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Frank Iero is in show business, the kind with a stage involved and the only screens being those of smoke or covered in decorations. So is everyone he knows; his two best friends own one of the last strictly-vaudeville theaters this side of the East Coast, all his cousins are in large-scale productions scattered across Europe, and his mother and father were a singer and illusionist respectively, and they’re living out their early retirement in an old Victorian somewhere upstate arguing over whether magicians should be considered actors or not. (A hearty yes.)
So whether he’s up on the stage or behind it as he’s been in more recent years, the theater, and live performance, is all Frank has ever known, and it’s all he ever thought he’d care to know. He turned a blind eye to the nickelodeons of his teenage years, and even managed to ignore the sudden sprouting of the picture palace all over the country, but he seems to have had a change of heart as of late — the prospect of silent performances projected onto a screen intrigued Frank, and every time he snuck into one of those new picture houses across town without his co-workers’ knowledge, all he saw was opportunity. For himself, but of course for all his friends in the waning business of vaudeville too.
He decided he wanted to make a movie.
“You what?” was Ray’s response to this.
Ray Toro, one half the owner of the rundown theater they’ve called home for the last five years, is a traditionalist. He is whole-heartedly against the concept of the moving picture, even if it’s liable to keep their doors open. Their acts are never strictly theirs save for a select few, and the ones they haven’t managed to keep on their payroll are always floating between companies and between theaters; when the ones they’ve befriended find their way back to this corner of New Jersey with tales of the fabulous movies they’ve seen, they delicately broach the subject of perhaps adding a two-reel to liven things up, or even a chaser at the end of the show, but each time Ray turns them down. Frank can only imagine the sort of betrayal this must be for him.
Keeping the conversation lighthearted, Frank, avoiding his friend’s granite gaze and continuing to slather paint over the large plaster rock he’s been stationed before all afternoon, says, “Is the turpentine making me speak Chinese?”
“He said he wants to make a movie,” Mikey calls down helpfully from his perch on the ladder.
Mikey Way, the other half of this building’s owner, is not a traditionalist. Though he's also in the business because it’s all he’s ever known, his morals on the matter aren’t as strict as Ray’s. He's a neutral player in their partnership, he goes along with whatever sounds most interesting to him, and Frank guesses him wanting to dip his toe into the art of movie-making is interesting enough to have him on his side this time.
“You know — moving pictures?”
He’s sure Mikey finished fixing that loose wire he went up there for what has to be a quarter of an hour ago, so now he must just be enjoying the warmth of the stage lights like a blond, bespeckled cat, and Frank idly wishes he could join him; the theater always gets bitterly cold the minute the leaves outside start changing from green to brilliant hues of red and gold, and their heating system is only decent at best.
Ray waves them both off, almost tossing off the costume he has draped over his arm. “I know what a movie is. Honestly, the two of you … ”
“So you think it’s a good idea?” Frank asks, sharing a wink with the sunbathing cat up by the eaves.
“Good?” Ray opens and closes his mouth a couple of times like a fish. At this point Frank is only looking for a laugh at his friend’s expense, because no matter what Ray tries to tell him, he’s pretty sure this is something he’d like to do, and no amount of guilt-tripping should sway him. Once Frank has his mind set, it’s usually in stone. “I think it’s the worst idea you’ve ever had! Worse than that time Mikey met one of the Ringling brothers and tried to convince me live bears would be a perfect addition to Lily Dufresne’s hoop-jumping dog act!”
Mikey laughs from his perch and the ladder creaks ominously. Frank checks the time on his watch and stands when he sees it’s nearing dinnertime. He closes his cans of paint and wipes his hands on his stained shirt. Ray usually leaves his hair unpinned and ungreased when they’re off the clock, and its naturally wild state leaves him looking frazzled. Which, though, for Ray Toro, is usually a given.
“I’m not stringing up a screen in here,” he warns.
Frank pats him on one burning cheek as he goes by, the base of his spine and the backs of his thighs complaining with every step from the hours he’s spent sitting on that short wooden stool. “How sweet. I haven’t even come up with a plot yet and here you are already thinking of the finished product. Don’t worry, Toro, I’m sure one of the palaces would be more than happy to receive a copy. They’ve only been hounding us to acknowledge the existence of movies since practically the war.”
Mikey lands on the stage with a sharp clack of his heels and saunters over. “I’d be happy to help you with the story, Frankie. You know I used to help my ma with her scripts when she was still on Broadway.”
Ray makes an indignant noise and hurries to catch up with them as they cross the stage. “So you’re leaving me to run the theater on my own? Is that it?”
“Of course not,” Frank reassures him. The thought never even crossed his mind. “Think of this as … extracurricular.”
“Well you won’t be getting any credit from me, that’s for sure.”
Ray, looking like an exasperated lion, spins on his heel and starts off towards wherever he was before he came out to check on them like they’re children who need adult supervision.
Mikey huffs when he’s out of earshot. He has a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and is offering another to Frank. “This’ll keep him up tonight, that’s for sure,” he says.
Frank takes the cigarette, and after striking a match on the underside of his shoe and lighting up, they go out a back door into the weak sunshine and autumn breeze that snakes down their collars and up the sleeves of their shirts.
“So what made you want to quit vaudeville?” Mikey asks, scuffing his shoe against the gravel.
For anyone who doesn’t know him, the lazy air about him, his slow-as-molasses movements and his tendency not to look one directly in the eye, makes him seem as if he doesn’t care, or like he’s better than those around him, but in reality, Mikey Way just moves at a more tender pace than most, isn’t affected by the stressors of the times or the whims of man. Despite the facade, he’s the most level-headed person Frank knows.
Frank chokes on his lungful of smoke and coughs into his elbow. “I’m not quitting! Who said anything about quitting?”
Mikey shrugs languidly, and begins wiping the lenses of his coke-bottle glasses on the tail of his shirt. Without their visual aid, his eyes look small and squinting, like he’s scrutinizing everything and nothing. “Making a movie isn’t exactly an extracurricular activity, Frankie.” He hooks his glasses back around his ears and leaves his shirt untucked. “It takes less effort than live theater, sure, but I wouldn’t say it’s an after-school club.”
Frank listens to what he says and lets it marinate while they smoke their cigarettes and periodically pluck small flakes of tobacco from their lips and the tips of their tongues.
He’s right, is the thing. Mikey’s level-headedness once again brings Frank’s spontaneous imagination back down to Earth, anchoring him. He can see now that toying with this idea for the last few weeks and announcing it with the surety he’s garnered after a handful of trips to the picture house wasn’t good enough for the stature of the escapade. Where Ray wasn’t able to sway his excitement, all it took was Mikey’s coolness to tug him down from the cloud he’s been riding on.
“I suppose you have a point,” he says eventually, and slightly bitterly, and drops what’s left of his cigarette to the ground where he grinds it into the gravel with the toe of his shoe. Mikey follows suit, and they go back inside where it’s at least a few degrees warmer.
Mikey replaces Frank at the plaster rock when he claims he’s inhaled enough paint fumes to choke a horse, and he settles on fixing a small tear in the curtain only he would notice, with the sewing kit he always keeps in his pocket.
It’s quiet while they work, and the gentle ambience of the sparse Sunday traffic floating in through the lobby makes them feel like they’re tucked away from the world. Eventually, though, the quiet starts to become too much, Frank’s sudden and inexplicable worries too loud in his head, and he looks up from his thread and needle.
“Do you think it’s a bad idea then?” he asks Mikey across the stage. His voice echoes and, cheeks growing warm, he hopes Ray can’t hear him wherever he is in the building. If he can, Frank is sure he’s raising his eyebrows in that way he does when he turns out to be right all along about something that should have been painfully obvious. Frank doesn’t want to give him that satisfaction, but he also can’t just let this idea of his blow quietly away. At least Mikey won’t raise his eyebrows at him.
Mikey pokes his head out from behind the large faux boulder, a splash of gray paint across his cheek like a dramatic dash of women’s contouring makeup. “I think it’s a great idea,” he says matter-of-factly. “I just don’t want you to make a promise you can’t keep.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll have no problem splitting my time between here and your movie, but I don’t think the same can be said for you, not if you’re playing the director and the cameraman and the candlestick-maker.”
Some of that previous defiant confidence seeps back into Frank then, and he wonders if Mikey is the one who’s wrong this time. He hasn’t been wrong since he suggested the live bears, so he’s surely overdue.
“Well I never said it was going to be a one man show, now did I?”
Mikey tips his head in consideration. “Even more so then. You’re going to have to find a cast and crew, then you’re going to have to boss them around. I’m just saying, man.”
Frank acknowledges what his friend is saying, he understands, but he’s not so sure he totally agrees. Why shouldn’t he be able to make a movie and continue helping with the show every night? Being in the business of show business, he already has plenty of contacts, and he’s always been a master at multitasking, so how difficult could it be?
And since when has Mikey Way been the voice of reason?
“You know, I think that’s the most I’ve heard you talk sober.”
Mikey flashes him a smile and retracts back behind his prop. “What can I say, I’m passionate about my friends’ passion projects. Why do you think I agreed to opening a music hall with you two brutes?”
“Because you’re madly in love with one Raymond Toro?”
Something that sounds like a paintbrush clatters to the stage, and Frank stifles his laugh in the thick folds of the curtain.
It’s reassuring to know that even the coolest of men have a weak spot.
Frank spends the next week hounding all of his friends and the friends of his friends like an overzealous newspaper reporter, and he makes so many calls on the telephone that the operator interrupts not once but twice to ask if there’s some sort of emergency she could help with. He tells her no both times, although on the second inquiry he almost says yes and asks if she has any experience on a movie set.
