Casting Couch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Clarissa's first, last and only boyfriend dubbed her and her friend Beth "Siskel and Ebert in drag," before he gave up on the relationship, and bailed. Clarissa didn't really mind. The guy was becoming a drag himself. And Clarissa's friendship with Beth, and their movie watching binges, were part of the basic furniture of her life--for which she wasn't about to apologize to anyone.

            Gradually, their friendship developed into something more; they became a recognized campus couple. "You two make nerddom seem so cool," their best friend Michael once observed wistfully. "It's 'cause you're so into what you're into."

             Films held them together. They loved to watch and they loved to vigorously argue--and then make it up sweetly, later. Each month they retreated farther into their private world. There was a small fire in their dorm sophomore year; Clarissa and Beth remained oblivious. Throughout the alarm, the evacuation, the sirens and hoses, the two of them sat in their shared room, unable to tear themselves away from the end of Escape from the Planet of the Apes. An astonished hall monitor burst in to find Beth sobbing over the fate of Zira and Cornelius, and Clarissa with her skinny arm around her shorter friend, soothing her, assuring her the chimps' baby was in good hands with Ricardo Montalban.

            Sometimes Michael, who had come out in September of freshman year, and ran all campus gay and lesbian events, chided them for putting films above politics. "You concentrate on trivia, and completely miss subtext," he told Clarissa once. "You can talk about Judy Garland for an hour, and never once consider her role as a gay icon."

            "She may be the patron saint of gay men. And I know she said, 'On the day I die, all the flags on Fire Island will be at half mast,' which was a pretty good line. But what does all that have to do with me?" Clarissa asked.

            "It has everything to do with you!" he scolded. "Because the day she died, all the gay men weren't on Fire Island--they went to the Stonewall Inn to comfort each other. That's why the place was packed. And when the police tried to raid--something in those men snapped. Don't you get it? Judy Garland is like the Rosa Parks of the gay civil rights movement! These are the things, Clarissa, that just pass you and Beth right by."

            Clarissa was not convinced. Celluloid mattered--to hell with theory and history, to hell with politics. Glamour, and romance, and magic mattered . . . She and Beth continued to miss Gay and Lesbian Coalition meetings, to drop out of the campus social life, to turn in half-assed class work, and watch movies on into the night.

            After college, they commenced their lives as downwardly mobile slackers. They moved into a grungy fifth-floor walk-up on Avenue A in the East Village--what Clarissa's parents still called the Lower East Side of New York. Clarissa temped, and Beth landed a job working for a small, lousy, industrial short film-production company. Increasingly, Clarissa noticed,  Beth acted like this gave her some kind of special new insight into cinema.

            "You just don't look at it holistically," she lectured one night, as they sprawled on the battered green sofa Clarissa had adroitly rescued from the curb months earlier. "You think a film is something you can dissect and then redesign--instead of an organic whole."

            Clarissa snorted. "C'mon. Spare me, Beth, okay?" They were eating Doritos out of the bag, passing it back and forth between them, as they watched Gone with the Wind. Again. They were confirming what both already knew; the knock-offs and spin-offs, on TV and in movie houses, would never come close to kissing the hoopskirted hem of the original.

            "Seriously," Beth pressed, her eyes large and earnest in her round, bland face. She recently had gotten her blond hair cut short, so that she looked, to Clarissa's eyes, as startled and innocent as a newly sheared lambkin. "I mean, this was how Vivian became a star. It was fate. Why are you out to rewrite history?"

            "I'm not. I'm just saying." Clarissa grabbed back the bag of crumbly, fragrant Doritos and settled it into her lap, as Atlanta burned. Her long legs were crossed under her, her feet snuggled into their sweatsocks. Her hair was dyed a luxurious black, and fell down her back in wavy curls. She was tall and fine-boned, and Beth was short and round; in this regard they did resemble Siskel and Ebert when they argued.

            "I'm saying," Clarissa went on, "it just seems a damned shame. Because, if you could fix that one thing, Wuthering Heights would be the perfect movie. Better than this one, even."

            "Nonsense!" Beth glared.

