Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  Lorene frowns. She’s not wearing any lipstick. First time ever.

  Three Weeks from Leaving

  Mina ran the dining room floor for the long lunch shift at Food Baroque. A usual exhaustion of mishaps: strangers agitated and demanding. The bookings changing constantly. The regulars who had to be appeased. The waitresses who had to be constantly reminded of so many tiny details. Mina greeted peoplewith a surface smile and was grateful for the still-heavy protocol of restaurants. There was a structure and an order, and everybody knew it. I say hello. You say hello back. I ask how you are. You smile, nod, and announce the name the booking is under. I take you to a table, you thank me. We know this. First, I offer you a drink. We serve the drinks from the right. We serve food from the left. I show you the label of the wine. I place the cork in front of you. I offer you the taste. This is the way it is done. I fill glasses of the women clockwise from the host, then the men, then I fill the host’s glass. This structure is understood between us, even though I’ve never seen you before. There is a grace and a comfort in these rules. Mina found refuge in them, a kind of beauty. She thought of it, pondered the rules of service, the order necessary to create pleasure. People still feel, however superficially, part of some coherent common culture where gestures among strangers are understood. She missed actually waiting on people. She loved marking the tables between courses with the appropriate silverware. She loved serving the women first, whisking crumbs off the tables with a sliver of metal designed for such niceties. It was about pleasure, the rules of pleasure and service, and Mina marveled at this, and lately inserted little torques in the protocol, not destroying them but emphasizing them by playing with the edges. She would make a tiny personal comment on the wine, or give a piece of silverware an extra twirl as she placed it to mark a table for the next course. She would hold eye contact a second longer than appropriate when asked what the wait for a table was, and then give a minutely precise answer with a deadpan earnestness. She could create ironic service, a swerve to the unexpected that would succeed only because everything was already intact and flawless; only play ifa space exists. And there could be no mistaking that the swerves came from art rather than sloppiness or ignorance. She would never incorrectly serve food from the right and clear from the left — that would be a meaningless erosion of order. Because there was a kind of beauty in this sort of mutually observed propriety. It was pleasing to have gestures to read, rules to respect, structures to subvert.

  She had the weekly staff meeting today at Gentleman’s Club. Billie Jean, Nancy, Roxanne, Annette (not their real names) were instructed in the rules of service by Lorene as Mina looked on, nodding. The same things over and over like a prayer, tiny, seemingly insignificant details that architected Lorene’s vision of pleasure. She was so confident in her vision, it hardly mattered whether it was right or not. Itwasright. Then Lorene went over the schedule, with all of the girls’ astrological charts in hand. No earth signs on the floor with fire signs. The planets dictated these combinations, and that, along with the audition demands of the actress/servers, made the schedule challenging. Mina was left to the task of reconciling all this: the back of the house, the front of the house, the sun, the moon, the pilot season. After she finished and discharged the girls to the evening shift, she had a look at the reservation book. A hopelessly overbooked seven o’clock seating. A wishful booking at nine for a two-hour turn. Not likely. She left the impending disasters of the half-hour waits at the bar and the nearly threatening, polite assertiveness of rich beautiful people who “didn’t want to wait a moment longer, please” to the night manager, Billie Jean, and said she would be at home if needed.

  On the way, she had to squeeze in Max, briefly. The walk home separated things.

  She again stood outside, staring at the house she lived in, aMildred Pierce-y sort of bungalow, its stucco walls surrounded by palm trees. Palm trees, palm trees. Dr. Seuss, branchless, Betty Boop, shadeless, wind-bent, transplanted palm “trees.” No matter how long she had lived here, no matter how many summers she had spent here as a child, she never failed to become momentarily unnerved by palm trees. They seemed to say, This isn’t a real place where things count, this is exotic, this is tropical, this is a vacation! And she got a kind of thrill from it, living here was a sort of faux living, it’s what gave her so much license with time. Southern California ambivalence that was too bright to be ennui. Too palm-treed. Natives were not supposed to get a thrill from a palm tree. It was just a tree. It could be a fir or an evergreen or an oak. She strove to find the tiny details that illuminated the vast differences between the rest of Los Angeleans and herself, and, especially lately, between herself and David. What was she trying to convince herself of, with this little game? Anyone scrutinized in this way would seem hopelessly strange. When she finally reached the vantage point outside David’s office, she became entranced with watching him look intently at his computer screen. She watched him take a sip of tea (she drank coffee and didn’t even understand tea), his eyes not wavering from the blue-green light of the screen, her eyes not wavering from him.

