Dana Spiotta - Innocents and Others

Jelly reached out her other hand and placed it on his. Still she did not speak, but he understood her reaction to his story. He could feel it in the heat of her hand, hear it in the slight change in her breath. He leaned in so his face was next to hers, and they were breathing close, with their mouth and hair smells next to the food and room smells. He would kiss her, she knew, but for now they were almost motionless. She heard a murmur from one of them. Then she realized that it wouldn’t just be a kiss, that they would keep going until they were naked and their bodies entwined. They would hungrily touch every part of each other, and she felt — even before the kiss — breathless and almost faint. She tried not to talk or even think. She tried to stop. She wanted to be still.

1985

Carrie Wexler stood on the lower level of Port Authority and tried not to breathe in carbon monoxide. She waited in a line that snaked from the door marked 21, and beyond the door she could see and smell the idling buses. She put her backpack on her feet and turned up the volume on her Discman. She let the sounds of Rossini’s Il turco in Italia be the soundtrack to the sightscape of Port Authority. This was the 1950 recording that she had wanted, and her father sent it to her with a note calling it one of her “odd little operas.” Her going-to-college gift from him was the state-of-the-art portable CD player. That was a thing with him, “state of the art,” and she was happy to play along even though it frequently skipped, unlike her cassette Walkman. Her father was crazy for new technology, and he liked to send his daughter extravagant electronic gifts despite the fact that her mother told her he had recently filed for bankruptcy. Carrie knew he had been broke or on the verge of broke since the divorce ten years earlier, but maybe the divorce was part of the reason he bought her things. He knew and shared her penchant for opera and musicals. Discard the cassettes, he said. He would replace them with the clear, perfect, undistorted Compact Discs. She now had a CD collection building in her dorm room, but many things were not available on CD yet, so she also kept a large collection of cassette tapes. Technological transitions are always messy. And you often have to keep multiple devices and formats. She had video as well as film cameras. In that case the video was distinctly inferior, but the film was so expensive — it limited what you shot, and you had to be so stingy about coverage. Part of the art was making blind decisions. Video is ugly but looser and more forgiving. You could experiment more. The technology would continue to change and improve. She would be drowning in overlapping gear and nothing would be perfect. She admired her father’s commitment to the new. That was a strategy for handling it. Just go forward and don’t look back.

A woman in the line ahead of her tried to get something out of her suitcase. It was overfilled and the top popped up when she unzipped it. As Carrie listened to the battling back-and-forth goofy frenzy of Rossini, she watched the poor woman trying to shove things back in so the zipper would close.

“Your eye is a camera,” Zakrevsky told them in class. “Imagine where your camera would go and where you would put it. What would be outside the frame and what would be inside the frame.” She did think of her eyes as a camera, especially when she had music flowing into her ears. It transformed the world into her soundstage. The music directed her eyes somehow. Something about that, how the music informs the looking. But of course films are scored and the music comes later, inspired by the images. The woman sat on her suitcase and her weight finally allowed the zipper a close-enough purchase to pull closed. Carrie checked for her own backpack and gear bag. She had brought a brand-new portable Betacam video camera that she had signed out from school, and she figured she could film some stuff in Meadow’s “studio.” She could edit what she shot when she got back to the city. Maybe she should have just brought the Super 8. Of course Meadow would be film-only, or whatever she was into now. Her homemade things, her projects.

A push from behind. The line moving. Carrie pulled the headphones down to her neck.

“Go!” the woman behind her hissed. Carrie lifted her bags and tried not to trip as she yanked her ticket out of her pocket while holding everything and moving forward. What is the damn rush? Wait to board after they take the tickets. Then wait three hours on the bus. Then off in Albany and wait for the next bus, which would probably stop in every empty town along the Mohawk River until it finally reached the stop in Fonda where Meadow would pick her up. All day was waiting.

The ride westward on I-90 turned out to be interesting. The highway ran along the rail line and the river, and Carrie could see the Adirondacks to the north and the Catskills to the south. She listened to Maria Callas singing “Vissi d’arte” in 1958. Her eye camera ran along the river in the foreground but then looked up to quilted farmland in the near distance and beyond that the long view of the cloud-dotted Adirondack peaks. The movement was glorious. You could see for miles, and no camera or lens she had ever used was very good at capturing the simultaneous long and short view. Nothing like her eyes.

She got off the bus in Fonda. Like most of the towns along the river, it looked quaint and pretty until you saw it up close. She took off her headphones and looked around. It wasn’t just the empty storefronts and the peeling paint. It was the plastic signage glaring from a service station, which also appeared to be the only viable business in town. After the bus pulled away, she could hear the music from the speakers at each corner of the convenience store behind the rows of pumps. The two people who got off the bus with her headed straight inside as if lured in by the sound of the Eagles singing “Hotel California.” Carrie followed them. What a strange overlaid place. Meadow had explained to her who lived here.

“Iroquois Nation people, fat white trash people, some leftover rural hippies, and sunburnt farmer people.”

“Farmer people?” Carrie laughed into the phone. “You mean farmers?”

“Yes. Weird Germanic farmers. Palatinates, Moravians, some Amish. How and why did they get here?” Meadow said.

“How and why did you get there?” Carrie said. “I’m serious.”

“The place I found is amazing. Wait until you see the Volta Cinematograph!” She spread the syllables out so it sounded very European: vol-ta cin-e-ma-to-graph.

“I can’t wait.”

Volta Cinematograph was James Joyce’s failed cinema in Dublin. Meadow had a penchant for failures, a soft spot for them. And there were so many failures to chose from, weren’t there? The Mohawk Valley was a collection of failures, or at least of the conspicuous obsolete. All of upstate New York was filled with cities that came to be for a reason, and still had to be even though the reason had long moved on. Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany, Troy, all slowly shrinking. New York City on the other hand was a collection of wins: crack vials and rats aside, make no mistake, the city story was a long march of win. No wonder Meadow liked it up here.

Meadow was late to pick her up, so Carrie wandered around the convenience store contemplating possible beverages. By the cash register was a rack with laminated prayer cards for Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks.” Carrie bought one and read the back as she sipped her pale coffee. Kateri was a Mohawk girl who converted to Catholicism. Later as they drove out of Fonda, Meadow explained that not only was there a shrine to Kateri, but also a huge shrine to two martyred seventeenth-century Jesuit priests who became the first American saints. The priests’ shrine was on a hill on the south side of the Mohawk River, and Catholic pilgrims came from all over the world to visit it. But nothing beat the growing popularity of Kateri among supplicants. She was depicted as an Indian beauty, like Pocahontas in that kitschy Chapman painting, despite the fact that she was described as “disfigured by smallpox scars.” Kateri was recently beatified, which put her on the short list for canonization.