by Dana Spiotta
He stops talking and looks at the ground.
TIME STAMP: 6:58
Deke is leaning back on the couch and staring straight ahead and almost dozing. His hair is disheveled. His t-shirt is off. He is drinking out of a mug. He starts to hum. It is almost a monotone hum like static on a TV, but then he starts to smile and it turns melodic. Finally he smiles widely and begins to sing a song. He sings a few lines and then stops. He eyes the camera and then shrugs and looks away. He yawns and stretches.
DEKE
Okay. It’s morning.
MEADOW
Another bathroom break?
DEKE
I am going to eat some eggs and go to sleep.
MEADOW
So we are done?
DEKE
Yes, we are done.
Meadow turns around and we see her face for the first time as she turns off the camera. The spinning numbers of the time stamp remain as the screen goes black, then the video stops.
SHOW YOUR WORK
It was brutal to watch Deke’s raw footage. Meadow knew there were a lot of ways to proceed. She could do as she planned and cut the pieces together and make it an eight-hour installation piece of real time, a long day’s journey into night. She could cut off the beginning and just make a two-hour film of the meaty pay dirt at the end. She could edit until it showed a ninety-minute highlight reel of his undoing. She could cut out all her questions, so it read like a monologue confession, which would make him seem even more unhinged. She could do many things. She could even record Deke on voice-over commenting on what he was doing in the film the way Jean Rouch did in his anthrographic films. But instead she did a variation on Rouch. She did what the Maysles brothers did to Mick Jagger in Gimme Shelter. She filmed sober Deke looking at rushes of what they had filmed on the video editing monitor. She filmed him looking at himself break down and confess to beating up this person. He pressed rewind and carefully watched it again. She queried him from behind the camera.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I am very drunk,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. She zoomed into Deke’s face as he watched Deke on the TV. He lights a cigarette, and we hear him crying on camera. He watches as the video keeps going and he is calmly sitting on the couch. The video goes to static. He stares at the monitor.
“I love it,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. But you should edit it. No one will watch an eight-hour film.”
“So.”
“We want people to watch it. You do, Meadow.”
This was how the film ended, with Deke talking about editing the film. Portrait of Deke, the first of Meadow’s films to go out into the world. She had the video transferred to film and, through connections Carrie had made at NYU, she entered it in three documentary festivals. It won a jury prize, and it received glowing reviews in small but significant places. She was now a real filmmaker.
Deke went along to some of the screenings. And although there was no sudden break, no breakup, Meadow traveled a lot and they eventually, gradually stopped sleeping with each other. By the end of 1988, Deke moved in with new friends in the East Village to try acting or some kind of performance work. Although Meadow was often down in New York and staying at Carrie’s only minutes away, Meadow rarely saw Deke. They were no longer lovers and they were no longer friends either.
There were other changes—consequences—that came out of making Portrait of Deke:
1) Meadow used her video camera. She liked that it was just her on her own. No sound person and natural light. Later she would get a pro Mini DV camera and she could carry it in her shoulder bag.
2) She understood that there is the film, the idea of it, before you make it. Then there is the film during the making of it, the filming and then the editing. But even when the film is done, it still changes. There is the film right after you have finished, then the film after you have shown it for months, and then there is the film after a year, or five years. Each time it feels different to her. Each time it is different to her. But why would this surprise her? When she watched Barry Lyndon at seventeen it was terrible. But at nineteen it was beautiful. That is the thing about films. They don’t change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different. But when it is your own film, it isn’t immutable. It feels part of you, and so seems to change with you. The filming, the editing, the showing: all of it looks different to her.
At the very first screening in front of an audience, Meadow almost had to leave. It was strange to see herself there in the film. Talking and exposing a personal element of her life. Who loved her and whom she loved. What she did to him in the film, or let him do to himself. Her goading and her relentlessness and the insistence on an all-night shoot. It was a kind of ambush, no matter how consensual, no matter how willing. It unsettled her to see it there. She realized that Deke was confessing to a crime that could have actual consequences for him. It never occurred to her until that moment. And that you can’t trust people to know their own interests, because even with the film right in front of them, they can’t see themselves. But why shouldn’t she believe him when he says he loves it? (Then there was the fact that they ended things between them with the film, even if it wasn’t obvious at the time. Years later she would see that very few relationships of any kind could survive the intensity and complication and power differential of filming a person as themselves.)
3) Most of the reviewers and juries remarked on the power of the film, the truth of it, the raw emotion.
4) She was very good at this kind of filmmaking and she liked doing it.
5) Nonactors—the unrehearsed, revealed, willing subject—captivated her. If this entailed a certain amount of distress, so be it. Something is there, but filming it, the act, transforms it somehow. The raw human drama—that’s what she wanted. She found the complex inquiry of documentary—not making up the narrative, but discovering it as you went along—was more exciting to her than filming actors in a fictional narrative. Or filming trains.
