I FOLLOWED THE cab back to the semicircle it had taken me so long to find the first time. It was almost routine now, as if I lived there. The cab stopped and I, without thinking, as if I lived there, parked once again in my old parking space.
There was something charming and gracious, although a bit theatrical, about the way she inserted her arm under mine in that Gone with the Wind kind of way and then led me through the moonlight down that narrow sidewalk of a street toward her home. We did not and would not talk of “her movie” until we were comfortably settled inside. We chatted instead about how hot it had been earlier in the day and how much cooler it was now. There were always cool breezes in Venice at night, she told me. I realized, as she lifted the latch on the gate of her chain-link fence and swung the gate open, that we had not introduced ourselves and that she didn’t know my name, but I decided not to spoil the ease and intimacy between us by bringing it up.
She seemed to have second thoughts about something, about everything, as soon as we were inside. About my being there. About “her movie.” About the improbability of good news coming her way. I could see her worries and anxieties and her efforts to dispel them as clearly as if her face were a series of slides with captions of the emotions she was feeling. I had to keep looking away from her, breaking eye contact, and this just contributed to her unease.
But I had to keep looking away. The completely open window of her face made me feel like a voyeur of her disrobed inner life. Nobody should be that open, I thought. Nobody.
She ran around turning on every single light in the living room, little lamps with little shades of various colors, pale yellow, pale blue, pumpkin orange, as if all that illumination could dispel her anxiety. She talked the whole time, telling me things about Venice I already knew, and the whole time she talked, I could tell, anybody could tell, that what she really wanted to talk about was “her movie” but that having been burned once before kept her from bringing up the subject for fear that she would be burned again.
“I’ll tell you what,” she announced when there were no more lamps to turn on and she had nothing left to tell me about Venice, “I’ve got to get out of this dress. I only wear it to work and I feel like I’m still working when I wear it, so I’ll go put something else on and then I’ll be right back. And then—” she paused and summoned whatever courage she possessed “—you’ll tell me all about my movie, all right?”
“All right.”
I could hear her traipsing through various rooms, half-humming some song, staying in touch with me through the noise she was making. I heard the faucets run. I heard the toilet flush. I heard her opening doors and drawers. I heard the rattle of ice cubes falling into the kitchen sink and the clink of a bottle neck against a glass and knew, both by the state that she was in and by the sound, that she was having a drink in the kitchen to compose herself. Which was fine for her. But what could I have to drink, burdened as I was by my disease, to compose myself?
Breezes blew through the living room from various directions and at different elevations. Some of them carried my cigarette smoke away and expelled it through the open windows, others rubbed against my ankles, blowing the other away.
The living room was decorated with clutter. A clutter of couches cluttered with little pillows. A clutter of cocktail tables, three of them, cluttered with magazines. Fashion. Fitness. Interior decorating. The floor around the couch on which I sat was cluttered with books. Romance novels. With romantic titles. Written by authors with romantic pseudonyms.
There, among the clutter on top of the end table to my right, I caught sight of a box of English Ovals, a brand I used to smoke.
I leaned forward and reached for the box. I opened it. There were still two cigarettes inside. I took one out, tapped the end on the hard surface of the box, just as I used to do, and lit it.
What the taste of madeleines was to Marcel Proust, the scent and the taste of various brands of cigarettes were to me.
The campus of Columbia rolled into view with my very first puff. The way I dressed, the way I walked, the way I talked and thought, for I walked and talked and thought and dressed differently in those days.
Dianah came back as she was when we met, because I was smoking English Ovals when we met and fell in love. When we got married and when I had a cigarette after our lovemaking, it was still English Ovals that I smoked. I smoked them when I first tried writing. I smoked them when I gave up writing. I smoked them when we decided to adopt a child.
Leila reappeared. She wore a strapless black gown and high-heeled black shoes, bearing liquor bottles in her arms. She announced herself by tossing her head back and saying, “Ta-da!” In addition to the bottles pressed against her breast, she carried two tall glasses in her hands. She was a little less tense and a little more composed, as people who are a little drunk tend to appear at first. Even so, she couldn’t quite pull off saying “Ta-da!” Dianah could do it perfectly. Dianah could “Ta-da!” with the best of them. But not Leila.
“This was going to be my gown for the premiere of the movie I was in, but the premiere went off without me, so I thought, why not premiere it tonight? What do you think?”
“I think it’s a wonderful idea and a beautiful dress.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
She placed the bottles and the glasses on top of the magazines on the cocktail table in front of me.
“I have vodka and I have gin and I have Scotch.”
I meant to smile but wound up laughing. It was the way she pronounced “Scotch.” She chirped it like a little bird. The sound of her voice tickled.
“What’s so funny?”
“What isn’t funny?” I replied.
