FROM THE MOMENT I returned to my apartment Friday afternoon until I finally saw Arthur Houseman’s film Sunday evening, the videocassette, removed from the envelope and lying on top of it, remained on my dining room table.
They remained there the whole time, one on top of the other. A videocassette. A yellow manila envelope. Two ordinary, mass-produced objects. As ordinary and as familiar as paper cups or disposable razors. There had to be hundreds of thousands if not millions of manila envelopes and videocassettes in circulation which were absolutely identical to the ones on my dining room table.
But after I had lived with them for two days, looking at them, picking them up and putting them down, their very mass-produced ordinariness began to invest them with a quality of foreboding. Not any specific foreboding but a kind of general mass-produced foreboding.
My own personal unease with videocassettes was something else entirely. Their submissive acceptance of all images and impressions to which they were exposed was a trait I also had. They came in various grades of quality, but as far as I knew there was no videocassette with a conscience that refused, on principle, to record some abomination or other. From the totally trivial to the truly sublime, it made no difference to any of them. Their reusability was particularly troubling. The way you could erase them by simply recording something else over them. What was there was suddenly there no more. Replaced by what was there now. I was uneasy because I had so much in common with these inanimate objects.
Sunday evening.
I unplugged the telephone so I wouldn’t be interrupted while watching the film. I took a clean ashtray and a pack of cigarettes and placed them on the end table next to the couch. Then I inserted the videocassette into my VCR.
There were no credits. No music. Nothing even to tell me what the film was called. The film simply began.
A man in his mid-thirties is at the wheel of a car. He’s driving slowly, both hands on the steering wheel. It’s a narrow, residential street lined with houses, lawns, and trees. Judging by the trees, it feels like a small town in the Midwest. Judging by the light, it’s early morning.
He stops for a stop sign and stays there a little too long. We’re tight on his face and he seems to be thinking thoughts he knows he should not be thinking.
The tempo of the film as it proceeds is controlled and deliberate, but as hypnotic and unassuming as a river flowing. It is the story of a love affair between a man and a woman, both of them married to somebody else.
About fifteen minutes into the film, the scene shifts for the first time, to a local restaurant.
Our would-be lovers, who are not lovers yet, go there for a cup of coffee.
They seem very eager to demonstrate to others, as well as to themselves, that by going to a public place together they have nothing to hide.
They sit down in a booth.
A waitress, played by an actress I have never seen before, watches from a distance. There is nothing particularly attractive or even particular about her, unless it is the unusual whiteness of her face. The face itself is as ordinary as the decor of that restaurant.
She watches them. She likes both of them. She walks up to their booth to take their order.
“Hi,” she says. “And how’s every little itsy-bitsy thing with the both of yous?” And without waiting for a reply, she inquires in a mock-sophisticated tone: “Do you want to hear our specials for today?”
She knew the couple. They knew her. It was the kind of town where almost everyone knew everyone else and there was nobody who didn’t know that there were no specials in this restaurant.
Having said her line, as if amused by it herself, the waitress laughed.
Everything stopped. The videocassette continued to roll, the scene in the restaurant continued to play, but I was deaf and blind to it all, undone and disoriented by the laughter I had heard.
I knew that woman. I had never seen her before, but I knew her. I didn’t know her name and she didn’t know mine, but I knew her.
Dianah and I met and married when we were quite young. I was at Columbia at the time. She was going to school across the street at Barnard College. We met at a party and fell in love at first sight, as we later described it to others. I was in graduate school. She was an undergrad. I was in comparative lit. She was in political science. She was blond and petite. I was on the dark and burly side. She was immaculate in her appearance. I was dressed in those days, not without affectation, like a tattered book jacket. Her parents lived in Santa Barbara, California, mine in Chicago, Illinois. Together, like a demographically correct presidential ticket, Dianah and I seemed to be in a position to have everything.
She graduated from Barnard at the same time that I got my PhD from Columbia. Shortly after that, we got married. Her parents were very rich. They were thrilled that their daughter was marrying a certified member of what they called “the intelligentsia.” They bought us a huge apartment on Central Park West and endowed us with enough money that neither of us had to work for a living. They were both quite old, and when they died, the wealth Dianah inherited was substantial.
