The Edge of the Gulf

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The Edge of the Gulf Page 8

by Hadley Hury


  In order to catch some occasional shade, Hudson and Moon walked back to Laurel along 26-A.

  Forty minutes later they turned south, at the Hibiscus Bed & Breakfast, into the village, passing the V intersection of Potero Street which angled off due south. With its old weather-shingled cottages and clapboard bungalows, intermittently canopied by oaks and Spanish moss, Pendennis Street beckoned like a dream, wiggling slightly in the radiant heat and smelling of hot pine and gardenia.

  Chapter 14

  Twilight found Hudson sitting on the porch reading over his work. Three reviews he’d pulled up to consider: he had lightly edited one, decided to keep one exactly as it was, and substantially revised the other.

  Moon lay at his feet, in the shade, sliding into an early evening nap, and even Olive had deigned to come out for a sniff of the cooling air. Both by Hudson’s choosing and her own clear preference an indoor cat, Olive nonetheless, occasionally and only in his presence, toured the perimeters of the porch of the house in Memphis, and now had similarly extended her cautious range to the cottage. There had never been a danger of Olive’s running away. She liked to look around a bit but was fundamentally uncurious about the world beyond the comforts of her own domain. She disdained it as a world of dirt and dogs and things like cars and planes and lawnmowers that made more noise than any civilized creature needed to endure. Her universe stopped at the edge of the porch and she always kept the door close to her back. She had been outside once, long ago, and like a hideous nightmare that’s precisely where she wanted to keep it. She had been brought to the humane society by some good soul, unweaned, lost from her mother and siblings at only a few weeks and found cowering in a rainstorm under a mailbox alongside a busy street. She now sat in the last narrow slant of sun near the steps, engrossed in a pedicure of balletic invention.

  Death in Venice

  Following on the heels of The Portrait of a Lady and the recently released Washington Square, American audiences now have their third chance in less than 18 months to respond to the rather quixotic challenge of translating Henry James to film. A writer perhaps best known for the “interiorization” of his novels, in which only the barely registered twist of a synapse or the smallest inaudible gasp may indicate cataclysmic psychological or emotional upheavals or some life-altering spiritual revelation, James’s filmability suffers in direct proportion to the success with which he achieved his artistic purposes. If in the past few years Edith Wharton’s works have met with better treatment at the hands of filmmakers, it may well be because her novels of manners tend to indicate the more obvious ironies of the manners themselves. James used the novel of manners to indicate large ideas and passions; they open outward as if from a great precipice, providing a dimensionally complex vision beyond the surface observation. As his view of the human comedy matured, taking on wider and more deeply felt concerns, he became a master of indirection, and his goal of seamlessly blending character, action, and theme fairly well displaced omniscient narrative.

  By the time of The Wings of the Dove (1902), James was using brilliantly intricate stylistic effects to create (ironically enough) a new kind of realism, melding his theatrical sense of dialogue as narrative, multiple viewpoints, and dramatic ellipsis. A master of subtlety, he asks his readers to accept the responsibility of ferreting out for themselves what is happening in the story. Going even farther, James places many key moments “off-stage,” as in classical tragedy: expected scenes never materialize; the reader is excluded from certain encounters. At the core of his later novels is James’ belief that life is a process of seeing “the great things,” through awareness attaining understanding and, thereby, achieving, if not freedom, the illusion of freedom. Through his masterfully controlled obliquities he sought to force the reader to see for himself. He wanted his art to provoke life, not talk about it. If this demand has caused more than a few 20th-Century readers to pass over James in favor of lighter or more explicit fare, it makes filming his major works an even thornier proposition.

  Iain Softley’s version of The Wings of the Dove, like Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, isn’t shy about taking liberties. For one thing, it is palpably condensed; and while at ninety-nine minutes it is a welcome relief from recent period pieces which, wanting in accuracy of detail or spirit, seek to impress with sheer length, there’s an apologetic, Cliff Notes feel to the undertaking. Softley dares to distill the essence of James’ novel rather than try to hoodwink us with an overstuffed Edwardian waxworks, and we can admire the effort even as we find it lacking. The foreshortening is also felt in how and when the primary characters meet one another: Softley’s shortcuts and compressions make narrative filmic sense; they just don’t happen, rather crucially, to be how James intended us to discover and come to know the relationships. And, finally, the key events of the denouement have been altered with cheapening, though not fatal, effects.

