Bookmarker tag: project/stunt-story (84 notes)

Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy—had never not been happy—and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.

I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.

I sat in the car while he filled the tank and a young man cleaned my windshield, which was unnecessary but I guessed part of the service. The guy with the squeegee had a Huckleberry Finn/Gilbert Blythe look that I used to flip out over as a teenager but with more closely cropped hair and a downy little mustache that kind of ruined the effect. He was sliding the rubber edge across the glass with long, sure, steady strokes. It was hypnotic, like being bathed. I fell into a sort of lazy trance and for this reason I was slow to realize we had made eye contact. How embarrassing. But to look away would make it seem as if I cared what this person thought—he should look away. He didn’t, so we remained locked together like this as he made his way down the window. In moments he seemed to be smiling faintly at our predicament and at other times he grew deeply serious, as if this thing between us was no joke. And I could feel my own face mirroring his, sunny and then somber, grave. I felt a little disoriented. What had I gotten myself into? Would this never end? And at the same time I had a growing anxiety about the end. I feared it would be too abrupt or that I would somehow be unprepared. It took a long time for me to notice the earbuds in his ears. He was listening to something, that’s why the serious then smiling face. Probably a podcast. Could he even really see me through the glass? No, the way the light hit it made that impossible; I was just a dark shape. No matter. I’d already forgotten him by the time I pulled back onto the freeway.

I drove to Fontana’s listening to Portishead at a very loud volume. This had been my main album in the midnineties when my ex-girlfriend and ex–best friend were living together in the apartment next door to me and loudly consummating their new love. The lovemaking involved some kind of hitting followed by a hoarse uh. It was a kind of arousal that I hadn’t experienced—I’d never been hit, I’d never gone uh. When they had sex like this I’d put on my Walkman and listen to Portishead and try to imagine a time when this would all just be a funny story. Now was that time. My young agony was the funny part; it made me smile as I drove. Twenty years ago I’d been in my twenties; twenty years from now I’d be in my sixties. I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot. I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to. I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow. Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decades, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season.

But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues—their many and sharp tongues—and give this new girl a chance.

“Okay, here’s my take,” she said. “Just ride it out. A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame.”

That had the ring of truth to it.

“So, you think I should just smooth things over?”

“I know that’s not the hip thing to say, but yes.”

“I don’t know if I”—I gasped—“can physically do that. Swallow my desires like that.”

Cassie sighed.

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ ”

I sat at the bar and had a scotch. The ashtray in front of me was full of pared fingernails. I was on the third drink when she arrived. The way she walked made her skirt sway lightly across her legs and I felt lucky and full of improvisation, a nice loose music in my head, and I knew the auto mechanics were watching her but not with sludge and crankcase lust; rather with a small joy, I thought, a tiny leap of flesh, the light lucky feeling of seeing a pretty girl with bare legs walking across a room behind a smile that says she likes being a woman being watched. I tried not to look so pleased. She glanced at my drink and asked for the same.

In retrospect, it was laughable for me to entertain the possibility that he would want to leave her for me after the diagnosis, since that was when he needed the stability and support of his family more than ever. But he’d just threatened to leave her when he thought he had decades of life left. I thought the shortening of the timeline might make seizing the day imperative, but it must have had the opposite effect; because he had less time left, there was no point in change. Maybe he was relieved that he’d not followed through with his ultimatum. Maybe he imagined what it would be like if he’d been separated from his wife when he discovered the tumor—living alone in a furnished local rental, buried in divorce paperwork, his children angry and confused, me dismissed from my post. I’m sure that vision would be almost too bleak to contemplate.

He had approached her with the idea of a brief and easy intrigue, such as he had so often heard described, but had never yet experienced, at least hardly in such a form as to be worthy of the name. She had dropped her sunshade just in time to provide him with an excuse for accosting her. and now that he was thus cunningly entangled in the pretty web of the young girl's life he felt no desire to free himself from it until he should have advanced much further into her intimacy.

But the amazing purity of her profile and her incomparable good health --- are not good health and corruption always assumed by the rhetorician to be incompatible? --- had subdued the ardor of his first onset and, overcome with a sudden reluctance to go further, he now found all his delight in marvelling at the mystery of her face, with its clear and delicate chiselling and infinite sweetness of expression. His happiness was complete, he was at rest.

[...] They were walking along the seafront when they saw Angiolina coming towards them, all lit up by the midday sun which was playing in her fair curls. She had screwed up her face a little in the effort to keep her eyes open in the strong sunlight. Balli found himself suddenly face to face with his masterpiece and, disregarding its outline, saw it for the first time in all its details. She advanced towards them with that firm step of hers which did not in the least diminish the grace of her upright figure. Youth incarnate, clothed, would have walked like that in the sunlight.

Amanda grew up smack in the heart of the heartland. You met her in a bar and couldn’t believe your luck. You never would have worked up the hair to hit on her, but she came right up and started talking to you. As you talked you thought: She looks like a goddamned model and she doesn’t even know it. You thought of this ingenuousness as being typical of the heartland. You pictured her backlit by a sunset, knee-deep in amber waves of grain. Her lanky, awkward grace put you in mind of a newborn foal. Her hair was the color of wheat, or so you imagined; after two months in Kansas you had yet to see any wheat. You spent most of your time at zoning-board meetings duly reporting on variances for shopping malls and perc tests for new housing developments. At night, because your apartment was too quiet, you went to bars with a book.

You keep meaning to cultivate an expertise in spectator sport. More and more you realize that sports trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country. You’d like to be the kind of guy who can walk into a bar or an eatery and break the ice with a Runyonism about the stupidity of a certain mid-season trade. Have something to hash out with truck drivers and stockbrokers alike. In high school, you went in for lone-wolf sports—tennis and skiing. You’re not really sure what a zone defense is. You don’t understand the sports metaphors in the political columns. Men don’t trust a man who missed the Super Bowl. You would like to devote a year to watching every athletic event on ABC and reading all fifty-two issues of Sports Illustrated. In the meantime your strategy is to view one playoff game in each sport so as to manage remarks like, “How about that slap shot by LaFleur in the third period against Boston?” Third quarter?

In the top drawer you discover two empty rectangular packets. Actually, one of them is not quite empty; inside the black paper is a fine dusting of white. You scrape it onto the desk with a credit card, using the edge of the card to rake up two clean lines. You look over at Megan. She’s reading. You could quietly hoover the lines and she’d never know the difference. You extract a bill from your wallet and roll it into a tight cylinder between thumb and forefinger. One apiece isn’t going to do much for either of you. On the other hand, two won’t do much for you, either; one will make you want another, and another will only intitiate a chain reaction of desperate longings. Is this self-knowledge? In any case, you want to do something nice for Megan. For her it might be a treat, something out of the ordinary.

