Innocents and Others Read online

  Then the last day came—ready or not—but of course I didn’t know it was the last day at the time.

  * * *

  We have lunch by the pool. The sunlight sparkles on the water. He looks pale, and somehow almost frail. He hardly eats or drinks, and lately his face has become gaunt, as though his full cheeks were hanging down from his bones. I should have guessed what was coming, for he surely does.

  “Wonderful news,” he says.

  “What?”

  “My picture will be financed. Things are falling into place. I just have to stay alive long enough to make the damn thing.”

  “Stop that—you’ll be able to do it. You are ready.”

  “Yes, I am. I feel as if I can make my greatest film. I know exactly how I want to do it. I’ve been dreaming of it for years. And at last, I get a chance.”

  I see him momentarily perk up, excited at the thought.

  “After all this time, I am finally making another film,” he says. But as he exhales, I can see something else, some trickery below the surface.

  He never made the movie. We all know that now. But about that very last day, the very last night:

  He is going on The Merv Griffin Show. He will talk about the new project, get things heated up. He has some backing, but he still needs more. They use him, the wonderfully witty and entertaining old has-been, and he will use them back, sneak in his agitprop on his own behalf. “That,” he says, “is how this town works, and I have always understood how this fucking town works.”

  I watch him on TV. He is eloquent and generous. I watch him and feel lucky.

  It doesn’t go the way he expected. He comes home from the studio, white-faced and damp. He shambles in on his cane, falls back onto the couch with a moan.

  “How did it go?” I ask.

  “A disaster. I went in to do my song and dance, but instead I was a dignified old man, elegiac and stinking of the grave.”

  “Nonsense,” I say. “I thought you were magnificent.” I sit down on the floor at his feet. I undo his shoes. His heavy wide feet are white and swollen. I take one foot in my hand: I feel tender toward this heavy small thing, the weight of a lifetime always pushing down on it. I press it with my palm for a minute, one and then the other. His feet are oddly soft and uncallused, but they also seem useless, abandoned somehow. I wrap my arm across his legs and push my face against his knees.

  “I am sorry,” he says.

  I pull back from his legs and look up at him. His face is barely visible across the landscape of his body.

  “What?”

  “I have nothing I can give you, no money. I have ex-wives and a wife, actually, and children. And very little I haven’t spent. It is possible you will get a window of attention, and you can do something with that. Believe me, the attention can hurt, so you must make sure you get something out of it.”

  I start to cry. He stops talking and places his hand on my head.

  “Can you shut up? Please?” I say. He sighs and I help him to his bed.

  You can guess the rest. What happened to him was on the news.

  The housekeeper comes into my room and wakes me up. Her face is sweaty, and she seems to tremble as she speaks. She tells me she has called 911, and that the ambulance is about to take him away. I scramble out of bed and stop at the doorway, unsure what to do. I watch them take him out on a gurney. He is white and nonresponsive, his massive body already collapsing into itself, looking passed and dead to me. The housekeeper says, “I am calling his family.” And she disappears into his room, closing the door behind her. Soon—within an hour—people will go to the hospital. Then they will descend on this place: a relative, an agent, the press. I pull on my jeans. I had slept in an oversized Mercury Theatre jersey, which I now use as a tunic shirt. I need, it seems to me, to get out of there fast. I pull a suitcase from the closet, the very same one I had brought over after a few days of living with him.

