Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

MAX (O.S.)

It’s about letting go of camera awareness. It’s about telling the truth. The truth is interesting.

MINA

The sad thing is you realize it has to be sort of petty vanity that got you here in the first place, in this disgusting position. And you can’t resist it. Disgust, hostility still, but mostly disgust.

The camera wobbles a little. Then it is a static shot from a tripod. She looks off to the left, where the cameraman has moved, still off screen, but apparently away from the camera.

MAX (O.S.)

The only thing that doesn’t work, Mina, the only thing that fails on camera is to be uninteresting. Boring people. The easiest way to be interesting is to tell the truth. The harder, deeper, more vicious the truth, the more fascinating. That is it, fascination, that’s what the camera loves.

GIRL pulls out a cigarette. Max throws her a lighter from off camera.

MAX (O.S.)

Abstracted pontificating about the nature of the camera’s gaze is not fascinating. Much, much more difficult to fascinate if you try something fancy. Much easier to bore.

She shakes her head, smiling.

MINA

Hostility, Max, huge mountains of nonabstract anger and hostility.

MAX (O.S.)

Hmm. You might shut up. Or you might not. This is the suspense, the narrative drive of this video. Will she ever shut the fuck up?

MINA

Max?

MINA

The camera still on?

MAX (O.S.)

’Course.

MINA

You could turn it off. You could just come over to the bed and see what happens.

MAX (O.S.)

Not yet.She sighs.

MAX (O.S.)

Mina.

MINA

Yeah?

MAX (O.S.)

If you don’t want to talk about yourself, if you don’t want to unveil your inner heart, you could just do what you did before and undress.

MINA

You want me to take off my clothes?

MAX (O.S.)

Yeah.

MINA

Max, I think I might just do that. I think it might be easier.

Mina starts to unbutton her dress.

TITLE: END

* * *Mina arrived at the Gentleman’s Club to meet Lorene a miraculous hour early. She hadn’t slept well. She spoke to David on the phone. She ordered a “drink.” She did not think about Scott. She bused a few tables through the lunch rush. Her floor rhythm was off. She dropped things. She was annoying the wait staff. She almost called Max. She spent ten minutes changing the arrangement of salt and pepper shakers, moving them to the other side of the tiny vintage vases (several tea roses in each). She examined the tables. She returned the salt shakers to their original positions. She thought she might cry if spoken to.

She ate a dinner-sized lunch: a whole red snapper, so she could filet the fish, the odd and solid satisfaction of cutting off the head, then making the incision through the skin to the bone. A delicate touch is required, and the fish must be properly cooked. But it was something she knew how to do flawlessly. It felt very satisfying to put her fork along and under the sides of the incision, flicking back the halves of the fish intact and then, with the fork and knife, pulling up the spine from the end and removing it unbroken, in one deft gesture. It calmed her to do this one delicate thing.

When Lorene finally arrived, she had two men with her: a slender and beatific man Mina hadn’t seen before and the high-voiced, thin-limbed Mariott, Lorene’s restaurant designer. Mina watched as Lorene led the beatific man around the restaurant. He gestured at corners and windows. Mariott took notes, nodding and smiling. Mina approached them.

“Feng shui is all about placement of objects in a room for maximum peace and productivity,” the man said.

“Lovely Mina, I want you to meet Beryl.” Lorene winked at Mina.

“The energy flows would make this table the worst table.”

“See, Mina? I told you nobody likes table twenty-three. I hate table twenty-three.”

“What is this?” Mina said, gesturing to a chart in Lorene’s hand. It was vibrantly colored and quite mathematical-looking.

Lorene handed it to her.

“It’s a new astrological chart for the restaurant. Chinese and Indian astrology combined in one chart.”

“A Chin-In horoscope.”

“And this part is the feng shui analysis of the seating. It’s going to help us with priority table placements.”

“You want me to redo the seating according to this?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

Mina rolled her eyes.

“I used to work in an Italian restaurant, and when it was slow the owner made us go outside the front of the restaurant and toss salt. To get rid of evil spirits.”

“Did it work?” Mina asked.

“Well, it gave us something to do other than stand there wondering why we were slow.”

“A reason and a cure.”

“Magical thinking and conjuring can be a great comfort, Mina. You shouldn’t be so cynical about it.”

Mina sat at the bar and took a sip of her soda. “Baby, somebody has to be around here. Or we are all liable to float into space. And then who would run the restaurant.”

Lorene took a sip out of Mina’s glass. “We’ll finish this discussion later. Jake wants to meet with us now.”

Mina sipped club soda and listened to Jake, the new floor manager of the Gentleman’s Club, pitch bar concepts to Lorene. Lorene wore gold-rimmed oval glasses. The lens colorwas smoky amber. She wore a white Chinese heavy silk dress so tight that she had to lean rather than sit on the barstool.

“I don’t know, tell Mina. Mina, listen to Jake. Ray, give me — what is Mina drinking?” she said.

“A Jeanne Crain Colada,” Ray said, filling a glass with club soda.

“Ugh. Really? Fine, give me a Linda Darnell Daiquiri. Jake, talk.”

Jake wore a sharkskin zoot suit, silver and cut as conservatively as a suit could be cut and still be called a zoot suit. He had L-O-V-E tattooed on his left knuckles, L–I-K-E tattooed on his right knuckles. After she hired him, Lorene speculated he had I-N-D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-C-E tattooed on his cock. Mina liked the fact that Lorene said the word cock from time to time, and never said dick or penis or, even worse, made vague southbound hand gestures accompanied by a giggle.

“I have a couple of concepts which I know Lorene has heard and dismissed for various reasons before, but you, Mina, must convince her.” Mina nodded, looked around the room, already bored.

“Cyber and Silk, a high-end Internet bar and restaurant. Everyone sees the success of cyber cafes; well, this would be a three-star-level cyber establishment.” Jake was making room for himself as he launched into the pitch. Lorene removed her glasses. She held up a finger.

“No, and I’ll tell you why,” Lorene said, her lips matte auburn in the gold-tinged light. The lighting in all of Lorene’s establishments was designed by the most respected Hollywood glamour technicians, and advertised as such. The back of the bar menu had credits to match any film, and her places got voted Most Flattering Lighting by the L.A. Reader three yearsin a row. That fact alone gave her enormous advantage over her competitors.

“But cyber places,” Jake said. “Someone has to take it to the next step.”

“Oh, cyber anything is so passé. Especially that word cyber. Totally over,” Mina said.

“Yes, and especially not for Pleasure Model Enterprises. You see, this cyber crap is a fad. Fine. But it’s not even social. The whole point of the Internet is not to be seen but to be comfortably agoraphobic, to travel without moving, to interact without contact — precisely the opposite of my philosophy of contemporary social enterprise. I create social clubs — for company. Not techno-pseudo company, but actual human company. Dietary fetish — fine. I want to create environments for people to indulge safely, not regress to cubicles of self-involvement. And, God, the idea of computers, possibly the ugliest design objects on earth, in one of my restaurants, and that horrible green-tinged light they give off, right on people’s faces — oh, God.” Lorene put her glasses back on.