by William Bell
We were silent for a moment.
“Your turn.” Alba broke the stillness. “The thing you most admire in the opposite sex. As if I don’t know,” she smirked.
“Um …”
“Yes? Go on.”
“A profound commitment to world peace,” I said.
The left corner of her beautiful mouth twisted a little and an amused look came into her eyes.
“And nice boobs,” I added.
But the joke crash-landed. Alba Magdalena Benedetti tsked, rose gracefully from her chair, and walked away.
SCREENPLAY: “ETERNAL LOVE”
by
JAKE BLANCHARD
FADE IN:
EXT. A DESERTED TROPICAL BEACH—DAY
Waves crash on golden sand under a porcelain blue sky. Coconut palms sway rhythmically in the onshore wind.
CUE MUSIC: violins
ALBA, barefoot, holding her sandals, enters from left, gazing out to sea.
CLOSE-UP:
She walks slowly, her eyes on the horizon. The wind lifts a strand of her hair, lets it fall gently against her cheek, presses her silk sarong against her body.
PAN RIGHT along the beach to JAKE emerging from the forest. JAKE stops, shades his eyes, drops his hand. He begins to run.
CUT TO:
ALBA sees JAKE, runs toward him.
SLOW MOTION, CUT TO JAKE then ALBA alternately until:
They come together, embrace, kiss. They drop to their knees, kissing passionately, then fall supine onto the sand. They continue to kiss as the waves crash on the beach, the surf rushing up the sand to envelop them in foam.
CUE MUSIC: violins rise to a crescendo
FADE OUT
CHAPTER FIVE
I LEFT DRAMA CLASS THAT MORNING in a daze, as if my senses had been wrapped in cotton and my brain had slipped out of gear. I bumped into Vanni in the hall, knocking her books out of her arms and all over the floor.
“Ach! You great lumbering oaf,” she complained.
“Eh?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
When I began to focus, I found her standing in front of me as kids streamed past us, her hand on my arm and an expectant look on her face.
“You look like you’ve just returned from electroshock therapy,” she said.
“Eh?”
“Let me rephrase the question. How was the lobotomy?”
“The lob—?”
Vanni peered up into my face. Pinched my chin between thumb and forefinger. Turned my head from side to side.
“Hmm,” she said.
“Hmm what?”
“You can’t even see the scars.”
“Very funny,” I said.
Vanni grabbed me by the arm. “Come on. We need to find a quieter location.”
She led me out of the school and across the road to a joint called the Blue Note. By night it was a jazz and R & B club with a seedy reputation. Instant played there sometimes when one of the bands needed a saxophonist. By day it was a rundown restaurant that specialized in trendy vegetarian concoctions whose descriptions on the dusty menu were more than enough to put me off—salads featuring seeds, sprouts and roots; soups heavy on beans and spices with unpronounceable names; and vaguely Asian treats like oily spring rolls, samosas and flatbreads.
There were only a few customers about, hunched over their tables as if guarding their food. Vanni tugged me toward a table by the window. The server was a skinny, surly-looking guy with a paper chef’s hat that didn’t quite hide his oily black hair.
“Yeah?” he greeted us, flipping pages on his order pad.
Vanni asked for a samosa with tamarind chutney and a cup of chai.
“What about you?” the server demanded, scratching his neck with the butt-end of his pencil.
“Chips with beef gravy and a cherry cola,” I said. “A side order of deep-fried pork rinds.”
“Not on the menu,” the guy replied, looking above my head through the greasy window.
“Okay. Let’s see … a dozen buffalo wings, extra hot. Hold the mayo.”
This time he just shook his head. Vanni gave me a look. I relented.
“Double-shot cappuccino and a piece of chocolate cake. Baked sometime this century.”
He nodded, made a note and wandered off.
“Guess what?” Vanni began, almost gushing.
