by Laure Baudot
Caterina beamed at Jesse, who sat beside her on the sofa between the love seats. She was from Latvia, and had a brashness I’ve come to recognize in many Eastern European women since then. She had no qualms about tackling things directly. When Angus first introduced her to us, he told us that she was living off her parents, who didn’t know their daughter was in film school; they thought she was enrolled in a math program at what we called the “real” university. In response to Angus, who seemed astonished that a person could do such a thing, Caterina nodded calmly. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them. After all, only I know what is good for me.”
She had also made it clear to Angus that she didn’t believe in monogamy. He’d admitted this to Christian and me in a drunken moment of intimacy. I admired Caterina’s confidence, but felt sorry for Angus and couldn’t understand how she could take a guy like him for granted.
Jesse was telling Caterina that he lived next door.
“Nice if you can afford it,” Christian said.
“My landlord lives in the States,” I said. “He’s clueless about rents here.”
“My condo’s not actually mine,” said Jesse.
“Do you have a rich wife?” Caterina laughed.
“It belongs to my ex.”
“Really?” I said.
Jesse shrugged. “Life is short.”
Girls had liked Jesse, but he’d never had a girlfriend. There were rumours that he was gay, but they were dismissed, and no one could figure out why he didn’t date.
I felt a jolt of jealousy, which surprised me, given our history. I got up for more beer.
When I came back, they were talking about Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, which had come out in theatres a few weeks before.
“It reminded me of Eraserhead,” Christian said.
“Yeah,” said Angus. “A transgressive masterpiece.”
I sat down. “Kind of masturbatory, I thought.”
“Yes!” Caterina said. “That giant penis. Oh my God.”
“In the end,” Jesse said, “it’s just a junkie’s hallucinations.”
Angus looked thoughtfully at Jesse.
Christian said, “You in the movie business?”
“He’s an actor,” I said. We waited for him to say that he had something lined up. This was an expression we in the film industry knew well. We were competitive (I always won-dered whether it was by nature or by nurture. The industry seemed to draw people who were naturally driven, and then nurtured them, through a paucity of work and funding bodies, to become even more cutthroat.) We lived in dread of hearing that someone we knew had something lined up; and were thrilled to make the pronouncement about ourselves, when possible.
“I used to be,” Jesse said.
“Speaking of which,” Christian said. “Angus, did you tell them?”
Angus swigged his beer. “I got a gig.”
“An internship with TVO,” said Christian.
“Just for the summer.”
“The guy applies for one job and gets it.”
Angus shrugged. “It’s always been like that.”
“Also Amy,” Caterina said. “Right?”
“What did Amy do?” Christian asked.
“Won that school prize,” said Caterina, “For most beautiful documentary.”
“Best cinematography,” I corrected her.
Christian raised his glass. “To our two stars.” We raised our glasses.
“What was it for?” Jesse asked.
I looked at him. “A small film on the rave scene.”
“She spent weeks going to every rave in the city,” said Angus.
“All those drugged-up girls,” Christian said.
“I was envious,” I said, and Angus and Christian laughed. I turned to Jesse. “About the power of the rave. How it re-signifies the female body.”
“She went postmodern on us. It was a smart little piece, Amy,” Angus said. He wasn’t laughing at me anymore. I knew from past conversations with him that he had partly understood what I’d been trying to do with my film, for I had tried to angle the shots in such a way that the ravers’ control in the situation was obvious.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Jesse said. “We used to make movies together.”
“Ah, you are high-school lovebirds!” Caterina smiled.
“No,” I said.
At sixteen, we spent after-school hours in Jesse’s mother’s lakefront condo, writing scripts and filming them with his video camera. We camped out on his mother’s deep couch and passed a notebook back and forth, our wrists brushing. Later that winter, influenced by the French New Wave, we wrote a kind of Canadian version of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, set in Toronto. Because there were only two of us, we could only have one actor in each shot, and had to film in such a way that a second character’s presence was implied.
In one scene, I was required to seduce a male character, played in turn by Jesse. I don’t remember the lines. I do remember feeling that I pushed myself aside, reaching within to find the person I wanted to be. Afterward, Jesse stared at me. My cheeks flushed. “I don’t know how to describe it. I felt high.”
Watching the video, I was shocked at how undressed I looked. My breasts were almost bared, revealing half of a nipple. Yet the camera flattered me. I was skinny, and the lens added much-needed flesh to my body. My face’s sharp lines were filled in. I’d always thought I was pretty, and there was the proof. I glanced at Jesse to see if he’d noticed but he said nothing. So I tried to goad him into it. “You won’t show this to anyone, right?”
“Yeah. I mean, no.”
He popped the videotape out, slotted it back in its case, and put it on a bookshelf. When I came back the following week, the tape was gone.
More people arrived at my party en masse, all from the film department, all very noisy and boisterous. Under their thick jackets, the women wore jeans that flattered their asses and tank tops that left their shoulders bare, polished like beach stones. Practically the whole department had showed up, which thrilled me.
