SEVERIN
This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes. Pilot, lighting designer, director of photography, production assistant, sound engineer, astronomer, local guide. You pay Mr Edison through gritted teeth and try to recover your finances by launch. You choose good kids, strong and a little gullible and intrepid as Argonauts. You check their references and they’re just as bright and perfect as stained glass. You get them all in a tin can together, set the clock for nine months transit on a favourable orbital window, and pour out the last real bourbon you’ll see for a year. Settle in for a long sail in the dark. And the first thing your kids do when the cameras are off and our big dumb blue mama is drifting away in the portholes is lean in close with eager puppy eyes and say: Come on, Severin, you can tell us now—who’s your mother, really?
But it doesn’t matter, that’s what the rags don’t get. And my crew does read the rags, sucks them down like sweets.
Let me tell you something terrifying, instead.
When I was seven, I saw Mary Pellam in The Seduction of Madame Mortimer—do you remember that series? Madame Mortimer, lady detective, having lost an eye on Uranus in The Saturnine Solution, finally meets her match in the dashing person of the master criminal Kilkenny, known to me as Igor Lasky, actor, Lothario at large, and frequent occupant of our liquor cabinet and back bedroom. Oh, how I loved those murder flicks! And Madame Mortimer best of all, with her bouncing blond curls and cruel laugh and hidden pistols and leaps of pristine logic. Madame always got her man. This was after Clotilde Charbonneau left us quite bereft and ran off with Clarence Feng, darling of the Red Westerns. Papa and I were both disconsolate. And I looked at my father and I pointed at the screen and I said: I want her for my new mother.
And he got her for me.
It took almost a year of gentle, insistent courting to seduce Madame Mortimer for my personal use. But Mary Pellam moved in by Christmas and had taught me to shoot like a bandit queen by Easter. The night after my father put a ring on her finger I sat up quite late, thinking very seriously about what had just occurred. I could ask for anything and receive it. Even people. Even a mother. I had a terrible power. I could easily become a monster like Kilkenny. Monstrous in my appetites, and each of them satisfied without end. I was reasonably certain I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I’d never seen a movie about someone with power who turned out nicely. If you have something, well, you’ve got to use it. I cried myself to sleep that night. I had been given a destiny, and that destiny was to be a villain, when all I wanted was to be Madame Mortimer.
Mary Pellam was a good mum. She taught me the Four Laws of Acting, which she had made up over gimlets at the Tithonus Savoy one afternoon so she could make a little scratch teaching between MM features.
[SEVERIN breaks into a glossy imitation of Mary Pellam’s crisp Oxford accent.]
No one will listen to a word you say if you don’t gin up a System of some sort. Everyone loves a System. Laws, Rules, Keys. You can sell Laws. You can’t sell, “Just be good at this for God’s sake; I’ll need a drink if you’re going to keep on like that.” If there’s a System to follow, that means it’s easy—why, patting up a good strawberry tart is a harder job than acting! If only we had known all along! Jolly good we’ve got you to set us straight, Mary. Offer up a System and everyone relaxes.
Mother Mary’s been retired for a while now, so I won’t be stepping on her side gig if I reveal her secrets. Miss Pellam’s Four Immutable, Immaculate, Ingenious, Imitable Laws of Acting:
1. Show up on time.
2. Bring your own makeup.
3. If you’re going to sleep with someone on set, make sure it’s the director.
4. Remember that the expressions and vocal patterns you are committing to film will become synecdoches. That’s a big word for a little mouth like yours, Rinny. It means something little that stands in for something big. Your smile will stand in for all human happiness. Your tears will be a model for everyone else’s sadness. Wives will copy your red nose, your shaking voice, the shape of your aghast mouth when they beg their husbands not to abandon them. Rakes will arch their eyebrows the way you do, grin just like you, tip their hat at your hat’s angle, and, with the weapons you give them, they will seduce the folk of their choice with ease. The more successful your film, the wider these synecdoches will spread. You have a responsibility to the people who will repeat your lines, wink your winks, imitate your laughter without knowing they are imitating anything. This is the secret power that actors hold. It is almost like being a god. We create what it is to be human when we stand fifty feet tall on a silk screen.
So you’d better be good at it, for God’s sake.
Mary Pellam was pretty as a playbill and hard as a hammer, but she was a philosopher, too. I used to stand next to her in the upstairs bath and we’d practice our faces in the mirror.
Determined. Betrayed. In Love. Awed by the Numinous.