Everett Chambers, a television casting director on NBC’s Philco Playhouse and subsequently a good friend, said Cassavetes was the most persistent unemployed actor he ever saw. Cassavetes would come to his office; Chambers would, only half-facetiously, yell at him to get out and throw a telephone book at him; and Cassavetes would return the next week without fail. At one point, Cassavetes chained himself to a radiator at CBS to force them to give him a walk-on in You Are There. Underneath the nutty behavior, it was an extremely discouraging time. Cassavetes later said he could never afterward bear to ride the New York subway because it reminded him of these days of round-making. The problem Cassavetes and his friends were up against was that Actors Studio graduates were the only ones taken seriously by the early television producers.

The film is utterly without interest and the action-centered plot allowed Cassavetes to do almost no memorable acting, with the single exception of his final scene on screen – in which he came up with the idea of playing the most evil lines he has in the entire film with diabolical gentleness. As proof that he was under no illusions about the nature of the project, during a scene in which Amy Irving said she needed a few minutes to ponder the ‘motivation’ for one of her speeches, Cassavetes turned to Kirk Douglas and sarcastically remarked loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘She thinks she’s playing Joan of Arc.’

Life experiences become acting experiences, which in turn become life experiences.

I scream with Jenny in front of the camera and feel tremendously relieved afterward.

Think what experience one could bring to one’s work after death, not to speak of the experience it would bring to living.

He should have waited another semester before summoning her. He realized that only after she had quit her job as a salesgirl, packed her two suitcases’ worth of belongings, slammed the door on her ragpicker father, and moved across the country into his tiny studio apartment at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. The glamour of spotlights sweeping the night sky to announce movie premieres made her feel as if she had just fallen off a turnip truck.

She had never heard of television, and no matter how many times he explained its workings, she didn’t understand how a moving picture could be seen without a projector.

He began to make new friends and she just didn’t fit in. She was both too serious, and not serious enough. His crowd, mostly women and a few lucky fellows with 4Fs, grew up around the movie business. They spoke about the war in a way that upset her. Her war began with the Nazis rounding up the Jews. Their war had begun in Spain six years earlier, after Franco encouraged German war planes to incinerate the town of Guernica and the West did nothing to retaliate. They rallied enthusiastically in favor of a Soviet-American war effort.

Rory knew before he came to New York what sort of life he would have. He’d read about it in novels by hip young authors who lived there. He saw the apartment, small but high-ceilinged, a tall, sooty window with a fire escape twisting past a chemical-pink sky. Nights in frantic clubs, mornings hunched over coffee in the East Village, warming his hands on the cup, black pants, black turtleneck, pointed black boots. He’d intended to snort cocaine, but by the time he arrived, that was out. He drank instead.

“It’s strange,” she says. “Going back.”

“To them?” Jann gestures at the group. “Or back?”

“Both,” she says.

Later today they will fly to Nairobi. Tomorrow morning, New York. Two weeks from now she leaves for Argentina.

“Everything fades the minute you’re somewhere else,” Bernadette says. It’s a mistake to say these things. “It fades.”

“When I was eighteen,” her father said, “I bought a motorcycle and rode around Europe for months.”

Ellen had never heard this before. “Was it fun?” she asked.

“I lived like a maniac.”

She paused, unsure whether this was good or bad. “Was it fun?” she asked again.

“Fun. Was it fun.” He stared across the miles of dead grass and shook his head. “It was the best time of my life.”

Ellen felt suddenly shy. She followed her father’s gaze to the horizon, where faded earth nudged a faded sky. It looked like the edge of something hidden, a place he alone had explored.

I freshened up the onion dips and chips and guacamole and went out on the steps. No one else was outside, and I was too depressed to call anybody to come see the unbelievable sunset. Is there a word opposite of déjà vu? Or a word to describe how I saw my whole future flash before my eyes? I saw that I’d stay at the Albuquerque National Bank and Bernie would get his doctorate and keep on painting bad paintings and making muddy pottery and would get tenure. We would have two daughters and one would be a dentist and the other a cocaine addict. Well, of course I didn’t know all that, but I saw how things would be hard. And I knew that years and years from then Bernie would probably leave me for one of his students and I’d be devastated but then would go back to school and when I was fifty I’d finally do things I wanted to do, but I would be tired.

Why married people have affairs: you feel luckier, with a happy secret place in your imagination in which to refresh yourself. My mistake in the past has been to keep it on the front boiler, cooking briskly, instead of turning off the gas and letting it go cold.

The real football reason, in all its inevitable real-reason banality, was that, over the course of weeks of dawns of watching the autosprinklers and the Pep Squad (which really did practice at dawn) practices, Orin had developed a horrible schoolboy-grade crush, complete with dilated pupils and weak knees, for a certain big-haired sophomore baton-twirler he watched twirl and strut from a distance through the diffracted spectrum of the plumed sprinklers, all the way across the field's dewy turf, a twirler who'd attended a few of the All-Athletic-Team mixers Orin and his strabismic B.U. doubles partner had gone to, and who danced the same way she twirled and invoked mass Pep, which is to say in a way that seemed to turn everything solid in Orin's body watery and distant and oddly refracted.

Orin Incandenza, who like many children of raging alcoholics and OCD-sufferers had internal addictive-sexuality issues, had already drawn idle little sideways 8's on the postcoital flanks of a dozen B.U. coeds. But this was different. He'd been smitten before, but not decapitated. He lay on his bed in the autumn P.M.s during the tennis coach's required nap-time, squeezing a tennis ball and talking for hours about this twirling sprinkler-obscured sophomore while his doubles partner lay way on the other side of the huge bed looking simultaneously at Orin and at the N.E. leaves changing color in the trees outside the window. The schoolboy epithet they'd made up to refer to Orin's twirler was the P.G.O.A.T., for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time. It wasn't the entire attraction, but she really was almost grotesquely lovely. She made the Moms look like the sort of piece of fruit you think you want to take out of the bin and but then once you're right there over the bin you put back because from close up you can see a much fresher and less preserved-seeming piece of fruit elsewhere in the bin. [...] The big hair was red-gold and the skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zygomatics indescribable and her eyes an extra-natural HD green. He wouldn't learn till later that the almost pungently clean line-dried-laundry scent that hung about her was a special low-pH dandelion attar decocted special by her chemist Daddy in Shiny Prize KY.

