Dana Spiotta: Innocents and Others

deranger→ Limpidpools3:49 pm

I love when the mens start explaining how feminism works to the womens. Thank you. Whatever origins Mori has had, she came to be a fascinating artist. Why is it that only men get to have colorful pasts?

Limpidpools→ deranger3:51 pm

Men can’t have opinions about female behavior, huh? Well the jokes on you, since I am actually a woman.

JennyW283:55 pm

The Children of the Disappeared is an incredible film.

rookiemistake4:00 pm

I wonder why she never re-enacted Citizen Kane?

dogyears→ Limpidpools4:02 pm

No one cares if you are a man or a woman because you are simply a troll. #dontfeedthetroll

BarbiesCervix4:02 pm

People, I am calling BS on this whole essay. Welles famously lived and died on Stanley Avenue in Hollywood, not in Brentwood. Everybody knows that. Even the death date is off. She is pulling your chain.

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1985

Jelly picked up the handset of her pink plastic Trimline phone and the dial tone hummed into her ear. She tilted the earpiece slightly away from her, and she heard the sad buzz of a distant sound seeking a listener. How many times had she fallen asleep after she said goodbye and not managed to get the thing on the cradle. The little lag when his phone was hung up but you were still on the line, in a weird half-life of the call, semiconnected, followed by the final late disconnection click, then silence, and then if you didn’t hang up, sharp insistent beeps. These were the odd ways the phone communicated with sounds: urgent beeps to say hang up, long-belled rings to say answer, rude blasts of a busy signal to say no. The phone always telling her things. She pushed the eleven buttons — the 1, the area code, the number, zeroing in, the nearly infinite combinations ousted — her fingertips not needing to feel the grooves of the numbers, but feeling them nevertheless. So many distractions, unneeded and unwanted. She had to concentrate to keep the information away. There was a bird outside, trilling at her. It was at least fifteen feet from the closed window, but it still bothered her. It must be in the Chinese oak in the courtyard. The ring of another person’s phone sounded so hopeful, and then it grew lonelier. It lost possibility, and you could almost see the sound in an empty house.

He didn’t have an answering machine. Make a note of that. A distinction. You can let it ring all day. Is that true? Has anyone ever tried it? The plastic rubbed against her jaw and her ear. She tilted it away again. If she lay on her side and let the receiver rest on her head, using a hand only for balance, she could talk for hours.

“Hello?” said a male voice that cleared itself as it spoke, so the end of the word had a cough pushing through it. Then came another cough. Was it the first time he had spoken today? Or had she woken him up? Roused from sleep was a special, intimate opportunity. But it carried high risk also. The woken person could sometimes start out frightened or vulnerable and then grow angry as the reality of the call’s interruption hit his conscious mind. It had happened to Jelly once: “Why the fuck are you disturbing my sleep? You have no idea how hard it is for me to fall asleep. And now. Well now I am awake for the goddamned duration, you bitch.” Jelly couldn’t get through a feeling like that. Not even Jelly. But this man just finished coughing and waited. She closed her eyes and focused on the white of ease, of calm, of joy. The pure and loving human event of calling a stranger, reaching across the land and into a life.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice sliding easily through the “l”s, to the waiting, hopeful “o.” She always takes her time. Nothing makes people more impatient than rushing.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Nicole.”

“Nicole? Nicole who? I think you have the wrong number.”

This was a crucial moment.

“Is this Mark Washborn?”

“Uh, no. I mean, Mark. It isn’t. Who is this again?”

“Nicole. I’m a friend of Mark’s. I thought this was his new number.”

“No. That’s weird. I know Mark. I mean, he’s a good friend of mine.”

“Oh my. How awkward. I am so, so sorry I disturbed you, uh…” She rarely used “uh,” but it was an important wordish sound that introduced a powerful unconscious transaction. Used correctly, not as a habit or a rhythmic tic, it invited another to complete the sentence. An intricate conjoining, it was an opening without content, just the pull of syntax and the human need to complete.

“Jack. Jack Cusano.”

“Jack Cusano? Not Jack Cusano, the record producer?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Jack Cusano who composes film scores. The gorgeous work you did on those Robert DeMarco films.”

“That’s right.” He laughed. His laugh cleared out his throat a bit more. She lay back on her pillow, held the phone so it barely touched her cheek. She imagined her voice going into the transmitter, sound waves being turned into electrical pulses, up the wires to the phone lines to a switching station, turned into microwaves speeding across the country with the memory — the imprint — of her exact tone, her high and low frequencies, her elegant modulations, to the switching station in Santa Monica, sending electric current up the PCH to a Malibu beach house and into Jack’s receiver — undoubtedly a sleek black cordless phone. So fast too: instantly made back into a sound wave by the tiny amplifier near his ear. All that way, all those transformations, but no distortions. A miracle of technology. The sound was as clear as speech in a room. She could, she could — amazing — hear the ocean in the background. A gull, the sound of water pulling back from beach. She swore she could hear the sun shining through his west-facing windows.

Many years before Jelly called Jack, before she had begun phoning men for love (not work), and before she had recovered her sight, she had fallen in love with Oz. She met him in the summer of 1970 at the Center for the Blind.

Oz was bald and a lurching, lumbering six four. But his hands were soft and she liked the push of sweat with the air-faded tinge of clove that she got when he put his arm across her shoulders. Jelly was more than a foot shorter than Oz, and his arm across her shoulders was a natural fit. Later she would discover that the faint clove she got under — or right up alongside of — the sweat was from an old sachet that she found when she pulled open his undershirt drawer to put away the laundry she had washed and folded for him. It shocked her to see this girlish thing, an ancient silk square with a ribbon. She only saw it as a bruise of pink, but she could feel the slight catch that comes in the weave of older silk fabric. The sachet must have been in the bureau when he got it from the Salvation Army. Because Oz wouldn’t buy a sachet of spices and put it in his drawer, would he? That seemed very unlikely. But surely he noticed the scent — his blindness made every scent noticeable. Distracting, even — one got so sensitive, and the overlay of scents could be deceptive, puzzling. Jelly had slowly stopped calling a smell “good” or “bad.” Instead she thought of them as “real” or “cover” smells. She just wanted everything to smell as it was. Actually. An armpit should smell of sweat and hair and skin. A mouth should be clean but not minty. Hair should smell slightly vegetal, plantish. And a room should smell like old wood. A candle like melted beeswax. The street like rain and leaves. The backyard of grass, earth, flowers. Walking into a store and getting the rank sting of ammonia under fake pine could make her feel ill in a matter of minutes. She would leave gasping for air, clutching a hand to her nostrils.