project/sutter-gutter

“I have to say that each time I visit with you, I am left wanting to see you more,” he wrote after that. I heard this sort of thing all the time, often in more ardent forms. The sentiment came from married men, single men, men who were divorced, men a few years or a few decades older than me, men who were wealthy and men who were rich, men living under secret, crushing debt. Some cried over how much they felt for me, wrote me songs and poems, daydreamed aloud about marrying or impregnating me. I felt highly desired, and I was, verifiably, highly desired. Coveted, even. There was proof: the messages, the money, the affirmations. I became a sex worker because I suspected, and hoped, it would be this way: a private, minor form of celebrity. An alternate version of myself.

Hollywood films rely on a distancing strategy that is absent from Faces. They comment on experience; they judge it; they tell us what to think about it; they offer interpretations. Cassavetes doesn’t provide any of these abstract ways of understanding. This is what makes all of his films so emotionally and intellectually demanding (and drives some viewers out of the theater). A viewer is not given a short-cut around unedited, raw experience. He is not given an interpretation that allows him to stand above, beyond or outside of the characters and experiences; he must muddle through them, be involved with them, be actively engaged with them, make sense of them and change his mind about them as he goes along. Faces captures the extent to which Cassavetes honestly enjoyed his characters and appreciated the performances of the actors who played them, without making distancing judgments about them. The result is a movie that takes away the characteristic interpretive ‘aboutness’ of other films and plunges a viewer into an intellectually unglossed, unsimplified, uninterpreted experience. Cassavetes himself felt the difference when he watched Faces.

Imagine. I was living entirely in the moment, with no formal assurance beyond tomorrow morning’s telephone call, and I found myself interested; not sad tearful frightened or resentful, only interested. Here, I reasoned, is a circumstance where you clearly cannot make terms. The truth is, one never makes terms. This affair is only the bare, unfiltered truth. Can you take it in or will you founder on the absence of illusion? Indeed, it was stamina and self-control that were required to answer the question. I rose to the task. I began to grasp the idea of living without a future: we had few moments to waste on bad behaviour. I saw errant impulses die before they could make trouble. I saw reflexive anger give way to analytic understanding. I saw petty indulgence stifle itself and a kind of rough emotional justice prevail. All this I saw, and all this I was pleased to see. Then a day came when I also saw that learning to live without a future is a sterile exercise: what looks like life within a walled garden is really life inside a renovated prison yard. Joe’s wife remained an abstraction, but Joe’s marriage became a stunning confinement.

I liked hearing him say he’s alone, even if he was speaking indifferently, in a slightly cynical tone. Yet, shaking my head, I persisted in saying that he has a great business and the opportunity to have a comfortable, easy life. He replied that that’s not important, either; it’s other things that count, he said, and in a flash Venice passed before my eyes. “At a certain age,” he continued, “everything we’ve done is no longer enough. It was useful only in making us what we are. And just as we are, now that we’re truly ourselves, what we’ve wanted to be or could be, we’d like to start to live again, consciously, according to our current tastes. Instead, we have to continue to live the life we chose when we were someone else. I’ve worked my whole life, I spent thirty years becoming what I am. And now?” He addressed this question into the void bitterly. Then, as if regretting he’d let himself go, he added, laughing, that an age should be established—“forty-five, let’s say”—past which we had the right to be alone in the world, and to choose our life from the beginning. “Besides,” he observed, “no one understands what we do, the effort it costs us, no one, except those who work with us.” I felt that he was criticizing his wife; maybe Michele is similarly critical of me sometimes. I said to myself that I wasn’t asking for anything, I bought only shoes for the children, clothes for the children, food, and no mink coats. But I wondered if there was a difference; and concluded yes, to my disadvantage, because Michele can’t even complain. “Still,” I said with a mischievous smile, remembering what Mirella had said about Barilesi, “if someone invited you to give up the effort that the work requires, would you give it up?” As we were talking, we had stood up and gone to the window. Shadows were falling on the garden below, a melancholy garden of palms and oleanders. “No,” he confessed candidly. We laughed. “But maybe precisely because I have nothing else,” he added in a lower voice.

n that New Year’s night above the bright lights of the city I asked him, ‘Have you ever thought you might leave your wife?’ I didn’t mean for me. My bottle was beaded with moisture, and cold. We could no longer see the small white streak of the yacht below.

Craig said, ‘My wife – my wife doesn’t want an adventure. She draws a blank. Me, I’m restless. I’d rather quit a job and start again. I’d rather give the finger. And I can strike up anywhere. And – God. She’s an attractive woman. You wouldn’t think, to look at me. You wouldn’t pick her for my wife.’

He fell silent. A bird called in the dark. Craig said, ‘I don’t know, Francie. How can I answer that? I left her before I even married her. There’s nothing there to leave.’

‘What’s she doing now probably?’ I said. ‘Tonight, for New Year’s Eve.’

‘Waiting,’ Craig said, and then he didn’t speak again for a long time.