Hans remembers her smile and her breasts, but the way she looks overall, he perhaps doesn’t know. But there she is, turning onto Schiffbauerdamm, and he recognizes her right away. She’s swinging her handbag as she walks, she’s dressed all in black, and as she comes closer, he sees she’s put up her hair and tied it with a black velvet ribbon. Exposed, he thinks, her face. He wanted to be straight with her today, he knows now he will have to be. It’s his only chance. He gives a nod as they pass the two waiters with long white aprons at the entrance, who are performing France for French soldiers over from West Berlin who like to have a cheap meal in East Berlin’s expensive Ganymede.

We will only see each other occasionally, he says, but each time will be like our first time — a celebration. She listens to him attentively and nods. I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She looks him straight in the face, there is a ring of yellow around her pupils, he now sees. I’m not just married, I’m also in a relationship with a woman who works in radio. If you had a thousand women, she says, all that matters is the time that we get to spend together. How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything? The black velvet ribbon moves him, it makes her look like a schoolgirl. If he doesn’t manage to say quickly what he needs to say, it’ll be too late. And you can’t expect any sort of public acknowledgment — I know, and you know, and that will have to do. That’s fine, she says, and smiles. Where terms and conditions are set, there is a future. All yesterday and today she was afraid he would just toss her out.

Two weeks ago, when Ingrid was taking Hans’s jacket to the dry cleaner’s, she found a passport photo of Katharina in the inside pocket and wouldn’t talk to him for three days. He didn’t tell Katharina. In October Katharina cried for the first time about the fact that he was married, and in November for the second time, and since then he’s avoided mentioning Ingrid’s name. And if Katharina now sometimes looks deadly earnest, he knows she’s making an effort and is repressing something she ought really to talk about. Anything the matter? No. Because everything is avoided that might make one or other of them sad, sadness suddenly comes to occupy a lot of space between them. He is old enough to know how the end likes to set its roots first imperceptibly, then ever more boldly, in the present. Without my marriage I wouldn’t be the man I am. That’s what he told Regina as well, the newscaster, and Marjut, the Finn. They went along with it until he’d had enough. Where Katharina is concerned, the sentence carries a different meaning, but she would deny it if he were to write it to her. Without his marriage, there wouldn’t be the danger, the secrecy, the circumstances that give rise to yearning. Not the content of their love, but factors that energize and quicken it. Just as if/ in a gallop/ an exhausted mare/ thirsted for the nearest well. Thirsting. Another one of those dead words. The marriage that threatens and attenuates their affair is also the ground that nourishes it. And probably, if Hans were honest, the other way around as well. Wasn’t Ingrid — when at the end of three silent days she started to speak again, and during the ensuing scene to cry, and when the makeup ran down her face and she picked up the nearest thing that came to hand, which happened to be a clothes brush, and threw it out of the window into the yard — wasn’t Ingrid in her desperation more beautiful and desirable than she’d appeared to him in a long time?

— I didn’t leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been for more than a year. He said it evenly, almost as if it had happened to someone else. It was my son’s tutor, he explained. I fell in love with her.

— And you began something with her? Morrissey suggested.

— Oh, yes.

There is love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot even breathe.

— Within two or three days, he confessed.

— There in the house?

Phil shook his head. He had a strange, helpless feeling. He was abandoning himself.

— I didn’t do anything in the house.

— He left his wife and children, Adele repeated.

— You knew that, Phil said.

— Just walked out on them. They’d been married fifteen years, since he was nineteen.

— We hadn’t been married fifteen years.

— They had three children, she said, one of them retarded.

Something had happened—he was becoming speechless, he could feel it in his chest like a kind of nausea. As if he were giving up portions of an intimate past.

— He wasn’t retarded, he managed to say. He was . . . having trouble learning to read, that’s all.

None of them could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of art. Two years in Mexico City oblivious to the wreckage. It was the sense of godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent forward with its slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones like pearls that ran down her smooth back. He could see himself, his former self.

— I talk to her, he admitted.

— And your first wife?

— I talk to her. We have three kids.

— He left her, Adele said. Casanova here.

— Some women have minds like cops, Phil said to no one in particular. This is right, that’s wrong. Well, anyway . . .

He stood up. He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled his life.

— Anyway there’s one thing I can say truthfully. I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.

— It’s right up there, he gestured. It doesn’t look like anything, just like another small star. It’s that extra one, by the Pleiades. He knew all the constellations. He had seen them rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts.

— Come on, you can look at it tomorrow, she said, almost consolingly, though she came no closer to him.

— It won’t be there tomorrow. One time only.

She had told them she had a doctor’s appointment and needed extra time for lunch. She told him that. As she entered the hotel elevator he could not help but notice her fine hips. Then, incredibly, they were in the room. His heart was uncontrollable and everything was prepared for them, the sleek furnishings, the chairs, the thick fresh towels in the bath. There had been four murders in Brooklyn the night before. The brokers were going wild on Wall Street. On Fourteenth, men stood in the cold beside tables of watches and socks. The madman on Fifty-seventh was singing arias at the top of his voice, buildings were being torn down, new towers rising. She rose to draw the drapes and for a moment stood in the space between them, in the light and looking down. The splendor and newness of her! He had known nothing like it.

Her apartment was borrowed, from someone on assignment. Even at that, it was sparsely furnished. He wanted to give her something every time he saw her, a gift, something unexpected, a chrome and leather chair that he showed her in the window before he ordered it delivered, a ring, a rosewood box, but he was careful to keep nothing that came from her— note, e-mail, photograph—that might betray him. There was one exception, a picture he had taken as she half sat up in bed, from over her bare shoulder, breasts, smooth stomach, thighs, you would not know who it was. He kept it at work between the pages of a book. He liked to turn to it and remember.

In those days of desire so deep that it left him empty-legged, he did not behave unnaturally at home—if anything he was more loving and devoted although Lily, especially, was beyond increased devotion. He came home filled with forbidden happiness, forbidden but unrivalled, and embraced his wife and played with or read to his children. The prohibited feeds the appetite for all the rest. He went from one to the other with a heart that was pure. On Park Avenue he stood on the island in the middle, waiting to cross. The traffic lights were turning red as far as he could see. The distant buildings stood majestic in the monied haze. Beside him were people in coats and hats, with packages, briefcases, none of them as fortunate as he. The city was a paradise. The glory of it was that it sheltered his singular life.

— Am I your mistress? she asked one day.

— Mistress? No, he thought, that was something older, even old-fashioned. He knew of no word to truly describe her other than probable downfall or perhaps fate.

