In Memory of Angel Clare by Christopher Bram

mouth shut and said nothing.
    Jack shrugged at his silence. “Okay,” he said. “All set. There’s no place to sit but the bed, so can you take your shoes off? Would you like some coffee or anything to drink?”
    “I don’t want to trouble you further, thank you.” Michael kicked off his shoes and sat crosslegged on the bed, a lean, sour Buddha lit by the cold light of snow on the television screen. A long toe poked through the hole in one sock.
    Jack pressed the button to start the tape. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.” He stepped into the brighter kitchen as the music for the distributor’s logo came on.
    His chief thought was to forget Michael and finish his damn movie review. The boy was still Laurie’s problem, and Jack should enjoy the respite while it lasted. But when he sat back at the table, he could only stare through the typewriter. Writing, difficult enough when Elisabeth Vogler was present, was impossible with Michael in the next room with Clarence’s movie. And Clarence’s death.
    Et ego in Arcadia sum: I too am in Arcadia. That was Death speaking Latin. Even without the movie, Michael had brought Clarence’s death with him, and the review Jack was writing, which had seemed like stupid work to begin with, became worthless and irrelevant. Death threw everything into focus. Jack wondered if closing the door to the bedroom would help, except that the music for the title sequence was playing and he wanted to hear it again.
    It was a version of Mozart’s overture to Don Giovanni, with a disco beat laid in that seemed both sinister and witty. The sequence was one of the best scenes in the movie, the music promising a clever black comedy while the camera glided around couples dancing in a darkness that was like red gold—using the film lab where he worked, Clarence had printed and reprinted it until he had the tones he had imagined. Those tones were lost on Jack’s TV, so he didn’t get up to look. He only wanted to listen and remember.
    Then the Mozart faded out and there was just the disco beat, and the first line of dialogue was read by the would-be actor who should have remained a would-be model: “Has anybody seen my girlfriend? She went to the ladies room an hour ago and I can’t find her anywhere!”
    Actors were not Clarence’s strong suit. Worse, the dialogue by the rich brat who wrote and produced the film was even clunkier than his story. Clarence knew the script stank, but beggars can’t be choosers on first features. The brat didn’t care what Clarence did to his script, so long as the movie kept its six bloody deaths, frontal nudity (female only), and his screenwriting credit. Clarence cut some deadwood and a homophobic joke, and tried to make the worse howlers seem deliberate, but he couldn’t write dialogue either. He had asked Jack to re-write the dialogue, without credit or payment. Jack had considered doing it, for one minute, then remembered working with Clarence on the script for Last Night at the A&P, when he had to fight with Clarence over every line, every word, Clarence unable to say what he wanted, only what he didn’t want. Clarence’s nonverbal intellect, which some people mistook for gentleness and others for stupidity, came out in all its stubborn glory when he made a movie. Calm, daydreamy Clare turned into an exacting, tongue-tied tyrant. “Our Hitler,” Jack called him, sometimes to his face, usually with a smile. Jack excused and lied his way out of doing the rewrite on what would always be a sow’s ear, believing there would be better, more intelligent projects in the future worth the aggravation of working with his closest friend. Now he regretted not giving himself that month or so of intimate aggravation.
    “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something mighty weird about this club.”
    That was the hero, played with surprising conviction by an actor named Doug Lipper: he convinced you he was a real actor if not always a real character.