project/stunt-story

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.

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.

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.