Straight Cut (5 page)

That would have been ten or twelve years back, the time of one of the first “Italian jobs” I did with Kevin. I had left Rome to take a break from the singular madness of Italian movie making, and in Florence I had walked across the river and out of the city to seek relief from the confusion of an ununderstood language (I spoke only about ten words of Italian at the time, whereas now I speak almost thirty) and also to get away from the tourists; it was the height of the summer season and all Italy was thronged with them.

Owing to this set of circumstances I stumbled up into the Belvedere, at the end of a long walk through the gardens below. I had not known the place was there and I found it by complete accident, but once I had arrived I liked it. The view, as I have mentioned, is spectacular, and the steep ascent discourages most tourists, though there is a road running up the back of the hill. There were some sightseers I had to share the hilltop with, but not too many of them.

I stood for ten or fifteen minutes by a parapet overlooking the city, luxuriating in the panorama, and then began to walk slowly around the inside of the walls. I was walking clockwise, and Lauren, whose name I did not yet know, was walking counterclockwise. In this way we passed each other about five times. Each time I looked at her, glanced at her, she kept looking better and better.

On the sixth pass she spoke.

“Are you following me?”

We’d both been up there an hour at the least. Lauren was speaking French. I replied in some semblance of the same tongue.

“No. But it would be a great temptation to do so. “

I walked on; she walked on. This was almost all the French I knew.

Eventually I sat down on one of the outer parapets. I thought that she would probably return that way, since it was the direction which led to the city. I had my back to where she must be, however. I was very casual. I smoked a cigarette, then another, looking out at the profile of the Duomo. A hand touched me in the small of the back and I almost fell in the river. I just barely saved myself by locking my legs hard around the wall.

So much for my savoir-faire. When I collected myself enough to look around I saw Lauren a few paces away, cracking up. She was laughing like a loon.

“What’s your favorite language?” I said, expending the very last of the French I had in store. It turned out to be English, luckily or unluckily for me.

Lauren was an extraordinary beauty, in truth and fact and without prejudice, the sort that grows on you slowly and never quits. Others of her admirers compared her to the works of Botticelli, and the simile was not without justification, though it got old fast, especially when it was suggested by persons other than myself. But Lauren did share the fine lines, the clear articulation of feature, specifically of the Botticelli Venus, which was enshrined in the Uffizi just down the hill and across the river. Though Lauren was considerably less vapid than the girl on the half shell there. She wasn’t a goddess; she was a woman, and her humanity added a great deal to the lines Botticelli might have drawn and most certainly would have admired. It made her more beautiful and more dangerous as well, much more so in both cases than any painting could ever be.

I learned, those first few days in Florence, not much at all about Lauren. So far as her own taste ran, the outward circumstances of her life were utterly without interest or importance. I did learn that she was a British citizen but had spent most of her childhood on the Continent, mainly in Switzerland; she was the second daughter of a diplomatic family. She had an undergraduate degree from Radcliffe, had been to acting school in New York, and did occasional modeling work. Her passport listed a London address. At the time that I met her, Lauren was twenty-two.

Lauren’s Italian was very good and she knew Florence much better than I did. For two days she conducted me on an unorthodox tour of the city, disappearing a trifle mysteriously at the end of each evening; she would not allow me to escort her home. On the third night she came back with me to my hotel, though I had not suggested it. There, for two or three more nights, we shared a smallish bed, without touching, as though there were a sword between us. I won’t say that I was shy, just curious to see what she would do if I left her to her own devices. It’s also possible that my subconscious early warning system was already in effect. It was she who turned to me when we made love for the first time.

When I had to return to Rome at the end of the week, Lauren accompanied me, quite as if it had all been planned in advance. I had not invited her; I did not object to her coming. Her suitcase, as it turned out, was already checked at the station.