  I look around my room. Here is what I take: my clothes, my videotapes, my notebooks, and a few little souvenirs he gave me (some lacquered balls for juggling, a deck of cards, a lobby card for the last of his great films, an annotated copy of King Lear with his small neat notes in the margins along with the King Lear screenplay he wrote but never shot, a long Nubian dress, and a vintage Mark IV viewfinder on a lanyard). I also take the wicker box filled with his love letters. Of course I do. I make the bed. I close the closet door. There is no sign of me in the bedroom or anywhere in the house. I walk to the back door in case someone is arriving. I hesitate as I pass his room. I push open the door. The bed is a mess; as they pulled him onto the gurney they must have dragged all the bedclothes off. I look at his dresser where he left his watch and his pocket notebook. His vest and scarf hang from a chair back, just as he left them last night. I pick up the scarf and hold it to my face. I can smell his hair oil and aftershave. I drape it gently across the dresser. I ought to leave. A tumbler of liquor on the end table by the bed. He couldn’t sleep so he drank and read. Next to the book are some scribbled notes and his sturdy fountain pen. I pick up the pen—it is green resin, fat and substantial in my hand. Just one small thing of his. I put it in my pocket. I slip out the sliding back door to the patio. I open the garage, throw my suitcase into the backseat of my Rabbit, and go.

  I drive to Brentwood Village and call my parents on a pay phone. “Everything is fine,” I say. “I just wanted to say hello.” The radio in my car is already reporting that my boyfriend was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center. I stare out the window and listen to the valedictory obituary, something carefully constructed long ago and updated each year until it would finally be read on the air. Nobody had really wanted to see him lumber onto TV sets to talk. They had been waiting to pronounce him dead, to bring to a proper close his long American story.

  I head straight to the camera supply store with my father’s wad of cash and pick out some gear. Then onto Route 15 and then 40, by myself, driving to New York. I drive until I reach a motel just over the New Mexico border. It isn’t until I collapse on the motel bed and switch on the TV that I feel it. I watch the special report, and I see him young and beautiful. Close to my age, in fact. And out of that young man comes my boyfriend’s voice. I cry and hold the motel pillow against my face. I see his face as he lay on the gurney, and it is that image that makes me feel how lost he is to me. How much I will miss him. How much I will always love him. I sleep.

  In the early-morning light, I sit on the motel bed and examine the equipment I have bought. I read instructions; I put pieces together. I lift the camera and look through the viewfinder.

  I will make my trip and I will also make a film diary of my trip called A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents. My first film since high school. I will make film after film that spring and summer. In the fall I will briefly attend the college with the excellent undergraduate film program. My life will begin to take an ordinary shape, as if the past nine months never happened. As if it were a dream, an unfinished film, a lost radio broadcast.

  I am a hungry young woman, just like thousands of other young women. But I have some ideas. A directive, of sorts. I will work and I will work. I have said this is a love story, and indeed it begins that way: my love of cinema, as pure as any I have known. Making, watching, thinking cinema. I become a machine of cinema, a monocular creator. It is as though I had been a drawn-back rubber band my whole life, seeming to pull farther and farther away from the life I wanted, until I am released and then I come forward with a huge snap. I am no longer wishing; I am doing. What do I do? I make films that excite and please me, occasionally frustrate me, and for a long while that feels like enough. Later I will find this meager in a number of ways. Later I will see it as self-aggrandizing, problematic, not just useless but hurtful. Later I will quit.

  But there is still a bit more of this inaugural story to tell, the end of the story of how I began. A narrative thr
ead that I have left hanging. So here it is: a year after he died, I was working late and began to think about him. There had been a big retrospective of his work, and there was a flurry of articles in the paper. I knew more about him and his work than all of these people. I considered my future and my opportunities. I took the wicker box out. I read the letters. They were ­beautifully written: some were a little erotic, some were funny. They could be tastefully edited, in any case.

  I took them out on the fire escape with me, and read them as I smoked. I could have shown them to an agent, published them, offered them to the highest bidder. That’s what he had suggested—no, urged—me to do. If I approached it all in the right way, the interest in me could lead to a chance to make a film. One little chance to take that attention and use it to my advantage. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it was like a puzzle for me to figure out: here was how I thought the world worked; here was how I thought I fit in it.

  I also could burn them, one by one, like a girl in a black-and-white movie. Every last one.