She poured a Scotch for herself. Having no preference, and knowing that it was a complete waste of time to drink, I decided to go in alphabetical order and therefore started with gin.
It was she who did the talking.
She told me all about the movie she was in, which she hadn’t seen and I had. And since I could not get drunk, she got drunker and drunker as the night wore on.
It was the longest single night of my life.
The lies I told her, or rather the lies she wanted me to confirm, were the easiest and the most catastrophic lies I’ve ever told.
Along the way, prodded only a little by myself, she told me the story of her life. It was, to borrow a phrase, the saddest story I have ever heard. It all began like this.
“Do you know what one of my favorite scenes in the movie is?” she asked. The fact that her question put “scenes” in the plural made me despair.
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, I shouldn’t say it’s my favorite scene. They were all so wonderful. But, on the other hand, why not say it? I mean, it is my favorite scene, so what’s the big deal about saying it, right?”
“Right.”
“Cheers.” She drained her glass, poured herself another, and went on. “It’s the scene, you know, when I drive home late at night after work, still wearing my waitress’s outfit, and I go inside the house where my little girl is sound asleep, still clutching that silly stuffed dog I bought her, and I just sit by her bedside and tell her all about my day. What I did. What happened. Who came into the coffee shop. How they looked. Who said what to whom. I just loved doing that scene. Did you like it?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Did you really?”
“It was wonderful.”
There was, of course, no such scene in the film I had seen, but there was no way I could tell her that. We were, after all, celebrating and she looked so happy, so involved, describing it to me, that I just couldn’t tell her it was gone, that it had been cut, as so many scenes in films are cut.
“It really was wonderful, wasn’t it?” she asked.
One confirmation was never enough for Leila, so in the course of the night I had to confirm everything, and lie about everything, in duplicate, sometimes in triplicate.
“Yes, it was. I don’t blame you for liking that scene so much.”
“It’s my favorite,” she said, clutching her drink with both hands and pressing the glass to her chest, “my absolute favorite.” Her white, naked face beamed with pride as she thought about that scene. She looked so fragile, defenseless. I could almost see the dotted lines of demarcation in her features, like tiny cracks in a beautiful ancient vase. A wrong word, a single tap with some harsh truth, and the whole thing would shatter.
She drank up and had another and told me about a couple of other scenes. Both were gone, of course, but I loved them both, just as she wanted me to love them. She talked about Mr. Houseman, what a gentleman he was, the nicest director she ever worked with, “a gentleman of the old school,” she called him, and how patient he was with her, and encouraging, and fatherlike, and what a shame it was that he was so ill as she had heard he was.
“There was that one scene, remember, where I just stood there in the coffee shop, cleaning off the tabletop with a wet rag and looking out the window at the two lovers walking away toward his car. Remember that scene?” I nodded. “We shot that scene I don’t know how many times, because Mr. Houseman wanted a certain kind of close-up where he could read all the thoughts in my face, how I felt, you know, about the love story of those two and what memories it kindled in me. And it was such a long, long close-up that I just couldn’t do it right because I lacked confidence that I had enough life in me to sustain the silent moment. So we kept on doing it over and over again, take after take. Finally, I don’t know why, maybe because I was so exhausted and tired of worrying about my inner life, but finally I just did it. I forgot they were even shooting. I forgot everything. I just looked out the window while I wiped the tabletop with the wet rag and thought my own thoughts. The people I’ve known, the friends I’ve had, my childhood, my mom and dad, my little … well, everything. I thought about everything. And the close-up seemed to last forever this time, it was like waking from a dream, or like in a hospital, you know, when you wake up after anesthesia and don’t quite know where you are or why everyone is smiling at you in that funny way. That’s what it was like. The whole crew burst into applause. They did. They really did. They all burst into applause. And Mr. Houseman, that sweet, sweet man, he was not in the best of health even then, you know, but despite all that and despite his age, he got all excited. He looked like a young man again as he jumped out of his chair, shouting, “Print!” and ran toward me to give me one of the biggest hugs I’ve ever had. Did, did you like that scene?”
“Did you really?”
“It was unforgettable.”
My description pleased her, but the look on her face entreated me to elaborate.
“It was heartbreaking,” I obliged her. “It was as if you were trying to look after the two lovers like some guardian angel, urging them to hold on to their love, as if you instinctively knew that …”
I blabbed on. Her face responded to every word I said. Ripples of joy appeared and, ripplelike, spread out in concentric circles until her whole face was consumed by delight.
