Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“Maybe I won’t play tonight,” Mina said. Dumplings, wet-looking and misshapen, thunked onto another plate. “What meat is in those, do you think? It looks gross,” she said.

“You’ll play. You always play. Don’t do this every week. You always have fun, once you’re into it. I can’t always get you to get into it.”

“I could just watch and not play,” Mina said.

“It’s the same meat in there as last night when you ate two and loved it,” David said.

“I’ll play but not for long,” she said. He was dumping ice into the ice bucket. Getting out his cocktail shaker. The chilled martini glasses. Cutting twists.

“Gosh, you’re good at cutting twists,” she said. “Even with that scratch. I mean, the lemon might make the scratch sting.”

“We could get pizza, I mean if this isn’t good. Max could bring pizza.”

She left the kitchen and examined yesterday’s mail by the phone. There were two postcards. One was addressed to David:

“Wanton, Wary and Weary”

an episode of Eros and Others

teleplay by Max Mitchell

airing August 15 at 8pm on FOX

This card she threw in the garbage after tearing it into six equal pieces. The other card she did not read but put into her jeans pocket. It was addressed to her and she could feel the origin of it. Martinis, she really wanted one of David’s ice-cold martinis out of his etched-glass vintage cocktail shaker. She watched him pour as people arrived. He handed one to her and it pleased her, to be offered something by her husband, and she didn’t mind at all when he sat next to her and she could admire his smile and good spirits sideways, as he addressed his friends. He was nice to watch like this, perfectly OK. After she felt the cold heat of the thick, chilled vodka, she decided she would play. Poker, charades, Scrabble. Whatever game night entailed this week. Whatever sort of drunken ironic stupid excuse it took. Sometimes it was all just goofy calls in the poker ring, blind three-card stud with all ladies wild. Or baseball, at night, follow jacks, until they outdid one another with ridiculousness. Eventually, at some time during the evening — in the duration of the evening — you could slowly sense the serious shift in the game. Nearly undetectably, andsort of contagiously, people would start really trying to win, really wanting to win, and somebody would argue about somebody leaving, and somebody would tell someone they’re taking it too seriously, and then Mina would think if she didn’t live there, it certainly would be a nice time to leave. She would yawn, and start to clean up, and eventually go to bed, leaving them laughing and arguing. Tonight she couldn’t wait for Max to arrive, and then studiously avoided any conversation that might address or exclude him. He behaved the same as always. He looked sexy, unshaven but combed, and in good cheer. She left for her room at eleven and undressed for bed. The next day he would probably call her at work and tell her, “I wanted to follow you in there, wanted to get under your Sunday nightie, press at you through the cotton until you woke up, and I’d have to cover your mouth when you came so the others couldn’t hear us,” or something like that, and she would wonder whether she should believe him. But the point was just the phone call and talking about it, anyway. It would make the work night bearable.

The other card, unfolded at last, read: I want to see you. I miss you. It’s suffocating on the road out in the world. PS I left the hospital and am heading east. All manner of dire request for your company on this expedition. Do not tarry. Do not pass go. Do not ignore me or you may not exist. Do not call or write. Just come here. Will be at Mom’s in New York by September.

Fidei Defensor, Michael

* * * VIDEO # 3

TITLE: MORE

GIRL on bed, legs crossed. Black-and-white, wobble-trembly, handheld.

MAX (O.S.)

You just talk about it.

GIRL puts her finger to her lips. She rubs her nail along the fleshy part of her lower lip, back and forth.

MAX (O.S.)

Stop that.

She looks at him, absent, continuing with her lip rubbing.

MAX (O.S.)

With the lip, stop. Get your fingers away from your mouth.

She stops, pulls her fingers away, and bites her lip in embarrassment, then she shrugs and sheepishly half-smiles.

MINA

Are you directing me? That’s exciting. ( Pause. ) It’s a habit. Do you ever wonder how it is that near-absentminded “nervous” habits offer so much comfort, but the comfort is only realized or thought of or appreciated after someoneorders you to stop? People flat out bark at you to stop as if they were saving you from some horrible mutilation, some regressive slide into nervous adolescence or an inadvertent pronouncement of neurosis. As if they were helping you. But it just gets on people’s nerves. It irks them. It grates.

MAX (O.S.)

You’re too self-conscious. Relax.

MINA

I can’t relax. I’m too self-conscious.

Abrupt cut to a close-up of GIRL’s hand. She massages the palm of one of her hands while staring at her thumb, wrinkling her flesh. Then the camera pans slowly up her body back to her face.

MINA

Can you really massage yourself? Does the pleasure of it derive from being acted upon by another body? Or is it like masturbation, where the fact that you know exactly what feels good almost makes up for the fact you have to do it yourself?

MAX (O.S.)

You don’t have to speak.

Abruptly stops rubbing.

MINA

No, it’s not like masturbation. It really isn’t satisfying to give yourself a massage.

GIRL just sits there. She yawns.

MAX (O.S.)

Mina, tell me. What’s in your head, this second?

MINA

Nothing, truly, there is nothing, just embarrassment, and beyond that a wish to please you, and beyond that, some real anger and hostility.

MAX (O.S.)

Just stop talking about your feelings, and tell me your thoughts, your random thoughts.

MINA

Hostility at you, at your trapping me here like this.

MAX (O.S.)

You just say the sentences in your head, the phrases, whatever. You don’t sum, don’t make it analytical.

MINA

I would say the hostility is paramount, it’s really the main thing at this point. I mean over thedesire to please and the embarrassment and the anger. If one wanted to construct a sort of hierarchy of emotion.

MAX (O.S.)

Mina.

MINA

I mean, to think that my vanity would allow me to accept the horrendous terms of being on the wrong end of a camera. To think I might enjoy the attention, your amplified attention. To be literally objectified and directed and exposed. Willingly manipulated only to discover later I really am ugly, really chew my lip like a ward case, really lose my chin when I laugh.

The camera moves into extreme close-up of her mouth, distorting her face, then abruptly cuts to her hands again, then back to her face. She seems animated, hyped up, excited by the noises coming out of her mouth.

MINA

There are a thousand little things one has no idea of, I mean in terms of how we come across. A gaze in the mirror is nothing. A gaze in the mirror is like a glance. A controlled moment of self-regard, a necessarily fixed thing. You only see yourself looking. But to be seen animated, looking down, looking away, talking, moving, is another world. All the thousand details of howyou move through any gesture, the true horror of your own exposed humanness, the thousand ways you give yourself away, off guard. And of the thousand, nine hundred are ugly. At least nine hundred or so are easily unattractive, if not repulsive. And the sad thing—