Between overseeing their acts, mending tears and applying makeup, tweaking scripts and giving pointers as he does every night, he makes his proposal like he’s reading from his own script, but everyone is either too busy or simply not interested in his venture. Even the ones who suggested he try his hand at movie-making in the first place let him down gently.
One man, Dennis Lawson, who does a fan-favorite act reminiscent of Mr. Chaplin’s Little Tramp once a week every autumn, told Frank in a way that reminds him greatly of Ray Toro, that getting in front of a movie camera is a death knell for the stage actor, which Frank thinks is pretty ironic, considering the inspiration behind his act and all.
But still, he’s fast approaching a wall, a wall that Ray is sitting on top of grinning like the Cheshire cat, and as the weekend approaches, the only players Frank has lined up for his game of chess are the photographer and the heroine, both of whom have never been up on a stage but the latter of which apparently has worked with Georges Méliès, of all people. Mikey — who’s still very much on his side — found them, and Frank has yet to ask where exactly.
Dennis Lawson also told Frank as casually as if they were discussing the weather that he would never abandon the stage for the screen, and by Saturday, still with just two willing participants in his armory so far, Frank begins to wonder if that’s just what he’s doing. There has to be another reason why no one wants to make this creative jump with him, one that would make Ray raise his eyebrows at him.
“You told me you’re not quitting,” Mikey says pointedly, suspenders hanging at his sides as he wrangles one of Lily Dufresne’s Yorkshire Terriers into its tutu. “Quitting and abandoning are the same thing.”
Frank feels stupid suddenly, and not for the first time since diving headfirst into this foray; he doesn’t think making a movie should be this much of a rollercoaster of emotion. And, honestly, he has to get Ray out of his head — he’s only making him feel scrambled.
“I’ve asked damn near the whole town!” Frank crows. There’s the skittering of nails on wood, and he watches as Lily chases another one of her pups around a corner. “Can’t you find me some more men?”
Being in show business, Frank has his connections, but none of said connections seem to be making connection, and Mikey Way is … well, he’s Mikey Way. He always seems to find a way (no pun intended), hence the sudden appearance of Roscoe Freeman, motion-picture photographer, and Winnie Lovett, leading lady, both conjured up out of thin air as if by magic.
“I’ll try my best,” says Mikey sagely. He finally gets the little Yorkie in its frilly blue tutu and puts it under his arm like a football. With his free hand he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, a gesture that reminds Frank faintly of Harold Lloyd. “You know how busy everyone gets with the holidays approaching.”
Frank does know, quite well. But inspiration struck him now, and with his mind set in stone, he just couldn’t wait until the start of the year to see this project through.
“Maybe you should talk to Russ, over at the Marigold,” Mikey suggests.
The Marigold is one of the palaces that’s been nagging them for years now to film some of their acts for a promotional reel, and it’s a nice one up in the more prosperous part of the county, with high, domed ceilings and popcorn-makers and an orchestra pit fit for Broadway. Frank’s become a bit more than acquaintances with its owner, Russel Nash, so that’s not an awful idea; he might be able to strike up some sort of a deal with him.
The sharp, hurried slap of Ray’s dress shoes comes echoing towards them from somewhere unseen, and when Frank looks up at his friend for the first time since they parted ways this morning at breakfast, he sees his hair is flat against his head and his slightly fake yet brilliant smile he reserves just for showtime is splitting his mouth wide.
“Everyone ready?” he says with an enthusiastic clap.
Mikey, as always, looks a little mystified at Ray in his three-piece suit, and he hands the dog to Frank dumbly. Frank, as always, decides not to bring attention to the crack in Mikey’s nonplussed demeanor in front of Ray, and he settles on leaving the two be and taking the little Yorkie to its owner.
He finds Lily Dufresne just behind the curtain, worrying a stray curl of hair while her legion of pups dances around her feet, seemingly practicing for their act.
“Here’s — this one,” Frank says, setting the dog on the floor and watching as its small form is immediately absorbed into the excited sea of multicolored tulle.
“Well, gosh, Mr. Iero, don’t you know his name yet?” Lily says, spinning on her heels, her arms up with her hands in her hair and her breasts in Frank’s face. “We’ve only been doing our act here for the last seven or so months!”
“Well, for one thing, I didn’t know it was a boy with that blue thing you had Mikey put him in,” Frank says. “And when will you start calling me Frank? We’ve only been working together for the last seven or so months, Miss Dufresne.”
Lily lets out a shrill laugh that turns into a frustrated groan, and she slaps her hands down against her sides. “I can’t get my hair to stay in its pins!” she cries, just as her mountain of curls tumbles from the top of her head.
“Come here, sweetheart.”
Frank turns her around by her naked shoulders and begins wrangling the golden curls back into place with his deft fingers. He’s fixed so many hairdos, so many costumes, during the time he’s spent offstage instead of on, that he knows the human body better than he ever learned in school, knows just where clothing should fall and just how certain types of hair can be properly pinned. And at this point, he’s sure Lily Dufresne just never learned how to do her own hair. Frank never minds though.
“Did you see that handsome fellow in the first row?” Lily says conspiratorially, rising on her toes excitedly. Frank follows the movement with his own ascension.
He can hear how full the house is tonight, the overwhelming chatter drifting through the heavy curtain and backstage where they and all the other acts are currently residing until Mikey gets on and announces the start of the show. Among the chatter he can also hear the band in the pit tuning their instruments like a pack of noisy seals.
“I did not,” he tells her, pinning the last tendril of hair into place atop her head.
Lily spins around when he’s done, her black-lined eyes shining. “I think he might be famous.”
Frank lifts his eyebrows in interest, though this statement isn’t all that surprising. Celebrities have been known to wander into their humble hall from time to time.
“How do you know? Do you recognize him as anything other than handsome?”
“Well, no,” she says, pursing her lips to the side. “He just looks famous, you know? You can tell that in a man. A lady, too!”
Frank definitely knows that. Famous people, or just well-to-do people in general, always carry themselves differently, or dress more smartly or wear more makeup. It’s easy to pick them out of a crowd, especially when they’re sitting front row at a small-time theater in northern New Jersey, which is where the celebrities usually sit when they come to visit.
Lily describes the fellow for him anyway.
“He’s got this really pointed nose and these eyebrows that girls five years ago would have absolutely killed for. Oh, and what a babyface! He looks like a handsome toddler!”
There’s a ripple in the curtain over at the other end, and the dogs start growing anxious at their feet.
“Oh, I hope he stays for my turn,” Lily says, hands on her rouge-red cheeks and looking as if this attractive stranger being absent for her act will be detrimental to how well her pups perform tonight. “You know I’m heading to the city next week and all.”
“You’re only the second act!” Frank assures her as Mikey begins addressing the quieting audience on the other side of the curtain. “He’d be a fool to leave early.”
Although, when Frank finally finds a free moment about an hour and a half into the night to enjoy the show from the side stage, Ray and Mikey probably at opposite ends of the theater putting out their own fires, there’s an empty seat in the front row, and he finds himself slightly disappointed at having missed Lily’s mystery man. The more popular movies get, the more obsolete the concept of vaudeville grows, and for a theater such as theirs that chooses to stay ignorant to the changing times and the evolving entertainment field, less and less does Frank get the chance to shake hands with people who wear cravats and top hats and have a jaunty tilt to their powdered chins.
He’d hate to go against Ray’s wishes, but as he ignores the Daniels sisters’ baby act taking place on stage currently in favor of frowning at that empty seat between the delighted faces of the dentist’s wife and Mr. Rose from the bank, Frank decides at once to debut whatever eventually comes of this plunge he’s taking right here at the theater he and his closest friends have put their blood, sweat, and tears into running. He’s not abandoning the stage for the screen, so he couldn’t in good faith disaffiliate his movie when he’s sure it’s going to garner a fair amount of attention (if old Russ at the Marigold knows what he’s talking about) — attention that can continue to fund their livelihood for the foreseeable future.
He’s thinking too far ahead for someone whose production only has two members involved so far, not including himself; he definitely should give Russ a call.
During intermission, while Ray is tending to the audience and Mikey is doing God-knows — probably drinking some hooch with that funny tap dancing fellow they picked up at a dance hall last weekend and gave a slot to — Frank decides to slip out back for a quick smoke.
It’s chillier tonight than it has been all week, the temperature threatening to dip into the thirties for the first time all season, and when he gets outside, cigarette warming only the tips of his fingers and his burning throat, Frank steps away from the cool bricks and almost frigid shade of the building and stands in a patch of moonlight he pretends is sunlight with his free hand plunged as far into his pocket as it’ll reach without tearing the stitching.
As he smokes and curls his toes in his shoes to keep them from growing stiff from the cold, Frank suddenly gets a whiff of tobacco that smells different from his own smoldering cigarette, and he follows the heady odor around a bend in the wall to where they store old props. That’s being generous, because the small, unlit area is nothing short of a graveyard, littered with piles of wood and plaster and other pieces of things they no longer have use for in varying states of disrepair, and in the middle of the mess, sitting on an overturned crate and chewing on the bit of a straight-stemmed pipe, is a man in an expensive suit.
At first Frank doesn’t think it’s a man at all — in the business he’s in he’s seen plenty of women in suits, not even counting the homosexual ones he knows in his personal life — but then he turns his head just so, angles his body differently, and not only does he see that it’s a man, albeit a very feminine-looking one, but the man Lily was describing. There’s the pointed nose like something out of a Coney Island caricature, and the finely-groomed eyebrows thicker than any modern-day woman’s and the plump cheeks and rounded jaw, and he knows this is just the handsome fellow, and handsome he is, in the sense of both sexes.
Frank is about to call out to him, ask him how and why he’s back here, but the hand that’s holding the wooden pipe is trembling slightly, and not from the cold, so he decides to leave him be; it’s more intimate smoking here than inside, or even on the sidewalk out front.