  But instead I perched on the steps under a shimmer of deep-night summer stars, and I started once again at the beginning. I read one, folded it, and put it away. I read another, then another, then another. When I got to the end, I put them back in the box, closed the box, and put them away, my secret forever.

  I told you this was a love story.

  —Meadow Mori, 11/5/2014

  Meadow Mori was born in Los Angeles in 1966. She has directed and produced feature-length documentaries, essay films, shorts, and video installations including Kent State: Recovered (1992), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary; Play Truman (1993); Portrait of Deke (1987), which won a BATT Silver Medal and the jury prize at the Seattle Film Festival; Inward Operator (1998), which was a jury prize winner at the Sundance Festival, and Children of the Disappeared (2001). Parts of A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents, the making of which is described in the post above, can be viewed here. Her reconstructions of famous lost films (made in 1984–1985) can be viewed here.

  Related links

  Carrie Wexler, A Conversation with Mira Shirlihan: Number 8

  Meadow Mori interview, Sound on Sound, June 1999

  Meadow Mori film channel at Gleaners.net and Vimeo

  Comments (866)

  Mouchette Jan 6

  This is so disgusting.

  Sleepovergirl Jan 6

  She was Carrie Wexler’s best friend, but she barely mentions her here.

  LegacyAdmit 12:15 am

  What happened to the letters?! Did she finally publish them?

  Eds 12:30 am

  A Carrie Wexler interview can be read here.

  Limpidpools 12:33 am

  Is it just me, or is this a straight-up star fucking/sleep your way up story? Yay, feminism. Not.

  Limpidpools → Mouchette 12:40 am

  Like you said, disgusting.

  Mouchette → Limpidpools 12:41 am

  I meant a teenager sleeping with an old obese man. And calling that a “love story.” Call it whatever you want. It’s just sad.

  dogyears → Limidpools 7:22 am

  Nice to be so judgey about a great artist. Yay, female solidarity.

  Limpidpools → dogyears 9:30 am

  Who says I am a woman. #feminismfail

  TheQualiaConundrum22 → LegacyAdmit 9:33 am

  She has never published them. She also stopped making films a few years ago. She had some sort of breakdown.

  Eberhardfaber 9:37 am

  I want to read the letters. I wonder if she will publish them now that she has told everyone about this relationship. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a setup for an announcement of a publishing deal.

  deranger 10:02 am

  So cynical! Don’t you think the point of this is that she doesn’t plan on exploiting the letters? That she got what she got on her own. His help to her was inspiration. What she did is unrelated to the famous boyfriend.

  Makemoney 12:42 pm

  I didn’t believe it until I saw this with my own eyes! I work from home and make $1050 a week doing easy transcription and data entry. Go to www.workfromhome.com and stop struggling.

  films4freedom 1:00 pm

  If you like Meadow Mori’s films, you should check out theendpoint dot net. We aggregate nonfiction and essay films that spotlight the struggle against corporate imperialism and environmental degradation. Many important documentaries all streamed for free.

  RitaHayworth 3:30 pm

  So she fucked Orson Welles. Who hasn’t?

  Rulalenska 3:37 pm

  What happened with Carrie Wexler?

  IrrealisMood → RitaHayworth 3:38 pm

  You are killing me Rita. I laughed so hard I almost choked when I read this.

  Canyouhearmenow → Rulalenska 3:39 pm

  They don’t speak because Wexler screwed her over. Neither Mori or Wexler will discuss it.

  Limpidpools 3:45 pm

  She hardly followed in his footsteps. Making those horrible films. Those distortive, pretentious documentaries. She is a tasteless, self-righteous defender of monsters. And it turns out she is the biggest woman-in-Hollywood cliché of all . . . expand comment to read more

  deranger → Limpidpools 3:49 pm

  I love when the mens start explaining how feminism works to the womens. Thank you. Whatever origins Mori has had, she came to be a fascinating artist. Why is it that only men get to have colorful pasts?

