Innocents and Others

by Dana Spiotta

  Notes:

  My Memory of Trains

  Night Mail, 1936, Basil Wright and Harry Watt. Night Train, 1959, Jerzy Kawalerowicz. The train ride in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt in which creepy Uncle Charley tries to kill his on-to-him niece. Teresa Wright lets Joseph Cotten die by falling (or pushing him?) into the path of another train. North by Northwest’s train into a tunnel. ­Strangers on a Train. Just a private place for people to meet with no one the wiser. The spinning, unhinged carousel is really the central mechanical object in that one. Okay, no more Hitchcock. What else?

  The Lumière Brothers. The forty-second film of a train arriving at La Ciotat Station. Entitled The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, 1895. People screamed and ran out of the theater because film was not understood yet, and the conventions of cinema were not yet invented. The technology was a stunning shriek of the new. Pacific 231, the short film that used Arthur Honegger’s steam locomotive symphony, which itself was inspired by the train in Abel Gance’s film La Roue (which makes it a memory of someone else’s remembering). La Bête Humaine, of course. The Tall Target, 1951, Anthony Mann. All steam gusts, night whistles, and steady clicks. The train chugging across the desert, blown up and raided, that a glorious Peter O’Toole climbs atop in Lawrence of Arabia, his white cloak billowing in the wind as he starts to walk and play for the camera. Lean shoots his film level to O’Toole’s suede boots, defiant and above it all, as they walk. There were trains in other Lean films: Brief Encounter, The Bridge on the River Kwai. There is the train in The Wild Bunch. Or in Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968. Dozens of Westerns. Jean-Louis Trintignant having sex on a train in The Conformist, psychedelic trains in Vera ­Chytilová’s Daisies. What else?

  Oh! The great train scene in Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray’s film of poor children in 1950s India. The girl and her little brother are in a vast field of wheat or rice. No one in any direction but these little people. The far horizon is a blank except for the interruption of telephone wires, the only industrial thing in the landscape. They walk. No music. We hear only the wind in the grass. They are made tiny by the growth, lost in it. First the sister hears it. She stops. Then we hear it. The distant train. We see the locomotive in the far corner of the horizon, black steam pouring out of the smokestack. It is approaching. The children start to run toward the train, through the high grass. The girl trips, gets up. They run and run and make it to the train as it passes. The train is loud and Ray cuts to a wheel-level view of the children. We are on the other side of the train—it passes between us and the children, and we glimpse them through the gaps in the train’s drive pistons and wheels. It is huge, and we see it as the children see it: massive, loud, fast. And then it is gone. The children have been passed by. We watch them watch it disappear.

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT STATION

  II

  Meadow woke up at five, drank coffee, and looked at the films she had made in the past two months. Hours upon hours of editing and here was how it read: nature dominated by industry. For Christ’s sake, really? That’s what it came to? Nature good, technology bad? The original cinema train cliché. She wanted to throw it all away and just watch how Satyajit Ray or Sam Peckinpah filmed trains. But she knew, somewhere, that where you arrived wasn’t as important as how you got there. If it was hard earned, that mattered. She just had to show her work, put it together. Let it be organic. Take your time, let the weirdness come through. Maybe she can have that cliché and eat it too. Maybe.

  JELLY AND JACK

  1986

  “Hey, babe,” Jack said when he answered the phone.

  “Hi, Jack,” Jelly said. She was sitting on her couch. She had the trade papers—Variety and The Hollywood Reporter—on the coffee table in front of her. Next to the papers were a large magnifying glass and a bold marker. The rain was coming down hard and almost freezing. Later it would turn into wet, sticky snow. The news called it a “wintry mix,” and it would freeze up and make the sidewalks ice sheets by morning. The weather was hard on her: if the sun wasn’t out, it was low-lit, low-contrast gray with hidden ice. If she was lucky she would hear and feel the ice cracking under her feet as she stepped, but mostly it was unmoving slick surfaces that made walking frightening. Or if the sun did come out, it was high-glare, every surface a beautiful-but-painful shimmer of reflected brightness. Gleams that exploded in waves of white. The winter was different every day, and you had to plan and react and accommodate it. There were easier places for someone like her. For anyone, really.

