You're on an Airplane

by Parker Posey

  One time I saw Woody looking at me from about fifty feet away, and I waved my splinted wrist side to side, far away from what felt like a shore, as I stood on the porch. He didn’t wave back so I took it to mean he was in his camera and so I carried on being the subject, like a character in one of his movies, which I was. But there he was, the progenitor of independent cinema, auteur and actor, around eighty years old now, in his iconic, casually chic weatherman attire, having his freedom to create whatever world he wanted. I had a good relationship with my wrist by this point and would look at it like it held all my anxieties, leaving the rest of me relaxed.

  Woody listens with his headphones maybe as much as he watches. He likes to hear the subtlety of the voice. My final scene was a walk on campus with Joaquin to meet Emma, who tells him some news, a scandal about a judge who’s been murdered. At this point, we had slept together but our relationship had cooled. I had a line to Joaquin before Emma came over that could express withering irony or jealousy. It was maybe seven words, off the cuff, nothing major. In the second take, I stepped back from the pain or jealousy and instead had more irony. After Woody gave notes to Emma and Joaquin, he said to me, “You lost the feeling of that line.” And he was right. I’d lost the feeling, and he’d caught it.

  * * *

  –

  Danielle called out, “It’s a wrap for Parker,” and everyone clapped. Woody came over and put his hands out in a don’t-hug-me stance, smiling, saying, “I may have the Ebola virus . . .” The news had come out in the papers that very day. I mirrored him and he said, “Thank you for your performance. You delivered the lines as I’d heard them and envisioned them. And now your parents will be proud of you.” I laughed really hard at that one.

  Who in show business believes their parents are proud of them? I never did, and fight to believe it. It’s an industry (an art, hopefully) full of orphans left to create their own worlds with one another. I don’t feel glamorous, I feel like a possum—the animal born clinging to its mother’s tail, that grows up by falling off it, and probably too soon. Acting is the possum’s defense. Have you ever seen this? When threatened, they play dead—and they’re very convincing at it. They scare themselves so deeply that their eyes roll back into their heads and their little tongues stick out. They’ll even take it so far as to froth at the mouth. They’ll go on with the act as long as they’re terrified and it’s truly ghoulish, because they’ve been known to be buried alive—they’re famous for it.

  Anyway, we celebrated at Cannes, where the movie premiered. Here’s another serendipitous thing: on the drive to the Croisette, where the festival is held, the woman on the Irrational Man press team sat in front with the driver and said I lived in her sister’s old apartment. I got to ask her sister if it was true that the great guitar player Jorma Kaukonen built the closet there, and he had. I hadn’t been to Cannes in twenty years—I’d had some independent movies there in the nineties, back when invitations were on paper and there was dancing. I danced with Chris Isaak.

  For the red carpet, I wore a dress my friend Leana designed. It was a bright coral lamé with a matching turban. She’d convinced me to go blond and I figured why not. It was Cannes and the French Riviera and I wanted to go all out. The look or persona went viral and friends sent pictures from Instagram—in one, I was being taken away by a cop. John C. Reilly went all out too, and I ran into him in the lobby of the Hotel Martinez wearing a porkpie hat and a cane with a duck’s head from Brooks Brothers. Life is too important to be taken seriously. That’s an Oscar Wilde quote and it’s on one of my coffee mugs so it’s easy to remember.

  I’d keep my hair blond for Woody’s next film, Café Society, and it would overlap with shooting for Christopher Guest’s film Mascots for Netflix, where I played an armadillo. I never expected a roadkill motif in the narrative of my story but I’m cool with it.

  My favorite shot in Irrational Man is toward the end, when Emma’s flashlight crosses the frame and points right into the lens, after she realizes Abe is a monster. Then she takes a solitary walk on the rocky beach, and “The ‘In’ Crowd” by Ramsey Lewis Trio starts up again. It scored the whole film and when it comes up at the end, it leaves us to wonder, with energy and complexity, about the big picture.

