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  For Agnes

  “What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking at what is to be seen?”

  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  PART ONE

  * * *

  * * *

  WOMEN AND FILM

  Home/Explore film and TV/Reviews and Recommendations/Articles

  “HOW I BEGAN” INSTALLMENT #32: MEADOW MORI

  This is a love story.

  My boyfriend used to, used to. Now he is. Enormous. He says he worries about exposure, books, articles, lies, truth. Everything.

  “Trust,” I say. “Trust. One day I will be old.”

  “You will be the one to leave me,” he says. “You’ll see.”

  “That is such a cliché,” I say. He laughs.

  “Yes,” he says. “It is. We are.”

  * * *

  I climb around him. He is very good at one thing. Everything happens slowly. He watches me, and I climb atop him, feeling his eyes. He laughs, and his laugh is deep and I feel it shake his body.

  “Smoke,” he says. I light up a cigar. I sit, on the wrecked bed, in a camisole and panties, and I puff a little breath at the red coal.

  “It smells awful,” I say.

  “It smells delicious,” he says and laughs again. Sometimes I help him get dressed. I button his endless shirt. He wears a black shirt, black pants with an elastic band where a zipper should be, and a black sports jacket if he is going to meet someone. He is always going to meet someone, but I don’t go. He has a table at Ma Maison, by the door, and people have lunch and make deals there. People stop by, there is some talk, he makes them laugh, he tells them stories, and maybe something will come of it.

  While he is gone, I roam around his house. It is a three-bedroom bungalow, with a bean-shaped tile pool in the back. His having lived there will one day be something a real estate agent talks about. The rooms are overfilled with things, mostly papers: notes jotted on envelopes, sketches, marked-up play booklets from Samuel French, storyboards, letters unopened, letters opened, photographs, screenplays—so many screenplays, towers of screenplays—receipts, newspaper clippings, unused sheaves of hotel stationery from Prague or Paris or Denver. I don’t clean or organize anything. He prefers I not touch things and misplace them. He will use his cane and start hobbling around, looking for this or that. He will find something else, a cocktail napkin with some scribbles, a matchbook with a phone number. If he finds anything funny—say a drawing, one of his cartoons—or if he finds something pretty—a postcard or an origami flower—he offers it to me, kisses my hand. He is generous, although I understand he doesn’t have money, but in that peculiar Los Angeles way of not having money where you still have nice things: a Mercedes, Cuban cigars, a housekeeper, a cellar full of wine from Échezeaux and La Tâche and Romanée-Conti. But I see the bills. He does whatever he can to make money. “Must keep the balls in the air,” he says. I say I will look for work, and I mean it. He insists that I do not. He wants me to stay at home, even if he isn’t there. I accept this, and I like having days of solitude and nights with him. I like it.

  It is another day and he is doing another voice-over. My boyfriend is a disembodied voice on a very popular TV show. He is old and fat, but his voice is rich and strong. He sounds like the voice of America, of a confident, glistening, win-soaked America, full of possibility and ambition and verve. He sounds that way still, when he wants to, and everyone loves to hear that voice. It makes them think, Oh yes, weren’t we. And then it makes them sad, but sad in a pleasing way. His voice does all of this to people. Still.

  He lies on the bed, propped up by pillows, watching me. I am wearing a short butter satin robe that gently opens when I move. There is a tray of food in front of me: a steak with grilled potatoes, a portion of haricots verts, a large glass of red wine. The wine lingers, silky and warm in my mouth, and after a few sips, it makes me laugh. He watches me eat the steak and drink the wine. I like his watching. I like how fascinated he is by my everything. He sighs.

  “What?” I say.

  “Old age is a shipwreck,” he says. He doesn’t stop looking at me as he speaks. “De Gaulle said that. The French know everything, and they know that too, even if you don’t.”

