by Ted Mooney
Her run-in with the Russians had prompted her to make her own inquiries about Thierry. At the Sorbonne she was told that he was on emergency leave, attending to a family problem. His home phone was answered by a machine. His apartment intercom—twice she had tried it, once at night—brought no response. Even the friend of a friend who’d first put them in touch professed to know nothing of his whereabouts and seemed surprised to hear about his leave. Whatever the reason for Thierry’s disappearance, Odile began to doubt that he would return anytime soon.
She checked her watch, then turned her back to the weather and passed through a set of glass doors into the megastore’s tri-level atrium. Part of an international chain, the establishment had opened barely a year ago to uniformly hostile press. Since then it had become a sensation, as much a social draw as a retail outlet, and Odile now paused to take in the spectacle. The ground floor was packed with students, office workers on lunch break, and others, like herself, just waiting out the rain. They sorted impatiently through CD bins or stood at listening stations, pressing headphones to their ears while their eyes went wary. A marble staircase, centrally placed, ran to the upper floors, and Odile took it to the top.
Twice since returning to Paris, she had dreamed she was back at the Brest train station, pushing through the crowd of people waiting to buy tickets, people she now understood to be desperate. All was as it had been—the dimness, the silence, the guards, the ruin—but now she, too, was desperate, no longer a traveler on an errand but another refugee, someone whose world had been erased by catastrophe and fate. Panic gripped her as she fought through the crowd, pushing and pleading and kicking until at last she reached the ticket window. But there, in place of the gray-haired matron, she found Thierry filling out the forms, and though he recognized her and spoke to her teasingly, in good humor, he wouldn’t sell her a ticket. “Because you can’t pay for it,” he said when she demanded an explanation. “What’s more, your seat has been given away.” In the distance were sirens, growing louder as they approached.
She wandered among the floor samples, televisions, DVD players, personal stereos, cell phones. A salesman showed her a palm-sized computer that could download and display electronic books. “This,” he confided, “is the quintessential Anglo-Saxon invention. I myself would never own one.”
When she spotted Turner—he was at the computer-peripherals counter, trying to return a pocket scanner—her first thought was to slip downstairs and out to the street. But it was too late for that; she’d already taken a step in his direction, and with it committed herself to the whole encounter and whatever might follow.
She walked straight up to him, assuming nothing. “Remember me?” she said.
Turner looked at her in surprise, but not just surprise. “I do, Odile. Most definitely.” His face struggled for a suitable expression.
“Because that job I did for you recently? There are problems.”
“Excuse me?”
“Problems that don’t belong to me, problems I don’t want.” She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they’re your problems. Shall I tell you about them?”
“No,” he said. “I’d really rather you didn’t.”
She tilted her head thoughtfully. “The police, then?”
“Wait.” He cast an unhappy eye over the sales floor and the customers wandering across it. “There’s a café next door.”
Ten minutes later, when they were ensconced at a corner table amid dark wood, tourists, and immaculate linen, Odile began to be alarmed at what she’d set in motion. She had not planned for this meeting, didn’t even know where to begin, and her earlier confidence threatened to desert her.
Their waiter deposited two espressos on the table in passing.
“So, Odile. You were saying?”
She let a small silence go by. “I am very curious to ask you, did the other courier, my partner, ever show up to collect his fee?”
“He didn’t, now that you mention it. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” she said quickly. “I just wondered.”
Turner leaned back in his chair and considered her, frankly and at length. She fidgeted with her coffee spoon, turning it over and over on the tabletop: concave, convex, concave again, convex. “Problems,” he said finally. “The subject was problems, yes?”
“Okay.” She forced herself to look at him. “I’m being threatened by two Russian guys—thugs, gangsters, I don’t know. They pretended to be police at first, but it’s not true. They know about the flags, and my part in getting them out of the country. I think they also wrecked my apartment, but to prove this would be difficult.”
He was nodding slowly, as if to suggest a distant familiarity with unrelated but similar events. “And what is it that they want from you?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know. They’re not entirely rational.”
“Did my name come up?”
“No. They know about the flags, but your name as such didn’t come up.”
“Then, in all candor, Odile, what do you expect me to do about it?”
She held the espresso cup a little away from her lips, steadying it with her left hand, and looked into his eyes. Dark as they were—brown almost to black, the pupils a darkness within darkness—she found herself quite able to negotiate their depths. He had told a lie to match hers, a lie of omission. It didn’t matter what he thought he was concealing, or if he’d succeeded. What counted now, the only important thing, was what the two of them had recognized, each in the other.
“I was hoping we could talk about that,” she said.
MAX STOOD at the back of the theater watching his film’s final scenes.
