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  DUPLICITOUS

  A novel

  Nicholas James

  DUPLICITOUS

  By Nicholas James

  Copyright 2017 by Nicholas James

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Author.

  The author acknowledges that use of dialog from the film “Sunset Boulevard” is copyrighted by Paramount Pictures Corporation and thanks them for the reproduction of said material.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read his work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book to help spread the word.

  Cover illustration by Dario Campanile

  Book design by Tornado Creative

  ISBN-978-1-63587-662-8

  Mental Illness Press

  2202 S. Figueroa St., Suite 236

  Los Angeles, CA 90007

  www.mentalillnesspress.com

  [email protected]

  For my sons,

  Van, Charlie and Ambrose

  BASTARD OF THE LIGHT

  I had known Billy Wilder for over twenty years, since the time I worked at UFA, in Berlin, the world’s most innovative and technically advanced film studio at the time. I worked there painting sets and photographing stills during the heady and creative days of the Weimar Republic. And, then, twenty years later, we were still good friends and working together.

  When Billy and I first met, in the ruins of the country that lost World War I, it was at the Romanisches Café, a hangout for young personalities who took over the place with our fresh tales of rotten Germany. Billy just had one of his stories turned down by UFA, something about an aviator who jumped out of his plane while crossing the Atlantic.

  “It was marvelous,” Billy told me. “I had the plane go on flying by itself and land in a field without a pilot. The crowd approaching the plane went insane when they realized that the technological marvel could fly itself.”

  Wilder wrote this story, Uplift, to satirize Lindbergh’s spectacularly successful overseas flight. He wrote it after Metropolis was such a huge success, certain that the producers at UFA would see it as a sure hit.

  They didn’t.

  Billy was only twenty-three when we met, yet four years my elder and filled with an energy and optimism that attracted me to be his Zechkumpan, his drinking buddy.

  I arrived in Berlin after my first big splurge in Paris where I spent some of the fortune my father bestowed upon me on my eighteenth birthday. On that same day, I learned I was a bastard of the light, that my mother had been the mistress of Louis Lumiere when she conceived me. I went from being Alexander Kelly to Alexander Lumiere, the son of the father of motion pictures.

  Louis Lumiere was a father who provided well for his bastard son, something my mother divulged later on – that all the time when my mother and I were barely getting by in our Brooklyn basement, she had been receiving monthly payments that she promptly turned over to charities. Instead of living off his support, my mother would dance in vaudeville houses and had patrons that supported the sin of her life style, the repetitious selling of her body so she wouldn’t have to spend the tainted money that came from having a bastard child.

  My mother, Hetty, was a saint in her own mind. A fallen saint, perhaps, but still a saint because she wouldn’t let herself feel dependent on the support of a man she had sinned with, a man she mistook for a devoted lover, the man who wouldn’t leave his wife once she became pregnant, a wealthy Frenchman who manipulated the light we see in theatres where controlled visions are meted out to the public in an acceptable manner. People paid their nickels and dimes and sat while a story, which appeared to be real, played itself out magically, against the retinas of those who were satisfied with suspension of disbelief while I, the son of light who couldn’t believe in the movies, instead had a passionate belief in visions and hallucinations that were a part of my everyday reality.

  I used to see things that weren’t there and imagine things that were unimaginable. I saw my future. In fact, I saw the future of the entire twentieth century. This happened, usually, as I lingered in my Brooklyn bedroom, taking photographs or painting the images that floated through my subconscious mind. I painted D-Day and the invasion of Normandy seventeen years before it happened. I saw the atomic bomb explode in Hiroshima when I closed my eyes. I also saw a sailboat and a dead Frenchman, my half-brother, who became a successful painter and an unsuccessful thief. These visions not only happened in the privacy of my bedroom, sometimes I would see things when I was in the public, sometimes the so-called real reality of my surroundings would disappear and make way for what I saw in my imagination. One of things I saw, right after my eighteenth birthday was myself leaving home and going to Europe.

  When I told my mother I was deserting her, she shrugged it off, saying I’d be back. And I might have come back if she hadn’t spat on the man she was so in love with two decades before. In my mind, at least, I was standing up for the benefactor that showered me with financial hope and allowed me the free time to fill my life with the success I expected to achieve in Europe as a painter and photographer.

  I bought and packed a trunk, grabbed my 35mm Leica and left on a cold January morning. My bedroom remained littered with sketches and paintings, wondrous depictions of life from my perspective but unsalable and unappealing to the art establishment that only accepted proper paintings on Park Avenue.

  By the time I was on my way to Europe on the Aquitania, my visions of the future grew brighter. I saw myself with starkly beautiful women. I was meeting famous men, shakers of the world of art and cinema. And yet, I still couldn’t lose the sense that, at the end of my life, I’d only see a dead horizon because of something unforgivable that I would do.