  “Congratulations on the Grammy nomination,” she said.

  “Thank you. To tell you the truth, it doesn’t mean that much. Barely five people qualify in that category. Some of these things, if you submit and your name is known, you are automatically nominated,” he said.

  “But you have won before, and surely there is nothing automatic in that?” Jelly pulled her thick chenille robe around her. She had a cold, and she’d spent the morning sipping tea with lemon and honey. Her throat felt swollen and even to swallow her saliva caused a sharp pain, but it hadn’t affected her voice yet. She held an ice pack wrapped in a dishtowel. As she listened to Jack, she pressed the cold compress to her throat.

  “True,” he said.

  “And it is such a perfectly realized recording. The production is outstanding, anyone will recognize that,” she said. She heard him light a cigarette.

  “I watched A Woman Under the Influence yesterday,” Jelly said. Jack loved John Cassavetes films, and he had sent her a private video copy, impossible to find.

  “Yeah? What did you think?”

  “I think it’s my favorite one. Gena Rowlands is mesmerizing, the way her vulnerability just crushes everyone around her.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” he said. “I love that scene where she’s waiting for her kids to get off the bus.”

  “Yes, she’s so excited she’s jumping from foot to foot, looking down the street, asking people for the time.”

  “Yes! I love that. That’s what I’m really like, way too much. When I was working at home and my daughter was little, I used to get so excited when it was three o’clock and she would get home.”

  “You?”

  Jack laughed. “Nicole, inside I am Gena Rowlands.”

  “I believe it. I’m glad,” she said. She made herself swallow a sip of tea. She felt the swallow in her ears. “So how did work go last night?”

  “Shitty. I’m not feeling it these days.”

  Jack frequently stayed up all night working. Jelly called at 2:00 p.m., about an hour after he got up. He would have eaten his eggs and drunk his coffee. Read the Sunday New York Times.

  “You say that, and then you have an amazing breakthrough,” she said. “A few weeks ago you said you felt spent and uninspired, and then you wrote a perfect, haunting melody for that DeMarco film.”

  “That’s true. I mean, I do usually feel shitty about it, but that’s no guarantee that things will ever get better. And then I complain about it, which must be boring.”

  “You feel bad because you care deeply and you are hard on yourself. Maybe it is part of your process.”

  “What?”

  “Feeling hopeless makes room for something, maybe,” she said. She heard him exhale.

  “You think I need to despair and give up so that I can get to something?”

  Jelly cooed a sound that concurred with but did not interrupt his thoughts: “mmm.”

  “Maybe.” A long drag on his cigarette. “Maybe I have to push all the obvious cliché crap out of my head. I have to exorcise it, throw it all out and then, when all the bullshit has been heard and rejected, there’s only something new—or at least interesting—left.” Jelly heard the ting of a spoon stirring coffee, a sip, and then an exhale. “Maybe that’s true. But it is a hell of a way to do it.”

  “What you are doing works. You always get what you need
in the end, inspiration comes.”

  “I really do do that, don’t I?” he said. “Never thought of it like that before.”

  “No?” she said.

  “I wonder if I could just be more deliberate about it? Know that I am clearing out the cobwebs, so to speak. Going through the litany of the obvious. The first wave of crap. Maybe I could be more efficient about the process.”

  “Interesting. And know that after you have rid yourself of it, the real work will start,” she said.

  “I could avoid the feeling of utter despair then,” he said. “Just by telling myself a different story of what I was doing.”

  “You do get it eventually. But it also costs you a lot in gloomy moments.”

  “True,” he said. “There really is a pattern.”