It is dusk. The protagonist brings his battered sports car to a screeching halt on West Street, where a half-ruined pier juts nine hundred feet into the Hudson. At the end of the pier a woman stands silhouetted against the dying light, her back to him, her arms folded, her hair lifted in the wind. The man runs toward her at full speed. Here the camera reverses angles so he’s seen from her point of view—she has turned to face him—and no longer in full motion but in a succession of stills, each held for two seconds, as he gets closer and closer to her, breathing hard, grimacing. The woman is now heard in voice-over, very near to the ear, with all else silent. “It isn’t really love, it’s the illusion of love … It ends badly … Well, no. Finally, it ends well … Or”—the last image of the man appears, he has yet to reach the woman—“it ends badly.” Freeze frame and credits.
The applause was more than polite. As the lights came up, Max went back down the aisle to the podium, nodding his thanks and then speaking them into the microphone.
When Fireflies had premiered, in New York, at Lincoln Center, he’d sat rapt through the screening, as though he were watching someone else’s film. By the time the credits rolled, he knew he’d succeeded in making, if not the film he’d set out to make, then another that was at least as good. There had been a podium on that occasion too, and when he stood behind it facing the audience, he had felt his whole life stretching out before him. Nothing had seemed beyond his reach.
The applause died away. He lit a small black cigar, then opened his hands to the audience, inviting questions.
“Did you give your actors any special guidance or exercises to prepare for their roles?” The speaker was a woman in her thirties wearing violet lipstick with a matching scarf tied close about her neck. “And if so, what did you intend?”
“In general I prefer my actors to sink or swim without my interference. For Fireflies, though, because my cast insisted on it, I did give them an exercise. I asked them to walk to the location each day, rather than take the subway or a taxi.” Max began to enjoy himself a little. “And my intention? It was just to make them wonder what my intention might be. As a result they became more thoughtful, more alert to possibility. Also, they absorbed the city more deeply. New York’s like a character in this film.”
A tall man in a black turtleneck asked about the shooting ratio in Firefli
es.
“I was very fast when I started out,” said Max. “About three to one for Fireflies. But with my most recent film, White Room/Black Room, I shot close to ten feet for every foot that made the final cut. The more one learns, it seems, the more film one wastes. Or, alternatively: I’ve forgotten what I knew.”
There was laughter, then an interval of silence. A woman in her twenties, her glossy hair hennaed red almost to magenta, stood up and smiled at him. She seemed to be referring to some private understanding between the two of them, and he smiled back.
“It is something of an open secret,” the woman began, “at least among your more devoted admirers, that there exists an alternate ending to Fireflies. In that version a boat is tied up at the end of the pier, waiting for the two lovers. They argue about what to do, then board the boat. Something is thrown overboard, and the boat sets out. The lovers escape together. Obviously, this ending changes the meaning of the film radically. My question is: do you favor one ending over the other, and why did you choose this one today?”
The woman sat back down, looking pleased with herself. She seemed eager to hear his answer, and he was fleetingly sorry not to have one.
“Unfortunately, you’ve been misinformed. There is no alternative ending to Fireflies, because, among many other reasons, I didn’t shoot one.”
“But one does exist,” she replied from her seat. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”
He hesitated. “Then you are ahead of me,” he decided to say. “Thank you for your question, though. You’ve given me something to think about.”
The woman acknowledged these words with a nod. She didn’t seem the least bit discouraged; rather, it was as if her earlier air of complicity had been shown to be justified. And though Max had dealt before with unsound or misguided students of his work, people who felt personally addressed by his films and unduly intimate with him, their maker, this woman was not at all like them. It would be desirable, he thought, to avoid her on the way out.
He continued to take questions for the better part of an hour. His audience was intelligent and well informed; he tried to give them worthy answers. Yet the more he talked, summoning up and consulting his younger self, so confident, even arrogant, the more he wished to be rid of this and all his other films. By the time he cut off further questions, he was fatigued—if grateful for the applause.
“That was really super good,” Jacques assured him as they walked back up the aisle together to the lobby. “And,” he added, brandishing a fist-sized vidcam, “I’ve got it all on disk. You really have to publish it as an interview.”
“What about the film?” Max asked. “Do you think it holds up?”
“You’re joking, right? It’s a classic.” He eyed his employer suspiciously. “What is this, a test?”
In the lobby they found, to Max’s discomfort, that a modest reception had been prepared for the occasion. The program director at once reattached himself to his distinguished guest and resumed his critical musings while Max pretended to listen, nodding thoughtfully from time to time. Several members of the audience waited politely to engage his attention, but at last he felt his patience exhausted.
“Jacques,” he said, catching his assistant by the elbow, “this gentle man”—he pulled the program director firmly forward—“has quite a lot to say about film. You two really ought to get to know each other better.”
Jacques shot him an indignant look, but already it was too late for protest.
This handoff effected, Max turned toward the exit but instead found himself face-to-face with the henna-haired young woman. He supposed the encounter had been inevitable.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you just now,” she said. “That wasn’t my intention.”
“You didn’t embarrass me,” he replied.
She held out her hand. “Marie-Claire.”
“Hello, Marie-Claire. Pleased to meet you.”
