“You know, it makes me very sad to say this, but I really don’t think that our young screenwriter here has his heart in the writing of the screenplay of Moby Dick.”
I froze in place.
The two reporters looked at John and then at me and waited. John did not look up from his soup but went on:
“No, I just don’t think that our friend here has his heart and his soul in this important film work.”
My spoon fell from my fingers and lay on the tablecloth. I could not lift my eyes. My heart pounded, and I felt that at any moment I might leap up and run from the table. Instead I stayed with my gaze on my food, as the soup was taken away and the meat served and the meat taken away and the wine poured, which I did not drink, while John talked with the reporters and did not once look at me.
When it was over I walked like a blind man out of the restaurant and accompanied John up to my room in the Royal Hibernian Hotel. When we got inside I stood, swaying, looking at John, afraid that I might faint.
John looked at me for a long while, questioningly and at last said:
“What’s wrong, kid?”
“Wrong, John? Wrong!” I cried at last. “Did you hear yourself at lunch today?”
“What, kid?”
“My God,” I said. “Of all the people in the world I wanted to work for, it was you. Of all the novels in the world I would most want to adapt, it was Melville’s. I have put my heart, soul, and guts in this day after day, with all my sweat and all my love, and now you, at lunch! Jesus! Don’t you ever listen to yourself!?”
John widened his eyes and gaped. “Why, hell, kid, it was a joke. That’s all. A joke, sure, only a joke!”
“A joke!” I yelled, and shut my eyes and burst into tears. John stepped forward swiftly and took my shoulders and shook me gently and then put my head on his shoulder and let me cry.
“Christ, kid,” he kept saying. “It was all in fun. Don’t you see? Fun.”
It took a full minute for me to stop crying. We talked for a while and John left, telling me to head out to Kilcock that night with my latest pages for dinner, chat, and late-night whiskey.
When he was gone, I sat at the typewriter for a long while, swaying, not able to see the paper. And then at last, instead of writing “Moby Dick, page 79, scene 30, shot 2, ” I wrote something else.
Very slowly, I typed these words:
BANSHEE
A story
And then I wrote steadily for the next two hours.
It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence.
All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.
It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if that city died in the night, no one would know.
I paid my driver and watched the taxi turn to go back to the living city, leaving me alone with twenty pages of screenplay in my pocket, and my employer waiting inside. I stood in the midnight silence, breathing in Ireland and breathing out the damp coal mines in my soul.
Then I knocked.
The door flew wide almost instantly. John was there, shoving a glass of sherry into my hand and hauling me in.
“Good God, kid. Get that coat off. Give me the script. Almost finished, eh? So you say. You got me curious. The house is empty. The family’s in Paris. We’ll have a good read, knock the hell out of your scenes, drink a bottle, you can stay over, be in bed by two and—what’s that?”
The door still stood open. John took a step, tilted his head, closed his eyes, listened.
The wind rustled beyond in the meadows. It made a sound in the clouds like someone turning back the covers of a vast bed.
I listened.
There was the softest moan and sob from somewhere off in the dark fields.
Eyes still shut, John whispered, “You know what that is, kid?”
“What?”
“Tell you later. Jump.”
With the door slammed, he turned about and, the grand lord of the empty manor, strode ahead of me in his hacking coat, drill slacks, polished half-boots, his hair, as always, wind-blown from swimming upstream or down with strange women in unfamiliar beds.
Planting himself on the library hearth, he gave me one of those beacon flashes of laughter, the teeth that beckoned like a lighthouse beam swift and gone, as he traded me a second sherry for the screenplay, which he had to seize from my hand.
“Let’s see what my genius, my left ventricle, my right arm, has birthed. Sit. Drink. Watch.” He stood astride the hearthstones, warming his backside, leafing the manuscript pages, conscious of me drinking my sherry much too fast, shutting my eyes each time he let a page drop and flutter to the carpet. When he finished he let the last page sail, lit a small cigarillo and puffed it, staring at the ceiling, making me wait.
“You son of a bitch,” he said at last, exhaling. “It’s good. Damn you to hell, kid. It’s good!”
My skeleton collapsed within me. I had not expected such a midriff blow of praise.
“It needs a little cutting, of course!”
My skeleton reassembled itself.
“Of course,” I said.
He bent to gather the pages like a great loping chimpanzee and turned. I felt he wanted to hurl them into the fire. He watched the flames and gripped the pages.
“Someday, kid,” he said quietly, “you must teach me to write.”
I was relaxing now, accepting the inevitable, full of true admiration.
“Someday,” I said, laughing, “you must teach me to direct.”
“The Beast will be our film, son. Quite a team.”
I arose and came to clink glasses with him.
“Quite a team we are!” He changed gears. “How are the wife and kids?”
“They’ve arrived and are waiting for me in Sicily, where it’s warm.”
“We’ll get you to them, and sun, straight off! I—”
John froze dramatically, cocked his head, and listened.
“Hey, what goes on …” he whispered.
I turned and waited.
This time, outside the great old house, there was the merest thread of sound, like someone running a fingernail over the paint, or someone sliding down out of the dry reach of a tree. Then there was the softest exhalation of a moan, followed by something like a sob.
John leaned in a starkly dramatic pose, like a statue in a stage pantomime, his mouth wide, as if to allow sounds entry to the inner ear. His eyes now unlocked to become as huge as hens’ eggs with pretended alarm.
“Shall I tell you what that sound is, kid? A banshee!”
“A what?” I cried.
“Banshee!” he intoned. “The ghosts of old women who haunt the roads an hour before someone dies. That’s what that sound was!” He stepped to the window, raised the shade, and peered out. “Shh! Maybe it means … us!”
“Cut it out, John!” I laughed quietly.
“No, kid, no.” He fixed his gaze far into the darkness, savoring his melodrama. “I’ve lived here two years. Death’s out there. The banshee always knows! Where were we?”
John broke the spell as simply as that, strode back to the hearth and blinked at the script as if it were a brand-new puzzle.
“You ever figure, kid, how much the Beast is like me? The hero plowing the seas, plowing women left and right, off round the world and no stops? Maybe that’s why I’m doing it. You ever wonder how many women I’ve had? Hundreds! I—”
He stopped, for my lines on the page had shut him again. His face took fire as the words sank in.
“Brilliant!”
I waited, uncertainly.
“No, not that!” He threw the manuscript aside to seize a copy of the London Times off the mantel. “This! A brilliant review of your new book of stories!”
“What?” I jumped.
“Easy, kid. I’ll read this grand review to you! You’ll love it. Terrific!”
My heart took water and sank. I could see another joke coming on or, worse, the truth disguised as a joke.
“Listen!”
John lifted the Times and read, like Ahab, from the holy text.
“ ‘These stories may well be the huge success of American literature—’ ” John stopped and gave me an innocent blink. “How you like it so far, kid?”
“Continue, John,” I mourned. I slugged my sherry back. It was a toss of doom that slid down to meet a collapse of will.
“ ‘—but here in London,’ ” John intoned, “ ‘we ask more from our tellers of tales. Attempting to emulate the ideas of Kipling, the style of Maugham, the wit of Waugh, he drowns somewhere in mid-Atlantic. This is ramshackle stuff, mostly bad shades of superior scribes. Young man, go home!’ ”
I leaped up and ran, but John, with a lazy flip of his underhand, tossed the Times into the fire, where it flapped like a dying bird and swiftly died in flame and roaring sparks.
Imbalanced, staring down, I was wild to grab that damned paper out but finally glad the thing was lost.
John studied my face happily. My face boiled, my teeth ground shut. My hand, struck to the mantel, was a cold rock fist.
Tears
