Remake

I went home and started work. I did the ones that mattered first — restoring the double cigarette-lighting in Now, Voyager, putting the uranium back in the wine bottle in Notorious, reinebriating Lee Marvin’s horse in Cat Ballou. And the ones I liked: Ninotchka and Rio Bravo and Double Indemnity. And Brides, which came out of litigation the day after I saw Alis. It was beeping at me when I woke up. I put Howard Keel’s drink and whiskey bottle back in the opening scene, and then ff’d to the barnraising and turned the pan of corn bread back into a jug before I watched Alis.

It was too bad I couldn’t have shown it to her, she’d seemed so surprised the number had made it onto film. She must have had trouble with it, and no wonder. All those lifts and no partner — I wondered what equipment she’d had to lug down Hollywood Boulevard and onto the skids to make it look like she was in the air. It would have been nice if she could see how happy she looked doing those lifts.

I put the barnraising dance on the disk with the others, in case Russ Tamblyn’s estate or Warner appealed, and then erased all my transaction records, in case Mayer yanked the Cray.

I figured I had two weeks, maybe three if the Columbia takeover really went through. Mayer’d be so busy trying to make up his mind which way to jump he wouldn’t have time to worry about AS’s, and neither would Arthurton. I thought about calling Heada — she’d know what was happening — and then decided that was probably a bad idea. Anyway, she was probably busy scrambling to keep her job.

A week anyway. Enough time to give Myrna Loy back her hangover and watch the rest of the musicals. I’d already found most of them, except for Good News and The Birds and the Bees. I put the dulce la leche back in Guys and Dolls while I was at it, and the brandy back in My Fair Lady and made Frank Morgan in Summer Holiday back into a drunk. It went slower than I wanted it to, and after a week and a half, I stopped and put everything Alis had done on disk and tape, expecting Mayer to knock on the door any minute, and started in on Casablanca.

There was a knock on the door. I ff’d to the end where Rick’s bar was still full of lemonade, took the disk of Alis’s dancing and stuck it down the side of my shoe, and opened the door.

It was Alis.

The hall behind her was dark, but her hair, pulled into a bun, caught the light from somewhere. She looked tired, like she had just come from practicing. She still had on her lab coat. I could see white stockings and Mary Janes below it, and an inch or so of pink ruffle. I wondered what she’d been doing — the “Abba-Dabba Honeymoon” number from Two Weeks with Love? Or something from By the Light of the Silvery Moon?

She reached in the pocket of the lab coat and held out the opdisk I’d given her. “I came to bring this back to you.”

“Keep it,” I said.

She looked at it a minute, and then stuck it in her pocket. “Thanks,” she said, and pulled it out again. “I’m surprised so many of the routines made it on. I wasn’t very good when I started,” she said, turning it over. “I’m still not very good.”

“You’re as good as Ruby Keeler,” I said.

She grinned. “She was somebody’s girlfriend.”

“You’re as good as Vera-Ellen. And Debbie Reynolds. And Virginia Gibson.”

She frowned, and looked at the disk again and then at me, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something. “Heada told me about her job,” she said, and that wasn’t it. “Location assistant. That’s great.” She looked over at the array, where Bogart was toasting Ingrid. “She said you were putting the movies back the way they were.”

“Not all the movies,” I said, pointing at the disk in her hand. “Some remakes are better than the original.”

“Won’t you get fired?” she said. “Putting the AS’s back in, I mean?”

“Almost certainly,” I said. “But it is a fah, fah, bettah thing I do than I have evah done before. It is a—”

“Tale of Two Cities, Ronald Colman,” she said, looking at the screens where Bogart was saying good-bye to Ingrid, at the disk, at the screens again, trying to work up to what she had to say.

I said it for her. “You’re leaving.”

She nodded, still not looking at me.

“Where are you going? Back to River City?”

“That’s from The Music Man,” she said, but she didn’t smile. “I can’t go any farther by myself. I need somebody to teach me the heel-and-toe work Eleanor Powell does. And I need a partner.”

Just for a moment, no, not even a moment, the flicker of a frame, I thought about what might have been if I hadn’t spent those long splatted semesters dismantling highballs, if I had spent them out in Burbank instead, practicing kick-turns.