Straight Cut (12 page)

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.

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.

And once I had my illegitimate peep inside the case, that camouflage job began to seem like the most important thing of all. So much so that I didn’t even waste time on a complete inventory of the contents. I just thumbed through a couple of stacks I selected at random and then went to work sealing the case back up again. When the solder had set and the polish was dry, then and not before, I got out my pocket calculator and did the estimation. It was old money, but fairly large bills. My guess put it between two hundred and two hundred fifty thousand, American; what you could casually call a quarter of a million.

There wasn’t anything much to drink in the house, so I made myself a nice cup of tea and took it out in the courtyard. Then I paced up and down and let it get cold, because I was excited. There’s an indubitable thrill to digging your fingers into a quarter-million dollars of cash money, even when you must assume that it would be unwise and perhaps unsafe, not to mention unethical, to convert it immediately to your own use. But the real kick came from something else, probably the same impulse that led me to become a film editor to start with: the pleasure of discovering the system that can order disparate images and events into a coherent picture. And whether this picture and its ramifications for oneself are pleasant or unpleasant in no way affects the thrill. The revelation of the thing in itself is as intoxicating as almost anything I know.

I remembered the customs man at the airport, his polite confusion at the conclusion of the body search. And now I understood too what the guard had meant with that careless question:
Did you find the money?
In my imagination I reshot the scene of our leavetaking, assigning myself a covert smile and wink to both of those gentlemen. Yes, I finally found the money.
Eccola.
There it is.

What I was going to do about it was altogether a different matter. I could of course have gone to Lauren and asked her something like, Why is it that you’re traveling around with a locked briefcase full of a quarter-million dollars, more or less? but that would have entailed a certain amount of embarrassment. I did not particularly want to admit that I had broken into the bag and violated what illusion of trust there was between us, especially since such violations had always been her province in the past. It was pointless and no doubt duplicitous for me not to want to reverse that pattern, but I didn’t want to reverse it, all the same.

Which left me in some difficulty about saying anything at all to Lauren. The ordinary topics of daily life had begun to seem rather dry and vacant. To talk on any subject became a strain for me. I took the coward’s way out and avoided her, pleading pressure of work. That weekend I took a break from the A and B rolling, took Mimmo into a sound studio for a thirty-six-hour marathon, and completed the whole mix for the picture. By Monday I was back at the synchronizer again, working as blindly as if I were part of the machinery myself. The only difficulty was that at the rate I was going the job would be finished quite soon and I would be deprived of my excuses.

I began to play hooky at both ends of the day, rising early, leaving the apartment before Lauren was fully awake, clocking into QED, where I’d work only an hour or two, then close the editing room and leave. What then? Certainly not back to the apartment, where the presence of the unspoken thing would build until it released itself into some sentence which I wanted neither to speak nor hear. I’d seen the sights and was sick of Rome. My Italian had not improved, but it was still adequate to order a drink in whatever bar or
trattoria
happened to take my fancy. Back to the daytime drinking again, I found it welcoming as a home of sorts. After the second, the third glass of grappa, an odd clarity came over me as I sat wherever, watching whatever was going on around me, which always reduced itself to no more than an abstract dance of lights and shades. It was not oblivion, only an abrogation of my will and conscience, permitting me a flight into a world of pure uncomplicated sensation. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it last for more than an hour or so, and then the dullness would set in, dullness which I fed with another and another glass and perhaps a meal if I remembered, until the sun had set and I went back. Arriving at the apartment as late as I could manage, I’d squeeze out a stagnant drop or two of conversation, if Lauren was there, and then I’d sleep.