Antonietta, page 26
SPENSER
I told you last time that I knew all about this one. I trust you don’t expect a percentage on this.
BOLEN
What are you saying? Hey, you’re hearing stuff right now that you didn’t have before. Whoa. Do you know the meaning of the word “insider,” Mr. Ham? Ever heard of the SEC? I could blow you right out of the water.
SPENSER
And cut your own dingus off doing it? [He thinks a while. Then:] All right. From now on, two percent on deals I’d known about, where you top off the data.
BOLEN [after a pause:]
Mmm. Okay. I’ll take two.
CUT TO:
33. Spenser at the wheel of a jeep, on Main Street in Vineyard Haven. He is in a hurry. He parks his car in the slot reserved for the handicapped, gets out and crosses the street to a public telephone, drops in a coin and begins talking.
SPENSER
…so listen, Maillon, I want you to buy thirty thousand more…
LONG FADE with dim sounds of Spenser’s order trailing off, then another voice, a woman’s, also on a phone, intermixing with his and finally emerging alone:
34. And FADE IN on Mrs. Coverly Patterson, at home, in negligee on a chaise longue, with a breakfast tray on her lap, holding a pink telephone.
FRAN PATTERSON
Another thing, Flora. Your friend Spenser Ham? He has a lover. Do you think it’s a man or a woman?
FLORA
What do you mean, he has a lover? How do you know that?
FRAN PATTERSON
I know it because just by chance I’ve seen him talking three different times in three different pay telephone booths. All over the island. Doesn’t even want his servants to know—
FLORA
My God, I guess you’re right. The little sneak!
CUT TO:
35. Utter stillness. Front hall of the Hat Hut, view through to the living room in subdued light. A buzzer is heard in the distance. Footsteps. Expensive brown brogues—Gucci?—with fringed flaps bouncing over the insteps, in rapid paces toward the door.
Door opens. Two women.
The viewer’s immediate reaction has to be: Spenser Ham owes Ducket Jones at least four thousand dollars. Wow.
One of the women is holding a violin case. Both have put their suitcases down. Both are in layered sweat-shirtish tops and wrinkled dark slacks. They are wearing running shoes. In these drab clothes they are world-class knockouts.
THE VIOLINIST
Hi. I’m June Speckman.
THE PIANIST
Vera Flamm.
SPENSER
Come in, girls!
36. Spenser’s hand flicks a light switch. Beyond the hand and the arm, Antonietta’s glass case is seen filling up with light. Camera sees the light creep up on the delicately sculptured faces of the two women as they move toward the case. Closes in on June. Her cheeks glow; her lips are parted; her eyes dart from detail to detail. Awe shimmers on her face. Certain abstractions are reified—they can almost be seen with the naked eye—in the thrills that stir and flush on her fine face as she responds to Antonietta’s beauties, and to the very idea of a Strad! The viewer sees in her responses hints of what it means to be a gifted young person totally dedicated to a craft—traces of years of hard work; self-discipline, patience, stamina, physical endurance; a yearning for unattainable perfection; a generous empathy for anyone who may listen to her playing, a consequent urge to use it to excite and delight; a willingness to subordinate her tastes, when she plays, to a composer’s will—but also a stubborn wish to be loyal to her own secret truths.
Camera veers to Spenser’s face, as if curious to know whether he is catching any of this. The viewer will have to be the judge.
It is the pianist who speaks first:
VERA
Mr. Ham? Can we play something right now?
JUNE
Please, Mr. Ham?
37. Spenser twirls a combination lock, swings back a panel of the glass case, takes Antonietta out, and hands it to June. He places a straight chair at the piano; Vera finds it too low; he fetches a big Rand McNally world atlas and puts it on the chair—just right, Vera, sitting, nods. Then the two begin to play, by heart, the slow second movement of Hindemith’s Sonata in C for Violin and Piano.*4 The knowledgeable listener will hear at once that these two women are not just four-thousand-dollar lookers; in fact, their physical beauty has suddenly become objectively irrelevant—though perhaps not to Spenser Ham, to judge by the glimpses at him that the camera now and then takes. These are superb musicians. The camera moves from one person to another. At the first sounds from Antonietta, June looks for a moment as if she had had the wind knocked out of her, then her face opens, softens, and begins to glow as if filled with the warmed blood (Spenser appears to be thinking) of sexual arousal. A viewer, insulated from her by the glass of the cathode tube and therefore perhaps more detached than Spenser right there on the couch, cannot help being moved, not only by the music itself, but by her sudden pure surprise and joy at being able to make sounds she has obviously never attained in all the years of her work. As the movement suddenly breaks into its fast and witty scherzo in 5/8 time, Vera waggles her head with Hindemith’s rhythms, and her fingering on the keys is crisp. Spenser’s Steinway, freshly tuned and voiced, happens to be a splendid instrument, too, and though Vera noticeably reacts to this, her face is turned to what is more important—the sounds she is hearing from Antonietta in June’s arms. Visible in her glee are signs that these two women have become very good friends.