— How was I lucky enough to meet you? he said.

They were having dinner amid the liveliness of the crowd, the intimacy within it, the voices all around. He had seen most of them. She was by far the prize of the room.

— We’re going to be friends for a long time, she promised.

Summer mornings with their first, soft light. Amorous mornings, the red numbers flicking silently on the clock, the first sunlight in the trees. Her stunning naked back. The most sacred hours, he realized, of his life.

Westhampton, her tanned legs and pale heels. The feeling she gave him of being younger, even, God help him, debonair. He was playful. On the beach he wore a coconut hat. He had fallen in love, deeply, and without knowing it. He hadn’t realized he had been living a shallow life. He only knew that he was happy, happier than he had ever been, in her company. This warmhearted girl with her legs, her fragrance, and perfect little ears that were tuned to him. And she took some kind of pleasure in him! They were guests of the Senders and he slept in a separate room in the basement while she was upstairs, but they were under the same roof and he would see her in the morning.

— When are you going to marry her? everyone asked.

— She wouldn’t have me, he equivocated.

The other episode went further, yet was more ordinary. A teaching assistant had joined his class, she was pretty and flirted with him, and once, when the staff had drinks after school, they kissed lingeringly in the car park. Then he drew back from her, with some relief. After all he had Lydia now. It was both a thirst and a blessing, the late renewal of his erotic life. When he was young he’d been too absorbed in the problem of himself to appreciate possibilities blooming around him everywhere. Now, how long before the women only looked at him with distaste, or pity? He thought that he understood his father at last, how he had accepted this pursuit of women as if it were in lieu of every kind of outward honour. Sex looked like a cheap trick from the outside, but in its moment it burned up the world. You could not have everything: the whole wisdom of life amounted to that. Whatever you had, was instead of something else.

Hansen stayed three weeks, and after he left, I experienced a modified version of my prior despair. I missed him bitterly, but with each day the bitterness abated and another set of possibilities began to assert itself, like shifting my weight from one foot to the other. A week after he left, I had dinner with a young playboy, dark-haired and light-skinned like the Carravagian boys Hansen and I had observed so recently. Again, as with Henri, the desire that I felt for this man was like a blanket tossed over my head. We went back to his house, a house in the middle of Paris with tall shuttered windows, and I spent the night without making love all the way, but the next morning I relented, and we began an affair. I felt exactly two opposite ways: gripped by the feverish eroticism of my new circumstances, and devoted to Hansen in a way that made the other feeling outrageous, inconceivable. In moments, I clutched at the notion of some larger “me” that could contain and justify my contradictory behavior, but more often I simply felt like the scene of two irreconcilable visions, two different people, one unerringly loyal and faithful, the other treacherous and greedy. My affair with Henri had pushed something open in me, and now I felt ravenous, in constant danger of going hungry. Hansen alone would never be enough.

She set down her pen and looked at me. “Charlotte, we know this thing is rotten,” she said. “But it’s still in our hands, we can still walk away. All we will have lost is some time!” I saw the martini in her eyes—the heat, the conviction. And a strange feeling overtook me then; it flared at the word “we,” a kind of vision—myself and Irene moving together into another kind of life: a life in which my choices were all different, in which I was different. The life of someone else. I glimpsed that woman rushing somewhere, engaged, engrossed, and a fat knot of hope snaked through me and jammed in my throat. And then she vanished. I was thirty-five. I’d made my choices long ago.

This opens up an important area. When the actor is being photographed looking at someone off-camera, he can obviously see past him to the whole darkened studio. We call this the actor’s “eyeline.” It can involve both sides of the camera. Just before we roll, any well-trained AD will always say, “Clear the eyeline, please.” If William Holden is making love to Faye Dunaway, he doesn’t want to see some teamster sipping coffee behind her. He doesn’t want to see anybody other than Faye watching him, even if he has great concentration. Since most crews don’t understand this, “Clear the eyeline” becomes a never-ending refrain.

[...] I was, I think, eight years old. The old folks gossiped and entrusted me to a young girl, who was to show me the park. We walked along the paths, crossed some little bridges which had railings made of birch poles - I remember that well. Then it happened. I looked at her thin bare shoulders, the narrowness of her arms above the elbow, and an emotion I had never experienced, a tenderness, a rapture, unnamable, welled up in my throat. I had no idea that this is called love. I think she must have said something, explaining, but I said not a word, strucky dumb by what had suddenly come over me.

Whisper, “Don’t go yet,” as he glides out of your bed before sunrise and you lie there on your back cooling, naked between the sheets and smelling of musky, oniony sweat. Feel gray, like an abandoned locker room towel. Watch him as he again pulls on his pants, his sweater, his socks and shoes. Reach out and hold his thigh as he leans over and kisses you quickly, telling you not to get up, that he ’ll lock the door when he leaves. In the smoky darkness, you see him smile weakly, guiltily, and attempt a false, jaunty wave from the doorway. Turn on your side, toward the wall, so you don’t have to watch the door close. You hear it thud nonetheless, the jangle of keys and snap of the bolt lock, the footsteps loud, then fading down the staircase, the clunk of the street door, then nothing, all his sounds blending with the city, his face passing namelessly uptown in a bus or a badly heated cab, the room, the whole building you live in, shuddering at the windows as a truck roars by toward the Queensboro Bridge.

Wonder who you are.

His eyes were hurting and he closed them. He couldn't understand how this had happened, how he had let the discussion slip away like this. It was too late to say he wanted to stay with her, that was clear, but when had it become too late? It seemed to have happened immediately. He contemplated putting his face down on the table and just crying like a child. Instead he opened his eyes again.

Until he could no longer write letters, Gabriel's uncle nagged him with useless advice. Most of it was about money. Owing to Gabriel's inability to produce his father's marriage certificate (in fact, he never tried), his uncle could not in all conscience leave him Baum possessions. It was up to Gabriel, therefore, to look after his own future. He begged Gabriel to find a job with some large, benevolent international firm. It would give him the assurance of money coming in, would encourage French social-security bureaucrats to take an interest in him, and would put him in the way of receiving an annuity at the age of sixty-five.

“Sixty-five is your next step,” his uncle warned, for Gabriel's thirtieth birthday.

“That sign was the end of life as we knew it in the sixties,” said Dieter Pohl. He was a colonel now, and as fussy as a monarch at a review about a badge misplaced or a button undone. Gabriel had no equivalent staircase to climb; who ever has heard of a victim's being promoted? Still, he had acquired a variety of victim experiences. Gabriel had been shot, stoned, drowned, suffocated, and marked off for hanging; had been insulted and betrayed; had been shoved aboard trains and dragged out of them; had been flung from the back of a truck with such accidental violence that he had broken his collarbone. His demise, seen by millions of people, some eating their dinner, was still needed in order to give a push to the old dishonorable plot — told ever more simply now, like a fable — while Dieter's fate was still part of its moral.

