After the War (II)

Here the protagonist meets two of his neighbors.

The blank, white flag of paper rising out of the typewriter that once signified a surrender to my creative prowess now seemed an ambulatory marker to excuse my panic as I drove this project recklessly through traffic. How could progress be made on this? The questions became more serious. My demand that Lois leaved the apartment for any period of time seemed ridiculous and I felt humiliated at even making the request; I would need to type something before she got home to retain any shred of dignity. Restlessness.

I got up and left the den. The heat in the apartment had risen, but the thermostat read 74 degrees so I let the discomfort stand. An odd occurrence in a building with such exorbitant rent; nature, it seems, had won for the day. I got a glass of water and looked out our living room window at the hazy streets. There were few people walking the street down there, only out of des peration or tourism would anyone suffer in this heat. I could see, from this perch, just far enough out into the city to recognize the drop in property value; and it pleased me for whatever reason to think about the citizens of skid row shuffling down sidewalks and arguing whether it was god or his antipodes that had brought such conditions down on them. Their rambunctious, illegitimate children playing only short-lived games before rushing inside to eat ice cubes or fight for space in front of the open icebox. What a scene it must have been down on those streets. Even further from the ghettoes, in little Italy, Old women fainting from heat stroke as they struggle to bring their retired husbands the last decent loaf of bread in the city. Businessmen (was it Thursday or Saturday?) either choosing starvation over sweating in their suits or dragging their pasty cadavers into the nearest diner and demanding lemonade; circles under their eyes.
Perhaps it was psychosomatic, but the apartment was getting hotter. I filled up another glass of water and, in bare feet and pajamas, walked out into the sitting room for our floor. My instincts were correct; I turned out of the hallway into a cool bank of air and my bare feet on the cold marble floor energized me. A graciously overweight, bald man sat on a davenport a few yards from the entrance reading the paper. Over his head was the kind of late afternoon, dusty slice of light that makes one remember photography class. I turned back for my camera, but he caught me before I could depart.
“Hello there young man!” he said. I immediately recognized the voice as that of the former president Wes Croughbah. I’d been told that he lived in the building, but I had not realized it was my floor, and I never expected to meet him. An ex-president strikes me as just barely more real than unicorns. I hadn’t seen the two bodyguards protecting the threshold of another door, perhaps I’d been too fixated on the rest of the mise en scene. They flexed their pectoral muscles and analyzed me. One turned to the other and said something in some kind of alpha male code and proceeded to brush the lint of the other’s suit jacket. Harmless.
“I say, I don’t think we’ve met yet son. Come on, sit down,” he had the practiced friendliness that I would expect, but with a touch of condescension I could only bear for the sake of the room’s climate.
“My name is Julius Stamp. Nice to meet you sir,” my interest was a bit piqued.
“I’m Wes Croughbah. I used to be president.”
“Oh, I know sir. I hadn’t realized you lived on this floor.”

“Ahh yes. Your Uncle and I were good friends. So it is true that he willed the suite to you?”

“Yes, been living there a few months now.”

“And how is it?” Wes put the newspaper down on the davenport, giving me a peek at a frustrated crossword puzzle. He only had the funnies and entertainment sections. It must have been Sunday.

“It’s . .well . . “

“Let me tell you son. It is a great honor to live in this building. Now, let me finish, you should know that people don’t take rooms in this building merely because they can pay the rent.”

“Yes . .I realize there are quite a few celebrities here...” I had taken a seat on a plush, maroon chair across a fashionable but functionally inept coffee table from a man that once ran the free world.
“Hogwash .. your uncle was not a celebrity, people did not approach him on the streets. He was a genius, and the Altoona would not have accepted him otherwise.”

“I...well yes...he was a brilliant man. I’m trying to live up to the endorsement he’s given...”
“Well, not to cut you short m’boy, but you have large shoes to fill. Tell me, what is it that you do?” I realized that when the ex-president said the Altoona would not have accepted my uncle otherwise, he was indicating not that he would have failed a credit check but that the other inhabitants would not have tolerated it. The former whisper of elitism was now palpable and pointed directly at me.

“I’m a filmmaker,” I put my elbows up on the arms of the chair and tented my fingers together like a chess player. Whether it was the unfinished crossword puzzle that I would have finished in under an hour or the blatant antagonism, something told me that this man was weak.

“Polymers? That’s a fascinating field. Tell me, and don’t be afraid to release some trade secrets . . is it true that they’ve created a material as thin as a human hair with the umm what do you call it. . . the warmth of wool?”

“I don’t know about that sir. I make . . .” I swallowed. A bit of pride, a bit of laughter. “Movies. I make movies. They get shown all over the country.”

“And so were you in your apartment just now, dressed like that, making a movie?” The humor of his accusation was a bit subtler than his previous comment; we were lounging in our home, why was he wearing a shirt and tie?

“I was working on the screenplay. I’m adapting a book for the screen. It’s the very early stages.”

