by Todd Grimson
“You never did answer me about why you’re in New York.”
“Some postproduction on a new film.” Lisa felt slightly embarrassed. Raelyn wanted to know all about it.
In a Chinese restaurant later on, Lisa questioned Raelyn about her background, how she’d come to want to work in films. It turned out that she had acted on the stage from the time she had been twelve. In the last couple of years she had been heavily involved in Seattle’s lesbian theater scene, from performing in musicals to designing sets and even directing a time or two. Lisa knew the common wisdom that filmmakers generally fell into two categories: actor-oriented and image-oriented. She was, of course, the latter, and tended to see actors as furniture.
Getting out of the cab at Track’s apartment building, a black guy was asking her and Raelyn for money, not taking the first turndown as definitive, a tallish, skinny guy in a navy blue pea coat and a watch-cap pulled down over his ears, several days’ beard on his face, dirty-looking, asking for a dollar, “Hey, you can spare a dollar, don’t give me that shit.” Lisa felt a great blankness come over her, she was ready to give the man a dollar if he asked just a little bit more nicely, then as she began to pass him he stepped in front of her, impeding her way to the door. They were very close, and something happened, her hand flashed out in an incredibly swift reflex, for a second she didn’t know where she was but felt a profound inner brightness. Raelyn took her by the arm as the man turned away, he ran a few steps, saying things … there was blood all over Lisa’s hand, though she didn’t recall touching a thing. She’d clawed him like a cat, Raelyn said. Certainly there seemed to have been disproportionate damage, given the not-so-long length of her nails. She’d ripped his cheek wide open, Raelyn said. Was she sure she hadn’t had something in her hand?
No, nothing, Lisa said, and Raelyn hugged her to comfort her because Lisa seemed shaken, a little spaced.
Upstairs, it was chilly in the apartment, the light dull bluish dark, without color. Lisa gave Raelyn a complicit little smile as Raelyn touched her, and they moved to the bed tentatively, slowly … Raelyn thought that Lisa was basically narcissistic and, of course, straight. But curious, and Raelyn was the instrument of adventure for her. That was all right. That was just fine.
“Did you have this planned all along?” she said after a sisterly kiss, her hand now gently exploring Lisa’s tender breast, the nipple hard.
“I don’t know,” Lisa replied, breathing out a long, relaxing breath, closing her eyes. Raelyn didn’t ask any more questions. She caressed Lisa’s back, her stomach, her buttocks and thighs, lingering over the tattooed area of her left buttock, lifting that buttock, excited by the wildness implicit in Lisa’s being marked in such a way … touching her expressively, in no hurry, as the other touched her in return without any real intention, coming back again and again to Raelyn’s breasts, which she seemed to find interesting, and which were actually bigger than her own. Raelyn assumed, without minding it, that Lisa would be clumsy, as pretty girls seldom had to try very hard to please.
Finally, after waiting as long as she could, Raelyn went down and spread apart Lisa’s thighs, licking her with appreciation and a kind of musical sensitivity to effect, feeling the vibrations set off by her strong tongue, tasting her particular, unique taste, registering every little contraction and tremor, as Lisa’s hands came down and she ran her fingers through Raelyn’s short silky hair.
Lisa was in a dreamy state, close to losing consciousness, her limbs heavy and voluptuous, the flavor of sin and sinfulness that somehow underlay everything only made the pleasure more surreal, the naturalness of two bodies together complicated and transfigured, in her present mood she didn’t care if, when she took her turn at Raelyn’s cunt, she seemed unsure and inept. It didn’t matter if her eyes stayed open or closed, she saw salmon, coral, orange-tinged waving frondlike shapes, rustling and moving against one another in harmony, preconscious but alive, that vision blending into softer forms, illuminated with an inner light, breasts, polyps and buds, swelling or merging, radiant, fending off the blackness beyond, too dark to be blue, the bottom of the sea.
FIVE
When Track arrived the next day, he found his sister alone but still in bed at two o’clock in the afternoon. Raelyn had just left an hour or so before.
“Track!” Lisa exclaimed.