  SUNSET BOULEVARD

  March 26, 1949 was a Saturday, a warm and breezy weekend languor hung over the Hollywood hills as Sunset Boulevard started production. I was working for Billy as his still photographer, the same job I had on two of his other successful pictures, Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend. The movie was shot in sequence, chronologically, unusual for a feature film – but Billy and his writing partner, Charlie Brackett, had only written half the script so they were starting production at the beginning of their story.

  We opened the film on a shot of William Holden, who was portraying Joe Gillis. The camera traveled through the open window in his apartment in Hollywood, past his curtains and focusing on a man, in a bathrobe, sitting on his bed, typing out movie stories, “two a week, but they weren’t selling,” Joe Gillis narrated.

  The apartment that Gillis worked so desperately inside of was not too dissimilar from the place I stayed in 1930, when I first came to Hollywood, after a fight with my father, after he stopped supporting me for a while, and after I had squandered all the money he gave me. Gillis was in the same position as I was back then. But for me, it wasn’t scripts; it was my paintings that would rarely sell.

  After that first day’s shoot, Billy and I had a drink, or several drinks. I was recollecting the circumstances of my transformation in 1928.

  “When you first started living scripts instead of writing them like I did,” Billy said.

  “When I began to get crazier than I was as a kid.”

  I recounted the story about how I spent my last night at age seventeen in a Manhattan speakeasy - Landmark Tavern’s clandestine third floor.

  In Landmark Tavern that night, there was a waitress passing out drinks and ignoring the come-ons of the local men. She had dirty blondish hair and a sour face; decomposing from the sn
arly attention she received. Then, as she gave me my drink, her face changed before my eyes – she became the softest girl I ever saw, her hair dangling over her eyes, enticingly and just for me. She put down her tray and took my hand. We went into a corner of the speakeasy and celebrated midnight, took advantage of the meaningless passage of time from one year to another to act out an impossible ecstasy. When we kissed, the background disappeared, as did the catcalls and encouragement from the crowd. For a moment, we were standing on the tropical shore of a South Seas heaven and as her lips pulled away from mine, I saw her face fill with light for a flickering moment, but then she turned back to the harassed young woman that was passing out alcohol.

  “Well, do ya want your drink or not?” she demanded of me.

  I drank slowly. The whiskey was as bitter as my hallucination was sweet. A girl in the South Seas, Tahiti maybe, lingered on the kiss in my mind.

  I sipped at my drink again and, through a haze of smoke, had my first blackout of a new and amazing year. I saw a morbid scene on some kind of screen in my mind that separated the future from the present. There were dead soldiers on the beaches at Normandy, bombed out London tenements and the first glimpses of a murderous sailing boat journey I would come to experience after the war.

  Always, from then on, startling realities began to occur more frequently, confident visions of darkness, mirroring the lack of faith I had in myself and my ability to achieve the fame and respect my father commanded.

  GALLERY OF WOMEN

  The second day of the shoot started out in the kind of fog that I’ve been used to all my life. Wisps of condensed air tried to make their way into my meditation room. I had the windows opened to the opaque mist. I was practicing the morning meditation that I had learned years before when Katharine was still alive. I would sit on my meditation pillow and stay with my breath as I went further and further back into that past that affixed itself to my exposed nerves. I welcomed the uncontrolled visions that were beginning to make my day a scene of liberation.

  Later on, after lunch, I’d be back on the set of Sunset Boulevard, slipping into another light suffused with the illusory reality of Billy’s imagination, a place where I could feel at home. Sunset Boulevard was the story of an aging movie queen, a middle-aged woman who had been passed over by time. She lived alone in her mansion, filled with evidence of the splendors that dominated her consciousness. Her character reminded me of my own older woman, one who I’d been seeing for ten years. This wasn’t about love, this was about surviving. Margaret fell for my paintings, and then she fell for me – or was it the other way around? Not that it mattered much; I stayed because she kept my gallery afloat during a hard time. Once I realized I couldn’t make it as a painter, I started Potala Galleries. I was hoping, at least, to make an income from the canvases that got the critical raves mine never received. And I did do well with the place for a while but when World War II came, my buyers started disappearing, doing the right thing and investing in the war machine, ostensibly to maintain their patriotic image, while it was really to just get richer.

  Art couldn’t be purchased when the world was falling apart; it became an indulgence that didn’t seem right to most people. As I was about to close the gallery doors, though, I met Margaret Wilcox, someone who wasn’t aware of the war frenzy, someone who had plenty of art to enjoy but no one to enjoy it with. She was a widow of Hollywood Real Estate royalty: her late husband had sold the land on which Paramount Studios had built their dream factory, the place where I was working then to memorialize Hollywood’s past in a lurid melodrama with more than a little dollop of cynicism and sarcasm. Sunset Boulevard, the movie, was the perfect fit for me when I was working on it. I had my own elder that I was working for, a woman with a senescent ego that looked to me to rekindle her carefree past.