            "This is a great spectacle." Clarissa gestured at the screen. "But with Larry and Vivian in it--I'm sorry. Wuthering Heights would be the greatest romantic film of all time. No contest."

            "Clarissa. Please. You're watching the greatest romantic film of all time. Now, maybe if they'd made Wuthering Heights with Olivier and Danny Kaye--"

            "He may have loved Danny Kaye, but he loved Vivian, too," Clarissa snapped.

            They sat in silence for a while, putting their private civil war on hold, as they viewed MGM's.

            Ten minutes later, Beth started up again. "And anyway, what's wrong with Merle Oberon?"

            "Please! Merle Oberon sucks! She was an uptight Hollywood so and so. Fine for drawing-room melodramas. But tell me she's as wild and raw and bizarre as Catherine Earnshaw. Tell me her hair smells of heather." Clarissa laughed derisively. "I don't think so."

            It was dangerous when they baited each other. Beth picked up the remote, aimed it at the set, and turned off the movie; this argument was too important for distractions. She leaned over to turn on the kitsch porcelain Elvis lamp on the floor, and pivoted to face Clarissa.

            "Let's get this straight. You don't think Merle Oberon did a good acting job?"

            "Oh, I guess she acted okay. It was a big stretch for her. But Olivier didn't have to act, don't you get it? He was Heathcliff. Just like Vivian Leigh would've been Cathy, if they'd offered her the role."

            "Well . . . did she want it?" Beth asked uncertainly. One damnable advantage Clarissa had was her encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood gossip and movie trivia.

            "Are you kidding? Laurence Olivier begged William Wyler to use her. But Wyler said, 'Oh no. We have enough unknowns in this film already--you, Geraldine Fitzgerald, David Niven. We need a big star, like Merle Oberon.'" Clarissa snorted as she thrust the bag of Doritos back at Beth.

            Beth stared down at it suspiciously for a second before accepting it. "So, he and Vivian Leigh were, like, involved back then?"

            "Yes! They were just coming over to the States. They were still married to other people, but living together--they fell in love making Fire Over England. Lousy movie. They were unknowns, then he got cast as Heathcliff--and then she won the Scarlett war! Both films came out in '39. But just think, if she'd only been in both!"

            Beth now looked uncertain, in the face of such rapturous enthusiasm. "Well . . . but I think Merle Oberon is fine."

            "Oh, she's fine, she's perfectly adequate." Clarissa's contempt was withering. "But don't you see? It could have been . . . transcendent."

            Beth got very loud at the beginning of fights--but she claimed that Clarissa bullied her, and that was often true. She looked at the floor, now, and sighed.

            "Well, maybe so. Who cares. I don't feel like watching the rest of this--let's put it away. You temping tomorrow?"

            "The agency hasn't called."

            "Well, then you return it." Beth ejected the tape from the VCR, and put it back in its plain black carrying case.

            "Listen, sweetie," Clarissa said sheepishly. "We can watch the rest. I mean, I didn't mean to--"

            "Naah. We got the idea." Beth, Clarissa suspected, enjoyed inspiring guilt. She knelt at the tower of black plastic video cases that teetered by the VCR. "But one thing we could really do, Clar, is label these suckers."

            "Yeah, we'll get to it--"

            "No, tonight. Really. Come on." Beth was tidier by nature; she pressed her advantage. "We don't even know what we have at this point."

            Beth popped tape after tape in the VCR, and they made a game of how quickly they could name the movies that flashed onto the screen. A shot of Marcello Mastrianni, looking young and gorgeous in shades: "La Dolce Vita!" Clarissa called out. The undulating pattern of a big, ornate Busby Berkeley production number appeared; "Goldiggers of '32!" Beth yelled --and scribbled a label.

            As she neared the bottom of the stack, Beth came across a tape that puzzled her. It seemed to shine as she lifted it out of the box, with the dull lucence of pewter. She held it up to her eyes, and as her wide body blocked the light of the Elvis lamp on the floor, the video cassette truly seemed to glow, with the silvery brightness of gray on a "silver" screen. Very trippy.

            "What the hell is that?" Clarissa asked, craning her long neck for a look. "Some new novelty item your company's marketing?"

