Director's Cut

by Arthur Japin

  The work is almost complete when Gelsomina strolls in during my final discussion with the carpenter. She looks at the drawings spread out on the table.

  “What’s that going to be, a doll’s film?” she asks, referring to the dimensions of the rooms that are almost bursting out of the church.

  The carpenter lends me a hand by pretending that it’s just a suggestion for the commercial, when in fact I’m already halfway done with it, and I explain, most plausibly, that the Banco Ambrosiano budget simply doesn’t stretch to large sets.

  “The whole film is set in a cellar,” I explain. “I’m dreaming I’m in a cell.”

  “Finally a dream that might come true,” she teases. “But I can’t believe it will be solitary confinement!” She says it with her sweetest smile, which could mean anything to bystanders, giving me a hard pinch on the cheek.

  “By the way,” she calls on her way out, as if it just popped into her mind, “the Academy in Los Angeles wants a definitive answer on that Oscar. I told them we’re thrilled and will absolutely be there. That’s all right with you, isn’t it?”

  The thought makes me ill. She knows that. I don’t like traveling. My arthritis acts up. I suffer fits of dizziness. But Gelsomina doesn’t wait for an answer. I’m too guilty to refuse her anything.

  The first time Maxim enters Gala’s new apartment, she’s sitting on the chair next to the telephone. She’s only been living there for a day and a half. He walks around. If he’s impressed, he manages not to let on.

  “It’s ideal,” he says. His voice is so cold it might as well be a reproach, but Gala seizes it like a drowning man grabbing a buoy.

  “Really?” she asks. “So you think I’ve done the right thing?”

  He suppresses his annoyance.

  “Darling, it couldn’t be better.”

  He wonders when she got into the habit of needing constant confirmation. Surely it hasn’t been that long since they both followed their whims. Absurdities took them by surprise. Outdoing each other and themselves, they grew steadier, more confident. And whenever something threw them off balance, they held on to each other until they could get back on their feet.

  With the melancholy surprise of an old man trying to find the fields he played in during the long summers of his childhood or to pick out the course of a stream in the suburbs that have grown up around his village, Maxim’s eyes meet her face.

  “You think it stinks,” she says. “Be honest.”

  He searches his memory for the last moment he admired her, really admired her, for throwing herself into something that he would have flinched from. There must have been a last time, but he can’t remember when it was.

  “I miss you.”

  “But you’ll come every day, won’t you?” says Gala. “You have to. You must. I need your wise advice. We have to see each other every single day!”

  “We won’t miss a day. How could we?”

  She smiles with relief.

  “It’s gorgeous here,” he goes on. “It’s a dream. Who would have thought it a few years ago? Us. Here. You. Snaporaz … Me.” To snap out of this gloomy train of thought, he jumps up and tries to pull her up off the chair. “Let’s go celebrate your new place. Come on, let’s go eat somewhere.”

  She shakes her head.

  “He might call.”

  “Then he’ll call back again later.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  Maxim goes out and comes back with pizzette and wine. During their meal, the phone rings. From fright, Gala spits the mouthful she has just taken into her glass. Her hand is already at the receiver, but she waits. She lets it ring twice. Three times. Four.

  “I don’t want him thinking I’m sitting by the phone waiting for him to call.”

  “But you are sitting by the phone waiting for him to call.”

  “I don’t want him to get the wrong impression.”

  The telephone rings for the fifth time. And again.

  “Which wrong impression?”

  “That I’m available on call.”

  She lets the phone ring twice more. Then it falls silent. They resume eating.

  “I don’t understand,” Maxim says at last, “if you were already planning not to answer, we could just as well have gone out.”

  “And how would I have known if he’d called?” she asks, as if it were obvious. When she sees the incomprehension on his face, she brushes aside her embarrassment. “You’re a man, you wouldn’t understand.”

  He tries to think whether he’s ever failed to understand her before.

  “You must be a woman then, I guess,” he says with bitter irony. “How strange that we never noticed the difference.”

  He kisses her on the mouth, as always. Before leaving, he sticks his head around the corner one last time. She hasn’t moved from the spot all evening.

  Now she’s waving to him, a little girl waiting big-eyed next to the lifeguard for her parents to come and fetch her.

  Out on the street, Maxim realizes that he could go back to smother her with kisses, but he doesn’t.

  It only takes him a few days to realize that he misses her more when he’s with her than he does when he’s alone.

  Milky Way

  My life is built around the pursuit of my dreams. The last thing I want to do is catch them.

  That’s why I don’t call very often. I was determined to have her, but now that I’ve got her, I let days go by without even contacting her. All the trouble I took to create a place for us to hide from the city and write our own story, only to balk at the prospect: who could understand that? Her, maybe. Yes, in the end, maybe her. Years later, when she looks back on me, Gala will probably be the only one who understands. Because in this we are one. That’s what’s so creepy about it. That’s what makes our relationship different from every other one I’ve ever had.

  Gala constantly defied her father in order to stir his love. She preferred burning herself in the flames to doing like the others and warming herself with them. For the same reason, he badgered her, harassing her tirelessly with his impossible tasks.