Dieter heard that a thirteen-hour television project about the Occupation was to be launched in the spring; he had seen the outline.

He said, “For the moment they just need a few people to be deported and to jump off the train.”

Some old-timers heard Dieter say, “They want to deport the Poles,” and some heard, “They are rounding up the foreign-born Socialists,” and others swore he had asked for twelve Jews to be run over by a locomotive.

Gabriel supposed that Dieter was right, in a way. Certainly, he was at a bad age for dangerous antics. It was time for younger men to take their turn at jumping off moving vehicles, diving into ice-cold streams, and dodging blank shot; nor had he reached that time of life when he could die blessing and inspiring those the script had chosen to survive him. As an officer, doomed to defeat, he would at least be sure of his rank and his role and of being in one piece at the end.

Have you read Deleuze and Guattari? she asks, and I have to hide a smile; she hasn’t acquired the defensive veneer that would prevent her from asking open-ended questions like that. There is something so earnest about her, a yearning for connection on some other plane than the everyday, or that she’s not getting on an everyday basis. I take a wild guess that her partner has not read Deleuze and Guattari, and that she wishes he did.

At that moment of seeing Victoire childlike on that bench I could have caught myself, freed myself with even the mildest allusion to Lolita, but the fact of the matter was that it was not her youth that attracted me. In fact, I am not even certain that what charmed me was all that genuine, that being her guiltlessness, her irreproachability, either of which were constructions of mine or hers. It really wasn’t that I wanted her, but that I wanted what she had, a kind of freedom, a purity of spirit. It was a sort of integrity, something that I strived for but had lost through so many years, maybe never had. I wanted what she had the way I wanted to draw the way my daughter drew when she was four, when that tangle of lines was an elephant, an elephant that I could not see, but an elephant. I recalled how brokenhearted I was when one day she crumpled up her picture and complained that it didn’t look like an elephant at all. Victoire allowed me to see that simple bench as it was, as more than what it was, and I was happy for it. I loved her for it. I sat on it beside her and felt the smoothness of it under my palms, attended to the coolness of it.

I heard her move around the room, but I kept my eyes closed. She told me I could open them and I did. Against the wall pinned to a foam-core board that leaned against the wall was a watercolor. The paper was about twenty by thirty inches. The work was green, green leaning into blue in places, edged with blood in the southeast corner. It was abstract, stunning. It was so unlike the country scenes and cityscapes of hers that I had seen before. The painting was rich, dense, and deep. Too deep, I thought, for a work on paper, no matter how heavy the stock, too rich to be anything but oil colors, but it was surely watercolors. I was surprised by it, confused by it. I began to cry.

“Do you like it?”

“Did you make this?” I asked.

“You think a young, pretty French girl cannot paint this picture?”

“I don’t believe anyone could make this picture. How did you do it?” I wanted to get up and walk over to it, to get right up on it, but I also did not want to end the experience I was having with it. “I love it.”

“Why are you here with me?” I asked.

“Pardon?”

“Victoire, you are a beautiful young woman. Men are drawn to you. Men your age. I’m an old married man. I have two children. I live in another country. I can offer you nothing.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“How is any of that not true?”

“First of all, I don’t want anything from you. Except you.”

“That’s my point. You can’t have me,” I said. “I’m not going to leave my wife and children.”

“But I do have you, don’t I? You are right here beside me, eating the same croissant, looking at the same overstated church. We lie in the same bed, breathe the same air.”

“Suppose,” I said, “we were together. Just for the sake of argument, imagine it. I will die long before you.”

“And then I will be sad before having a happy rest of my life. I will find another man. Maybe another old man like you. Maybe a younger one.”

Her answer was so clean, so perfect, so smart. “Of course,” I said. I reached over and held her hand.

“I told you. You do love me. Tu es mon beau ténébreux.” She leaned over and placed her head against my shoulder. It was an agreeable feeling, a nice weight. I would later confess to myself, sadly, that everything she had said I wanted to hear. I studied the top of her beautiful twenty-two-year-old head, peered through her hair, through her unblemished scalp, through her bone and into her brain, and loved her, wanted her to feel loved. More precisely, I wanted her to feel loved by me. It sounded as stupid then as it does now.

The women excused themselves and left us on the patio.

“You dog,” Richard said. “You’re not going to say that this isn’t what it looks like.”

“No, I’m afraid it’s exactly what it looks like. A goddamn train wreck.”

“The daughter? How old is she? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-two.”

“What about the mother?” he asked.

“What about the mother?”

“She’s beautiful, in case you hadn’t noticed. And she knows?”

“Yes.”

Richard whistled. “To the French,” he toasted.

“I’m an idiot,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Take my word,” I said.

“Victoire,” he said to the moon. “She’s a beauty.”

“There are lots of beauties out there,” I said.

“Right. Aren’t you above it all.”

“Yes, she’s beautiful,” I agreed. I stopped at the middle of the bridge and looked down at the Seine.

“Don’t do it,” Richard said.

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.” I looked at him. “So, my friend, am I crazy?”

“No, but you’re a carrier.”

“Am I?”

“Yep.”

“This can’t lead to anything,” I said.

“Nope.”

“I’ve got a beautiful family.”

“Yep.”

“Is this pretty much how this discussion’s going to go?”

“Yep.”

“I actually have feelings for this woman.”

“I’m sure you do,” Richard said. “I don’t even know her and I have feelings for her. And for her mother.” He laughed softly. “Don’t listen to me. I know you’ve done the math, but here it is again. She’s nearly twenty-five years younger than you. When she’s thirty-five, you will be fifty-nine. Not quite old, but you see where this is going. Your daughter will be nineteen and will hate your guts. Your son will be fifteen and he’ll excuse himself from the dinner table so he can go to his room and jack off to internet images of Catherine Deneuve.”

“I preferred the monosyllabic routine.”

“She must have some pussy.”

I caught myself before I could become angered by his remark. Instead, in my head I heard Victoire’s whispered “Je t’aime” and saw her green watercolor. “You have no idea,” I said.

“Tell me, does she make you feel younger? Is that part of this?”

On the face of it this was a reasonable enough question. I thought about it. “No,” I said. “In fact, I feel older. I would have to, wouldn’t I? But the thing is, I don’t care. She doesn’t care. She really doesn’t. So, I don’t care.”