JELLY AFTER OZ
A few years after Jelly and Oz broke up, Jelly came home from the call center and saw that she had a message. One of her friends from college, Lizzie, had moved to Los Angeles to become an actress. She called Jelly once every couple of weeks, and they would talk for an hour or so. It was Jelly’s big indulgence. Lizzie didn’t work much as an actress, and she worked part-time as a housecleaner. She was always broke, so Jelly called Lizzie back and the call would go to Jelly’s bill.
When Jelly called, Lizzie was very excited.
“Guess what?” Lizzie said.
“What?”
“I was cleaning this gorgeous—I mean unbelievable—house on Mulholland. Me and three other girls.”
“Marlon Brando’s house?” Jelly said.
“No, nobody’s house, but listen.”
“What?” Jelly was washing dishes as she spoke, gripping the phone between shoulder and ear. She ran the water low so she could hear.
“I was in the office off the bedroom dusting, and I notice that this guy has a big Rolodex with a lot of handwritten numbers on it.”
“So,” Jelly said. “I thought you were going to say you found a drawer of whips or something.”
“They all have that drawer, believe me, but I started to flip through the Rolodex, and you won’t believe the numbers—”
“Who?”
“Jack Nicholson. Warren Beatty. Robert Evans.”
Jelly took vegetables out of the crisper drawer and rinsed them in the colander in the sink.
“I see the circles he runs in,” Jelly said. “What is his name?”
“I don’t know. No one you woul
d know. Wait, it is on the schedule.”
Jelly moved the phone to the other shoulder and the other ear, and she began to arrange the vegetables on the cutting board.
“His name is David Weintraub.”
“He is a producer, a very important producer,” Jelly said.
“How do you know that?”
“How do you not know that? I read credits,” Jelly said. Jelly had been so thrilled when she recovered enough sight to see the words clearly again, she now stayed and read every name of the credits.
“Plus you see more movies than anyone.”
Jelly cut the onion in narrow slices. The fumes wafted up and she sniffed.
“Should I call one? What would I say, though,” Lizzie said. “Give me a job?” She giggled. “You can’t call people that famous anyway. They will just hang up on you, or their assistant will answer, I guess.”
Jelly stopped cutting and ran the water, rinsing her fingers. She stopped and sat down.
“You know what?”
“What?” Lizzie said.
“Next time you go to this guy’s house, or any really fancy house, write down some of the numbers for me. The names and numbers.”
“All right,” Lizzie said.
“But not the really famous ones, the huge names. The other names, the names you don’t know.”
“You are weird, Amy.”
* * *
Once Lizzie gave her some numbers, Jelly began to do a little research. She went to the university library and looked up the names. She began to read the trade papers. When she felt that she had sufficient background information, she started to make calls. It was just for fun, and for a few years she only did it occasionally. But as she talked to more men and learned more background and connecting details each time, she began to feel that she was a part of this wondrous world. She began to believe that the distance between her life and their lives was not so big after all. The greatest moment came when she called a sound engineer and he said to her, “Nicole? The Nicole? I heard something about you.”
JELLY AND JACK
“Good morning,” he said. His voice was croaky, as if he hadn’t spoken today.
“Good morning! How are you feeling?”
There was a long pause. Jelly pulled a velvet pillow onto her lap. She rested her elbows on it, the phone carriage on the pillow between her arms, the receiver held lightly by her ear. The room was bright. It was mid-morning. She was still in her silk pajamas. Her kimono robe opened to the morning air. The sun was strong and warmed her face as she spoke. She heard Jack light a cigarette. She resisted the urge to fill in, jump in, talk. She waited for him to speak.
“What if I said something crazy?”
Jelly waited some more. But she could feel what was coming. It always came.
“What if I bought you a ticket and you got on a plane to come see me?”
She laughed. Not a mocking laugh but a fluttery, delighted laugh. It was a delicate situation. She could feel his want. All down the wires the want traveled. In his scratchy morning voice, his cigarette voice, his sentence didn’t sound like a question until it went up a half register on the word me. It was touching.
Still she didn’t speak. This was the moment she was longing for but also dreading. It always fell apart after this.
“I mean it. I have been thinking. I think—well, not thinking. That is the wrong word. Feeling. I have these feelings for you. I want to be with you.”
“I have feelings for you too,” she said. She did. She loved Jack.
“I’m in love with you,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. As they spoke, she could feel her heart beating in her chest. She was not calm; her body was going faster and faster.
“Is that crazy? Never meeting in person, feeling this way?”
* * *
After she got off the phone, Jelly began to cry. She let herself feel loved, in love, the incredible feeling of connection, however fleeting. No chance for them, not after what she had done. She had no choice. She only wanted their perfect connection to last longer. It seemed harmless.