And so there we were. We were young, she was beautiful, I was an intellectual, we were wealthy, we had everything except a baby.
Dianah wanted to have a baby right away. She didn’t want to be just a mother. She wanted to be a young mother. Her own parents had been quite old when she was born and she felt cheated that she had never known them as anything other than old her whole life. She didn’t want her child to have to repeat that kind of an experience.
She was going to be a young mother. She loved that image of herself.
“We’ll take our baby everywhere with us,” she kept telling me.
Freed by Dianah’s wealth from the necessity of pursuing an academic career, I was trying to write something of my own at the time. I soon discovered that although I was considered a witty and amusing conversationalist, a talent much admired in the social circles in which we moved, I really had nothing to say. Even my talent as a conversationalist was that of someone capable of responding to other people’s ideas rather than initiating any ideas of his own. It seemed that I lacked both the talent and the creative urge ever to become a writer.
To become a father, to create a baby, seemed at the time an artistic endeavor of which I was capable. I embraced the idea wholeheartedly. Dianah would be a young mother. I would be a youngish father. We would take our baby everywhere with us. We became passionate on this subject.
Passion produced pregnancy after pregnancy but no baby. One miscarriage followed another and was in turn followed first by a deep depression and than by a renewed and almost fanatical desire for a child.
After her fifth miscarriage, Dianah began to panic. We consulted several specialists, who all reassured her that there was nothing biologically wrong with her, that she was putting too much pressure on herself to have a baby and that if she just relaxed, waited a year or two before trying to have a child again, everything would probably turn out all right.
But Dianah couldn’t wait. She felt time slipping away. She saw herself repeating the pattern of her own parents and becoming a mother when she was long past her youth.
She wanted to be a young mother.
We decided to adopt a baby.
We quickly discovered, however, that if we wanted to adopt a baby through normal channels, it would take a long time. A few years perhaps. Every adoption agency we applied to had a long waiting list and Dianah just couldn’t wait.
There were, we learned, other ways of getting a baby and getting it quickly. There were lawyers who specialized in this field, and because they were certified by the New York State Bar and because they had diplomas from reputable Ivy League law schools hanging on the walls of their offices, it made it a lot easier to overlook the quasi-legal nature of their work.
We hired one of these lawyers. His fee was exorbitant but presented no problem to our resources.
In less than a month, he called to tell us the happy news.
I answered the phone in the living room, and once Dianah discovered the nature of the call, she ran to the phone in our bedroom and picked it up.
Our baby. Already it was ours. The lawyer kept referring to it as “your baby.” Our baby was not yet born. It was still in the womb of its mother. The girl who was expected to deliver in a few days was only fourteen years old. She was from Charleston, South Carolina. Her boyfriend, the father of the child, was only seventeen. He had been killed in a car accident two months ago. Drunk driving. The girl’s parents were very poor but very religious and wouldn’t hear of an abortion.
Our lawyer kept on talking.
Confidentiality, he told us, was crucial in these matters. We would never know the name of the biological mother and she would never know ours. There were nasty legal ramifications and heartbreaking emotional costs when names were revealed. Therefore he, our lawyer, would be our representative. He would make the trip to Charleston. He would wait there until the baby was born. He would pick it up and he would bring it to us along with all the necessary paperwork.
We would have to pay the young girl’s hospital expenses, our lawyer’s travel expenses to and from Charleston, and any and all expenses he incurred while waiting there for the baby to be born, plus, upon delivery of the baby, the remainder of the mutually agreed-upon fee he charged for his services.
“Congratulations,” he told us.
I heard Dianah scream with joy on the extension phone. I ran from the living room toward her and she ran from the bedroom toward me. We met in the corridor and flew into each other’s arms.
She went on a mad shopping spree the next day. Every few hours it seemed, the door would open and she’d be standing there engulfed in packages of baby things. Toys. Blankets. Diapers. Baby bottles. Stuffed animals too big to wrap. And then out she went to shop some more. Delivery men brought a beautiful baby crib. Dianah hung mobiles above it. She was as happy as I had ever seen her.
Three days later our lawyer called again. Dianah was out shopping for more baby things.
