Are Snakes Necessary?

by Brian De Palma

  Fanny thinks, Take me Lee Rogers, I love you.

  Rogers positions Fanny back on the bed and begins to explore her body, her neck, her breasts, the soft skin behind her neck, with his mouth. He does not stop until he hears Fanny start to moan, softly, hungrily. Rogers likes this sound and is pleased with his effort.

  For Fanny this is at least twelve worlds apart from the few experiences she had in high school. Those were clumsy and goal directed. This is something different entirely.

  The senator unbuttons his shirt, drops it to the floor, and presses his naked chest against Fanny’s. Fanny will try hard to remember the sequence of what follows but won’t be able to, as it all happens in the fevered heat of a desire she has never known or even imagined.

  Rogers parts Fanny’s legs with his knee. He pulls her tights down and off. Now she is naked before him. He takes a moment and looks up, at Fanny’s face, before he lowers his head and has a taste of her sex.

  Fanny wriggles free. She wants to look Rogers in the eye. She wants to see him, touch him, smell him, drink him in. She wants to feel his mouth on hers. She wants—

  Rogers turns her around, pulls her back against the edge of the bed, lifts her rear slightly into the air, and then, unable and really not so interested in waiting any longer, he plunges into the soft ready videographer and her choice little pussy.

  Rogers is lost in his own rhythm. He has one hand on Fanny’s breast (firm, peach shape) and uses the other to pull her back against him as he moves deeper inside her.

  “Kiss me,” says Fanny softly. Rogers tries to put his mouth on the back of her neck. But he’s distracted and can’t get his mouth in the right place. Or hear the breathy words Fanny is saying. The senator’s body is far ahead of him now, deep, deep, deep, and he cannot and doesn’t want to stop. Fanny is saying something like “Oh!” “God!” “Lee!” when he comes hard inside her.

  “That was intense,” says Rogers when it’s all over. He looks at Fanny spread out before him and thinks, What a tasty lunch.

  And then he rolls over on his back and closes his eyes, spent.

  Fanny is way too excited to even close her eyes. She curls up beside Rogers, listens to his breath and waits excitedly for him to awaken.

  Rogers stirs twenty minutes later. He looks fondly at Fanny and starts to roll on top of her. But a terrified look crosses Fanny’s face. She stops Rogers, grips his shoulders and looks hard into his eyes.

  “What is it?” says the senator.

  “Are you going to fire me?”

  CHAPTER 15

  Nick likes being a set photographer. It’s kind of like acting. One minute he is a lanky guy in a starched shirt who lost his love and the next minute—presto—there he is, camera in hand, shooting a hundred photos at a time of his old college friend.

  Okay, maybe Hildy couldn’t act to save her life. But she sure takes a great picture.

  Unfortunately, she keeps making goo goo eyes at Nick, which interferes with his work. Not to mention endless discussions in her trailer over her “look.”

  She sits Nick down on the couch next to her and stares deep into his eyes. “Isn’t there anything you’d like to do?” she purrs.

  Nick considers the possibilities.

  It’s true that it could be fun to romp around with Hildy. And yet…Nick doesn’t want trouble. Or a romp really. What he wants is Elizabeth. And she is gone.

  Mourning his ex isn’t the most manly thing Nick might do when alone in a trailer with his old college cock tease whose robe keeps slipping open, but his heart just isn’t in it.

  “I have an idea,” she muses, “why don’t we give those old coals a stir.”

  Nick takes a deep breath.

  “Hildy,” he says, “let’s try to stay focused here. I should be just a fly on the wall. Catching your lightning in a bottle, so to speak. Any distractions and I might miss it.”

  “My lightning. I like that.” Hildy inches closer. Nick feels the heat of her body through his cleanly pressed button-down.

  But neither his muse nor his cock is aroused.

  Could this turn into something if Hildy would just keep her purring to a minimum, her fetching little body covered up, and stop reaching for him every time she wants to make her point, whatever that is? Maybe.

