A Stranger Like You (15 page)

With the project in development, you work together on the script. You spend late hours in your office at the studio. Sometimes he comes to your house. Usually it is late at night, after he’s been to the editing room, cutting his documentary. You drink together, talking, your bare feet curled up on the sofa. Sometimes you will eat a little something, an omelet maybe, or some hard salami, sharp cheese, olives. It is like old times, you think. Only not really. You are different now, and so is he, and the truth is you miss your old self, that courage you had, the ease with which you survived without comfort. Without safety. Shooting edgy sixteen-millimeter films with no money; living off baked ziti and peanut butter sandwiches. Barely having the cash to process your film, let alone rent the Steenbeck. The risks you were willing to take for your art—because that’s what it was—that’s where you began, making something called art. But money will do that, you realize, suck away at your courage. And anyway, you’re not making art anymore—not really.
You are making money
.

Watching Tom Foster makes you happy. The way he sits there, his long, lanky body, his big feet, his enormous shoes. Sometimes you will walk around the house in his shoes, just to see what it’s like. He wears clogs, old boots with broken laces. His shirts are deep caves, the pockets of his trousers filled with pencils, lint, useless matches upon which he has scrawled intermittent lines of poems. He talks about his film, the famed documentary, his eyes lit with passion. There is a girl in the film, sixteen and homeless. She has been living at the shelter. She has a talent of playing the harmonica. He has her playing in the film, sitting on some playground swings. The girl has freckles, her hair is long and blond. “Wholesome American stock of the Midwestern variety,” he tells you. “She was living in her mother’s car for about three years till the mother got a boyfriend. Left soon after that. Says he broke her arm. She doesn’t talk about it much.”

“Did you try to contact the mother?”

“Sure, I tried. Couldn’t find her. She’s totally off the grid.”

“Now what?”

“I’m not sure. I’m looking into it. She doesn’t want to be part of the system. She doesn’t want to live with strangers. Maybe it’s all right.”

“What if it isn’t?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

It comes to you that his life is larger than yours. The way he puts himself out there for strangers. On the one hand, it humbles you—you admire his passion—on the other, you think it’s a marvelous distraction from all the other stuff in his life he’d rather not deal with, like his unconventional marriage to the Italian shrew. Countless people seem to depend on him and he never complains. He seems to welcome the confusion. “I’m happy to help,” he is fond of saying. Even his wife is something of a stray cat. Still, you haven’t quite forgiven him for staying married, especially now that you are fucking him on a daily basis. On the rare occasion that he tells you about her, Lucia—just her name is enough to make you ill—you imagine that he is talking about a character in one of his scripts; it is the only way you can tolerate the folklore. A few times you’ve been up to his house in Laurel Canyon, a striking modern cube that juts over the cliff. The walls inside are covered with extraordinary photographs, most of them black and white and exceptionally valuable—Harry Callahan—Dorothea Lange—Edward Weston—Ansel Adams—a serious photography collection for which he is renowned. The furniture is spare, Scandinavian. Only once you slept beside him through the night. It was there, in his bedroom, with the white moon shining through the skylight that you first told him that you loved him—you admit now that it was a mistake.
Too much information.
His wife was in Italy somewhere, at her family’s vineyard. Of course her dilemmas were always fascinating and exotic. While he slept, you snooped around the house, opening her drawers, fingering pieces of her stationery, a box full of feathers, a book crammed with poems—much to your dismay, they were all in Italian. Evidence of his life with her everywhere you looked, the espresso machine, wine from the family vineyard,
please,
the hand-painted plates from Sicily. You find yourself wondering if her absence is in some way more meaningful to him than the flesh and blood time he spends with you. It makes you weak; you don’t like thinking about it. It is as if there was a tiny crack in your heart that leaks your pain, there is no drug for it, but you are stoic, you can put up with a little pain. And you don’t believe in jealousy—as your therapist would say it undermines your self-respect—and yet there’s this weight in your chest, this rage. You lie awake at night, stewing over it. It’s your own fault for falling under his spell.
Your own fault!
And yet you refuse to compete. You are a fascinating, accomplished woman, terrifically exciting—everybody says so. And you have worked your fingers to the bone to get where you are! You are smart—smarter than
her
—smarter than him too while you’re at it—but she is the phantom wife, persistently unattainable and, like some devious icon, forever in his thoughts.