Our lawyer told me that he was calling me from the hospital room where the young girl was now recuperating. His voice was very low. He was whispering almost. No, no, he said, there was nothing wrong. No problems at all. Everything was fine. The girl had delivered not long ago. The baby was fine. It had been quickly removed so that the girl didn’t even have a chance to hold it or see it, which lessened the risk of her becoming attached to it. She didn’t even know if she had given birth to a boy or a girl.
“It’s a boy,” he whispered.
There was just one thing, he said, and I could refuse if it made me uncomfortable. The young girl had pleaded with him to be allowed to hear the voices of the couple who were adopting her baby. Just to hear them. To hear what they sounded like.
Had Dianah been there, I would have passed the phone to her and let her, as one mother to another, talk to the girl. But since she wasn’t, I agreed to do it myself.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” our lawyer advised me.
“I know.”
“Remember,” he whispered, “no names.”
“Yes. I know.”
There was a long pause and then a very sleepy, very young voice came on to say, in a soft Southern drawl, “Hi.”
“Hello,” I replied.
Another long pause ensued and then, not knowing what else to say, I asked her how she was feeling.
“Tired,” she said. “I thought it would hurt more to have a baby. But it didn’t hurt. Not nearly like I thought it would. It just made me tired. I could sleep and sleep. It’s a real nice room they have me in.”
“My wife’s not at home,” I felt obliged to tell her, so she wouldn’t be wondering why she wasn’t talking to the future mother of her child. “She’s out buying baby things. She’s been shopping ever since we heard.”
“Tell me, mister, if it’s all right for me to know this, are you folks rich?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Real rich?”
“Real stinking rich,” I told her.
Maybe it was the way I said it. Laughter just bubbled out of her in response. There was this raucous catch-in-the-throat quality to her laughter that not only seemed unusual for somebody her age and startling under the circumstances, but also caused her laughter to break up, seemingly to die, and then reerupt again an octave higher. It just trailed off at the end, becoming softer and softer, but raspy soft, like the sound of a soft-shoe dancer.
We talked some more. She kept calling me mister. I didn’t know what to call her. She asked me to promise that I would love her baby, that it would have everything. I promised. I thanked her for giving us her child.
“You are welcome, mister,” she told me.
And then, tired and sleepy, she said, “Bye.”
When Dianah returned, I told her all about the telephone call. I left out the description of the mother’s laughter.
I despise and have always despised the term “little masterpiece.” It’s a favorite category of film critics for certain foreign films. The term “little masterpiece” seems to suggest the existence of a whole spectrum of masterpieces ranging in sizes, like products on supermarket shelves, from small to medium to large, to jumbo-sized masterpieces. And yet, despite my aversion and detestation of that term, I could think of nothing more fitting to describe the Old Man’s film. It is humbling, if not humiliating, to realize that there are occasions when we’re all just as fatuous as any film critic.
The film was a masterpiece because it was perfect. It was “little” because its subject matter was love.
A man and a woman. They were both, in their own words, happily married. Then, by chance, they met each other. A vision of another kind of life and another kind of love was born between them. It was as if at some point in their lives their souls had been torn in half. Just when they had adapted and found a way to be happy living with half a soul, they met the very person who had the other half in his, in her possession. The serrated, torn edges, like the two halves of a treasure map, fit perfectly.
Once they had met, they could not unmeet. Once they had experienced the feeling of being whole, they could not pretend that it hadn’t happened.
So they went on meeting and the affair began.
The mere act of being together, in a car, in a coffee shop, in a motel room, increased the wattage in their lives, made both of them burn with a different kind of light. Her whole face changed, became more beautiful, when he was with her. Likewise, he changed when she was with him. A third entity came into existence when they were together. A ghost. The holy ghost of love itself.
But to keep this kind of love alive required an inordinate amount of energy, both spiritual and emotional, because it was an inordinate kind of love they felt for each other. Each time they got together was almost a mutual act of self-immolation. They were both ordinary people, an ordinary man and an ordinary woman, caught in an extraordinary love affair that required terrifying amounts of inner resources to feed the fire of the love they felt.
It was not the infidelity that troubled them, or what the people in the town were saying about the two of them. It was the sheer amount of energy they needed if they wanted to keep on loving each other.
