by Dana Spiotta
I sat them both down together but it was to her that I addressed my explanation of why I was leaving. Immediately.
I told her that I planned to take a road trip with my friend Carrie. I picked Carrie because she in fact was spending the summer driving across the country. She was going with her boyfriend—my going with her was something that I made up on the ride over to my parents’ house, but it would be easy to cover for because it worked for both of us. Carrie could tell her mom she was with me when she wasn’t, and I could say I was with her when I wasn’t. I told my parents my plan as they sat on our cream velvet Empire couch and I sat on the rug in front of them, holding a can of Diet Dr Pepper and taking frequent sips. The sips helped me buy time, as I was making this up as I spoke, or at least partly, the general ideas taking shape on the drive over, but the detailed contours of the plan coming to life as I formed the sentences between sips.
“There is a film collective in upstate New York,” I said. Sip. I was thinking of the great director Nicholas Ray and the weird upstate New York collective he formed with his students in the ’70s after he had been forgotten by Hollywood. (I have always been attracted to afterlives, codas, postscripts, discursive asides, and especially misdirection. Note this.) I had never seen the film Nicholas Ray made with his students, but it was legendary, at least to me.
“Where in upstate New York?” My mother’s brow furrowed. She was raised in Long Island, but she had developed a West Coast revulsion for the extreme temperatures of New York, and to her “upstate” seemed like a tundra of snow and forgotten factory brick. I hadn’t considered that I needed to be more specific than upstate. I thought of Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester. I thought of Troy, Albany, Kingston. I thought of Binghamton, where Nicholas Ray taught. But that isn’t what I said to them.
“Gloversville. They have an abandoned glove factory that gets used as a soundstage. It’s incredibly cheap, and we have easy access to woods or lakes or old houses for locations,” I said, and took another long swig of my soft drink. I was addicted to the slightly cooked peppermint-chemical taste of Diet Dr Pepper. The flavor had a wave of sweet followed by something bitter and then something metal; it was so close to repulsive, and yet I had grown to crave it. I tried to figure it out nearly every time I drank it. Is it marshmallow or peppermint? Is it a cola with a fruit flavor? With an undertaste of saccharin? Perhaps the blatant artificiality of it pleased me—it wasn’t trying to taste like anything real, the way diet Fanta or diet Fresca attempted to have “fruit” flavors. I drank it constantly. Sip, sip.
“A film shoot in Gloversville, New York?”
“A collective. Like an artists’ commune, so we can share equipment and ideas. In Gloversville, New York.” Sure. Why not?
The town of Gloversville came to me from a coffee-table photo book of old movie theaters: the Glove Theater in Gloversville. It was a former vaudeville venue whose exterior sign was renovated in 1939 in high Art Deco. Perhaps the glove in both the town name and the sign made it stick in my head, and then it popped out while the soda sip still tingled my tongue. Later, when I finally saw the place in real life, my eyes filled and blurred. It was a decrepit theater, in grave disrepair, on a dying street full of empty storefronts. The door was open; I stepped in. A ghost town with a ghost theater, yet the former grandness still evident, the gold wallpaper peeling, the velvet seats in attendant rows, though ripped and ruined. Why did I cry? Not because it was a wreck, but because I felt the history. I knew that cinema had touched every small town in America. Cinema is everywhere. And to discover it in the most obscure places made me believe that it mattered. Its decay only meant there was room for me somehow. That is why I cried; I was full of joy and excitement.
“Sounds ambitious,” my father said. Ambition pleased him. He was an entertainment lawyer, but he never talked about his work with me. He loved, though, to talk about me and my “work.” He encouraged me to believe that my particular possibilities had no limits, and one strategy he apparently had for conveying that idea was not giving me any limits, financial or otherwise.
“What’s the name of it?” my mother said.
“Of the film collective?” I sipped my Diet Dr Pepper. Swallowed. “Spectro Corps,” I said. Both parents tilted their heads like they hadn’t heard. “Spectro Corps. Like the Peace Corps. Or the Marine Corps.” No one spoke. I was about to go on, but I saw my father smile and begin to nod, so I made myself shut up (which is hard for me sometimes).
“Where will you live?” my mother asked.
“I will stay in the collective’s apartment so we can work all the time.” My mother pursed her lips.
“You are going to make films. That’s great,” my father said. “That’s what she wants to do, she should do it.”
“You are going to make films with Carrie?” my mother said. My mother loved my best friend Carrie. It is ridiculous how an adult decides to take to one of your friends. A bit of eye contact and a thank-you from a teenager is a kind of miracle I suppose. I knew any harebrained scheme became instantly credible to her if I included Carrie.