She had 769 faces in the bank, she said, and was working on Number 770. She kept a little notebook with a green velvet cover that had all her Systems inside. But she wouldn’t write in a face until she had it deep down, locked up and loaded into the bones of her face. As I was only little, I couldn’t be expected to have so many, but no time like the present! If I applied myself, I might have as many as twenty under my belt by the time school started in the fall. Try Number 123, Attentive Reporter. Or Number 419, I Know Whodunit but I Won’t Say Yet, No Sir. And Number 42, Is That for Me?, useful for class birthday parties and being asked to jump rope with the bigger girls. Don’t think school isn’t a movie set, kid. It’s the most cutthroat location you’ll find ’til you work for your father. You’ll be competing for roles and you won’t even know what they are, or when auditions are over and you’re stuck with what you’ve got. I’d shoot for Professional Understudy. That way you can move from clique to clique undetected. Play chess until you can beat the club champion—but don’t move in for the kill. Let her have her pride. Move on and learn how to outqueen the queen bee.
Pretend you’re Madame Mortimer, she told me. Perfect your disguise case and you can go anywhere.
I remember touching her green velvet notebook. It had a brass lock on the side. I thought it must contain everything you could ever need to know about being alive. I was sure Mary had a System for anybody I wanted to be somewhere in that book.
She and my father weren’t well matched, though. That’s what happens when you let your kid pick your wife. He’s lucky I didn’t pick the dinosaur from Attack of the Cryptolizards, a B-flick my Uncle Gaspard made on the cheap and I loved like most children love their blankets.
Obviously, Gaspard Almstedt wasn’t really my uncle. He was Ada Lop’s agent’s lover, which made him family. Eventually, Madame Mortimer packed up her things and moved on to her next case, citing a need to hunt down Number 771 on Neptune, where the gravity changed the whole muscle sequence of smiling. In her wake, my father fell hard for Ms Lop.
Ada Lop, born Adelaida Loparyova, got her start in the business as a ballerina, although she was never one of the pink and rose-scented set. [Footage of Ada Lop’s performance with the Bolshoi plays beneath SEVERIN’S words.] Instead she tore her tulle to pieces at the culmination of Giselle and streaked her body with ugly black paint like blood. She kept the paint in little packets sewn into her leotard until the moment at hand. The first time, this was rebellion on her part—a statement about the stagnation of the ballet world, performing the same handful of very pretty but stultifying shows on a long loop—but it caused such a storm that she was compelled by her directors to repeat it night after night, to increasing and passionate crowds. She repeated it until she hated it. Until the tears were real. Until her body revolted and developed an allergy to the pigment in her leotard, and she retired up to the Moon and onto the screen, as so many dancers did in those early days.
It is now simply part of the ballet. You’d be hard pressed to find a Giselle mounted anywhere outside of Nekyia that does not conclude with a young woman doing serious damage to her costume. The Plutonians are all decadents, anyway: the planet of the lotus-eaters.
On the first morning of her new life as my third mother, still in her bridal nightgown, with her long hair falling down her back like black paint, Ada made me breakfast. Hard-boiled egg, bitter greens, Saturnine corncakes, and a thin, almost translucent slice of pink pork from the rooftop farms in Tithonus. She even let me have coffee. She poured it into a cup meant for one of my old dolls, then poured herself a much bigger cup. We both got cream, I got sugar, and Ada Lop looked at me with those famous gigantic dark eyes and asked me what kind of mother I wanted her to be. She was very frank that way. She just asked things and expected straight answers, even when they were inhuman, unrealistic, performative questions. She performed even her most intimate conversations. As if we were recording all the time. I suppose we were, which is probably why Ada lasted so long in our house. No one in the world talked out loud like Ada talked. Not even people in plays. It’s too hard to write. Embarrassing to everyone else, but nothing embarrassed Ada.
[SEVERIN’S voice deepens, a cigarette-voice, feathery and Slavic.]
What does love look like to you? What do you think a mother is?
I was ten and a half. I was ten and a half and she was asking me for stage directions. I said, rather churlishly: A mother is whatever a father isn’t. She’s a detective. She’s a bandit. She knows 770 faces. A mother is a person who leaves.
Honestly, Ada Lop was the best interviewer I ever met. She got you off your guard. She asked things nobody asked. You never got to know her, but she’d get every last drop out of you and in her cup. I always wear her wedding ring when I interview somebody. It has a black amber stone in it with a golden flaw, like an eye. And she did exactly as I asked. Whatever my father failed to do, she picked up; taught me how to fix a cannon and do my own taxes and do a perfect plié and that to perform, to really perform, you have to make yourself ugly at some point. Nothing real is pretty, she said. Only a doll is pretty. And a pretty doll drinks out of a tiny cup forever. A woman wants a big cup.