Re: Second Class; Theater smoking room
Perfection in movies was plastic and primped. It was lit by hot, white lights and presided over by a man whose job it was to stand at the side and instruct the life to be lived on celluloid, the perfection to run in reels in theaters across America. The movie man was a flicker on film, dust caught in the cap of a lens but he knew perfection. It ran in his veins like silver tissue, like the ends of reels caught alight. He knew it was falser than young men’s hopes and futile dreams of heroics. He knew charmers too, they were written all the best lines. The celluloid gentleman stood silently and he smiled a very small, very private smile.
Whoever had written the devil into existence had conjured very handsome horns on his head. They had forgotten, the movie star thought, the very beginning of a good script. They had forgotten to make a horror-show that was believable. No one, the movie star thought, could believe he was anything less than human. It was a pity he’d been trussed up as if he were not. His eyes were frank when they met that doubt, that guilt, and they were a clear, soft gray and they had nothing in them but honest trust. They were gray because all of him was gray, this man with the neat shiny shoes who looked faintly surprised but only faintly when the devilish companion bent over his head and a whisper of heat skimmed his skin. It was a warm kiss, the simmer of dull coals and the faint smell of scorched plastic and celluloid hung in the air. The movie star pretended not to notice.
“There are no starlets for me,” he said quietly, but with no regret at all. The smile that deserved to be lit up in lights had gone and behind was something smaller, something kinder. “But I’m sure people will be chasing about. No one seems able to love anyone without them running away from them first.” It was something that had crept into the scripts, played out in living rooms and movie theaters. It was something that was a glorious kind of truth dramatized in celluloid. The dirty side of it was grubbier. Sadder. But no one wanted to know about what had been lost on the cutting room floor. “You go on now. Don’t get too caught up in,” he hesitated and made a neat gesture with his hand that encapsulated the horns a little helplessly, “This.”
A smile. He swung around on neat heels, and he walked away with a flutter of static as a parting gift.