  She entered the kitchen and saw that David had washed all the dishes. He was very tidy. She has had her moments, but they’ve been unpredictable and, generally, David has kept things in order. He stepped into the kitchen when she opened the refrigerator.

  “How was work?” he asked. She shrugged and opened a cardboard to-go container. She ate in front of the open refrigerator. “Hey,” he said, “you want to order a movie?” She nodded,chewing, and he approached her. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m not getting anywhere on these rewrites. I’m sick of it.” David was finishing a tenth rewrite of a script about white, rural, Luddite, fundamentalist terrorists who plan to blow up the White House.

  “It’s timely” was all he would really say about it. Whenever she described the plot as being about white, rural, Luddite, fundamentalist terrorists, he corrected her. “It’s not about the terrorists. It’s about the hero who thwarts them.” But he often didn’t say more than that. He was weary of it, as he was weary of all the scripts he wrote and rewrote. When she first met him he was an art history student. He was someone who used to trace his fingertips, with a dreamy shyness, along the hollow at the back of her knee.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, mouth full of moo shu pork. It was actually all vegetarian. Almost moo shu pork. It was made of seitan.

  “Isn’t that what they use to make wicker chairs?” David joked. It was soba and tempeh and seitan. Fibrous mystery food from the East. Almost tasted like real food, faux moo shu pork. She spooned it in. She had the postcoital munchies. She had the postmeandering famishes. Wretched, she thought, and ravenous.

  “You know, we could actually eat dinner,” he said.

  “I plan to,” she said, still chewing. Mina could eat a tremendous amount of food. She really enjoyed eating. Also, it felt vaguely defiant. So anti-Lorene. A woman of appetites. She laughed at the young waitresses/actresses working at the restaurants, watching them control their eating, fasting and constantly rebuilding their castles of deprivation. They had neophyte eating disorders. Hers was so elaborated, so long contemplated,that it full-circled to the appearance of a normative eating pattern. Yes, a retro affectation — a woman who eats. That kind of self-obsession was an art, a silent, pure art performed and appreciated only by one’s self. She wasn’t defiant enough to be fat, though. There was a little fullness around the hips, a smoothing of edges that had occurred over the last two or three years. Over-twenty-five metabolic slowing. The inevitable decline begun. But of late, of Max, she liked this softness around the hips. It felt sexy somehow. A concession to the immoderate and sensual. Female and decadent, even. She planned, at some liberated later point, to be able to romanticize her fat, fetishize it. But then there was cellulite. Then there was the drooping of large breasts. Sagging. Technically called ptosis. It was a syndrome, a medical problem to be fixed, don’t you know. A pathology, surely. The pencil test. If you placed a pencil
under your breast and it stayed there, if the leaning, sagging breast actually held the pencil there, you failed the pencil test. Fallen buttocks, too. Stretch marks. Lapsed uterus, for God’s sake.

  Mina stopped eating.

  Of course, there was always Dr. Mencer, Lorene’s plastic surgeon. The pencil test, what sadistic misogynist came up with that one? But it could be fixed, nothing was irrevocable. All was curable. Good old Dr. Mencer.

  She ate another mouthful.

  “I suppose we could order in,” David said. She nodded. “Sushi,” he said.

  “I’m bored — in a deep, profound, practically hysterical way — with sushi,” Mina said, “and besides, they give you the dregs for to-go orders.”

  “They do not. It’s the same sushi.”

  “Dregs. Ends. The unlucky pieces. Unwanted, bad luck, cat food pieces.”

