The Cutting Room Read Online Free Page A

giving up the fight—to show how hard it is to kill someone. But when
Torn Curtain
plays on TV, the scene is often cut to be less violent and, ironically, less cautionary for any kids watching.
    Tonight, as I traveled with Gus inside, like a fly on an elephant’s neck, I hoped our struggle might be edited for TV.
    That was not going to happen. The door closed ominously behind us in the shabby first-floor hall. Gus turned, quickly, and his hands reached behind to grab my hands as if he were flinging away a cloak. The gesture lifted me from the ground and sent me into the wall, legs first.
    “Gus!” I screamed.
    I ricocheted off the wall and landed in a far corner of the floor. I was now at some distance from Gus, who was moving like a small car to his apartment, steps away. My legs feeling a new kind of pain, I managed to half-rise and half-roll after him. I was right behind as, having opened it, he now tried to shut his door. It was as if we were both squeezing into a fleeing subway train.
    “Gus . . .”
    Try as he might to lock me out
and
get inside himself, it was impossible. Both Gus and I went shooting in, the old door snapping shut behind us.
    Here Gus had a definite advantage. The sun had set, the place was dark, and Gus lived there, I didn’t. In other words, as I just groped around, idiotically, he was already scrambling efficiently for whatever he needed to defeat, maim, or kill me.
    “Gus?”
    I heard him reaching and hauling, zipping and lugging. I knew he was not accumulating any homemade weapons. He was instead grabbing whatever it was he wanted to either hide from me or, dragging past me, carry out. And, of course, I thought I knew just what that might be.
    “Gus, let’s talk about this,” I said as my eyes adjusted slightly to the dark. All I could make out were piles of clothing, strewn on every surface, and I did not think I would be more enlightened if the lights were on. “Gus, it’s not yours to take.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, panting, as he scooped up something and stuffed it down into something else.
    “You know exactly.” My problem in communicating was: I did not want to just blurt out the words, for what if I was wrong, what if he didn’t know? I could just imagine Gus stopping what he was doing, standing there and staring, saying, “You mean, Alan had
The Magnificent Ambersons
?” and then what would I do? So I had to be suggestive if not downright vague.
    “You know exactly what, my friend. You know just what.”
    Suddenly, there was silence. Though I could make out even more of Gus’s run-down studio swollen with clothes and remains of meals, I could not make him out any more. In Welles’s film
Touch of Evil
, there is a fight in the dark at the end of which, in a shocking closeup, Akim Tamiroff’s character is shown garrotted, his eyes bugged out. That film was also recut and reshot, in Welles’s absence.
    I was hit in the stomach by what felt like a swiftly moving shovel. (I later learned it had been the one-volume edition of
The New York Times Encyclopedia of Film Reviews
, 1926–1970. My one copy was hard enough to pick up, let alone swing around.) The force of the blow bent me completely over. I grasped before me and clawed a terry cloth bathrobe off a chair before going down. Then I lay on the floor, near what looked like a small pile of egg and mushroom omelette that I’m sure Gus had meant to wipe up.
    Carrying whatever he had been packing, Gus now started to step over me with his muscle-clogged legs. As he did, I managed to choke out, “Are you going to do to me what you did to Alan?”
    I got him with that. Gus stopped, straddling me, his single piece of luggage held in one hand and swinging above my eyes.
    “I didn’t do that!” he yelled.
    That was all he said. He started to go again, the bag pulled away from my reaching hand now, like bait from a fish, as his sneaker grazed my left cheek with its dirty sole.
    Switching my