“I loved the ending of the film, didn’t you? I just loved it. It was so melancholy, I know, but I just loved it. Standing there in the park while the fireworks went off above us in the night, looking around and catching glimpses of my friends and neighbors by the light of the fireworks and feeling the life of the town flowing through me, flooding me somehow. I almost cried while we shot that scene. Part of it, of course, was that it was the end of the film, and that come tomorrow, we would all go our separate ways, but a part of it was the scene itself. The two lovers weren’t lovers anymore. Something had triumphed which wasn’t love, but life still went on and for all the fuss and the bother and the pain and the mess, there was still something glorious about life. Even when it’s tragic, it’s still a glorious tragedy. We had our wrap party that night. Everyone danced. You should have seen Mr. Houseman …”
She told me all about it. How he danced like a young man. How she danced with him. He took off the hat he was wearing, he always wore a hat, and put it on her head, and told her that he had never seen a woman who looked so good in hats the way she did.
I could not tell her that she had been cut out of the ending of the film that she loved so much. What did remain of her in the film, her one spoken line in the coffee shop, her laughter, and glimpses of her in the background of two other scenes that belonged to somebody else, these were so inconsequential to her that she never mentioned them. And yet they were all that was left of her. The rest was gone.
She poured herself another drink, most of it going into the glass but quite a bit of it spilling on the floor on which she was now sitting.
“Cheers!” She raised her glass.
“Cheers.” I raised mine.
“You really don’t know what this means to me. You see, I’ve been in so many films.” She tried counting them on her fingers, but gave up and swept them away with a flick of her wrist. “Many, many. That’s how many. Many, many films. And for some reason, they always cut me out of them. Out of all of them. Or they did up to now. Cheers!”
We clinked glasses again.
“All those films I was in, and they cut me out of every single one. Gone. From all of them. Simply gone as if I had never been in any of them. So many films. So many parts. Little parts, yes. Most were little parts, but still, I was there. I said things. I felt things. I wore costumes. My characters had names. Gone. Poof. And you see, they never even bother to tell you that you’re gone. Not if you’re somebody unknown like me. They never even bothered to tell me. So I’d go and buy a ticket to see the movie I was in and I’d sit there in the theater waiting for myself to appear only to have the film roll on without me. All those films. They just rolled on without me.
“And it’s not just movies. I mean, it would be bad enough, right? Bad enough even if it was just movies, but it wasn’t just movies. There is, or rather there was, knock on wood”—she rapped with her knuckles on the floor—“there was something about me, I don’t know what other explanation there could be other than that there was something about me which followed me since I was a little girl. I swear to God, mister, these things have been happening since I was, what? Fourteen. Parts of my life are just cut out. Taken away. Just taken away somewhere. Whole sections. Whole big chunks. And what’re you supposed to do then? Reconnect what’s left. Just reconnect what’s left and carry on as if nothing had happened. I’ve tried, mind you. But when you’re constantly removing parts of your life and reconnecting what’s left, you start feeling bizarre after a while. Like you’re getting older and older and yet the life you’ve lived seems shorter and shorter. Know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said.
She frowned.
“I’m terribly sorry, mister, but I can’t remember your name.”
“Saul. Saul Karoo.”
“And mine’s Leila Millar.”
“I know.”
“You’re in movies, right? You told me that, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. What is it that you do?”
I explained what I did, that I was a rewriter, a movie doctor, and how, in this case, I had been asked by the producer to assist him in doing some work on the film that Mr. Houseman, because of his failing health, was no longer able to do himself. She listened with that smiling drunken benevolence of someone who doesn’t hear a word you say because they’re listening intently to their own voice in their own mind.
And then, out of nowhere, but perfectly consistent with the line of her own drunken thoughts, she exclaimed:
“Take my father, for example. He’s dead now. He died, I don’t know when anymore, but he died. And do you know what he told me just before he died? He told me how sorry he was that he didn’t love me. He asked me to forgive him on his deathbed for not loving me. See what I mean?” She flung out her arms in both directions in one of those drunken gestures meant to encompass the whole of life.
“The thing is, I didn’t have a clue. I had no idea until then that he didn’t love me. I grew up thinking he did. I was sure he did. God knows I loved him and it never occurred to me that he didn’t love me. Why the fuck couldn’t he die quietly and keep his mouth shut about that? Why did he have to tell me? So he can die in peace? But what about me?
“I flew back to Charleston as soon as my mom called to tell me he was dying. It was late at night and I had to take a red-eye to Chicago and then hang around O’Hare waiting for my conncetion, worrying myself silly the whole time that I might arrive too late. But I didn’t. I got there in the nick of time, running down that hospital corridor like a fool, in the nick of time so he could tell, me, before he died, that he didn’t love me.
“All those years, mister, what was I supposed to do with all those years I lived believing I was loved?
“And when I walked out of that hospital that day, exhausted by travel and lack of sleep and stunned by what my father had told me, I felt like some patient who had an amputation. I was a grown woman, but it was like all my growth was taken from me and I was a girl of fourteen again. It was just like that. I felt just like I did when I was fourteen, leaving the hospital, going home.”