His own cigarette has ruined itself down to his fingers, and he drops the mess of paper and burnt tobacco before he burns himself and goes back inside to oversee the rest of the show.
A part of Frank hopes the man finds his way back to his vacant seat in the front row, but he doesn’t, and by the end of the night Frank is sure he was just a figment of his overactive imagination, a figment Lily Dufresne somehow shared.
Another successful week under their belts, Frank takes a taxicab to the Marigold Sunday morning and has a lengthy discussion with Russ Nash over a plate of sandwiches brought over from the delicatessen. By the time Frank leaves, his belly full and his clothes stinking of enough smoke to concern the firehouse alarms, he has a list of names of viable candidates for his movie, the telephone number of a man with a production company out West in case this isn’t just a one-off, and a very good feeling about the whole thing.
Ray wants to hear nothing of it, but Mikey helps him make the calls from his own apartment across the hall above the theater, and by mid-afternoon Frank has not only a man to operate the camera and a leading lady, but now also reserved equipment he couldn’t borrow from the theater’s own storage and men to operate it all, a woman surprisingly more well-versed in applying makeup and styling hair than him, strangers willing to play background roles for a paycheck, and even a kid from the high school to cut the picture when it’s all finished, even though Frank is sure he could do that himself. He’d prefer to play more parts in the production, but he’s already writing and directing, and he did tell Mikey he wouldn’t act as a one man show.
He just doesn’t have his hero, but he’s not concerned about that; he’ll worry about a main man when he has some semblance of a script written.
Frank has seen enough movies recently to know that his favorite kinds, and seemingly most people’s favorite kinds, are the comedy shorts, namely the ones by Chaplin and Lloyd and Keaton. He’d love to make a feature, one that pushes that one-hour mark and gives him more freedom for practice and experimentation, but this is only his first production, and Chaplin was in the business for six years before making anything longer than a two-reeler — plus Frank just can’t afford to do that at the moment. So a comedy short it is.
While his cast and crew are waiting patiently for the production to start, Frank scours the newspaper for scenario ideas, circling humorous-sounding job ads and advice columns and stories of men being robbed by their wives. He and Mikey toss their ideas back and forth over the dinner table, to Ray’s chagrin, mostly because he had no idea Mikey had ever dared to step foot in one of those substantial picture palaces, let alone know how to put a moving picture together, and eventually they come up with the perfect plot.
It’s nothing too complicated, nothing like those features the bigger Stars are coming up with, but it’s lighthearted and touching and just the thing Frank’s been wanting to see play out on a screen.
Mikey, acting as the loyal producer he’d christened himself as somewhere along the way, asks Frank if he has anyone in particular in mind to play his hero that he could call up on the phone for him, but Frank tells him he doesn’t, even as a vision of the man with the babyface and pipe takes shape in his mind. Mikey tells him he’ll keep his eyes open, and Frank assures him he will too.
Frank writes up a script and sends out copies to all his actors, and by the middle of the week, with no word from Mikey in regards to his extensive connections that go far past Frank’s and Frank himself also coming up short, he’s starting to grow nervous; not to mention everyone he’s hired has been calling him up and asking, with a certain air of anxiety coloring their tinny voices, when their movie is going to start photography, because they enjoy the script very much — and they’re low on cash.
He has a moment Wednesday night when he’s afraid the production won’t come together at all, that it’ll topple without its most crucial component and Ray will raise his expressive eyebrows and say ‘I told you so’, but then, in the bustling after-hours of the show when performers are packing their things and changing into something more appropriate for the oppressive real world that exists outside the doors of the theater and wishing the ones that are needed in other towns and states and countries farewell, the hushed gossip between tap dancer Marla Hanson and illusionist Ernie Cassella from a near-abandoned dressing-room Frank is passing by catches his ear:
“Did you hear Michael’s brother is in town?”
“Michael who?”
“Way! The man who gave you this job, Ernie.”
“Marla, honey, I’m only here until Keystone writes me back.” A semi-interested pause. “What’s the big deal with his brother anyhow?”
Dennis Lawson walks by with his cane and top hat, and Frank has to pretend like he’s not eavesdropping when they acknowledge each other.
“Well he hasn’t been around the States since … since the Titanic went down, I think,” Marla continues shrilly.
“Are you saying he was on the Titanic then?”
There’s a soft whump, as if Marla just gave Ernie a slap on the arm.
“What I’m saying is that he’s been in London since the Armistice, and before that he was doing Shakespeare in Scotland. I follow him in the magazines and I just think it’s peculiar none of them mentioned he was back, is all.”
“Have you thought maybe he just wanted to visit his brother?” Ernie says sarcastically, almost eliciting a laugh from Frank that would surely give away his position. “You women are such conspiracy theorists. Don’t you ever let anything alone?”
There’s another whump, and Frank continues down the hall even though he hasn’t the faintest clue where he was even on his way to, because an idea started taking shape in his mind the moment Marla Hanson mentioned Mikey’s older brother.
Gerard Way. Frank has never met him in the near decade he’s known Mikey as he’s always off in another country acting in big stage productions reminiscent of all their parents’, and despite only having heard about him from childhood tales and backstage gossip and seen his picture now and again in The Theatre, Frank decides then and there he wants to cast him in his movie.
Mikey looks slightly confronted when Frank brings this up to him over dinner that night, like he wanted to keep his brother’s arrival a secret and is startled that Frank has found out. The look on his face is faint, and anyone who doesn’t know him wouldn’t notice his change in expression, but Frank knows Mikey almost as well as himself, and the slight wrinkle of his nose tells him he wasn’t planning on letting either of them know Gerard was on this side of the hemisphere.
“I didn’t know he was in town,” Ray remarks casually as he spoons soup into his mouth from across the table. Slowly his hair is beginning to escape from the pomade prison it’s been subjected to all evening, and the half-up half-down look of it makes him look as if he stuck his finger in an electrical socket. Frank is sure his hair doesn’t look far off from that either. Mikey’s hair, on the other hand, is seemingly never out of place.
“Why didn’t you tell me!” Frank demands boyishly, finding Mikey’s foot beneath the table and giving it a playful stamp.
Mikey must see the idea swirling excitedly just behind the sheen of his eyes because he shakes his head sharply and says with finality, “He’s not here for work, so don’t even think about it.”
Ray, despite his affinity for ignoring the existence of Frank’s movie, must catch on then as well.
“Gerard is too self-respecting of an actor to be in a motion-picture,” he says dismissively.
Frank raises his eyebrows at Mikey in a surprised sort of betrayal, and Mikey assures him that’s not it, that Gerard has no qualms about movies like Ray does and is simply taking a well-earned break.
“I thought you said your brother is a notorious workaholic,” Frank points out.
It’s true; he may not know Gerard Way personally, but all the magazines — and even Mikey himself — always say how even death itself couldn’t give him the hook. As far as Frank is concerned, the longest Gerard spent away from a working theater is when he was in the Army, and even then Frank is almost certain he was entertaining his fellow soldier. But like he said, he doesn’t know the man.
“It wouldn’t hurt to simply ask.”
They both tell him that Gerard won’t accept, for very different reasons, he’s sure, and Frank decides to take that as a challenge. Of course he’s all for taking a vacation and he would never want to steal that away from Gerard with how much of an eager beaver he seems to be, but Gerard Way is just what his movie needs, and he wouldn’t give him long hours on set and he’d be sure to compensate him generously. And also — how could he turn down his brother’s best friend?
“Just you watch,” Frank says, wagging a finger at them. “I’ll get Gerard in my movie.”
And then he says with a witty snap and a mischievous smile, like he just came up with the idea, plucked it right there out of thin air, “If I get Mikey’s brother in my movie, then you have to premiere it here.”
Ray rolls his eyes and huffs like an angry bull into his soup but doesn’t object, and Mikey, never able to turn down a good bet, says disapprovingly, “I’ll introduce you tomorrow.”
“Frank, this is my brother, Gerard.”
Frank drops the prop gun he was holding, the heavy piece of metal almost hitting his toes, and turns with a big smile already set firmly on his face, but it dips slightly at the corners when he sees who it is at Mikey’s side.
The man standing at Mikey’s left, hands behind his back, is the handsome pipe-smoking fellow he saw outside the other day, the one Lily Dufresne brought to his attention. Gerard Way turns out to be the stranger in the expensive-looking suit that has for some reason hooked to the edges of Frank’s subconscious like a particularly sticky cocklebur.
Frank blinks dumbly at the pair, the sudden confrontation that that man wasn’t only not just a figment of his imagination but also Mikey’s brother rendering his ability to speak useless.
“Gerard, this is the man I was telling you about.”
He’s even more handsome up close — Frank can see what had Lily whispering about him backstage and is almost disappointed she’s in New York and not here so he can introduce them — and when his golden-brown eyes land on Frank, a strange swooping sensation overtakes his stomach and the proposition he had for Gerard evaporates like the evening mist.
Gerard, a nervous air about him, holds out a large hand and stretches his pursed lips in a smile that doesn’t exactly reach his eyes. “Pleased to finally meet you, Frank,” he says in a voice higher than his brother’s, one that almost matches the girlish look of him. “I’ve heard a lot of good things.”
Frank shakes his hand, returning the sentiment when his voice returns to him. “Did you enjoy the show?” he asks.
He feels like he should be nervous in Gerard’s presence, embarrassed at the scuffed stage floor beneath their feet and the profanity their acts are spewing jovially just a few feet away, because while Frank has met plenty of celebrities in his line of work, this is surely the most popular, and standing there in his expensive three-piece suit and his perfectly-oiled hair, he doesn’t look like someone who would ever show his face at a vaudeville show.
Gerard nods politely, his hands disappearing behind his back again like the picture of the perfect gentleman. “Very much so. I thought the ventriloquist was lovely.”
