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Screen Tests

Page 16

by Kate Zambreno


  The other day a woman in a bright pink bathing suit, wearing what looked under the bright turquoise water to be black socks, bobbed gently up and down as she walked in a lane in the open swim area. As I allowed myself a break, panting short, jerky inhales, I watched her. I realized she was lifting white Styrofoam weights at her sides as she bobbed gently up and down. Up and down. Forcing legs through the water. As if in a trance.

  Sometimes, rarely, I forget the choke of the chlorine in the bright blue pool, forget the bored guard watching me from the deep end, forget the hair clogged and my environment entirely. The chill of the deep. The warmth of the shallow.

  When swimming I sometimes think through this essay. The body essays. It attempts.

  It is the experience of swimming that reminds Edna Pontellier in The Awakening of the freedom of her childhood, running through the grasses of Kentucky. It is open to interpretation, the ending, whether she drowns or she becomes one with the sea, like a goddess shuffling off all the restrictions of society, mortality, morality, maternity, wifedom. I guess it depends how you look at it.

  * * *

  Elia Kazan writes in his autobiography that when Barbara Loden died, she died in fury and excruciating pain. The cancer had spread to her liver. Her last words—“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  I wonder if Barbara Loden thought of her film career as a failure. Whether she measured herself against the success of her husband, his films that are now seen as classics. The screenplays she could not get funded. She died a decade after Wanda came out. The film only played in one theater in New York.

  “There’s so much I didn’t achieve, but I tried to be independent and to create my own way,” she wrote. “Otherwise, I would have become like Wanda, all my life just floating around.”

  I’m drawn—always—to failures. To the aborted project. Edna Pontellier was supposed to be a bohemian painter, and move to Paris, and then she got scared. She was not strong enough to fly away from prejudice. The hag pianist Mademoiselle Reisz tapping her shoulder blades, her fragile wings. Wanda got lost on the way to the bank robbery. And lost again in the ambiguous ending scene—never really found. Yes, Barbara Loden was, in a way, in terms of concepts of career and the canon, a failure.

  And yet the work survives. This singular work.

  * * *

  A few years ago I was watching a video online of a sit-in downtown in a health insurance office, protesting for single-payer healthcare. Of the protesters being dragged away by police I recognized Ronnie, kicking and screaming. I searched for her online for a few hours and made out that she was now involved in several activist groups. I also observed, rather cynically, that she was also dating someone involved in one of the groups.

  I contacted her on Facebook to say hello. She said hello, cordially, back. But then I realized she blocked me.

  I mean, I understand. Sometimes one desires to sever off the past. But did she have a political awakening, a coming-to-consciousness? Or did she change, at least initially, for someone new in her life? Impossible to know, I suppose. I hope that it’s the former—that she found her voice.

  I hope, wherever she is, that she is happy. No, happiness sounds so trite. I hope that she’s fulfilled. I wonder if she still makes popcorn all the time.

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment to the editors of the journals and collections in which the following stories and essays appeared, sometimes in slightly different form:

  BOMB: “Susan Sontag,” “The Fourth Annual Jean Seberg International Film Festival,” “Introductions to B. Ingrid Olson”; Anne Collier (MCA Monographs): “Fragments of a Lost Object: Meditations on the Photographs of Anne Collier”; Apogee: “Sleepless Nights”; Fireflies #5: Agnès Varda/Angela Schanelec: “Gleaning”; Frequencies (Two Dollar Radio): “One Can Be Dumb and Unhappy at Exactly the Same Time: An Essay on Failure, the Depressed Muse, and Barbara Loden’s Wanda”; Icon (Feminist Press): “New York City in 2013: On Kathy Acker”; Paris Review: “Blanchot in a Supermarket Parking Lot,” “Second Dog,” “Plagiarism,” “Diane Arbus Visits Marilyn Minter in Gainsville, Florida.”

  Thank you to the Sarah Charlesworth estate and Paula Cooper Gallery for permission for the wonderful Sarah Charlesworth collage for the cover. Thank you to Mónica de la Torre at BOMB especially. Gratitude to Emily Nemens and Hasan Altaf at The Paris Review for publishing four pieces in their spring issue. Thank you to B. Ingrid Olson, for asking me to write a series of texts inspired by her work, which were typeset and photographed by the artist and included in her show at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Thank you to Sarah McCarry and Jenny Zhang, for giving me the opportunity to write “Sleepless Nights” on the occasion of the Guillotine launch of Hags. Thanks to Amy Scholder for asking me to write about Kathy Acker, and Eric and Eliza at Two Dollar Radio for asking me to write about anything, at any length. Profound thanks to Mel Flashman. Thanks to everyone at Harper Perennial, especially Sarah Haugen, Caitlin Hurst, and Amy Baker. Thanks to Mary Beth Constant for her witty and succinct copyedits. Thanks to Brian Evenson, Amber Sparks, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Jen George. Gratitude and love to Sofia S., Danielle, Suzanne, Steph, Clutch, Amina, Hedi, Cal, and Bhanu. Love to Leo, whose face I watch with such joy. And as always gratitude to John.

  About the Author

  KATE ZAMBRENO is also the author of two novels and three books of nonfiction. She lives in New York and teaches writing at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Praise for Screen Tests

  “In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories (after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests (inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with.”

  —Brian Evenson

  “If Thomas Bernhard’s and Fleur Jaeggy’s work had a charming, slightly misanthropic baby—with Diane Arbus as nanny—it would be Screen Tests. Kate Zambreno turns her precise and meditative pen toward a series of short fictions that are anything but small. The result is a very funny, utterly original look at cultural figures and tropes and what it means to be a human looking at humans.”

  —Amber Sparks

  “Kate Zambreno writes with a winning, gleeful transparency about days and nights spent entranced by literature, film, and her own densely populated imagination. Above all, Zambreno pays attention to her own desire’s fluctuations—to attachments, moods, self-constructions, and self-abasements, reconfigured in a series of shadow-box homages to writing as an asymptotic specter. In rhythm-conscious bulletins, streaked with passionate candor, she confirms her vocation as haunter and as haunted.”

  —Wayne Koestenbaum

  “These stories and essays are layered and build as a Goldin-esque slideshow of textual stills that, often through other art and artists’ lives, explore the book’s central first-person voice as private figure, as public figure, as member of the (abstract) writing ‘community,’ as mother, as an aging (female) body, as a person who has escaped their idea of nothingness through dedication to and persistence in making work.”

  —Jen George

  “Weird, daring, triumphant.”

  —Sofia Samatar

  Also by Kate Zambreno

  FICTION

  O Fallen Angel

  Green Girl

  NONFICTION

  Appendix Project

  Book of Mutter

  Heroines

  Copyright

  SCREEN TESTS. Copyright © 2019 by Kate Zambreno. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required
fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by Sarah Bibel

  Cover art: Rider, 1983–84 by Sarah Charlesworth. Cibachrome with lacquered wood frame. Frame: 20½ × 15¾ × 1¼ in. (52.1 × 40 × 3.2 cm) © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

  FIRST EDITION

  Digital Edition JULY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-239203-9

  Version 06152019

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-239204-6

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