“Yes, Carrie. And others.” They looked at me and leaned in. They were saying yes, but they expected some detail, so out it came: inventing, as I had just learned to do, a story about myself. A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie. It needs a different word. It is maybe a fabule, a kind of wish-story, something almost true, a mist of the possible where nothing was yet there. With elements both stolen and invented—which is to say, invented. And it has to feel more dream than lie as you speak it. I could see it ribbon from my head like an image in a zoetrope. “We are remaking lost and never-completed films. Like The Apostle of Vengeance by William S. Hart. The Dream Girl by Cecil B. DeMille. The Serpent by Raoul Walsh. The Eternal Mother by D. W. Griffith. Maybe every Alice Guy-Blaché short made before 1920. There are a huge number of famous silent films that don’t exist anymore. The nitrate ignited or they were just trashed. Destroyed. Only titles, descriptions, and some stills survive. I want to make these films. Enact—but also interpret, because what reenactment doesn’t involve an interpretation—the films as described. That is the summer project of the collective.” See? I made it up on the spot and I already wanted to do it. My parents had no further questions at this moment. Just the benign smiles they always got when I started talking in detail about films. Like they wished they found it interesting so they almost did.
“But you will be in New York City by the time school begins, of course,” my mother said. I was supposed to start at NYU in the fall.
“Of course,” I said, and maybe I believed it.
“Orientation is August twenty-fifth.”
I nodded.
“When do you leave?”
“Today—this week anyway.”
Later, as I packed a suitcase in my room, my father knocked on my door. Did I need anything, anything at all? I looked at him. An Eclair ACL 16 mm camera, 16 mm film, a Nagra IV-STC, a good microphone, a Magnasync Moviola upright editing console, a Betacam video camera, a Sony VTR tape-editing deck, and videocassettes. But I wasn’t sure what I would do with the equipment, as I planned to return to the Brentwood house with the pool and the huge filmmaker. My father wrote me a check for these things, trusting me to buy them. And I intended to buy what I described to him. I cashed the check and stored the money in a sock in a side pocket of my suitcase. Someday I would get my gear. But now? I wasn’t—as it happened—ready to make films. I was still just thinking, wishing, hoping. Pretending to make films.
* * *
Things I now had to figure out after my lie:
1. NYU at the end of August—Can I defer? By when? Would I just inform my mother that I had deferred, after it was done, a fait accompli? Yes.
2. Mailing address. My mother will want a mailing address. Can you get a P.O. box without being there in person? And then forward the mail?
3. Ditto for ph
one number. However, I can say there is no phone, I will call you from a pay phone once a week.
4. Not to be seen lurking about Los Angeles by parents, friends of parents, friends.
* * *
I moved into his Brentwood house with one suitcase, five notebooks, a box of videocassettes, and a stack of paperbacks (including Spectropia: Or, Surprising Spectral Illusions Showing Ghosts Everywhere and of Any Colour, a reproduction of an 1864 novelty book of optical illusions that gave my film collective its name). I parked my Rabbit in the garage, closed the garage door, and didn’t take it out again for nine months.
I had my own room, because of the times he needed to sleep by himself. But I spent many nights with him. He worked, mostly writing screenplays and treatments, and I read on the couch, screenplays or whatever I found on his shelves. I read Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett and I read all the plays of Shakespeare. I read Swann’s Way (in translation), several Booth Tarkington novels, and I read a tattered paperback of Jealousy by Robbe-Grillet. There was only one thing I missed. I wanted to watch movies with him. The Brentwood house had a mini screening room, with a projector for films but also a VCR and a videodisc player. People sent him packages of movies, and many of them sat unopened. He rarely wanted to watch films. Later I would come to understand why, but at this stage in my life I needed to watch everything. This small difference in appetites was my only real complaint. He didn’t stop me from watching them on my own, but I wanted to do it with him. I longed to watch movies—black-and-white movies, Technicolor movies, glistening silent movies, short and long movies, old and contemporary movies, funny slapstick movies, deep subtitled movies, glorious American movies—in the dark, with him. I wanted to share that love with him.
On one of those special nights when he did want to see a film, we watched a hand-marked videotape of Terrence Malick’s Badlands. He asked me if I’d seen it and I pretended I hadn’t because I didn’t want to spoil the fun of his introducing it to me. It’s the story of two American kids, Kit and Holly, who calmly fall into a killing spree as if it were a Sunday matinee. We watched, but he didn’t say anything as he watched. I was disappointed. I wanted him to point out what he thought worked so well in the film. I wanted him to say, instructively, knowingly, “See how he uses long shots? Kit gets farther away from us as the film progresses.” But he did not.
There is a scene in which Holly uses a stereoscope and we get her point of view as she looks at photos. We hear her voice-over as she looks at the hovering vintage images of strangers and wonders:
“It sent a chill down my spine, and I thought, where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? . . . Or killed anybody? This very moment . . . If my mom had never met my dad? If she’d of never died? . . . And what’s the man I’ll marry going to look like? What’s he doing right this minute? . . . Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face?”