He says it in a wooden way, and it makes Frank think he didn’t actually care much about Willie O’Neal and the Amazing Talking Teddy. He wonders what Gerard’s favorite act really was, if he has one, and why he didn’t choose that one to mention.
Frank doesn’t ask him though, and he still doesn’t bring up his movie; what he says is, “I saw you here the other night. You were sitting in the front row, but then you disappeared.” He doesn’t mention how he actually saw him out back smoking his pipe with his trembling fingers.
The look that passes over Gerard’s face reminds Frank of Mikey last night, when he realized Frank found out his brother was in town, and while the look is as faint as Mikey’s was, it disappears from the line of Gerard’s features much more quickly, like the tide retreating from the sand, and his mouth quirks up again.
“I’m not much for the front row, but I can assure you I stayed through the whole thing,” he explains. “It was just as wonderful as tonight’s, and I’m sorry I never visited sooner.”
The perfect moment is there for Frank to make his proposition, Gerard setting it up for him like low-hanging fruit, but still he lets it be.
Suddenly a chorus girl presses her back against Frank’s front, holding her hair up off her neck. “Unbutton me, Frankie, won’t you?” she demands harridly. “It’s dastardly hot in this joint.”
Frank unbuttons her leotard for her and his gaze wanders over the girl’s shoulder to Gerard, who’s flicking his eyes inconspicuously down her arms, up her legs, looking like a regular old stage-door Johnny. Frank bites his lip to keep from laughing; it seems as if Gerard wasn’t born with the same proclivities as his brother.
When the chorus girl, half undressed, flounces away, Gerard bids them both a good night, having already been introduced to Ray earlier, and when he’s gone, Mikey fixes Frank with a suspicious cock of his head.
“Why didn’t you ask him?”
Frank picks an invisible piece of lint from his sleeve and says, “I can’t just state my business on the first meeting, Michael, that’ll scare him off! No, I’m going to try and woo him.”
Mikey crosses his arms and cocks his head even further, pairing the strange torque of his neck with a frown. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Frank. Maybe you should keep looking for your hero.”
“Are you on my side or not?” Frank asks, putting a hand on Mikey’s shoulder and squeezing the back of his neck.
Mikey ejects a burst of air through his nose and shakes his head.
“That’s what I thought.”
Frank is officially a man on a mission, so after a bit of asking-around to find out just where Gerard Way is staying — because even though he’s seemingly here in secret, word still spreads — he heads into town at the crack of dawn the next morning with a folded copy of his script in his pocket towards Mrs. Hubbard’s boarding house. He snuck from their apartments above the theater without Mikey or Ray knowing, but luckily, with all the illicit movies he’s been to see, he’s garnered quite the knack for sneaking about. And with a mother as understanding as his and growing up in the community he did, even his homosexual romps never required much pussyfooting.
Mrs. Hubbard is the one who answers the door when Frank rings the bell of the large brownstone, and she's big-boned and mean-looking with a face like a bird’s, beak and all. When she looks down her substantial nose at Frank, he gets the fleeting urge to turn tail.
“Can’t you read the sign?” she barks, indicating the sign hanging next to the door that says boldly NO VACANCY!
“I’m not here for a room, ma’am, I’m here to see someone,” Frank tells her politely.
Mrs. Hubbard’s hard expression doesn’t waver. “No boyfriends or husbands allowed on Sundays except for Mass.”
“Today — isn’t Sunday, ma’am.” She only raises a single plucked brow at him, but he doesn’t relent. “Is Gerard Way in?”
“The actor? Sure, he’s in.”
Mrs. Hubbard rakes her eyes up and down his being, like she’s trying to find a flaw somewhere in the stitching of his coat or the fit of his hat, some reason not to let him into her respectable home, but eventually, having found no warrantable offenses and coming to the conclusion Frank is not standing on the stoop of her boarding house with ill intentions, she steps aside and lets him in.
“Upstairs, third door on the left,” she directs brusquely, and leaves the foyer after shutting and latching the door against the early morning chill before Frank can even offer his thanks.
Hat in his hands, Frank goes up the rickety staircase and down the corridor until he comes upon the third door on the left. He knocks lightly so as not to wake the whole floor, but the second his knuckles touch the wood, there’s a clatter inside the room loud enough to rouse the entire neighborhood.
“Who is it?” a husky, ruffled voice says a moment later.
Frank presses his nose into the crack between the door and its jamb. “The boogeyman,” he jokes, then pulls his face away. “It’s Frank, we met last night.”
The door opens, and behind it stands Gerard Way with his black hair mussed, wearing a fleecy robe and looking like a deer caught in the headlights of a car. The floral scent of a ladies’ perfume wafts out from behind him.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, glancing over his own shoulder with his nervous eyes. His robe slips off that same shoulder, revealing a collarbone and a delicious expanse of milky-white skin flecked with freckles like paint splatter, and it makes it difficult for Frank to keep his gaze on his face.
“Have you got a girl in there or something?” he says lightly, swallowing around his suddenly dry throat.
That same look as last night passes over Gerard’s sleep-swollen face, like he’s been found out (in regards to what, Frank has no clue), and this time it has trouble receding as easily or as quickly. Perhaps it’s the early hour; being a well-functioning human is always a feat before the consumption of caffeine, after all.
“Come on,” Frank amends, almost feeling bad at having startled him like this, “Can’t a man take his best friend’s brother to breakfast to welcome him to town?”
Gerard cocks his head in a way that reminds him of Mikey. “You want to take me to breakfast?”
“Sure,” Frank shrugs. “You big actors still eat bacon and eggs, don’t you?”
Gerard bites his bottom lip, and looks again behind him.
“Alright,” he says carefully. “Just give me a moment.”
He shuts the door in Frank’s face, and Frank waits patiently, his back against the floral wallpaper, while Gerard dresses and most likely hurries his sweetheart down the fire escape. When he emerges again a handful of minutes later, the perfume has been replaced by a more masculine cologne and Gerard’s hair has been slicked smartly back. Unfortunately, too, he’s traded the robe for a warm sweater and slacks, but it’s a handsome change from the expensive suits Frank’s only ever seen him in.
“Shall we?” Frank says, gesturing ahead of him.
Gerard nods, and Frank notices that mask of humanity he thought only coffee is capable of giving has already slipped firmly into place, and he looks again like a perfect gentleman from a magazine or a school diagram. If Frank hadn’t seen him just moments before, with his clothes falling off and his hair tousled from sleep, he wouldn’t know that this facade he’s exhibiting right now isn’t his natural state.
Mikey was right about his brother being a workaholic; Gerard is still acting even when he’s off the stage.
The lunch wagon they go to is parked in an alley between two department stores and is the only one in town willing to fry up eggs for breakfast. They purchase two hot sandwiches and two paper cups of black coffee and sit down on a bench in the park nearby.
Gerard is quiet while they eat and drink, humming when Frank makes a comment about the weather or a flock of geese that go by, but otherwise keeping to himself. He sits rigidly on the bench where Frank curls his legs up beneath him, and keeps his back straight like being sent to finishing school was a requirement to perform plays in Europe. His light eyes shift every which way and his foot taps out a restless beat against the grass, and Frank thinks he looks like a man with a hit out on him.
When their sandwich wrappers are sitting in little balls at their sides and their coffees are gone, Frank takes a crushed pack of Camels and a box of matches from the depths of his coat pocket and offers up a cigarette to Gerard.
“No, thank you,” Gerard says, waving him off. “I haven’t smoked a cigarette since the war. Tobacco companies were sending them to all the doughboys like they were candy.”
He proceeds to produce his wooden pipe from his own pocket and packs it with tobacco from a sizable red tin of Prince Albert’s with deft fingers.
“It’s a beautiful pipe,” Frank comments. He strikes a match and drags himself closer on the bench so their thighs are almost touching. “My grandfather had the same model, he used to let me light it for him.”
Gerard smiles crookedly, covering up the fact he looks slightly nervous at their closeness. “Yeah, I — Don’t touch it to the bowl.” Frank holds the burning match above the bowl of tobacco and lets Gerard guide his fingers in a small circle while he puffs rhythmically on the bit.
When he pulls away, letting out a cloud of nutty, almost chocolatey-smelling smoke from the corner of his mouth, Frank lights his own cigarette with the quickly-burning match and sucks in his own lungful of tobacco.
“I guess it’s been a while since my grandfather passed,” he laughs, and leans back on the bench. “What were you saying now?”
Gerard inconspicuously puts the distance back between them, and lifts his chin a bit like he’s balancing something on the tip of it that’s liable to fall. The thought Frank had about him attending finishing school was purely in jest, but the longer he spends in Gerard’s presence the more he’s not so sure if it was a joke after all. He may be the biggest celebrity Frank’s met, but he’s apparently the most punctilious one too.
Taking the pipe delicately from between his teeth, Gerard says dismissively, “It wasn’t important.”
“Sure it was! Come on, now, no need to be shy around me, we’re practically brothers.”
Gerard gives him a furtive glance, and frowns like he’s not sure if he should continue. Ultimately, he does. “I was just going to say a friend gifted me this pipe before I was shipped off — a friend in Glasgow. I told them to keep it safe until I returned.”
“How long were you in the Army for?”
“Just a few months,” Gerard says quietly, looking like he’s not very well-versed in the art of small-talk. “I helped with the battle in the Argonne and suddenly I was home again and the war was over.” A glazed, wistful sort of look passes quickly over his eyes, then disappears. “Did you fight?”
“I got off, and so did Mikey, but you probably already knew that. Though Ray spent a few months in France as well.”
Gerard nods, his pipe back in his mouth like the motion of mouthing on the bit like a fish out of water brings him comfort, and they lapse into a semi-comfortable silence.