  Other times, after he has done a talk show, a voice-over taping, a phone conference, a lunch meeting, other times he is not in the mood to watch me. We go to sleep. Tonight, things must have been quite grueling. When he comes in he looks gray and worn. This is what age is to me—that naked, worn-out face. Because a young person, if she feels bad, fed up, she must really make a show for you to get it. But old people, the only thing that keeps their faces from looking hopeless all the time is a lot of moving and a lot of expression, a lot of what my boyfriend calls flimflam. The minute they stop working at it, they look like hell.

  He goes right to bed. Sometimes when he is like that I stay up and watch a movie on my own. But tonight I decide I should lie in bed beside him. He sweats and I can feel how restless he is. It is hard to move on the bed, his body sags and pulls him. He turns on his side, his face red and washed in sweat. He takes leaky, noisy gulps at the air.

  “Do you want more room? Should I leave?” I ask.

  “No, no.” He looks at me. Whatever was building in his breath seems to pass. At last he whispers to me in the dark: “I just panic sometimes, which makes it worse. This body, this flesh—I feel like Fortunado in ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’ Do you know the story?”

  I shake my head. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.

  “Oh, it’s marvelous,” he says. “An elaborate murder by immurement, by being walled in. You see? I am not exactly suffocating, but being slowly immured behind a wall built of flesh. Brick by brick, until I am obliterated. Do you know how many stories and fairy tales concern immurement? Or being buried alive? It is the most elemental of fears.”

  He pauses, and I can hear him taking noisy breaths in the dark.

  “You must stay, darling. See how just talking to you calms me down,” he whispers.

  I move up on the pillows, I put my hands on the sides of his face. I make him look into my eyes. His eyes are dark and wet. They look like a boy’s eyes with laugh wrinkles at the edges. He presses his cheek against my hand. He presses his lips against my hand. I kiss his forehead, I pull his head in close to my chest. He rests against me and goes to sleep at last.

  I told you this is a love story.

  One day, one of the very last days, it will be a different story. But before I tell about that part, please let me tell this part. The very beginning part. The how-we-met part. I was just finishing my senior year at Wake School, a private arts high school in Santa Monica. It was 1984. I was a very good student; I had no need to rebel and actually felt comfortable at school. I did my senior project on him. It was a kind of stunt. I have always liked stunts (and also, as you may have guessed, pranks, hoaxes, games). I had read how he said he learned everything he knew about filmmaking from watching Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights twenty times. My project was called, “A Response to My Favorite Filmmaker’s Response to Watching City Lights Multiple Times (From Emulation to Extravagance).” Short official title (as it was too long for
the school course credit form): “(From Emulation to Extravagance).” It consisted of me watching my boyfriend’s most famous film—his brilliant, wunderkind, iconic film—twenty times over three days. That is, consecutively except for when I slept. The school let me set up in a room with a couch/bed where I could be comfortable, and I had meals brought in. (It was that kind of school.) I kept a record of my thoughts as I viewed the film and posted the pages on a large bulletin board in the adjacent hallway. People were welcome to watch the film with me, or simply watch me watch the film. My notes were the record of those twenty viewings and I still have them:

  Viewing 1:

  Fantastic, this is gorgeous. I can’t wait to see it again.

  Viewing 2:

  The composition is so self-conscious.

  Viewing 3:

  The person who is narrating always occupies the lower right quadrant. It is a code, a secret code that can be charted. Windows must be passed through, seamless and yet with bravado. It is brash, revolutionary, yet very controlled and orchestrated.

  Viewing 4:

  Actually, not entirely consistent in the composition and cinematic tropes. Occasionally arbitrary?

  Viewing 5:

  Maybe not arbitrary, maybe the broken pattern is deliberate, the thing that makes the film live.

  Viewing 6:

  There is a kind of purgatory that happens on the sixth viewing. You are bored of the repetition, and then you go through it. You are liberated from the narrative, the story. But it is only because you know it so well, and then you can absorb HOW the story is told.

