Romancing the Ruins, a Film Treatment Page 3

temper snaps and he accuses Anna of a conspiracy with his father to destroy him. He is calmed by nurse McGuire, who takes him back into her office, leaving a bewildered Anna standing there looking for an escape hatch. In a world, now upside-down, she feels she can no longer control the events that must play out.

  Scene Eleven:

  A reeling Anna flees the nursing home to find herself in an unseasonable spring storm, snowflakes swirling about her. Confused, she wanders aimlessly about the old coastal village. As the snowstorm increases in fury and in the growing dark, she comes upon the “Maine Moose B & B.” She enters the foyer of an old sea captain’s house turned into a bed and breakfast and feels the warmth of a fire in the hearth.

  Hannah, the innkeeper, in her Down East accent comforts Anna and suggests she rest awhile before “dinnah.” They ascend the stairs and Hannah folds back the goose down comforter on the bed, inviting Anna to curl up and escape into a quiet sleep. The sound of the crashing Maine surf fills the room.

  Scene Twelve:

  Anna is awakened by the innkeeper’s knock on her door. Rubbing her eyes and trying to orient herself, she hears Hannah tell her there will be one other dinner guest.

  Entering the parlor, Anna sees the back of the other guest standing by the window watching the storm. Mounted above the window are the antlers of a large bull moose. The swagged draperies encompass the guest, so that he appears to Anna to be a desert sheik with antlers. His ridiculous appearance tops off the chaotic events of her day in this never-never world, releasing her built-up tensions, and she breaks into shrieks of laughter.

  The figure turns. To Anna’s astonishment, it is Worthington Rhodes. Her infectious laughter stops abruptly, just as Worthington’s begins. Falteringly, Anna’s laughter resumes, and together they over talk each other in a jumble of apologies, explanations and double entendre. He suggests that here, tonight in this special place, the two of them pretend they are two different people who are free to communicate, unencumbered by their personal histories.

  From the corner of the dining room, Hannah smiles knowingly as she watches their laugh-stimulated relationship develop and then announces that “dinnah” is served.

  Over a bottle of Cotes d’ Rhone vintage red wine, their dinner conversation ranges from the Down East dialect with its Shakespearean origins to the sensual fiddlehead ferns of Maine’s Aroostook Valley, which Worthington says retain their lusciousness for only an evening.

  Having come out from behind their public facades, and with passion overpowering them, Worthington leads Anna up the stairs and into his room.

  Scene Thirteen:

  The next morning with the local airport closed by the storm, Anna learns that the only way out of town is by Greyhound bus. During the long arduous journey down old U.S. Highway 1 to the Boston airport, we see her looking out the window, contemplating, visualizing Worthington Rhodes speaking from a platform, then at a shopping center, in each instance being gunned down by an assassin with a high-powered telescopic rifle fired from a passing car or from atop a nearby building. Anna shudders as she sees Worthington lying in a pool of blood.

  On the flight from Boston to Albuquerque, Anna continues to agonize about her love/hate relationship with this man. Eventually, her dedication to save her ruins winning out, she calls Quentin Ford IV on the in-flight telephone and confesses she was unsuccessful in dissuading Worthington from building his bullet train.

  “My dear, if you weren’t so headstrong, I could have saved you a lot of trouble,” the chairman replies. “Stuart and I will take care of matters with a professional.”

  Scene Fourteen:

  Stuart Wales paces back and forth along the towpath beside the first lock on the C&O Canal in Georgetown, waiting for Quentin Ford IV. The ILMA chairman arrives, not in his stretch limousine, but perspiring, having walked, as he tells Stuart, “...from the Foggy Bottom Metro Station—no one must see us meeting.”

  They walk along the towpath where only an occasional biker and a lone runner pass them. Between interruptions from the noise of jet planes taking off from Reagan National across the Potomac, Quentin expounds on the need to preserve America’s heritage—at all costs. Any action he takes, he says, will be justified in order to save the national patrimony for the sake of children and their children to see, feel and touch—the real things—not just Disneylands.

  He hands Stuart two envelopes, one bulging with currency. “For Christ sake, man, put them away! We don’t want anyone to see!” Quentin commands. “Your instructions are in the thin envelope.”

