The Golden Age

I was out on the west coast, wandering around the streets of the city, and I came across a beach where a famous scene from a historical epic had been filmed. I passed under a bridge where the echoes of the cars zipping by on the freeway overhead reverberated off the concrete walls, and on the other side there was the vast white beach, and further on was the ocean with the waves rolling in from the horizon, their swells tossing around blinding glints of light from the afternoon sun. In the scene, this empty beach had been filled with extras dressed in bright period costumes in striking shades of lavender and blue and orange. There had been giraffes and elephants and lions, golden trumpets and soldiers in bronze armor, statesman in robes unrolling parchments bearing official decrees.

There was a large flat stone that had been the centerpiece of the scene. The hero had stood in sweaty-faced defiance at the foot of the stone, his wrists shackled, glaring up at the centurion who stood on the top of the stone, huge and regal in the sun, his jaw set, his foot planted on an outcropping of rock, his iron hand resting on his knee. The trumpets and revelry had all abruptly stopped, and there had only been the sounds of the waves and the wind and the birds as the two men squared off entirely with their eyes, the camera flipping back and forth in a montage of menacing squints, the score finally punctuating the tension with a protracted buzz that stung like an insect born out of the sweat and the heat.

That was all gone now. The beach was deserted. The day was getting later. I walked along the sand. I knew that further down the shore there was a beach house that had belonged to the lead actress from the film, the one who had stood by the centurion in her clean white linen, secretly in love with the hero. Years later, the cast had all gotten back together to reshoot the scene for a reenactment that was being included in another film about the glory days of Hollywood. The cast had eagerly agreed to get back together to shoot the scene, because they had all wanted to spend the weekend hanging out at the beach house, reminiscing about old times and reclining by the pool in their light-weight summer shirts and sipping their margaritas to the smooth rippling notes of the piano playing up on the balcony as the cool breeze rolled in off the sea.

But it hadn’t quite worked out. Nothing in the scene had really looked the way it was supposed to. All the same props and costumes were there, and everyone hit all their same marks, but all the traces of time were visible just beneath the surface. The lead actress had gotten older and the makeup didn’t quite hide the lines around her eyes. The centurion’s bearing wasn’t quite as firm, and he had gotten fatter and the armor didn’t quite fit him anymore. Even the film stock they used was a little different, making all the colors and costumes look like they had been transposed to some other time and place. Worst of all, they hadn’t been able to get the lead actor back. There had been a falling out between him and the actor who had played the centurion. There had been some sort of scandal involving a traffic accident that had circulated in the Hollywood gossip columns for years. They had cast a replacement, but with someone else, shackled and trying to glare that same iconic glare in his place, the whole scene just fell apart.

The weekend at the beach house hadn’t worked out either. The white-haired old actor who played the centurion had gotten drunk and mad and shoved the replacement lead actor into the pool. There had been an awkward scene between him and the actress who owned the beach house, and it had made everyone uncomfortable, and it ended up with her throwing him out. Afterwards, the piano had resumed its cool ripple, but there was something sad and even a little anxious between the notes. Guests started to slip away, offering a variety of hastily improvised excuses for why they had to go, blushing and smiling their awkward smiles, trying to say how great it had been for everyone to get back together, how it had all been just the same, so incredibly, wonderfully the same, leaving all the tables around the pool littered with half-finished margaritas until the last of them were gone.

But, of course, it hadn’t been the same. I finally reached the beach house, and it was boarded up now. No one lived there anymore. The sun was going down out over the ocean and the house was latticed with deep shadows from the grove of untended trees that surrounded it. The waves rolled right up to the edge of the foundation beams of the crumbling wooden deck, provided with all the neglected ages that they needed to pick apart the whole property one piece at a time and pull it all back into the sea. I plucked a hot smoothed stone out of the sand and flipped it around between my fingers. No, things were never the same.