  “That’s in your head,” David said. Mina made a mental note that David needed to be drunk to go down on her, but he’d eat sushi from three days ago. He’d eat it warm and wilted, he’d eat it from Super Sushi Surprise if he had to.

  “It’s yesterday’s. The edges are curled. It’s salmonella and mercury drenched. It’s a petri dish. It’s a penicillin experiment,” she said.

  “Oh, stop. You don’t get salmonella from fish.”

  “Well, then trichinosis. Or trignomisis. The trich,” she said, “didn’t you hear about the Brentwood housewife who got herpes from a piece of slightly used anago? A piece of previously owned maguro?”

  “I heard it was genital warts. From take-out sushi.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Pizza, okay.”

  “I’ll order it,” Mina said. She pulled open the drawer by the phone. It was full of paper menus.

  “Hey, you got some mail today,” David said from the bathroom.

  “I did?”

  “I almost forgot. A postcard. It’s by the phone,” he shouted. She listened to the shower running. He took showers, she took baths. She noted that, repeating it to herself. Added it to the list compiled for some unknown purpose. He takes showers. Tea. Ignores palm trees. He’s tidy. He drives.

  The postcard was a photo of the Andalusian countryside. The card said only one word, “LEFT,” in block capital letters and was unsigned. The postmark was San Francisco.

  David appeared, a towel jauntily tied around his hips. Minaadmired his body, damp, tan, and lean, and the hair on his legs and arms and chest in artful wet swirls. The towel tied around the hips. The way the drops of water found all his hollows.

  “Who sent the card?” he said.

  “Don’t know,” she said.

  “It’s got a San Francisco postmark,” David said. David had checked the postmark. He was pondering her mail. She was almost touched, almost excited. She put her finger on his belly. Dragged her finger to his hipbone. The skin was damp and warm. She traced the outline of the hip to where it reached the towel. She could hear him exhale. She thought, I should, I should. She put her hands on his hips and angled them forward, toward her. He did nothing, he was pliant, and she didn’t look at him but bent from the waist to where the hair started to curl and leaned downward. She put her lips there. It felt soft and wet, and when she licked she could feel a trembly sort of movement. His hands were on her shoulders, and he started to pull her shirt up along her back as she bent into him. She grabbed his wrists. He let her. She held his hands out to his sides away from them both. She pushed the towel down with her face. She felt him looking down at her. She pulled her face back a little, closing her eyes, imagining what she looked like, her lips moving on his cock, her hair stranded on her jaw and forehead. She saw them both, her mouth attaining a sort of mesmerized rhythm, and the muscles in his legs and abdomen tightening. She heard his urgent breaths. Then she heard him sigh and some seconds later she felt him shiver. She thought of Max coming, earlier, and then she felt David come. No one should know these things about her. She wouldn’t let herself think about it. David held her for balance and then unwound. She was glad his body felt so heavy, glad being with Max madehim a body again, made him unfamiliar and sexy. He smiled at her, shaking his wet hair. Anyone,anyone, would find him appealing. He leaned to kiss her.

  “The pizza will be here soon. Don’t you think we should call the Videorama?” she said, pulling back from the kiss.

  They rented a Gary Cooper movie. Movie choices — rental choices, actually, because they never saw movies in the theater anymore, that would have required effort and actually leaving the house and possible contact with strangers — Mina and David often didn’t agree on. Mina had her obsessional way with movies. She liked to see all of a certain actor’s films, or a director’s, or a related batch of films. She would want only postwar melodrama. A William Wyler festival. Or only William Holden. Or postaccident Montgomery Clift. Only British-produced Hitchcock. A Dorothy Malone/Gloria Grahame/“sort of slutty” festival. Films were an organic, coherent whole, with categories and patterns. She saw them connected to the world and to each other. It comforted her to exhaustively track a single career, the rise, the fall. It was the drama outside the drama, and the movies were the artifacts that remained. Her father had filled in obscure production details, quoted lines. He would make jokes, inward metacomments that spoke to their organic movie world, their exclusive and idiosyncratic expertise.

