by Dan Chaon
You’d think that after two years at the Picture Palace she’d at least be able to hold a video camera with some competence. But when I look back at the TV screen, the image is wobbling helplessly. It’s had more beers than I have, it seems.
This is the bridegroom’s first appearance. She has trained the camera on him at last, and he seems to be posed in front of some great view. He straightens, grinning broadly, as if the majesty of the backdrop has conferred a mantle upon him. But we can’t see the background. She has pulled in too close, and all we can see is my brother-in-law, from the waist up—a typical medium shot. “I think you’re too close,” he says. “You’re not going to be able to see anything.” He waves his hand at her, and she begins to step back, slowly, hesitantly. We can hear the crescendo and decrescendo of a car passing on the road behind her. She keeps stepping back, the frame jiggling, and I can’t help but imagine that she will back onto the highway just as a car comes up the hill. We’ll hear the screech of brakes, her scream, and then the screen will go black. It would be a good scene in a thriller, especially since he keeps directing her to go farther, farther. “Keep on going,” he says. “You’re okay. Keep on going.” His eyes narrow as he waves his hand at her.
Of course nothing happens. She stops at last, and he is framed in what I remember from a film class as a plan américain, a full body shot. There is the mountain range he wants so much to appear in front of—jagged peaks coated by a pale haze, like a picture seen through a sheet of onionskin. He shifts; he waits for his presence to be recorded there.
PM 5:24:11
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So many gaps! Over an hour has passed since they last turned on the camera, and you know that so much has happened in the space between one jump cut and the next. They talked; moods shifted; subtle plays of interpretation and intent have been calculated as their conversation in the car ambled on, whirring smoothly and then slowly. Their minds wandered through miles of memories, associations, abstractions.
But all this has passed. It has evaporated, like steam or smoke, so that all that remains are atoms and molecules, un-traceable and free floating, combining at last with other detritus to form dust, or rain. Who remembers what they were thinking twenty minutes ago? What was the last thing you thought before you fell asleep last night? Who knows what motivated a certain choice of words, or why the expression of a listener, a certain eye movement or flicker at the mouth, was interpreted in the way that it was? None of that remains.
And yet a tape such as this one is saved—these images, always ruined by the inescapable self-consciousness of the performers, by the camera’s moronic lack of subjectivity. This, which says nothing about who my sister was or what’s inside her, this is permanent.
They’ve set up a tripod, or perhaps they’ve merely balanced the camera on the hood of the car. In any case, they both appear in a frame that is obviously not handheld. My brother-in-law leads. He glances back at the camera, then stops. They are at some scenic turn-off again, it must be fairly high up because there are patches of snow on the rocky slopes in the background. They stand there for a moment, facing each other, both in profile.
And then he starts to sing. It isn’t clear at first, but slowly his voice grows bolder, and his thin tenor strains distantly from the speakers.
“I’m on top of the world,” he sings, “looking down on creation . . .”
He lowers himself uncertainly to one knee at the second chorus, spreading his arms wide, like some old vaudeville actor rehashing The Jolson Story, a sweep to his gestures. For a time he holds an imaginary microphone in his fist, then forgets and spreads his palms, letting it fall to the ground with what would be, I imagine, a clatter of feedback.
I watch my sister’s face. It expresses the usual sort of pain we feel when someone sings to us. How are you supposed to react at such a moment, especially if you know that it’s being recorded for posterity? How do you hold your posture—what expression is appropriate? You can see these questions pass over her as he sings. She tries at first a polite attitude of attention, her arms limp at her sides; then a more responsive pose, smiling or nodding or putting a flattered hand to her throat as he goes through his various mimelike maneuvers. She’s mortified, though. You can see that in the furtive flicks of her eyes toward the camera.
The person I grew up with, the one I knew, is in there somewhere. I press Pause as she looks sidelong, and there she is—this is her, really, I think—though the image trembles as it is held there and thin white static lines blur across her face. That’s my sister.
