Of course I panicked, for in a way I had expected something of the sort to happen. The pattern was familiar. I stood in the doorway for a moment, near paralysis, and finally noticed that the two bags were still there. That at least proved that the whole episode had not been a dream. Then I heard water running toward the rear. I went into the main room and Lauren was in the shower. My relief was so overwhelming it was almost insane. I reached into the shower to embrace her and got myself soaking wet. Lauren began to laugh, and I was giddy too.
When Lauren was with me I often suspected that perhaps I might have imagined her, that she was a fantasy, an anima projection. But as long as I was with her, it was the rest of the world that seemed like a dream. I don’t recall now exactly how the next couple of days were passed. We spent a great deal of time in bed, we ate a lot, and we walked in the city. I was drinking hardly at all, forgoing even my evening glass of grappa in deference to Lauren and her return. I did introduce her to Signor Strozzi, and with her superior Italian she soon knew him better than I did. I don’t think we talked a great deal, and certainly of nothing of importance. Past and future were excluded from our conversation, as if by mutual agreement.
At the end of the two days I had to emerge from this concupiscent cloud and go back to work at QED. Lauren was left to her own devices. I promised to get her a spare key from Mimmo; meanwhile she could use the one ordinarily kept by Strozzi. Of course it occurred to me, that first day back on the flatbed, and other days afterward, that I might return to find the door locked, the bags gone, and no sign left to indicate that Lauren had ever been anything more than a ghost summoned up from the more shadowed regions of my mind. But at the close of each day I found that that had not happened after all, and by the end of the week my anxiety on the subject began to fade.
There was enough work to fill up my days to the brim and prevent me from worrying about much of anything else. In the first place, Dario’s interest in the proceedings flared up again once the sync-up and the coding were complete. He began to hang around the editing room, and his presence made me nervous. What Dario wanted from me was a version of the impossible: he wanted his film turned into a great work of art. I wasted much time during the first week of the rough cut listening to Mimmo’s translations of Dario’s most ponderous ideas, many of which were either not really translatable or senseless in the first instance. I counterattacked with barrages of technical information which I suspected that he in his turn would have trouble understanding. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have lost this little game, but since I was getting paid through an outside channel I could deal from a position of strength. Also, Mimmo aided and abetted me in the project to detoxify Dario. Together, during that first week, we prevailed upon him to accept what could be accomplished, rather than merely wished for. By the week’s end his visits to the cutting room had become infrequent and perfunctory, and Mimmo and I were getting more done.
Once I got used to the limitations, it wasn’t a particularly difficult cutting job. There was no question of being artistic; the material simply was not there. All I had to do was turn out reasonably solid craftsmanship. It was journeyman’s work, but I’ve never objected to that. Along about the end of the second week I knew the film could be cut into a decent piece of television — not extraordinarily good, not exceptionally bad.”
In a few days’ work with the logs, Mimmo and I put together a loose overall structure for the program, like the outer edges of a puzzle. After that was done it was mainly a matter of filling in the pieces. And at this point the work became less fully absorbing. Fortunately or unfortunately, it allowed my mind to wander.
I fell into the rhythm of working by rote, and the job began to go faster. Pieces fell into their appropriate places: establishing shot, interview with some rehab center official (here endless match cutting was required, to create an illusion of continuity where in truth there was none), cutaway to encounter group, some horror story told by a client, cutaway to a street scene, say, and then another horror story. This assembly of parts was satisfactory, yet my mind drifted. I began to feel a vague unease, to suspect that certain pieces missing from the puzzle would never be found or had never been there at all. There were many horror stories from the clients, the recovering addicts. They addressed me more and more insistently from the Steenbeck’s screen, that cube of light in the darkened room, and in my mind I mumbled vague excuses: But we were never in the hard stuff anyway … well, cocaine sometimes … well, a lot maybe, but that’s for the rich, the privileged, the safe, not for you, street junkie …
And I wondered if Kevin might have had such defensive thoughts as these when he filmed these people and recorded their words. I was quite certain that he had not. But the question remained, another missing piece, a fragment that hadn’t been developed on the film.
With this background speculation about Kevin came other, unrelated concerns about Lauren. The plates on the Steenbeck whirled; I went on cutting and splicing, and yet as the completed segments of the rough cut rolled back behind me, the, questions which I would not ask directly, the big ones and the little ones, kept coming back again and again. A big question: Why had she come back to me, and did she intend to stay this time? A small one: Why had she completely unpacked the cloth suitcase into the shelves of the apartment and left the Halliburton, which one would have expected to contain the most crucial articles, locked shut in the same place on the floor near the entrance where I had seen it that first day? I told myself the questions didn’t matter. That it was only my editorial habits, the training of the cutting room, which made me want to force all inconsistent information into some sort of conformity. The theory was reasonable and rational, but as time went by I believed it less and less.
The questions (they had hardly matured into suspicions) only troubled me during the workday, when I was apart from Lauren. Together, we were both completely absorbed in the bewilderment of our passion, which as I knew from repeated experience only grew stronger over the course of her disappearances and returns. I knew that one way or another it was her very elusiveness which gave her such a hold over me when she was there. Of course I also understood that she might also exercise that influence over others, and most probably did so. Whether she was aware of how and why she did it I was unable to guess.
