Screenplay

Also by MacDonald Harris

Private Demons

Mortal Leap

Trepleff

Bull Fire

The Balloonist

Yukiko

Pandora’s Galley

The Treasure of Sainte Foy

Herma

The Carp Castle

Tenth

The Little People

Glowstone

Hemingway’s Suitcase

Glad Rags

A Portrait of My Desire

The Cathay Stories and Other Fictions

FOR ROBBIE

The onlie begetter of this insuing boke

Copyright

Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss

Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!

KEATS

1.

I was born in 1950 in a rather odd part of Los Angeles that not very many people know about. If you are like most people, you probably don’t regard Los Angeles as a very enchanting city. But I can assure you that St. Albans Place is a very enchanted street indeed. It is a private drive that you enter through a large and ornate iron gate on Wilshire Boulevard, where a guard is always on duty in a small kiosk like a miniature alpine chalet. From there it winds its way—sending off a number of tributary streets with names as spuriously English as its own—through a park of enormous trees and well-kept lawns, to end at Olympic Boulevard at another iron grille that is never opened, although there is a small pedestrian gate at one side that can be unlocked, if you know of its existence and have the right key.

The park was subdivided and most of its houses built in the Twenties, when the city first left the confines of the downtown area and began moving out to the west. The trees were planted at that time. Now they are huge—elms and sycamores for the most part, with gnarled trunks and thick over-arching branches. When you come into it from the traffic of Wilshire Boulevard the place has something of the atmosphere of a bird sanctuary, or a cemetery. The noises of the city are shut out by the trees, and you are conscious only of quiet and isolation, of the pastoral and shady green light that pervades everything, and of the sense of privilege that comes from being very wealthy. The street is broad and curves its way with a kind of negligent magnificence through the sylvan atmosphere of the trees and lawns. The houses on it have only one quality in common—they are all large and expensive. Except for that they are a kind of anthology of all the pretentious and derivative architectures of the time—fake Florentine villas, English country houses, Venetian palazzos, stucco Spanish palaces with tiled roofs, and one house with eaves curled up and stone lions in front of it that vaguely attempts to be Chinese—we always called it the Pagoda. The one I grew up in is a large shingled house with overhanging eaves, a kind of Cape Cod cottage magnified to the dimensions of a mansion. It was built by my grandfather, a Harvard professor who lived most of his life in Cambridge and spent his summers on Martha’s Vineyard. He was independently wealthy (the family came from a plumbing manufactory that owned the patent on the flush toilet, in case anyone is curious), and when he was widowed in his fifties he retired early and came to Los Angeles, bringing with him my mother, who was born late in his marriage and still a small child. He acquired a large lot in St. Albans Place, and there he built an exact replica of what he regarded as an ideal habitation, even though it was far too large for a middle-aged professor and a small child—a Cambridge townhouse like those along the winding and shady sanctuary of Brattle Street.

The furnishings of the house, as I remember it from my childhood, were expensive but ill-sorted—some heirlooms, some acquired at a later period. Most of the furniture was that left by my grandfather, whereas the bric-a-brac and smallobjets d’art had been acquired by my mother and father, or, as I always called them, Astreé and Dirk. (My grandfather was a professor of French literature, and it pleased him, out of a kind of antiquated perversity, to name his only child for a character in a seventeenth century pastoral.) There was a pair of Sisleys, said to be authentic, on the wall by the mantelpiece, and a photograph of my mother by Man Ray. In the dining room there was an extraordinary piece of furniture: a Louis Quinze sideboard with gilded legs and a large ornate mirror covered with gray splotches, which in my childhood I endowed with all the mystery and significance of a map of an unknown land. I identified continents in it, rivers, and even cities, which I inhabited in the secret reveries of my imagination. The house was full of a clutter of other odd things: a camel saddle, a bronze Pompeiian figurine with a phenomenal erection (when I was small I thought it was only the way he carried his sword), an arquebus which worked and could be fired on the Fourth of July, and a toilet in the downstairs bathroom so old that it might have been the original of the family patent, with a brass chain hanging from the tank on the ceiling and a pattern of stains, in the bowl, almost as complex as those on the tarnished mirror. This we called the Infernal Machine. It had a sound all to itself: a wheeze, a gurgle, a chuckle or two, and then, after a pause, a great rush of water that went on for a long time and left all the pipes in the house humming. Finally it shut itself off with a snap, the gasp of a person suddenly throttled with an iron hand.

My grandfather died when I was still very young, so that I hardly remember him and I think of the house mainly as a place where Astreé and Dirk and I lived together. We must have seemed an odd family to others, although, since we lived almost entirely to ourselves, our way of life seemed to us perfectly natural. Both Astreé and Dirk were exceptionally good-looking and seemed eternally young. They were always blithe and happy and gave the impression somehow that they were living in a romantic comedy rather than a life in the real world. Sometimes they sang to each other, trading lines like characters in a Noel Coward musical as they moved through the house from room to room. “Many’s the time that we feasted …” “And many’s the time that we fasted …” “Oh well, it was swell while it lasted …” “We did have fun …” “And no harm done …” And then, with a look of mock sentiment and a glance through the doorway between them, they would join together in two-part harmony for “Thanks … for the memory …” Astreé had difficulty taking things seriously, including her own unique and striking boyish beauty, the wealth she had inherited so effortlessly, and even the house itself. Sometimes, when the three of us came back at night from the noise and traffic of the city and stopped the car in the drive, in the silence and the dank, slightly foreboding shade of the old trees, she would intone in a fakey theatrical voice:

“A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover!”

They lived their lives almost entirely together and for each other, so in some ways they hardly paid attention to me. They were always going on motor trips, burning the toast, quarreling and making up, trying to outspend each other for clothes, and having disagreements which turned into torrid clinches and then ended in the bedroom. When they went away on trips, often for a...