There was a time, about five years ago, when my sister was once wholly the person that I must now use the Pause button to locate. Which is to say that she, the former she—or my construct of what she was—has slowly disintegrated. This sidelong glance, for example, exists here as only a few seconds of expression, barely noticeable. But once, such an ironic look would have lasted through the entire rendition. If, in fact, she would even have put up with some cornball singing to her on bended knee. I used to go to bars with her and her friends when I was home from college. Those girls were so funny, and so mean. I remember being surprised at how incisive these dull-looking girls could be, their intelligence hidden under heavy makeup and large, cockatoo-like hairdos, the trappings of country songstresses. They were all retail clerks, factory girls, beings we encounter sometimes in the real world but don’t really notice.
They noticed things, though, especially my sister. She’d always had a pithy, sarcastic edge to her. There were times, in childhood, when she could stun me speechless with a single, well-aimed observation. And once she had all but destroyed my interest in a certain girl by imitating and exaggerating her small habit of briefly pinching her nose between her thumb and forefinger. The girl did this when she was being thoughtful, or when she was nervous, but my sister had made her seem so prissy and ridiculous that I had a hard time holding back my laughter when the girl and I were alone together.
My sister’s ability seemed heightened by her audience, and I, like her friends, was enthralled by her. Her specialty was caricature, and in the time it took to drain a pitcher she might have anatomized three or four people with deadly accuracy: the fawning way her boss spoke to male customers; the mumbled innuendos of some cowboy who had ambled over to buy them a beer; the awkward, earnest dancing of an accountant who liked one of her friends.
I can imagine what she might have done with the spectacle of my brother-in-law’s song. And she does seem to be holding back. She glances at the camera as if hoping for some ally, and a whole map of uncertainty branches through her like lightning. Just for a second.
She’d never admit this now, of course. She would say he was “sweet.” She would give me that small-eyed, uncomprehending stare.
“What do you know about it?” she might say. “What do you know about marriage, about being in love?” Her eyes would flicker a little, the way they did when I came in and found that she’d made my bed for me—something I never could have imagined her doing.
I came in and she was slowly folding the bedspread over my pillow, tucking it.
“I thought you’d like some clean sheets,” she said.
PM 6:12:55
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Is this a happy woman? Look at her: her face here framed against a background of yellow brick, her skin lit badly in the pale dusk, her smile held up by the constant prodding of the camera’s presence, her pace hesitantly slowed, as if she’d like to move quickly out of the picture but knows that it would be rude. She looks as if she wishes she were wearing sunglasses.
She is married. You can see that idea occupies her, encasing her whole body with a kind of gloss, like the sheen that covers wax fruit. You can see her thinking, What have I done?
And then the camera lifts over her head, slides up over the top of her head and over the concentric rectangles of brick like a tongue, like a cash register printing out a receipt. SANGRE DE CRISTO MOTOR LODGE says a sign on orange neon, somewhere above he
r. VACANCY, it announces.
So this is it. This is the site, the focal point toward which the various rituals lead us—the billowing white gown and awkward men in tuxedos, the rice throwing and the toilet-papered and tin-can-dragging car with its JUST MARRIED sign, even the tour of beautiful, exotic sights. Everything points the way toward this climax. Here is the motel, the bare, simple room, the intimation of consummation.
My sister was not a virgin, of course. There had been several men—perhaps more than a dozen—before my brother-in-law, and she had almost certainly been sleeping with him for some months before they even began to consider marriage. Neither one of them is being initiated into some great mystery.
So why does the film pursue this line of thought with such obsessive—even fetishistic—insistence? Why does he move slowly from the motel sign to her face, lingering, following as she turns and begins to walk across the parking lot to the glass doors, toward the motel’s office? And you have to remember that the camera is her husband, so that, given the lexicon of film and the expectations of point of view, we, the viewers, become the husband as well, strolling a few paces behind her, focused on her body as she leads us toward the marriage bed. Given the context, you can’t help but look at her in a sexual way, you can’t help but imagine the act that awaits beyond, as she reaches out to open the glass door and enters. Why else would you show this sequence in detail if not to titillate, if not to pique our expectations?
