John Domini: Movieola!

The G has more to say, more wool to pull over the now-absent eyes of Laverne. Those painted yet candid eyes. Finally, though, with a whistling sigh and a silencing finger, the Lady gulps her biggest shot of courage yet and tells him there’s something she’s got to tell him.

And whatever he is to her now, a boyfriend or who knows, he proves in fact an excellent listener—well he’d better , hadn’t he?—settling with one knee over the other at the same end of the futon at which she’d discovered him when she stumbled in. Gaylord inserts a thoughtful hmm now and again, always in the right place, and he makes a neat connection to classical mythology, the manifestations of Zeus or Apollo. When she takes a break from storytelling he’s there with the reassurances, all therapeutic as he reminds her that there’s nothing crazy about visualization. Nothing nutso. Anyone with a goal needs to picture it first, to establish its dimensions, before they plunge into the welter…

Oh, Gaylord, a hothouse flower so willing to share the warm spot. Never mind that he carried on with the same equanimity as half an hour earlier, when he’d been suggesting, between them, “a more open arrangement.” Nola can hear that, she can see right through the man, yet nevertheless she finds herself nodding along when he says they’ve got to try it again. They’ve got to see if Miss Magnolia can do it again, the bookstore trick. If she could cast her shadows a hundred feet high, cast the spells she claimed she could, just think of what it would mean for the career . Just think of the elephant dollars, breaking into a stampede. G-Lord tucks right into it, as easily as he tucks in his J. Crew top. The Lady Swee has got to give it another try, and this time she’s got to have a—a friend—there with his digital video.

She’s nodding, yielding to the undertow. He and she come to understand without a word spoken about it that now they’ve got to turn on the news, the early show, the local. Our Lady finds herself thrown off by the anchor-woman’s makeup, heavy on the eye shadow. But she picks up enough of the newscast to confirm, along with Her Man in the Closet, that no one managed to get a moving picture of this afternoon’s craziness. A thousand video hawks in LA but none of them quick enough on the iPhone. The networks had to make do with a still that suggested a side view of an old riverboat, with the mall the body of the boat and Nola’s magic theater the half of the paddlewheel that’s up out of the water. You couldn’t even tell that the two figures up on the screen wore costumes that didn’t match. Besides that, the story ran at the close of the show, in the thirty seconds set aside for the Hey-Maude stories, Hey-Maude-Looka-This. Speculation had it that the quirky business had been intended as some sort of promotion, but since the technology had failed to come through as planned, the major studios were all denying any connection.

So what then for our Lady and her Lord, except to prepare for bed? She stumbles upon an appreciation of him as something else again: a person nearby in the night, a solidity amid the dim flapping laundry of the future. Plus this housemate always set up the espresso for the following morning. Nola discovers herself incapable of telling the guy to go spend the night with Laverne. She can’t even say to him: Hey, you’re the one who likes the futon . Rather, she counts on his reading between the lines, and she sees he gets the message in his choice of pajamas, long-legged and formal. Gaylord does up all the buttons too.

Still the girl stalls a while, as if the woven rattan of the bedroom chair has her caged. She might even be nattering. A couple of possibilities for an appointment occur to her, times when she and G could try out her new gift.

Wednesday p.m., Thursday a.m., mustn’t dawdle. Another hour another elephant.

The next morning she tiptoes around behind ballooning personal boundaries, she can barely find the voice for Have a nice day , but then before her first espresso break Nola taps out an email for her accomplice. A couple more appointment possibilities. Gaylord proves likewise quick to make arrangements, both with the agency in the Hills and with the clearinghouse for under-the-table gigs. The following afternoon the two of them hit the highway, taking separate cars to a very different Barnes & Noble. A mall far upslope and inland, out where the Okies live. Still, the shelves hold the same chockablock narrative and the café sells the same milkshakes. It’s their best opportunity, if you ask the G-Lord, and the uneasy star of the show has to agree. Their best shot is to recreate the same conditions while steering clear of anyone who was there the first time.

Urban sprawl is itself a kind of magic, thinks our Good Witch in Black. Wherever the city seeps outward it turns to forking byways, to spirals and cul-de-sacs, its roads change name and number and create, finally, the sort of asphalt bayous that hold the potential for reinvention without end. Case in point, the latest chameleonic turn in her, umm, her cinematographer or whoever. Gaylord tools into the bookstore lot in, umm, a fully loaded Hummer. He claims he borrowed the wheels from a friend, but Nola’s been watching him for a while now, it’s been almost a year, and today at last she could’ve told him: Brother, the car’s the least of what you’re going to get away with. Brother, you’re fixing to steal yourself a whole ’nother life . This pretty young buck in his bling of a ride is going to grow up into a one-man showboat, a producer, a mogul—and multiple degrees of separation apart from his former Lady.

In fact, he clambers down from the Humvee already giving orders. The G-lord declares, jabbing a finger in her face, that she ought to go into the store by herself: Sister, it’s all about mood.

She adjusts her glasses, her smile. Since when did she need anyone to tell her how to daydream? Nonetheless she has to admit that, once you got this guy out of the bedroom and over where the deals are made, he amounted to a decent contact. A useful connection in a company town. After all, Nola first came to him as a new hire. Now as she works up her game face, she’s thinking the same as he is, this swivel-hipped mover. She’s thinking how whatever he gets on camera today could be huge for them both, viral and huge. As big a deal as Madonna on Bandstand , when the teenyboppers discovered the singer wasn’t black.

Yeah, G, you get every last bit of bandwidth you can, and with that, bon voyage, ma bête . Take all your shadow selves and find another closet. As for the money, if she had to fight him, she could do that now.

Quick as a montage, she’s settled in. The ’Bucks has plenty of open seats. In a mall like this she’s a long way from a Venti and a madeleine, it’s more like a Slurpee and Twizzlers, and her sophisticate’s looks have drawn some glances. Every personality you put on demands its pound of flesh, doesn’t it, especially here where the racks alongside the café, the front racks, are all Religious Interest. The Lady Swee can check the titles from where she sits, here Glory on the Hilltop , there Stranger on the Roadway . Yet the store should have no shortage of other titles, as well as plenty of customers who carry their title on a card: editor, foley man, continuity consultant. Every standing surface in the world bears its dog-eared layers of pretension. And what about her own surface, this table before her, covered with a fresh stack of titles? Embossed, half these titles. What about the way she’s fallen again for their ridged and glittering promise? The first flip through her little library snatches Nola off into the not-unpleasant past, into that moment at ten or twelve years old when all things seemed to possess the same mystery, when she read as if seeping into the pores of story; and after that and a dollop of skim milk and French roast, lawd-a-mercy she’s off again, she’s riding the tepid but pliant stalks as they sprout, multiply, lengthen, as they take on hue and start to cohere, a flood of semi-liquids out of the agglomeration of paper before her, and it all bulks up at gusty and back-tightening hyperspeed till the whole behemoth of a halfshell is once more in place and she’s at her perch at the upper curve of the mall-dwarfing movie screen (and this time she’s alone, our Lady; whoever the store had on duty was too slow), and she can look up at today’s contribution to the landscape, her latest spectacular, where the images haven’t yet cohered, where she can’t even pick out colors, but she’s starting to get the voices: You want to see?… You want to see?