Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  Lorene, over a mere two weeks, had him paying attention to things he hadn’t before — the sort of crucial details that indicated an examined life-style. She had him buy Egyptian cotton sheets of a ridiculously sumptuous thread count (they must be changed every day without fail). She had him collect wine — a cliché, true, but a necessary and sensuous amenity. A temperature-controlled, five-hundred-bottle cellar to start, which she filled with auction-bought bottles of Burgundy. (“You are either a Burgundy man or a Bordeaux man — you must chooseand then be quite fixed in your opinion. You’ll take Burgundy, it’s much more complicated, and indicates sophistication. Not just mind-blowing Romanée-Conti, mind you, but you’ll buy obscure monopole Grands Crus that only collectors and, of course, you know. And, yes, they are obscenely expensive.”) He happily complied. She created a book collection — an extensive inventory of contemporary fiction, plus some obligatory modernist giants. She suggested he read the first chapter of each, when he could. He of course wouldn’t, so she composed a paragraph or two about each writer and what was thought of him or her. She gave him a list of movies to rent. She, in short, created a life for him to come home to and slip into. He loved it. He had so little time. He offered her a weekly stipend, and she began to read theL.A. Timesand theNew York Timesfor him. She gave him weekly clippings of must-read items, which were further distilled to underlined, must-read sentences, to save even more time. She devised suggested conversation topics. When he had no time to read those, she offered short opinionated summaries of topics. She would even dine with him and give him conversation-style evaluations, a sort of dating report card, and give him (recited) precise notes. He was remarkably improved. Lorene imagined he could fool almost any woman into thinking he was interesting and had a full, exuberant life. From Joseph she had other men. Mock dates were very popular; she became quite succinct in her critiques: listen more, talk about this movie, hate that book. Make eye contact. Don’t inflect your sentences so. Mostly she gave them lots of encouragement, and she discovered the sort of heart-wrenching, desperate loneliness of certain kinds of men. It wasn’t that Lorene devised false lives for these men, as she sometimes accused herself, but that she had discovered shehad a laser accuracy for reading other people’s desires and vanities, and she could help them actualize those desires as styles and traits and purchasable objects in the world. She brought out the dark longings and turned them into lists and packages and simple, easy steps. Lorene learned what every confidence woman learns: all our desires are the same, we all want the same things, we are all desperate in the same way. And the first to declare an answer, especially a vehement, confident answer, wins. It was all in how you framed it. It was an issue of syntax. If you say, This is the one crucial detail that you must know, they will listen. And that was what she was selling, not a list of books — because, really, it was all so arbitrary — but a confidence, a way of thinking about the power of things to transform your life that made it work. She was selling faith, of course.

  After a while it became difficult. Perhaps she had gotten too good at it, or thought on it a bit too much. Somehow, the relativity and arbitrariness of her own passions increased as she consulted for so many others. Everything grew quotes around it, and she found she started to give clients more perverse and obscure style advice. As her judgments became more divorced from actual feeling, she found herself increasingly mannered and overwrought. Her own fascination had pushed to a level of circular antitaste. She soon regarded her established passions as tacky and boring. She full-circled in such a singular pursuit of style that she started to forge strange ironies within her own already ironic pursuit of taste. She no longer recalled the chains of reference. She genuinely admired formerly despised things — the fat oakiness of a California Chardonnay, for instance, seemed witty to her. She loved, suddenly and deeply, the slyness of bombastic, terrifyingly dated seventies prog rock. She thought John Grisham novels would be so unexpected andunusual. She assured her charges that Paul McCartney was the coolest Beatle — his solo stuff, even better. She made them buy five-year-old hip-hop records. No more Kiehl’s men’s products, instead she recommended Dial soap, Aramis cologne. Finally, she found that her own taste was indistinguishable from her clients’. It had become hopeless; the men began seeming perfect as they were, so delightfully unstyled, chicly unconsulted, and she wanted to make lists of their books and records. She was desperate to hear what movies they saw and admired. She couldn’t help them at all anymore, and she had ceased to enjoy any of it — a record or a book or a steak. She had to quit consulting, end her career as a life-stylist, Lorene having finally become so stark and minimalist, so desperate for simplicity and purity, that if she continued she’d need a stylist herself, someone to fill in her own blanks with confidence, focus, and consistency.

