Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  One Week from Leaving

  David waited for his wife in the foyer of their small house.

  David and Mina were surely going to have an argument. David was ready. Mina thought if it were in a movie, you would see it from his point of view. Mina walking in the front door,glancing at her watch. The watch would indicate lateness, and David, already in the foyer, standing, arms folded in front of chest, indicating lateness.

  Mina said, “I’m sorry I’m late.” You wouldn’t see David’s response, which would be assumed, in cinematic conventions of what silence indicates, to be a shrug. But in fact David didn’t shrug. He watched Mina for a real-time second and a half. This made Mina sort of half smile at him. The absence of a corresponding reverse on David’s reaction would change the point of view — the viewer would identify with Mina’s imploring him for a response. If David didn’t respond, the scene would be all sympathy for Mina. It must change to a two shot, or David must begin talking. Or better yet, alternating reverse angles on the two, as they spoke, so the viewer would simply read the dialogue naturalistically, as in life. But if the film instead used reverse angles on each one as the other spoke, the words would be altered by the imagery, be read as reactive and dual, all about listening and response and not seem natural at all. But that would be a foreign film, wouldn’t it? This was a domestic drama, a situation comedy. David and Mina, after all, learned their visual grammar of how couples argue from TV more than movies. Something invisible and conventional. This is aided by David’s having enclosed the space physically, trapping them in the foyer and in the conversation. The scene is lit from the living room lamp, unseen, the foyer full of afternoon shadows. Mina gestured toward the living room doorway, and David headed that way as well until he stopped her in between the two rooms, not actually in her way, but arresting her movement somehow. Perhaps to keep them in the frame of a static shot. The dialogue now, overlapping, more real than real.

  “I’m sorry, I had to—” Mina said.

  “You don’t use your car anymore, do you? You won’t drive.” She tried to move to the living room, but David stood directly in front of her. She shook her head.

  “You have a problem with driving.”

  “I have no problem with driving. I know how to drive.”

  “Your car problem is what I’m getting at here, Mina.”

  “I have no problem with cars. I am not against cars. I haven’t been, yes, but it doesn’t mean I won’t. I mean, drive, my car, soon, at some point when I deem it necessary.”

  “Unless—” he said.

  “Unless what? Unless driving has taken on some symbolic meaning for me? Unless not driving is my expression of dysfunction? Some deep-rooted ambivalence about my life, or some adolescent rebellion, some—”

  “Or maybe you’re scared to drive?” he said.

  “It’s not as if I’ve stopped bathing or something. You can’t be committed for refusing to drive.”

  “Well, it certainly hasn’t kept you at home. I mean, we can rule out agoraphobia, can’t we?” They were still toe to toe in the doorway between foyer and living room. Perhaps a close-up of her eyes as they glanced from him to the room and back again.

  Mina tried to smile at David.

  “I’m starving. Let’s get something to eat.”

  “OK, let’s go out and eat. You drive us to a restaurant,” David said, arms still folded. The challenge.

  “No. I don’t want to go to a restaurant. I work in a restaurant.”

  “Fine. Let’s drive to the supermarket and buy food. Let’s cook dinner.”

  “I’ll give you a list.”

  “Look, I want to see you drive.”

  “David, I am so weary right now. Do we have to do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “OK, fine. Do you ever notice that when you drive the world becomes invisible?”

  “No, I never noticed—”

  “You’re going places but you are not really moving, you’re in the same place, the car? You play the radio, you look out the window, but you are not really in the world in any way?”

  David now apparently felt the desire for some actorly activity. He left the doorjamb and entered the living room. He went to the liquor cabinet and opened it. Where did he learn this? Why fix a drink in the middle of an argument? It was more John Cassavetes thanThe Thin Man,but he hadn’t seen any Cassavetes movies. He just wanted to be doing something. Mina lit a cigarette.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

  “No, I have to go to work later.”