            "Not. I figure it's one of your wacky purchases."

            "Not. Probably something Michael lent us."

            Beth popped it in the machine. "This is why we really have to keep things labeled, so we don't--"

            "Spare me, sweetie. Please?"

            The film, as it turned out, was rewound to the very beginning of the tape. It was old, black and white . . .

            "Wuthering Heights!" Clarissa exclaimed. "I didn't know we even had this! Now you'll see what I mean about a near miss."

            She gazed at Beth, who still sat on the floor, looking bewildered. Beth switched off Elvis, and scooted back up on the couch; she could swear she'd seen a bizarre screen credit at the start--but it had to be a trick of her eyes.

            Both women knew the film. They watched Olivier, as the grim, older Heathcliff, terrify his guest. They watched Flora Robson as Ellen begin the tale of the place. Something seemed a little . . . off to both of them about the sequences with Heathcliff and Cathy as children.

            "I thought the kids were such perfect matches for the adult actors, last time I saw this," Clarissa said, puzzled.

            "Yeah, me too."

            "But that little girl . . . doesn't look like Merle Oberon at all."

            "She's too thin," Beth agreed. "And her hair's too light." Picking up the bag of Doritos--now down to the moist, crumbliest dregs--she took a pinch, and handed it back to Clarissa.

            When Catherine Earnshaw appeared as a young woman, both Clarissa and Beth gasped. It was impossible. It could not be. Yet there she was--upturned nose and vixen's eye, Miss Fiddle-de-dee Vivian Leigh herself, young and lovely, in black and white, talking with her original British accent.

            Clarissa tried to speak, and managed a noise like their apartment's rattly pipe letting off steam.

            Beth's eyes were wide beneath the blond down of her hair. She switched on Elvis. But she did not switch off the film. "Clarissa. This is a really juvenile gag."

            "What--?" Clarissa did not seem to hear her. She was gaping at the screen.

            "I don't know where you got this, or how you did       it--"

            "Shut up," Clarissa breathed. "I don't know how they did this, either. But it's wonderful. God, look at it."

            They watched Heathcliff and Cathy scramble across the moor together, laughing. The chemistry between the two young actors, the sensual pleasure and joy they found in being together, was obvious.

            "Their scenes in Fire Over England are like this," Clarissa murmured. "It created a scandal on the set." She reached over and grabbed Beth's chubby hand. A head of sheared blond fuzz leaned into her dark curls. It was how they watched such films, when harmony reigned in their home.

            They watched Leigh, like a spoiled little minx, toy with Olivier, and with David Niven--and then marry Niven, when Olivier disappeared.

            "Okay, okay," Beth grudgingly conceded. "So, maybe you're right. Maybe this is better."

            Clarissa's rightness was so obvious, she did not bother to reply. Why gloat?

            By the final scenes of the movie, as Cathy died, both women were in tears. Beth disengaged her hand, and hunted around under the couch for the Kleenex box. Soon they both were honking away.

            The tape skidded into snowy static. It was Clarissa who picked up the remote and silenced it.

            "I still don't know how they did that. But bless them, whoever it was. Bless them."

            "Do you suppose," Beth said slowly in the darkness, "that they could have shot it both ways? With both actresses? You'd think we'd have heard . . ."

            "Maybe it was morphing." Clarissa still spoke in hushed, amazed tones. "But the chemistry, everything was so right, I don't see how . . . " At last, she rose from the couch, stretched out her long legs, and turned on the overhead light by the door. It broke the cinematic spell. "Or maybe it was God. Maybe he wanted to see the movie made properly also, so he came down and changed it."

            "Right. Sure." Beth sounded less than convinced. She stood, and swept the nacho crumbs off the sofa into the empty bag.

            Clarissa ejected the tape, and held it in the air. Under the overhead glare, it was still gray, but otherwise looked ordinary. "Anyhow, I'll take this with me to the video store tomorrow, and see if they've ever heard anything about it."

            They retired to their large, frameless futon on the floor, and got lost under the downy comforter. They made love for hours, inspired by the most romantic movie of all time, that never was.