  The plot is a melodrama (“vulgar” by James’ own description). It’s what he does with it, and what he would have us make of it, that pries open the big questions about human love and spiritual possibilities. Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) is a pretty and penniless young woman taken in by her rich and scheming aunt (Charlotte Rampling), who seeks to marry her off suitably. But Kate is in love with the equally penniless and charming Merton Denscher (Linus Roache), a journalist. Kate’s aunt will cut her off unless she drops Merton. Kate and Merton happen to befriend an orphaned American heiress, Millie Theale (Alison Elliott), who is terminally ill. Kate asks Merton to marry Millie, who is in love with him, knowing that she will leave her fortune to him and that after her imminent death, Kate and Merton can marry.

  Though despicable, the couple’s plan unfurls with James’ ironic sympathy for the economic deter-minism that entraps Kate. What they do not bargain for is the Jamesian “great thing” that Millie’s love for both of them evokes: her generosity of spirit and her capacity for love live on after her death, with profound consequences.

  Much of the film takes place in Venice, where Millie goes when she hears the prognosis for her illness, and this is where Softley’s film has its greatest success. It captures James’ almost excruciatingly delicate tug-of-war between good and evil, life and death, spirit and flesh. Kate accompanies Millie and, soon, Merton joins them.

  This brief season of glamour and tenderness, of duplicity and forgiveness, is mesmerizing. Softley’s graceful pacing and his use of revelatory close-ups feel exactly right, Sandy Powell’s costumes are very fine, and the cinematography of Eduardo Sera brings the golden light and rain-dappled shadows of Venice to ethereal life.

  Helena Bonham Carter is more interesting here than ever before. She lets her voice nestle in a lower range and projects a canny maturity that is more watchable than the line-up of strident ingénues in which she has heretofore been stuck. Roache (who did a fine job in the title role in Priest) is perfect as Merton, intelligently sexy, at first cynical, ultimately vulnerable to the large lessons with which life engulfs him. As Millie, Elliott is pictorially correct, American as apple pie, with a sweet, fun-loving smile. The actress doesn’t exude the magnanimity or spiritual grace necessary for us to see fully “the greatness” of which James provides such haunting intimations; on the other hand, her self-effacing rendition of simplicity does remind us that another of James’ key points is that life, and one’s sense of mortality, can have a way of creating unlikely heroes and alchemize even a perfunctory existence into a numinous life.

  For all its presumptions and faux pas, Softley’s essay of The Wings of the Dove is a fairly honorable defeat. At times, hovering around certain frames of the film, just off-camera and if only obliquely (discretions of which James might approve), we sense the mourning dove murmur of a sort of falling greatness. The film gives a richly visual life to the central poignancy of James’ novel: in one of the most significant of its multiple, quiet epiphany scenes, Kate admonishes Merton about Millie: “She didn’t come here to die, she came here to live.”

  Occasion
ally Hudson looked up from his reading and stared at the quiet street through the shrubs and trees. It seemed, at certain moments, almost a mirage. A piece of a conversation with Alex floated to him. This is about your relationship to her. She believes in God and you believe in God. We can’t know what she’s doing about the relationship now. And, frankly, neither you nor I can make that our job. Yours is to change your relationship with her. It seems unspeakable, I’m sure, not only to feel the one thing you thought was forever unchangeable changing but to be called upon to be the agent of that change. But, Hud my man, you’re the only one who can find those new places, or at least help those new degrees and qualities of loving find their own places to exist.

  He thought about Kate because it was unavoidable to do otherwise. She was—is the strongest person he knew. He would probably trade on her strength always. He had in the past two years and he really couldn’t imagine letting go of that. It was one thing he felt he could keep and about which he could feel okay, and know that she would approve. He used it as a sort of inner barometer. Her example. To try to be strong himself.