She had the pasty white complexion of a film enthusiast and was modishly dressed in a black-and-white-print miniskirt, a tailored denim jacket buttoned to her neck, and red patent-leather pumps. Max scanned her oval face for signs of madness.
“I admire your work very much,” she said. “I didn’t know that the other version of Fireflies was … unauthorized, if that’s the word. What happened? Did you have trouble with your backers?”
“I always have trouble with my backers,” Max answered, looking belligerently around the room as if one or two might be present. “Tell me, Marie-Claire. Where did you see this other version of the film, with the ending you describe?”
“At university. In Bordeaux.” She frowned. “But also it’s in the video stores, though you can’t tell from the packaging. You just get what you get. I’ve rented both.”
“Really?” He looked at her anew. “So my films interest you?”
She blushed and with her fingertips hooked her hair back behind her ears. “Yes, very much. I am writing my thesis on you.”
Max received this news as gracefully as he could. “Oh. Well, I’m honored. Prematurely, I hope, but definitely honored.” After looking thoughtfully at her, he inspected his cigar, then let his gaze float away. “And who knows? Maybe you’ll be the one to clear up this confusion over Fireflies. If that’s what it is.”
Encouraged, she started to ask another question, but he cut her off. “Look, Marie-Claire. There’s only one version of Fireflies, and you just saw it. Anything else is horse manure, okay?”
She stared at him.
“If you’re going to write about film, you have to start with the facts.” His anger embarrassed him. The conversation was over. He left the theater.
Dusk had settled over Paris, and the rain had stopped, leaving the air fresh and cutting. He walked south on rue Claude Bernard past the technical schools for which the area was known, toward Gobelins. The streetlamps came on. Reflections from the rain-slick pavement twinned the passing traffic—headlights, taillights, white and red.
It annoyed and discouraged Max that already, at mid-career, he was the subject of an academic paper, let alone one written by somebody as demonstrably misguided, even disturbed, as the girl he’d just encountered.
A gloom settled over him, frustration at having wasted the day and its possibilities. He thought of his daughter, struggling to make a place for herself, and of Odile, never fully predictable but also, since the break-in, tense and preoccupied, inclined to brood. He felt keenly the fragility of their intermingled lives, of other people’s lives. Something like pity welled up in him, so enveloping that it soon encompassed everything and was all he felt. Then, abruptly, it left him, and he knew only exhaustion.
Making a right on Glacière, just blocks from home, he noticed the local video store was still open. He glanced at the cardboard promotionals in the window—most of them for an American space-epic remake—but kept on walking.
The store didn’t even stock his films.
CHAPTER 6
BALAKIAN HAD HIRED a publicist for the opening, a Congo-born Belgian blonde who stood just inside the gallery entrance monitoring arrivals and pouncing triumphantly on those she believed useful to her. Young female journalists circled behind her, notepads in hand, while photographers jockeyed for position.
Turner’s first impulse was to step back into the night, but the Belgian gleefully called out his name, kissed him hello, then asked loudly in French whether he still provided intimate services for his preferred clients. He knew what she was referring to, and though the incident, years past, had been largely her invention, considerable trouble had ensued from the brief account of it she had managed to place in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids. He was careful now to appease her before plunging ahead into the crowd.
It was largely an art-world crowd, ambitious people imaginatively dressed and coiffed, but there was also a scattering of foreign nationals, men in suits, demi-celebrities, and downtown hipsters—notables of the sort that routinely appeared at the Belgian’s events. They milled around th
e soaring exhibition space, a former trucking depot whose interior had been gutted and elegantly refurbished, drinking wine from plastic cups, conversing in small groups, discreetly vigilant for company more desirable than their own.
The flags upstaged them all. Unframed, suspended from clear plastic clips high on the walls, the crimson banners charged the gallery with their presence. After inspecting the initial seven that Turner had sent him, Balakian had requested three more, and they now hung two or three to a wall, positioned so that each commanded enough surrounding space to be seen for itself without appearing isolated. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Kosygin, Brezhnev—all looked perfectly at home in the quasi-industrial setting, as if they were reviewing yet another May Day rally. Taken as an ensemble, though, the blazing monochrome fields with their iconic figures—figures once recognizable to virtually anyone, anywhere—strongly resembled an Andy Warhol exhibition of the late 1960s or early ’70s, the time of his Marilyns and Jackies and Maos. The same mix of adulation and irony, awe and indifference, suffused both bodies of work. Such had been the zeitgeist, big faces for impossible times, as much a force in the Soviet Union as in the U.S., and Turner rejoiced at his perspicacity. A serious man didn’t become less so just because he was attempting to turn a profit.
Turner made the rounds, greeting clients, colleagues, acquaintances, and friends, taking care not to appear connected to the show, which was being presented as a Balakian production pure and simple, but when talking to critics or journalists he allowed himself to share his Warholian insight. These people would be writing about the exhibition, and it was only sound practice to point them in the correct direction. Positive reviews in the art press could double the price of the flags, and a magazine cover could do even more.