 

                                    *                                  *                                  *

           

            Their video rental place of choice catered to arty East Village snobs; films were arranged on shelves alphabetically by director. The store stocked many well-known commercial releases, but also a variety of old, hard-to-find films, and foreign films, and bad, campy films on a rack labeled "Scud" video. Clarissa arrived in the afternoon. She returned Gone with the Wind, and awkwardly, shyly, held up the gray cassette, feeling stupid.

            "What's that?" the store clerk asked. "One of ours?"

            "No . . . I'm not sure what it is . . . " Clarissa glanced nervously at the line of impatient people behind her. "I was wondering if you could help me figure it out."

            The clerk was about her age--out of school for a few years, a few inches shorter than she. He had a nose ring and a shaved head, and wore a plain white undershirt. "Well, what's on it?"

            "Wuthering Heights. With Laurence Olivier--and Vivian Leigh." Clarissa felt herself blushing.

            The clerk stared at her blankly for a moment. Then he said slowly, as if talking to an idiot: "Well. I guess you know what it is, then."

            "No, but it has Vivian--" Clarissa cut herself off, and stared. She wandered away from the counter, toward a poster hanging on the far wall. It was for a movie she had never heard of--Corporate Affairs. It featured a dark, compelling older man, with flashing eyes and a square jaw. He was dressed in a well-tailored suit and looked oddly familiar--or like someone who ought to be a star. His name appeared above: Auberon Olivier.

            "Who the hell is that?" she asked a woman perusing the names of directors on shelves to her right.

            The woman glanced at the poster, threw her a weird look, and went back to browsing. "What planet are you from?" she asked irritably.

            Clarissa had meant to ask the clerk to play a bit of her tape on his machine. Instead she found herself backing out of the store. She gripped the gray video cassette tightly; it felt clammy in her hand.

            Once home, she called Beth at her office. "That's right, sweetie. Auberon Olivier. Now, I know Sir Larry had kids--Tarquin with Jill Esmond, and whoever the other ones are with Joan Plowright. But he and Vivian Leigh never had a child. She had a couple miscarriages, I think, that helped lead to her breakdown. So what the hell does this mean?"

            "It means that one of Larry's kids with Plowright is named Auberon, and you've forgotten?" Beth suggested helpfully. Clarissa could hear her fingers clicking away on the word processor.

            "No. This guy is older. And besides--he's the son of Olivier and Vivian Leigh. I mean--you'd have to see his face. He just is."

            "Okay, whatever."

            Beth did not seem to share her sense of urgency; this was exasperating to Clarissa. "And besides, he's, like, this big star, apparently. And we've never heard of him. Look--ask the people in your office about him. Ask your boss."

            In a fond, patient tone, Beth promised to ask. When she called back a few minutes later, her voice was very different--thin and strained.

            "Clar? They say he is their son. They can't believe we never heard of him. They think I'm kidding. They said he was 007 for awhile . . ."

            Clarissa said nothing.

            "They said--he was really good in Howard's End."

            She did not feel her long legs giving way, but Clarissa suddenly found herself slumped on the green couch.

            "But, I mean, that was your favorite Watergate cannibal, Anthony Hopkins, wasn't it? Wasn't it?"

            "Of course it was."

            Beth exhaled. "Just checking. If I'm going nuts, I don't want to go nuts alone."

            "Wait till you get home. We'll figure this out then," Clarissa promised her, and hung up.

 

                                                *                      *                      *

 

            "What if it's some sort of--hiccup--in the alignment of the universe?" Clarissa theorised.

            "Mmm. Or in the music of the spheres?" Beth sat Indian style, her blond head lost inside an extra-large, shapeless, blue college sweatshirt. At last she nosed through, and glanced up to find Clarissa staring down at her crossly.

            "Well, do you have any hot explanations?"

            Beth shrugged. "No. I just know that once that video played the movie that way, the world decided it had to do the same thing."

            "Maybe the world changed first. Or maybe we're both messed up--maybe it's always been this way." Clarissa felt scared. Movies were the one thing she had always been sure  of . . . "Maybe we both got our minds screwed up, and convinced ourselves it was Merle Oberon who played Cathy."

            "Why the hell would we think that? I've never even seen her in anything else."

