Daphne had been quiet for a while; I did my best not to take notice. Although I couldn’t rule out her being in peril out in the woods, as she’d suggested she might be, somehow her silence felt more like an attempt to lure me to her, to surface my drives, which lately had been finding satisfaction in Karen. In any case, I was preoccupied with the film drawings, which wouldn’t seem to crystallize, not least because of Paul’s incessant calling. He’d become quite the enforcer, monitoring me with a touch no-one could call light, and each day, as we moved closer to the film’s release, it grew heavier, more flagrant. Now, whenever I sat down to work, I found I couldn’t stabilize Daphne’s pose on paper. I couldn’t even still my imagination enough to transcribe coherently from it, so that all I got for my pains were sheets with twenty and thirty poses lightly overlayed in India ink. I was stalled. So perhaps it was no surprise that on the fourth day of Daphne’s silence, I had a change of heart, if you want to call it that. Why not go looking for her? The question had anyway been eating at me from the start.
I was waiting on Immo now. There’d be greater insulation from Cosquer with him in the car instead of John, the other thought I’d had for an accomplice. But Immo, it turned out, had a fresh problem with Vera to sort out. She’d not quite called off the marriage when she’d learned of his latest consort, another physician—this was the indignity she couldn’t stand, not the infidelity per se—but she was keeping him very close now. I felt sorry for them. They would never make it to their wedding day, or if they did, they’d have no more than a handful of anniversaries before it was over. Yet I also had the feeling they’d both be fine without the other. They could do without anyone.
If Duke weren’t in such bad shape—his right eye was still giving him trouble—who knows, I might have been tempted to enlist him in my reconnaissance. That left just John, whom the troupe certainly wouldn’t know; he could investigate freely in my stead. There was no question he’d do it if I asked, even in such rough shape, having lost kin. And he had his father’s Chevy truck, sky blue but torn down to steel in so many places: the best and only present he’d gotten growing up, the only one he’d wanted.
By the time Daphne texted, John and I were already across the Lincoln Tunnel, headed into Jersey: You never came! I could have used you. But but but who cares, I will see you tonight okay? Nik signed off on a cut of the film, the team is showing it tonight. Uptown, 9pm. You’ll come? xxx
I felt like tossing the phone, crushing it under our tires. Needless to say, I couldn’t tell John that we weren’t going to find Daphne by the riverside. Talking was impossible, anyway: he had the radio way up, classic rock, Zeppelin, Queen, Sabbath. I’d never seen him take quite so much time lazing through turns, though; his foot had never been so light. He offered me little faraway smiles the whole way, which had nothing to do with unfriendliness. No, he was just leaving his world behind for a while, and I was the only one he knew who could truly appreciate this about him. He didn’t, for instance, ask me why this mission needed to be undertaken. He just came.
Two hours later, when we arrived at the great house in the woods, far grander than my own, I sent him in as my proxy. He returned with the expected finding: everyone’s gone. Somehow I found it disheartening to hear what I already knew. I suppose I must have not quite believed it could be true. That’s the way things went with Daphne—never quite knowing, until everything changed. We sat down in the hotel’s quaintly elegant restaurant and I bought John a very long lunch, something to match the leisureliness of the trip so far. He didn’t so much as scan the drinks menu; it was going to be water for him, beginning to end: I’m driving, right? I’d seen him drive drunk so many times, and so uncannily well, that I don’t think he expected me to believe this was why he was abstaining; he just expected me to leave the question alone. Of course I did.
As we started on the yellow squash soup, though, I could see reality catching up to him, the heaviness of circumstance saturating his face, which was sunburnt after his recent time on the plains. Now that the aim of our trip had been satisfied, or rather had been shown to be unsatisfiable, he was being ineluctably drawn back into the ruts of his own life. His disappointment, his bitterness, was beginning to show; he didn’t much want to be here anymore, I could see that. But I was exceptional at silence. And so, without making anything out of anything, I ate and languidly pondered the finished film I’d be viewing in the evening, considering, among much else, the several takes of the scene in the clearing, the various selves Daphne and Alonso had explored merely through changes in footwork, spacing. I even imagined several of these takes being included in the final cut, one after the next, or perhaps with interpolated material. Nik was that kind of director, at least that’s what I thought.
