind. The grizzly bear from the wilds of Montana, wearing a radio collar. Now relocated and retrained and driving a cab in Manhattan.

  It was a pleasure to be driven by him. I couldn’t smoke in the cab, but I much preferred to be deprived of my cigarette by an out-and-out liar like himself than by an impersonal city ordinance sign. I was predisposed toward liars. Being a congenital liar myself, I took to others with the same affliction. There were no longer any truths I had in common with others. Lies were my last link to my fellow man. In lies, at least, all men were brothers.

  “It’s terrible, huh?” I asked. I didn’t want the subject to die, the lying to end.

  “To have an attack of asthma?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s more than terrible. Believe you me, mister, you don’t want to know.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  He looked at me again in the rearview mirror and asked, a little suspiciously, “You ever have asthma yourself?”

  “No.”

  My answer reassured him.

  “It’s terrible. Horrible. Positively horrible.” He was getting expansive, feeling his oats. “It’s like … like being held underwater in a public swimming pool. That’s what it’s like. You ever been held underwater in a public swimming pool?”

  “A long time ago,” I lied.

  “That’s what it’s like. Only worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “Yes, worse. Because with asthma you can’t come up for air. See. Because when you come up for air, there’s no air. There’s only more asthma.”

  “Sounds pretty bad, all right.”

  “Bad, nothing. It’s positively horrible.”

  “How long have you been an asthmatic?”

  “Been what?” He sounded suspicious again.

  “Asthma. How long have you had asthma?”

  “Oh,” he nodded. “Since birth.”

  “That long?”

  “Yes. Runs in the family.”

  He changed lanes constantly, but his bulk obscured the steering wheel from my view. From where I sat, he looked like he was steering with his shoulders, lurching left, lurching right, throwing the Peugeot around like a toy.

  “Do you have any other diseases?”

  “No, just asthma. I thought I had something else, but it turned out I didn’t. Why do you ask? You a doctor or something?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He got suspicious again. “What kind of a doctor are you?”

  “A movie doctor,” I told him, and I tapped my temple with a finger when I saw him looking at me again in the mirror. “If you have bad movies in your head, I fix them up.”

  He thought about this for a bit and then came up with the answer.

  “A shrink? Is that what you are, a shrink?”

  “Yes,” I lied, out of courtesy for all the lies he had shared with me.

  “You’re in the right city, that’s for sure. No shortage of sick individuals in this burg. I see all kinds.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “People walking around the city with cornflakes for brains. You make eye contact with the wrong guy and you’re dead.”

  He stopped the cab in front of the building where I had my office.

  “Nice talking to you,” I told him and gave him a big tip.

  “Thanks a lot, Doc.”

  3

  I sit at my desk and smoke, reading the New York Times. An old floor lamp with an enormous shade, reminiscent of hats worn by Edwardian ladies, is my primary source of light. There is track lighting overhead, but I never use it.

  On my desk is a typewriter, a large black Remington, a screenplay I’m supposed to be rewriting, a telephone, an answering machine, and a large ashtray.

  To my left, facing south, is a window with venetian blinds looking out on West Fifty-seventh Street. There is a large air conditioner in the window. It’s on “high” at the moment. I like the sound it makes. I chose this particular model for the sound it made. At the height of our marriage, Dianah and I used to rent a house in Easthampton for the summer. It was close to the ocean and at night, through the open window, I could hear the ocean waves attacking the beach. It’s not quite the same thing but close to the sound my air conditioner is making now.

  To my right is a bookcase, with books I’ve kept since my college days. My comp lit collection.

  In the southeast corner of my office is a pyramid of cardboard boxes. Inside the boxes are my word processor, printer, and two years’ supply of printing paper.

  In a sudden fit of passion to keep up with the times, I purchased the word processor a little over five years ago. While I waited for it to arrive, I proselytized the virtues of having a word processor to one and all. I convinced Guido that he simply had to get one himself. And he did. When mine finally arrived, th
e accompanying owner’s manual in three languages filled me with despair. The more I read it, the more I despaired. A few days later, I put everything, including the owner’s manual, back into the cardboard boxes and moved them to the southeast corner of my office, where they still reside. At the time of my purchase, the equipment was on the cutting edge of technology. It is now, for both me and its manufacturer, a relic from the past.

  I light another cigarette and turn another page of the Times.

  4

  The rent on my office is exorbitant. The trade-off is that my office is located at an exorbitant address. I recently renewed my lease for two more years. When the new lease goes into effect, my rent will almost double to keep up with the rising exorbitance of the location. Money’s not the problem. I can afford it. My problem is that I no longer need an office. I have more than enough empty rooms in my apartment where I can do my rewriting.

  A nostalgia for my rotten marriage comes over me. I don’t so much miss living with Dianah as miss having a Dianah to leave five days a week in the morning. To have a Dianah for a wife not only made going to the office in the morning a matter of some urgency, it made being in the office itself a constantly pleasant reminder that I was not at home.

  When I left Dianah, I no longer had a motive for being in my office. It was no longer a refuge, it was just an office.

  More about Romania in the Times. The students who made the revolution and toppled the old regime don’t know how to make a new government. The people who know how to make a new government are the people from the old regime who were overthrown by the students. Those very people are now coming back to power in Romania. The students feel betrayed.

  I feel for them. I find many analogies in the turmoil in Romania to my own life. Poor students. If they think they feel betrayed now, wait until they grow up and start betraying themselves. It gets bad when you have only yourself left to topple for life to get better.