Dana Spiotta: Innocents and Others

He wrote me letters nearly every day. Sometimes I wrote back. I reported on what I had read or seen or thought about that day. What I liked and why. I saved his letters in a small wicker box under my bed. I have no idea what he did with my letters.

We did this for nine months, the watching and the books and the tricks and the letters. I swam in the pool. I didn’t rush into the future.

Once a week I took a deep breath and called my parents, spinning a story of a cross-country trip leading to the factory in Gloversville where I spent my summer and then winter making films. No, thank you, I didn’t need more money, I had told them in late August, but I did need to defer college for a year so I could finish making these films. They protested feebly about delaying school but then insisted on sending money. (This is the type of parents they were.) Instead of making films, I lived with my enormous boyfriend. I inhaled filmmaking in the air I breathed. I ingested it; I took it inside me. I spent my days imagining films that I wanted to make while at night I loved my boyfriend.

Sometimes I wanted to go out into the world with him. To dinner or to a party. I was reckless like that. But he didn’t let me. He did not want anyone to know about us, because he felt it would be misunderstood. He knew how people can be, and how much it can cost a person. “You have no idea what it feels like,” he said, “I want to spare you that,” and I believed it.

“I’m stronger than you think,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. I tried out the idea as I spoke it. Maybe I really was.

Mostly we were happy, in the way you can be happy when you know something won’t last forever. The way you can clutch the moment deeply and without holding back. “I love you,” I whispered to him. “And I love you, darling,” he said. “That is what this is, love,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

Then the last day came — ready or not — but of course I didn’t know it was the last day at the time.

* * *

We have lunch by the pool. The sunlight sparkles on the water. He looks pale, and somehow almost frail. He hardly eats or drinks, and lately his face has become gaunt, as though his full cheeks were hanging down from his bones. I should have guessed what was coming, for he surely does.

“Wonderful news,” he says.

“What?”

“My picture will be financed. Things are falling into place. I just have to stay alive long enough to make the damn thing.”

“Stop that — you’ll be able to do it. You are ready.”

“Yes, I am. I feel as if I can make my greatest film. I know exactly how I want to do it. I’ve been dreaming of it for years. And at last, I get a chance.”

I see him momentarily perk up, excited at the thought.

“After all this time, I am finally making another film,” he says. But as he exhales, I can see something else, some trickery below the surface.

He never made the movie. We all know that now. But about that very last day, the very last night:

He is going on The Merv Griffin Show . He will talk about the new project, get things heated up. He has some backing, but he still needs more. They use him, the wonderfully witty and entertaining old has-been, and he will use them back, sneak in his agitprop on his own behalf. “That,” he says, “is how this town works, and I have always understood how this fucking town works.”

I watch him on TV. He is eloquent and generous. I watch him and feel lucky.

It doesn’t go the way he expected. He comes home from the studio, white-faced and damp. He shambles in on his cane, falls back onto the couch with a moan.

“How did it go?” I ask.

“A disaster. I went in to do my song and dance, but instead I was a dignified old man, elegiac and stinking of the grave.”

“Nonsense,” I say. “I thought you were magnificent.” I sit down on the floor at his feet. I undo his shoes. His heavy wide feet are white and swollen. I take one foot in my hand: I feel tender toward this heavy small thing, the weight of a lifetime always pushing down on it. I press it with my palm for a minute, one and then the other. His feet are oddly soft and uncallused, but they also seem useless, abandoned somehow. I wrap my arm across his legs and push my face against his knees.

“I am sorry,” he says.

I pull back from his legs and look up at him. His face is barely visible across the landscape of his body.

“What?”

“I have nothing I can give you, no money. I have ex-wives and a wife, actually, and children. And very little I haven’t spent. It is possible you will get a window of attention, and you can do something with that. Believe me, the attention can hurt, so you must make sure you get something out of it.”

I start to cry. He stops talking and places his hand on my head.

“Can you shut up? Please?” I say. He sighs and I help him to his bed.

You can guess the rest. What happened to him was on the news.

The housekeeper comes into my room and wakes me up. Her face is sweaty, and she seems to tremble as she speaks. She tells me she has called 911, and that the ambulance is about to take him away. I scramble out of bed and stop at the doorway, unsure what to do. I watch them take him out on a gurney. He is white and nonresponsive, his massive body already collapsing into itself, looking passed and dead to me. The housekeeper says, “I am calling his family.” And she disappears into his room, closing the door behind her. Soon — within an hour — people will go to the hospital. Then they will descend on this place: a relative, an agent, the press. I pull on my jeans. I had slept in an oversized Mercury Theatre jersey, which I now use as a tunic shirt. I need, it seems to me, to get out of there fast. I pull a suitcase from the closet, the very same one I had brought over after a few days of living with him.

I look around my room. Here is what I take: my clothes, my videotapes, my notebooks, and a few little souvenirs he gave me (some lacquered balls for juggling, a deck of cards, a lobby card for the last of his great films, an annotated copy of King Lear with his small neat notes in the margins along with the King Lear screenplay he wrote but never shot, a long Nubian dress, and a vintage Mark IV viewfinder on a lanyard). I also take the wicker box filled with his love letters. Of course I do. I make the bed. I close the closet door. There is no sign of me in the bedroom or anywhere in the house. I walk to the back door in case someone is arriving. I hesitate as I pass his room. I push open the door. The bed is a mess; as they pulled him onto the gurney they must have dragged all the bedclothes off. I look at his dresser where he left his watch and his pocket notebook. His vest and scarf hang from a chair back, just as he left them last night. I pick up the scarf and hold it to my face. I can smell his hair oil and aftershave. I drape it gently across the dresser. I ought to leave. A tumbler of liquor on the end table by the bed. He couldn’t sleep so he drank and read. Next to the book are some scribbled notes and his sturdy fountain pen. I pick up the pen — it is green resin, fat and substantial in my hand. Just one small thing of his. I put it in my pocket. I slip out the sliding back door to the patio. I open the garage, throw my suitcase into the backseat of my Rabbit, and go.

I drive to Brentwood Village and call my parents on a pay phone. “Everything is fine,” I say. “I just wanted to say hello.” The radio in my car is already reporting that my boyfriend was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center. I stare out the window and listen to the valedictory obituary, something carefully constructed long ago and updated each year until it would finally be read on the air. Nobody had really wanted to see him lumber onto TV sets to talk. They had been waiting to pronounce him dead, to bring to a proper close his long American story.