The first time Jelly had come to such a pass was with another man she called, Mark Jenks. He was a mildly successful film director. Things had gone on for months; things had gone as far as they could (nothing stays in one place, people need more), and one day he asked her what she looked like. She had described herself accurately but not too specifically: long blond hair, fair skin, large brown eyes. Those true facts would fit into a fantasy of her. She knew because she had the same fantasy of how she looked. But after a few weeks of that, there came the request for a photograph. She took some photos of her beautiful friend Lynn. She had met Lynn through the Center. She was the mother of one of the low-vision kids Jelly worked with. Lynn was lovely to look at: a slender girl with delicate-but-significant curves. She was not that bright and had a flat, central New York trailer accent, but she also had the most appealing combination of almost too pouty lips, heavy-lidded eyes, and an innocent spray of freckles across her tiny nose. Lynn invited her to the beach with her son, Ty. Ty was six, and Jelly met with Ty once a week to help him adjust to his fading eyes. Although she had regained nearly all of her own sight since Oz, she still had to use extremely thick glasses, she was tunnel-visioned and had great difficulty in low-contrast situations. Like Ty, she didn’t fully belong in either world, sighted or blind. She was like a character in a myth, doomed to wander between two places. Belonging nowhere. That’s the word, belong. How much she would like to be with someone, and be long—not finite, not ending—with someone.
At the beach that day, Lynn looked even more beautiful than usual. She wore very little makeup. She had a tan and wore a white macramé bikini. She looked happy, relaxed. Jelly took three photos of her. Just held up her cheap camera and clicked. One showed Lynn looking away, thoughtful. One was blurred. The third showed her smiling into the camera. Lynn looked sexy but not mean. A happy, open, sweet-looking girl. Jelly knew as she took the photos what she would do with them. She dropped the film at the Kodak stand to be developed. She made sure she kept the negatives in a safe place.
The photos bought her some time with Mark, but they also escalated things. She knew there was no coming back from the lie. She tried to enjoy the moment, the delicious male desire directed at her. She often imagined herself looking like Lynn and being worshipped by Mark.
Jelly never thought, even in her fantasies, of Mark loving Jelly the way Jelly looked. She was always Jelly but not Jelly, even as she lay in her bed with the lights out after Mark had whispered his love for her and she had replaced the phone on the cradle. She closed her eyes and leaned back into her pillow. Her hand found the top elastic of her panties. The curly hair and then the tiny wet bump. She took her time, and she thought of Mark meeting her at last. With all the possibilities of the world at her beckon, she did not imagine Mark loving Jelly, squishy middle-aged Jelly. She was herself but in Lynn’s body. She imagined Mark undressing her and touching her perfect pink-tipped breasts as they spilled out of her bra, her smooth thighs under her skirt, her supple-but-taut midsection, her round high ass. In all of Jelly’s fantasies she looked exactly like Lynn, not even a better version of Jelly. She watched her fantasy as if it were a movie; she could see the man—Mark—undress the perfect girl, and Jelly could feel him lose his breath. He cannot believe how exquisite she is. And after Jelly came, she didn’t think too much about it. Was it unusual to exclude your own body from your fantasy? Why not imagine he loves you as you are, if anything is possible? Because (and she knew this absolutely without ever saying it to herself) her desire winds around her perfection in the eyes of the man. The fantasy—and her arousal—was about her perfect body. That’s what excited her. And how a man like Mark—a man who already loved her in theory—would worship her in that body. It was impossible to fulfill, and she was never dumb enough to believe that Mark could love he
r as she actually was.
After Mark, she used the photos with two other men. Things always proceeded in one direction, and she ended things when they escalated to an unavoidable meeting.
But what about Jack? She didn’t want to send him those photos. Some part of her thought that maybe Jack would love her no matter what. She thought about sending a neck-up flattering photo of herself, just to see what happened. The second time he asked her for a photo, she addressed the envelope and started to cry as she put the photos of Lynn inside and sealed it. She realized she was ending any future between them. But she had to. Before he wanted her photo, before he wanted her to visit him, he asked her the question they all had asked at some point. But it was an artful, gentle version with Jack: “You sound so young when you laugh. How old are you?”
She laughed again. Jelly knew how to avoid answering questions. But you couldn’t laugh off questions forever. She didn’t want to lie to Jack, which was something she’d just realized. But all of his circling around eventually came to the point. What do you look like? It wasn’t that she didn’t expect it or that she didn’t understand it, it was just so hopeless to always wind up against it. And how could she answer it? After she hung up the phone, she sat on the couch for a long time, staring into the faint dusk light.
What do I look like? If you look or if I look? It is different, right? There is no precision in my looking. It is all heat and blurred edges. Abstractions shaped by emotion—that is looking. But he wants an answer.
What do I look like? I look like a jelly doughnut.
Jelly got up and looked in the mirror. What to do if what you look like is not who you are? If it doesn’t match?
I am not this, this woman. And I am not Lynn-in-the-photograph. Jack must know, Jack knows who I am. I am a window. I am a wish. I am a whisper. I am a jelly doughnut.
I am beautiful when my hair brushes my shoulders, when the sun makes me close my eyes, when my voice vibrates in my throat. When I am on the telephone, I am beautiful.