When I’d passed an hour or so this way, in my own mind, working through the soup to the stuffed peppers to the heirloom tomato salad, and then on to the cold lamb and asparagus that was our entree—I was eating the way he liked to, with total abandon; we were both losing ourselves in our appetites—John began to mumble and then to speak, unprompted. About Lenore’s condition, first. She’d taken a tremendous fall. Lucas, John’s father, might have played his part but it was really her, as always, testing people with her intemperance. She’d also cut herself with a knife Lucas swore was intended for him. The combination had nearly finished her; certainly no recovery would ever be complete. Lucas was terrified by her state. This was the first time John had seen someone genuinely inconsolable, worlds apart, even though this was his father. John had waited with the man, never a very strong or potent man, for two full weeks, bringing him back from whatever place he’d gone to. And then he’d returned to New York, to sit next to me now. It took him a long time to unwind this story, there were many drawn-out pauses, yet I didn’t speak again until he finished, sometime after our cherry crumbles. I picked up the check—my only contribution to our exchange, and it was enough. The hotel was a luxury hideaway, the waiter told us somewhat indiscreetly, a place celebrities turned when going incognito. I’d noticed the menu had no prices, and though the setting was rustic, the bill was fully cosmopolitan. At least it was Antral’s to pay.
Now that John had been able to say his piece, and our gluttony had rendered us more or less emotionally unreachable, I confessed to him about Daphne’s message. He polished off his coffee and spun the cup on its saucer, but gradually his eyes lit up, if that wasn’t an artifact of the shifting cloud cover spilling brilliant country light onto his face. Soon he was smiling, which confirmed his feelings: he was pleased for me, I could see, that I wasn’t to be wholly disappointed today, given the screening in Manhattan later. With that in mind, we headed back to the city at speed, John once again driving like he was John. I told him about the mural that was planned, about what might need doing. More than picking up the check, my asking for his help buoyed him. The rising odometer told me as much. There was nothing greater I could have given John at that moment than my confidence. By the time we got back, which wasn’t long, I thought I heard him whistling over the radio. He was going to go home and think about how to pull this one off. As I was getting out of the truck on Park Avenue, near the theater, he punched me on the shoulder and chuckled. You aren’t nearly as bad as Rick says you are. I wasn’t so sure he was joking.
The doorman pointed me through to the theater, which I realized, as I entered from the lobby, held only fifty seats or so. Apparently Nik had arranged the viewing for next to nothing, courtesy of an old friend whose life had bloomed brightly, and profitably, once he’d left the stage. I’d never sat in such a carefully manicured screening room: the wide eggshell seats were like nothing I’d seen in a movie house, wrapped in buck leather with full back- and head-rests, as on a business class flight or indeed a Gulfstream. No concession stands to be found, either. This was cinema divorced from all that: the swampy popcorn, the stale air, the tight rows. Wine—vintage wine —might have been served earlier, I was told, remarkable for an impromptu rough-cut screening intended mostly for cast and crew, although I saw some others, dressed too properly to belong to the troupe, loitering as well.
I spotted Daphne standing at the front, very near the screen. In fact, much of the audience had crowded itself into the first few rows, and others sat even closer on the ground, rather than in those luxurious leather seats farther back. I stood peering at the crowd, their odd configuration, when someone came bounding toward me in the dimness: she nearly tackled me, so that to keep upright I had to pick her up off the ground slightly. She tucked her chin in my neck and I felt genuinely exalted in that moment—anyway, until my eyes ran into Nik’s. He was staring me down; evidently he was ready to begin the screening. He looked beastly, his beard grayer than before and his face seeming to have emerged from the fat it had been previously been embedded within.
“It has been fucking awful,” she whispered in my ear. She kissed my neck briefly, secretly, and I set her back down.
“Did he confiscate the phone or something?”