  Limpidpools → deranger 3:51 pm

  Men can’t have opinions about female behavior, huh? Well the jokes on you, since I am actually a woman.

  JennyW28 3:55 pm

  The Children of the Disappeared is an incredible film.

  rookiemistake 4:00 pm

  I wonder why she never re-enacted Citizen Kane?

  dogyears → Limpidpools 4:02 pm

  No one cares if you are a man or a woman because you are simply a troll. #dontfeedthetroll

  BarbiesCervix 4:02 pm

  People, I am calling BS on this whole essay. Welles famously lived and died on Stanley Avenue in Hollywood, not in Brentwood. Everybody knows that. Even the death date is off. She is pulling your chain.

  show more comments in this thread

  PART TWO

  * * *

  * * *

  JELLY AND JACK

  1985

  Jelly picked up the handset of her pink plastic Trimline phone and the dial tone hummed into her ear. She tilted the earpiece slightly away from her, and she heard the sad buzz of a distant sound seeking a listener. How many times had she fallen asleep after she said goodbye and not managed to get the thing on the cradle. The little lag when his phone was hung up but you were still on the line, in a weird half-life of the call, semiconnected, followed by the final late disconnection click, then silence, and then if you didn’t hang up, sharp insistent beeps. These were the odd ways the phone communicated with sounds: urgent beeps to say hang up, long-belled rings to say answer, rude blasts of a busy signal to say no. The phone always telling her things. She pushed the eleven buttons—the 1, the area code, the number, zeroing in, the nearly infinite combinations ousted—her fingertips not needing to feel the grooves of the numbers, but feeling them nevertheless. So many distractions, unneeded and unwanted. She had to concentrate to keep the information away. There was a bird outside, trilling at her. It was at least fifteen feet from the closed window, but it still bothered her. It must be in the Chinese oak in the courtyard. The ring of another person’s phone sounded so hopeful, and then it grew lonelier. It lost possibility, and you could almost see the sound in an empty house.

  He didn’t have an answering machine. Make a note of that. A distinction. You can let it ring all day. Is that true? Has anyone ever tried it? The plastic rubbed against her jaw and her ear. She tilted
it away again. If she lay on her side and let the receiver rest on her head, using a hand only for balance, she could talk for hours.

  “Hello?” said a male voice that cleared itself as it spoke, so the end of the word had a cough pushing through it. Then came another cough. Was it the first time he had spoken today? Or had she woken him up? Roused from sleep was a special, intimate opportunity. But it carried high risk also. The woken person could sometimes start out frightened or vulnerable and then grow angry as the reality of the call’s interruption hit his conscious mind. It had happened to Jelly once: “Why the fuck are you disturbing my sleep? You have no idea how hard it is for me to fall asleep. And now. Well now I am awake for the goddamned duration, you bitch.” Jelly couldn’t get through a feeling like that. Not even Jelly. But this man just finished coughing and waited. She closed her eyes and focused on the white of ease, of calm, of joy. The pure and loving human event of calling a stranger, reaching across the land and into a life.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice sliding easily through the “l”s, to the waiting, hopeful “o.” She always takes her time. Nothing makes people more impatient than rushing.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Nicole.”

  “Nicole? Nicole who? I think you have the wrong number.”

  This was a crucial moment.

  “Is this Mark Washborn?”

  “Uh, no. I mean, Mark. It isn’t. Who is this again?”

  “Nicole. I’m a friend of Mark’s. I thought this was his new number.”

  “No. That’s weird. I know Mark. I mean, he’s a good friend of mine.”

  “Oh my. How awkward. I am so, so sorry I disturbed you, uh . . .” She rarely used “uh,” but it was an important wordish sound that introduced a powerful unconscious transaction. Used correctly, not as a habit or a rhythmic tic, it invited another to complete the sentence. An intricate conjoining, it was an opening without content, just the pull of syntax and the human need to complete.