One morning, you fly to San Francisco together then drive down the coast to Santa Cruz. In person, Fatima Kassim is graceful and lovely. Her head is covered, but she is wearing a Western skirt, a long-sleeved blouse. You drink tea together in the student union and she tells you about her mother and the woman who was murdered, her mother’s best friend. “They were like sisters,” she says in nearly perfect English. “They were good women. They were good Muslims. It’s not right, what happens to women in my country. Before the invasion was different, but now it is very bad. It is much worse now. Before we went to school, to the cafes. We could wear what we wanted. We had
life
.” She shakes her head, her eyes filling with tears. “Not now. Now we don’t go out. The suspicion—that’s all they need to condemn you. If you are a woman, you have nothing. We cannot drive, we cannot wear trousers, I could not be wearing this,” she tugs on her skirt. A look of shame crosses her face, but you are not certain for which she is more ashamed, her country’s treatment of women, or the newly acquired clothing. “If you are seen in the street wearing makeup someone will throw acid in your face. Just before I came here, a woman who was not wearing her head scarf was murdered. One of the girls in our village was raped on her way home from school, she was just twelve years old. And do you know what she did? Because of the shame? She set herself on fire. They said it was some kind of kitchen accident, but we knew. All of us knew the truth.” Fatima looks across the table at you. “People should know. They should know these things happen.” She nods, as if she is resigned to something. “You make your film. You tell the truth.”

In silence, you and Tom drive back to San Francisco. On the way, driving up the coast, he wants to stop to go kite surfing. There’s a place he knows, friends of his who have equipment right on the beach. They are toned, handsome men in wetsuits. They make a fuss over you, the only woman. They give you coffee in a thermos and warm bread. For a few hours, you sit on the beach watching them surf, attached to kites that are like enormous wings. You can’t help thinking of Icarus, the dream of flying. The power of being up in the air like a magnificent bird. Of using your body, your strength. The détente that forms between the body and the elements: the ferocious sea, the relentless wind. You envy it. That feeling he must have; that rush. The freedom. It is something to see, watching him, being part of this scene—the wild ocean, the cold sand beneath you, the smell of the water, the wind shouting in your ears. You fall in love with him all over again. Maybe you are not strong like him. Willing to stake your life, willing to take such risks. And yet, you are making his film. You are putting yourself on the line for him.

Driving into the city you tell him how you feel, that the movie about Fatima’s mother and her friend terrifies you. There could be serious consequences for her. If word gets out about her involvement, and eventually it will, she could be in danger. You express this to Tom.

“She’s already in danger,” he says, “simply because she’s female. Anyway, she’s here. For now, she’s safe.”

“They can always send her back.”

“She’s willing to risk that.”

Still, you don’t feel any better. You fear you have no business making a movie like this now, with so much trouble in Iraq. With American soldiers fighting over there. What do you really know about Islam? Who are you to question their laws? You’re an American; you can’t relate to their way of life, their rituals. Maybe it’s none of your business.

“As long as we’re over there, it’s our business,” Tom argues.

“Convince me that’s it’s all right to risk Fatima’s life. Because that’s what we’re doing.” He doesn’t say anything. “Why are we making this film?”

“If you have to ask, you shouldn’t be involved.” He pulls over to the side of the road and looks at you in a way that makes you feel sorry you started the conversation. The Bronco shakes with the wake of passing cars. “We’re making it, because she has to go back there one day. Because it’s not just about Iraq. It’s just as much about us as it is about them.”

“It could be dangerous. That’s all I’m saying. It could piss some people off.”

He looks at you. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” He reaches across the seat and takes your hand. “We’re into it now, Hedda. For better or worse. No turning back.”

You spend the afternoon in San Francisco, walking the streets. He pulls you into the contemporary art museum and you wander together through the open bright spaces. A museum is a good place to be with your lover, you think. Something about the white walls, the art, allows so much possibility. It is a place where you are free to be anonymous. The work, the art, lures you out of yourself, into another realm, an abstract arena of pictures and sounds, dreamlike and abeyant. Much of the work is informed by war, images of genocide and apocalypse. Landscapes of broken cities, destitute villages. Dead people; ghosts. Languages of nonsense conveyed by passionate graffiti we cannot understand. The consequences of wars devised in strange, foreign lands. For some reason you think of Harold, his obsession with
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
the visceral evocation of bloodshed, the legends of wars between men, the enduring characteristics of heroes.