  Part III

  21

  What We Make

  My parents were madly in love during my childhood and liked being away from us. Who could blame them? We were kids! “Children are to be seen and not heard!” they’d say with humor and reprimand. They punished us but they didn’t beat the shit out of us and I’m very grateful for that. When they took a break from us to go on vacation, they’d say, “We’re getting away from you guys!” We’d stay at Nonnie and Glenn’s, and sometimes my uncle Mark would give us a ride back to Monroe. A few times, I was put on a Greyhound bus, which was cool.

  Mark was my father’s younger brother and came into the world on a visit from Paw Paw to Granny, who had to have been at the height of her longing for him. Paw Paw delivered just on time—you could say he made his mark.

  We’d roll down the windows and turn up the radio on those drives in his brown lowrider; “My Sharona” became “Rice-A-Roni” and that was the funniest thing we’d ever heard. I’d take Oblio, our miniature black poodle, and we’d both stick our heads out the window to catch the breeze. I loved Oblio. He was named after a character in my favorite album, The Point! by Harry Nilsson, about a little boy who had a round head in a town where everyone else had pointed heads. It had a point about pointlessness, which is a good point.

  One trip, Uncle Mark had his friends in the car when he picked us up, and I was smushed next to a lady in the backseat who was smoking a tiny cigarette with something that looked like a bobby pin, that was pretty when she put it in her hair. We were going to some backwoods place where they taught us how to shoot BB guns and we shot cans off a fence post. I stepped on the cans, crunching them down in the middle of my sneakers to make tap shoes, and danced around while the grown-ups were doing their own thing. That was a fun day.

  Uncle Mark, in those days, resembled Tom Waits so much that I’d look at his albums, like Small Change and Closing Time, and ask him if it was him on the album cover. I was six. Albums were a big thing at our house and in our family. I remember showing my dad’s records to a stranger at the front door once. The door was windowpaned, and I could only hold, like, ten at a time, so I flipped them with my little hands. The man was laughing, because I wouldn’t let him in. Even though I could tell he was to be trusted, I couldn’t let strangers in the house when I was alone. Oh, the benign neglect of the seventies, I’m blessed to have been born at that time.

  * * *

  –

  It was around the time the song “Wildfire” was on the radio. The song was about a woman who’d lost her horse in a fire and our narrator, the singer Michael Martin Murphey, is haunted by her ghost. She ran away, calling out “Wildfire,” and that’s basically the song. Those story songs of the seventies could be sentimental and intense but I loved all that. “Get these hard times right on out of our minds / Riding Wildfire . . .”

  Uncle Mark would come over for dinner and afterward we all sat on the couch and watched TV or listened to albums. My mom would do what she called her “surgery,” and take the shade off the lamp. She’d beg and demand him, “Come here, come here, come HERE!” and he’d go to her, like a dirty kid who’s been playing outside and the sun’s gone down and he’s not ready for a bath.

  She was ready for him to lie on her lap when she had her accoutrements (needle and rubbing alcohol) ready and then she did the surgery, which was popping the bumps on his face. I’d hear screams from both of them. “That was the BEST!” Laughing and screaming with giddy disgust. “GROSS! AHHHHH!!!!” and “I don’t think that one’s ready, but this one is,” and, “Oh! That was a good one!” She hurt him so bad that I remember him leaping off the couch. The naked lampshade, with the bulb exposed, and
Uncle Mark, holding his face—and kind of laughing? It was good times. Sometimes I perched on the back of the couch, like a gargoyle, and got my mom anything she asked for.

  One afternoon, on a ride back from Shreveport, my mom broke the news about Oblio. She told us that Uncle Mark had left the fence unlocked and Oblio had run across the street and gotten hit by a car. We were all bawling in the front seat and there was nothing in the car to blow our noses with. Then my mom said, “I have some clean underwear in my bag in the back.” I flipped over to the backseat and found a clean pair. “It’s really okay to use your underwear, Mom?” She said that it was and started giggling through her tears. I hopped over the front to share, where we laughed as hard as we cried.