Daphne nodded and took me by the arm down to the seats, explaining the odd arrangement of the audience, so near the screen, by citing Nik’s recently developed view that Obsequy, as he was now calling the film, couldn’t be watched properly except from within the image. Since this wasn’t yet possible, he thought we should at least do what we could to approach the ideal. I looked back at the director, whose eyes tracked me furiously, and I had to assume a long time had passed since he’d had a full night’s sleep. Although Daphne and I managed to put valuable distance between ourselves and Nik, where we ended up, four rows from the front, was no safe haven: I discovered Alonso in the seat next to mine, wearing a thin white oxford with the sleeves pushed back. He was slouched down low; the chunky seat couldn’t truly accommodate a man of his length and litheness—a fact I could only smile at. If the world had turned out differently, I might have been sleeping with him, too. He wasn’t merely a model, though. He was an artist, apparently an extraordinary one, or an extraordinary one in the making, though my knowledge of theater wasn’t strong enough for me to judge. He looked at me in the chest rather than the face, as though he were only used to looking at women. I despised Daphne then, for taking away the pleasure of our reunion so suddenly, by bringing me to seats so close to his. Couldn’t she have warned me in some way? Was it imperative that we sit just here, with him? We could have even sat on the ground like so many others. I was still adjusting to the disappointment of having Alonso next to us when things got worse: just two rows in front of us, I found Jeff.
The lights came down a notch, as if we were close to starting, when Alonso rose and walked over to Nik, leaning down to speak in his ear. Then they were both walking briskly out of the room. The lights disappeared on cue.
“What was that?” I whispered.
“They’re always conspiring now,” Daphne said. “They’re like the same person. Nik’s absorbed him, or maybe the other way around, I don’t even know now.” She gripped my hand. With the lights down, Nik and Alonso gone, and Jeff a ways off in front of us, I’d become her number one man—for the second time. Another rehearsal. But as I sunk into the soft seats that left ample room for my legs, unlike Alonso’s, to stretch out flat in front of me, as in an exit row seat, and the first frames of the reel flickered soundlessly on screen, and the sweat from her palm joined that of my own, I found myself less at war with the notion of being a backup or a standby.
We stayed like that, Daphne and I, holding hands, for the whole eighty-three minutes, and it felt like the most intimate exchange I could have had with her, that I had yet had with her, simply being appended to her body, even, or especially, at rest, watching her onscreen doppelgänger handle the business of motion for both of them. By the end of the film, Daphne had managed to bend the nymph Estelle into a new shape, though I couldn’t say just what. The girl moves back in permanently with the father, now in Madrid; the maid, Marguerite—dear Malory Martin, in fact—remains a phantom presence, continuing to write to her, with ambiguous intentions and terrible knowledge; and Vincent, the lover she finds back in America, in the woods, is left to wonder.
Alonso, it turned out, really was commanding—this much, and only this much, was now certain. But Daphne’s performance was something even more than that. Yes, it was nothing less than a breakthrough, precise and new, taking the Lolita concept, in this case the girl masterminded by her own cold father—who might as well have been a stranger, how poorly they knew each other—and giving the force of choice and authority to the woman, even if the result was chilling, the choice she’d made so repugnant to common sense. For all that, you couldn’t assume that this film, with its oddly matched exposures, and its cuts that purposely misled you as to precise spatial relations, slightly jumbling the grammar of ordinary cinema, which made eighty-three minutes seem more like two-and-a-half hours, as did its total lack of diegetic sound—you couldn’t assume, given the vagaries of renown, that such a film would find much of an audience outside the festivals, and maybe not even there. Which is to say: for Daphne, there might be no corresponding breakthrough with the public. Nor could you bank on sensitive reviews of her acting; her artistic triumph, the broader film’s as well, might not be grasped as such for years or decades, or, perhaps most commonly, ever. The film would simply disappear, and Daphne right along with it. Didn’t I face the same prospect? My drawings, I thought, could just as easily evaporate as congeal into an evolutionary node of late modern art.