VOLUME UP as June treats Antonietta to Hindemith’s recapitulation of the earlier slow passages of the movement, now heard in a swift perpetual motion of sixteenth notes, glinting like sunlight on the beating of a hummingbird’s wings. Anyone who is listening is bound to tremble with delight.
38. Spenser is showing the women their rooms. There is one for each, with a shared bathroom between. As they are looking around, greatly pleased with what they are seeing, a manservant glides in beyond them with their bags. The view from the bedroom windows is to the eastward, up toward the Tashmoo Pond opening and the magisterial summer houses on West Chop.
SPENSER
I have to make a phone call. Then how about we take a swim?
Sounds of enthusiastic agreement from the musicians.
CUT TO:
39. Spenser in his office, on the telephone.
SPENSER
Andy! How you been? Listen. I want to talk to you. A little birdie told me you guys at Consolidated had gotten kind of uptight about the Sempervirens move….I just decided ten minutes ago I’d like to buy you….Friendly, absolutely. Sure, white knight….You think I sound as if I’m on something? Come on!…Well, the fact is I’ve just been listening to—to some good news….Hell, yes, I realize it’ll be expensive, but Andy, I know a buy when I see one….I have absolutely no interest in managing your outfit….Just hold on and give me a few days to get my act together….Do you want to hear a really weird coincidence? You remember the steep cliff down to the beach from my house? Well, the steps down from here were all cut from a single bole of Sequoia sempervirens. One tree trunk, three hundred feet of steps. I’m not shitting you, Andy. I had it built two years ago. I bought the damn wood from those pirates….
CUT TO:
40. Three figures are seen from a distance, descending the very steps Spenser was talking about. Zoom in. Spenser is in his awfuls. June is in a blue tank suit; Vera wears a pink bikini. Spenser looks as if he is thinking of giving Ducket Jones a bonus.
SPENSER
You know something, girls? I’m sure as hell glad I bought that fiddle.
JUNE
Oh, Mr. Ham, are we ever!
SPENSER
Please. The name is Spenser. You can call me Spense.
MUSIC up during a FADE: the first movement, tempo di ciaccona, of Bartók’s Solo Violin Sonata. This fervid, restless music, with its wild leaps in pitch and volume, and its insistent discords, completely drowns out the spoken lines in the next two takes, which are, in effect, mimed.
41. A curve in a driveway somewhere on the island. Spenser, in his hat and mirroring shades, is interrogating Bolen, who appears to be some kind of repairman, in a soiled green jumpsuit with a company logo on the chest. The conversation looks urgent—evidently a new morsel of inside information. The MUSIC suggests an overlay of restless impatience on Spenser’s usual cool demeanor, and a reciprocal irritable nervousness that seems to pollute Bolen’s servility.
42. Spenser in a phone booth near Poole’s fish market, alongside Menemsha basin. He places his order with Maillon—and perhaps because of the agitation of the MUSIC his state of mind seems ruffled. He nods, and later shakes his head in an impatient no, as if his interlocutor could see him. He hangs up.
MUSIC fades, CUT TO:
43. Nighttime. A messy living room, dimly lit, in a run-down summer cottage which looks as if it’s made of papier-mâché. Eerily, the same violin sounds that dominated the previous takes—those of the Bartok unaccompanied sonata—are now heard again, badly played on a rotten fiddle. After what the listener has heard from Antonietta, not long ago, and from the virtuoso on the recorded music-over of those two takes, this sound is thin, tinny, stingy—it seems an envious, whining complaint. Camera snoops around: daybed, with a rumpled blanket on it; a table against one wall, cluttered with dirty dishes and magazines; a big padded armchair with stuffing spilling out of gaps in the fabric. In this armchair a young woman sprawls, in a Madonna T-shirt and jeans, with bare feet. Her eyes swim; she is on the moon. Two men lie prone on the shabby green carpet, holding beer cans and talking to each other and laughing. From them the lens swoops up a pair of legs in torn jeans and up a bare chest, to frame the head and swinging bow arm of the violin player, and his yellow instrument. It’s the guy with the red beard and red hair pulled back in a ponytail. He’s completely zonked.
ONE OF THE MEN ON THE FLOOR
Can’t you play anything but that shit?
REDHEAD [without stopping:]
Hey, Jocko, listen up. This music is real.
Jocko grunts.
REDHEAD
You like monster movies?
JOCKO
Yeah, I like ’em okay.
REDHEAD
Then you got to like this. This is horror, man. It’s so real. Can’t you hear it? I think the guy wrote it just for you and me.
CUT TO:
44. Spenser walking past the International Bazaar in Freeport, Grand Bahama, pointing out to June and Vera, who flank him, the Moorish golden dome of El Casino, one of the island’s gambling houses. All three are in tourist clothing. They seem not to have a care in the world. From time to time, they stop and peer in shopwindows. At one of them, a chic boutique, the camera catches them from behind, with their reflections vivid on the plate glass, while ghostly mannequins loom beyond the mirrored glare….Now the lens stares at them fullface, from inside the shop.