  My mind wandered back to the meditation pillow. I had been there for a solid hour. I wasn’t getting anywhere; just fooling myself with the spiritual hocus pocus that Katharine and I tried to use to sew our relationship together, to make one pristine garment of mutual compromise that would get us through our marriage and our life.

  Once the fog turned into a rabid rain, I knew my morning peace was over and I left the house for the gallery. I took my umbrella, the one with the rock handle that impressed all the passersby and could protect me from anyone who might try and dig too deeply into my past.

  When I arrived at my shop, I momentarily froze as I watched my assistant, Sabrina, the blessing of Sicilian heritage that I could never quite see as just a normal woman. Her pendulous long black hair teasing me by only allowing brief glimpses of the elegant expression of certainty that emanated from her smooth skin and arresting black eyes. Looking at her, at any time, reminded me of the life captured by artists painting beautiful women, only the art was alive and biological and shared a consciousness with me that could be accessed if I were brave enough to make a move. She was placing sold markings over the paintings that I was lucky enough to sell at the previous night’s exhibition. I was relieved to have sold so many paintings; now my debt load could get a little lighter.

  Sabrina greeted me with her usual warmth. She was drawn to me for some incomprehensible reason. The fact that I had a multiple personality, one filled with rage; self-loathing and fantasies of an ideal world overlaid on my disgusting one didn’t seem to alienate her. While I enjoyed the attention, there was always something at the back of my mind that told me that I wasn’t ready, that I’d never be ready for peace and complacency. If that’s what Sabrina would bring to me. She was twenty-two to my thirty nine and the long run with an age difference like that wouldn’t go down well. There’d be the passion at first, then the effort to resurrect the passion, the desire to settle down, the belief in an afterlife of love and companionship once the sex matured to a routine. And then, if I was lucky, Sabrina might be that rare woman who would try and domesticate the two of us, unlike my first wife Katharine. But the Sabrina I came to know and love and despise was made of sterner stuff, she would never let herself be a compassionate companion. There would always be an out of place laugh and smile that showed me she was living an internal life that I’d never get to know about. She’d laugh at all the dark parts of a movie; smile when a negative event took place. Sabrina expected disappointment and always seemed to successfully acquire her own expectations. She was an artist herself, a budding art director who wanted to force her own image onto the screen and relax inside of it.

  I’d hired Sabrina almost two years before when we met at an art class at Santa Monica City College. I was lecturing the students on the kind of situation they would find themselves in when they left college and attempted to make a living with their art. But I was not wholly forthcoming. Telling them the truth, that it would be a futile effort to try and exist as an artist, didn’t come from my lips. Instead, I talked about the kind of jobs one might acquire with an art degree – working in a museum, working as an interior decorator, even finding work as an art director for the movies. I talked about Hans Dreir, about the terrific work I was exposed to on the Billy Wilder films I worked on. At the time, in the theatres, was Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. I talked about working on it, about watching Dreir work out the art direction from pre-production and through production, how he weaved subtleties of the characters into his work, and in the case of The Lost Weekend, how he articulated the delirium tremens that Ray Milland experienced when he was trying to stay away from liquor.

  After the class, Sabrina walked up to me.

  “Mr. Lumiere,” she said, “it must be so exciting to work for Billy Wilder and with Hans Dreir.”

  “Guess I just lucked out.”

  “I’m in this class because I want to be an art director for the movies. I’ve put together portfolios that I developed from books, showing the way that I’d tell a story in film. Could I get a chance to show them to you sometime?”

  Sabrina’s face was so determined that I knew right away that she’d achieve some success in the field even thoug
h I hadn’t yet seen her work.

  “I know about your gallery. I’ve been there several times.”

  “Really?” I didn’t remember seeing her there. But then, when my wife Katharine was running the show, she would naturally keep someone as desirable as Sabrina away from me.

  “I spoke to your wife a lot, trying to get a job.”

  “Hmm. She never mentioned you to me.”

  “She seemed very devoted to her work.”

  “She is.”

  “And after a while, I just stayed away.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “You really think that?”

  I thought about my wife’s uncanny ability to keep young and beautiful girls away from me even though she’d been having an affair herself for years.

  “Why don’t you come by this Sunday,” I said, inviting the lively girl into my gallery and my world, knowing full well that I’d have Katharine’s wrath come down on me. But I wanted to make her jealous.

  “I’d love to,” Sabrina said.

  “Let’s make it at 1 o’clock, an hour after the gallery opens. I can show you how we spend our times during the days when we don’t make a single sale.”

  Sabrina reached out her hand to me. I held it and felt warmth that was looking for someone. Then, I let my imagination run away with me and spent the next several days fantasizing about the relationship that I’d develop with this student, right under my wife’s nose.

  A few days later, when Sabrina arrived with her portfolio, she interrupted one of my verbal wranglings with my wife. This time, as so often before, it was about an occasion she spent away, “helping” my half-brother Michel when he came to town.