Despite the script in his pocket, Frank still doesn’t make his proposition. Gerard doesn’t seem to be in the right mood for a business offer — the offer being his potential motion picture debut, of all things — and Frank doesn’t want to scare him away when he already seems like quite the nervous fellow. And Frank hasn’t done nearly enough wooing yet to secure the answer he’s looking for.
Their breakfast date ends too soon, when Gerard mentions offhandedly that he has some errands to run even though Frank doubts he’ll be doing much of anything during his time in town, but Frank lets him go with a bright smile and a firm handshake with the promise of seeing him again soon.
Gerard looks surprised at this, but agrees that yes, he’ll be seeing him soon, and they part ways.
Frank is looking forward to their next meeting, and interestingly enough, he realizes his movie isn’t the immediate reason why.
Frank makes it a habit of buying Gerard breakfast even though he’s more than capable of affording it himself, makes a habit of correctly lighting his pipe for him which he smokes with a sort of fevered intensity that he must have brought back with him from the war, and he reads accounts of Gerard’s performances in his own time and compliments him until he’s red in the face. They see a movie or two together at the Marigold, and in the darkened room between the newsreels and the travelogues Gerard lets himself relax, and they become something like friends.
At first Frank was doing all this to sweeten him up, but now he’s not so sure, because every now and again that mask will crack just a little more and Gerard’s true self will shine through, his real emotions that make him seem less like a wooden puppet, and it’s in those moments that Frank finds himself liking Gerard that much more, and wanting to make him laugh and flush with pleasure and put a look into his eyes that seems normal — for himself and not his movie.
No one else besides his own flesh-and-blood brother may see it, but Frank realizes that Gerard is immensely dissatisfied with the fabled real world. No, it’s just the opposite, actually: the world is dissatisfied with him, and this front he puts on, this granite, perfectly-proper front he slots into place each morning in the mirror like a woman fastening a pair of earrings, is his own armor to protect himself.
Gerard Way is similar to his brother and at the same time nothing like him — where Mikey is quiet because he simply doesn’t have much to say, more of an observer than anything, Gerard is quiet because of a nervousness that lives in his knees and the tips of his fingers and the quivering base of his throat, and when he does decide to speak, each word is deliberately chosen, every sentence carefully crafted like a script that’s gone through a dozen revisions — Frank gets the sense that Gerard is only ever himself when he’s on stage playing someone else entirely.
Gerard seems to have a secret, and Frank has a sneaking suspicion that secret is a hoard of sweethearts that he hides in the room he’s renting, and if it weren’t for the way he looks at every beautiful woman they pass on their jaunts, the perfume that seems to follow him like a feminine apparition, the lipstick he’s caught in the corner of his crooked mouth once or twice, Frank would wonder if Gerard doesn’t bend in his same direction after all.
The night before the theater’s last show before they take their long-awaited break for Christmas and the new year, they have their annual holiday bash upstairs, throwing open both their apartments to all their closest friends in the business, and Frank decides to invite the crew of his movie, who have begun to feel neglected. Gerard has sat in the back of nearly every show they’ve put on since his arrival, so he kindly comes to the party too, dressed in his best, and he stands out in the hall by the banister shaking hands with strangers that tell him how much they appreciate his work and express surprise over his having left Europe.
After about five of these bouts of small-talk Gerard looks ready to fall apart at the seams, hands twisting nervously behind his back and looking suddenly uncomfortable in his starched shirt and shined shoes, like he’s been wearing a particularly ill-fitting costume for just too long, and Frank takes him something to drink to calm his nerves.
When Gerard spots him, he visibly relaxes, and he leans so heavily on the banister Frank is afraid he’s going to topple down the stairs.
“Not much for parties?” Frank asks, handing him the crystal tumbler.
Gerard looks down into the glass and blinks at Frank owlishly, like he’s never been handed something other than water.
“Don’t worry,” Frank smiles, “the ban forbids the sale of alcohol, and there’s no flow of cash here tonight; Mikey made this batch in his and Ray’s bathtub.”
“Oh, I don’t mind that,” Gerard says. “I just haven’t had a drink in what feels like a century.” And then he swallows the entire contents of the tumbler in one fell swoop like he was taking a dose of foul-tasting medicine and wanted to just get it over with, and if the wrinkle of his nose says anything, it tastes just as bad.
Frank watches the ripples of his throat with rapture and he leaves quickly to refill his glass; he’s already had a fair amount of Mikey’s hooch himself, and he can feel any decorum he may have had withering away to nothing, so he flees the scene before he does something rash and foils more than just his plan to get Gerard to play his hero.
Mikey has one hand in Ray’s hair and the other up his shirt when Frank comes back from their bathroom, which is a welcomed surprise, for sure, but he hurries on his way without making a fuss. The sight of them entangled in one another causes a patch of perspiration to break out suddenly on the back of Frank’s neck.
When he returns to the hall, Gerard is just where he left him, watching the Daniels sisters dance to the echo of the phonograph over by the dark frosted window in their beaded dresses and bare feet. He takes the proffered glass again, this time with a smile that’s looser than it’s been.
“I love parties,” he says after taking his first sip, wincing less this time.
“You just don’t like this party.”
Fred Portman and his wife Hannah, wearing each other’s clothes, run past them from Ray and Mikey’s apartment to Frank’s, and, watching them go by, Gerard muses, “No, I like this party too.”
Quieter and more present, he repeats, “I love parties,” and then louder, almost bitterly, “That’s why I left London.”
Like he revealed something he wasn’t supposed to, Gerard’s eyes go wide and he quickly gulps down his second glass of whiskey.
Frank refills him a third time, and even gets another for himself, and they get roaring drunk out in the hall while the guests flutter around them like bugs from apartment to apartment. Gerard doesn’t elaborate on his love of parties nor his first clue as to why he’s no longer in Europe, and Frank doesn’t press.
The more Gerard drinks the more constricted in his clothes he looks, so Frank decides to get him away — from the music and the laughter and the suffocating atmosphere of intimate parties — since the crew of his movie already introduced themselves casually hours ago and no one would miss them too terribly. He takes him to the one place he knows he’s most comfortable — the theater.
When they get downstairs, Gerard starts shedding his clothes before Frank can even get any lights on, dropping his suit jacket haphazardly to the floor and toeing off his shoes so they sit one before the other, like their owner evaporated mid-stride.
“There’s snow on the forecast, you madman!” Frank laughs, and carries the slender ghost light out onto the stage where Gerard, his suspenders hanging at his sides, is now standing. He and Ray are always trying to keep this particular light on during the holiday break, but Mikey for some reason is convinced that one of these seasons it’s going to set the whole place on fire.
“I’m boiling. What was in that concoction my brother made?”
Gerard cards his fingers through his hair, disrupting the pomade and throwing the shining black strands over his forehead. When he turns to Frank, the single bulb on the stand of the ghost light casts strange shadows over his lovely face, and Frank wonders if he’s able to hear the drum of his heart, beating loud enough to echo in the vast, empty room.
“Your brother has become something of an alchemist,” Frank says, with some difficulty.
Now that Gerard has some drink in him, arguably more potent than the tobacco he smokes like a fiend, Frank can see him just how he’s meant to be seen, in all his unmasked glory; his mouth, with the one side that doesn’t open as wide as the other probably from all the hours he’s spent with his pipe held between his pink lips, is curled back over his teeth in an easy smile, a natural smile, and whatever rod was reinforcing his spine has corroded away and left him loose-jointed like a well-loved rag doll.
He holds himself femininely, delicately, like he should be wearing flowing dresses that fall around the curves of his pale body but he instead buttons up in starchy shirts and slacks, trammels with suspenders like a modern-day corset. Now Frank knows why he looked like he was wearing a costume before — because he just doesn’t seem to be meant for the suffocating masculine garb of their time.
He should’ve stopped drinking after the third glassful; these are dangerous thoughts to have.
Gerard turns away from Frank suddenly, towards the empty seats of the audience in his shirtsleeves and tie like he’s about to address a roomful of ghosts, and Frank doesn’t want to move, and yet at the same time he wants to bound across the stage and take him up in his arms and put his hands on him like Mikey was doing to Ray upstairs.
He watches as Gerard’s mouth twitches like he’s about to give a grand soliloquy and then sits down on the stage and lays back. The flickering bulb falls over his unmoving body and shines on his pale skin and makes him look like a corpse dressed for its service. Frank hurries over on his unsteady feet and gets down beside him, and he puts his hand over Gerard’s chest just to confirm with himself that Gerard is still alive, that his heart is beating just as hard as his and this moment isn’t just a drunken mirage.
The scarf Frank wrapped around his neck on their way down here falls over Gerard’s face, and Gerard grabs ahold of the end and tugs it off; the motion of the soft fabric snaking around his neck makes him shiver, and he shivers still when Gerard presses the scarf to his nose and inhales.
“You can keep it,” Frank finds himself saying. He almost offers up everything he has right then and there.
He takes the bundle of warm fabric from Gerard, and, carefully lifting his head, arranges it like a pillow for him to lay on. All the while Gerard keeps his eyes closed, his hands resting at the tails of his shirt that have been tugged free from the hold of his waistband like he’s liable to tear it off like he did his jacket and shoes at any moment.
A flush is crawling up his throat and bleeding into his cheeks like the tip of a pen touched to water, a flush different from all the ones Frank has caused him to have and different still from the kind one usually gets from drinking. It makes him look like a painted rose, and his parted lips, the damp skin of his eyelids, are as soft as petals, and as Frank watches him like a man in a trance, he’s overcome with the urge to photograph him just as he is so he can remember this moment even when the claws of old age stake their claim on his mind. Gerard is more beautiful than any star he’s seen, both on stage and screen.
Frank eclipses Gerard, fans his sour-tasting breath over the sharp point of his nose and touches his fingers, feather-light, to the slight cleft of his chin.
