Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“The pizza will be here soon. Don’t you think we should call the Videorama?” she said, pulling back from the kiss.

They rented a Gary Cooper movie. Movie choices — rental choices, actually, because they never saw movies in the theater anymore, that would have required effort and actually leaving the house and possible contact with strangers — Mina and David often didn’t agree on. Mina had her obsessional way with movies. She liked to see all of a certain actor’s films, or a director’s, or a related batch of films. She would want only postwar melodrama. A William Wyler festival. Or only William Holden. Or postaccident Montgomery Clift. Only British-produced Hitchcock. A Dorothy Malone/Gloria Grahame/“sort of slutty” festival. Films were an organic, coherent whole, with categories and patterns. She saw them connected to the world and to each other. It comforted her to exhaustively track a single career, the rise, the fall. It was the drama outside the drama, and the movies were the artifacts that remained. Her father had filled in obscure production details, quoted lines. He would make jokes, inward metacomments that spoke to their organic movie world, their exclusive and idiosyncratic expertise.

“What’s going on?” her father would say, watching Red River. “What’s Wayne doing, he’s in a rush because he left all those people on the stagecoach.” Mina would laugh at his joke, because she had seen Stagecoach, too. She would say, Well, they better get to Missouri before the army realizes Matt is AWOL. Very good, kid, he would say, and she thought she knew the whole world watching movies with her father. And mostly old, and mostly American. She liked to imagine livingin 1952 and seeing these lady melodramas. She imagined herself housewifed and weeping. Or old war and baseball movies — they made her nostalgic, made her homesick for a time she never even lived through. And she thought she could see what her father was like, at seventeen, watching From Here to Eternity. Imagining him watching those movies for the first time made him seem more like a real person, less like someone’s father. It made her feel a funny kind of sad affection for him. She saw him leaving the theater and she tried to guess what seventeen-year-old Jack felt, whether he thought he was more like Burt Lancaster or more like Frank Sinatra. As she grew older, old films gave her pleasure as the secret heart not just of her father, but of the world, collective pseudomemory of American innocence, Norman Rockwell but more sordid and ironic because the medium wasn’t static — as contexts changed the actual films became ironic and winking. They moved from American to Americana. She knew Gary Cooper spilled his guts to the House Un-American Activities Committee. That was why his brave American heroes were fun to watch. She knew Clift was gay — it made his ambivalent, helpless shrugs all the more resonant. Mina had so many movie reference points in her head, as many as the memories of her own life, it seemed, and they became nearly equally weighted, her memories of her actual life and her memories of the movies she had seen. Was there finally that much difference? She sometimes thought that if someone saw all the movies she had seen, the number of times she had seen them and in the order she had seen them, that person might know exactly who she was. That couldn’t really be true, but it was half true, it felt that crucial, as if her identity were a collection of references.

She watched Cooper’s long eyelashes and baseball swaggeras he rubbed his bad arm and let Barbara Stanwyck talk circles around him. David wanted to see a seventies action film. Mina wanted anything — anything at all — with James Mason. They settled for an easy one. They compromised on a film they had both seen dozens of times.

“Sometimes a film we haven’t seen before seems like so much effort,” Mina said.

“Daunting and risky,” David said. He commented constantly. He had to — they’d seen it too many times to actually be engaged. They now sought the supracritique. The odd detail you missed the first eight times you saw it. The depth of repetition. The continuity gaffes. The way the timing of the dialogue had rhythm. Sometimes Mina thought if you watched one movie enough, it could mean anything. It became a funnel for the entire universe. Besides, it was the most talking they would do all day.

David, the technician, the analyst, said, “You can’t get away with dialogue like that anymore. Too much talking.”

“But it’s good still.”

“Yeah. It is. You can’t, though.”

Mina nodded, not turning from the eyelashes. The black and white and gray luminous movie eyes. She knew Cooper’s eyes were cerulean blue, translucent and denim-flecked and cold, an impossible manly American Blue, the way she knew Rita Hayworth’s Gilda nails in black-and-white had to be a platonic perfect sex-sinister Red.

“Now you have to have less dialogue. It has to be careful and tricky, though. It can’t be too obvious. The lovers fight, then say, ‘I can’t live without you.’ Or they’re making love, and she sighs and says, ‘You bastard.’ It has to go like that,” he said, looking at the TV.

Mina, eyes on Cooper, said, “Yeah. I think that’s called irony, David.” And it came out more sarcastic and mean than she intended. Cooper was shrugging, in that “It seems to me but what do I know” kind of common, noble way. Cooper was starting to irritate her.

“You’re a snob,” David said quietly, looking at the screen.

It’s funny that she often forgave things in other people that irritated her in David. She fingered the Andalusian “LEFT” postcard folded in her pocket. Left of what? Why Andalusia? She’d have to call the hospital tomorrow. She felt moody and impatient.

“We should have rented Only Angels Have Wings. Rita Hayworth. Cary Grant. And that actress with the oddly pitched voice.”

“Who?” David said.

“She’s wearing slacks. These great slacks.”

“Jean Peters.”

LEFT. Of course. It was left from, not of.

David cracked a beer open triumphantly. “Oh, I have to have lunch with my agent tomorrow.”

“On Saturday?”

David shrugged.

“Well, I have to work tomorrow night at the club, so I guess I won’t see you.”

David nodded. He took another sip of beer and watched the screen.

“Jean Arthur. Not Jean Peters, for Christ’s sake.”

“I love Gary Cooper,” David said.

“Jean Arthur, David.”

Mina took a long, hot bubble bath. She stared at the parts of her body that poked out from the bubbles. She extended aleg to wash seductively. A commercial, it reminded her of. Her leg looked great, all bubble-dripping against the tile. She tried to forget pencil tests. She wrapped a towel turban-style around her head. She emptied the tub. She stopped on the way to the bedroom at the door to David’s office. He was at his computer again. The room was completely dark except for the sickly green-blue aura of the screen.

Mina stood watching David. David watched the screen, which contained a small screen within the screen that watched some other guy’s computer, unattended and unmoving. Free-streaming live-feed video. Sometimes you could watch him at his computer. Sometimes he left and you could just watch his computer.

“I can watch him for minutes at a time,” David said.

“I do other things. I eat my lunch, I talk on the phone,” Mina said.

“He stares at his screen. Does nothing. Occasionally he works the keyboard, but mostly he watches,” David said, eyes fixed.

“I walk around. I see people. I smell things. I take baths, David.”

“I like to watch real life, a stranger’s life, in real time. There is unlimited space, so the most atomic details are available. The most micro moments get play. Everything is attended.”