“I see . . .” the ex-president said with the same studied look he exhibited publicly when considering the gravity of a difficult question. The man chose words carefully. After a moment of consideration I assume he arrived at the conclusion that I was of at least mild interest. He leaned forward a bit and put his hands on his knees. “Tell me son, what is the movie about?”

“It’s…umm,” how to talk the arts with a politician? And in description I knew that this particular project lost some of the allure for those not familiar with the book. “It’s about Japan during their period of seclusion . . 1809 or thereabouts.”

He turned his head to the side, confused. I gathered that he’d never heard of that period in Japanese culture in which the government of the island officially decided to drop out of all world affairs. This was, of course, the time of the samurai.

“Yes,” I continued “Well, it was the time of the samurai. And from what I read there was a sort of philosophical seriousness to the country.”

“Ah yes!” and it seemed the ex-president finally recognized a word that I had said: ‘samurai’. “The samurai was a fierce warrior, from what I recall . ..” and he began to build an eloquent story from the scant exaggeration he knew of them. Wes Croughbah had definitely acquired an ability to at least seem as though he’s contributing. Before he could finish his sentence, one that I’m confident parlayed into a second or third with progressively more dramatic hand gestures, his wristwatch alarm went off, mobilizing his bodyguards and bringing all of the decorum of his conversation to an abrupt pause.

“It’s time for Duchess to wake up from her nap,” the ex-president said without looking back to his men. “Could one of you run and get her?”

“Of course, sir”

One bodyguard left to tend to Duchess and the remaining moved closer to the president; replacing the quantity of protection that had just left with an increase in quality. I wondered if they had strict guidelines governing all such maneuvers, I wondered if they were learned over time or if the precepts were mixed into a serum and injected into the base of their spine.

“I’m sorry, young man. What were we talking about?”

“Oh, the movie. Basically, it’s about a boy who is learning the craft of sword making from his father. And, of course, he at some point has to make the decision to either be a craftsman or move to Tokyo and open some kind of shop and be a bit more cosmopolitan. But see, it’s set against the backdrop of Japan’s similar crossroads. . .”

“Are there battles with the swords? These samurai swords.”

“Yes, but most of them are told thru tertiary characters and so they get a bit exaggerated. It was something I really liked about the book.”

“Hmm…”

The former president was not at all interested any longer in my dry, art-house film. When I first saw him sitting on the davenport poring over the morning paper I thought for a brief moment that he could provide some sort of “outsider insight”, being a learned man and presumably an intellectual. I was missing something in the theme of the film, something in the sword making itself. It turns out the old man was even more vapid then I had suspected during his term. I hung one leg over the other and bit my tongue at the sudden ironic beauty of sitting under this cathedral ceiling, framed by these grandiose, maroon curtains, and discussing film with a blundering, frustrated former commander-in-chief.

“Anyway,” I continued. The conversation had hung in the air stiff and increasingly awkward. I felt the need to finalize it, to at least end the topic in friendly tones. Despite the ex-president’s malaise he was unquestionably important, and I had the inkling that I wanted this man, so adept at forming alliances and enemies, to be on my side. “The book is really a kind of coming of age story. It kind of boils down, on the surface, to the choice that the boy has to make. Whether he’ll become ‘learned’ and seek modernity and eventually become world-weary, or will he take advantage of the wisdom of the simple, sort of elegant, life that his father has offered to him.”

“I suppose that’s not such a bad thing for a movie to talk about, son. Even if my own interests in a movie are a bit different. I had to make a similar decision in my life, and I must say that I still don’t know which decision was best.”

The ex-president had either saw an amiable exit to the conversation or he had actually appreciated what I said in some small way. Of course, my curiosity swelled:

“What was the other option,” and I looked at him as a peer. He responded only with an icy, reciprocal stare. “Sir?” I added.

“I could have become a very wealthy business man.” I mustered the strength to not roll my eyes. “Your uncle, however, gave me an important lesson on life. As you may know, he and I sat out here many an evening remembering our respective lives. He told me that there really is no good or bad, as far as the end result. That it doesn’t really matter what it is that a man does. He said, and I agree, that it is far more important what he will do, what his character is.” He said these words with the stern intent of a narrator paid to recite lines for radio commercials, I suspected that he carried a small card in his wallet inscribed with a more eloquent paraphrasing of those same words.

At this time the bodyguard returned with a small, overly groomed Shih Tzu and set it in the ex-president’s lap. The ex-president gave an accidental giggle of joy, then a rough cough to clear his throat and a brief glance up at witnesses to insure his masculinity. He clearly loved the dog, it’s tail wagged ferociously as he petted it.

Duchess and her carrier were followed shortly thereafter by a clever looking man dressed in a cross-culturally inoffensive manner. He dressed like a journalist might in a foreign land with rugged pants and a solid color oxford, the sleeves rolled and buttoned by a fairly elaborate system that could only be necessitated by daylong forays into the bush. He wore glasses in much the same way he wore his pipe, fashionable and studied but mostly ineffective. The glasses rested at the end of his nose, and the pipe tucked into the corner of his mouth cool and smokeless.