  “Pursue an endeavor, live forever,” he made her rattle off, “but he who takes the prize, dies.”

  As soon as I am in danger of getting hold of something, I retreat. I am a coward. Running away is second nature to me.

  And this is the only way I can contain the universe between my thumb and index finger. To keep from pulverizing my happiness or letting it slip through my fingers, I keep it floating there.

  • • •

  People everywhere call themselves my friends, but I hardly have any real friends. There are very few people I’m comfortable with. Two or three. And I don’t see them all that often. It’s one of the things that used to worry Gelsomina deeply. She doesn’t really understand it, but she finally had to accept that I carry everyone who really matters to me with me in my heart. I don’t make it easy for people to get to my heart, but once they succeed, I enclose them there forever. Within that isolation, our friendship is perfect. When they seek me out again, I feel warm and grateful, but I have no need of visitors. This feeling, so secure to me, is not always mutual. I find that hard to accept. Some turned their backs on me, unable to tell from my silence how much I loved them. This crushed me every time. And though my mind knows where I failed, it’s still impossible for me to feel it. The people I care about are simply closer to me in my thoughts than when they’re slurping up chicken soup at my kitchen table.

  I think social interaction is just something people use to compensate for their lack of imagination.

  For the first few years, Gelsomina persisted in trying to invite friends over, but I was too shy and suspicious and she soon gave up hope. Recently, however, she’s taken to turning up now and then with someone new, introducing them to me with a look in her eye like a matchmaker trying one last time to pair off a shriveled old maid. Now that she’s ill, she worries about leaving me behind alone. And she’s afraid that my loneliness will be lonelier
than anyone else’s.

  “You won’t hate me for it?” she asked recently, out of the blue. We were at an outdoor café in Frascati. It was a perfect evening. I couldn’t bear to have her suddenly explode the little bit of happiness that was left to us. I tried to laugh off the remark, but she wouldn’t let it go.

  “Promise you’ll never blame me when I … well, if I deserted you.”

  “Are you mad?” I exclaimed. “First you tie me hand and foot and then, as soon as I’m totally devoted to you, you’re going to dump me?” (All this in a tone that unmistakably meant the opposite.) “That is unforgivable!” When I saw her forcing a smile on my behalf, I immediately addressed her seriously. “Don’t worry. You’re the light of my life. Wherever you’re planning on going, you’ll always be shining deep inside me.”

  But I’ve never been able to dupe her with empty phrases. She didn’t say another word. For a while, we looked over the lake, the headlights of the cars in the mountains rippling over the water. Finally, she shook her head, slowly but firmly.

  My friendship fails to match any norm, and my love unfailingly falls short of the way I imagine it. Take my days now: I am in love. She is omnipresent in my mind, that delightful milky way, my Galassia! I discuss my every thought with her, present her my every idea. If they make her smile, I brighten; I feel dejected if she shrugs and try feverishly to think up something new that will impress her. I run everything past her, not just the big things, but also the question of whether to put Unghrese or Parma on my sandwich. I don’t decide a single thing without her approval. I simply couldn’t, since I exist only by virtue of her attention. Wherever I look, I feel her eyes turning the same way. When I walk, she takes me by the hand. I smell her presence in my every breath and when I exhale I see it ruffling her hair. When I have to speak to someone else and must, ever so briefly, turn my back on her, I feel her as clearly present as if her hand were resting between my shoulder blades. I spend every hour of the day with her.

  Then evening comes.

  Gelsomina is expecting me at home.

  That’s when it becomes extremely difficult to reconcile the euphoria I’ve been feeling with the reality that I haven’t seen or spoken to Gala all day. I grab the phone and dial her number to explain that every hour has been dedicated to her and that I must see her the next day. Sometimes I find the nerve. More often I don’t, and I drive home with Gala stretched out on the hood, waggling a reproachful finger.

  This is how we squander weeks of our happiness. Many days find her world confined to the chair beside the telephone. She waits for me to call. When I finally do, she calmly pretends that she hadn’t really been expecting me, pleasantly surprised, pleased, ever so briefly, to interrupt her hectic activities to speak to me. She herself never once tries to contact me, which only confirms my doubts. How could I know that this requires supreme will power, and how could I possibly guess at the shenanigans she gets up to trying to track me down? She regularly asks Maxim to dial the number of my office.

  “I don’t need to talk to him, I just want to know if he’s there.”

  After the first few times, Maxim has learned that resistance is futile. He calls and gets a woman on the line. He makes up an excuse: once he was from Vogue and wanted to schedule an interview, another time he asked for material for a BBC documentary.

  The high, pinched voice invariably answers, “Signor Snaporaz has left the office,” and hangs up.

  “See, he is there!” Gala exclaims angrily. Her eyes flood with tears, as if silence were more villainous from close by than from a distance.

  She’s right. That voice is me. I don’t have any staff in my city office. She knows that. I answer the phone myself and pretend to be my own secretary. If I don’t feel like talking to someone, I say I’m not there. How could I know that it’s her? My heart would leap. I’d skip through the room like a little boy. Why doesn’t she call herself to let me know that she really does care as much about me as she does in my dreams? Adultery is so much more complicated in practice than in theory.