  Fortunately, there’s a knock at her trailer door and the question is tabled.

  An AD breaks through this magic moment by calling Hildy back to the set. Nick grabs his camera and follows her out of the trailer, across the street, and into an apartment where a camera unit is crammed into a corner of a first-floor living room.

  Hildy joins her co-star, Laurent, on the couch facing the camera. Nick squeezes onto a windowsill and stands up to get a clear view of the couple on the couch. He puts his camera to his eye as the assistant director yells “Action!”

  Hildy takes a deep breath and, eyes filling with tears, says, “I don’t know why. I couldn’t stop myself because I wasn’t myself. The next thing I knew I was in the water.”

  Laurent puts a consoling arm around her. “Wasn’t it lucky I was on the quay.”

  “Yes,” replies Hildy. “Otherwise I’d be dead.”

  Until the director calls Cut!, Nick keeps snapping away.

  CHAPTER 16

  Fanny is in over her head. She is intoxicated by Lee Rogers.

  It’s not the senator’s power she cares about either, but the truth. (At 18, you can actually think things like this without feeling pretentious or, for that matter, laughing at yourself.) There is a truth to her connection with the senator. The words “true love” come to life as she thinks about this.

  Honestly, she had no intention of sleeping with Lee Rogers. And, had anyone suggested to her when she started that this is where matters would end, she would have thought it gross.

  It is true that the word Bashert passed through Fanny’s mind when she first met Lee in the airport. The word, according to a friend whose mother studied Jewish mysticism, refers to one’s intended, her other half, the man that makes the woman complete. It is also true that Fanny felt something, a vague chemical heat, when she confronted Rogers in the Scranton Hotel.

  But he lives in a different world. The world of politics—of smoke and mirrors and endless spin, all of which, Fanny knows, is a nice way of saying “lies.” Ironic, Fanny realizes, given her interest in truth.

  Fanny started her personal essay when applying to Barnard with the sentences, “I want to see, really see, the truth behind things. The naked truth.” And she meant it. Her interest in documentary filmmaking and videography were all part of this same drive.

  Now Fanny has seen the naked truth about Lee Rogers. Funny. And a little scary.

  When she mentally replays the evening in the hotel suite with Lee, she feels a little embarrassed. Why did she gush so freely, telling the senator about Bashert and the mystical connection she felt when they first met in the airport? She braces herself with the idea that love is the one thing in the whole world it is absolutely worth making a fool of yourself for.

  He is married and older. Yes. But these facts dissolve in the sweetness of feelings and the intensity of the connection she senses. The pressure of Lee’s hand in hers is all she needs to remind herself that the marriage and all else will somehow resolve and that, even if they don’t, everything will somehow be okay.

  Fanny cringes when she imagines what her mother would think if she knew. Jenny is the happiest person Fanny ever met. But Jenny would not be happy about Lee. Not at all.

  The married man part is bad enough. The senator part is worse. Jenny wanted her daughter to live her own life fully and absolutely. She would hate to know that Jenny, Barnard First-Year, has wound up in the bed of a Washington power player. And the older man part, forget about it.

  The only discouraging word Jenny ever said to Fanny about a boy was about Rick, the senior who wanted to take Fanny to the prom when she was a sophomore. “Stick with guys your own age, Fan. I mean it. Men are difficult enough. Older
ones who prey on younger girls. I don’t like that at all.”

  I wont tell her, Fanny thinks, relishing the feeling—the autonomy—that comes with imagining actually keeping something from her mom. Fanny can’t think of a thing she hasn’t shared with her mom. She told her all about how lost and confused she was during big parts of her junior and senior years. She told her, too, about losing her virginity to Mark the month before graduation, and also about how it was fine when that relationship ended.

  “He was nice. But I want more than nice,” she told her mom.

  Go girl, said Jenny, encouraging as always.