Lauren and Kevin were immediately intrigued with each other, a development which I had anticipated. After a week’s absence from the cut, I was very busy, and Kevin, the producer, was relatively idle; he’d come over mainly for the trip. So it was natural that Lauren should spend more time with Kevin and less with me while I put in ten-and twelve-hour days on the flatbed, cutting a none-too-interesting program on the then New York art scene. Most nights Lauren returned to my room, occasionally not. I’m not sure exactly which day she and Kevin closed the triangle. At the time I thought I didn’t care.

I was nearly seven years older than Lauren, so I had an edge on her in experience (though there’s always the theory that women of her kind know everything from the instant of their birth). My love life at that time centered on avoiding inconvenience; you may say that I was just a little jaded. Lauren was an enormous refreshment to me, but I was determined not to let her become any more than that. From the very beginning I knew it would be unwise to be in love with Lauren, and for a long time I believed that I was not.

For all of these excellent reasons I was undisturbed, maybe even relieved, when Kevin took Lauren back to New York with him, leaving me to wrap the edit and also some other tricky business that was going forward under the table. So far as I was concerned, she was well out of my way. It’s also true that in those days I was closer to Kevin than I had ever been to any woman, or ever expected to be.

And more than a decade later, it was still frustrated love for Kevin, not Lauren, that could spoil my sleep, at one point bouncing me all the way out of the couch before I could even locate myself, back in the old apartment in Brooklyn. Once I figured out where I was, I began to pace the floor of the front room, stopping at last before the three fist-shaped holes in the wallboard, which I had forbidden all my various subtenants to repair. Much as I have tried to pretend and indeed be otherwise, I treasure both my memory and its symbols, as an injured man may come to prize his wound.

So much the better, I was thinking. A bad night now will give me a better chance to sleep on the plane.

Memory is fully as chimerical as forgetfulness, deceptive as any other work of the imagination, or so I comfort myself by believing. Memory will never serve up an absolute truth, only further examples of the relative. Five, six years went by without a crisis. A chimera herself, Lauren drifted in and out of New York, in and out of my house and Kevin’s and the houses of others who are only bit players in the script my memory writes. During that long meanwhile, Kevin and I drifted a little apart, our friendship waning in the manner that passionate friendships between confirmed heterosexuals often do.

I watched Lauren’s comings and goings with what I liked to think was benign and paternal amusement. Nevertheless, I organized my life in such a way that I was always free to receive her, when and wherever she might turn up, with her aura of a recurring dream. There came a day which I cannot date, though I remember the hour: late afternoon, near sunset. Lauren slept calmly and I had drawn the sheet up solicitously around her chin. I was going out to buy something for dinner, but for some reason at the door I turned back and looked at her. Perhaps it was some trick of the dying light, its kindness to her face, the dust motes dancing above her in the sunshafts that came through the blind.
I love this woman,
I said to myself, shaping the words silently with my tongue, with surprise and horror, too, for I knew already that I could never trust her.

The next day, appropriately enough, she was gone. I spent the next few years fighting it.

Lauren once told me that I was the only person she completely trusted, and I believe that this was true. The only problem was that she could never stand to be around someone she trusted for very long at a stretch. I believe the subject first came up on the occasion when she made me promise to kill her.

A comparatively recent event, about a year before we married. There were circumstances. Lauren, returning by air from some jaunt to somewhere, came down with a prodigious headache. It went on for days without improvement, until friends of hers, including me, drove her to the doctor, who expressed considerable surprise that she was still alive. Lauren had had a stroke, and for three or four weeks she lay in forced immobility, waiting for an operation that might kill her, or blind her, or turn her into an idiot. It was this last possibility that seemed to frighten her the most.

During the pre-op period I visited her as often as I could, which was almost every evening. It would be tempting to say that I was as terrified as she, but of course I wasn’t the one with the scalpel to my head. Even as a pre-op, Lauren was in intensive care, plugged into a fearsome array of machinery. Tiny television screens displayed the most minute movements of her heart and brain, and Lauren wondered, she told me once, if she would get to watch those bouncing balls stop bouncing, supposing things did take a turn for the very worst.

But she didn’t often say things like that. For the most part she was a model patient, obsessively cheerful and optimistic. However, there were sometimes moments when she would withdraw completely, turning away from me or whoever, to stare hypnotically at the signals of her life in their regular passage across the nearby screens. Fifteen, twenty minutes might go by like that; then she would resume her conversation at whatever point she had dropped it, so that I would wonder whether she was aware that any time had passed at all.

Kevin was not much in evidence during those days. Hospitals depressed him. He did send flowers, which were considered insufficiently sanitary to be brought into the intensive care unit.

I was not fond of hospitals either, but the worst times for me were those long lacunae in our conversations, when Lauren seemed virtually to stop existing. At such times I was perfectly convinced that she would die, so that our subsequent cheery chatter became as eerie as though she had already become a ghost. Then, the day before the operation, she asked me for a promise. I avoid blind promises when I can, but under the circumstances I agreed.

“I want you to kill me,” Lauren said.

“What?” I said. I was too surprised to be appalled.

“If I’m not the same,” she said. “If I’m alive and out but not the same.” She closed her eyes and went on to suggest a method. There was a long straight staircase in the building where she lived. I could push her down it and her death would appear to be an accident. Lauren opened her eyes and held out her hand to me. We shook like business people on the deal.

Thirty-six hours later we were out of those woods. The operation was a stupendous success, one for the medical journals, and Lauren was neither dead nor blind nor a vegetable. The next time I saw her, her most grave concern was finding some appealing way to cover her shaved head and her scar. She never mentioned our agreement, and in my relief I wondered frivolously if she remembered it, and if not, did that mean she was “not the same”?

Whatever it meant, she never spoke of it again, not even after our marriage, which like the other arrangement was a deal. That came later, when Lauren had exhausted every loophole and wrinkle in immigration policy, and had either to marry or leave the States. The likeliest choice was between me and Kevin, and I don’t know whether she asked Kevin first, but I do know he never would have done it. So I became the lucky man, and I’ve always wondered if it was a matter of sheer convenience or if Lauren did have some personal preference of her own.

Why me; why not Kevin? is a question I can apply to all sorts of situations. A question which came up frequently toward the end of the recurring nightmare I had for some weeks after Lauren’s operation, as I watched her, usually with hokey slow-motion effects, pinwheeling down the three flights of stairs from the door of her Tribeca loft. Why me? Why not Kevin? He could have done the job without upsetting his conscience. Though when I woke I usually felt that this last notion was unfair to him.

The dream diminished in frequency and finally stopped altogether, but that night on my couch in Brooklyn I dreamed it one more time. With this difference: once Lauren had rattled and smashed her way to the foot of the stairs and come to a stop against the street door, I was sucked from my own body, translated out of it, as one can be in dreams. Looking back at myself from the new perspective, I saw that it really was Kevin after all. I might have been relieved at that, but Kevin’s expression was terrifying. It was not an expression at all. His face was so vacant of memory or intent that it had lost its individuality altogether. The face was caught in the moment of metamorphosis, and I did not want to see what it might next become. The shock of it informed me that I had finally slept, and I rose deliberately toward consciousness, like a breathless diver swimming up toward light and air.

W
AKING,
I
BELIEVED THE
dream was true, believed Lauren was dead. In fact, I enjoyed the gray comforts of resignation for a good part of the day, before the dream fog lifted and I recalled that she was alive and presumably well and walking around in the same material world as me.

But I had slept, at any rate; I had even overslept. My tenant had got up and gone to work while I was having my nasty dream, leaving me a slightly testy note which inquired how long I might be staying. I cleaned up the dishes in his sink out of contrition and then had a workout and a wash and a shave. By then it was nearly noon and I picked up my bag and started into the city.