  Thank God, there are days when we do see each other and lap up our happiness, divine hours that prove all our fears unfounded, even if their perfection only feeds our folly in the days to come. How does a fool know that everything is really as perfect as he thinks it is?

  And then, suddenly, amid the chaos that is love, I am ambushed by the suspicion that my difficulties in relations with friends and lovers are due not to their incapacity to live up to my image of them, but to my failure to measure up to the image of myself I present to others.

  The night before I leave for Hollywood, something strange happens. Gala and I are eating at La Cesarina in the Via Sicilia. It has been a jovial evening. We are going to be far apart for a few days, but I promise to call as often as I can, and tell her that, with the appropriate discretion, of course, she can call me too. I take a card and write down the number of the Beverly Hilton. When I’m about to hand it to her, I see that she’s turned as pale as a ghost and is staring horror-stricken at someone behind me. I turn around to see a fellow standing by the cloakroom. He’s no oil painting, that’s for sure. He waves.

  “Who’s that?” I ask, but drop it when I see the pained look on her face. We talk some more, but less than five minutes later she says she has to powder her nose. Her excuse is so transparent, it’s charming. She heads off to the toilets and I see the fellow follow her. He is too ugly to be her lover and too stupid to be dangerous, so I bear with her for a few minutes and gesture to Cesarina to bring me another bottle of wine.

  That fellow is Gianni, of course, but at that moment I don’t have the slightest inkling of his existence. Right after she moved, he traced her address by simply following Maxim on his daily pilgrimage. Then, for a long time, he left her in the delusion that she’d gotten rid of him.

  “Sometimes you have to let a woman ripen,” he informed Dr. Pontorax in Catania, not without a certain pride in the method he had developed over the years, “like leaving wine in the cellar to age until it’s ready to drink.”

  Not long before, Gianni had called Gala. The way she answered betrayed that she was in love, a fortuitous circumstance he could use to increase her willingness. She hung up the moment he said his name. He knew that all he needed to do was to appear when she was in my company.

  Gianni opens the door of the women’s bathroom.

  Gala is standing in front of the mirror.

  He kicks open the doors of the cubicles to make sure there aren’t any eavesdroppers. Then he blocks the entrance with a garbage can.

  He has respect for his prey. Imperturbably, she puts on her lipstick, licks her teeth, and wipes a small smudge off a front tooth. As if alone, she starts combing her hair, a superior smile playing on her lips. He knows how to deal with that. He likes a challenge.

  When Gala comes back to the table, I can’t tell what’s happened. She’s excited about the upcoming Oscar presentation and promises to watch it live. I tell her how much I’m dreading it. Of course, she’s noticed the slight deterioration in my health of late. I bluff to friends that the long, wild nights with Gala are taking their toll, but in these last few weeks we’ve actually spent more time lovingly holding hands than rolling ardently through the grass. I think something’s pinched in my back and is cutting off the blood supply. Whatever it is, Gala is no more impressed than Gelsomina and thinks I should stop worrying about it, not just for my sake but for Gelsomina’s. We go to her apartment and make love to say goodbye.

  • • •

  That night, when I crawl into bed beside Gelsomina, she ascribes my irritability to my aversion to our trip. I mutter something and turn my back. Why am I so much nicer to my wife after a whole day of being adulterous in my thoughts than after the one hour in which I actually give in?

  The next day, around the time we’re taking off from Fiumicino, Maxim’s eyes are opened once and for all. It’s the weekend before his first day of shooting. He has packed his bag and awaits the summons to the se
t near Cortina d’Ampezzo. He knows his lines by heart. He’s rehearsing one of the key scenes, checking his slalom in the mirror, when the call comes from Cinecittà. It’s the assistant of an assistant. He’s terribly sorry, but the American investors have found a cheaper location in Romania. Maxim calmly answers that he doesn’t mind the extra traveling.

  “No,” laughs the voice, “you don’t get it. We’re only taking the star. We’ll get the rest from Romanian casting.”

  That evening, Maxim climbs the high steps to the Ara Coeli. The square in front of the church is tiny, but the whole city is at your feet. He and Gala have often come here to escape the traffic, enjoy the glow of the sunset, and sit close together, waiting for the first stars to appear over the city.

  This time, he has come alone. He called her and told her his news. She sounded genuinely upset, but she was impatient as well. She wanted to comfort him, but couldn’t wait to get off the phone. He knew why, and that only made him sadder.

  “Come straight over,” she said in a caring voice. “Venom must be drowned in wine! We’ll eat and dance!”

  He turned down her offer, and though she heard the catch in his voice, she didn’t suspect that she could be its cause, telling herself that he was mourning the death of a career that was stillborn. She was incapable of seeing herself as pitiable. After all, she was at her peak. One of the most famous men in the world, a man who could have any woman he wanted, longed for no one but her! These might be the most perfect months of her life. Even if she spent most of her time holed up at home she was alive inside as never before.