And when I was with her, I truly did not care, for she did make me happy. It is a quality of such love as this to make ordinary actions and objects glow, suffused in an aura of the heart’s delight. At our best moments together, Lauren and I had always been able to take possession of this joy. What we had failed with an equal consistency to do was to transform the delirium into contentment, to endure the dailiness of a mutual life. I could and did remind myself that this failure characterized by far the greater part of our marriage, if you wanted to call it that. But during the good times, I loved Lauren for her mystery, her impenetrability, as much as for anything else. Much of what Kierkegaard says about women is wrong or at least cannot travel across the century. But often I think he was right to believe that the mystery of woman cannot be reduced and that it is an error, a dangerous one, to try. Though sometimes the impulse is irresistible.
Then it was June, almost the end of June, and Lauren had been in Rome for over a month, and I was done with the cut. I had come as close to making a silk purse out of that sow’s ear as I believed anyone could have done, and now there was nothing left to the job but the tedious chore of A and B rolling the original footage. There hadn’t been a peep out of Kevin the whole time, but that was typical Kevin. I was my own boss if you discounted Dario, who seemed easy enough to discount. I decided that Mimmo and I deserved another short holiday before we got into the final phase.
On the afternoon of my vacation day, Lauren and I met by prearrangement in the Piazza del Popolo, and had an ice and an espresso in a bar there. Afterward we climbed the staircase at the western end of the square to the smaller and seedier Piazzale Napoleone, whose eminence overlooks the river and the western end of
the city. We had not been talkative. Lauren seated herself on the gray stone balustrade and looked out over the western rooftops into the beginning of sunset. I paced a little away from her, smoking, and then returned to take her hand. She had lovely hands, long, elegant, tapered, the hands of a Flemish Madonna. I spread her fingers, bending them a little, and traced the lines of her palm.
“What do you see?” Lauren said. “In my future.”
“I see a fair man and a dark man,” I said. “A long journey over water. Much trial and tribulation, to be followed by success and happiness.” I was joking, but the words made me sad as I spoke them and I dropped her hand. The falling sun made me squint a little as I looked out over the river at the silhouette of Saint Peter’s, which dominated the horizon. It occurred to me with a minor pang how similar this setting was to that of our first meeting in Florence.
“A little more specific, please,” Lauren said lightly. I lifted her hand but did not look at it.
“I see trouble and darkness,” I said, mimicking some generic foreign accent. “I feel that the lady suffers from uncertainty of mind. Difficult choices lie ahead and she may find it difficult to choose.”
Lauren nudged me in the ribs.
“Don’t make it so gloomy,” she said. “Isn’t there a happy ending out there somewhere?”
“Signora, I am unable to see that far.” The truth was that I suddenly did feel very despondent. I turned away from her and leaned back against her lap.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I said. There, it was finally out, making sound in the air. “Why did you come to Rome this time?”
Lauren put her hands around my head and covered up my eyes.
“Is it really so important?” she whispered in my ear. “Do you really have to know?”
“I’m going into one of my rational phases, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Can’t help it, you know, sometimes.”
Lauren took her hands away.
“I wanted to be with you again,” she said. “Couldn’t that be enough?”
“If I believe it,” I said. Once I get started it’s often hard to stop. “Sorry, slipped out. I believe it.”
“You ought to believe it. “
“I don’t suppose it would be possible to think of it as a permanent arrangement, then?”
Lauren did not answer, not much to my surprise. I thought again how nothing can be better or at least more manageable than a little.
“Could I?”
“I don’t know,” she said. I felt her forehead drop into the space between my shoulder blades. “Try not to push.”
I turned around to face her, grasped her by the upper arms. “Haven’t I been good, though?” I said. “I’ve been sober and industrious. For a month and a half already. I’m a reformed character, it’s written all over my face.”
“And now the job’s almost over with. Now what?”
“I thought that’s what I was asking you.”
Lauren lowered her head. “I don’t know.”
“Same old song,” I said. Come sei bella, Roma … If you stay you will regret it ... Et cetera. Et cetera.
“All right,” Lauren said, looking up. “There was one other reason. I had to see some people here. I could get a part in a feature. A good part. That’s how I could afford to come, for one thing.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said. Could this be one of Kevin’s little schemes? was what I was thinking, but there’s some limit to how unpleasant I’ll be out loud. “Did you see them?”
“I saw them.”
“And?”
“Nothing definite, of course. But it looks promising. “
“And you got a ticket out of it, at the very least. Well, that’s good. Congratulations, if it’s not premature. You could have told me, it’s good news after all.”
“Didn’t want to jinx it,” Lauren said.
“Oh, girl,” I said, and put my arms around her. “You won’t jinx it.” Lauren nodded against my shoulder. Another line slipped out.
“Why do I get this feeling that there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Because I can’t tell you,” Lauren said.