I took coats, handed out drinks, and turned up Joy Division on the stereo. When I came back, Caterina and Angus were having one of their usual arguments.
Caterina was saying, “What I mean, Angie,”— when angry, she pronounced his name with a soft G; I was never sure if she did this on purpose — “is that you are a man, white, and charming. You are in a good position to find work.”
“Not in Canada,” Angus said.
“You Canadians think you are so advanced, so different from Europe.”
“When it comes to looks, girls have the advantage,” Christian interjected. “I read that pretty people are three times as likely to be employed as ugly people.”
“You see,” Caterina said.
“You’re full of crap.” Angus rose. He was a greyhound impatient for a hunt to get started. “I’m going for a smoke.”
“Be careful,” I said. “The balcony is slippery.”
“I will stay with someone who doesn’t get mad.” Caterina pushed a beer toward Jesse, who had been watching them argue. He looked slightly amused, as if the argument neither concerned him nor mattered to him very much, which I found surprising; I had been waiting for him to say something. In any case, I was irritated that my friends couldn’t put on a better show for him. I wanted him to think that all was perfect in my world, that I was just fine, thanks.
“We are not usually so annoying,” said Caterina to Jesse. She winked at me. “Well, it is possible that we are.”
I retrieved my coat and, without zipping up, went out onto the balcony. It was a tiny space, about three feet deep and six feet wide, with a low cement ceiling. In the summer, my upstairs neighbours’ plants dripped on the planter hanging on my railing.
Angus sat on a beach chair, smoking. Both breath and smoke went up in s
hort, cloudy bursts. Beside him was a young woman, one of several first-years at the party. She wore a faux-fur hood, from under which peeked out blonde strands.
“Miranda,” Angus said, “This is Amy, our host.”
“Is it?” She peered up at me. “Welcome to our balcony.”
“Well, thanks.” I shivered.
“Have a seat.” Angus opened his coat as if to make room for me. “I need someone to warm me up.”
I sat down on his lap and leaned back, felt the bristles of the hair on his chest, the ones that came up above his T-shirt. For a moment I was thrilled at the vision of our heads together, my own narrow face beside his equally long one, my thick brown hair caressing his cheek. I pictured him and me, far into the future, crossing the stage together to receive our film accolades.
“How are things with Caterina?” I asked him.
“Caterina is Caterina.”
“Are you guys together?”
“Together, apart.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the armrest. “She can take care of herself.” His breath smelled like ashes.
I went back in, finding it too cold to stay out. Christian was with a crush of others in the kitchen. Caterina and Jesse were still seated. Caterina looked at the porch door and then at me. Her eyes seemed hurt. She turned back to Jesse, who to my surprise had a beer in front of him. He had unbut-toned the top two buttons of his shirt and was sitting with his legs spread out.
“She left me for another guy, but she still drives me to dialysis! What kind of woman does that?” he asked.
“She still has love for you. This is so rare.” Caterina stared at me as she said this.
“Maybe you can persuade her to come back.” He too turned to me, his eyes wet.
I figured out what I’d sensed in him that morning, in the shopping court, why he was here now. It took me a long time to understand, which was strange — loneliness was some-thing I knew well.
“Maybe Amy could extol my virtues.” Jesse drank. “But I don’t think so. Amy has held a grudge for years. She has nothing good to say about me.”
I blushed. I had never before been confronted about the past in quite that way, with someone presenting it to me like a wrapped package. I dropped onto the armrest of the sofa opposite them. Someone had switched the music to acid house, which thrummed through the couch.
“Amy!” said Caterina loudly, over the music. “How is the ethics committee going?”
“The what?” Jesse asked.
“She filmed those girls on drugs.”
“We’re working it out,” I said.
“They did not sign consent forms, right, Amy?” Caterina’s look was steady.
“There weren’t any complaints, so school won’t pursue it.”
“Little girls will not come chasing after you.”
“First of all, they’re seventeen. Women,” I said.
I couldn’t tell if she was serious or trying to be mischievious, but I felt myself becoming irritated. I’d discussed the issues with the committee and didn’t want to talk to Caterina about it. I was annoyed with her for not being more on Angus’s side, when my affection for him was growing. I was also astonished that, given her propensity for self-invention, she didn’t understand my film.
I had sat in front of the committee and tried to persuade them that I had meant no harm. They were men and women who had assembled after someone, probably a conservative-leaning parent, had contacted the department. At first, I told the administrators, I thought the ravers were just doing what young women sometimes did, which was to act sexy to get picked up. But as I scrutinized them, I realized that something else was going on. They were not performing at all. I described what I had seen; I even showed the committee some film clips. They were not exploited, I explained. I had tried to capture the women’s power with my camera. The committee members had glanced at each other and I thought they had been persuaded. They told me they would get back to me formally, by letter, but I hadn’t yet received their verdict.