SPENSER
Tell me something, you two. What does the expression mean, when you say that a guy has “music in his soul”?
The two women look at each other across Spenser, and laugh.
SPENSER
No, come on. I’m serious.
VERA
It means he’s sexy.
JUNE
No, Vera, give him a break, he wants to know, it’s much more than that. [She stops to think a moment.] It means that he has a feel in everything he does for the proper balance between basic instinct and good order. Think of his soul as a membrane in his mind. It has staves on it, and there are notes on the staves—and the notes are his actions. If he really has music in him, the actions—the notes—are connected one to another in a satisfying way, and the links between them make chords and sequences and melodic patterns. I don’t mean that they have to be sweet or anything like that. The combinations of notes may be harsh and complicated—you may have noticed the rough kinds of music I like—but they have to have a pattern that makes sense, they have to be interesting.
SPENSER
Hell’s bells, you mean I didn’t have to buy Antonietta? That nothing like that was the point?
VIOLINIST
Ah, Spense! I don’t know you well enough to make a total judgment, but I’d say that the action of buying that violin was written down as one of the few whole notes on the score of your soul.
SPENSER
Well, thank you, whatever that means. That’s too fancy for me. I know I like to hear you playing on that damn box—or I like to watch you, anyway….But right now, we have to go back to the hotel. And I’m going to have to borrow the fiddle from you for half an hour. I promised to show it to a friend of mine downtown.
CUT TO:
45. Hotel room. Spenser is transferring stacks of bills from the violin case to his suitcase. When he is finished, he fetches Antonietta and the bow from a desk drawer. This time, in his euphoria, he kisses the back of the violin. He puts it gently in the case, and for a few moments the lens hovers over it. Antonietta glistens in the brilliant tropical light. The varnish of its beautiful back and ribs must be feeling the delightful warmth of all those tropical banknotes! The violin looks as if it has begun to feel very much at home in the twilight years of the twentieth century.
CUT TO:
46. A roulette table in the hotel’s Monte Carlo Casino, that night. Players, in tropical dress, are around the table. We hear:
CROUPIER
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen!
The camera closes on Spenser. He is handing a hundred-dollar bill to each of the musicians.
SPENSER
Good luck. If you win a heap, you can buy me a new soul.
We watch the women lose the money. We see that they have never done anything in their lives as ridiculous as this, but that they nevertheless care terribly each time the croupier’s rake pulls away their chips. They are stunning in their naïve greed.
CUT TO:
47. Spenser’s office in the Hat Hut. The viewer may be surprised to see Bolen sitting right there, not in disguise—he is dressed, in fact, in the pinstriped charcoal-gray uniform of the person he really is, an executive (and in fact a managing director) of the investment banking firm of Farraday, Simmer. Bolen himself is obviously surprised to have been summoned, skipping all subterfuge, directly to Mr. Ham’s house.
SPENSER
The point is, Bolen, is that this time you and I are aboveboard. Couldn’t be cleaner. So we can deal right out in the open. And for once I’m letting you in on something, instead of the other way around. But bear this in mind. At the moment—so far—there are only two people in the world who know about this move, and you’ll be the third. If there should turn out to be a premature fourth, or if you should start getting so greedy for yourself that the arbs pick up the signals, I’ll personally come to Manhattan, you goddamn little crook, and deball you. Is that clear?
BOLEN
You have an understandable way of putting things, Mr. Ham.
SPENSER
Okay. Here’s what’s up. I’m going to buy Consolidated Broadcasting.
BOLEN [obviously shocked:]
You are? With what, may I ask? You must know how steep it’s going to be.
SPENSER
This is where you come in. We’ll start with secured financing. You know the list of my companies. I want you to scout out reasonable collateral that I can siphon off of them. Give me complete numbers on that. Ought to be damn good—maybe enough so we can do without too much outside leverage. But we may have to use some junk, too, and there I want you to dig up the best risks on the market. I don’t want any of that old pumped-up Drexel Burnham Lambert crap. Find me…
As Spenser continues to give directions to Bolen, we hear, softly at first, then coming up to drown out the talk, MUSIC OVER: Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment.*5 The piece’s declarative melodies in the violin part, followed rather docilely by the piano, seem to suggest a new level of assurance in Spenser’s ordering up of more and more numbers from Bolen.
FADE INTO:
48. June and Vera, practicing that very composition in the living room. We see that there is now a proper bench—a fancy black-leather-upholstered one, capable of being raised and lowered—for the pianist. The pleasure on the two women’s faces, as they play, speaks to the viewer/hearer along with the music.
Spenser walks into the room, pauses, listens a few moments, then approaches, holding his hands up in a command to stop.
SPENSER
I wanted you to know, girls, I’ve just sent out eighty invitations to the first recital. Next Wednesday. It’ll be out on the grounds. There’ll be a clambake first, and then you come on. I’m having a little stage built with plenty of room for the piano and both of you, and don’t worry, there’ll be super lighting. I’m wondering. Should we have printed programs?
JUNE