  The relationship with Lee is something different. Something that she doesn’t want to share. Not simply because her mom would disapprove but also because it isn’t something that she can explain, to her mom or anyone else. It’s hers, just hers. The secrecy adds to the intense near-sacredness of the connection. It belongs to Jenny and to Lee in a private world—a world beyond spin, family and all else.

  Naturally, Fanny has considered the possibility that she might get hurt. It’s a risk she’s willing to take. She was looking for truth, and she found it. In the form, in the body, in the soul of the most unlikely person. And yet.

  Rogers regards Fanny’s declarations with equanimity.

  “How can a married man make you complete?” he asks with genuine-seeming curiosity. He listens with interest as Fanny explains herself.

  “Maybe so,” he tells her. “But for now…we must be discreet.”

  Fanny’s irrepressible earnestness again: “Lee, if you ask me to, I can walk out this door and you will never see me again.”

  “I don’t want you to leave. Just be patient. And know that I will always do the right thing. I promise.” He pulls Fanny against his chest and kisses her tenderly. “You can trust me.”

  “I know I can,” Fanny says, and then she melts into the senator’s kiss.

  CHAPTER 17

  The bus speeds through the desert. The older woman in the seat next to Elizabeth stirs. Her head bounces and flops, like one of those drugstore dogs on a spring, and lands on Elizabeth’s shoulder. Elizabeth nudges the woman away. Not gently enough. The woman wakes up.

  “I’m so sorry, I’ve been dozing off—on you. Forgive me.”

  “Not a problem. You’re light as a feather.” Elizabeth, on her own for just a few days, has already developed an edge.

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “An hour, maybe.”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “Just outside Reno.”

  “Jeez. It’ll be four more days until I’m home.”

  “Where do you live?”

  Why not? A little idle conversation, with an old woman. Beats going through the motions of seduction with some guy out of Vegas who is genuinely confused as to whether the conversation is going to end up in bed or not. (Yes, mister, it is, why else do you think I’m listening to you prattle on about your golf game, the jazz that means more to you than anything in the world, the novel that will bring you fame and fortune and change the way the world thinks? Darling. This is the noise we make to fill up the time between here and the not too distant moment when we’ll be naked animals grunting and moaning in a world far from conversation.)

  Monhegan Island, says the woman.

  “Where is that?”

  “Twelve miles off the southern coast of Maine. You can only get there by ferry. No cars on the island.”

  “Sounds like paradise.”

  “If you like seclusion. The whole place has a population of maybe a hundred people. Mostly painters and retired fishermen.”

  “Which are you?”

  “Neither. Just retired—or about to be.”

  “From what?”

  The woman, gray haired and nicely outfitted in a smart cardigan sweater set, says, “Dear Dottie.”

  “Dear Dottie? What’s that?”

  “I write the lovelorn column for the Boston Star. For the last thirty years! Used to run in the daily paper. Now it’s online too—on the paper’s website. People email from all over. But I’m done. And not a moment too soon. The letters and email I get…I don’t know what to say anymore.”

  “What kind of letters? What kind of emails?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “That bad?”

  “Got a minute? What am I talking about, we’ve got days.”

  “How about a proper introduction,” Elizabeth says, extending a hand and inventing a new name for herself on the spot. “I’m Elizabeth Black.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Lucy Wideman.”

  Lucy Wideman reaches in her bag and pulls out a letter.

  “This one is pretty representative of the letters I’ve been getting for years. Kind of gets to you after a few decades. So many awful people out there. Nothing special about the piggery involved here except it got me to send in the resignation letter I’d drafted a long time ago.” She hands the letter to Elizabeth, who opens it up and reads it to herself.

  Dear Dottie,

  I want to kill my husband. Or myself. I love Ben (not his real name). We’ve been married for twenty years. I put him through law school. When he finished, he decided he didn’t want to be a lawyer. He wanted to be a political consultant.

  So I supported him for three more years. I worked two jobs. A night job as a nurse three nights a week and a day job as an assistant to a hospital administrator.

