Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

This was not what was going to transpire between Mina and David.

She didn’t want more liberation — she wanted something else. She’d not find out his secret life, or he, hers. And even if they tried, it could only be partial. They could exchange monologues for hours and it wouldn’t reveal all. What would they have then — a catalog of unforgivable tabloidisms, an indelible ugliness. The equivalent of vomiting on each other. And even then, it was not really the full story. Some things would never be known. They could exhaust their secrets and they would still be discontinuous forever, static, however disclosed.

“You like to drive. I don’t,” she said.

“Fashion is a form of daydreaming,” Lorene said to me when we opened her first restaurant. I remember she was picking clothing for the opening, and we stood before her closet, stuffed with seven decades of clothing in size six. A few things were bigger or smaller, but so beautiful they were bought for their own sake, never to be worn, but just so they could hang in a closet and mean something about her. She was handing me a gift. I unwrapped the Japanese rice paper. I held a bone-cream silk nightgown. It was exactly that, a gown to be worn at night. The fabric was microthin, delicate, and yet so densely and finely woven it appeared to be a sheet of skin.

I watch Lorene sitting in the outdoor cafe in the French Quarter, waiting to meet me. She doesn’t see me yet, but I am watching her wait.

I had draped the nightgown on her blond-wood dressing table and begun to undress. This was a gesture between women — undressing in front of each other, without embarrassment or comment. It was trusting them with your deepest secrets.

“It’s a way of reimagining yourself. You wish upon a dress and a hue, and it’s a prayer of transformation.” I was naked in front of her three-way mirror and I let the nightgown slip down over my head. It did just that, slipped and slid over my body, a whisper of beige silk. The dressing room smelled of Shalimar perfume, the perfume of American women in the fifties who dreamed of exotic places, harems and veils, Louis Jordan Europeanlovers, or Vittorio Gassman in Venice, making them wicked and undoing their dumb American naivete. The nightgown did not have lace trim, just delicate filigree-scalloped edges at the neckline and hem. The scallops flirted with skin and fabric, so the gown seemed to tease at what was silk and what was skin.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like I should be climbing down a trellis covered in roses to meet my lover in the middle of the night. I’ll catch the edges on thorns but it will be worth it.”

“With a cool desert midnight breeze making you shiver slightly.”

It is disconcerting to see Lorene sitting at a cafe in New Orleans waiting for me. It is the first time we have separated on our trip, and I am now finally able to look at her. She is wearing the same tight jeans she has worn since Texas and a black T-shirt. Her hair falls in her face, which is actually sun-kissed and golden brown. What sort of daydreaming did this indicate? If Lorene at nineteen was my first experience of the power of beauty and style — what had occurred? I am the same as I always am, in a thin cotton dress and sandals, hair hanging long down my back. A woman like Lorene can be read in the complicated ways she reinvents herself, in the way she appears.

I think of my father, sitting on the set of one of his films, talking to his assistant director, Dennis. I stood behind them, unseen (something that had became a habit), an invisible fourteen-year-old constantly lurking behind long hair and baggy clothing. They were seated, backs toward me.

“She’s not a beauty like her mother,” my father said. “But she has a good body, probably, long legs, and she’ll have a kind of cheerleader charm.”

“You sound disappointed,” Dennis said. “At least she’s not fat.”

“No, no. Stop it. She is my daughter.”

I already knew at fourteen that I was no genius like Michael, skidding through books and skipping grades with casual dash. And then, right then, I realized I would never be a great beauty either. I was consigned to the ordinary. And it was the beauty part I missed more. I didn’t cry, I knew it was true. And the events that followed that conversation on the set were colored by this realization. A desire to be extraordinary in some way and not knowing how I could be.

I stand on the cobbled edge of the street and watch Lorene sipping her espresso. She is an epic beauty — someone could launch a war over her face, or even over the mere delicate poetry of her wrists and slender hands.

Finally I approach her. She looks up, ravishing and slightly grubby, the face now wearing a sun-crinkled smile — a smile to wash the world, I think.

I want to tell her about something true. I want her to understand and absolve me.

“Are you ready to leave?”

Lorene smiles at me and shakes her head. She pats the seat next to her. She sips her coffee and doesn’t look at me.

“I don’t think I’m going to New York with you, doll.” I didn’t expect her to say this.

“You’re not?”

Lorene puts a hand on mine and squeezes.

“C’mon. I think I want to be here for a while. By myself. Stay away from hyper urban centers and old lovers. Unwind a bit. You go on and see your mom and your brother. I’ll see you back in L.A.”

“I just called my mother. Michael isn’t even there yet.” Lorene says nothing. There is a woman at the next table, by herself. I can see her over Lorene’s shoulder. She’s in a black dress. She is wearing way too much makeup. One of those old ladies who somehow has forgotten how to put lipstick on. They run it outside the edges of their lips a bit until their mouth looks punctured and sore. The makeup feathers in the vertical wrinkles puckered around their lips. There is too much powder over it all. It cakes in corners. They get lipstick on their teeth. They refuse to notice. Or maybe they don’t care. But for some reason they keep caking on the makeup, every day. She is sipping a Coke through a straw. I can’t stop watching her. Of course she is smoking a cigarette.

“I’ll leave in the morning. New Orleans depresses me, anyway.”

Lorene nods.

“Hey, Lorene, do you remember my father’s friend Dennis Halpern,” I say.

“Lean sycophant AD with penetrating sleazy gaze,” she says, not hesitating.

“Yeah. That’s him.”

“Yeah, I remember Dennis.”

“He was the first guy.”

Lorene gestures at the waiter for another coffee, for me.

“What?” she says. She’s already forgotten our road project.

“I was fifteen, and we were having one of those long dinner parties at the house. One of the last ones before Mom left. I had a few glasses of wine through dinner and listened to Michael and my father argue about politics. The party dispersed into little candlelit groups as usual. Some people went to the pool and got high. Some people stayed at the dinnertable and talked. Others sat in the kitchen sipping wine and talking, putting away dishes and laughing occasionally. It was a jolly desert night, where the general feeling was warm and loose.”

“I remember Michael talking about those dinner parties. Everyone envied your family. Your family actually had groupies, he said.”

“I was not taken with any of these warm murmuring subgroups and went to my room to listen to my records and petulantly lie on my bed. Soon I started to touch myself in the way I did routinely then. I put my hands in my jeans and thought of, well, what girls think of at fifteen.”

“What did you think of?” Lorene asks, allowing her sentence to rise at the end like a real question.