“I’m making a movie,” he whispers into the darkness, “and I want you to be my hero.”
Frank watches in horror as Gerard’s honey-colored eyes snap open and the light that he’s spent so long stoking like a dying ember dims into something cold and scared. A pinched sort of fear begins tugging his handsome features in all the wrong directions, and he sits up without any concern over their proximity; Frank leans back before he accidentally suffers a concussion.
The moment has been completely ruined, shattered like glass at the soft yet detrimental drop of the proposition he’s been carrying around with him for weeks now, and it’s just as painful as if Gerard outright told him no, which he can tell is hovering closely on the horizon, because he can see Gerard reconstructing that inner wall, brick by trembling brick. He watches that gorgeous flush be sucked back into his skin and sobriety come into his face as he stands. Frank, his drunkenness also long gone now, stands as well.
Gerard starts tucking his shirt back into his pants, looking confused enough to begin crying, and Frank wants to lap the words back up, wants to reverse time so they’re still laying on the cold, hard stage and he can kiss his plush mouth and tell him not to return to London, to remain right here, damn the movie and everyone he’s employed.
“Gerard — ” Frank begins, but he doesn’t know how to continue, and the words snap off like a dying branch under the winter frost. He can see the betrayal on his face, can almost taste it himself, and yet he has no idea why everything just imploded like a dying star the way it did. Perhaps it has something to do with why Gerard’s here, why he’s taking a respite from show business when he was at the top of his game over across the pond and is notorious for never taking breaks before.
“I’m sorry,” Gerard says raggedly, avoiding Frank’s searching gaze, and leaves the stage with his shoulders hunched like he’s trying to hide in place.
Frank picks up his scarf from the floor and follows after him.
Behind the curtain, Gerard has his shoes and jacket back on, his costume buttoned and laced securely, and he’s trying desperately to smooth his hair back so it doesn’t fall around his eyes like one of those sticky-looking bobs Frank’s seeing increasingly more women wear in the magazines. Frank takes up an abandoned tin of oil from a nearby stool and helps him slick his hair back into place, and when it’s laying flat again, Gerard breathes a sigh of relief.
“I think I should go,” he says, a fragile tremor in his lilting voice. He looks like a dog that’s been kicked one too many times, and Frank hates that he’s the reason why, for whatever reason.
Frank wraps his scarf around Gerard’s neck like he’s swaddling a baby, firmly, lovingly. “Let me walk you back.”
Snow has started falling when they get outside, the soft white tufts peppering their shoulders and dampening the fabric of their coats. Gerard starts to shiver only a block away from the theater, but no matter how many times Frank offers, he won’t let him telephone for a taxi, so they walk side-by-side down the abandoned sidewalks towards Mrs. Hubbard’s boarding house with their hands in their pockets and their mouths firmly shut. Every now and then Gerard will expel a harsh burst of air through his nose and Frank will answer him with a pointless clearing of his throat.
When they reach the house, looming large over them like some gothic castle, Frank, an adamant believer of never going to bed angry, says lightly, “I hope you didn’t miss your curfew.”
The tip of Gerard’s nose, with the tiny freckle above the left nostril, is red like the glowing cherry of a cigarette, and when they’re facing each other at the bottom of the stone steps in mirrored positions, his trepidatious eyes flit between Frank and the building, between the whitening sidewalks and the street lamp, and just as Frank is about to intervene in his inner turmoil, Gerard closes the distance between them and kisses him.
Neither move for a long moment, Gerard’s hard mouth and sharp teeth pressed against Frank’s, their noses compressed almost painfully, like they’re posing for a photograph. Eventually Gerard breaks away with a gasp, and he looks at Frank in alarm like he had no control over what he’s just done.
Frank, some inebriation flooding back into his extremities, warming him up against the late autumn chill, wonders vaguely if this is something Gerard has been thinking about like Frank has, or if it’s just circumstance of a sequence of intricate events.
To find out, to get that final answer to whether Gerard was born with the same tendencies as his brother, Frank braces one hand on the back of his head, pinching his soft chin lightly between the yearning fingers of his other, and opens his mouth over Gerard’s slack one like he’s savoring a sweet fruit ripe with nectar liable to spill down his chin if he isn’t careful.
Frank holds him delicately so he doesn’t feel trapped, and yet firm enough so that he can’t slip away easily. Gerard’s hesitant mouth, after some time of Frank coaxing him with his own, opens like a budding rose, and their heads tilt in opposite, romantic directions, and the hand Frank had on the back of his midnight-black head curls around his neck, digging into the knit fabric of his scarf, and his other braces his rounded jaw.
Gerard’s lingering arms find shelter under the back of Frank’s coat, and when he’s the one to pull Frank closer to deepen their kiss and not the other way around, his suspicions are confirmed; whether his homosexuality is simply a velleity or he still harbors an attraction for women like Frank does, Gerard does not lead a linear life.
Running out of air in his lungs, Frank presses his scalding cheek to Gerard’s, nuzzling his nose into his ear, and says like a drowning man, “You’re a dream. Why won’t you be in my movie?”
Gerard smooths fervent hands up Frank’s back and down again. “I can’t,” he says, his soft voice almost drowned by the imperceptible fall of snow. “I’ve quit acting.”
Frank wilts into him like that information has physically wounded him, and he hides a kiss behind his ear where no one will find it and pulls away. He wants to ask why, wants to ask so many questions, but all he can do is trace the arch of his brow like a parting gift.
“You’re the only one I want,” he says, a double entendre, as Gerard steps away from the touch of his fingers; Frank’s arm stays hovering in the air for a moment. “At least think it over.”
Before Gerard turns and goes up the steps, he looks at Frank in a way that makes him fearful he might skip town before daybreak, bring his secrets and his warmth and his radiance somewhere else.
He goes back to the theater with his collar turned up against the increasing wind and his fingers crossed in the depths of his pockets.
When Frank returns, the guests have all gone, the music is quiet, and no traces of their bash are to be found, and when he slips into his apartment, Mikey is stretched out on his couch in his socks and undershirt, and the smell of coffee is in the air.
“Did Ray kick you out?” Frank asks, sloughing off his clothes on the way to his blessedly-awaiting bedroom.
When he’s inside the room, dressing for bed with limbs that nearly don’t work, there’s a crash from the living-room, and when Frank steps back out in his pajamas, he finds Mikey face-down on the oriental carpet.
“I am never drinking again,” he says, pausing between every other word for emphasis.
“You say that every time.” Frank goes to the kitchen to pour himself what’s left of the coffee.
“This time I mean it!”
Mikey appears a moment later when Frank is settled at the table with his mug warming his frozen fingers, and as he scrutinizes him, his glasses nowhere to be seen, Frank thinks for a panicked second that there’s evidence of the kiss on his face like a lipstick smudge or a bruise, but even if Gerard didn’t leave any trace of himself behind other than the taste on the back of Frank’s tongue and the phantom touches still tingling around the ridges of his spine, Mikey must still know what transpired between his brother and his best friend tonight. Even his spectacles couldn’t make it clearer to him, that’s how well he knows Frank, how well he knows his kin.
“He says he quit,” Frank says bluntly, bracing his elbows on the table. “Did you know that?”
Mikey sighs and sits down across from him. “I wasn’t sure if he made up his mind or not yet. That’s what this trip was supposed to be for.”
As Frank sips at his black coffee like he’s nursing a glass of expensive champagne, savoring its nutty warmth and ensuring he has something to hold onto to ground him, he wonders when Gerard made up his mind, and hopes it had nothing to do with him. Did Frank say or do something over the last fortnight to sway him? Was he so disgusted over the bowels of the theater that the dying art of vaudeville now makes up? Or was his decision clear the moment Frank made his proposition?
The only person that would know this is Gerard, so Frank asks Mikey instead, “Why did he leave London? And don’t tell me he needed a change of scenery, Mike, I know you far too well, and if he just needed a change of scenery then he would’ve agreed to play my hero. Why else would I be making a movie in the first place?”
A humorous twinkle shines in Mikey’s blind eyes. “So Ray is right? You better not tell him that, his head is big enough as it is.”
“I’m being serious here, man!” Frank says, still a bit drunk and half in love. “What is it that he’s hiding, that made him give up such an illustrious career so easily? It can’t be simply that he kisses other men under the street lamps.”
Mikey ignores that last bit, and says with some color, “For one, it wasn’t easy, alright? And it’s — not my story to tell.”
Frank wants to throttle his friend, wants to shake him and tell him that Gerard might flee in the night and he needs to know for the sake of his sanity and his constricted heart why he won’t give himself to Frank the way Frank knows he wants to. Every one of his senses could tell this, so doesn’t Mikey understand?
Mikey must see this on his face, for he shifts uncomfortably on the creaking wooden chair and reveals, eyes trained on the polished buttons of Frank’s pajamas, “The thing you think he’s hiding, it has nothing to do with his attractions, so you’re right about that. He had a boy in London, I forget the fellow’s name, and after they broke things off he found out about Gerard’s — secret, and, leaving himself wholly unattached from the affair, informed the man that runs the theater they both worked at and got Gerard kicked from the company. He sent me a wire when he was already on the boat home.”
Frank lets that sit in the air while he finishes the rest of his coffee. Mikey massages his temples silently.
He wonders what it could possibly be that Gerard is storing away in that ivory body of his, what it is that fills him with a constant, thrumming anxiety and which forced him to throw away so many years of hard work, talented work, because a jilted lover brought it to light. Frank tries to fill in the blanks of Mikey’s exposition with scandalous shapes, secret liaisons and crimes committed, but none of them fit, none of them make any sense, so Gerard remains shrouded in mystery.
He guesses it’ll all come out in time, as long as Gerard hasn’t already been scared off.
