NOVEMBER 29, 2011
The darkest time of year. Isn’t some kind of light in order?
Deb puts the TV and VCR in the back of her truck and brings them down the hill to Hazel’s kitchen. She’s rented The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a film she hasn’t seen in twenty years. She and Vale need something transporting, something sexy; she wants to go back in time and be Sabina with her artistic broodiness, bohemian and solitary by choice. She wants to watch films about hard times and remember the ways that people go on living in the face of tragedy. Art as blueprint.
“You ever seen this before?” she asks when Vale arrives.
Vale shakes her head.
Deb dumps olives into bowls. Pours them each a glass of French wine.
Vale picks up her glass. Sniffs it. Smiles. “Enlighten me.”
They sit at the kitchen table to watch it, not wanting to wake Hazel. It’s set during the communist takeover of Prague in 1968. Sex and politics and people finding one another in the dark. Across the screen: Lena Olin as Sabina with her hat, undressing. A young Juliette Binoche snapping photographs of the occupation. 1968: Deb misses, in so many ways, the immediacy of that year. The way her purpose and direction felt so clear. The way the resistance—to war, to racism—brought her generation together in art, in academia, in action.
The quiet beauty of the ending guts Deb now just like it did when she watched it the first time—the way Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche found light in each other. Happiness!
Just before their car crashed on that rain-slick back road at night.
“Harrowing,” Deb says, when the movie ends.
Vale leans her head back. Closes her eyes. “I don’t want the dream to end,” she whispers.
Deb smiles. “Me either. The return from that transportation is unbearable.”
And not just transportation, Deb thinks; the film makes the stark wood of the kitchen cinematic, Vale’s autumnal beauty magnified, Hazel’s dying a harbinger of something greater.
“I’ve met someone,” Vale says quietly, her eyes closed.
Deb looks at her, eyebrows raised. “You have?”
“Yes,” Vale says, eyes still closed. “Neko. A photographer.”
“No shit.” Deb grins. “I’m happy for you, Vale.” She takes a sip of her wine. “And jealous.”
“It’s terrifying,” Vale says. She stands and puts on her sweater. Her hat. Slips into her boots.
“Yes,” Deb says. “I remember.”
Vale stands in the doorway for a moment. “Is it worth it?”
Deb laughs—her old-lady laugh. Half-crow. “Hell yes.”
Vale smiles, tips her hat, steps out into the dark and wind.