By now I had returned to the real world after my encounter with the luscious girl with the beautiful name, so I noticed that Vanni’s face glowed with excitement. Her dark eyes danced. Her grin was a mile wide under her overdeveloped nose.
“You really want me to guess?” I asked.
“No. I want to tell you, but first you have to swear to keep this a secret.”
I raised my hand. “Girl Guide’s honour,” I intoned solemnly. “May my head be severed from my body with a rusty axe if I breathe a word. May my teeth fall out the day before Thanksgiving. May—”
“You’re holding up the wrong hand.”
The reappearance of our friendly server interrupted her. He put his tray on the table next to ours and set Vanni’s order before her. In front of me he banged down a small plate with a tiny wedge of chocolate cake looking lost in the middle. He delivered my cappuccino as if he had palsy—a third of the coffee slopped over into the saucer.
“Enjoy,” he sneered as he left with his tray.
The cappuccino was tasty. “So, your news,” I said.
“I’m going to be published in a poetry anthology!” Vanni declared. “Five of my poems. Hardcover. Clothbound!”
“That’s amazing,” I said. I had known she wrote poetry, but I’d had no idea she was this serious. “That’s really hard, isn’t it, to get published?”
“’Tis. And it’s not a vanity press, either, where you pay for the printing and all that yourself. It’s the real thing. This is Pentameter Press. They’re an old, well-known company. I’ve had poems in magazines before—quite a few of them—but this is the big time.”
“And you want to keep this a secret?”
“I don’t need the ridicule I’ll get if people around the school find out.”
She was right. The worst crime was to look conceited.
I’m not very perceptive most of the time, but I realized as I watched Vanni’s dark eyes sparkle that she was offering me a kind of gift. Not just her trust that I would keep her secret—she was sharing her happiness in her achievement.
“What’s it called, and where can I buy a copy?”
“It doesn’t come out for a few months. It’s called Water Beads, from the title of one of my poems. And you can’t buy a copy. I’m going to give you one.”
“Water Beads, eh?” I tapped the tines of my fork against the side of my plate. “Well, I guess a book of poems doesn’t have to have a snappy title.”
Vanni laughed and took a sip of her chai. She looked at me playfully over the rim of her cup. “There’s a story there.”
“Gee, I wonder if I could possibly persuade you to tell it.”
“My favourite poet is—”
“Seamus Heaney. You told me.”
“Right. You knew that. But what you didn’t know is that he’s the reason I decided to be a poet. One of his poems is called ‘The Railway Children,’ and it’s about these kids lying on a high embankment beside the train tracks, looking at the telegraph wires after a shower. There are raindrops suspended all along the wires, like beads, full of light, and the kids think that the words in the telegrams people send are carried along the wires inside the raindrops. Isn’t that a beautiful image? The speaker says, ‘We were small and thought we knew nothing worth knowing.’ That’s exactly how little kids think, isn’t it? The poem’s lovely, but it also tells us something true. And it’s only thirteen lines long.”
While Vanni talked, I ate my cake and drank my coffee. She had let her samosa and chai get cold, carried away as she was with her exciting news, and I recognized not for the first time that one of the reasons we were friends was that in at least o
ne respect we were similar. She loved poetry and I loved movies. The difference was that where I was unfocused, full of plans and aspirations but short on production, she had done something about her dreams.
I thought about Vanni’s words and the stumbling attempt I had made with Alba to explain why I wanted to create movies, not just watch them. Okay, I had been trying to impress her—especially after she caught me scoping out her physical charms—but I had meant what I said. Only I was no good at expressing myself in words—especially compared to Vanni. Alba had said she would only be attracted to a man who could convey his thoughts and feelings poetically. What chance, I thought morosely, did an inarticulate clod like me have?
Bing!
“Hey,” I said. “I have an idea.”
“Really? Should I alert the media?”
“It’s brilliant!” I smiled.
“What? You look like the wolf after he swallowed Grandma.”
“I have to think about this. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, let’s celebrate your good news. How about another cup of chai?”