  Chapter 15

  As Sydney strolled through Neiman’s looking for a few choice summer beach things, she recalled and reexamined a mild day in late March, one of those dazzlers that brought Atlantans out after their brief winter with a sense of ruffled entitlement, as if—instead of what really amounts to a few weeks of moderate chill—they were emerging from a protracted season of sunless hyperborean permafrost.

  At one of the tables that had been insouciantly laid in the sun of the upper terrace at a small restaurant overlooking the river, Sydney and her old chum Daphne Kerrigan had chatted across a bowl of exquisite white and yellow tulips. They were finishing their lunch amid a merry Friday throng of executives and tennis matrons in sunglasses.

  Although Sydney had more acquaintances than she could keep, despite her superb organizational skills, in strict Filofax order, she had never had many friends. The concept, especially, of “girlfriends” had always seemed repugnant to her.

  ***

  There had been one girl she had cultivated in junior high school in Coweta County. The girl had been a grade ahead of her and Sydney sensed that they might strike some sort of delicate balance that did not characterize most of the juvenile clan-building she saw around her, defined so unabashedly by the Southern rural rubric of family financial status for girls and sheer alpha-animal brawn for boys. The two of them had bonded with rage over their outsider status and their disdain for their families’ severe financial and social limitations.

  Her friend’s father worked for the railroad and seemed alternately away for long stretches or asleep in a back bedroom; her mother grew irregular lines of vegetables in their scraggy backyard and, very peaceably, drank. Sydney’s mother, a sad-faced wraith who managed day to day on religious fundamentalism, cigarettes, and misspent nervous energy, owned the two-chair beauty shop cum drug store in the neighboring burg of Moreland. Sydney’s father had left them when she was not quite two and her mother had desperately married a widower from the small church. Though he was grossly fat and rather slow-witted, he had inherited a small but still viable farm machinery franchise. He seemed mostly to sit around in his underwear, his pink flesh burgeoning out of his big chair as he slumbered intermittently in the window unit air conditioning, watching, when he roused himself with a series of ragged snorts, a mélange of CNN, soap operas, and television preachers. Sydney, early on, had trained herself not to look at him when he was thus enthroned. Though she suspected nothing dangerous from him, she did not even want to see him watching her pass quickly through the room. And she had noticed one too many times, as a small girl, some aspect or other of his squished scrotum oozing from his shorts.

  She and her friend had shared a mutually nurturing belief in their unrecognized natural gifts. They were excellent students, already bored with the mediocre scope and pace of education at the small-town school; they devoured great literature, celebrity magazines, and trashy paperbacks with equal voracity. Physically, her friend was more precocious, and she experimented knowingly with cosmetics and hairstyles. Even so, it was she who eventually became something of an acolyte to her younger friend’s will and imagination. “You could be an actress, someday,” she said. “I already am,” said Sydney. And to prove it, she would enact scenes from favorite films they had seen at the theatre in Newnan or watched late at night on television or had read in books in her companion’s bedroom. Even more than the actresses or characters she evoked in these impromptu reinterpretations, it was Sydney herself her friend had found compelling. Not picture-pretty by regional prevailing standards, she seemed original in her good looks, with her dramatic, searching, yet oddly self-collected eyes, her glossy chestnut hair tailored in a Peter Pan bob to flout the big-hair fashion of the day. One day she might be the young Audrey Hepburn in capri pants, shirt tied at the waist, and a pencil behind her ear; the next an approximation of Bette Midler’s Rose, swathed in Joplinesque glad rags, rings, and beads. But never, thought her friend, was Sydney more infinitely watchable yet somehow unknowable than when she was herself.

  The girl’s father was transferred to Indiana; they moved away during her junior year. Sydney finished high school without taking the effort to make a new friend. She had a few dates her senior year with a wealthy peanut farmer’s son who had some intelligence and, when they were alone and he felt less threatened by certain social stigma, sensitivity. But he was going to Charlottesville as a legacy, and she had been lucky to get a scholarship to little north Georgia college up in hill country. Already adept in picking her battles, Sydney saw insufficient reason to fight a four-year campaign for the relationship. They talked about movies, politics, music, who they were, what their futures might hold, took long drives in the country, passed a few Saturday afternoons in Atlanta, and had four stilted bouts of sex.