  Viewing 7:

  Agnes Moorehead. Paul Stewart. George Coulouris. Everett Sloane. Joseph Cotten.

  Viewing 8:

  He did not watch City Lights twenty times. You don’t need to watch a film twenty times to discover all it has to teach. Maybe eight times, maybe, but no way twenty.

  Viewing 9:

  Dialogue, I’m just listening to the dialogue. My eyes are closed. Music and dialogue.

  Viewing 10:

  I’ve memorized this whole film. I could recite the entire movie. I’m going to say all the lines with the actors as they say them.

  Viewing 11:

  I did it, I did it. Just think of how this can impress and amuse people. I’ll always have this.

  Viewing 12:

  I turned the sound off. Light—gorgeous silver light—and those tactile gray planes, almost abstract.

  Viewing 13:

  I am dreaming through these viewings. My mind wanders; I try to pull it back to the film. It is like trying to meditate. I have to let go in order to focus.

  Viewing 14:

  I’ve had it with this film. I’m growing to hate it. I’m listing every continuity error.

  Viewing 15:

  This was a bad idea. I have ruined the movie. It wasn’t meant to be looked at like this. No film is. It is meant to be magic, not endless brain wallpaper.

  Viewing 16:

  I’m frankly ignoring this film now. I block it out. I endure it. I am just holding out for the hours I get to sleep, unmolested by images and sound.

  Viewing 17:

  Now when I sleep, I dream of this movie. I’ve become a part of the film now. This movie preceded me and colonized me and will outlast me.

  Viewing 18:

  It really is good, you know.

  Viewing 19:

  I never realized how funny it is; I am crying from laughter. My laughter echoes in the room. Now every line seems to wink and turn on itself. We are in some private, exclusive world, just me and the movie.

  Viewing 20:

  Done.

  I used a spotless 16 mm print I acquired through Jay Hosney, the cinema studies teacher at my school. This print was a gleaming object of 1940s light and shadow. I had a projector and reels that had to be changed, making it hardly a seamless dream. But the reels were so physical, and as I handled them, it was almost as if I were touching not just the object but the film itself, mingling with it in some deep way, overcoming its implacable borders. In the end, I talked to the screen; I stood in the stream of dusty shades and shapes; I watched the projection flicker across my body; I hallucinated.

  * * *

  At graduation I was awarded the senior prize. The summer was suddenly upon me. I found his address on a map of the stars’ homes. I sent him a copy of a school article about me and a letter explaining “A Response to My Favorite Filmmaker’s Response to Watching City Lights Multiple Times (From Emulation to Extravagance).” I told him how in homage to his watching City Lights twenty times, I watched his most famous film twenty consecutive times. I also told him how an idea of him came to me as I watched: that he was everything Americans were, writ large. Written in giant, bold, back-lit sans-serif letters. I realized, as I sat in the dark, that he conjured up our past and our future, the glory and the disappointment. We lived in it, but we didn’t like it. In fact, we hated it. We hated him. So now he was trotted out for quips, and sometimes he said disturbing things, uncomfortable things. He couldn’t help it. He never learned, and I loved him for it.

  He wrote me back right away. He said he would like, very much, to have lunch with me. I came to his modest Brentwood home. A middle-aged woman served us grilled fish by his pool. He didn’t talk at all about movies. But he did talk about Brazil, about voodoo, about the paranormal, about extinct animals and the etymology of the word chivalry.

  Then he said, “It wasn’t City Lights, you know. Although City Lights is a very fine film, one of my favorites, I believe that I said I had watched Stagecoach over and over to teach myself how to make movies.”

  John Ford! Not Chaplin. I felt my face get hot. Had I misread that? It didn’t seem possible that I could have made such a mistake. He pushed butter into the soft center of a roll. He bit into the roll, all the while watching me. I took a sip of ice water and watched him back. At once I knew what to say, but I took another sip of water first, placed my glass on the table and leaned back.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said slowly. “You were lying about all of it anyway, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said.

