by
Elaine Dundy
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“It’s just that the mystique of brutality runs right through —well, it doesn’t run, but it’s there. It’s like that G.I. we knew who went AWOL in the war—” he turned slowly to the Englishman. “AWOL, A, W, O, L,” he repeated clearly for his benefit. “Do you have it? I mean of course you have it, but do you say AWOL. A, W, O, L—you don’t mind my asking?”
The Englishman nodded vigorously, managing to mingle total agreement with total astonishment, and though neither was exactly what was called for, they had to do, as he was obviously beyond speech. Doric’s wife said, “Yes, darling, he was AWOL,” quickly, to get him back on the track, but Doric, who had been hoping here for a chance to discuss the basic differences between American and British Army terminology, gazed around him, completely thrown.
“The film,” whispered his wife.
When we all sat around moaning and groaning about how expensive Paris was—and we did, it was one of our favorite conversations—he simply switched off. You could actually see it boring him. And the few times that we dined alone together, at the end of our meal there was none of the usual leaping up from the chair as though shot through with an arrow, yelling Wow! or similar Indian war whoops, which most of my friends felt de rigueur in heralding the arrival of the bill. I was grateful to him for that, and yet it was impossible to say just why, but it was always a relief to find out that he had the money to cover it. Did it mean he was going without breakfast next morning, or what? And it was crazy to feel like this, because sometimes you could see he was just rolling in the stuff.
“Are you a gambler?” I asked him finally.
“There isn’t anything you do in life that isn’t a gamble, Gorce,” he replied.
“But do you gamble?” I insisted.
“In a way. In a way.” He looked at me oddly.
It just defeated me. I could guess and guess and guess about Larry and still not get anywhere. It all led down a blind alley.
After he left I started to cry. Then I fell asleep again. At two o’clock I woke up, suddenly remembering I’d made a date with Judy’s Frenchman, the painter Claude Tonnard.
He took me to his studio, poured me out some perfectly ghastly tea and we looked at his paintings a while. Then, as if it was the only thing left to do, he made love to me.
The studio was dark and cold when I left. I felt experienced without feeling that I, personally, had been through anything. I’d really shocked myself, to tell you the truth. I was a long way from St. Louis. My past was receding a little too rapidly.
I tried to remember one minute that whole week end when Marion and I weren’t either feeding people, or clearing up from doing it, or preparing to do it again. And presumably she never stopped doing it. But I couldn’t quite see why just because she did, I should. I mean, here was I practically fresh out of the egg, everything was so new to me, and here was everybody telling me to stop driftingy and start living in this world; telling me to start cooking, and sewing, and cleaning, and I don’t know what. Taking care of my grandchildren.
I sat in the studio lost in thought, watching the evening get darker and darker and colder and colder, unable to move. Finally I roused myself and went to look for Jim. I found him wandering aimlessly around the kitchen, peering every now and again into one of the empty cupboards, hoping as if by some miracle to find that particular one filled.
“What is it, Jim?” He looked so forlorn.
“I’ve … I’ve already invited them to dinner on Thursday.”
I took a deep breath.
“O.K.” I said. “Which is the stove and how do you light it?”
that's like my gas pedal / brakes joke lmao
When did all those nightmares begin? My mind keeps going back to that Christmas vacation, sophomore year, when I had an English paper to write and spent most of my time in the Public Library. People kept mistaking me for a librarian. They kept coming up to me and asking me for books and things. I thought it was maybe because I didn’t wear hats and at first I was merely annoyed. Then I became frightened. I somehow became obsessed with the idea that the reason they kept mistaking me for a librarian was because that’s what I really was meant to be, and instinctively they knew it. It was sheer fantasy, of course. I mean they probably asked dozens of other people as well and I just didn’t notice. But it started to prey upon my mind. Then I began having this nightmare. Actually I have it so often I’ve even given it a name. It’s called the Dreaded Librarian Dream.
It’s all very vague. It takes place in sort of a vast hall, in the center of which sits a girl behind a desk, or rather a circular counter, which completely surrounds her. It’s funny about that desk: I’ve seen it somewhere before, I know I have, although it’s quite unlike any desk I’ve ever seen in a library. Anyway, the closer I get to this girl, the older she becomes, until she turns into a middle-aged spinster librarian. Then I see that it’s me. People keep coming up to her from every direction asking her for books. They are all going somewhere. In fact it isn’t a library at all, it’s more like a station. Everyone is in a hurry. They are all going somewhere except me. I’m trapped. One of the worst aspects of this dream is that from the very first time I dreamed it I’ve known, within the nightmare, so to speak, that it was one I’ve had before—an old, old nightmare of long ago. That gives it its special ageless, timeless, hopeless quality. When I awaken from it my space urge is upon me stronger than ever.
some unneeded repetition here but i like it a lot
NOW HERE’S THE heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I’ve been fleeing all my life. And (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become. I’d taken my lamb by the hand to the slaughter and nobody even wanted it. Apparently there’s a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify. So I finally found a little out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-track library downtown and they let me put the books away.
We were very hungry but we didn’t want to leave, so we ate there. We had chicken sandwiches; boy, the chicken of the century. Dry, wry, and tender, the dryness sort of rubbing against your tongue on soft, bouncy white bread with slivers of juicy wet pickles. Then we had some very salty potato chips and some olives stuffed with pimentos and some Indian nuts and some tiny pearl onions and some more popcorn. Then we washed the whole thing down with iced martinis and finished up with large cups of strong black coffee and cigarettes. One of my really great meals.
I don’t know what time it was when we went into the bar, but it was dark when we came out. We went to a movie and he kissed me for the first time. We kissed right through it. Coming to life in a movie house on West Fourth Street is an apotheosis I’d have to leave to one of those mad seventeenth-century mystics like Herbert or Vaughan to do justice to. It’s the end.
cute
I sat down next to him and said hello. He acknowledged me without speaking and soon the film began. The then prominent film critic had a notebook in his lap, but he remained immobile until a scene revealed that Winslet’s husband was an online porn addict. At that point the critic began furiously taking notes, scribbling with great force and speed. Since I had read his book, his vigorous jotting during that particular scene caught my attention. When his review came out, he called the movie, which was average and predictable, “extraordinary” and “startling.”
why is this so funny
The cashier looked at the picture, then at me, then back to Welles in the magazine. She looked up again at my young, beardless face and my full head of black hair, which was clearly visible because I was not wearing a hat or a cape. “Is that you?” she asked, pointing at the photo.
“No!” I blurted out. “That’s Orson Welles!”
“Oh,” she said, scanning a can of pinto beans. I put the magazine back on the rack where I found it, gathered my grocery bags, and left through the automatic doors. Wow, I thought, that was a lesson in the artist-critic divide.
amazing
Part of what made this victory of perpetual blockbuster reanimation possible was the abandonment by most baby boomers of the film-critical cultural sphere, a flight that culminated in the publication of Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay “The Decay of Cinema” in the New York Times. Sontag claimed that both cinephilia and cinema were dead, an argument that now resembles the early 1990s “end of history” posited by Francis Fukuyama. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, as internet cinephilia began to rise, world cinema gave us, to name only a dozen, Mulholland Drive, In the Mood for Love, The Werckmeister Harmonies, In Vanda’s Room, Trouble Every Day, Khrustalyov, My Car!, Platform, The Piano Teacher, Kandahar, The Circle, Batang West Side, and Millennium Mambo. A serious, vital cinema of great originality, emotional depth, and beauty — the kind beloved by Sontag — was not in decline at all.