“Yeah. Hi. I’m going to take a shower. I’m fucking tired. Do you want to get some coffee? Who painted Mares and Foals on a Mountainous Landscape?”
“Stubbs!” Lisa cried out, delighted, and she laughed.
Later on they went down to the recording studio, and Lisa talked freely, imaginatively, about how she’d like to assemble a team—like Fassbinder had—that could make three or four films a year, dirt cheap. She mentioned various names they both knew.
“What about Boris?” she asked.
“You don’t want Boris.”
“Why not?”
“You could spring for his rehab, I guess, but you’d probably have to kidnap him off the street.”
“Smacked out?”
“You got it.”
“What about Julia Hyphen, uh … “
“Julia Hyphen-what-the-fuck?” Track said. “She’s done some set design for the I Told You So Theater. Maybe she’d be good.”
“If we have the sound ready by next week, I can show Manoa in Berlin.”
“That’s right. They liked that other piece of nihilist-slash-Riot Grrl neo-Lizzie Borden art shit, didn’t they?”
He meant, affectionately Girl, 10, Murders Boys.
SIX
Selwyn Popcorn had come to Germany on sort of a whim, in order to get out of Hollywood for a while. Postproduction was finally done on his latest film, the sound mix was finished—he had a week in between that and the color timing.
The actual shooting of this last project had been filled with
unpleasant turmoil. The script was fundamentally flawed. If you had to think about trying to save it in the editing room, it was almost certainly too late.
Popcorn had allowed himself to be talked into a “package.” Not without misgivings, but what overrode those misgivings? Greed. The probably erroneous idea that he could do this film, Call It Love, make it more interesting than it might otherwise be, make some money, and be free to do whatever he wanted for the next two or three years.
So he had put himself in the position of directing a “Susan Heller vehicle,” a picture in which she manifested exactly the same Susan Heller that had worked before. She would repeat it until she wore it out. She had a powerful agent, and the producer, Larry Planet (Popcorn couldn’t really blame him: Larry was a survivor) was completely on her side.
Susan Heller had to have her close-ups and her honest indignation scene, she had to have her designer clothes, she had to break down and cry. She was very proud of these tears. They were her signature, in a sense.
On the set, she had more of an entourage than Popcorn was used to dealing with, it was really the worst he’d ever seen … oh, he just needed to get it behind him and go on to the next one.
He needed, as always, to work.
Selwyn Popcorn didn’t always keep up with what everyone was doing, but every so often he liked to see a few of the new, off-the-wall films, see what people were talking about, see if he was missing anything, if there was anything out there really new.
He liked Berlin.
If he was going to pick a city in the world in which to die, he might pick Berlin. Maybe this meant that he didn’t actually like it in any commonly recognizable way. Maybe he hated it. Its architecture, its obvious aura of history, its streets, the people one saw on these streets. Death was here. It was all around.
Popcorn was divorced again, for the fourth time. He had five children scattered all over, but he despaired of himself as a parent. The oldest, Mark, was in Amsterdam, if that information was still valid, and Mark didn’t love him, or respect him, or even like him enough to be more than vacantly, coldly civil when they me
t or talked on the phone. Popcorn’s children had no use for him. And he didn’t recognize himself in any of them, to tell the truth.
His latest wife had been another actress. He was a fool. Still, that was whom, in his business, he tended to meet.
What was he doing here? A British journalist, or film critic, same difference, an admirer of his work, told Popcorn he wished to write a book about him, that is, about his work. Popcorn was forty-nine, he had made eleven films. Nine of these had made money. Critical opinion had been divided but generally favorable. One of the films that had been rather despised, The Body Removed, had done especially well on video, and now opinion seemed to be revising itself.
Popcorn became bored watching these festival films. Tired of being noticed, pointed out, or spoken to, approached.
He went to a museum and no one followed him. Popcorn looked at a painting by Vermeer, The Glass of Wine. His favorite painting of all time. He left the Gemäldegalerie and located a gallery with an exhibit of paintings by Gerhard Richter. It was lightly raining outside.