  “Is that better?” Beryl asked.

  Lorene had stopped, taken time to recover — spent a year infatuated with undyed rice-paper screens, felt a sort of ecstatic thrill throwing things in the garbage, listened only to Pakistani Qawwali chants, and cut her hair way too short.

  Lorene sighed.

  And now it had come to this, hadn’t it? Lorene needed to hire someone named Beryl to touch her. She was more Joseph than Joseph now. It was worse than hiring someone to buy your art. It was paying someone to help you be yourself. Somehow, your confidence disappears. You need to loosen the tightness in your head, to make silent the colors in your body, to feel the low beating of your heart that seemed so alien and distant. Somehow find your way to some — what?

  She had totally failed to meditate past red. Again.

  She had an appointment with her contractors at Vanity and Vexation. She had to hurry.

  He didn’t die in a mangled car wreck. He wasn’t stabbed or drowned in some sex-drenched confusion. No pills or rope or last pleas for help. He hadn’t even really “disappeared.”

  He lived in a yurt in Ojai.

  Mina held the phone in her hand, ready to call Lorene. There was a high-pitched tone and a message saying the cellular customer she was calling was not available or had traveled outside the coverage area. She listened to the message twice.

  Since their divorce, Mina’s mother always referred to him as “your father.” How is your father? Tell your father I saw one of his films, or, Your father didn’t like it when I cut your hair short. Never “Jack.” She has never heard her mother say his name. She would even say to her current boyfriend, When I was living with Mina’s father. . Aside from her refusal to say his name, her resentment never surfaced. It was as if she were speaking of a small child or an elderly person. Perhaps because of her mother’s habit, it never occurred to her until recently that he was not merely her father, but her mother’s ex-husband. Despite what Mina had learned, years after the fact from her brother, her mother never betrayed any low esteem for him. She was graceful in her privacy, or maybe it didn’t matter anymore since he wasn’t in the running in a real way. Or maybe (as her brother claimed) she merely forgave him. Mina, evidently, had not.

  Mina suddenly and with no apparent hostility or self-awareness stopped calling him “Dad.” He was “Jack.” Even to his face, Jack.

  Jack had amassed colossal debt. As much as he once had, it was double (triple) that he now didn’t have. The debt loomed, tumefied and metastasized. Negative money is a powerful force. It grows unseen, becomes an ever-reproducing intestinal parasite, unfelt, or a self-replicating retrovirus, autoimmune, insinuating itself into the DNA of things, growing with you as it destroys you, and, most important, it would never stop.

  Jack lived (perversely unaffected, Mina felt) in his yurt in Ojai — a placid, modest existence in the mountains with his new female companion, Melissa. When Mina last visited, she couldn’t take her eyes off Melissa’s large, braless, and preternaturally perky breasts. Melissa was all long legs and lips and tits. The silicone must have been from an earlier, more material phase of her life, because now she was feather-draped and yoga-poised, crystal-crusted and spiritually
sanguine.

  Mina rose before dawn, creeping out of the yurt while they slept. She was alone and anxious. The Santa Ana — surely it was one of those — was blowing from the northeast. It was a dulling predawn gale. Mina waited for them to get up, had a hazy glimpse of Michael waking in a room somewhere unfamiliar, and then she heard strange moans from within the yurt.

  Mina realized, with enormous relief, their moans were controlled and in unison, of some meditative nature, not caused by exertions Mina would have found wholly inappropriate in the vicinity of the visiting daughter.

  Jack and Melissa paid close attention to their breathing.

  The dawn was upon them, the wind dying down as the sun rose.