            "Yes, you have. In--"

            "Skip it." Beth picked up the gray cassette, which had acquired a faint luster in the early evening light, and turned it over in her hands. "I just feel like you did it, somehow. You changed it. By wanting to see it that way so badly. With Vivian Leigh."

            This sounded to Clarissa too much like blame. She placed her hands on her slender hips. "Oh, come on, Beth. And you've never wanted to see a film with a different cast?"

            "No. I take a holistic approach, I told you--"

            "Holistic, my ass. Aren't you the woman who thinks The Wizard of Oz would be so much better if they'd made it with Shirley Temple and W.C. Fields?"

            "I never said it would be better. I think it would be awful. All I said was, it would be strange and maybe interesting to see it the way they originally intended. That's all."

            "Yeah, well," Clarissa grumbled. Their bickering tired her, sometimes. The tiny apartment could get claustrophobic. She snatched up the gray cassette, hopped forward to the VCR, and balancing on her skinny haunches, popped the tape into the machine. "I want another chance to figure out what's up with this thing. Whether it's morphing, or what."

            The tape was rewound to the beginning--though Clarissa could not remember either of them rewinding it. Soon the screen was filled with clouds, and stirring music swelled--but not the music of Wuthering Heights.

            "The Wizard of Oz," Beth said in the same strange, strangled voice she had used earlier, calling from the office. And when the names Shirley Temple and W.C. Fields appeared, neither woman was really surprised.

            Still, it was a shock to see thirteen-year-old Shirley running down that country road with Toto. She stopped to ask the little dog if Miss Gulch had hurt him. "No--but she tried to," Shirley piped, in her husky, adorable voice. And they were off again, and running.

            "Jesus Christ." Clarissa sank back into the couch.

            When Shirley ran into the farmyard, calling for Auntie Em, they could see how the screenplay had been written just for her. The dopey, cutesy dialogue that Judy Garland had somehow made charming, delivering it in her deep, serious voice--was just too saccharine, coming from Shirley. When she fell off the railing into the pigpen, Beth cracked a grin.

            "Good!" she said, emphatically.

            When Shirley launched into her gruff, lisping, wide-eyed rendition of "Over the Rainbow," Clarissa and Beth both shut their eyes and covered their ears, and rolled around on the couch making retching noises.

            "Oh, God, no," Clarissa moaned. "How could she? How could she?"

            They both kept threatening to shut the thing off--but they didn't. They watched it all the way through, with a kind of horrified fascination. It was wild seeing W.C. Fields as Professor Marvel, grumbling nasally and gazing into the crystal ball. And when Shirley, awakened after the twister, tiptoed out into Technicolor and observed: "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," it had no ironic edge. She sounded as cute as if she were saying, "Oh my goodness!"

            "Unbelievable," Beth murmured, with a pained expression. "What damage control Judy Garland did! They should have given her a special Oscar just for that."

            The movie played itself out. The supporting players seemed the same; Billie Burke as Glinda gave Shirley a run for her money in the sugary-sweet department. But something seemed to be wrong with the rusted Tin Man.

            "That's not Jack Haley," Beth said.

            "Nope."

            Soon he was oiled, and began to talk.

            "My God, it's Jed Clampitt!"

            "Buddy Ebsen," Clarissa agreed.

            Whenever it got to be too weird or too cute, Beth and Clarissa clutched at each other, and Beth hid her eyes in Clarissa's shirt.

            Still, overall, Shirley looked convincingly young and brave as Dorothy, and entered the Emerald City with her friends, and melted the wicked witch, and confronted the cantankerous Fields . . . and woke up in her own bed, to earnestly tell her favorite people she would never leave again. "Because this is my room. And you're all here. And--oh, Auntie Em--there's no place like home!"

            The images on the screen gave way to snow, and blaring noise. Beth killed them with the remote.

            "It was the best role she ever had," Clarissa said wonderingly. "Too bad she never had it."

            "Yeah, well. They gave her another vehicle like it--but it stunk," Beth recalled.

            "Right. The Bluebird of Happiness."

            "No. I think it was called Since You Went Away."