It would be one thing if there were some real reason for excitement and anticipation. But there isn’t. Why should intercourse as a married couple be any different from the intercourse that occurred a few days or weeks before, or that will occur with (presumably) some regularity in the future? Why make it into this big moment?
What I am trying to get at, what I am trying to express is simply that they are worshipers of empty ritual. There is some ideal, some model they want to ape, as if their life were like the build-it-yourself furniture they buy at department stores, with easy-to-assemble instructions. I never would have guessed that this is what she wanted.
She used to write me long, sad, bitchy letters, full of furious observation—when she first started dating him, she dissected him completely in a letter she wrote. She said that he had a face “like kneaded dough,” and that he talked too much. “He is extremely tiresome, besides he is only thirty and has big bulgy varicose veins right behind his knees. I almost gagged when I saw them.” This was around the time that she was very depressed, even (I thought) slightly suicidal. She seemed to think that she’d missed something in life, or that she wasn’t going to get what she wanted. She dropped out of college her freshman year, for no apparent reason, and moved back in with our mother. In that same letter, she wrote: “It is hard to see the point to most of what I’m doing. I have been told by several people that it is all attitude, that I seem like I would rather see the negative than the reasonably good things, but the truth is that when I look at a flower I would rather shove it down some certain people’s throats than sit and contemplate how pretty it is. . . .”
Less than a year and half later, she was writing me postcards. “Just a quick note to let you know all is well. John has been spending a lot of time remodeling the baby’s room. It is a lot of work, but it will be worth it!!!”
If this is happiness, I want no part of it. Look at her! Following some mechanically romantic dough-face into the lobby of an anonymous motel, her shoulders stiffened by the weight of the camera pointed at her back. The attendant at the front desk glances up as she enters, and (there is a nice moment here) his look is so Candid Camera. His mouth goes a little slack, and he stares directly into the eye of the video recorder, utterly taken aback for a moment. As she approaches the desk, the attendant does a quick double take, his eyes shifting between her and the man holding the video camera.
“I’d like a room,” she says, and he looks down uncomfortably, his shoulders hunching like those of a person who is unsure if he is the victim of a practical joke. His face hardens. “Uhhh . . . sure . . . ,” he says. He bends down, shuffling a few papers, and brings up something that he huddles over, pointing with his pen. He mumbles as the camera draws nearer.
My sister glances back at us, smiling. We are drawn into a close-up of the exchange with the poor desk clerk; he, too, is sucked into this vortex of artificiality, pinned there and forced to act. My sister signs the credit card voucher, and the desk clerk grins helplessly as he gives her the key to their room.
For a moment I wonder whether we’ll see what happens next. Will they actually set up a tripod in their room and record the consummation of their wedding night for posterity, as, more recently, they have recorded the birth of their baby (which I refuse to watch).
No. They don’t. We cut from a close-up of their motel-room door (102) to the next morning: AM 10:03, 8-12-94. Another day of innocuous scenery begins to unfold, and I hit the Fast-forward button. Behind a thin membrane of video static, I can see beautiful sights hurtling by, my sister and her husband flitting in the foreground, their speeded-up movement making them twitch like epileptics. Their happy mouths chew the air as rapidly as insect mandibles, their heads nod and bob. I finish my fifth beer.
Her life will pass like this, I think. It will shoot by her in a blur, and she will hardly see it. I watch her jerk like a puppet through landscape after landscape, and then I imagine the same girl, the same woman asleep in the next room, falling heavily through some sad dream.
Oh, honey, come back to me.
I press Stop. Stop—stop. Eject—eject—eject.
GOING OUT
Scott and his father have been attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on Thursday evenings for several weeks now, and Scott is beginning to find it hard to pay attention. Scott’s father sits, hands folded in his lap, head cocked as if he’s at a symphony. His father nods and writes in a small spiral notebook, and Scott watches his face surreptitiously. As always, Scott can’t help noticing the eye.