  Mina found herself helping Melissa sweep the yurt out in the early morning mountain light, a batted-eyelash, mottled dawn light, flirting through tree branches and from behindleaves and stone ledges, until the whole world had a gold-flecked glow. Mina wondered if Melissa always smoked pot first thing in the morning. Melissa did a classic, familiar mid-inhale gesture of drug sharing. How, Mina wondered, do we learn these exact gestures? How did drug culture develop protocol, actual cliché?

  “No thanks, I’ll stick to nicotine.” Mina sat outside the yurt shamelessly smoking. “Outside the yurt, endlessly, shamelessly smoking,” she said aloud. She loved saying “the yurt”; she inserted it into every sentence she could during her visit. “I’m going in the yurt for a lie-down.” “Is there a feng shui direction I should sleep in the yurt?” “Is this a nonsmoking yurt?” “Do you have yurt-owner’s insurance?” Jack and Melissa took these questions with surprising good cheer. They did everything with pacific, smiling faces. Melissa sometimes tried to talk to Mina. She sat next to Mina, crossed her long legs, and smiled one of those million-dollar California-girl smiles. Who could blame Jack?

  “Where did you grow up, Melissa?” Mina asked.

  “Boise, Idaho,” she said. “You thought maybe Hermosa Beach?” And she winked at Mina, her crystal earrings glimmering in the dawn light. She had undeniably a new-age sort of guileless charm. Melissa was looking for the moon in the morning sky. She felt her menstrual cycles were connected to the cycles of the moon. Melissa, certainly, was connected to the moon in important ways. But no way more profoundly than menstrually. She discussed her cycle at length. “Your cycle,” she explained, “can tell you things.” She examined it, like entrails, for wisdom.

  “The flow is really strong this month.”

  “Really? Smooth or clotty?”

  “Stringy, stranded.”

  “Pain or no pain?”

  “Aches, good aches.”

  “Cravings? Mood swings? Emotional disintegration?”

  “No, not with the beetwort tea, the dong quoi, the hemp oil, the sage-burnt incense, and the daily affirmations. Just rapturous orgasms at the drop of a hat.”

  Thanks for that detail, girlfriend of Jack.

  “Mina, have you ever heard of St. John Solutions?”

  “No.” Mina smiled.

  “I took ‘Understanding Menstruation, the Advanced Seminar’ there.”

  “It changed your life.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  VIDEO # 1

  TITLE: FIRST TIMEAUDIO IN:

  MAX (OFF SCREEN)

  It’s not on.FADE IN:

  Extreme close-up of a GIRL on a bed, youngish, long hair, looking slightly off camera.

  MAX (O.S.)

  It’s not on.

  MINA

  Is that why the red light is on?

  MAX (O.S.)

  Grainy, black-and-white, cinéma vérité girl.

  Open your pretty mouth and talk to me.

  MINA

  Is this a sort of foreplay?

  MAX (O.S.)

  It’s a video of a girl on a bed. It’s the girl. It’s the girl being filmed by someone who finds her interesting.

  MINA

  I don’t think it’s interesting. I don’t think I like it much.The GIRL has her head down. Her long hair blocks her face. She has her legs crossed and her arms crossed over her legs. She stares at her toes. The camera moves closer. It moves to a close-up of her bowed head and long hair.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Close-up on girl. Handheld, wobble-fisted. Is it home movies? Is it art? She’s shy, she doesn’t look up. She doesn’t speak. We move in close to her long blond hair. But it’s such pretty hair. I wish it were in brightest Technicolor. I think you should be in brightest yellow, reddest red.Rainbow-painted fifties American Technicolor. You could dazzle us with your long blond hair.GIRL pushes her hair behind her ears, looks at the camera. Her face is pleasant, symmetrical, round. Her eyes are large and her mouth is serious. She shakes her head.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Lovely. The face in view. The eyes, the lips. Those full girl-next-door lips. Reddest red. Can they speak?

  MINA

  This is not amusing me. This annoys me.GIRL looks away. The camera pulls back, to show her on the bed, body folded into itself.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Tell me why you’re annoyed. No, tell me something else. Something I don’t know. Tell me about when your uncle came into your room at night and made you promise never to tell. Tell me about when you and your college roommate got drunk and kissed each other’s breasts among CliffsNotes and fingernail polish and you both swore never to mention it. Tell me about when you first cheated on your husband and wrote a confessional note, which you tore up, swearing to yourself it never really happened. Tell, tell, tell.