  Unable to handle more than two years at the small backwoods college where she’d earned a free ride, Sydney escaped to the city, where she lived in a vile little studio, worked as a restaurant hostess and completed her degree in theatre and communication at Georgia State. She had done only a few shows at a couple of the better community theatres when she decided to go up for an audition for the Alliance Theatre Company. To the consternation of several more experienced actors with degrees from prestigious graduate programs at Vanderbilt or Northwestern, and pedigreed apprenticeships at the Arena, the Alley, or Actors’ Theatre, she was offered a contract.

  It was during her six years as a member of the repertory company that Sydney struck up a friendship with Daphne. Three years older, Daphne had been with the Alliance for two years when Sydney arrived and seemed already, with her feisty irreverence, an old hand. Because they were different types—Daphne was a petite Irish redhead from New Orleans—their fondness for one another was never clouded by competitiveness. Their common ground was the lack of pretension with which they practiced their craft and for which they secretly reviled their peers. Not that they didn’t take the work seriously; they were dedicated. They simply could not abide the intellectual stuffiness and “furrowed-brow-late-night-high-art gobbledegook-chat,” as Daphne called it, in which most of the company engaged. They were just good. Better, by their estimation, than anyone else in the group, and quite probably, they thought, because they did most of what they did onstage without so much pale cast of thought and more through instinct. Instead of being self-absorbed, they were indefatigably outward-directed. It was as if they breathed life in with hungry scrutiny and reproduced it on the exhale. They did not so much act as channel, effortlessly and at will, human behavior.

  This ability to participate almost borderlessly in, even to anticipate, life, had served both of them well when they set their professional sights beyond the footlights. Daphne’s impatience with her fellow thespians finally led her to pronounce that she would rather sell encyclopedias than have to sit backstage between scenes and hear one more conversation about Chekhovian subtext, and Sydney’s
coolly realistic assessment of a professional population in which at any given moment only five percent are employed was that she simply couldn’t face the scenario that fifteen and twenty years from now she would be pacing a grungy flat in the East Village hoping desperately for a commercial or two each year. Sydney also, as the initial aura of glamour evaporated, increasingly found the idea of acting onstage a useless, rather arcane, confinement. The world loomed, and seemed more her size. In her years with the company, she carefully parlayed her currency as a big-actress-fish-in-the-small-Atlanta-pond into minor socialite, albeit bohemian, status. Her greatest performances took place nowhere near the Alliance stage. She was more focused on mastering the art of using the conventions of society in order to get what she wanted.

  Far from selling encyclopedias, Daphne had in two short career steps become director of corporate communications for a new and rapidly expanding high tech firm. Sydney had signed on with a video production company as actor, producer, director, writer and talent recruiter, and, within a year, had also signed on as fiancée to one of her clients, Broward Boule Landerswaite IV, forty-eight, a perpetually tanned and twice-divorced son-in-waiting to a large agronomics corporation. Just in time, she came to realize that there was even more than met the eye to his fondness for bourbon, a variety of pills, mordant sense of humor, and other effete eccentricities, and to understand why one of her betrothed’s previous marriages had lasted three years, the other not quite as many months, and why daddy, at seventy-three, was still president and CEO and probably looking around hard for a good deal. Sydney certainly considered going through the motions and then getting out as soon as possible with a good settlement, but had to overrule herself in the early morning hours after the Swan Ball. Staying overnight, she had wakened to find “Bouley” standing beside the massive 18th-Century bed, two feet from her face, wiping his behind with a silk handkerchief. Nodding to the side of the bed where he had lain, the sheet and coverlet thrown back, he said: “I left you a little gift.” The worst of it was that he was giggling and held in his shaking hand, unknowingly it seemed, a heavy gold eight-inch letter-opener.

 

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