  “You didn’t watch any film twenty times. It’s a lie.”

  “I don’t think of it as lying. I think of it as a little story I told about me, or what people want to think of me.” He took another bite of his roll. It was nearly finished, only a dainty piece remained between his meaty fingertips. He slowly chewed and swallowed. “I’ve already disappointed you.”

  “No, you haven’t at all,” I said. “It is much better as a lie.”

  He barked a laugh at this; he laughed so hard his eyes closed. His body shook. He finally stopped laughing. “Just marvelous,” he said. “I feel sorry for the college you’re going to attend.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know about going to college,” I said. “I don’t like the way everyone expects certain things of me because I am . . .”

  “A bright young person,” he said. “Possibly the best thing in the world one can be.” The middle-aged woman, who apparently was the housekeeper, cleared the plates. At first I imagined she might be a wife or girlfriend of some kind but then I realized how unlikely it would be that such a person might wait on us. I watched her disappear through the sliding glass door.

  He patted my hand, and then I leaned over and kissed him gently, pressing my lips against his. Understand, I was no groupie, no seeker of famous men. He seemed to me, for whatever reason, a chagrined innocent, a man I could trust. So I kissed him, then pulled back and waited for it to change my life. He shook his head, and he laughed again, a lower, softer laugh that trailed off into something else. He looked at me like he couldn’t believe his luck. People, if you have never had that, that kind of look, well, it is worth giving up everything for. I sat back down. We ate crème brûlée. He had a beard. I never liked beards before. But I had never liked anything before, I r
ealized.

  I never left. I did return once to my parents’ house—only a few miles away on the other side of Sunset Boulevard. I drove my graduation gift, a dark blue VW Rabbit convertible (this makes me sound spoiled, but it was used, a 1982, and you should see what some of my fellow graduates got as gifts), up into the winding streets of Bel-Air. We lived in a recently built very large one-level house that hugged the edge of a scrubby canyon. Sliding glass doors in every room faced the landscaped yard: the pool and the hazy view beyond the pool of other houses with pools on the opposite side of the canyon. Some of the walls in our house were lined with suede panels and other walls were lined with mirrors. My parents liked the effect of juxtaposing contemporary surfaces with an elaborate collection of French and Italian antique furniture. My mother considers herself a person with interior design skills, or at least a very strong sense of her own taste, and I admit that it worked in a way that at least felt deliberate. I didn’t mind looking at the fine Louis XIV gilt-painted wood table set unexpectedly in front of the palm trees and cactuses visible through the glass panels. But I myself would have preferred a Mediterranean-style Craftsman bungalow decorated in Art Deco tubular furniture with the chromed curves and the squeak of leather promising a life of gliding modernity. That’s me all right: out-of-date modernity with its edge of future promise unfulfilled, even failed. Which I admit contains a smug kind of nostalgia, but you can’t help what you find beautiful. I so loved the clothing style of the 1930s that my prom “dress” was a slim, high-waisted vintage men’s suit (in those days I liked to dress like a man, albeit a kind of louche, fem-stylized “man”) that I had rented from Western Costume, something a minor player wore once in a long-forgotten silvery black-and-white film. But my mother was different from me. She liked things hypernew or very antique. None of this freighted recent past for her. “Vintage?” she would say when we went into the expensive, retro-stocked stores that now dotted Melrose Avenue. “That’s what they call this garage-sale attic junk?” Or she would make a sound of hard-pushed air in her throat, which I came to understand meant that she had a similar item once and had happily discarded it years ago. She had no tolerance for the sentimental revisiting of the 1950s that became so popular during my grade-school years. She never understood our desire to dress up in sock hop outfits for “’50s days” and felt that watching Grease was ridiculous (not to mention inaccurate, i.e., “The fifties weren’t fun, by the way”). My father did not have such strong feelings, but he went along with my mother in matters of decor and in almost everything else.