  I wanted to have a baby, very badly. Ben asked if we could wait until he’d finished law school. I got pregnant very quickly when he graduated. Ben said it was too soon. “Abort the baby, Betty,” he said. This was very hard for me to do.

  Then one day Ben told me he decided he didn’t want children. “Sorry Betty. I don’t.” I’d supported him all those years thinking we would one day have the family of my dreams. “Sorry Betty” was all he would say.

  I think you can guess how hard it was to work two jobs and keep myself in shape for my husband and now I had to give up my dreams. But I would have done anything for Ben.

  Apparently he did not feel that way about me.

  He started up with his secretary after he joined up with a fancy political consulting firm. I didn’t find out for years. I thought Lynette was a lovely lady. She always called on our anniversary and was very nice to me. We joked about how much she looked like a younger version of me.

  Of course I had no idea she was involved with my husband. When I found out, I was devastated.

  I couldn’t work or sleep or eat or anything. I quit my job, got a trainer—damn it if I was going to lose my husband to some young duck! I used money I had squirreled away for the baby we never had, and used it for breast augmentation surgery.

  Dottie, I looked good. And only then did I say to Ben “I love you. I love our life. I know what’s been going on with you and Lynette and I don’t care. I understand. Just end it. End it now. And let’s go on with our life, the one we built and the one I love.”

  Ben cried. “Betty,” he said, “I don’t deserve you. I’ll do whatever you say. My family matters most. I’ll end it with Lynette.”

  And then he went to end it with Lynette—in a hotel room!

  Please don’t ask me how I know—I know! I found the hotel bill on his credit card and when I asked about it, Ben told me: he couldn’t stop himself.

  Dear Dottie I am going to die. Either that or my husband and his little pop tart girlfriend die.

  I know you will say, Betty, take your new augmented breasts and get someone new. But I don’t want anyone but Ben.

  Someone has to help.

  Dear Dottie What Can I do?

  I am,

  Desperate

  Please help me!

  Lucy Wideman sighs. “You can see why I don’t want to do this anymore. The only appropriate response to this letter is: ‘Put a bullet through Ben’s head.’ ”

  “Who’s going to replace you?” Elizabeth asks.

  “Doesn’t matter to me. Why? Do you want the job
?”

  Elizabeth considers. For a moment. Then she surprises them both by saying, “Yes! Yes I do.”

  Why not? Answering a bunch of letters under a made-up name might be fun. And she’s perfectly glad to say it straight, to say “Put a bullet through Ben’s head” when that’s the appropriate response.

  Elizabeth’s been up there on Bruce Diamond’s trophy shelf for long enough, it will be fun to have her say whenever she wants.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Write an answer to this letter and email it to the editor, my boss. He’ll read it. If he likes it—and he will, because he’s tired and not so interested—he’ll print it. If he doesn’t like it, he’ll suggest a couple of changes and email it back.”

  “Don’t you ever meet with him?”

  “He doesn’t even know who I am. I’m a bank account and an email address to him. I never wanted anyone to know that I’m ‘Dear Dottie.’ It’s nine hundred a week. You want the job?”

  CHAPTER 18

  There is a lot of downtime on the campaign trail. Boring. Fanny goes to the gym, reads film theorists like Grierson and McMahon, and “visits” with Rogers, who can’t seem to get enough of her. God, they have a great time. And he’s tickled by her ideas about truth and what we see and what we don’t. But her constant presence is not appreciated by all.

  Brock and other Rogers staffers try to exclude Fanny when they can. Right now, for example, they’re at some staff meeting Fanny should be attending.

  Fanny chalks it up to jealousy.

  She opens her laptop and skypes Hart McCoy. They’ve been having an ongoing long-distance conversation about signifiers, meaning, vino and veritas. Fanny’s approach to her videography has a lot to do with questions that have been under discussion in her Barnard documentary class and in her ongoing conversations with Hart.