It was a shock to his senses. Here was this girl he’d noticed staring at him in the lobby of a theater earlier. Here she was in the gallery. She had burning dark eyes, extraordinary eyes, brown hair, and she wore a weathered black leather jacket over a dress that seemed more like a short lacy ivory-hued slip. Black tights and Doc Martens.
Yes, he remembered now. She had been with another girl, who had seemed to be her girlfriend. Was she a lesbian? A German?
In English, she said, “Do you like Gerhard Richter?”
“Yes. You?”
“I love his work.”
Her very beauty … Popcorn’s wariness returned. She might be an aspiring actress, or a model.
“You’re an American? Are you here for the festival?”
“Yes,” she answered, and then, somewhat shyly, “I have a film.”
“What is your name?” Then he asked her the title of the movie, and “Do you have a good part?”
“Oh, I’m not an actress. I appear in this, and I was in something else … but I’m not an actress. I directed it.”
“Really?” Popcorn was faintly interested, but also in a way disappointed. If she’d been an actress, she might have come up to his hotel room. He could deal with actresses. They were well aware of his star-making potential. But Lisa Nova, a young feminist filmmaker, was probably actively seeking to avoid being treated as in any sense a bimbo. Even with those full lips, and the leather jacket…
He asked her if she’d like to have coffee with him. She said sure. As they walked down the street together, he asked what her film was about.
“The search for El Dorado. Manoa is the Indian name for that, you see. Roy Hardway’s in it, and—”
“Oh, Roy. How is he? I’m sort of surprised, actually …”
“That he’d be in an independent film? Yes, it’s an unusual move for him. But by now he might not be much like people remember him.”
“What? Has he become a mystic?”
“Something like that.”
When Lisa took off her jacket in the coffee shop, it was the tattoos that entranced Popcorn. Lisa Nova was very pretty, but the tattoos hit at some perverse desire, some machinery he’d never indulged.
Her favorite film of his was Thin Skin. Popcorn laughed and said he’d like to see her film. He wondered if she was part Brazilian. He studied her. Had she stalked him? He was afraid of her in a funny way.
SEVEN
Flying from Berlin to Los Angeles, Lisa had to change planes in London, New York, and Chicago. She was exhausted. Sitting in O’Hare, amongst all the glass, it seemed like she’d walked for three miles. And now she had two more hours to wait. She was too tired to enjoy watching the people, to be interested in them.
Lisa asked Raelyn to stay in Europe, represent the film in London, while Lisa returned to Los Angeles for meetings with the rest of the production team for L.A. Ripper II. It was time to start casting, etcetera. Only two parts were really etched in stone: the Ripper and the police detective who’d gone after him in the first film.
The rendezvous with Selwyn Popcorn, coming as it did, completely by chance, seemed almost meaningless, in that she had had nothing especially to gain … and yet she still contemplated it, even if she didn’t believe he’d much liked her film. There’d been some sort of electricity between them, possibly sexual. He was undeniably attractive, though she kept hoping that that wasn’t all of it on his part, as she was very conscious of the age difference—he was forty-nine to her twenty-six, the only time she’d done something like that had been with Lou.
She thought of Popcorn’s face after he’d seen Manoa. He’d asked her about some of the scenes. She tried to recall what she’d said … the images from the film kept interfering, overwhelming or at least overshadowing all civilized discourse. It hypnotized her, looking for herself in it, feeling that she could almost, just about, remember having dreamed this scene or that. She had sorted through the flood of images, like Maxwell’s demon theoretically sorting molecules according to heat. Yes. Somewhere inside of her, she had viewed all of this material, even if it wasn’t all hers, and she had chosen, however instinctively, she had sorted, she had directed the dream.