I didn’t want to get into all this with Caterina. And Jesse didn’t look sober enough to even begin to understand any kind of explanation I had.
“Excuse me, ladies,” Jesse said. He got up and left the room.
Caterina watched him. “He is a sad guy, that friend of yours.”
At the end of grade twelve, people started treating me differently. I had never been popular, but now other students seemed to single me out. Girls clumped together, whispering when I walked by, and boys I’d never talked to catcalled me. I didn’t understand why until, one day, I was standing beside Jesse in the hallway when someone walking by whispered, “Porn,” and Jesse seemed nervous.
I stared at him. “Are you serious?”
“Some of the guys were over, and Alex picked up the tape. You know Alex.”
“You let him watch our movie?”
“You looked good, you know. Really good.”
“You’re such an asshole.”
He glared at me. “The movie was your idea.”
I found Jesse in my bedroom looking at prints I had on the wall above my bed. One was a still from Luc Besson’s Nikita, in which Nikita, her eyes wide with listening intent, crouches with a gun in her hand. The other print was from the original version of Breathless, featuring a close-up of Michel, his gun by his thigh, arrested in mid-run, as if he’s been shot.
“Similar plots,” he said, gesturing to the posters with his chin. “More than that of course. Both directors valued style over narrative.”
Now that he mentioned them, their similarities seemed obvious. I saw the two of us on his mother’s couch, discussing films as we sat cocooned in the overheated condo while, outside, frozen rain pelted the windows.
“Your friends are interesting,” he said. “But a bit nasty, eh?”
“It’s a competitive field.”
“I guess.”
“You had an advantage,” I said. “A mother in the business. Plus, you were cute.”
He paused. Then he said, “I wanted to say. Since this morning. Since long ago, really. I’m sorry about what happend back then.”
“You don’t say.”
“I bumped into some friends years ago and we talked about it.”
I didn’t answer right away. I wanted him to repeat his apology, simply because when he’d said it I hadn’t felt the way I thought I would. “You talked about me?”
“Sort of. How we were all pretty messed up. I found some others, but I couldn’t find you. I tried, though.”
“Is this like twelve stages or something?” I asked.
He seemed confused.
“The forgiveness stage. Are these the twelve stages of dying? Like AA?”
He reached for the wall, his fingers fanned out under the photo of Michel.
“Forget it,” I said. “Forget I said that.”
He found his puffy jacket on the bed under several others. “Let me ask you a question.”
My heart was beating. I had an urge to confide in him about the embarrassment and pain I’d suffered back then, but even as several images of my adolescent hurts appeared in my mind’s eye, I understood that he would never fully get it.
“You filmed those girls,” he said.
It took me a second to reorient my thoughts, for I hadn’t been expecting him to bring the subject up, and when I understood what he was talking about, I got angry. True, my movie had won an award, but the naysayers haunted me. I was so damned sick of defending my work. At the same time, I thought, So he does care about movie making, after all. And he cares about who gets hurt and who inflicts the pain.
“It’s not the same,” I said. “I thought you would understand. But maybe you wouldn’t, given your history.”
“I just apologized. Didn’t you hear me?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking ab
out. These girls, as you call them, were in control of their actions.”
In my explanatory piece accompanying my film, I had called them young women, even though they seemed too young to be called anything but girls. And yet, as they danced, they were strong, stronger than I had been at their age. Dressed in silver tops and short skirts, they had loosened their bodies like rag dolls, then tightened them in a kind of ecstasy. In the blinking strobe lights, their limbs had multiplied, and they had made me think of Kali, the ten-armed Indian goddess.
Throughout, they kept their eyes closed, their faces were drawn inward as if they were looking for something that we, as onlookers, were unable to see. They were not performing; they didn’t care if anyone — men or women — watched. They could have been alone in their rooms. They made and owned their own pleasures.
With my camera, I focused on their strong, outstretched fingers, their faces that shut everyone out. I did not emphasize their breasts or their bared midriffs. I had tried to change the gaze of the cinematographer and, by doing so, that of the audience. Back in high school, Jesse had filmed me with a masculine vision. If I had loved the version of prettiness he and I had concocted together, it was because I had been socialized to do so — I knew that now, after years of film and political theory. I wanted to film these other girls — these women — from a woman’s viewpoint. But perhaps I had not succeeded; didn’t the ethics’ committee prove this? Suddenly I was devastated by the fresh news of my failed artistic vision.
I wanted to explain all this to Jesse, to tell him that the two movies were made from dissimilar intents and with differing perspectives. I wanted to ask him to watch my film, so he could see how unlike it was to the work we had made, years ago. But, stung by disappointment, I just said, “They were so strong. They danced like crazy. They didn’t care what anyone thought.”
Jesse looked at me. “You had a hard time.”
A sob escaped me, but I quelled the next one by tighten-ing my throat. I sat down on the bed and felt the zipper of a coat under my thigh.