I can say that Obsequy had this rarefied quality of significance, all while having scant recollection of what the cut actually looked like, the order of the scenes. Which was strange, given that, frame by frame, the film was highly realistic, depicting nothing that couldn’t happen, and moreover, nothing that wasn’t likely to happen. Yet the film’s primary structure wasn’t causal or additive. It was... radial. I knew from Daphne that the cut had been rapidly pieced together by Nik in the final days, working out of a makeshift editing room in the hotel with only his cinematographer by his side. This man, an old hand with long ties to AFI, had been looking for a swerve in his career for some time, an opportunity to work with a proper artist. Nik was the chance. Over two years and a few films, mostly shorts, they’d co-evolved a style that put most elements of his classical expertise on the shelf. Conventional filmic technique didn’t much interest Nik—nor did he fully understand it, for better or worse, being a dramaturge, really, and not a traditional filmmaker. Plenty of his troupe, apparently, felt he’d gone too far, with this latest cut, in defying his cinematographer’s wishes, and they’d said as much to him. Tyrannical as Nik was, he was principled, asking the group to opine on nearly everything, which naturally made the making of this film excruciating for all. No matter: I felt Obsequy’s magic, however much I couldn’t parse it.
There might have been slightly more to my recollection’s being so vague, I should say, and it began from our sweaty palms. Throughout the screening, Daphne would shift from one side of those capacious seats to the other, altering the tension, almost below the level of attention, between our clasped hands that stretched over the armrest. Three or four times, she moved toward me more fully, breaching the border between our seats, to rest her head on my shoulder. The first time, I thought she’d actually fallen asleep, and it was only by the way her hand tightened at moments of screentime densest with sense that I discovered she was conscious.
Two-thirds of the way through, a whisper entered my ear, an often inaudible one, like those of dreamers and sleepwalkers, all while the same voice, at its full pitch, spoke to us from the screen. The whispering girl told me of the father in the film (Henry) and the one in her life (Tony) who was probably not so far, right then, from the theater, at the Frick, perhaps, inspecting their Beatus for marginalia he’d missed on the last trip. She told me of the way she’d felt too close to Tony. Did this explain the frostiness I’d observed earlier at her apartment? Her mother’s departure, she cryptically avowed, had had something to do with this bond.
She was being sensational, of course. She probably thought it would turn me on. Didn’t guys like that kind of twisted stuff? I had come to expect this from her, and so I said and did nothing. I had to allow, though, that her tone was different this time. The more she whispered in my ear, the more I could see that the film, her own image often dancing in front of us, had set her on a sort of reverie transcending any of her machinations. She might have been improvising even, in just the manner she frowned on. Her commentary continued in fits and starts, right to the end of the film. There were times when words seemed simply to well up in her, and others that gave the impression she was trying to control the future, to shape the drawings of her I’d yet to begin. The very fact of showing me the whirl of men about her so pointedly, now in person, but first in that string of photos I’d gotten soon after meeting her, knowing the distress and confusion it would cause me—surely she was performing.
Iberia dominated the last quarter of the film, though most of the footage had been shot in New York, New Jersey, and Maine. Here on the moors, it’s bright orange among the boats, terrific glare everywhere, and Estelle growing close to her father, a somewhat laconic foreign correspondent for an American newspaper who seems barely interested in her, annoyed at her presence in his European life. He is, I should also say, played by none other than Nik, which I’d not guessed, and I’d not been told about.
The whisper moved on from Tony, who’d anyway been misunderstood by Daphne’s mother. Though, you know, she wasn’t all wrong. I could see that Jeff’s silhouette, not far in front of us, had turned into that shadowy profile I recalled so vividly. Was he now looking back at us, over his shoulder? Would his phone come out like the last time? She leaned further onto my shoulder, already halfway out of her seat and still gripping my hand. I felt her other hand sliding down my shirtfront, all the way down to my trousers.
“There was something off,” the voice purred.
“What?”
I heard the zipper go then, I could feel my eyes closing, and soon the voice became nothing but the mouth from which it came. My attention couldn’t have been more divided: it was the loveliest pleasure, illicitly taken, right in sight, I realized, of the old girl, Alice. This must have been calculated; consternation budded in me. Then the whisper was back, huskier now, provoking with every word, in slow little dribs between glorious silence: “She just... got her... men mixed up,” she offered in soft tones partly masked by Vincent, who was clearing brush onscreen at a European ranch. Still I felt her breath, heavier than my own, its rhythms carrying intimations, directly through my thigh, as the girl’s chest pressed upon it with her face in my lap.