  Scene Fifteen:

  Following the funeral service for Aunt Hattie in a snow-covered cemetery in Maine, Worthington returns to Washington, thoughts of his torrid affair with Anna dominating his mind, muddling his brain, confusing him. Arriving home that evening, he is embraced by his devoted wife, Sara, who is coloring Easter eggs for the following morning’s hunt. Having tucked Emily away in bed, Sara’s concerns center on Worthington’s wardrobe for his forthcoming national tour promoting The Windjammer.

  We feel Worthington wants to confess his one and only infidelity of their fifteen-year marriage, but Sara, in her domestic ramblings, doesn’t give him a chance. He elects instead to put his arms around her and tell her how much he loves her.

  Scene Sixteen:

  Easter morning, as ten thousand runners gather at the Tidal Basin for the start of the Annual Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Race, participant Stuart Wales tapes the thick envelope to his midriff. Hoping to make contact with the dreaded assassin, as Quentin Ford IV has instructed him to do, he pins a dollar bill to his race number and visually searches the other runners but, other than giving him strange glances, no one comes forward.

  The race begins. In a human tide, the runners cross the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac, pass the Reflecting Pool, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. The weather turns colder, the clouds thicken, the wind blows and the rain comes. Running toward the finish line, Stuart slips on the pink cherry blossoms that now cover the asphalt pavement. Helping him up is a lithe female runner, who says she is Angela. She instructs Stuart to ascend the steps of the Lincoln Memorial beyond the finish line where a runner named Booth, holding a trophy, will contact him.

  Amidst the tourists, race finishers and the pelting rain, Stuart climbs the stairs and waits at the foot of Abraham Lincoln. A runner with a winning trophy approaches him. Stuart raises his rain and sweat-soaked t-shirt and, grimacing, peels off his thick envelope and hands it to Booth.

  Booth says he is sorry to have to be the one who does in the train project for, being deathly afraid of flying, he was looking forward to riding the fast train to Los Angeles.

  Stuart comments that he is sorry Worthington Rhodes is to be killed for he, too, was beginning to admire the man’s courage and imagination.

  Booth laughs and tells Stuart that Worthington will live; it’s his character that he and Angela will be assassinating. He explains to a surprised Stuart that in Washington today character assassination is the “in” way to do people in. No bullets to buy. No guns to register. And if there is no real scandal, they’ll go scandal mongering.

  Scene Seventeen:

  Anna, back home again in her Southwest, finds her affinity with the area hasn’t changed, but she wonders, has she changed? Worthington Rhodes was the first man she ever let penetrate her very soul. But maybe the decision hadn’t been hers to make. What omnipotent force is directing her life?

  Entering her Santa Fe-style adobe house, she plays her answering machine tape. A message from Alexander Parish tells her he is arriving early and pleads with her to give him a personal preview of how her computer software will chart their dig site. She feels his appearance on the scene will help her forget Worthington Rhodes.

  Anna meets Alex at the trailhead. She leads him through juniper and piñon pine forests, across mesas and through canyons to the remote ILMA excavation site, which has the official name of Noah’s Ark. There, in the plaza of an ancient Anasazi settlement
, surrounded by the rubble of rock walls, she professionally maps the area on her computer, establishing random one-meter squares in which each of her seminarists will dig.

  It soon becomes apparent that Alex is more interested in Anna than in the technical aspects of an archaeological dig. He suggests they explore an Anasazi “bedroom.” They climb up to a natural cave, using handholds and toeholds carved centuries ago into the cliff side. Inside is a seven-hundred-year-old rock art drawing of the legendary Kokopelli playing a flute and displaying a large erection, and the two of them begin to playfully seduce each other.

  But when Alex interrupts their foreplay to uncork a bottle of wine from his backpack, Anna’s thoughts flash back to her Maine candlelight dinner with Worthington. She rebels against her promiscuous behavior, her sea level eroticism and against all men at this juncture in her life. Deserting a stunned Alex, Anna flees the cave.

  Scene Eighteen:

  On a nearby mesa, standing next to his surveyor’s transit and 4-wheel drive vehicle, Clarence Short, his dog Willie and his assistant Dillon are engrossed in the mechanics of surveying The Windjammer route. Their comments confirm that the right-of-way will dissect the exact point where the four western states touch, an area over which the Navajo Nation