It didn’t take much prodding, a few casual questions was all it took to have her tell me what happened to her at fourteen. I probably didn’t even need to have asked. Leila, unprodded, would have told me everything by herself.
“I had a baby when I was fourteen. It was a love child, if there ever was one. The stories you hear about girls that age, you know, how they don’t really know at fourteen what love is, how they don’t really like sex but do it for other reasons, how they can’t even have proper orgasms at that age, wrong, wrong, wrong. I loved that boy. I loved the sex. I loved getting pregnant and having that secret growing inside of me.”
She told me a little about her boyfriend, her first love, Billy’s father. His name was Jaimie Ballou. He was seventeen. Very tall, with a mop of hair that bounced up and down when he ran. A basketball star. Every college in the country was after him.
“Nobody knew that I was pregnant for the first couple of months. Nobody. Not Jaimie. Not my parents. Nobody but me. It was my secret, and it was the happiest two months of my life. It was springtime and there was life growing outside of me and inside of me. All was life and it was all growing.
“My parents were very religious people. When they found out, they were horrified. They had a harlot for a daughter, a sinner. But they tried to love the sinner in their midst as proof of their religion. They saw it as a test. My dad tried so hard to love me that I thought it was the real thing. I did. I thought he was crazy about me.
“Even if I’d been willing—which I wasn’t—they wouldn’t hear of an abortion. Or consider letting me keep the baby. They took turns talking at me, the way detectives do in crime movies. They brought in the parish priest, who talked at me too. It would be a bad thing, they all kept telling me. My whole life was still ahead of me. If I kept the baby, my whole life would be over. In the end, I came to see it their way. The thought that my whole life was over frightened me. I felt so full of life, and the thought that somehow, it would all be over …
“So it was arranged that as soon as my baby was born, this lawyer would take it. He was representing some couple who wanted to adopt. They would pay for everything, you know, medical bills and things like that.
“Although I agreed to give it up for adoption, my body didn’t want to give it up. My time for delivery came and went and my body held on to the child as long as it could. They finally had to cut it out of me. A C-section. My baby was taken out like an appendix. I never even saw it. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl, but I have this hunch it was a girl. It’s just a hunch, but I trust my instincts.”
“Do you know who adopted it?” I asked her.
“No. Some rich people. They didn’t know my name and I didn’t know theirs.”
“How do you know they were rich?”
“I pleaded with the lawyer to let me talk to them so I could at least hear what they sounded like.”
“What did they sound like?”
“The woman wasn’t at home. She was out shopping for baby things. I only got to talk to the man.”
“What was he like?”
“I don’t know. Can’t remember anymore. All I remember is that he said that they were stinking rich. I was still a little dazed. It was all like a dream. Before I even went to the hospital, Jaimie got drunk. He never drank in his life, but this time he got drunk and got killed in a car crash. He was gone. The baby was gone. It was all gone, but somehow my whole life was supposed to be still ahead of me.
“Nobody really warned me what it would be like afterwards. What it was like to go on living after you’ve lost so much. The boy I loved. The baby I loved. Nobody prepared me for that. The rest of my life, whatever that meant, was mine again, but I no longer felt that I could just live it. I had to do something special. Make something special of myself. Become somebody special. So that someday I’d be able to look back and say, ‘There, it was all worth it.’ I saw only two choices. I could become a saint or a movie star.
“Cheers,” she chirped, raising her glass, and then suddenly she started crying.
“No, no, no,” she waved me back. “I’m OK. I’m fine. Really, I am. It’s not what you think. I’m just crying because all that stuff’s finally behind me. All my life, things have been taken away from me. Until tonight. And then tonight, you show up and tell me that you saw my movie and that I was in it. For once I survived. So I’m not here falling apart. I’m celebrating, don’t you see. That’s what I’m doing.”
She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand.
“You see?” She pointed at her new face. “See how good I feel? I’m going to sleep so nice tonight.”
She did not mean this as a cue for me to leave, but I chose to take it that way. I got up.
“I better get to bed myself.”
She saw me to the door.
“Are we going to see each other again?” she asked, holding the screen door open with her hand. “I’m not petitioning, you understand. Just asking.”
“I think we should,” I told her.
“What a coincidence.” She clapped her hands. “I’m just breaking up with this man, so I happen to be emotionally available at the moment, you lucky dog.”
She laughed, as if making fun of herself.
“Thank you. Thank you ever so much for everything.”
“No need for that.” I shrugged.
“Yes, there is.”
“Good night, Leila.”
“Good night.”
She stayed in the doorway, watching me open and close the gate.
“I’m in the phone book,” she shouted after me. “My last name is Millar but it’s spelled with an a. Drive carefully.”