  He opened a bottle of wine and poured himself a glass. He also pulled out a cigarette. He patted his shirt pockets for a match (which was a terrifically cinematic thing to do, as he never had matches in his shirt pockets. In fact, he didn’t even have shirt pockets — he was wearing a T-shirt, wasn’t he?) while holding the cigarette in his mouth. She handed him her matches. He lit up.

  “When you get where you are going,” he said, exhaling, “you leave the car.” He paused, looking down, thinking. “ You are now in a new place. You walk when you get there. All it does is cut down the time in between where you started and where you are going. It is a simple device to enable you tomove between places more quickly.” He took another sip of his drink and leaned on the cabinet and he looked at his wife.

  This would be the part where Mina would confess everything to David. In David’s script of things she would have to start talking about why she lived for the in-between places, how she wanted the distance between things, why driving in this car-born place oppressed her. But then she would have to fill him in about Michael’s cards and her affairs and her private obsessions and his best friend, Max, and her private shopping and her desperation. But of course she wouldn’t. Because not all secrets can be told. He didn’t really want to know. In a movie there would be a sense of narrative closure. In a script, revelation was liberating and solved everything.

  This was not what was going to transpire between Mina and David.

  She didn’t want more liberation — she wanted something else. She’d not find out his secret life, or he, hers. And even if they tried, it could only be partial. They could exchange monologues for hours and it wouldn’t reveal all. What would they have then — a catalog of unforgivable tabloidisms, an indelible ugliness. The equivalent of vomiting on each other. And even then, it was not really the full story. Some things would never be known. They could exhaust their secrets and they would still be discontinuous forever, static, however disclosed.

  “You like to drive. I don’t,” she said.

  Fourth Road Stop: New Orleans

  “Fashion is a form of daydreaming,” Lorene said to me when we opened her first restaurant. I remember she was picking clothing for the opening, and we stood before her closet, stuffed with seven decades of clothing in size six. A few things were bigger or smaller, but so beautiful they were bought for their own sake, never to be worn, but just so they could hang in a closet and mean something about her. She was handing me a gift. I unwrapped the Japanese rice paper. I held a bone-cream silk nightgown. It was exactly that, a gown to be worn at night. The fabric was microthin, delicate, and yet so densely and finely woven it appeared to be a sheet of skin.

  I watch Lorene sitting in the outdoor cafe in the French Quarter, waiting to meet me. She doesn’t see me yet, but I am watching her wait.

  I had draped the nightgown on her blond-wood dressing table and begun to undress. This was a gesture between women — undressing in front of each other, without embarrassment or comment. It was trusting them with your deepest secrets.

  “It’s a way of reimagining yourself. You wish upon a dress and a hue, and it’s a prayer of transformation.” I was naked in front of her three-way mirror and I let the nightgown slip down over my head. It did just that, slipped and slid over my body, a whisper of beige silk. The dressing room smelled of Shalimar perfume, the perfume of American women in the fifties who dreamed of exotic places, harems and veils, Louis Jordan Europe
anlovers, or Vittorio Gassman in Venice, making them wicked and undoing their dumb American naivete. The nightgown did not have lace trim, just delicate filigree-scalloped edges at the neckline and hem. The scallops flirted with skin and fabric, so the gown seemed to tease at what was silk and what was skin.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Like I should be climbing down a trellis covered in roses to meet my lover in the middle of the night. I’ll catch the edges on thorns but it will be worth it.”

  “With a cool desert midnight breeze making you shiver slightly.”

  It is disconcerting to see Lorene sitting at a cafe in New Orleans waiting for me. It is the first time we have separated on our trip, and I am now finally able to look at her. She is wearing the same tight jeans she has worn since Texas and a black T-shirt. Her hair falls in her face, which is actually sun-kissed and golden brown. What sort of daydreaming did this indicate? If Lorene at nineteen was my first experience of the power of beauty and style — what had occurred? I am the same as I always am, in a thin cotton dress and sandals, hair hanging long down my back. A woman like Lorene can be read in the complicated ways she reinvents herself, in the way she appears.