“Well, aren’t you the big spender.”
ACT THREE
CHAPTER ONE
LIKE MOST BULLIES, the Vulture held a grudging respect for anyone who stood up to him. Within a week or so of Vanni’s noisy arrival into our English class, Vanni and he had called an unspoken ceasefire, and had coexisted ever since. So I wasn’t surprised when, a couple of days after Vanni’s big announcement in the Blue Note, he directed his raptor gaze at her from behind his lectern.
“Turn to page 89,” he told us as soon as he had snapped the cap onto his fountain pen and closed the attendance book. “Today you meet James Joyce, Ireland’s greatest writer.”
I glanced at Vanni, saw her brows clench. Here we go, I thought. She’s going to defend her precious Seamus Heaney.
But Locheed beat her to the punch. “Vanni, perhaps you’d read ‘Araby’ to us. Your Irish accent will enhance the experience for the class.” It was as close to a compliment as Locheed would ever get.
So Vanni began to read, and her lyrical voice, far from crashing through the lines like most of us did when the Vulture called on us to take our turn, seemed to lift the words off the page. I settled back. Outside, the sun was bright on the coloured leaves of the maples, a light breeze glided over the window sill into the room, and Vanni took us to the winter-dark dead-end Dublin street where the boy in the story talked about Mangan’s sister. As he described himself watching her across the road on her porch, I thought about Alba, her graceful form, her unblemished skin, the curve of her lips. That morning I had caught sight of her in the clamorous sea of bodies as she moved down the crowded hall away from me. She had been wearing a long rose-coloured dress and had plaited her hair into a single gold braid. “‘Her dress swung as she moved her body,’” Vanni read, as if she was inside my head, “‘and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.’” The vision of Alba brought an ache—a deep, hollowed-out sense of longing. “‘And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.’”
The kid in the story liked to watch Mangan’s sister secretly from his window. His love for her was like a chalice that he carried with great care through the dirty, thronging streets of Dublin. It was of a higher quality, brighter and purer, than the world he lived in. “‘My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.’”
I had never heard love described the way he talked about it, as something refined and spotless. On TV, in commercials and in movies, love was sex—panting, sweat, sloppy wet kisses, the mindless tearing off of clothing. I was no puritan, but I had always secretly believed that there had to be more to love than clanking, preprogrammed biological urges and actions. The love we saw in the media was selfish and egotistical, a kind of mutual exploitation. Wasn’t love supposed to be the opposite—generous and liberating?
In the end, the boy’s hopes came crashing down. But that didn’t change my mind. I was going to let Alba know how I felt about her, because if I didn’t I’d regret it for the rest of my life.
“What’s this brilliant idea you mentioned the other day?” Vanni inquired.
We were in creative writing class. Mrs. Cleaver had paired us up to “brainstorm.”
“You’re going to be a published poet soon,” I began.
“Shhh! Someone might hear.”
“How are you at writing letters?”
In a low voice I explained my plan. Vanni wasn’t impressed.
“It would be fraud,” she said.
“Come on, Vanni, we’re not talking about identity theft here.”
“But you’d be tricking—What’s her name again?”
“You know her name. Alba.”
“Right, Alba. You’d be deceiving her, pretending something I wrote was created by you.”
“No, it wouldn’t be like that. I’d write the letter and you’d improve it. Think of it as editing. A minor rewrite. Like we do in this class all the time.”
“Well …”
“Please?”
“You say you fell in love with this Alba person after—what?—a twenty-minute conversation?”
“I think we’re soulmates.”
Vanni smirked. “Spare me.”
“No, really. I mean it.”
“Twenty minutes. You’re a deep one, you are.”
“Does that mean you’ll help?”
“I guess so. But you’ll owe me.”
“Of course. And you have to promise not to say anything about the letters.”
“Wait a minute. ‘Letters’? With an s? I thought we were talking about one letter.”