“How moving.”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

The secret that I held closest, the secret that I never told anyone, that I shared with no one, was that I had married Linda without loving her. I wanted to love her. I liked her immensely, thought the world of her, respected her, but I could not then say that I loved her. I probably came to love her. I certainly shared life with her enthusiastically, happily, willingly. I was pleased that she was the mother of my children, but my heart never ached for her, my skin never longed for her touch. I had in fact used her. I had used her to feel whole again, normal, to feel like a good man after what I had done in El Salvador. She held my head and stroked my temples when I was depressed without knowing the cause. She considered me the moody artist. And that I was. The irony, of course, one of them, was that my depression actually fed my work, made my art better, gave it a gravity, a depth that it hadn’t had before. A certain amount of guilt came with that truth, a guilt that never went completely away, a guilt that became easier to live with and yet more profound.

[...] those two years of graduate school, of writing workshops and literature classes, had been the happiest of his life. He’d hauled boxes for a moving company, read two books a week, and begun the novel that Athena and some others, too, had liked. Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing else.

David Clark was neither strong nor handsome, but the bewildered look that had blighted his boyhood was long submerged now in a face that suggested intelligence and humor. For years he had made it a point of honor not to mess around with the girls in the classes he taught. “There isn’t any sport in it,” he would explain to other teachers. “It’s taking unfair advantage. It’s shooting fish in a barrel.” It was shyness too, and a terrible fear of rejection, though he didn’t usually mention those aspects of the matter.

But the whole of that argument had vanished some months ago when he found he could get through a lecture only by letting his gaze go back time and again, like that of a man seeking nourishment, to Miss Andrews in the front row.

‘Older than Hana. Could you fall in love with her if she wasn’t smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now. She can be obsessed by the Englishman because he knows more. We’re in a huge field when we talk to that guy. We don’t even know if he’s English. He’s probably not. You see, I think it is easier to fall in love with him than with you. Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Hana.

‘Neither do I. Let me tell you about people my age. The worst thing is others assume you have developed your character by now. The trouble with middle age is they think you are fully formed. Here.’

They are in the botanical garden, near the Cathedral of All Saints. She sees one tear and leans forward and licks it, taking it into her mouth. As she has taken the blood from his hand when he cut himself cooking for her. Blood. Tear. He feels everything is missing from his body, feels he contains smoke. All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want. What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

There’s the door, she tells me, and points. Why don’t you just walk out?

I don’t move. I can walk out the door, but then I’d have to stand in the hall and wait.

What about that gate? She’s pointing out the window now. The gate is lit up at night: razor wire coiled along the top, the tower with a sharpshooter in it. Or what about your cell doors? she asks. Or block gates? Or shower doors? Or the mess hall doors, or the doors to the visitor entrance? How often do you gentlemen touch a doorknob? That’s what I’m asking.

I knew the minute I saw Holly that she’d never taught in a prison before. It wasn’t her looks—she’s not a kid, and you can see she hasn’t had it easy. But people who teach in prisons have a hard layer around them that’s missing on Holly. I can hear how nervous she is, like she planned every word of that speech about the doors. But the crazy thing is, she’s right. The last time I got out, I’d stand in front of doors and wait for them to open up. You forget what it’s like to do it yourself.

She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says. That’s what I’m here to do, and if that doesn’t interest you then please spare us all, because this grant only funds ten students, and we only meet once a week, and I’m not going to waste everyone’s time on bullshit power struggles.

She comes right to my desk and looks down. I look back up. I want to say, I’ve heard some cheesy motivational speeches in my time, but that one’s a doozy. A door in our heads, come on. But while she was talking I felt something pop in my chest.

‘A large crowd of us went to see Anna Alekseyevna off. She had already said goodbye to her husband and children, and the train was about to leave at any moment. I rushed to her compartment to put a basket that she’d almost forgotten onto the luggage-rack. Now it was time to say farewell. When our eyes met we could hold ourselves back no longer. I embraced her and she pressed her face to my chest and the tears just flowed. As I kissed her face, shoulders and hands that were wet with tears – oh, how miserable we both were! – I declared my love and realized, with a searing pain in my heart, how unnecessary, trivial and illusory everything that had stood in the way of our love had been. I understood that with love, if you start theorizing about it, you must have a nobler, more meaningful starting-point than mere happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue, as they are commonly understood. Otherwise it’s best not to theorize at all.

‘I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand and we parted for ever. The train was already moving. I took a seat in the next compartment, which was empty, and cried until the first stop, where I got out and walked back to Sofino.’

‘How can I defend myself? I’m a wicked, vile woman. I despise myself and I’m not going to make any excuses. It’s not my husband but myself I’ve deceived. And I don’t mean only just now, but for a long time. My husband’s a fine honest man, but he’s no more than a lackey. What does he do in that office of his? I’ve no idea. But I do know he’s a mere lackey. I was twenty when I married him and dying from curiosity; but I wanted something better. Surely there must be a different kind of life, I told myself. I wanted to live life to the full, to enjoy life… to enjoy it! I was burning with curiosity. You won’t understand this, but I swear that my feelings ran away with me, something was happening to me and there was no holding me back. So I told my husband I was ill and I came here… And ever since I’ve been going around as if intoxicated, like someone demented. So, now I’m a vulgar, worthless woman whom everyone has the right to despise.’

One night, as he left the Doctors’ Club with his partner – a civil servant – he was unable to hold back any more and said:

‘If you only knew what an enchanting woman I met in Yalta!’

The civil servant climbed into his sledge and drove off. But then he suddenly turned round and called out:

‘Dmitry Dmitrich!’

‘What?’

‘You were right the other day – the sturgeon was off!’

This trite remark for some reason suddenly nettled Gurov, striking him as degrading and dirty. What barbarous manners, what faces! What meaningless nights, what dismal, unmemorable days! Frenetic card games, gluttony, constant conversations about the same old thing. Those pointless business affairs and perpetual conversations – always on the same theme – were commandeering the best part of his time, his best strength, so that in the end there remained only a limited, humdrum life, just trivial nonsense. And it was impossible to run away, to escape – one might as well be in a lunatic asylum or a convict squad!

