Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  I wrote to Hannah, “Who’d have thought, I’m finding out so much, I miss you, write to me, tell me who sang “Memories Are Made of This”? What year was that? Do you remember?”

  We were the last generation in England to grow up with radio as our main entertainment; in our house, we only got a television in time for the Coronation. It was somehow disappointing: too small a screen, and not grand like the cinema. I wanted to watch film in the dark, unobserved, with nobody to talk to me or notice me in the paradoxical total privacy of a cinema.

  She was getting married, Hannah wrote back. “Claude, please come. I’m giving you loads of time, and I know you’re in a different world, but I can’t get married without you.”

  That year, I flew back across the continent I had crossed, switching time zones, bug-eyed with fatigue, to be there. Flying east is always worst: your body is moving against the sun. But I saw her married, I was there.

  That year, after graduating again, I went back to San Francisco, encouraged by the fact of the Zoetrope studio, Francis having established it there in 1969, and hung out on houseboats in Sausalito with my new friends. I bought a better used camera and began to shoot my own first short feature, the story set on the San Francisco waterfront in the café where I’d worked. The script was, à la Cassavetes, improvised by the actors, who were my fellow waiters and dishwashers and oyster shuckers. Even the boss wanted to be in it. It cost me a borrowed thirty thousand dollars—my kind father sent me pounds and I translated them into dollars, promising to pay him back. Spoon organized a crew for me and we found a studio where we could mix it. The Zoetrope team invited me to their family homes, where simply listening to the talk was an education. The kindness of strangers, who became not-strangers—my American friends, who also happened to be great filmmakers, pioneers in the field. The waterfront film eventually got foreign distribution, through a boyfriend of a friend and someone he knew in Stockholm, and was shown at a film festival in Uppsala. It even got a review in Swedish. I thought in my excitement that this was the beginning of my glittering career; it was only a dazzled beginner’s luck. I discovered that you need more money than you are ever going to have, and though I had some now, it didn’t last. I went back to waiting tables, this time in Haight-Ashbury, down the street from the old cinema where in the afternoons you could sit on sagging sofas, drink tea, and watch foreign and experimental movies. I would go there after work and immerse myself, as I had at the Hampstead Everyman and the Arts in Cambridge, in the place where I felt most at home.

  I did write to her, I know I did. I thought of her often; I wanted to include her. She answered; I still have some of her letters with the flimsy blue airmail paper, its edges stuck down to be torn open, and her large handwriting crossing the page to tell me not very much. We were in different worlds, she was right. I had moved west with the thoughtlessness and careless energy that must have fueled the early pioneers. I was a Californian now. Hungry, sometimes homeless, but never friendless, never depressed for long. She was married, living in the country, publishing local history books; then she was pregnant, then she had twins. It became harder to tell her about my life; I imagine that it was the same for her. I had behaved the way that men do—and get away with—putting my career first. Had she forgiven me? She never mentioned it; her “I miss you” was easily answered by “I miss you too.” I did not tell her in my letters about what was difficult; I’d left for a dream, and it had to succeed, whatever it felt like at the time.

  I decided that if I couldn’t shoot 35 mm, I could still shoot 16, if I couldn’t shoot 16, then I could shoot video. If I couldn’t do that, I could shoot Super 8. I would not give up. It wasn’t a mirage, but was mostly far harder than I’d imagined. When young, we don’t imagine obstacles to our ambition, I think now—we have to learn to expect them. I don’t regret any of it. Not the hardship, not the homesickness, not the feeling like an idiot because I knew so little. What I learned in those years was essentially that I could look after myself, learn to do anything in film that a man could do, and that if I was quiet and helpful and ready to learn, I would in turn be helped. I let go of my life in England—and Hannah—because I had to, to survive, to flourish where my gypsy path had taken me.

  I worked in a cooperative we set up, for a while; on the strength of my waterfront film, I finally got a few grants and was able to live, eat, and work on a short feature and later, half-a-dozen documentaries, as well as a couple of fairly well-paid docudramas, then a miniseries for TV and several short experimental films. My mentors went on to Hollywood—Coppola got The Godfather, then Apocalypse Now; Walter Murch worked on most of the really great films of that era, always behind the scenes; George Lucas made Star Wars. I went to New Mexico for a year and stayed in Taos, interviewing and filming people who knew Mabel Dodge Luhan. I moved to New York, stayed in my friend Joanie’s apartment in SoHo while she was in South America, and made a short documentary film with the help of the NYU film school on the poet Wallace Stevens, who reminded me that a poem is itself alone, not representative of anything—as is a film. It was shown at a few festivals in the US and got me the Guggenheim, third try. I went to Honduras and lived on a barrier island there, filming a community that lived in stilt houses in water, their children going everywhere by boat, tiny kids steering with ancient outboard engines into the waves.