“S is one letter.”
“Don’t be clever. It doesn’t suit you.”
“So do you promise?”
“Oh, all right. And there was me, so eager to tell everyone at York that I’m ghostwriting a love letter.”
Mrs. Cleaver called the class to order.
“Quick,” Vanni said. “We need to come up with the idea we’ve supposedly been brainstorming.”
“How about a guy who falls in love at first sight with a girl whose name means ‘dawn’?”
“She’d never believe it.”
CHAPTER TWO
IT HADN’T TAKEN THE GUYS at York long to home in on Alba like heat-seeking missiles. Whenever I caught sight of her in the halls, there was someone with her, chatting her up—Brent Longman, Students’ Council exec and fledgling politician; or Emile Dupuis, with his black scarf and I’m an-artist-too-bad-about-you manner; or Chadwick Bromley, with his soap-opera-star looks, who, like Alba, wanted to be an actor. They were all in the graduating class and drove flashy cars. Every smile she gave them was a needle in my heart. I felt that I had already lost ground, that if I didn’t get into the competition soon, I’d miss my chance forever. I began to bug Vanni about the letter I had written for her to revise, and one Friday she finally came through.
Dear Alba,
Last summer my family and I took a trip to Newfoundland, and one day I went alone to a place called Cape Spear, the easternmost point in the whole North American continent. It was every bit as beautiful and rugged as the brochure said it would be—strips of spruce standing dark against the grey of wind-scraped granite, a red-and-white lighthouse, the endless grey-blue ocean.
A powerful wind drove foam-topped waves thundering against the shore, like armies hurled against a stone fortress. Deep fissures split the shoreline, and as the in-rushing surf surged into the narrowing channels, geysers of spume and mist spired into the bright summer air, hung there as if they would last forever, then crashed to the rocks.
I stood as close as I dared to the shore, soaked by the spray, looking out to the horizon, past the wheeling gulls whose white breasts were lit by the afternoon sun, past the ships plodding toward St. John’s harbour. For a few moments there was no one there but me, and I knew that there was nothing but the Atlantic between me and Europe, and that, for that brief moment, I w
as, of all the millions of souls in North America, the farthest east, the closest to Europe, and somehow that knowledge made me feel like a pioneer or a solitary explorer on the rim of a vast unknown sea.
Being in love is like that.
I read the letter a second time before I said anything to Vanni.
“This is nothing like what I wrote.”
“I took a few liberties.”
“A few liberties? This isn’t even about love,” I protested. “It’s about … tourism or something.”
“It’s about your emotions,” Vanni replied. “You told me—”
“I know what I told you, but I was expecting it to be about me and her, like my letter, not about the ocean.”
“It is about you and her. What did you expect—‘Dear Alba, I think you’re hot. I’d really like to pop the buttons on your bra’?”
“Bras don’t have buttons.”
“How would you know?”
“I read a lot.”
I looked over the letter once more, telling myself I had asked for this, then I began to see what Vanni was trying for in her flowery descriptions. She was talking about feelings. She was showing Alba that I could be sensitive, even poetic.
“I guess you’re right,” I admitted. “Thanks.”
I copied out the letter, and later that day, during drama class, while Alba was doing an improv with three other kids, I slipped it into her backpack.
But for all the difference it made, I might as well have sent her a dead mouse. Days went by without any acknowledgment from Alba that I had poured my heart out to her. When I was able to find her alone in class or in the halls and say hello to her, she was friendly but cool and reserved. What was going on? I wondered. Did she get love letters so often she just ignored them? Had I offended her? Was she playing hard to get? She didn’t need to—she was hard to get. Then began the paranoid fear that somehow my letter had fallen from her backpack and she hadn’t seen it at all. Maybe somebody would find it lying in the hall or on the playing field, laugh and share the joke with the whole school. I imagined someone reading it over the morning announcements to hilarious laughter. I’d have to leave town.