            Clarissa rolled her eyes; didn't her foolish love know better than to challenge her? "Since You Went Away was a war movie--it came later. It was her one decent adult film. But Bluebird was meant to be her big color fantasy vehicle --and it bombed. She was, like, fourteen."

            The dispute caught them up, and got their minds off the strangeness of recent events.

            "I think Since You Went Away was the big fantasy vehicle," Beth insisted. 'Cause these grandparents were in suspended animation, till Shirley shows up--"

            "That's Bluebird!" Clarissa yelled. She hunted around under the couch for their two fat bible testaments: a video guide, and an encyclopedia of screen legends. With these, she had triumphed over Beth in many battles. "Here, dope, I'll show you."

            She flipped open the encyclopedia of the stars. She sat reading, the book in her lap; Beth watched her gaunt face change amidst the black hair. Clarissa became very quiet and pale.

            "Well?" Beth challenged. "I was right, huh?"

            Clarissa closed the book, and pressed her lips together. "We were both wrong. Shirley Temple never made either film. She did, however, star as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz."

            Beth let out a howl of protest and opened the book to see. It was true, it was there, and there was some kind of insane logic to it; Shirley was loaned to MGM for Wizard, and while her performance in it did not age well, according to the book, it was a big hit at the time. People had been beginning to consider her box office poison--but Wizard assured her transition to adult roles. Beth paged through the Video Guide, and found its contents similarly altered. The Wizard with Shirley received three and a half stars.

            "Looks like she stayed in movies, and never married Agar or Black," Clarissa mused. "Looks like she kept her maiden name."

            "But . . ." Beth protested guiltily and mournfully, "but, what about Judy Garland?" She turned back to the book containing biographies of the stars. There was barely a paragraph under the name; Judy Garland had appeared opposite Mickey Rooney in a few Andy Hardy films--and that was about all. She flipped ahead to read the entry on Vivian Leigh. It was much longer than it used to be, and spoke of Wuthering Heights and the birth of her son Auberon.

            "What have we done?" Beth cried, almost keening. "What have we done?"

            Clarissa was sitting on the floor in front of the silent screen. She ejected the shining, silvery cassette, and turned it around in her hands. "What we have here," she said dramatically, "is a magic video tape."

            Beth looked up from the book. "You really think it would play any film with any cast we wanted?"

            "Maybe. Or maybe it only plays the casts--that almost were."

            "And then they become real."

            "Looks that way." Clarissa was pleased at how calm she sounded. At least they had an answer--even if it made no sense.

            "Well . . . that's a real responsibility for us." Beth said slowly. "I mean, there's a chance that we could improve some almost perfect movies--"

            "But we have to be very, very careful."

            "Yes. At least we have good taste," Beth said, satisfied that the magic tape, wherever it came from, had fallen into the right hands. Her large gray eyes were thoughtful. She leaned back on the couch, and scratched her knee through her after-work jeans. Her gaze locked with Clarissa's. "What do you want to watch?" she asked quietly.
            Clarissa leaned back on her elegant hands, smiling up from the floor. She thought for a moment. "I heard they almost made Casablanca with George Raft," she said at last.

            "What?"

            "Instead of Bogey."

            "Who the hell is George Raft?" asked Beth. "I heard they wanted to use Ronald Reagan."

            "What? You're dreaming. You're making it up."

            "That's what I heard." Beth, tired of being sneered at, leaned forward off the couch, picked up the cassette, and shot it into the VCR. "And if this thing plays it, I guess it must be true. I guess they were considering it."

            She stretched out her hand to rewind the tape--but Clarissa grabbed the plump hand in mid-air. "Oh, no you don't. You're not ruining Casablanca by putting Ronald Reagan in it, Beth. Not Casablanca! Don't you think you've already done enough damage tonight?"

            Beth looked surprised and hurt. What do you mean?"

            "To The Wizard of Oz."

            "Well--how was I supposed to know it would do that?"

            "But you did it, and you took away Judy Garland's whole career to boot."

            "Listen," Beth said defensively, pointing at the book of screen legends. "Did you read what that thing said? Judy Garland is retired now, and lives comfortably in Burbank. And Vivian Leigh died, like, only ten years ago, instead of nineteen."