This:
I used to have a View-Master with various “sets” of viewing reels that each contained twelve related photo slides. You pushed the plastic-and-cardboard reels into the View-Master and clicked through the illuminated photos. I had the Wonders of the World set. I looked at those a lot, but the ones I loved best were the slides of the Apollo landing. The capsule tiny and glowing on the screen. The men fragile and unprotected in their tinfoil suits. I imagined climbing into that capsule, and being the first person to do it, shooting past the clouds, the ship burning away, and then the world beneath me. Would I be brave enough to do it? What did they think about, the very first time they shot into space?
But also this:
Holly didn’t love Kit anymore, and the movie shows us that through Holly’s fantasizing about her future husband, obviously not Kit. It shows us how dreamy and self-centered she is, and it shows us the flatness of her moral imagination. Part of it is in Holly’s monotoned-but-childish recitation, and part of it is in the cheerful drum-churn of the soundtrack.
And this:
While I understood the art of Malick’s construction, I felt—like a revelation—that I was Holly, unrealized, my future uncertain, all possibility and no accomplishment. I had only dreams and the childishness of yet, yet, yet. My dreams not of future husbands, but of making a film like this one, a film that implicated the viewer even as it delighted her. I blinked and tears blurred my view despite the fact that the filmmaker had gone to great lengths not to create a feeling of emotional sympathy with Holly and Kit. I blinked but I did not wipe my eyes; my boyfriend didn’t need to know I was crying. What a mystery the way things act on us, like secret messages just to you as you sit in the dark. We watched the film together, but my feelings were private, unshared and unspoken.
We saw films together only a handful of times. Much more often I would see a movie on my own after he fell asleep. Sometimes I watched a video or I would watch what was on the Z Channel. But just as often I would get stoned and look at reruns of Rod Serling’s creepy ’70s TV show Night Gallery. One night, when very stoned, I watched a plant-loving Elsa Lanchester grow out of the ground after she refuses a developer’s insistence that she move. He kills her, and her revenge is to come back as one of her plants. It terrified me and I had to sneak into his room. I startled him as he slept. My plan was to sleep near him, not wake him. But his breath caught and he sputtered awake.
“What’s wrong?” he said in a stern rasp.
“Nothing, I’m sorry.”
“It’s the middle of the night, Meadow.” He sighed.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You can’t do this to me. I’ll be up for hours.” He hoisted himself up on his pillows and rubbed his eyes.
“I was scared,” I said, and I detested my own words as if someone else had spoken them. Then I stood there and waited for him to soften or explain. Instead he pulled the chain on his fringed reading lamp and picked up a book from his bed table. He opened it and began to read. I waited for him to look up or speak but he did not. Finally I went to my own room. That was the only time I remember him getting angry with me. Or that is the angriest he ever got, as far as I was concerned.
I’m not complaining, though. He was a great companion. He recited Shakespeare. He spoke it so beautifully in his deep, resonant voice. Words seemed to linger in the air after he stopped speaking. He had a precise, actor-trained memory—nothing I said to him was ever forgotten. He wove every moment into the last moment, never stopped connecting things. I think I will never get over what it was like to be with someone who remembered everything. He could make a fork disappear into the air with a wave of a napkin and the lift of an eyebrow. He talked as he worked his magic and he revealed his trickery, which only makes the trick work better. He never bored me.
One of the best things about him was his letters. He wrote love letters to me. I found them in my books. He would leave for the day, and I would read about my lips, my laugh, my gentle touch. My long legs in shorts and loose socks. Yes, mostly they were about my body, but a body is part of you, there is no getting around it even if you want to. Besides, I liked the attention to my body details. Strange as it seems, I hadn’t had that before. All my life I had felt like a brain with two incidental arms and two useful legs growing out of it. For whatever reason, boys my age never approached me.
He wrote me letters nearly every day. Sometimes I wrote back. I reported on what I had read or seen or thought about that day. What I liked and why. I saved his letters in a small wicker box under my bed. I have no idea what he did with my letters.
We did this for nine months, the watching and the books and the tricks and the letters. I swam in the pool. I didn’t rush into the future.
Once a week I took a deep breath and called my parents, spinning a story of a cross-country trip leading to the factory in Gloversville where I spent my summer and then winter making films. No, thank you, I didn’t need more money, I had told them in late August, but
I did need to defer college for a year so I could finish making these films. They protested feebly about delaying school but then insisted on sending money. (This is the type of parents they were.) Instead of making films, I lived with my enormous boyfriend. I inhaled filmmaking in the air I breathed. I ingested it; I took it inside me. I spent my days imagining films that I wanted to make while at night I loved my boyfriend.
Sometimes I wanted to go out into the world with him. To dinner or to a party. I was reckless like that. But he didn’t let me. He did not want anyone to know about us, because he felt it would be misunderstood. He knew how people can be, and how much it can cost a person. “You have no idea what it feels like,” he said, “I want to spare you that,” and I believed it.
“I’m stronger than you think,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. I tried out the idea as I spoke it. Maybe I really was.
Mostly we were happy, in the way you can be happy when you know something won’t last forever. The way you can clutch the moment deeply and without holding back. “I love you,” I whispered to him. “And I love you, darling,” he said. “That is what this is, love,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.