  “What’s going on?” her father would say, watchingRed River.“What’s Wayne doing, he’s in a rush because he left all those people on the stagecoach.” Mina would laugh at his joke, because she had seenStagecoach,too. She would say, Well, they better get to Missouri before the army realizes Matt is AWOL. Very good, kid, he would say, and she thought she knew the whole world watching movies with her father. And mostly old, and mostly American. She liked to imagine livingin 1952 and seeing these lady melodramas. She imagined herself housewifed and weeping. Or old war and baseball movies — they made her nostalgic, made her homesick for a time she never even lived through. And she thought she could see what her father was like, at seventeen, watchingFrom Here to Eternity.Imagining him watching those movies for the first time made him seem more like a real person, less like someone’s father. It made her feel a funny kind of sad affection for him. She saw him leaving the theater and she tried to guess what seventeen-year-old Jack felt, whether he thought he was more like Burt Lancaster or more like Frank Sinatra. As she grew older, old films gave her pleasure as the secret heart not just of her father, but of the world, collective pseudomemory of American innocence, Norman Rockwell but more sordid and ironic because the medium wasn’t static — as contexts changed the actual films became ironic and winking. They moved from American to Americana. She knew Gary Cooper spilled his guts to the House Un-American Activities Committee. That was why his brave American heroes were fun to watch. She knew Clift was gay — it made his ambivalent, helpless shrugs all the more resonant. Mina had so many movie reference points in her head, as many as the memories of her own life, it seemed, and they became nearly equally weighted, her memories of her actual life and her memories of the movies she had seen. Was there finally that much difference? She sometimes thought that if someone saw all the movies she had seen, the number of times she had seen them and in the order she had seen them, that person might know exactly who she was. That couldn’t really be true, but it was half true, it felt that crucial, as if her identity were a collection of references.

  She watched Cooper’s long eyelashes and baseball swaggeras he rubbed his bad arm and let Barbara Stanwyck talk circles around him. David wanted to see a seventies action film. Mina wanted anything — anything at all — with James Mason. They settled for an easy one. They compromised on a film they had both seen dozens of times.

  “Sometimes a film we haven’t seen before seems like so much effort,” Mina said.

  “Daunting and risky,” David said. He commented constantly. He had to — they’d seen it too many times to actually be engaged. They now sought the supracritique. The odd detail you missed the first eight
times you saw it. The depth of repetition. The continuity gaffes. The way the timing of the dialogue had rhythm. Sometimes Mina thought if you watched one movie enough, it could mean anything. It became a funnel for the entire universe. Besides, it was the most talking they would do all day.

  David, the technician, the analyst, said, “You can’t get away with dialogue like that anymore. Too much talking.”

  “But it’s good still.”

  “Yeah. It is. You can’t, though.”

  Mina nodded, not turning from the eyelashes. The black and white and gray luminous movie eyes. She knew Cooper’s eyes were cerulean blue, translucent and denim-flecked and cold, an impossible manly American Blue, the way she knew Rita Hayworth’s Gilda nails in black-and-white had to be a platonic perfect sex-sinister Red.

  “Now you have to have less dialogue. It has to be careful and tricky, though. It can’t be too obvious. The lovers fight, then say, ‘I can’t live without you.’ Or they’re making love, and she sighs and says, ‘You bastard.’ It has to go like that,” he said, looking at the TV.

  Mina, eyes on Cooper, said, “Yeah. I think that’s called irony, David.” And it came out more sarcastic and mean than she intended. Cooper was shrugging, in that “It seems to me but what do I know” kind of common, noble way. Cooper was starting to irritate her.

  “You’re a snob,” David said quietly, looking at the screen.

  It’s funny that she often forgave things in other people that irritated her in David. She fingered the Andalusian “LEFT” postcard folded in her pocket. Left of what? Why Andalusia? She’d have to call the hospital tomorrow. She felt moody and impatient.

  “We should have rentedOnly Angels Have Wings.Rita Hayworth. Cary Grant. And that actress with the oddly pitched voice.”

  “Who?” David said.

  “She’s wearing slacks. These great slacks.”