“Being in my movie would be just the thing then,” Frank says decisively, washing his mug out in the sink. “All Gerard needs to do is show how he’s just as good on a screen as he is on the stage and no one will care what he does in his free time.”
“As far as I know, no one knows why he left,” Mikey says, sounding close to sleep or death; with how potent his hooch tends to be, it could be either.
“Then he should do it for himself.”
Mikey drags himself up from the table and comes over. Dark shadows bruise the undersides of his eyes. He puts a hand on Frank’s shoulder consolingly and says, “I think you should give it up. Why don’t you just let me play your hero? I know the script just as good as you.”
Frank pats a sticky hand on his cheek. “You’re too ugly to play opposite Winnie Lovett. Now go get some sleep, I’m sure Ray is waiting for you.”
Mikey’s face turns the color of old brick, and he ducks away from Frank’s touch. “You’re a bastard, Frankie,” he says lightly, and stumbles from the apartment.
Stupidly, foolishly, Frank was hoping all would be forgotten from the night before, that everything before and after the kiss, not counting the good bits, was just a terrible phantasm. But then Gerard doesn’t show up to the theater that night for their last show; his inconspicuous spot in the back of the house taken over by a penniless young mother that Ray let in, and Frank realizes with a horrible sinking feeling that Gerard must have left. He must have really left.
While Frank runs around backstage like a gopher, attending to everyone he can attend to, he feels as if he’s missed out on more than just filling in that last square of the puzzle that makes up his movie production.
Ray keeps any eyebrow raises to himself, and Mikey, with an uncharacteristic look of pity on his angular, handsome face, tells Frank that Gerard would have let him know if he left town, and that maybe he should stop at the boarding house after curtain call, but Frank doubts that (as if he knows Gerard better than his own brother), and there’s no point in disturbing mean old Mrs. Hubbard because he doesn’t want to be riddled with disappointment when he’s already walking on a wire.
In a fit of childish hysterics before their last act, performed for the emptiest house they’ve had yet, Frank almost convinces himself that he doesn’t care about Gerard’s leaving, and that the kiss they shared was just the result of too much cheap whiskey and that it didn’t mean anything. They’re practically strangers and it meant nothing at all.
When their last performers board their coach and the doors are locked behind them, Frank trails Ray and Mikey, tired but happy-looking despite the empty seats tonight, holding hands all the way up the stairs, to their apartment, and he takes call after anxious call from the crew of his movie asking for what has to be the millionth time when photography is starting. Frank tells them what he tells them every time (“Soon, I hope. Stop worrying, won’t you?”), and goes to bed feeling disheartened over the whole thing again.
When the clock on the nightstand reads half past three, Frank is awoken by a knock at his door, and he answers it bleary-eyed and in his bathrobe and slippers to find Gerard standing in the hall looking at him tragically.
Before Frank can even unclamp his jaw, Gerard says, “I spent the whole day thinking the kiss we shared was a figment of my hungover imagination. I only remembered it wasn’t when I saw this scarf hanging from the bedpost.” He adds, almost sheepishly, “It still smells like you.”
Snowflakes add a luster to his hair, left shaggy in the late-early hour, and his clothes look as if they were put on in a hurry; Gerard looks as disheveled as he did last night, and Frank has a sudden, overwhelming renewal of faith, and a fantastic urge to wipe that melancholy look off his face in exchange for one of those rare, scintillating smiles.
Frank pulls him inside by said scarf, desperate to pull on other things, and kisses him in a clash of teeth and fervor. Gerard’s mouth tastes like chocolate, like his pipe was his hangover cure of choice, and Frank does his best to consume him. Gerard, slowly, opens up to him again; he presses his palms flat against Frank’s chest and makes pretty noises in the back of his pretty throat. Desperation meets desperation in the doorway of Frank’s apartment.
Refraining from picking Gerard up and carrying him over the threshold, Frank puts his hot mouth to his ear and says, “Tell me you’ve thought it over,” hoping Gerard knows he means more things than just one.
Gerard sighs heavily, everything Mikey said to Frank last night tingeing that single exhale of breath, and he holds onto Frank like if he doesn’t he’ll be dragged down through the floorboards. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. He’s here — that’s enough; Frank can afford some patience.
He decides to make coffee, to brew a pot of humanity for them both, and leaves Gerard to slowly take himself apart piece by piece in his imitation of a foyer. When the apartment smells like the earthy aroma of Maxwell House, there’s a hesitant creak, the delicate clearing of a throat, and Gerard’s unignorable presence behind him, filling up the small kitchen.
“My landlady doesn’t allow anyone in or out after curfew, so I had to sneak out through my window and scale the trellis like — ” Gerard lets out a nervous, breathy laugh that makes the back of Frank’s neck prickle pleasantly. “ — like a petty thief.”
“Or a romantic hero,” Frank suggests over his shoulder.
There’s a weighty pause, then Gerard says, “I don’t know how I’m going to go about returning in the morning.”
Frank pushes a mug of the coffee into his hands, standing close enough to smell Gerard perspiring nervously beneath his sweater, beneath the ghost of a floral perfume. He takes it gratefully, like Frank just handed him something wonderful, and takes a greedy sip.
“Just stay here,” Frank says, eyes trained on him. “We’ll orchestrate a heist in the morning to get your things.”
There’s a flicker of something indecipherable in Gerard’s greenish, ever-changing eyes, something that probably alludes to his secret burden, like it’s hidden among his bags in his room at the boarding house, and it threatens to incite Frank’s curiosity, his desperation to know every last detail of this beautiful creature, but neither says anything, and they take their coffees to the living-room where they sit on the couch like two bookends with enough space between them to be upsetting. They sit in positions that parallel their first breakfast date, with Frank having his legs curled beneath him and Gerard looking wholly out of place, with a posture as straight as an arrow.
“It’s just me,” Frank says. “Just us and two snoring boars across the hall. You can relax, you know.”
Gerard looks startled at first, clutching his steaming mug of coffee like a lifeline, then slowly retracts his legs onto the cushion and swivels so his back is against the arm. He wiggles his socked toes invitingly, or like he’s testing some unfamiliar waters, and Frank mirrors him, nearly spilling his coffee and making Gerard laugh (for a brief second he contemplates dumping the whole mug over his head just to hear him make that sound again), and touches his feet gingerly to Gerard’s. He wants to run his foot suggestively up Gerard’s leg, wants to put his hands to Gerard’s suffocated skin, but he relents.
They sit like that until their coffees are gone, watching each other through their lashes, and after some time, when Frank is growing sleepy despite the bright spot of warmth sitting on the couch across from him like a naked filament and the caffeine running through his veins, Gerard says softly, “I’ve never been in any sort of moving picture before.”
Frank perks up like someone rang the dinner bell or pinched him on the arm, and he seizes the moment like he’s catching a firefly in a jar.
“Neither have half of the cast,” he says, trying not to sound too eager. “Some have never even been on a stage. Granted, those are the extras, but.”
That tragic look comes back into Gerard’s pale, round face, making him look like the moon desperate to catch a glimpse of the sun as they pass each other by like ships in the night. He looks like he’s going over everything in his mind that’s gone through Frank’s, and Frank resists the urge to take his hands and beg.
Finally, having come to a conclusion, and still not looking Frank directly in the eye (though Frank wishes he would — he has the most arresting eyes), Gerard says, “Is the script any good?”
Frank doesn’t need to make a scene, to shout and cheer and tell him he doesn’t need the theater anyway for how they treated him; he just gets up calmy from the couch to retrieve his personal copy of the script, all traces of sleep now gone from his mind and body, and drops the curling and ink-blotted pages into Gerard’s lap.
He makes them both another pot of coffee, and Frank watches in rapt attention over his mug as Gerard reads the script over, eyebrows dancing on his forehead and pink mouth forming the words. He even laughs to himself a couple of times. He’s finished before he even takes a single sip of his second cup of coffee; they are making a two-reeler after all.
And then, without any verbal confirmation, Gerard gets up from the couch and Frank follows suit, and they reenact the scenario until the first golden rays of sunlight are peaking through the curtains.
Frank and Gerard fall into routine, and into each other, without any particular conversation shared. It just happens, as natural and seamless as the changing of the seasons, and neither have to talk about it.
The cast and crew of the picture is beyond pleased to finally begin production, and Gerard is slightly surprised to find he knows them all already when they have their first day of shooting, having met them at the holiday bash, but he’s just thankful enough that he doesn’t have to introduce himself to them that he doesn’t bring this up to Frank. All of them either being homosexuals or in show business or both, Gerard befriends them all fairly quickly, and it warms Frank to see him being absorbed into his life so easily.
The woman that’s been hired to do the grooming slathers Gerard’s beautiful face that first morning in waxy, oversaturated makeup that she’s adamant will show up well on camera and fits him into one of his brother’s suits; the short sleeves and popping buttons make them all laugh, Gerard included. They’re off to a very good start.
As Frank watches from behind the camera as Gerard and Winnie run around each other with their wonderful chemistry, speaking lines to each other that will never be heard, he feels like Gerard was always meant to be a part of this, was always meant to be here. Even Mikey says this, from his chair with the word Producer stitched into the back that he got from God-knows-where.
Gerard moves into Frank’s apartment for the foreseeable future after devising a plan to retrieve his personal belongings from Mrs. Hubbard’s that’s wacky enough to warrant its own short, and he keeps a particular bag of his unpacked and stuffed under the bed, but Frank doesn’t ask about that.
They photograph the movie each morning when the sun is at its brightest, and in the hours between leaving the set and dinnertime, when they’re both weary and sick-feeling from the bright, almost painful lights, they lay in bed with the phonograph cranked tracing the lines of each other’s bodies behind the shut curtains.