“I think you better tell me,” I said. I was right again, lucky me, though not too pleased with the fact. What’s wrong with this picture …
“Not now,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Okay,” I said, drawing her a little closer. I could feel in my fingertips that she was slightly frightened. “Okay.” I was ready to drop the subject, being a little scared of it myself. I thought I might not like the answer if I did get one. I hugged Lauren and rocked her a little, looking over her shoulder into the piazza. It was a run-down little park, not a museum piece like so much else in Rome, and I liked it for that. But now I noticed for the first time since we’d come there that someone had been dropping bloody needles in the weeds along the wall.
It was that night or maybe the night after that Lauren woke us both up, quivering and trembling from some nightmare. In the past she had sometimes been troubled with recurring bad dreams, but if she’d had any since she’d come to Rome I didn’t know about it. I tried to get her to tell me what had happened, but she was still half asleep and all she would say was “I’m scared, I’m scared.”
So I did something that had worked the few times I’d tried it before. I rolled against her and put my mouth beside her mouth and whispered, “I’m going to suck out the bad dream. I’m going to draw all the evil spirits out of your mind.” I breathed against the corner of her mouth and went on saying words to that effect until I could tell from her breathing that she was completely asleep again.
I didn’t particularly believe in the evil spirit hypothesis, but I was wakeful for a while after I had performed the exorcism and Lauren was back asleep. I lay on my side with my eyes open and stared at the corners of the room. The locked silver case by the door seemed to have some sort of ghostly luminescence ... I thought for some reason of Lauren in the hospital, those frightening periods of nonbeing that the stroke had given her. There was a flash and a smell of smoke and I felt a bullet enter my left temple, I could even see the parabola the bullet described inside my head, curving over my shrinking brain and exiting through my left ear. My head snapped back, my eyes opened, and it was morning. Lauren slept on quietly by my side, and I wondered if I might have drawn that phantasmal harmless bullet out of her dream after all.
10
I WASN’T GOING TO GO back to sleep and risk having any more dreams like that, so I got up and went in early to QED. Mimmo was sleeping on the floor of the flat and I woke him up and sent him out to buy us a dozen pairs of white cotton gloves which we would wear while handling the original stock. While he was gone I vacuumed the editing room, the floors and walls and even the ceiling, and then went over all the surfaces with a damp sponge. I am fastidious about A and B rolling: no dust, no fingerprints, not even the fog of somebody’s breath is allowed to touch my film. I had the room cleaned to my standards by noon, and when Mimmo came back with the gloves we set up the synchronizer and rewinds and got down to it. A and B rolling is a mindless task which requires little but patience and precision, a great deal of both. To make it a trifle less tedious, I could explain to Mimmo what it was all about. You make two rolls, corresponding to the work print. Roll A carries work print shot one; roll B carries an equivalent length of black leader. Roll B carries work print shot two; roll A, an equivalent length of black leader. And so on. When it’s all done the A and B rolls go to the lab and two runs through the optical printer will produce a seamless print with no visible marks of editing, or at least that’s what you hope. All three rolls are locked into the synchronizer, and you simply do not make a mistake, as an error of a single frame will spoil the entire sequence.
The A and B rolls are composed of the original footage, to which any damage is irreversible, which is why all the fetishism about dust and gloves and so on. QED’s equipment stash didn’t run
to a hot splicer, so we had to use old-fashioned glue splices: shaving the film at the edges of the frames and sticking them together, which is a nervous-making process, as a slip of the hand can ruin a section of film. But because of my lengthy experience with low budget productions I was fairly fast at doing it.
I worked for a day or so with Mimmo just watching me and sometimes handing me things. In the middle of the week I sat him down in front of the synchronizer and walked him through his own first few splices. He was slow, of course, but that was all to the good; the main thing was that he didn’t scratch anything or spill any glue on the film. After four or five days (when I myself was beginning to suffer from eye strain and a sore back) I decided it would be to the benefit of Mimmo’s all-round editing experience if I left him to work an afternoon on his own.
That set me free to get out of the stuffy little editing room for the first time that week. I took a walk around the Piazza Navona and then went back to Trastevere. Lauren wasn’t home; she was spending her afternoon with the phantom film people who constituted such a simple straight answer to nagging major question A (Why is Lauren in Rome?) that her initial reluctance to tell me about them was left unsatisfactorily explained. The coincidence of her absence and my afternoon off was unplanned, or so I maintained to myself at the time, though in retrospect I perceive that it did have the character of a deliberate accident, perhaps even of deception by omission or some such cloudy moral category. Because nagging major question A still retained in my mind what I already suspected might be a causal connection to nagging minor question B: Why doesn’t she ever open the Halliburton — and what’s in it, anyway?
My efforts to fox out the combination locks with subtlety didn’t come to much, not that I’d really expected them to. But there was such a quantity of metalworking equipment lying around the place that I found I could pop the rivets out of the hasps without making too much of a mess. The gear was there to solder them back in place afterward too, and I even found some silvery polish which covered up the few scratches I left on the finish and made it almost imperceptible that the case had ever been tampered with in the first place.
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