Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

Ned doesn’t have a photo of her. On the few occasions when they took pictures, it was Ceil who snapped them. He recalls her fiddling with a new digital camera as they walked out onto a wave-sloshed pier under a bleaching summer sky. Ceil stopped before a small fish that looked as if a wave had flipped it onto a pier. Ned thought she was going to photograph it, but she gently slipped the fish back into the water. They’d gone only a step when an Asian man fishing from the pier turned and yelped, “Miss, you throw away my bait!” Ceil was annoyed when Ned laughed, but by the time they reached the end of the pier, where gulls swirled around a man cleaning salmon, they were both laughing. Ceil asked the man’s daughter to take a picture of them. They didn’t know then, smiling for the camera, that later that night, stoned on hashish, they’d end up in the emergency room. Ned asked for a copy of the picture taken on the pier, as he’d also asked for a picture of her for his birthday present. Ceil gave him instead an antique letter opener that she said would accrue in value. Ceil collected letter openers, pens, and paperweights, which she traded on eBay.

It was that night, after Ned had talked Ceil through her near-death experience in the ER, that she told him about a long-distance affair she’d had before they met, with a man named Dom, who until then she’d only vaguely mentioned. He was a paleontologist who lived in Princeton and ran an online business selling fossils to museums and gift shops. She told Ned the story of how she regarded love at first sight as a cheesy cliché until it happened to her. Their affair had lasted for years and Ceil had subsequently sold or given away the fossils, geodes, gemstones, and meteorites he’d given her. She’d kept only a single rare fossil from the Cretaceous age, of mating dragonflies trapped in amber. Dom had photographed her naked so that during phone sex he could summon what she called “nonvanilla” poses—Dom had a thing for women and bottles. Ceil said posing for him was one of the most erotic experiences of her life. She described their nearly immediate rapport as “speaking the same language”; it was as if she’d met a male twin to a secret self she’d always felt was dirty. Dom, she said, had made it clean. Their sexual likeness had overridden their difference, including his right-wing politics. After she and Dom broke up, Ceil had asked more than once if she could come for a last visit, to watch while he deleted the intimate show he had directed, but he refused, claiming that it would be too painful for him to see her again. He promised to erase the photos. Still, Ceil worried that they were somewhere in cyberspace, posted on one or another of the websites Dom frequented.

Listening to her, Ned understood how profoundly in love she’d been with the paleontologist and the authority the relationship still had in her life. It brought to mind an earlier night with Ceil, in bed, when she’d called him what he thought was “mister” in a little girl’s voice he hadn’t heard before and then apologized. Had she said “master”? Ned wishes he’d thought then to ask: That “same language” that you spoke, what language was it? He’d wondered, but didn’t ask, what it had taken for her to break that long relationship off.

Tonight, he wonders if perhaps Ceil had been sleeping with them both. It would have been easy, given her frequent travel. He wonders if she could have been that devious, if in fact he’d been the catalyst she needed to end things with Dom, if he’d been a player in a love-triangle drama she was directing, a love triangle he hadn’t known he had a part in. He had felt uncomfortable having to press her for what was, in her word—or was it Dom’s?—a simple “vanilla” photo.

It’s nearly three a.m. Costner and Bening have grown closer despite the lack of chemistry between them. As one reviewer remarked, “If the two of them were any more upstanding, they’d be trees.” Though Bening still hasn’t asked the question, she has revealed to Costner that she “always hoped somebody gentle and caring might come along.” The nurse she plays has up to this point abhorred violence, but when Costner replies, “Men are gonna get killed here today, Sue, and I’m gonna kill them, you understand that?” she submissively answers, “Yes.” After the climactic shoot-’em-up, modeled on the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in which the bad guys are wasted, Costner asks her again, “Those killings, they don’t give you pause?”

“I’m not afraid of you, Charley,” she answers. It’s the moment in the film that reviews found least credible, given Bening’s character. But Ned thinks that the film has finally got something right. Afraid? No, she’s turned on, thrilled, ready to brag about her gunslinger. Peace be damned, she just wants to get laid.

Ned wonders what Ceil, who regarded George Bush as a war criminal, would have said about Bening’s response. Often the best part of going to a movie together was the time afterward, when they’d stop for a drink and talk about what they had just seen. Tonight, Ned has carried on a one-way conversation with Ceil, as if she were watching it beside him. He’s had many others with her since she vanished. He wishes he could make them stop, but they’re growing more frequent, as if the lengthening of her absence is making their phantom dialogue more compulsive.

Costner shyly asks Bening for a kiss. Killing is easy for cowboys; it’s smooching that takes nerve. The film is winding down, the time for asking is running out. But she doesn’t ask. Ned watches as they ride out of town together—Duvall, Costner, Bening—under the big sky. Ned listens for her question. She doesn’t ask it. After all that killing in support of a man’s right to the open range, Duvall says that he’s tired of the open range. He’d like to run a saloon in town, and maybe Costner could be his partner. Costner tells Bening he’ll be back. They exchange happily-ever-after smiles. She turns back toward town, and Costner and Duvall ride off toward the dogies they’ve left on the open range.

Ned watches the credits roll.

He feels confused, then tricked. He has an impulse to replay the whole dull film. Could he have somehow missed the line? He vividly remembers that conversation with Ceil being predicated on the question about vanishing. He knows he didn’t make that up. He can’t understand why Ceil would have invented it, ascribing it and the answer to lines from a second-rate movie. There has to have been a mistake. Could she have conflated Open Range with some other film? He remembers her having complained that she wasn’t sleeping well; she used to wake beside him in the middle of the night from dreams that made her moan but dissolved before she could describe them. Maybe she had dreamed the question. It’s another thing about her that he’ll never understand. He ejects the DVD and logs off.

Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?

The screen goes wordlessly blue, and then blinks off, leaving the apartment lit only by the reflection of the streetlights in the falling snow. The blank windowpanes are fogging from the bottom up. He isn’t tired. Ceil was right about the coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. He tries again to summon her face. If the myth about a hundred words for snow were true, there’d be a word for snow-erasing-its-own-memory. He has an urge to open the window and let the wind and snow blow in. He tugs at the handles, hammers the sash, but the window won’t budge. The cold pane mists with his breath and body heat, and, when he wipes away the steam, his reflection peeps in darkly. He wonders if a person can forget his own face. He wonders if his cabbie double ever showed up for “the usual.” All the windows but one are dark in the apartment building across the way. Lines he hasn’t thought about for years, from a poem in Doctor Zhivago , come to mind: