Life Goes to the Movies (25 page)

“Oh, come, now, really,” Venus can’t resist saying.

“What,” says Dwaine. “You don’t believeme?”

“AIDS in powdered milk? Isn’t that stretching things just a wee bit?”

“That’s the whole point! They know it’s unbelievable, which is why they’ll get away with it!” His forehead achieves that
red, feverish glow that might as well be a sign saying Beware of Dog: KEEP OUT.

“I’ve got an idea,” I say, “Why don’t we change the subject.”

“Good one,” says Venus. “Let’s talk about pleasant things. Any guess who’ll clinch the series this fall? Looks like
Detroit’s got a lock on things, huh?”

“Sure,” says Dwaine. “Let’s look at the bright side! Accentuate the positive, E-liminate the negative? Don’t mess with
mister in-between?”

“Could you, like, lower your voice just a little bit, please?” Venus asks.

“Why, is someone actually listening?”Dwaine scans the crowd of mostly Asian faces looking up from their rice bowls.
“That’s right, folks,” he addresses them all. “I am a mental patient. Just your run-of-the-mill garden variety borderline
paranoid schizophrenic with transistorized tooth fillings and a vast repertoire of conspiracy theories.” He tears off his skullcap, revealing a
bullseye tattoo printed on the back of his shaven skull. Venus blanches. No mean feat for an albino.

“Oh, God,” she says and covers her face as our waiter deposits a plate of fortune cookies and sliced oranges.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but what I think you’re saying is that I should shut up, right? Isn’t that what you’re both
trying to tell me?”

“No,” I say. “That’s not what—”

“Wait, wait!” He cups a hand to his ear. “I’m getting a broadcast. It’s coming in loud and clear on my lower left molar.
Ffff …ffff … fuh …kuh … kyoo … FUCK YOU. That’s the message. Right?Right?”

Venus pushes her chair back, gets up and hurries through the crowded restaurant. I start after her. With a rigid arm Dwaine stops me.

“Let her go, babe.”

“Fuck you. Why did you do that?”

“Honestly, babe? I don’t know. I guess I felt like it.”

With his free arm he reaches for a fortune cookie. As he bites into it I push past his arm and go after Venus, who’s in the ladies’ room
downstairs.

“Venus?” I say knocking. “Are you in there?”

Water sings through pipes. A voice says: Go away.

“Venus, come on.”

“I hate him. I hate him.”

“You don’t.”

“I do. He’s the devil.”

“He’s sick. He needs our help.”

“He’s sick all right. I wish I’d never met him. I wish that I’d never met either of you.”

A lady needs to use the bathroom. I let her by. As she goes in Venus steps out, her face a Pollock painted with tears.

“May I strike that last remark Your Honor?”

“Come back to the table, okay?”

“Give me a minute.”

3

All of the fortune cookies are all gone, the fortunes, too. Dwaine has eaten them all. “And I regret to inform you,” he says, still
chewing, “that the future tastes as bland and stale as it looks.”

“I want you to lay off Venus,” I say, sitting.

“Really? Why?”

“Even if the world is coming to an end it’s not her fault.”

“Is that so? What are your sources?”

“Just lay off, Dwaine. I mean it.”

“Have you been fucking her, babe?”

“Jesus, Dwaine—”

“I’m asking, have you?”

“What is this, more Raging Bull?”

“It’s not a movie quote. I’m asking: have you?”

Dwaine smiles, a different smile than the one that I’m used to. His lower lip catches the surface of the new false tooth the V.A. dentist has
made for him. I can’t say I haven’t been expecting the question. I have; I’ve been dreading it. And I have prepared an answer, but
now that I’ve got my cue suddenly I forget all my lines. The only words that reach my tongue are Joe Pesci’s from that movie Dwaine and I
sat through a dozen times at least, lines that we both committed to memory and used to laugh over, and which I don’t dare repeat now, under the
circumstances. Instead I sit there, matching Dwaine’s smile with my own, trying to, until finally he reaches an arm out and pinches my cheek,
hard, saying, “No need to answer. You know I trust you, babe. To the end of the world, or as far as I can throw you, whichever comes
first.” He pinches me again, harder.

Venus returns, raw from crying. She smoothes the front of her baggy sweater, revealing for an instant (and to my eyes only, I hope) the faint global
contour beneath. She sniffs back a tear.

“So—is the mongoose back in his cage?”

“Hey, I’m behaving,” says Dwaine. “See? I’m buttoning my lips, look. Hm? Mmmm, mmm, mmm. Mmmmm?”

4

At Grand Central we say our goodbyes. As the train slides down the platform and we wave goodbye Dwaine presses his lips to the window and lets a thin
stream of drool roll down the glass. We watch the train’s taillights grow smaller, dissolving into the tunnel’s darkness.

“Thank God,” says Venus.

5

A barge piled high with assorted colorful trash lumbers downstream, pulled by a pair of red tugboats. We watch its progress, Venus and I, standing by
the promenade railing, bundled in mutual scarves and silence. She is showing, the life inside her twenty-one weeks old. A cloud of gulls follows the
barge as as it pushes through drab waves.

“Know what the Indians used to call this river?” I ask mainly to shatter the silence. “The Mohicanituck. It means River of Mixed
Feelings, because it flows both ways. The current flows south, the estuary tide flows north.” It’s been three weeks since Venus and I last
made love. We blame her pregnancy and our demanding jobs, Venus designing costumes for two downtown theaters, me concocting an ad campaign for a new
brand of colorless mouthwash built around the slogan, “The Clear Choice for Bad Breath”—my brainchild. Nightly we lie face to face in
bed, breathing each other’s dreams, content and safe but void of anything resembling lust. Sometimes by day I cannot remember her face. I see her
features distinctly one by one, but can’t assemble them into a whole, and this bothers me. It bothers me a lot. And I’m aware, too, of an
unspoken distress that keeps us from looking each other in the eyes.

“We should tell him,” Venus announces suddenly, looking out over the river as the barge drifts by with its cargo of garbage and corona of
gulls. She waits for me to say something, and when I don’t she turns with a sudden fury in her eyes that even her dark sunglasses can’t
hide. “I want him to know we’re living together as lovers, Nigel, that you’re in love with me. And I want youto tell him. You
do love me, don’t you, Nigel?”

A cardboard coffee to-go container bobs among waterlogged crates and other jetsam sloshing down below.

“That was a question.”

“I heard it. And you know the answer.”

“Please say it, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Of course I do.”

“You loveme?”

“I love you.”

“Then you’ll do this for me. I want Dwaine out of the equation, out of our lives, out of both our lives. Is that straightforward enough for
you? I want you to choose between us: me or Dwaine. Which will it be?”

“Dwaine’s not part of the equation. He’s locked up inside a mental hospital, Venus.”

“Wrong, he’s right here, Nigel, holding us together and tearing us apart. We’re both tied to him, just like those tugboats are tied
to that barge. Only he’s the one pulling us. One of us has got to cut the rope or he’ll tug us straight out to sea. Will it be you, Nigel,
or does it have to be me?”

She looks into my eyes, searching for something—I’m not sure what, maybe the answer that she refuses to accept in the form of words. She
takes my hand then and presses it flat to her belly, delicately curved and hard. “Feel,” she says. “Can you feel? Know what’s
in there, Nigel? Everything worth living for, that’s what. Do you agree?”

Then she leans close and kisses me softly, so softly I barely feel her lips. So softly I should realize it’s a kiss goodbye.

6

She left a note:

Nigel,

This is the best plan. Don’t ask me where I am, and please don’t try to find out, because I plan to keep it a secret for as long as
possible. I’ll be divorced by the time the baby comes. As for the baby, it will be mine: not yours, not Dwaine’s, not ours. I’ll
send a photograph. I don’t mean to be cold. You know I love you, Nigel. But I also know that this is the right thing to do. You and Dwaine
love each other, and no one is ever going to change that. Even if I could, I don’t think I’d really want to. You’re salt and
pepper. You need each other. More than you know.

V.

7

The photographs arrived in January. Boys, two of them, five and three-quarter pounds each. The identical bundles of flesh were swarthy, but then so are
most newborns. No return address. The postmark said Albuquerque. Albuquerque? What kind of place is that for an albino, I asked myself. By southwestern
standards a sunny northeastern day qualifies as rain. She’d have to baste herself daily in sunscreen. She’d have to carry a beach umbrella
everywhere. She’d be like one of those bubble people, a prisoner of her own pigmentless skin.

The same morning that the letter arrived with the photos I booked a flight to Albuquerque. I’d track Venus down. How many albino costume
designers could there be in the state of New Mexico? I’d marry her. We’d live in an adobe house in the desert. I’d turn to pottery
making, or turquoise jewelry. I’d be a devoted husband and father. Whether mine by blood or by marriage, I’d love those children as if they
were my own. Under the dry desert sun our very mixed memories of Dwaine would slowly fade. Life would be, if not exactly sweet, good. Anyway it would
be real and not someone else’s bloody movie.

The taxicab roared across the Triboro Bridge, bound for LaGuardia Airport. As it did I was seized by that dizzy weightless feeling people get when they
realize they’ve started something they can’t possibly finish. I wasn’t going to make pottery. I wasn’t going to be a father. I
wasn’t going to live in New Mexico. I wasn’t going to give up everything I’d worked hard for over the past four years. I
wouldn’t find Venus. And even if I did find her, and even if she did agree to marry me, she would not want to come back to New York City, nor was
I about to drag her and her infant children back here against their will.

The whole exercise, I realized, was pointless.

I watched the smoke clouds billow from the three candy-striped Con Edison smokestacks rising surreally from a dense growth of trees on the
bridge’s lee side, gray smoke clouds. I felt an overwhelming sense of defeat and exhaustion just then, a feeling that was accompanied by my
father’s voice repeating It’s not worth it, it’s not worth it—over and over again,like the tolling of a cracked,
doomed bell.

I tapped on the Plexiglas partition. The driver, who wore a checkered burnoose, caught my eye in his rearview mirror.

I said, “Turn around.”

The
Pure Truth II:
The Sequel
(War Movie)

“A man fights for what he believes, Fernando.”
—Gary Cooper,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Pertinent Movie Quote Wall

T
hat November I got a call from Dr. Shattnuck, Dwaine’s veteran hospital psychiatrist. He asked me if by any chance I’d heard from Dwaine
lately.

“No. Why, isn’t he supposed to be up there with you?”

A week earlier, Dwaine’s doctor informed me, Dwaine had gouged open his wrists with one of the pens he used to fill his black books. He had
escaped from the surgical recovery room where he had been taken after his wrists were stitched and had not been seen or heard from since.

“You have no idea where he might be, by any chance?” Dr. Shattnuck asked.

2

I found him in his hellhole of a hideaway underneath Times Square. From what I could discern by candlelight, his short-cropped hair jutted in flattened
hunks from his skull, and his skin was as waxy as the candles that spluttered and dripped in the darkness. Both his wrists were still bandaged. He lay
curled up on the filthy mattress, so cold his teeth chattered when he spoke. Under his voice I heard the faint deep OM.

“Know what’s f-f-funny?” he said, laughing through shivers. “It wasn’t losing all that b-b-blood that almost d-d-did me,
it was blood p-p-poisoning from the ink. The pen truly is m-m-mightier than the sword.”

“Why did you do it?”

He shrugged. “What can I say, b-babe. It seemed like a g-good idea at the time.”

We spoke for a while. He wanted to know about Venus. I told him only that she had gone to New Mexico. I didn’t say a word about the circumstances
of our parting, or about the babies. “Come on,” I said to him after we’d spoken for a while, “let’s get out of
here,” and tried to move him, but he wouldn’t budge. He started rambling, saying how the city was an apocalypse waiting to happen, how any
day now the gutters would run with blood, so on and so forth. I let him ramble on for a few minutes, his voice weak as water, letting the words drizzle
like warm rain all over me. He rambled on until his voice broke into ragged coughs. “You okay?” I said.

“No,” he said. “No, I’m n-not okay. The w-war’s over, babe. We’ve l-lost. The B-B-Balkanization is c-c-complete,
the Orwellian state has taken control. I thought movies might b-b-be the answer, that they might offer a w-way to combat the killer clichés. How
wrong I was. Now there’s n-nothing left, n-nothing but d-demons and h-h-husks…”

“Come on.” I coaxed him off the mattress and onto his knees, so we could crawl the hell out of there. As we did I heard him sniffling
behind me, saying, “I k-killed them, I k-killed them all.”

“Who? What?”

“All of ’em, babe; I killed all of ’em…”

“All of who?”

“All of ’em … all of ’em …”

He’s just rambling, I thought. Being cinematically, melodramatically cryptic. Being Dwaine.