Right now, as she half dozed on another plane, the jet engines soothing her in some kind of modern way, she saw again certain moments that had been vivid to her, sharing the experience in a crowded Berlin theater, a level of exhibitionism and uncalculated … uh, exposure … the couple of times she appeared on the screen as an actor: first as an Indian girl in the Amazon, her face painted brightly, bisected, half red, the other side black … just a brief sideways look at the camera while being raped by Roy Hardway, along with some others being raped by soldiers in a conquered village, faces painted the same, amid corpses and unbelievable amputations and disembowelments, severed heads—and back to medieval Spain, where in the most startling shot she saw herself suddenly as one of the witches accused by the Inquisition, wearing the exaggerated dunce cap they made them wear while on trial, something seemed the matter with her feet, the way she was sitting on the bench, with the others, yet she was brave, she had been tortured, no doubt the strappado, and now she would be burned, she saw it in her own face … that was a still picture Lisa would never want to study, it had too much painful information. Strangers saw this and hardly noticed, it was “acting” to them, less self-exposure than was shown in her manifestation as the painted Indian girl, lying naked on the ground, panting, frightened, wondering if the conquistadors were done.
The image selected for the poster was the gilded man, the Indian covered in gold dust, before he ceremonially leaped into the cold blue lake against a backdrop of the lost city of Manoa … in its perfect geometry and clean white stones. And: Roy Hardway, standing in shallow wavelets, blond beard, shiny armor and red sash, raising and kissing his sword … cut back to a procession of white-robed choirboys, doing an intricate dance, slow and solemn … and then a penitent scourging himself … to royalty in an elaborate Velazquez interior, moving in slow motion, in rich velvet and damask, silver and wine red.
Fast-tracking shots of silent jungle: monkeys in trees, jaguars with faces of yellow and white and black, aquatic plants over still water like a dark green living carpet, fungi, alligators seeming to be fallen logs, endless vines, a baroque profusion of lianas, mosquitoes, snakes, oozing bulbs, sticky, syrup-anointed insect-eating plants, opening like vulvas, then snapping shut around their prey.
In the twilight the Spaniards saw the silvery gleams of movement composing themselves into the strange vocabulary of nightmares: deformed faces, skulking demons, dwarves, creatures half animal and half man … these monstrosities blurring into a raucous carnival in Seville, the pre-Lenten revelers wearing grotesque masks, pig faces, impossibly long noses, dancing in the flickering light … an insert once more of those condemned by the Inquisition, the distorted music continuing, then a fire against a clear blue sky, red and orange, burning a corpse black
, down to the skeleton, the rib cage and skull, the smoke from the body’s fat rising black….
As Lisa woke, the last thing she saw was a tableau vivant, the Virgin Mary portrayed as a girl of thirteen, according to the Inquisition’s directive, a thirteen-year-old girl with long golden hair, only her eyes move as she is enveloped by a paper sun and crowned by silver paper stars; she stands on a crescent moon with its horns touching the earth.
Lisa asked for a Sprite. She didn’t want to think about the soldiers shitting, the frenzied massacres, one of which in particular went on for a long fucking time, tense despite hardly being cut, hardly changing point of view, and mostly being in real time … or the late scene of Roy painfully vomiting a large quantity of gold and jewels.
The blond stewardess smiled at her. Lisa was very thirsty. When she had finished the Sprite, she got up to wash her face. She kept seeing herself in the dunce cap, unwashed hair and face, mouth open a little stupidly, eyes however alert to the meaning of the sentence passed, a witch condemned to die.
EIGHT
Amazingly, a limo picked her up at LAX. How Jules Brandenberg could have figured out she was coming on this flight, she didn’t know. The limousine driver was tall and looked like he knew martial arts, a Steven Seagal wanna-be. He drove her to her apartment. She was thankful he was with her, bringing up her bags. She opened the door, mentioning to him that she hadn’t been here in a while. Inside, the vine had disappeared from the piano, and everything looked as if the maid had just been here a few hours ago. It was like nothing strange had ever happened; she couldn’t believe it.
The chauffeur left, saying he would be back in the morning. Lisa nodded, walking around, looking at how clean it was, how her plants had been watered—but then, when she took a shower, she still had Boro’s tattoos. There was even fresh food in the refrigerator. It was insane. She needed her cat. Casimir. The thought of this distracted her from the other stuff or from trying to analyze the responses to her film in Berlin. She opened a Tecate beer and called Adrian.
