2 or 3 Things I Know About You

Claire Corbett

I’m standing in your study, stunned to find it unlocked. Bad teen girl stalker. How could I have got so lucky? Your home so isolated on this hill overlooking the water. I’m almost your neighbour and we never lock our doors either. It’s like the country, though ninety minutes from town. But you’re a world-famous film director and this weekender, with one of the most beautiful views on earth, stands empty during the week. This is years ago, before CCTV: no sensor lights flood the garden breathing in the dark.

Breathless

I am standing in your study that you told Cahiers du Cinéma you built yourself. Gum trees writhe in the night, pale sickle of beach gleams, lighthouse beam winks slower than the racing motor of my heart, which revs higher than your red sportscar. What if someone sees the light I’ve switched on? Is there a dog? The night is quiet except for the clatter of possums on Colorbond.

Detective

I am standing in your study where I have no business being. Intruding. Looking for your real self. If I’m caught what will they do? The shame. To be exposed as every man’s terror: the crazy girl who loves too much. I’ve read every article, seen every film. I could be your daughter but am hopelessly obsessed, more than any character you’ve created. You haunt my dreams. I search your study. Everything here will bring me closer to you. Finally I will get under that skin, that skein you’ve woven of art and the marketing of your public self. Your movies, your interviews, the reviews and critiques. I will know you better than any collaborator, fan or scholar.

Goodbye to Language

I am opening the drawers of your desk. Picking up your keepsakes. A leather wayang kulit puppet, an ancient tin of corned beef from the North Queensland Meat Export Company, an antique paperweight, glass enclosing purple pansies. In the bottom drawer lies treasure beyond anything I could have imagined. Twenty, thirty handwritten diaries!

Contempt

I’m eighteen, have read all the Diaries of Anaïs Nin. Diary-keeping is for dreamy, self-absorbed women. Notoriously, you scorn your scriptwriters: what are you, the famous film director who thinks only in images, the action-hero among artists, doing contemplating your navel in all these notebooks?

A Woman is a Woman

What do I do now? Sit and read your diaries, exposed by the light streaming from your window? I know I am doing wrong but I am excused by love.

In Praise of Love

I cannot stay here. I pull the diaries from the drawer, heap them on the desktop. They are not large; they can be smuggled to my house nearby. No-one will ever know. Safer than reading them here and I cannot ignore this windfall. I have to know. I worship you. I am justified.

Masculin/Féminin

Your diaries are stacked on my bed. No-one else is here. The person who shares the house is working on a film in town during the week. I pick up diary after diary, open the volumes, your handwriting neat. Your voice, your soul on the page for no other eyes. Alone in the soft sub-tropic night I commit a traceless wrong, a crime unknown to any but myself. But as I flip through the black books I wonder. The truth is that they’re not that interesting. You’re not really here. Oh, now here is something: your pregnant wife and the pride you feel seeing her heavy and rounded, weighted with your child. At last. A man exulting in his power to change a woman’s body, a woman’s life, forever. You’d admit it to no-one, not even her. That page the only one that springs to life. That lives in my memory.

A Story of Water

Three days to decide. I could secrete the diaries, the most astonishing keepsake. No other way to own a piece of your soul. But if I return them my sin washes away.

Passion

For a day or two I agonise. Though I’ll never be found out, never punished, I will know I’ve harmed you. Not the power I’m looking for. But I’m afraid to sneak around your garden at night again. I could be caught doing the right thing. Finally, on the last night before you arrive for the weekend I steal back, replace the diaries. You will never know how you’ve been violated.

I watch one of your films again. And see, finally, you are here. The diaries are no more than the discarded feathers of a bird that flies thousands of miles across the sea. It’s the patterns of your flight that show me your soul, looping forever, flashing past at twenty-four frames a second.