Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

Scott had just kept talking, until he was in tears and not even angry. She tried to touch him. He shook his head, looking down like a child. This was what you got.

“I don’t get you people,” he said. “I don’t understand women like you.” And she put a hand to his smooth blond cheek.

“You understand, you must try to understand,” she said. “I told you it wasn’t possible. You know that’s true.” She didn’t know what to say, she had to touch him, now worse than ever. She had to make things worse.

“Please, don’t. I can’t anymore. I’m so ashamed, so humiliated.”

“No, now, no.”

“I am foolish. I am a fool.”

She could not help but find his tears erotic, looked at hisarms where the sleeves of his T-shirt ended, the little concavity between his pectoral muscles. She wanted to touch him one last time, ease his loneliness, ease hers. She had to make things worse. She put a hand on each shoulder, tried to lean him back against something — the couch. He tensed and resisted the push.

“No, please, Mina, it’s bad for me, we can’t. I won’t. Give me some air.”

She thought of it, that certainly this was mean. But she couldn’t help it. She stopped pressing for a second. He didn’t move, his head hung low. She inhaled, her breasts soft and just inches from his head. He just needed to lean forward.

“It’s OK, Scott, it’s OK.” He shook his head. “Come here.”

Afterward she left him, alone in his hotel room, stricken and spent from loving the wrong person. She thought that when she had finally ended it she would feel relief and liberation. She thought it would simplify her life. Why, then, did she feel so much worse, so much more confused and trapped as she walked home from the hotel, not noticing the sun setting, the splattered orange light — the garish, Mexican postcard sunset.

David waited for his wife in the foyer of their small house.

David and Mina were surely going to have an argument. David was ready. Mina thought if it were in a movie, you would see it from his point of view. Mina walking in the front door,glancing at her watch. The watch would indicate lateness, and David, already in the foyer, standing, arms folded in front of chest, indicating lateness.

Mina said, “I’m sorry I’m late.” You wouldn’t see David’s response, which would be assumed, in cinematic conventions of what silence indicates, to be a shrug. But in fact David didn’t shrug. He watched Mina for a real-time second and a half. This made Mina sort of half smile at him. The absence of a corresponding reverse on David’s reaction would change the point of view — the viewer would identify with Mina’s imploring him for a response. If David didn’t respond, the scene would be all sympathy for Mina. It must change to a two shot, or David must begin talking. Or better yet, alternating reverse angles on the two, as they spoke, so the viewer would simply read the dialogue naturalistically, as in life. But if the film instead used reverse angles on each one as the other spoke, the words would be altered by the imagery, be read as reactive and dual, all about listening and response and not seem natural at all. But that would be a foreign film, wouldn’t it? This was a domestic drama, a situation comedy. David and Mina, after all, learned their visual grammar of how couples argue from TV more than movies. Something invisible and conventional. This is aided by David’s having enclosed the space physically, trapping them in the foyer and in the conversation. The scene is lit from the living room lamp, unseen, the foyer full of afternoon shadows. Mina gestured toward the living room doorway, and David headed that way as well until he stopped her in between the two rooms, not actually in her way, but arresting her movement somehow. Perhaps to keep them in the frame of a static shot. The dialogue now, overlapping, more real than real.

“I’m sorry, I had to—” Mina said.

“You don’t use your car anymore, do you? You won’t drive.” She tried to move to the living room, but David stood directly in front of her. She shook her head.

“You have a problem with driving.”

“I have no problem with driving. I know how to drive.”

“Your car problem is what I’m getting at here, Mina.”

“I have no problem with cars. I am not against cars. I haven’t been, yes, but it doesn’t mean I won’t. I mean, drive, my car, soon, at some point when I deem it necessary.”

“Unless—” he said.

“Unless what? Unless driving has taken on some symbolic meaning for me? Unless not driving is my expression of dysfunction? Some deep-rooted ambivalence about my life, or some adolescent rebellion, some—”

“Or maybe you’re scared to drive?” he said.

“It’s not as if I’ve stopped bathing or something. You can’t be committed for refusing to drive.”

“Well, it certainly hasn’t kept you at home. I mean, we can rule out agoraphobia, can’t we?” They were still toe to toe in the doorway between foyer and living room. Perhaps a close-up of her eyes as they glanced from him to the room and back again.

Mina tried to smile at David.

“I’m starving. Let’s get something to eat.”

“OK, let’s go out and eat. You drive us to a restaurant,” David said, arms still folded. The challenge.

“No. I don’t want to go to a restaurant. I work in a restaurant.”

“Fine. Let’s drive to the supermarket and buy food. Let’s cook dinner.”

“I’ll give you a list.”

“Look, I want to see you drive.”

“David, I am so weary right now. Do we have to do this?”

“Do what?”

“OK, fine. Do you ever notice that when you drive the world becomes invisible?”

“No, I never noticed—”

“You’re going places but you are not really moving, you’re in the same place, the car? You play the radio, you look out the window, but you are not really in the world in any way?”

David now apparently felt the desire for some actorly activity. He left the doorjamb and entered the living room. He went to the liquor cabinet and opened it. Where did he learn this? Why fix a drink in the middle of an argument? It was more John Cassavetes than The Thin Man, but he hadn’t seen any Cassavetes movies. He just wanted to be doing something. Mina lit a cigarette.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked.

“No, I have to go to work later.”

He opened a bottle of wine and poured himself a glass. He also pulled out a cigarette. He patted his shirt pockets for a match (which was a terrifically cinematic thing to do, as he never had matches in his shirt pockets. In fact, he didn’t even have shirt pockets — he was wearing a T-shirt, wasn’t he?) while holding the cigarette in his mouth. She handed him her matches. He lit up.

“When you get where you are going,” he said, exhaling, “you leave the car.” He paused, looking down, thinking. “ You are now in a new place. You walk when you get there. All it does is cut down the time in between where you started and where you are going. It is a simple device to enable you tomove between places more quickly.” He took another sip of his drink and leaned on the cabinet and he looked at his wife.

This would be the part where Mina would confess everything to David. In David’s script of things she would have to start talking about why she lived for the in-between places, how she wanted the distance between things, why driving in this car-born place oppressed her. But then she would have to fill him in about Michael’s cards and her affairs and her private obsessions and his best friend, Max, and her private shopping and her desperation. But of course she wouldn’t. Because not all secrets can be told. He didn’t really want to know. In a movie there would be a sense of narrative closure. In a script, revelation was liberating and solved everything.