  “Maybe you can reassure yourself in the midst of it and it won’t cost as much,” she said. “Because you need—you deserve—the feeling of competence. You know what you are doing, and your bad moments are just part of a process.”

  “Now I feel a little better about working again tonight,” he said.

  “Wonderful,” she said.

  “You always make me feel better,” he said.

  “I hope so,” Jelly said. She pressed the ice to her throat. “Shall I go and let you get back to work? I don’t mind.”

  “No!” he said. Jelly laughed. Jack laughed. “Don’t you dare hang up yet.”

  “All right,” she said, but she usually didn’t let herself get talked out of her instinct for exit timing. Most days when they talked, they talked for an hour, sometimes only half an hour. The times when she was on the line for two or even three hours were unusual but had happened more frequently lately. Jack would play music—his or someone else’s—or they would watch a movie on TV together. He now regularly sent her VHS cassettes in the mail along with letters and other little gifts. She gave him her Syracuse address, and if he got the impression that she was a graduate student at Syracuse University, it wasn’t from anything she directly said. She left gaps, and Jack filled them in. The contours were collaboration, built of his desires and her omissions. She didn’t think of these as lies. He assumed things; she just didn’t correct them. And she did feel like a graduate student. She had been helped by social workers when she really needed help. Jelly volunteered to work with blind kids at the center. Helped their parents. She was a kind of graduate student in sociology. She felt that way, just as she felt blond and supple and young when she talked to Jack. She felt elegance in her hands and wrists. Here is what she did not feel: she did not feel dowdy and heavy. She did not feel the doughy curve of her large stomach; she did not feel that the flesh of her thighs grew into her knees making them dimpled and lumpy. She did not feel knots of spider veins or calluses or stretch marks. Is it fair that she hadn’t even had a baby, that mere quick adolescent growth had given her red stripes that had faded to permanent white breaks in the skin of her breasts, her upper arms and upper thighs? Did it make sense that before she had shown anyone her body, her body felt old and damaged? She did not feel like a forty-one-year-old woman, did not feel like being this heavy, invisible, unremarkable creature. She felt young and taut, a person who could beguile and a person who loved and understood men. That was the truth, and the rest was not of import to either of them.

  “But I have to go soon,” she said.

  “No, Nico,” Jack said.

  Jelly wanted to hang up while he was still wanting her, long before he had had his fill. But Jack was hard to resist. She liked the way he called her Nico. The way he asked things of her so openly.

  “No? Why not?” she said, her voice slightly creaking from her sore throat.

  “Because your voice sounds so sultry today, and I need to listen to it,” he said. His naked want worked on her. It skirted toward the sexual, but she never let it go there. She was reserved about overt sexuality, and the men she talked to got that somehow. Some women were butterflies in your hands. You didn’t say crude things to them. You breathed gently and you didn’t make any sudden moves.

  However, it was also true that a few men she had called in the past didn’t get her at all. They didn’t understand her despite her guidance, her clear vision for them, her parameters. They weren’t interested in her, not truly.

  “You are making me so hard,” said one unworthy contact apropos of nothing she had said. She hung up immediately and never called him again. This despite her elegant and subtle approach, her knowledge and the fact that she knew someone in his circle. Jack was polite, he cursed and he hacked his cigarette cough, but he was gentle. A gentleman.

  “Maybe I don’t have to go yet,” she said. “Are you feeling sad? You sound a little sad.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “It isn’t just about your work?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a nice Sunday sad, some old-fashioned melancholy. Sometimes I sit around and just feel sad about things. Is that odd? I am odd, you know I am. It isn’t just loneliness. I miss certain people, feel sad about certain people, which is different, I think.”

  “Who?”