“But what... does that matter... really?”
How hard it was to parse those suggestions in a state like this, where reality, its presentness, was second by second more apparent, and the future more and more inconceivable. Still, I tried. The questions, my suspicions, too, were growing with equal vigor, and my voice broke down into the same rhythms as hers: “But then... who are you talking...”
Vincent chopped through the last of the grass, arrived at a tiny marsh, a small little dingy tied up in the floating weeds. And that’s when the movie and I finished—within seconds of each other. I wouldn’t put it past her to have planned for as much, or to have steered matters that way once it had become a possibility, the screen going black to the sounds of rushing water. I could hear people shifting in their seats, their quiet murmurs, presumably about this particular cut, which included, just as I’d daydreamed hours earlier with John, a sequence in which many takes had been artfully piled upon each other.
Daphne was out of my lap now, all the way back in her seat and indifferent to my predicament. I could feel what she’d done: spat me out on my crotch and leg. I buttoned myself quickly and draped my shirt, blissfully white, over my pants, as if I were one of those young fraternity men on the town. With that, I fled for the bathroom, making myself, for very good reason, into a blur. I could feel the squish expand as I searched for the toilet in the quietly lighted lobby of this Park Avenue building. Its design was so symmetrical, linked by many identical halls, distinct only for their terminating on different rooms, that it took me some time to locate the facilities. Down the first corridor, I ended up at some sort of private club or restaurant, where the maître d’ smiled secretively as the mess dripped down my thighs; the second hall, as I swerved, took me to a delivery platform; and the third, a champagne bar. By this time the men at the lobby desk, having seen me for the third or fourth time in succession, were rising to help me, just as the drip reached my knee. Only then, down the last possible corridor, with all my luck exhausted, did I find the toilets.
On my way back out, with my clothing a few shades darker from all the water I’d used, rinsing off, I spied Nik through the windows, smoking in the street. No sign of Alonso, though; he must have seen him off. When I returned to the theater, the lights were up and the cast and crew had gathered in small circles.
“I thought you’d just left”—Daphne was coming in from the lobby just as I was smoothing my trousers. “You look fine,” she said, laughing somewhat cruelly. She put her hands on my pants: “Wet and fine.”
Was she coming just from the lobby? Or had she also gone outside to speak with Nik? Could Alonso have returned?
I made to leave.
“Oh, you can’t! There’s an afterparty, didn’t you know, just over there”—she pointed at the champagne bar, its gleaming marble façade—“and now I don’t even have Alonso with me.” The crew had insisted on this little get-together, in celebration of what, I couldn’t tell, perhaps merely surviving the making of this film. Nik, who probably fancied himself a new and more radical Herzog, had been indifferent to the notion, but as a concession to the will of his group, the terror he’d put everyone through, he’d agreed to it. His prosperous friend, the one who’d let him use the theater—everywhere, Nik knew people with money, in the swamps of Jersey and the clubs of Park Avenue—was happy enough to cover the expenses.
“I’m not going without a date,” Daphne pouted. I turned back toward the room and searched for Jeff, the man who’d probably seen me getting head from his would-be girlfriend. When I raised my hand to point him out, she slapped it down.
“I’m through with him. It hardly ever started. James fucking hates him.”
“Is it James now?”
“Jimmy—sometimes I don’t care.”
“And he hates Jeff being with you?”
“Yeah.”
“And what about me?”
“Jimmy doesn’t know about it.”
“He knows.”
“You’re an artist, though. His one. So it doesn’t feel like sharing, to him.”
“Sharing?”
She laughed at what must have been the terror of realization on my face.
“You shouldn’t fuck around about that,” I said.
“What would you know?” she asked, with plenty of acid. The shift disgusted me.
