My head twanging, I felt my feet sliding out behind me, off the step, one away from the top. I fell backward as Gratey’s famous, destroyed face receded into the darkness like a Halloween mask.
As I plunged down the length of the long staircase, I thought, Hey! I’ve never seen a real Oscar before. I’m not kidding; that’s what I thought.
I better rewind this tape to the FBI Warning, right?
SEQUELS ARE AS OLD AS MOVIES THEMSELVES, IF YOU COUNT A SERIAL LIKE The Perils of Pauline. The first sequel to win the Best Picture Oscar, though, was The Godfather Part II in 1974. The first one to be nominated in that category was probably The Bells of St. Mary’s in 1945, the sequel to Going My Way, which won the year before. Bing Crosby repeated his role as …
Sorry. Occupational hazard.
A year ago, I had discovered the most sought-after “lost” film, the full version of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons. I thought I would like being a movie detective. After all, it beat just being what I was: a “trivial man,” a person devoted to finding, hoarding, and recounting arcane movie information—in other words, a loser, I think it’s generally called.
Word of my discovery had spread through the “trivial” community like a virus that caused self-loathing. From obscure fan Web sites to tiny film festivals to dusty memorabilia stores, it was rumored that I had found, then given up—without even seeing!—Ambersons. In the trivial world, which is populated by people even less socialized than I, the rumor led to incredulity, awe, and (of course) jealousy and hatred.
My little newsletter, Trivial Man, which I publish out of my jammed apartment on West Forty-third Street in New York and subsidize through typesetting work, suddenly exploded in popularity, which meant it actually sold a few copies. I began to receive phone calls from trivial people seeking my deductive services, people not accustomed to navigating in the real world.
“I’ve got a movie I want you to find,” they’d say.
“For how much?” I’d ask, now priding myself as a professional.
Then there’d be a pause, and then I’d hear a dial tone.
I already had something over many of my colleagues: I was presentable—imagine Zeppo Marx crossed with John Garfield—had even, amazingly, been married, and still stayed in contact with my ex-wife, Jody. If you can’t deal with the present, you can always depend on the past. In our own ways, Jody and I both knew this.
It was during one of Jody’s usual phone calls—to ask me who was playing whom in an old movie we both, by chance, happened to be watching—that the whole thing began.
“You mean, the bandit?” I asked, muting the volume. “Akim Tamiroff.” Then Call Waiting, a recent upgrade to my phone system, clicked in. “Hold on. Hello?”
There was a pause. I heard a voice I recognized. It was old, and it was downbeat.
“Roy? It’s about your mother.”
—
I don’t mention my parents too often, and for good reason. Neither has the faintest idea what I’m doing with my life. Make that singular: my mother doesn’t, my father’s dead. But before he died, he didn’t have a clue about it, either.
It always surprised me about my mother, because she loved movies, so I’d assumed my obsession had some genetic basis. (My father, who worked in insurance, never liked to leave the house for any reason, let alone movies. His usual review after seeing one consisted of three words: “Piece of crap.”) My mother, however, persisted in hoping that my vast store of trivial information could lead to gainful employment, marriage, and DNA propagation. No such luck.
“What do you do with a thing like that?” she’d usually ask after I’d made the mistake of sharing some little-known fact with her, like, for instance that Maggie Smith had replaced Katharine Hepburn in Travels with My Aunt. “Why don’t you write your own column?”
“I put out my own newsletter,” I’d reply. “I sort of do that already.”
“No, I mean, you know, for real.”
I assumed she’d be encouraged by my discovery of the complete Ambersons, and the idea of dealing with her (“What do you do with a thing like that? Why don’t you join the FBI?”) caused me to stay mum.
Now Mom was the one who was mum.
Apparently she—as my aunt informed me on the phone—was no longer speaking. There seemed no physical problem; it was apparently a head thing. It wasn’t unprecedented—once, my mother had hidden under the kitchen table all afternoon; another time she’d been found wandering the neighborhood in her nightgown—but this event, or so my aunt believed, was a keeper. No amount of medication mattered. My mother was no longer a moving picture; she was a still.
“But what do you want me to do?” I asked Aunt Ruby, as I followed her down the stairs. I hadn’t been in the old family house in the Westchester suburbs since Thanksgiving; now it was March.
“Help pay for the upkeep,” said my aunt. She was a frighteningly practical and direct woman, a registered nurse, and my mother’s only other relation. She referred to her kid sister as if she were no different from the familiar, crumbling home we were in. That was life to Ruby: we all just became a question of maintenance.
“Well … for how long?”
“For as long as it takes.”
“But—” I stammered lamely, “she’s only seventy. She could live another twenty years.”
My mother was no vegetable. Lying silently in bed, she still showed a hearty appetite and flicked efficiently through TV stations. Her eyes had even sparkled a little when I walked in. Still, none of my small talk had brought a response.
“Twenty years or even twenty-five,” Aunt Ruby agreed, unhelpfully.
“Well, she’s got health insurance—Medicare—doesn’t she?”
“These days you can never have enough.”
This was true. I myself at thirty-six—the time everything “starts to go,” my aunt once remarked—was uncovered. I was running out of reasons to resist. “But things are just starting to pick up for me.”
“Good. Then it shouldn’t be a problem.”
I stopped at the front door. “You have no idea what might have caused her to become like this?”
My aunt only shrugged. “Something must have rubbed her the wrong way.”
For Aunt Ruby, the comment summed up diseases, accidents, even death itself. It made a funny kind of sense, yet I had to keep fighting this lost cause.