            "So?"

            "So, we're saving people right and left here. We're doing good things!"

            "Beth,"  Clarissa said gently, placing a hand on her shoulder, "we're talking about movies. We're talking about The Wizard of Oz."

            Beth looked down, ashamed. Clarissa knew her love felt as she did; movies were what mattered. The end result. Actors and their sad, tawdry lives were of secondary interest.

            "And anyhow, if Garland never worked with Vincent Minelli, then she never married him," Clarissa thought out loud. "Which means we've uncreated Liza. Which means, no Cabaret."

             "All right! So, okay, then, we'll change Wizard back--let's see if it changes back."

            Again, Beth reached for the machine, and again Clarissa stopped her hand.

            "No! We have to think this thing through. We don't know how it works yet."
            "So, we experiment."

            "No!" Clarissa insisted. "How do we know it isn't like a genie's lamp? How do we know we don't get only three wishes?"

            "Give me a break!" Beth shrugged Clarissa's hand off her shoulder.

            "You want to waste our last wish on experimenting?"

            "I want to get the hell out of here!" Beth sprang to her feet. "I have had it with you yelling at me, and pushing me around, and acting like you're in charge, when you don't know any more than I do." She stomped to the corner and scooped her parka up off the floor.

            Clarissa tried to mollify her as she buttoned herself up. "Okay, sweetie, all I'm saying is, let's strategize--"
            "You strategize! I'm going for a walk."

            The door slammed behind her. Clarissa was left with a familiar, residual guilty feeling. She pulled herself up, and slouched into her own long, battered wool coat of several seasons. Come to think of it, some fresh air sounded like a good idea.

            The stairwell of the building actually looked a little cleaner than she remembered--in better repair. Out on the street, the night air was nippy and bracing. Not a single homeless person approached her begging for change--that was a first. In general, as she walked along, she thought the city looked cleaner than it had since she was a little girl.

            She thought she knew where Beth must be headed. Around the corner was the Kit Kat Club, one of the few lesbian bars left in the city. They hung out there sometimes, and Beth had probably headed in to have a beer and sulk. If their relationship was a marriage of true minds, Clarissa sometimes thought, it sure was a dysfunctional marriage.

            The door was propped open as Clarissa approached, but the sounds that poured out were unfamiliar. They were gruff, deep male voices, laughter and cheers, and the patter of a television set. Clarissa blinked at the frosty window; it said "Harry's" instead of "Kit Kat Club." What the hell? She walked in--and stopped short. A group of rough-looking straight guys were clustered around a TV suspended from the ceiling, watching a football game.

            "Oh, yessss!" one man yelled, and the others broke into war whoops, as the announcer hyped a touchdown.

            What could have happened? Had the city found some stupid pretext for closing Clarissa and Beth's favorite bar? They had been in here just last week, talking to Pam, the      owner . . . 

            One of the guys looked over at Clarissa. "Hello, beautiful. Don't be a stranger, come on in. The first drink's on me."

            Clarissa threw him a glance of infinite resentment and disbelief, turned, and left.

            "Hey, bitch, who the hell were you looking for? Auberon Olivier?" he called after her, as his buddies jeered and razzed him.

            She walked down the block, badly shaken. What had happened to Pam? How could the bar have been sold so fast?

            Clarissa did not look where she was going. She skirted around the edge of Tompkins Square Park--and suddenly saw Michael.

            He was Michael, and not Michael. He was tall, and his features were the same, but his face was badly made up in pale pancake, lipstick, and false eyelashes. He wore a flowery woman's shirt and a pink jacket, and tossed his hair as he paced back and forth under a street lamp, smoking a cigarette. He looked like a Fassbinder hero, like some self-hating refugee from The Boys in the Band.

            The Michael that Clarissa knew was masculine and        self-assured, and would be at a meeting of "Act Up" tonight. He had married his lover Steven on the Circle Line, in a sweet ceremony. Michael's parents had not come, but Steven's mother had embraced him as her new son-in-law.

            Now Steven's Michael, Clarissa and Beth's Michael, was swishing with self-conscious camp in the lamplight, glancing furtively at men who passed him--and backing away when they glared back. What was this? Last Exit to Brooklyn?