First sighting: tall, proud, shapely, with very black hair and a white dress; suave, elegant, warm and educated. Accompanied by a tall, proud, athletic, elegant and educated man. They came into the place where I worked, in the period following the episode with the green-eyed girl – the period of films, books, alcohol and prostitutes. We talked for a while, and after they left, my business partner and I fell silent, looking at the place where she’d stood. My business partner was having a mild attack of asthma. As the minutes went by, the invisible pedestal holding her aloft grew higher and higher without us noticing. After a while, my business partner and I dared to exchange a glance. Then we looked up and down but with our chins tilted a little to the right, somewhere between nodding and shaking our heads, our lower lips pushed slightly forward to simulate disappointment. What a shame, we were trying to say to each other, that a woman like that could never be ours. In the days that followed, we began to reminisce about her out loud. My business partner, who was very observant, or had an overactive imagination, always added some new detail I’d overlooked or forgotten: the tasteful patterning on her embossed belt, how well the strip of white wool peeping over the top of her dainty leather boots suited her, or the lock of jet-black hair nestling behind her left ear. And after a few more days we’d forgotten her, at least to a certain extent.

How can we say whether anything’s good or bad for us? Are we capable of judging an ordinary event, sure of not being mistaken? [...]

Sometimes I really feel the loss of everything and everyone concerned. I understand what Fellini means when he says filming to him is a way of life and I also understand his little story about Anita Ekberg. Her last scene in La Dolce Vita took place in a car erected in the studio. When the scene had been taken and filming was over as far as she was concerned, she started crying and refused to leave the car, gripping firmly onto the wheel. She had to be carried out of the studio with gentle force.

Sometimes there is a special happiness in being a film director. An unrehearsed expression is born just like that, and the camera registers that expression. That was exactly what happened that day. Unprepared and unrehearsed, Alexander turned very pale, a look of sheer agony appearing on his face. The camera registered the moment. The agony, the intangible, was there for a few seconds and never returned. Neither was it there earlier, but the strip of film caught the moment. That is when I think days and months of predictable routine have paid off. It is possible I live for those brief moments.

Like a pearl fisher.

Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind on one frame after another, see the almost imperceptible changes, wind faster —a movement.

I didn’t know what was happening. Gun was four months’ pregnant. I behaved like a jealous child. She was alone, deserted. There are moving pictures with sound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity. Only one’s own insight inexorably and relentlessly moves inwards towards the truth.

Suddenly she took off her concealing sunglasses and said, ‘This is what I look like, Mr Bergman.’ Her smile was swift and dazzling, teasing.

It is hard to say whether great myths are unremittingly magical because they are myths or whether the magic is an illusion, created by us consumers; but at that particular instant there was no doubt. In the half-light in that cramped room, her beauty was imperishable. If she had been an angel from one of the gospels, I would have said her beauty floated about her. It existed like a vitality around the big pure features of her face, her forehead, the intersection of her eyes, the nobly-shaped chin, the sensitivity of her nostrils. She immediately registered my reaction, was exhilarated and started talking about her work on Selma Lagerlof’s Gosta Berling’s Saga.

The truth in our interpretations is bound by time. Our theatre productions do indeed disappear into merciful obscurity. But individual moments of greatness or misery are still illuminated by a mild light. And the films still exist and bear witness to the cruel fickleness of artistic truth. A few steles rise above the crushed pebbles.

When Henri opened his eyes, he saw, in the half light of dawn, a pale-green tufted wall. The happiness of being alive on this morning made his heart jump with joy. It called for brisk, salty pleasures - cold water, a rough bath glove. He slipped out of bed without awakening Josette, and when he came out of the bathroom, washed, dressed, and starving, she was still asleep. He crossed the room on tiptoe and bent over her; she was lying there wrapped in her dampness, in her fragrance, with her bright locks flowing over her eyes, and he felt wonderfully happy to have that woman for himself, and to be a man. She half-opened an eye, just one, as if she were trying to retain her sleep in the other.

Nothing whatever had been agreed upon between us, but when the carriage turned into the park I could not refrain from getting out, perhaps simply because I did not want to drive up to the house like any stranger. Summer was already at its height. I headed into one of the side paths and toward a laburnum tree. And there was Abelone. Beautiful, beautiful Abelone.

I shall never forget how it was when you looked at me. How you wore that gaze of yours, holding it up, like something that was not fixed, upon your back-tilted face.

Ah, did not the climate change at all, did it not grow milder round about Ulsgaard with all our warmth? Do not certain roses bloom longer in the park now, even in December?

I shall tell nothing about you, Abelone. Not because we deluded one another: since you loved someone, even then, whom you have never forgotten, you lover, and I loved all women; but because only wrong is done in the telling.

Okay to switch the final two scenes? Because Ray had a hard out at three. Settlement meeting with divorce attorneys.

Lynn had sprained her wrist skateboarding—could costume come up with some way to hide the wrist guard?

The twins’ mother was complaining that the wigs were digging into their scalps—did we have the budget to replace?

Everyone looked to Carter, awaiting Daddy’s guidance.

Eight years in, Carter knew this little dance: when to flatter, when to discipline, how to calm the daily tantrums. How did they even function in their actual lives without him around?

When he started to speak, the gathered crowd got quiet, reverent.

“Yes,” Carter said, “switch the scenes. Tell Ray no more wives.”

(Pause for laughter.)

I recall you within a chance patch of sunlight. You had sharp elbows and pale, dusty-looking eyes. When you spoke, you would carve the air with the riblike edge of your little hand and the glint of a bracelet on your thin wrist. Your hair would melt as it merged with the sunlit air that quivered around it. You smoked copiously and nervously. You exhaled through both nostrils, obliquely flicking off the ash. Your dove-gray manor was five versts from ours. Its interior was reverberant, sumptuous, and cool. A photograph of it had appeared in a glossy metropolitan magazine. Almost every morning, I would leap onto the leather wedge of my bicycle and rustle along the path, through the woods, then along the highway and through the village, then along another path toward you. You counted on your husband’s not coming in September. And we feared nothing, you and I—not your servants’ gossip, not my family’s suspicions. Each of us, in a different way, trusted fate.

In your misty bedroom, the sunlight, having penetrated the lowered Venetian blinds, formed two golden ladders on the floor. You said something in your muted voice. Outside the window, the trees breathed and dripped with a contented rustle. And I, smiling at that rustle, lightly and unavidly embraced you.

When we had left the village, crossed the bridge, and were climbing the path toward your house, I took you under the elbow, and you flashed that special sidelong smile that told me you were happy. Suddenly I had the desire to tell you about Pal Palych’s little wrinkles, about the spangled St. Isaac’s, but, as soon as I began, I had a feeling the wrong words were coming out, bizarre words, and when you tenderly said, “Decadent,” I changed the subject. I knew what you needed: simple feelings, simple words. Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants. All silence is the recognition of a mystery. There was much about you that seemed mysterious.