I went to the gathering with her, partly, I suppose, to shut her up, though more so to get the rest of the story about her family, which she’d begun in the darkness of the theater. One of the reasons I would have liked to avoid Nik’s party, besides the mess she’d made of me, the wetness of my hand-scrubbed pants a perennial reminder of what had gone on (she was delighting in this) and what I’d owed Karen but failed to deliver, was that, because of Daphne’s seductions, the way she dominated space in the flesh, I’d experienced the film on an almost non-cognitive level. Which meant I wasn’t prepared to say a thing about what I’d just seen. I mumbled something to this effect as Daphne and I wandered toward the bar—we were the first to arrive—and she thought it was a perfect response to the film.
“Nik should kill all the sound in the next cut. Not just the music, the dialogue, too. We can just watch people take up space.”
This was too clever, I thought. Only the quality of her acting let her get away with throwaways like this.
We clinked crystal as the rest of the troupe, crew members and peripheral staff, and then several screen actors I half-recognized, filtered into the bar, re-creating the circles they’d built in the theater just after the film had finished. Everyone in The Vegetable Gender I found here, too. And though they’d been cautious on that occasion, and then quite positively disposed to me the last time they saw me, unexpectedly, by the river, they segued now to a third stance toward me, worse than either of those: coolness. Hank, the giant—he’d had the smallest role in Obsequy, playing a vagrant whom Vincent nearly stabs in a fit of pique over Estelle’s relationship with her father—I waved at him from afar and he quite pointedly looked away. Elias was a major player here, as the spurned American lover roundly defeated by Vincent in the contest for Estelle—but on seeing me now, he showed no enthusiasm. Indeed, he seemed to keep twenty-five yards clear of me throughout the event, even though I was on the arm of one of the film’s stars.
The one who seemed to have an interest in me now, though the wrong kind, as the looks she gave me were violent and hateful, was old Alice, shriveled in so many ways. Had she really been offended by a blowjob? She kept closing in on me, bit by bit, so that she might find a natural way to confront me. To her I did the very thing that Elias, who I would have liked to talk to, especially with Daphne, was doing to me: endlessly slip away. Eventually, though, Alice caught Daphne and me as party talk whirled around us. The strangest exchange ensued between them, of tiny gestures alone, as if they’d devised some private language between them on empty afternoons upstate. She didn’t even look my way now, not from close range.
I must have earned a bad name over the last couple of weeks, I thought. I don’t know what exactly Daphne, or Jeff, may have pinned on me. Perhaps they’d all agreed that I was the reason their star had been so distracted from the company’s work lately. Jeff, under the rich light of several chandeliers, appeared just as I’d imagined he would: despondent, especially in the presence of Daphne. The more attention she paid me, the more his gaze hardened, until finally he retreated, his look crumbling into sadness. Had he been spurned by her? Disciplined by Garrett? Lost favor with Nik? Seen my cock in Daphne’s mouth?
Nik was the only one who came straight for me, bringing along that searing stare of his. He shook my hand stiffly, and then, without prompting or context, commented on my recent work: Strong figures was all I understood, though he went on for some time muttering in elaboration. The drinks were affecting him, or his nerves had frayed from his time at the compound in New Jersey. Ignoring Daphne, who stood just behind me now, he pointed at my trousers but could think of nothing to say. That he’d said something favorable about my work, though, made me want to compliment his film. But how could I? If he were to ask me a concrete question about it afterward—and I judged him to be the sort of man who would do that, as I would, too, calling the bluff of gladhanders and sycophants—I’d be caught out. So, I reluctantly settled on nodding, presenting a guarded coldness I didn’t feel but didn’t know how to do without just then. At least I thought I didn’t feel it. Hadn’t he chased me off his set in the woods, robbing me of a proper goodbye from Daphne? Perhaps my look had purposes even I couldn’t keep in mind.