Gerard doesn’t elaborate on what Mikey told Frank that night, but he lets himself be touched, every inch of himself, and while Frank doesn’t find any answers in the hollows of his collarbones or the crease that joins his thigh and groin, it’s good enough. Anything Gerard offers him is good enough, and he’s sure if one day Gerard lets him look in that bag he has hidden under the bed, both literally and metaphorically, Frank will accept whatever is folded away in it with an open heart, because he doesn’t think there’s a single part of Gerard he could condemn.
(He still wonders though, because even though they’re together most of the time now, Gerard never smells like women’s perfume anymore, and there are never any traces of lipstick on his mouth except for the makeup he has to wear in front of the camera that he makes sure to wash off thoroughly the minute they leave the set. Frank simply wonders about it all sometimes; he also wonders if this makes him a conspiracy theorist.)
Slowly Gerard begins to unthaw; his smiles linger longer and his eyes are brighter and don’t shift so nervously anymore, and Frank can see his bones and his muscles and his tendons relaxing, and he knew getting Gerard to play his hero was a good idea.
And then, halfway through photography when Frank is yearning for the day he can send their editor away with the reel — because while the theater is closed for the season, making a movie is quite the task on its own (though don’t tell Ray or Mikey that) — Winnie Lovett is called away for a family emergency and isn’t able to be photographed for the rest of her scenes.
Production is put on hold until Frank figures out what he’s going to do, and he and Gerard go down into the theater the day they lose their heroine and lay on the stage under the singular glow of the ghost light, talking over their options. They’re all thankful for the short break, but this has to be a worst case scenario, and Mikey takes a taxi into the next county over to talk to a girl he knows to see if she’s looking for a bit of work. He claims she looks just like Winnie, but Frank isn’t sure he believes that.
With Gerard resting his head on Frank’s chest, shivering faintly under the afghan they brought from upstairs because they never keep the heat on in the theater at night, Frank wonders aloud whether they should wrap the movie up where it is, or cut out Winnie’s parts, or just scrap the whole thing and be done, and he drifts off with Gerard murmuring encouragements into the underside of his chin.
He wakes with a start, not even realizing he fell asleep, but he did, and he’s tucked under the afghan snuggly with his scarf balled up beneath his head — and completely alone.
“Gerard?” he calls, his voice echoing throughout the darkened house, bouncing from chair to empty chair.
When there’s no answer, not even from the ghosts that are said to haunt every theater, Frank gets up, his lower back aching and stiff from too long laying on the unforgiving stage, and he follows the magnetizing force of Gerard’s presence like a moth to a flame. It carries him to one of the dressing-rooms, where he can see light spilling out into the hall from a crack in the door. Frank hears rustling from within when he draws near, the muted shuffling of feet, and he presses his face to the scant opening to find Gerard with his back to the door.
At the sight of him, Frank is thrown back to the first night he spotted Gerard, smoking his pipe outside and half turned away. Frank thought Gerard was a girl then, at first glance, and he’s reminded of that moment now because here Gerard is — wearing a dress. And if he didn’t know the back of Gerard’s head like he does, couldn’t pick out the curve of his spine and the width of his shoulders from a pile of blurred photographs, he’d think the theater was being broken into.
The dress Gerard is wearing is from a box on the floor of costumes left behind by past acts, either generously donated or forgotten entirely, and this specific one, slipping off his freckled shoulders and cinched at the waist with a crude bow that desperately needs to be ironed, was worn by a girl that had some sort of comedy act, Frank thinks. Though it never looked as good on her as it does on Gerard, incorrect proportions and all.
Gerard’s hair, always so meticulously styled, is loose and curling around his ears, and Frank watches him turn this way and that, admiring himself in the standing mirror, sliding his hands up and down the beaded material of the dress, his fingers rasping over the plastic in the quiet room. His clothes are discarded, cast off to the side like they were the costume all along, and he stands there barefoot looking like some will-o'-the-wisp that drifted in through one of the windows, pale and shimmering and beautiful, not meant to be seen by the naked human eye.
Suddenly, like someone dropped an anvil on him, it hits Frank. It all slots into place at the sight of this pale dress accentuating the feminine lines of Gerard’s body, and he feels so tremendously stupid. The perfume, the lipstick, everything — Gerard is the beautiful woman he kept stashed away in his room at Mrs. Hubbard’s, that he has stuffed under the bed upstairs. It all makes such gorgeous sense, and Frank can’t believe he didn’t figure it out sooner.
A sort of ecstasy comes over him then, and he melts a little in relief; whatever it was that Gerard’s lover used against him back in London was surely something Frank knew he’d have no trouble looking past, but something as simple as an affinity for women’s clothing relieves him. That realization, and the way the fringe of the short dress rests against Gerard’s thighs, makes him feel as if he could become one with the structure of the wall.
In his relief, Frank leans a little too heavily on the door, and it creaks loudly, slicing through the intimate moment like a knife. Gerard spins around with a gasp, the beads of the dress exclaiming in alarm, and the look on his face is one Frank never wants to see.
Neither says anything for a moment, and Frank floats into the room, his hands extended palm-up. Gerard retreats into himself, and he backs up right into the vanity, knocking over tubes and bottles in a symphony of startled sound.
“Gerard.” The name escapes Frank’s mouth like a sigh, and suddenly, as suddenly as the realization of Gerard’s secret came to him, he knows exactly what he can do to save his movie.
He takes Gerard into his arms, holding his trembling body swathed in silk, and asks him, reminiscent of when he first asked him to be in the production, if he’ll play his heroine.
Gerard tries to escape his hold, choking on delicate sobs, but Frank won’t let him go, he wants him to know he’s not like his former lover. “Are you crazy?” he says raggedly, wildly, on the verge of tears. “Don’t you know how much money I had to pay so this — this skeleton stays in its closet?”
Frank pulls back, tucking Gerard’s black hair behind his ears and caressing the slight stubble on the edge of his jaw. “Plenty of men wear women’s clothing in show business,” he tries to amend.
Gerard, looking like he’s pulling it from the depths of his tortured soul, says, “I’m not just playing dress up, Frank. When I put on silks and furs and — It’s the only time I feel like I’m not wearing a costume.”
His eyes cut away from Frank’s like he can’t bear to witness his reaction to that, and Frank brushes the pads of his thumbs gently across his glossy lids. “I know,” he whispers, and kisses his unassuming mouth. “I know.”
“So you understand?”
“No, I don’t,” Frank says bluntly, holding his face in his hands more firmly. “You’re already more beautiful than any woman I’ve seen. With some makeup and maybe a hairpiece, no one will know who it is they're watching.”
“Frank … ”
“It’s gone out of fashion since the studios realized they can’t keep taking advantage of their Stars, but I don’t have to put your name anywhere in the credits, and I wasn’t planning on doing anything promotional anyway. Don’t you see how this could work?”
“People will know, Frank,” Gerard says harshly, breaking away from him once and for all. “They always know. Look at what they did to Oscar Wilde — he wore one too many ruffles and they buried him with craven hisses! I can't let that happen, I can’t let myself be photographed as — as myself.”
Frank’s heart constricts painfully in his chest at Gerard’s panic-stricken display of emotion, but the way he looks right now, completely unraveled and with such inflection in his careful voice, only propels Frank further. To have Gerard in his movie is no longer just a simple want, or even a need, it’s a desperation as forceful as a meteor crashing to earth.
“It might work if it was fully slapstick,” Gerard goes on, “If I was falling all over myself in every shot and it was obvious I was just a man in a dress playing a part, but what you’re saying is to deceive everyone — ”
“I’m saying to be yourself — ”
“And what about after you get the final reel? And you grow bored of me and tell the papers who plays your girl?”
Frank wants to shout, I’m not him!, but he doesn’t, he puts an arm around Gerard’s waist, holds him as close as he’ll allow, and assures, “I would never do that to you. I would marry you to prove it if I could.”
Gerard’s face falls into his shoulder like his neck is just a feeble stem unable to support the bud of his head.
“You deserve to be immortalized, just like this,” Frank whispers to the dust motes floating in the beam of the lamp.
“You’re sure?” Gerard says meekly.
“As sure as the sun rises. All I need to make this movie is sunshine, celluloid, electricity … and you.”
Gerard, with his hesitant touch, takes Frank’s hand and slides it up his naked thigh until his fingers breach the hem of the beaded dress, parting the fringe, and disappears into the warmest thing in this entire theater. Frank wraps his other hand around the bulb of his throat and kisses him again.
“Who will take the hero’s place?” Gerard breathes into his mouth.
“No one but me.”
With touches colliding and their quivering bodies sliding into perfect place, sounds and words soaking into the ancient wallpaper, Gerard lets Frank take him in that abandoned dressing-room in the quiet, blue-tinged hours before the world wakes.
Frank would say he’s surprised they got away with it, with only Mikey and Ray aware of who it is he’s kissing before the camera, but he really isn’t. Nobody even bats an eye; they cut Winnie’s scenes from the reel and photograph everything again, and it’s beautifully simple.
That friend of Mikey’s was never able to take the place as heroine, but for a few dollars she’s happy to let them use her name anyway with no questions asked. Frank still wants Gerard’s name to be attached to the credits somehow, so, after finding out Gerard has an affinity for art that he also kept wrapped up neatly in his bag under the bed along with his powders and his stockings, he asks him to draw up the intertitles, and Gerard agrees.
The Marigold lets Frank use their screen after closing to do a final showing when the high-school-going boy they hired finishes cutting the picture, and even Ray attends; Frank raises his eyebrow more than once at the way he lights up the second the projector starts to whir from its hidden alcove above their heads.
Russ, the man of many talents that he is, plays the piano in accompaniment so they aren’t forced to sit in complete silence, and while their faces, with their whitened skin and corked features, look down upon the small cast and crew in all their flickering glory, Frank takes Gerard’s hand in the safety of the dark room and they watch the whole world move before their wondering eyes.