  Money was short again; I’d used up my small inheritance from my father. I was too old to go back to waiting tables, too nomadic in my habits to contemplate any sort of regular job. I thought of going back to Europe—but where, and to whom? Alexandre was getting married again and wanted to give the new relationship a chance. My parents were dead, first my father, then my mother; I’d flown home for their funerals but not stayed; when you have left home at twelve, it is easy to leave again. My siblings were busy; even my baby sister was working in IT in London. Hannah was growing roses, opening village fetes. A book—someone’s—was doing well. The twins were walking. She and Philip had bought a house in France.

  My country was no longer mine, except to visit; I had become American. I moved at last—fifteen years ago now—out of New York, where I was back from the increasingly murderous streets of Tegucigalpa, sharing Joanie’s rent-controlled apartment and giving occasional talks at NYU, where they liked my Wallace Stevens film. At last I applied for a job that came up to teach film studies in the English department in Virginia. I can only suppose it was my English accent and my small résumé of unusual movies that made them take me. Perhaps there was simply nobody else. It was then that I began visiting Hannah every summer, in France; we connected again. What had I missed? I’d never know. You can’t, as a Jewish friend of mine once quoted to me, “dance at two weddings at once.”

  What else? I discovered to my surprise—I told Hannah this—that I loved teaching, simply for the “ah, I see” look on students’ faces when they understood something for the first time; it was not unlike the look of people coming out of a cinema, a little dazed, inspired by what they saw.

  My last film, called simply Susana—which did show at Sundance—was a story about a young immigrant student at college, learning about science. Very little happened in it. But the beauty of that young Mexican woman’s face as she saw her world transformed by knowledge was something that film audiences did not forget.

  I wanted Hannah to see that film; when I came to stay in the house in France one time, I brought a copy with me and we watched it together, having managed at last to get it transposed to a French DVD.

  “This is what I do,” I was telling her. “This is what it was all for.”

  I still dream of the next film, the way fishermen perhaps dream of the next fish: the gleam of its body as it comes up through water into sunlight, thrashing, whole and alive. It’s there just waiting to be caught; as in a dream, I am often back there on the San Francisco waterfront, hopeful, naïve, ridiculously young, open to what comes next. One day perhaps—but I have never said this alo
ud—I will fling my line again to hook it, haul it up to the light of day.

  16.

  We have decided to do nothing over the weekend but be together and try to be normal. The twins will have to leave on Monday, and by then we will have made a plan. Deciding to make a plan seems for a moment almost as good as making one. We spend the weekend swimming, eating, and drinking, with occasional tears from Melissa and increasing gloom from Philip. Piers occupies himself by changing plugs on equipment, testing outlets, fixing a toaster, oiling the mower, making things work. It seems that after the initial shock of someone disappearing, you almost get used to it; you cannot stay in shock forever, the body and its habits take over, the days resume a subdued but recognizable normality; you begin to forget. You long, guiltily, for normality, progress, the illusions of ordinary life. You begin to re-create them.

  Piers then begins to spend hours online, doing searches on the Web, contacting friends who might know, websites for details of missing people, support groups for those who miss them. He gets lists from his father of everyone who knows Hannah. Her doctor. Her massage therapist. Her dentist. Their investment advisor, their bank manager, the garage that last serviced her car. Nobody, none of her friends, none of her acquaintances, has any idea where Hannah may be.

  “The woman who gives her massages says she did know she was going away. She assumed she was coming here, to join me.”

  “What about the bank? Had she taken money out?” Piers asks.

  “They won’t tell me. She has her own account. All these passwords, you can’t even talk to a human being these days.”

  “I just get the feeling that I’m spreading bad news and getting no answers. Dad, does she have any friends you don’t know?”

  “Well, if she does, I don’t know them, do I?” He’s hovering above Piers, looking at the screen, but he’s wearing gardening gloves, obviously wants to go back outside to—what?—prune, dig, rake up grass, be occupied?

  Piers says, “I can’t believe you don’t know any of her passwords.”

  Well, as I said, I may have a note of some of them at home. I think she uses her birthday.”

  “You’re not supposed to do that. It’s too easy.”

  “But at least you can remember it.”

  “Well, let’s give it a go. April 12, right?”

  They are both irritated by their failure to come up with a single clue. Men like to solve things, they like to make clear progress. Melissa and I seem to have fallen by default into the female role of just keeping things going, making coffee, getting the next meal. I’m trying not to go on feeling angry with Hannah, that she is putting us all through this: trying to keep in mind that she may be in danger, lonely or sick, and deserving of our best efforts, trying not to entertain the irrational idea that forty or more years ago, I abandoned her to follow a path of my own choosing. It’s a mental juggling act that is only partly soothed by getting my hands in the sink, washing up coffee cups (Claude, we have a dishwasher, leave them!). I go outside to look for something else to do, under the blue arc of today’s sky, in the still-cool-enough air of the morning.

  Then it’s Monday, and the twins are leaving together this afternoon in Piers’s rented Peugeot to go to the airport at Marignane and then home.