  I think of my father, sitting on the set of one of his films, talking to his assistant director, Dennis. I stood behind them, unseen (something that had became a habit), an invisible fourteen-year-old constantly lurking behind long hair and baggy clothing. They were seated, backs toward me.

  “She’s not a beauty like her mother,” my father said. “But she has a good body, probably, long legs, and she’ll have a kind of cheerleader charm.”

  “You sound disappointed,” Dennis said. “At least she’s not fat.”

  “No, no. Stop it. She is my daughter.”

  I already knew at fourteen that I was no genius like Michael, skidding through books and skipping grades with casual dash. And then, right then, I realized I would never be a great beauty either. I was consigned to the ordinary. And it was the beauty part I missed more. I didn’t cry, I knew it was true. And the events that followed that conversation on the set were colored by this realization. A desire to be extraordinary in some way and not knowing how I could be.

  I stand on the cobbled edge of the street and watch Lorene sipping her espresso. She is an epic beauty — someone could launch a war over her face, or even over the mere delicate poetry of her wrists and slender hands.

  Finally I approach her. She looks up, ravishing and slightly grubby, the face now wearing a sun-crinkled smile — a smile to wash the world, I think.

  I want to tell her about something true. I want her to understand and absolve me.

  “Are you ready to leave?”

  Lorene smiles at me and shakes her head. She pats the seat next to her. She sips her coffee and doesn’t look at me.

  “I don’t think I’m going to New York with you, doll.” I didn’t expect her to say this.

  “You’re not?”

  Lorene puts a hand on mine and squeezes.

  “C’mon. I think I want to be here for a while. By myself. Stay away from hyper urban centers and old lovers. Unwind a bit. You go on and see your mom and your brother. I’ll see you back in L.A.”

  “I just called my mother. Michael isn’t even there yet.” Lorene says nothing. There is a woman at the next table, by herself. I can see her over Lorene’s shoulder. She’s in a black dress. She is wearing way too much makeup. One of those old ladies who somehow has forgotten how to put lipstick on. They run it outside the edges of their lips a bit until their mouth looks punctured and sore. The makeup feathers in the vertical wrinkles puckered around their lips. There is too much powder over it all. It cakes in corners. They get lipstick on their teeth. They refuse to notice. Or maybe they don’t care. But for some reason they keep caking on the makeup, every day. She is sipping a Coke through a straw. I can’t stop watching her. Of course she is smoking a cigarette.

  “I’ll leave in the morning. New Orleans depresses me, anyway.”

  Lorene nods.

  “Hey, Lorene, do you remember my father’s friend Dennis Halpern,” I say.

  “Lean sycophant AD with penetrating sleazy gaze,” she says, not hesitating.

  “Yeah. That’s him.”

  “Yeah, I remember Dennis.”

  “He was the first guy.”

  Lorene gestures at the waiter for another coffee, for me.

  “What?” she says. She’s already forgotten our road project.

  “I was fifteen, and we were having one of those long dinner parties at the house. One of the last ones before Mom left. I had a few glasses of wine through dinner and listened to Michael and my father argue about politics. The party dispersed into little candlelit groups as usual. Some people went to the pool and got high. Some people stayed at the dinnertable and talked. Others sat in the kitchen sipping wine and talking, putting away dishes and laughing occasionally. It was a jolly desert night, where the general feeling was warm and loose.”

  “I remember Michael talking about those dinner parties. Everyone envied your family. Your family actually had groupies, he said.”

  “I was not taken with any of these warm murmuring subgroups and went to my room to listen to my records and petulantly lie on my bed. Soon I started to touch myself in the way I did routinely then. I put my hands in my jeans and thought of, well, what girls think of at fifteen.”

  “What did you think of?” Lorene asks, allowing her sentence to rise at the end like a real question.

  “That’s not what this story is about,” I say, smiling, blushing.

  “Come on, I want to know,” she says, laughing, putting her hand on my knee.