Nik left us then, returning to the far corner he’d occupied, but not without first arranging for a bottle of Chablis and a single glass to be sent to his high table near the windows. I re-engaged Daphne, whose spirits were rising as the hub of the room’s attention, the real star, Alonso notwithstanding. For myself, I began to take a certain pleasure, as I got through my third whiskey, in not relating to the crowd, and grumbling to myself just as Nik was. Periodically, Daphne would try to reintegrate me and speak with the others of my work, both my early artistic triumphs at Hinton and the glories of the new project all over town that were yet to come, though without disclosing anything about it Garrett wouldn’t want her to. She seemed, frankly, to know more about it than I did—the two of them were that close. Yet her efforts only further estranged me from the crowd, as did the greediness with which I began to drink, the more expensive stuff the better. This was, I quickly learned, the sort of estrangement that could be delicious on the night: to see bisexual Sikah, for instance, lose his jaded distance—this half-man who was so unfriendly on all three occasions I’d met with the cast, though this may well have been his steady state—to see his composure melted by rage at Daphne’s effusions over me pleased me very deeply.
Sadly, my exhilaration dispersed at the appearance of a man I’d thought we’d seen the last of tonight—Alonso. He was rushing toward me, but I was feeling vital, and venomous, and nearly untouchable now in my remove from this crowd of actors. Even if Daphne’s reasons were her own, I believed in her praise, about the grandeur and distinctiveness of my project, a twenty-first century resurrection of urban renewal, through a developing body of imagery that didn’t bear the lukewarm, committee-approved quality of state-sanctioned art. If there was a time to face Alonso’s aloofness, even his rage, and if there was also a time to dismiss it mockingly, it was now. If I had to, I might even show him the stains on my trousers.
As Alonso came closer, the unsteadiness of his gait, which gave his movements their headlong quality, became obvious. He wasn’t rushing toward me so much as stumbling forward. The olive had gone completely out of his skin; you could have mistaken him for a Scotsman. He looked scared, too, which didn’t suit him. It made everything feel wrong. Daphne didn’t know what to say or do, so when Alonso finally fell into me, I put my arm around him, escorting him to the bar so he could sit down before he collapsed. All my plans of attack were ruined. What was there to do, then, but buy him a whiskey and laud the power of his acting in the film? This wasn’t actually a lie. He’d been every bit the match for Daphne, while utterly distinct in style. He was bewildered by my warmth, I thought, and kept looking over his shoulder with a crazed expression, searching for Daphne, who was standing in the middle of the room, just where we’d left her, but seeming lost as people continued to congratulate her. I pulled Alonso’s head back around to me, had him sip the drink. Had Daphne engineered this meeting, insisting Alonso make a return, never mind how sick he was? What was it she was hoping to extract from me, or my imagination, this way? And had she been horrified by her own sickly intentions? Perhaps she was trying to figure these things out for herself as she stood there, paralyzed. Guests began descending on the bar, looking in on Alonso. Everyone but Nik. I moved off to the side, near the exit, when Daphne finally came to console the golden boy. From his perch near the window, Nik raised his glass to me, his teeth finally entering into his smile, and then nodded toward Alonso and Daphne: we ought not miss the finale, he seemed to say.
The couple was huddled together; a fight was brewing, anyone could see. But the dispute was all quite hushed: Alonso because he was sick, and Daphne for reasons of discretion. She was trying desperately to explain something to him, to find absolution probably. Meanwhile, Nik looked deeply satisfied in his corner, where no-one dared approach him. It must have been the first time I’d seen him content, and it had nothing to do with the film, which gave him, it seemed, an entirely different set of feelings, judging by the amount of reshooting and recutting he’d been doing. No, he was reveling now in domestic drama, the push-and-pull of his fifty-strong family, this school or company he curated so carefully, that could well end up his lasting achievement. His eyes darted back to me, and his grin widened slightly, stretching that patchy grizzled beard of his, all to express his pleasure: after all, if Nik was jealous of Daphne and me, Alonso could only have been more so.
Inevitably, Alonso’s simmer boiled over. His eyes landed on me once or twice, just as Nik’s had; and as I downed the rest of my drink, Daphne escorted him out of the bar without bothering to wish me good evening. I could have been stung by this; I had a right to be, frankly. But tonight, as I gazed at Nik presiding by his window, an uncontaminated delight irrepressibly blossoming within him, and as I felt the wetness of my trousers finally begin to lift, the woman’s departure couldn’t touch me in the least.