  I stand outside by the pool, just breathing the air and looking up at the mountain, close and pale in the morning light, its shadowy presence illuminated, its foliage simply a tangle of broom, small pine trees, and rosemary. It’s a benign presence by this light: warm rock and herbs, pine trees with cones and twisted roots, a summit that glistens white. I tuck my phone in my shirt pocket and come back to begin raking cut grass from the blue pool’s edges where Philip, after sweating at the cleaned mower, has left it. Is the gardener on vacation, then? Does Philip simply want something active to do? I can’t stand being in the house any longer, listening to the murmur of anxious voices, the quiet mutter of English irritation and concern. Surely Americans would be yelling by now. I rake the grass into bunches that are green and damp as wet hair. My phone buzzes. I’m alone out here as I press the green button and hear Alexandre, that clipped French telephone voice he has, as if life is rushing past him at such a rate that he really doesn’t have time to talk.

  “Alex, bonjour.” I drop the rake. The pool shimmers in a slight breeze; swallows dive across it. The cypresses at the end of the orchard flex their tips in the air current.

  “What’s up?” Relief—it’s you! But why, and why now?

  “You can talk?”

  A cloud passes over the sun, just a small one, enough to make a shadow pass across the water, across me.

  “Yes.”

  “She has called me,” says Alexandre. “Hannah has called me. She got my number at work. Are you alone?”

  “Yes, at the moment. Tell me.”

  “She does not want her family to know. She is in Switzerland, in a hotel. She is going home to England. She wants to meet you, here in Paris. Can you come?”

  “But why doesn’t she want Philip to know? He’s going nuts here.” In fact, he seemed remarkably calm this morning, when I came down: driving the mower up and down, turning at the end of the lawn and coming back, leaving long pale stripes in the grass, almost as if he has forgotten what’s been going on; as if he can forget, for ten minutes, then for half an hour, that his wife is missing. It was only when Piers began questioning him about who Hannah knew, asking for their emails, that he became flustered. It must have felt like having taken a painkiller that has worn off too soon.

  “Because what she wants to do, she thinks he will stop her,” Alexandre mutters into the phone. “She thinks her children will stop her. Claude, it’s all very bizarre.” In his voice I hear his need not to be coping with it alone, the strangeness: to pass it on to me as my business, not his. We do know each other well.

  “Do you know what’s going on? Why she’s in Switzerland?” I can hear the hee-haw scream of Parisian sirens in the background, the hum of traffic. His voice comes and goes, fainter.

  “No, she didn’t tell me.”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “There, is that better?” I can see him on a street corner, turning away from the traffic noise, one shoulder hunched, trying to find a clear way through in this chaotic semblance of conversation. “I said, she didn’t want to tell me.”

  The cut-grass smell, the heat of the sun, the close presence of the mountain, all seem to intensify. Cicadas buzz, then stop, as if silenced. I hold the phone hard against my ear, not to lose a word as his voice comes and goes. I walk up and down, to try for a better signal. “So, you have no idea?”

  “No, really no idea.”

  “Do you think she is going crazy?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She sounds calm.”

  “Hmm. So she wants me to come to Paris, you said?”

  “She wants to meet you here. In Paris. She wants you to tell Philippe that she is well, that she is going home, that she is safe. D’accord? And she will let you know a place to meet. She will tell me and I will call you. I have to go now. But I will see you, we must see each other, Hannah or no Hannah, yes?”

  “Yes. Just one thing, Alex, when is she going to get in touch? And, am I supposed to give Philip the message now?”

  “Yes, today. Not immediately, perhaps, wait an hour or so. He should go home to England and wait for her there.”

  “Not here? You’re sure, he shouldn’t wait for her here?”

  “No, not there. She said in England. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know why, it was just what she said. Bon. Now I must go, but till very soon, okay? A très bientôt.”

  He’s busy, I can hear it, and sounds more than a little annoyed at being involved in all this. He likes things cut-and-dried, Alexandre does. Work has its place, and so does leisure, and so does love, and I remember what he said long ago about “histoires de bonnes femmes” and
think that Hannah, in involving him in complex messages, has overstepped a mark he likes to stay well behind.

  “Ciao, je t’embrasse.” We both say it at the same time, and then the phone goes dead. I put it down on the nearest deck chair with my shirt and dive into the pool, to swim as far as I can underwater and rise shaking water from my eyes and ears, flinging back my hair. Only total immersion will do, to wash off the insanity of what I’ve just been told. I swim to the far end and prop myself there for a moment before swimming back, more slowly, breaststroke to the shallow end. But I can’t wash off the feeling that has immediately replaced my anxiety, that we are all being used, and for what purpose? How can I tell poor Philip to go home and wait for Hannah there? How can she do this to us all? She wants me to meet her in Paris, she wants to tell me, presumably, what is going on, while she doesn’t want to tell Philip. Is she involved with somebody, about to run away? Is she in some financial trouble or other? Has she simply left her marriage? All these scenarios rerun themselves through my mind. And how the hell did she get to Switzerland, without her passport being checked? Now that I know she’s alive, I can be angry with her at last.