Straight Cut (11 page)

Another case of jet lag, I imagined. She would have just come off the plane; I could see a corner of her passport edging out of the open purse that rested against her shoe; Her legs were crossed and she slumped a little in the old chair, chin propped on one hand, her long white neck curved a little to one side. She was dressed for fair-weather travel: tan slacks, a cotton shirt, a linen jacket folded across her knees. Her hair had grown a little longer than I remembered it. A thick coil of it hung forward over her shoulder and across the open neck of her blouse, its reddish highlights shimmering in the leaf-filtered sun. I meant to move softly, to leave her undisturbed, but in spite of myself I began to laugh. Lauren had always been a little careless in the kitchen. It was like her to let a boiling saucepan slip her mind.

My laughter was sudden in the quiet of the courtyard; it sounded harsh even to me, and it was enough to rouse Lauren. She shifted in her chair and stretched like a cat. Her long fingers groped for the purse and failed to find it. Her eyes opened, clearing, and she looked at me.

“Will you give me a cigarette?”

“What about ‘hello’?” I said. “What about ‘I’m sorry I started a fire on the stove’?”

“Did I?” Lauren yawned so widely that her eyes closed altogether. “It’s a bloody long trip, you know.”

I walked over and set a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. My hand was an inch from her cheek and I could have touched it if I had wanted to. I struck a match.

“Thanks,” Lauren said, centering the cigarette’s tip on the flame. “I knew I could count on you.”

“You stopped in for a cigarette, did you?” I said. “Where were you coming from?”

“New York. You know I never can sleep on the plane. And I never feel like eating anything until afterwards. “

“I know.”

Lauren was somewhat frightened of flying, though she had done enough of it, and the long transatlantic hauls could tie her stomach up in knots.

“I was going to make some pasta,” she said. “It seems to be what you’ve got.”

“Well, you’ve made a nice botch of it so far,” I said. “I don’t think your cooking’s improved, anyway.”

“Is that a nice thing to say?” Lauren pulled hard on her cigarette. “And it’s months since I’ve seen you, too.” She wasn’t being arch, she really did seem a little miffed. It came as a surprise to me to find that I still had the least capacity to injure her, however slightly. It was not what I had intended at the moment.

“You must be hungry,” I said. “Wait a minute and I’ll get something together. “I left her on the terrace and walked into the kitchen. The sauce she’d begun was not salvageable, I decided. I threw it out and scraped the pot and put it in the sink. The smoke had cleared from the room, at least. I began to peel an onion and sank the knife into the ball of my thumb. My hands were shaking badly; they went on shaking as I held them under cold water to stop the bleeding. I knew that she would return this way, without any hint or warning, if she returned at all. I would be lying if I said I had not wished for that very thing. But I was not prepared for it.

“Oh, you’ve cut yourself,” Lauren said. I had not heard her coming up behind me over the running water.

“Nothing much,” I said. In fact the bleeding had stopped. “I’m getting clumsy in my old age, I suppose.” I turned off the water and walked in a wide circle around Lauren, out of the room. In the open door of the courtyard I stopped and lit a cigarette. The cut on my thumb was seeping a little and I licked it.

“Let me see,” Lauren said, and took my hand without waiting for an answer.

“It’s only a flesh wound,” I said. That didn’t sound particularly amusing once I had said it. Lauren folded my hand into hers and brought it up under her chin. She bowed her head and rested it on my collarbone.

“You’ll get yourself all bloody,” I said. “That nice outfit.” I flicked my cigarette so hard that the head came off, and I dropped the dead butt over the doorsill.

“You’re shaking,” Lauren said.

“I know.”

“Should I have stayed away?”

I looked down at the part in the center of her hair. Yes, I might have said, with a fair degree of truth.
You should have stayed away. My mind was at ease, and now it is not.

“No,” I said. Though I knew that with Lauren any return was most often only a prelude to another departure. “Of course I’m glad you came.” Saying the words, I became so desperately delighted I could scarcely bear it. I raised my free hand and let the fingers of it sink down into her hair.

The bedspread lay crumpled across the sill of the open courtyard door and I found myself looking up across it onto the terrace, again and again. The birds had become bolder; they picked their way among the fallen leaves on the cobbles, coming closer to the door. Our movement on the bed did not seem to disturb them. My body was bending, close to its limit, and each time I felt it near the breaking point I would glance over at the birds and they would spare me for a moment more. From lack of interest as much as lack of opportunity, I had been celibate since Lauren had left me months before, and at first I worried that I might have become awkward or hasty. Not so. At this level, in this act, we had never understood each other so well.

The invisible sun was dropping down behind the rooftops, and fingers of light stroked across the wall beside us, crossing her face, then leaving it in shadow. Outside, a sparrow had reached the sill, and stood at the edge of the bedspread with its head cocked to one side. The bird and I exchanged a glance, which gave me one more instant of detachment. If I was in love again, I was angry too, whether at myself or her I was unsure. It had become a struggle of sorts and I was determined to win it somehow. My hands moved of their own volition, knowing every inch of her flesh and bone as intimately as they knew themselves. I found a grip on the points of her shoulder blades and raised her a little, lighter than air.

“Tell me that you love me,” I said. Her face rose up and up toward mine, weightless as a kite.

“I love you,” Lauren said, and her eyes closed.

I might have slept a little, I don’t know. Lauren was sound asleep when I sat up in bed, and it was almost dark. I dressed quietly and left the apartment, locking the door behind me. My body felt papery, almost transparent, and I even had some difficulty walking. There was not a trace of a thought in my head. I walked for some distance before I found an open market, where I bought bread and cheese, a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of wine. When I came back the bed was empty and Lauren was gone.

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.