            "Michael!" Clarissa called out, and crossed the street toward the park, to approach him. "Michael, wait up!"

            He glanced at her in fear, without recognition--and then fled into the shadows. She stared after him, into the darkness, for a long time.

            This wasn't fucking funny. She was beginning to feel like Jimmy Stewart, for Christ's sake, in It's a Wonderful Life . . .

            Someone ran up and grabbed Clarissa's arm. She felt fear--and then a flood of relief. "Beth!" she exclaimed, and hid her face in her sweetie's parka. Beth was round and soft and mammalian.

            "I went to the bar," Beth squeaked, panting, "but it wasn't there--"

            "I know. Shhh. It's okay." Soothing her, holding her, Clarissa felt back in control.

            "But what happened to it?" Beth demanded.

            Clarissa was suddenly struck, uneasily, with Michael's words from long ago. Was Judy Garland really their Rosa Parks? Could the fact that they had exiled her to retirement in Burbank really mean that they were now no longer living in a post-Stonewall world?

            "I don't know what happened," Clarissa lied. "Let's just go home."

            They held hands, and trudged in the direction of their building. The East Village still looked eerily clean. Still no homeless men in sight. A public housing project loomed above them. It wasn't supposed to be there. "CARTER HOUSE" it said, over the entrance.

            "Clarissa?"

            "Look neither left nor right, sweetie. Let's just keep on walking." But they both continued to glance around, nervously.

            Two more blocks till their building. The night was icy cold, and they hunched down inside their coats, their mittened hands squeezing each other, their free hands buried in coat pockets.

            Flyposters flapped on the boards surrounding a vacant lot. Their lettering was unavoidably large: WHETHER OR NOT YOU HAVE "THE PANSY DISEASE," WE CAN HELP YOU. WE HATE THE SIN, NOT THE SINNER. This message was from something called the National Council on Health and Hygiene. Its logo was a perky-looking little bird.

            "Don't worry about it," Clarissa said calmly. "We'll figure things out when we get home."

             "You never think about subtext," Michael said . . . 

            At the corner of Avenue A and East Sixth Street, Beth and Clarissa froze, hands still clasped. A billboard stared down at them. A chubby woman with dimpled cheeks and curly dark hair was smiling a smile full of small white teeth. The words beneath the picture told them: THE PRESIDENT IS YOUR FRIEND. DRUGS ARE YOUR ENEMY.

            Back home in the apartment, glowing black and white in the darkness, the VCR had been running of its own accord. First, a globe spun. A plane route was outlined. Couriers were shot, and letters of transit signed by General de Gaulle himself were stolen. Someone signed "OK--Rick," and the camera panned up to reveal Ronald Reagan, craggy and grim in a white tuxedo, smoking a cigarette in his cafe.

            Within the video movie guide, films winked in and out of being. Within the book of screen legends lying abandoned beside it on the green couch, several entries recomposed themselves--and Shirley Temple's entry grew in size. It now read, in part:

 

            . . . and after the success of Wizard, the transition to adult roles was assured. Tepid performances in films like The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, The Philadelphia Story and Meet Me in St. Louis did not slow her career . . . and she performed adequately in successful pictures like Hitchcock's Vertigo and The Birds. Increasingly drawn to politics, Temple found herself president of the Screen Actor's Guild in the mid-fifties. She received much support from her one-time co-star Ronald Reagan (See: the dreadful That Hagen Girl) who had made his transition from B movies to leading roles with Casablanca; both became forces to contend with. Their brief marriage, however, after his divorce from Jane Wyman, ended acrimoniously.

            When she entered state politics in California in the sixties, Temple's political career eclipsed her movie stardom. She was a strong candidate in the 1980 presidential election, galvanized moderate Republicans into the Big Tent Coalition during Jimmy Carter's second term, and held them together during the Mondale years. Since leaving the California governorship and entering the White House in 1988, President Temple has shown a tenacity few would have suspected when the adorable, curly-headed moppet first sang "On the Good Ship Lollipop" and danced the sailor's   hornpipe . . .