They discovered, in the course of the film, that the demands of this kind of love were too much for them. They tried to make do on less. They tried to ration themselves. They could both tell that as a result of this rationing, something divine was dimming and dying between them. But they could not shake off the entropy. In the end, it was just the two of them, sitting in that same restaurant where we saw them early in the film. Just the two of them. The ghost, the holy ghost of love, was not there with them anymore.
Unable to comprehend what had happened, to accept responsibility for what they had allowed to happen, both of them used their marriages as an excuse for ending their love affair. They both said that the guilt they felt, she toward her husband, he toward his wife, was the cause of their separation. They said this to avoid confronting the much greater guilt and the much graver infidelity toward their own souls, torn in half again.
We see them a few years later, at a Fourth of July celebration in the park in the center of the town. Her husband is there. His wife is there. Their children are there. In a scene full of heartbreaking ordinariness, we watch the fireworks.
They have both returned to the fold of their families and former lives, but it is clear that they will be haunted forever by the vision of the love they have allowed to die. And because the memory of that vision, and the part they played in its demise, is still with them, they both seem, in that final scene in the park, despite the fireworks and the festivities and their friends and families around them, as alone as any inmate on death row.
The film was a love story, but it would be more fitting to think of it instead as a story about love, a story that explored the expiration of love in us all. The tragedy of the limited resources of man.
The waitress in the restaurant, that woman I knew to be Billy’s mother, appeared several more times in the film, but only as part of the background in a scene belonging to somebody else. She never had another line to say.
The movie ended the way it began. No end credits. No music. No THE END at the end. Nothing. It just ended.
Four days later. It’s a little after three A.M. I sit on the couch in the living room, smoking, with an ashtray on my lap. I have one of those remote-control gizmos in my hand. On top of the TV set, where I have placed it, sits a framed photograph of Billy. His high school graduation picture. On the screen I watch, yet again, the scene in the restaurant. The waitress appears. She goes to the booth. She says her lines. She laughs.
The laughter just bubbles out of her. The same raucous catch-in-the-throat laughter of that fourteen-year-old girl on the telephone some twenty years ago.
And then I rewind and replay that same scene all over again.
I have been doing this for hours.
I think my thoughts or they think themselves, it’s hard to tell the difference. I think the kind of thoughts that only God should think, but the remote-control gizmo in my hand makes me feel godlike.
The three of us, Billy, his mother below him on the monitor, and I sitting on the couch opposite them, the three of us are like three parallel rivers, three parallel lines, which in the old Euclidean geometry could never meet and intersect, but which in the modern time-bend and space-bend universe can. With a phone call or two (another remote-control gizmo) I can alter the landscape of all three of our lives. I can change the course of the rivers. I can cause a confluence to occur. I can, like God, bring mother and son together. There is something terrifying about doing this, meddling in their lives in this way, but I know that I can do it.
What would happen, I wonder, if I arranged to bring mother and son together without either of them knowing that they were mother and son?
Would something in them respond to each other?
Would they know in some way that they were flesh of the same flesh?
My thoughts move on as I replay the scene again on the TV screen.
Despite my many failures as a father, I now have (do I not?) something enormous and essential in my possession that I can give Billy and that will (will it not?) make up in one fell swoop for all the derelictions of my past. If I give him back his mother, that will (will it not?) more than make up for all the rest.
What greater gift could I give him?
And by doing so, would not a bond form between us, some new bond, loving in its own way? Would he not thereafter think of me as a true father, because who else but a true father gives back a mother to a child?
And she, would she not see in me a deliverer who gives her back something she foolishly gave away as a child?
It is possible (is it not?) that thereafter I will be an indispensable and cherished part of their lives. It is Saul, they will say (will they not?) who brought us together. We owe it all to him and we will always love him for it. And as a result I will (will I not?) finally have a home of my own in their hearts.
I think my thoughts, or they think me, it’s hard to tell which, and because I’m in a mood to do so, I warn myself against setting such thoughts in motion.
There is something terribly wrong, I tell myself, about my godlike contemplation of intervening in their lives.
A man like me, incapable of playing the role of a man properly, should not try playing God with the lives of others.
My mood is one of judicious restraint and concern for the welfare of Billy and his mother.
But I know myself. I know that my mind revolves. I know that my moods are like phases of the moon. I know everything except how to stop being the way I am.