  * * *

  –

  Not long after, I was wandering around the house and ended up by my mom’s old sewing machine side table. I liked to sit on the two-by-two-inch pedal and rock back and forth, like I was on a sideways seesaw; I’d hold on to the outside edges of the top and go as fast as I could, rocking myself dizzy until I had to slow down.

  Behind the sewing machine, a little miracle appeared. My mom, who revered a clean house and found her sense of peace in the vacuum, had overlooked something: a petrified piece of Oblio’s poo-poo. It was dried and hard and mostly white and green, and it was absolutely precious to me. I considered it to be from Oblio in heaven. I took it and went upstairs to wrap it in one of Granny’s handkerchiefs, which I kept in the top drawer of my chifforobe. I kept it and revisited it, like a cherished relic, with all the love in my heart.

  * * *

  –

  The very first thing each of us makes in life is our poop and we don’t even have to think to do it because it just happens. What a gift to the mind of a child. This, of course, wears off, and it’s too bad that it smells. One of the first times I got in “big trouble” was when my brother and I were three years old and a smell was coming from our room. The smell was so strong that it woke up my parents. My dad came in and saw us with our shit in our hands and in the crevices of our crib and on our faces: we were happy and proud of what we’d made. My dad didn’t see it that way and he swung us up by our elbows and spanked us.

  * * *

  –

  That was the first time I experienced art producing punishment or shame. Oh shit, that’s funny.

  22

  Rear Window/Live Pie

  My view facing Eleventh Street from my apartment on East Tenth was like the set piece from Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The buildings around this block shared a courtyard, so it pulled my view in even closer. There was one apartment that stood out at night because the window lit up yellow. It was on the same level as mine, to the left and easy to see into.

  I could see her paintings. Her lights, the metal ones with hooded satellite cones, clamped onto her shelves, and she used bright bulbs. She didn’t have curtains, which singled her out even more, making her square of window radiate like a bulb itself. If other apartments’ lights were on at night, they were blue TV-screen lights, and everyone else had window coverings, and a few were just sheets.

  During one stretch of time, I could see she was painting clouds—a small row of them on her wall, the size of notebook paper or smaller. It was easy to see because the painted poufs of white on the light blue sky stood out.

  There was a wrought-iron love seat on the small “patio” below, in the courtyard, which got very little sun. I never saw anyone sitting on it.

  In the spring, the white cherry blossom trees snowed the area, especially the sidewalks facing Tenth Street. I didn’t have blinds or curtains on those windows for maybe a year when I lived there, preferring the windows to be bare and clear and easy to see out of. No one lived above me and I’d bumped out the ceiling, opening up the attic loft, and installed a skylight in the peak of the roof. I commissioned the necessary work to make my fireplace usable for years to come. I felt my body standing taller with the added space above my head. I felt my body getting smaller when I thought of how difficult the co-op board had been, nixing the central air after I’d already built the space for air-conditioning vents along the ceiling . . . after an architect on the board said it’d be cool if I just went ahead and did it. I was thinking of future tenants but the co-op board were jerks. Bob Gober, the sculptor, and his partner had central air on their two floors—it hummed so loud I could hear it, because it was right outside my window.

  Anyway.

  The main window, which faced Eleventh and the courtyard, spanned the width of the loft and was made of cloudy beaded glass. A painter could have lived there in the fifties. It was the kind of glass favored by the abstract expressionists during that time because it softened the direct sunlight.

  I took in this Rear Window view more intently as I was leaving it. I’d see this woman’s light on, painting not clouds this time but something I couldn’t make out.