  “I honestly don’t remember. But, all right, for the sake of the story, let’s say I was thinking about the handsome scarred Indian inThe Searchers,the one who captures Natalie Wood.”

  “I remember him,” and Lorene is really laughing now. “Captured by Indians, ooo—”

  “All right, are you through? Let’s move on here.”

  She smiles and nods. “You know what I used to think about when I was fifteen?” she says.

  I look again past Lorene’s shoulder at the woman at the next table. She’s old, very old, and I watch her sip her Coke and move her lips. She’s talking softly to herself. I watch for a second, to make sure, yes, very much murmuring to herself. Lorene is talking, talking.

  “I used to think about Gram Parsons,” she says. “Tragic cultrock star. Sweet, Southern-boy angel, a Christian junkie, in one of those cool Nudie suits he wore — you know, those suits with appliqué birds and marijuana flowers on them that Southern rocker boys used to get at Nudie’s Western store in North Hollywood, back in the early seventies during that weird segue between hippies and glam rock.”

  I look at Lorene and shake my head. She thinks about clothes even when she masturbates.

  “OK, Dennis,” she says.

  “Skip it.”

  “Come on, tell me. I’m listening.”

  “Christ, OK. I was in my room, by myself, hating the warm embrace of my family, wanting separateness. Then there was a low knock at my door. It’s Dennis, with a drink and a joint, and he asks me if I want to get high. I’m rumpled and dizzy with dreams of erotic kidnappings. I let him in and we get stoned. He listens to my records with me and then he does the California come-on.”

  “He gives you a massage.”

  “Yes. And Lorene, to be touched felt so terrific. I leaned into it, and we were soon out of our clothes and on the floor of my room.”

  “With your whole family just down the hall.”

  “With my father’s best buddy. It was done rather easily, and I sensed after it was done a kind of paleness in his face. I think he realized then that this was a pretty odd situation, somewhat combustible, to say the least. I was suddenly in a panic.”

  “It is important to get this right, the part afterward,” Lorene says. She is right, it feels absolutely necessary to get it precisely correct. To articulate som
ething, if it gets at all at the thing, if it makes some narrative cohesion of it, even if it is not the truthbut the “truth,” is the only way to escape the things that bind your life. It’s the only way to make a life your life. The woman at the next table makes tiny gestures with her hands. She seems to think she’s invisible, murmuring to herself, in public.

  “ ‘What happens now?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘Nothing happens,’ he said.

  “ ‘But what about my father? We can’t tell him.’ Dennis was getting dressed and he looked hard at me.

  “ ‘Of course we can’t tell your father, Mina. It’s a secret.’ I, of course, started to cry at this point. He zipped his pants up. He said something to the effect of ‘Why are you crying?’ Then, I remember this, he said, ‘Things like this happen every day.’

  “ ‘Not to me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I’m crying.’ And I’ll never forget what he said next.

  “ ‘Look, Mina,’ he said, ‘let me let you in on a secret. Your father has a girlfriend. You know, his assistant Sheila?’

  “ ‘He does not,’ I said, really crying.

  “ ‘Your father’s sleeping with Sheila, his assistant. Or at least he was.’

  “ ‘No, that can’t be true,’ I said.

  “ ‘Yes. It’s a secret. Everyone has secrets just like this one. Even your mother, believe me, has her secrets—’ I stopped him, I guess, with my expression. But I knew it was true. He was right. The world, the grown-up world, was full of not-so-secret secrets. And really secret secrets. I thought of my uncles and aunts at family gatherings, and of distant looks at off-sides moments, unwrapping a present or pouring a drink. They were maybe thinking really of a secret life somewhere. Maybe even a grand passion. And it made them all seem complicated and sad in ways they hadn’t before. They were wives and husbands, human and full of desire, and no one knows, or maybe everyonedoes. And sometimes it is that way forever, and sometimes things break down and dissolve. My mother left my father the following year. And I never told anyone — well, except Michael, and now you — about Dennis.”