Scott’s father has a glass eye. The father used to be a welder, and once, when he was drunk and not wearing goggles, a spark flew up and put his eye out. This story had always frightened Scott. He remembers being about five or six and staying at his father’s place and waking up to go to the bathroom. The eye was lying there by the sink in a tiny box of white cotton. Scott imagined that it could see him. He pictured his father stretched out, sleeping, and thought of the empty socket. Whenever the father looked at him, the glass eye remained fixed. When the father was drunk, or hadn’t showered, the eye would become encrusted with a dull gold mucus. Sometimes Scott’s father embellished the story of the welding spark and told Scott that his eye had turned to jelly, which the doctors had dug out with a spoon.
Even now, Scott finds himself unnerved by it—it’s a token of how his father used to be, and when his father catches Scott staring, he looks down quickly. His father is printing in a notebook: “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.!”
The speaker has written these words on the chalkboard and underlined them. Scott copies them down, too.
As they are driving back to the father’s trailer on the outskirts of town, Scott’s father weeps. He often cries after these meetings, though not openly. Scott can see the tears only if a car goes by in the opposite direction, lighting his father’s face in a brief flash, like a snapshot. Scott is completely still. He never asks, but Scott suspects that his father is crying over him, blaming himself for how Scott’s life has turned out, ashamed that Scott has ended up an alcoholic before he’s even turned twenty-one. That’s what Scott imagines, though he knows it’s self-centered. He has always had a weak spot for easy excuses; he can’t help but embrace them, though he knows better. For example, Scott always felt certain that his father drank because Scott’s mother had left him, despite the fact that they were divorced long after his problem became apparent. Scott also likes to think that he himself became a drunk because his mother died, though in his more honest moments he has his doubts. Not to say that he wasn’t upset.
She died in the winter of Scott’s freshman year in college, and for months and months afterwards he’d wandered the campus like he was underwater. He couldn’t hear people when they talked to him.
Secretly, though, Scott knows that he drank because it was wonderful. He loved it—the numb freedom that allowed him to walk across the fraternity rooftop, three stories above ground; or kiss a pretty girl at a party out of nowhere, with no fear of retribution; or catcall the big, square-jawed guys outside the fraternity house next door. It was only when, on a dare, he chugged half a bottle of ouzo and ended up in a coma for three days that he began to blame it all on his mother’s death.
For as long as Scott can remember, his father has lived in a two-bedroom trailer house in the country. Scott used to spend a month there every summer until he was fourteen, by which time his father’s drinking had gotten so out of hand that even overnight visits weren’t possible anymore. But the memory of the place has stuck with him: the smell of sweat and leftovers; the dirty clothes and overflowing ashtrays; the girlie magazines and detective paperbacks scattered on the floor, piled on the furniture.
Scott can remember his father teaching him to play poker. His father would get up in the morning and sit in his underwear at the kitchen table, and Scott would sit across from him. They’d play cards all afternoon, into the evening, and his father would smoke cigarette after cigarette, drinking beer and later Jack Daniel’s, not wanting to eat or get dressed or even raise the shades. Whenever they played, Scott’s father gave him fifty dollars. Then, he proceeded to win it all back. By dusk, Scott would have lost all the money and his father would be drunk enough to begin giving him beers. Scott took them nervously, sipping them until they grew flat and warm, grimacing at the bitter taste. He never thought his father was a monster, no matter what his mother said. For Scott, there had been something conspiratorial and grown-up about staying with him: gambling, drinking, looking at nude ladies in his father’s magazines, going to bed when he wanted to. Scott didn’t even hate him when he grew frightening, late at night. His father would talk about old bosses he’d had, punching the air with his fists, or describe the bodies of women he had known, grinning languorously, looming over Scott and gesturing. Scott had made believe it was a rare and passing moment of insanity, though his father got that way nearly every night.