  Just weeks before I moved out of there, a young man stopped me on the sidewalk while walking his dog. Our dogs introduced themselves to each other and we did, too. His name was Daryl and he was smiling, like he couldn’t contain himself, and was almost laughing, “You’re my neighbor!” As if I were Agnes Moorehead from Bewitched and had popped up out of nowhere, curled atop a refrigerator, specifically for him. He was excited, like there was something he’d always wanted to tell me. “I can see into your kitchen! It’s red!” I’m sure I just mirrored his enthusiasm and smiled in a shocked way, like when a drunk person corners you as you’re leaving somewhere fun.

  “What else can you see?” I asked. I had seen him and his boyfriend fooling around a few times. It was fun saying, “I can see into your place too . . . You have a boyfriend . . .” I smiled knowingly, with bedroom eyes.

  I told him I was moving in three weeks and would miss my Rear Window view, and I mentioned a woman I’d seen painting over the years who must have been a neighbor of his, with blond hair. Daryl laughed some more and said, “Oh, that’s Emma, she’s great! She’s an amazing painter!” And then, “You should commission her to do your portrait!”

  “Do you think she could do that thing where she paints my eyeballs a certain way so it seems like I’m following myself everywhere I go?” I wanted to ask. My parents had a similar picture in their house, an oil painting of me with a bobbed haircut, age fifteen, in a black vintage dress from the twenties and I’m smirking. It’s what you see when you open the front door of my parents’ home. I look like a character from the Rod Serling show Night Gallery. No, I wouldn’t want a portrait of myself.

  * * *

  –

  Emma left me a gallery brochure of her work called “Reflected/Inverted Landscapes.” Huge paintings of reflections in bodies of water, now surfaced onto canvas: fallen leaves, the sky and trees reflected, rippled in the water. She left her number and I called her later and we talked for at least an hour, waving to each other from our windows and drinking wine and laughing about bad boyfriends.

  She invited me over to check out her view of my apartment. She had been painting flames, which was coincidental since I’d been lighting fires myself, burning papers and doubles of photographs. The flame paintings were lined up on her walls, on framed stretched canvases the size of my hand, and she gave me a painting to commemorate my move. She also gave me a large photograph, a reflection of her, framed. The photo shows her window, a vase of flowers reflected, along with her paint supplies, and small paintings that surround her bright blond hair. My kitchen window, yellow before it was painted red, is in the top left corner of this particular frame. The center is the Nikon lens of her camera, covering most of her face.

  There’s a pie that Emma makes, a raw-food pie adapted from a cookbook by Pure Food and Wine. Pure Food and Wine was a vegan restaurant, but it was shut down by protesters who weren’t getting paid. The owner abandoned her establishment in the city and charged an Uber account more than ten grand so she could hole up with her boyfriend in Atla
ntic City. They were busted eating a Domino’s pizza during a weekend slots bender. I’m not making this up. It sounds like a Christopher Guest plot, doesn’t it? I bet the pizza was sausage or pepperoni, mushrooms for sure.

  The recipe is labor intensive; some of the labor is running around trying to find all these different ingredients, especially the berries when they’re out of season, and perhaps there’s the labor of waiting, if you’re not exercising patience. When Emma first brought the raw-food pie to my country house, I changed the name of it to “Live Pie.” There was something about “raw-food pie” that made it sound like it could give you salmonella. We had dinner at Pure Food and Wine once and it was delicious and expensive and I remember shivering from the cold draft and wanting to eat more afterward.

  Emma has found the time to make Live Pie between her eight-mile runs in the morning, her decorative painting job, her own artwork, going to galleries, her Buddhist practice, and the silent retreats she goes on. I’ve thought about going on these silent retreats but figure it would be a lot like being at work on set for me, minus the silence. Emma loves making this pie, I think, because it’s a meditation for her. Her latest meditation while making this pie has been on whether or not it’s a distraction from making art. There’s no way that could be true because everything she does creates the beautiful edge that she needs to paint beautiful paintings. But of course it’s true for her.

  Live Pie Recipe

  CRUST:

  1½ cups almond meal

  1½ cups finely ground almonds

  ⅓ cup coconut butter (blended coconut)