Read Online Everything Happened to Susan by Barry Malzberg - Free Book Online Page A

immortal beloved of Ludwig van Beethoven, Isadora Duncan, the dark beloved of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the mistress of Nikolo Paganini. These scenes have been heavily slanted toward the musical, the director explains to her, because they are shooting the unimportant, connective, fringe material first before working into the more basic political and sociological focus of the film as the actors warm up and become more confident in their roles All of the scenes are very short, averaging no more than two to three minutes playing time, and all of them involve sexual activity of some sort, although in the Paganini and Tchaikovsky episodes she has only had to stand to the side and witness the actor simulate masturbation. The purpose of the film is to show the basic sexual obsession of all great lives and events although Susan cannot say that she understands much of it.
    Most of her scenes have been with Murray who seems to be basically paired with her throughout, but two or three of them have been with other actors: a thin man named William who played Beethoven with a lisp and an immensely tall, disheveled actor named Frank who under the director’s instruction played Shakespeare as if he were a common drunk in search of rough trade. Frank told her in an intense conversation over the sandwiches brought up for a lunch break that he had never seen anything like this in the history of the world but then he was willing to learn. “I think the point is,” Frank had said, chewing and gesturing violently, the towel thrown modestly over his lower sections functioning as a napkin as well, “that these people are absolutely
serious;
they may be the last serious people left, they mean business. This is not a gag. You’re a very attractive girl; how did you get into this, you look a little young for it,” and then, without waiting for an answer, he had gone into an analysis of his background which he said made inevitable what had become of him. He had studied for a doctorate in medieval English at the University of Washington but before the orals had found that he had lost the power to read. “I mean, I looked at the page and it was just letters stuck down in different-sized clumps, but I couldn’t make any sense of them at all; I couldn’t make out the meaning. I had to use my index finger just to pick out the letters and that’s the point at which I decided I had better get out of the business. I mean my subconscious was obviously trying to tell me
something
about taking a doctoral degree in English; so I figured that after hanging around the university for ten years it was time to go. Of course I’m not really interested in acting, I just kind of fell into it.” Susan had found his conversation interesting if distracting. She had wanted to read her script and concentrate on the lines and scenes so that maybe she could get some internal comprehension of what everybody was driving at but everyone wanted to socialize, even the director who had gotten on a parapet toward the end of the lunch break and given them a long harangue in which he had talked about the deeper artistic truth and purposes which he hoped to bring out in this film and how he hoped that they would cooperate with one another to cause their performances to flow together. The talk had been almost incoherent. The director seems to have two modes of speech altogether — one of which (abusing actors) makes perfect sense and the other a more ruminative mode in which he cannot make himself understood at all. Susan knows that she will want to think about all of this later on. She will have to think a great deal. She is really stockpiling a lot of experience. The Marie Antoinette scene had been really difficult to get through what with her head being inserted into a strange contraption that entrapped and choked her while unspeakable things were done to her helpless backside. At that the scene had been nothing compared to what the girl playing Man Of War in another scene