I looked you straight in the face. I looked with all my soul, directly. I collided with you. Your eyes were limpid, as if a pellicle of silken paper had fluttered off them—the kind that sheathes illustrations in precious books. And, for the first time, your voice was limpid too. “You know what I’ve decided? Listen. I cannot live without you. That’s exactly what I’ll tell him. He’ll give me a divorce right away. And then, say in the fall, we could …”

I interrupted you with my silence. A spot of sunlight slid from your skirt onto the sand as you moved slightly away.

What could I say to you? Could I invoke freedom, captivity, say I did not love you enough? No, that was all wrong.

An instant passed. During that instant, much happened in the world: somewhere a giant steamship went to the bottom, a war was declared, a genius was born. The instant was gone.

[...] regardless of what happened to me or to her, in between, we never discussed anything, as we never thought of each other during the intervals in our destiny, so that when we met the pace of life altered at once, all its atoms were recombined, and we lived in another, lighter time-medium, which was measured not by the lengthy separations but by those few meetings of which a short, supposedly frivolous life was thus artificially formed. And with each new meeting I grew more and more apprehensive; no—I did not experience any inner emotional collapse, the shadow of tragedy did not haunt our revels, my married life remained unimpaired, while on the other hand her eclectic husband ignored her casual affairs although deriving some profit from them in the way of pleasant and useful connections. I grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping off poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core which perhaps it kept offering me in a pitiful whisper. I was apprehensive because, in the long run, I was somehow accepting Nina’s life, the lies, the futility, the gibberish of that life. Even in the absence of any sentimental discord, I felt myself bound to seek for a rational, if not moral, interpretation of my existence, and this meant choosing between the world in which I sat for my portrait, with my wife, my young daughters, the Doberman pinscher (idyllic garlands, a signet ring, a slender cane), between that happy, wise, and good world … and what? Was there any practical chance of life together with Nina, life I could barely imagine, for it would be penetrated, I knew, with a passionate, intolerable bitterness and every moment of it would be aware of a past, teeming with protean partners. No, the thing was absurd. And moreover was she not chained to her husband by something stronger than love—the staunch friendship between two convicts? Absurd! But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?

He had seen Caro from a distance and altered his course to intersect. Had observed, as he drew near, that her walk turned the progress of other women to a thump or shuffle. He would have said her delicate dark strength was virile--a sombre glow that might distinguish some young man. He remembered dark, vigorous young men who kept somewhat to themselves, yet retained this vibrancy of adventure. Then he thought how such youths often ended feebly, how quickly they grew sour or cautious, or became the foils of bitter women--their energies turned to blame or bluster, their pride morose. He had already seen that; and supposed that in the case of women such beings dwindled entirely, or at most passed some shred of their lost impetus to children.

Paul Ivory had also noted penalties of impulse. Had seen how men provide themselves, before their taste or character is formed, with wife and children--committed and condemned thereafter to the fixtures of an outgrown fancy. He was satisfied his own prospective marriage would preclude such dangers. An accusation of dispassion would not have troubled him. He was not convinced that passion was essential, or that the world had properly defined it.

"Or the best." He smiled. His hound-face had lines, at eyelids and mouth, that were now at rest but might be put to use. His dark hair, greying, fell loose over his forehead. His body, too heavy and indolent for the precise little chair, was that of an active man who had taught himself to wait: an incongruous patience that could trouble those who wondered what might be restrained. He said, "Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self."

She took up a parched sandwich whose lifting corners bared a scaled sardine. She left the tough crusts with the half-gherkin on her plate. When they went out the man at the bar looked at her openly, tenderly, ignoring Christian's claim or seeing through it.

In the street Christian said, "You had an admirer in there." He did not mean himself.

"Yes."

Having drawn the man to her attention, he was displeased to find she had seen him. In no time obviously she will take up with someone else. You iron your hair, you nickname God's creatures, go thy ways.

Nowhere in movie-making is the balance between practical concerns and creative process more in evidence than in production scheduling. Even large-budget movies have to make compromises here. Movies are rarely shot in sequence, though that would seem best for the actors. Instead, an actor may do his death scene in the first week of production, get married in the fourth and meet his future wife in the eighth. On low-budget features this is usually done without the benefit of rehearsal before shooting starts (since the Screen Actors Guild requires that actors be paid for rehearsal time).

Prince (suddenly turning, hand on door knob, pointing his cane at Stark and lowering his voice to a near whisper): Iceberg, listen ... why don't you come up and see the world, the sea gulls and the ships to Europe? (Coming back into the room.) When did you look at another woman last? The year they put the buffalo nickel on the market? Why don't you suddenly ride away, an airplane, a boat! Take a rocket to the moon! Explode! What holds you back? You don't want to hurt Belle's feelings? You'll die soon enough --

Stark: I'll just have to laugh at that!

Prince: Laugh ... But make a motto for yourself: "Out of the coffin by Labor Day!" Have an affair with -- with -- with this girl ... this Miss Cleo. She'll make you a living man again.

Stark: I thought of you all last night. I was walking on the boardwalk and I thought of you. Do you know what the waves are saying?

Cleo: What?

Stark: Your name ...

Cleo: Well, were you walking alone?

Stark: No.

Cleo: With your wife?

Stark: Yes ... (There is a pause; Cleo walks to the water cooler.)

Stark (quietly): Much more mine. I don't know what happened. I thought about these things a lot these past few months. You expect many things from marriage, but I can't give them. I feel a moral obligation but I don't know what to do. These scenes go on. We're always worried ... we're two machines counting up the petty cash. Something about me cheats you -- I'm not the man to help you be the best woman it's in you to be. So your attitude's justified. I know I owe you a lot, Belle --

Prince: What can he offer you? He loves you -- his memoirs are written on his face. But I see a big chapter heading: "No Divorce." Why not? Ten years they're married. She runs his life like a credit manager. They lost a child together ... they're attached underground by a hundred different roots. But if he left her -- as he knows -- could he leave his practice? Never! Then you'd be a credit manager ... But why go on? He won't leave her. That needs courage, strength, and he's not strong.

My brother dies several times a month.

It’s always my mother who phones to inform me of his passing.

“Your brother’s not answering my calls,” she says in a whisper.

To her, the telephone bears witness to our permanence on Earth, so if there’s no answer, the only possible explanation is the cessation of all vital functions.

When she calls to tell me my brother is gone, she’s not looking for reassurance. Instead she wants me to share in her grief. Suffering together is her form of happiness; misery shared is misery relished.

Sometimes the cause of death is banal: a gas leak, a head-on collision, a broken neck from a bad fall.