  MINA

  Nothing like that to tell.

  MAX (O.S., FIRMLY)

  Then make it up.

  MINA

  No.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Tell me about the fantasy you have of being tied up by a stranger. He blindfolds you and makes love to you while your parents are in the next room. Or your husband. Or the man you saw on the street that you imagined unzipping and feeling against a wall as his hands undid the buttons on your dress. Tell me.GIRL starts to laugh, shaking her head. She takes her handbag from the side of the bed and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She puts one in her mouth, tosses her head back a bit and strikes a match, lights it, inhales. She blows smoke in the camera’s direction.

  MINA

  It’s to be one of those movies, is it?She smirks a bit, shaking her head.

  MAX (O.S.)

  To light a cigarette while you’re being filmed.

  It’s poetry, it’s the American gesture. It’s what Jean-Paul Belmondo died for inBreathless, his exhale on camera, his hopeless European envy. The fulfillment of a thousand film noir fantasies, blowing out smoke on camera. It’s the

  true American dream.

  MINA

  I don’t smoke. I don’t have secrets to reveal. I don’t have sexual fantasies to reveal. I’m an unsuitable subject for this game.GIRL takes another drag on her cigarette. The camera is static on her.

  MINA

  I think I’ll just bore you into turning the thing off. Not out of resistance, but a genuine inability to do or say anything worth filming.There is a pause. She looks at the camera. She is waiting. The camera is static. A minute elapses.

  MINA

  It’s a waste of film. Or video, or whatever it is.Another minute elapses. GIRL looks down, purses lips, indicates annoyance.

  MAX (O.S.)

  You could leave. You could get up and leave.

  MINA

  What did the other women do?

  MAX (O.S.)

  What makes you think there have been other women?

  MINA

  What did the other women do?

  MAX (O.S. LAUGHING)

  They usually take off their clothes. They do. Put a camera on a woman, and sooner or later, she starts to take off her clothes.

  MINA

  Liar.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Nine out of ten.

  MINA

  What did the tenth one do?

  MAX (O.S.)

  I don’t k
now. You’re the tenth.GIRL starts to laugh. There is another pause. A real-time dead space.

  MINA

  Say something. Ask me something. Anything.There is silence. Just video drone. The sound of breath. She keeps looking at the camera. She stops smiling.

  MINA

  What else? What else happens? Do you ever turn it off, or does the tape run out?Silence.

  MINA

  How long does it take for the tape to run out? Max.Silence. Mechanical whirring.

  MINA

  How long?Silence. Static, unmoving on her. She looks weary. A minute passes, she sits on the bed, examines her toes. She looks off camera, stares hard to her left at something unseen. She doesn’t move.

  MINA

  I can’t stand this. It’s not funny. I’m going to leave.GIRL looks up at the camera. She looks at her toes. She looks back up. She looks directly into the camera, unsmiling. Shemoves her hands to her dress. She closes her eyes. She starts to unbutton. She opens her eyes. Fade to black.

  TITLE: END“ Is this Mrs. Delano?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Is this Mrs. Delano?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “This is Bill. I’m an old friend of your husband, Jack Delano. I’ve been trying to reach him.”

  “You’re lying. And I’m not his wife.”

  “Oh, I thought—”

  “You’re not a friend. You work for a collection agency.”

  “It’s crucial I speak with your father.”

  “I’m late for work.”

  “It’s crucial I speak with your father.”

  “My father lives in Landgrove, Vermont. His name is Mitchell Howe. He is the high school football coach.”

  “You are not related to Jack Delano?”

  “Do you mean biologically? Or legally? Or spiritually? I have no aesthetic relation to the man.”

  “Do you know how to reach him?”

  “I have no knowledge of his whereabouts. He disappeared, didn’t you hear? It’s a great mystery. I have not seen nor heard from him in five years.”