It’s late, and you’re both hungry. The restaurant is noisy and close, with tight leather booths and white tablecloths. You drink two bottles of wine and decide to check into a hotel. You make love all night over the noisy street below, the unruly behavior of strangers. Your bodies sweat. Deep sounds erupt from your mouths. It is reckless, bitter sex, each of you fully aware of your own inability to save the world from ruin.

On the plane to Abu Dhabi, the magician’s wife, Inez, comes to you in a dream. She is wearing her long white driving gloves, the same ones you had found in the glove compartment that first day you drove the car. You are a passenger in the car and she is driving and the sun is very bright, you can hardly see. You are in the desert. The light is fierce, and yet Inez is laughing. She hands you her necklace, a string of heavy white stones. When you look at her now, you see that she is wearing the
abaya,
her head covered. The veil is like a shroud, and when she turns to you once more you see that she has no eyes, only empty black holes. You put the necklace around your neck, but the string breaks and the stones fall into your lap.

You wake, muddled, smelling roses.

The sound of the plane reminds you that you are in flight, that the crew is all around you, and that your lover, Tom Foster, the film’s screenwriter, is in the seat beside you. You have agreed to keep your affair a secret. It isn’t something that Harold needs to find out about right now, with so much money on the table. As progressive as he is, he would not approve of it and you know he would think less of you. Everyone is asleep. The journey is long, and you are not fond of planes or of flying through mysterious channels of airspace. The idea that your life hangs in abeyance, that progress of any kind is suspended, fills you with anxiety. How strange to think that you are up in the sky, moving from point A to point B and yet you haven’t even the slightest understanding of the physics behind it. Glancing out the window at the pink clouds you can’t help hoping that there’s a God out there, even though you have proclaimed yourself a nonbeliever. Thousands of feet below are the ancient cities where life began—this is a reality. You remember your summer in Israel, living on a kibbutz, visiting Jerusalem. It had amazed you at the time, just being there, in the Holy Land, amid so much history. Although you were hesitant, you indeed felt a kinship with the Israelis, you were proud to be a Jew. At the Wailing Wall, you can remember feeling moved, tucking your prayer for peace into a deep crevice between stones. And yet the culture was so different, even the simple negotiations of daily life were rife with dissent. It was the Middle East. It was not America. You suppose that living in the desert changes you somehow. Perhaps the heat, the dry air, the need to protect what you feel is rightly yours. And yet, the boundaries of territory are philosophical, subject to debate. Living so close to God—the idea that the Holy City is God’s homeland—the place where history began—that changes people. It permits the possibility of something larger, something beyond one’s ordinary scope. Of course it is far more complicated than that, and you are smart enough to know that power, in any form, is often an illusion.

These thoughts make you nervous. You don’t like being at the mercy of others. You don’t like the fact that your country is at war and you don’t fully understand the war. Even now, making a film about it, you are still full of doubt, uncertainty. In truth, you feel completely powerless. You feel very small, as though you are an insignificant speck of sand in the eye of an infantryman who, within a matter of hours, might be dead.

With only ten days in the United Arab Emirates, your crew will have to work quickly and efficiently, transforming the neutral landscape around Abu Dhabi into the war-ravaged desert of Iraq, a sweeping white landscape that gives nothing back, nothing at all, only heat and rage. And you will be shooting in Iraqi-style homes on city streets that resemble Baghdad’s. One soldier Tom interviewed had described the first invasion as an unlikely parade of tanks and Humvees rolling out of Kuwait City down a strip of vacant highway in the middle of nowhere, no human presence around for miles save for the distant clusters of Bedouin tents. That same summer in Israel, you bought a Bedouin bracelet in Jaffa—it was once the ankle bracelet of a young bride, a silver tubeful of sand. It makes noise whenever you move, the rattle of tiny stones. You are wearing it now, for good luck. You shake it, wondering how old the sand inside of it actually is. Centuries, perhaps. The fact that there are still people living out there in the desert in tents amazes you. You can’t imagine living like that, with nothing, and you reject the idea fiercely; you have no patience for such nonsense.