  “I miss my Uncle Tom. He died a few years back, but I thought of him today. He was a funny guy. He didn’t really understand me or what I do, but that didn’t matter. We were family and he always liked me and made me feel that. Up until he died, he used to give me money every time I saw him. Even though he was a retired insurance salesman and I was making a lot of money, a successful guy, an adult with a kid, when he would see me at a family dinner or whatever, as he said good night, he would press a hundred dollars into my hand and say, ‘a little gas money,’ and wink. I would try to refuse, but it was his way to say he was looking out for me. An Italian thing, I guess. I miss that little jolt of family.” Jack coughed. “I should have, I don’t know, asked his advice or something instead of just talking to my cousins.

  “And I miss my dog Mizzie. She was a mutt, with these droopy hound eyes and long velvet ears. I got her in my twenties and had her through my first divorce and second marriage. I never walked her as much as she liked, I rushed her or let the housekeeper do it. I grew impatient with her, and today I wish she were here so I could take her for a long walk.”

  “Oh, you are being very hard on yourself,” she said.

  “Not just that.” She heard him light a cigarette and exhale. “Not just that. I miss my daughter and my mother. I mean, my daughter is still around, but—” Jack said. He laughed.

  “What’s funny?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. My spiel of regrets.”

  Jelly fingered her tender throat and listened to Jack smoke.

  “It’s difficult,” she said. “So difficult.”

  “Do you miss anyone, Nico?” he said. “Maybe you are too young—”

  “No, I do,” Jelly said, talking before Jack finished, which is something she tried never to do.

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “My father died when I was sixteen,” Jelly said. “He never lived with us, so I didn’t see him too often. Once a week or so he would take me out. Usually we saw a movie and then went to a diner and had hamburgers. It was hard because he died suddenly of a heart attack, and I kept thinking about the last time I had seen him. I was in a bad mood, and I didn’t want to go out to dinner with him. I wanted to be with my friends. So I went, but I sulked. I didn’t want to see a movie and I barely ate my dinner. I remember peeling the label off the Coke bottle and that he kept asking awkward questions about my life. I found everything he said irritating and boring. Anyway, after he died, I felt bad about that dinner. I remember sitting on my bed and realizing I could actually count the number of times I had spent with my father. One night a week plus a full week in the summer. Times my age, or at least my remembered years, so let’s say twelve. That’s all we had, and yet I couldn’t be bothered to even look at him the last time I saw him.” This was a true story that she had never tol
d anyone before. Part of her thought, Stop. What are you doing? She pushed that thought away. Jack would love her, she knew it.

  “Oh no,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. But you were a kid, he knew you loved him under the sulk. My daughter did this—all kids do this. I promise you he understood that.”

  “Yes,” Jelly said. The word squeezed through her tight throat. She could feel patches of heat on her cheeks and her eyes started to sting.

  “I mean, my daughter—I haven’t seen her in months,” he said. He made a loud exhale sound, half sigh, half noise. “We had a stupid thing a few months ago. We—I mean I—should be able to do better, but every day I don’t.” Jelly said nothing, just waited for what he would say or sound next. A sniff. “It’s okay,” he said, but it was still heavy in his voice. “It is good sometimes to feel this way, even if it fucks me up a little,” he said. Jelly could hear that his voice had what gets called a catch: a failure of breath mid-word, and it undid her. Jelly’s own throat caught.

  “I know,” she said softly, and she heard the unmistakable sounds of a person weeping, a man unused to it, and she let him get it all out. She could hear his breath, his sniffs, the little human sounds of feeling. “I know.” She did know. The longing to love and be loved in a very deep way, not the usual way.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Jack. You’re okay with me.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I am okay with you. I am.”

  * * *

  She felt so close to Jack that she did something she had never done before. She stopped calling other men, her other phone dates. She gave Jack her number and let him call her whenever he felt like it. They began to talk every day. It was quickly escalating, and she tried not to worry about it or think of where it would lead. She tried, in her own soft, quiet way, to maintain a little reserve and slow things down. But it was hard because, well, she was in love with Jack. She felt connected to him in ways that made her feel happy all the hours of her day.