A Short Film About Disappointment

by Joshua Mattson

  There was one thing she wanted to know.

  I overheard her ask why him to Dr. Lisa when Jonson was working up a bit about rail cops.

  Jonson said, The thing about rail cops is.

  I couldn’t hear what Dr. Lisa said in reply to Lucretia. Why me? Better not to know. The answer could be unflattering. I did manage to hear what Lucretia said, when Dr. Lisa asked her in turn. Jonson thought I was enjoying his shtick and dragged it out long after the punch line. His sense of timing awful. There is no retailer of wit.

  Lucretia said, He’s a person I can be myself with.

  The three started talking about the best slingshot carrier.

  Jonson said, I take Canadian Suborbital. There’s something about Canadians that makes me think they’re paying attention to what they’re building. But I’ll go on New Korea if I’m splurging. They do a delightful brunch.

  Lucretia said, I don’t get on one of those things unless I’m good and drunk.

  Dr. Lisa said, I like Des Moines Worldwide. They pack the passengers in but everyone gets a pill to make the time fly by.

  Lucretia said, Who do you like when you travel?

  I said, I wouldn’t get on one of those.

  Dr. Lisa said, Are you afraid of crashing?

  I said, Actually, I’m afraid it won’t come down.

  The bell.

  Jonson said, Who might that be?

  He looked on his Pinger’s security app.

  Jonson said, Millings, how wonderful. I’m glad you patched things up, or this might have been awkward.

  He was admitted to the residence. Millings in health. His stoop drew attention to his vigor. Good clear eyes. His cosmetic work was not obvious. If one saw him in a guest neighborhood selling apples, one might be envious of his genetic material. Dr. Lisa approving. Her eyes returning to him, when she thought nobody was looking.

  Millings said, Who is this lovely woman?

  Dr. Lisa said, I’m Lisa, how are you?

  Millings said, Rolf Millings, a friend to all.

  Bending over her, into her personal space, to shake her hand. Dr. Lisa taking him in through her nose. She let herself have a deep breath. He lingered for a second longer than was proper.

  Millings called my name.

  He said, When are we going to see that movie?

  I said, Soon, soon. When there is time.

  He said, I’ve got time for you.

  Jonson said, Can I get you anything, Millings?

  Millings said, No, thanks. I was with a friend down at the bookshop nearby, and I remembered that when we saw each other at Chez Prateek, I promised you I would send along that book of photographs of the city before the Hub was established. Half of the book is of this neighborhood. Anyway, I couldn’t find it at home, but I saw another copy, and I picked it up for you.

  Millings flipped to a page he had marked. As he bent over the book, I noticed his hair was graying.

  He said, Look, it’s your building, sixty years ago.

  Jonson, his wife, and Dr. Lisa gathered around. Talking between themselves, pointing out landmarks.

  Millings said, Good play with Uncle Al. I’ve never approved of his methods. You know, there’s nothing to be done with an unruly employee. But he was my father’s favorite, and I can’t let him go. We’re almost done doing bad things to each other, I think. Then you can take my money, and the three of us can make our film. That’s my promise to you. Tell me, is there a shoot-out? A chase?

  I said, No.

  He said, Dr. Lisa, I have a recurring pain in my ears. Maybe I can see you for it.

  She said, If you call my office, I’ll be happy to refer you to a colleague of mine. He’s an ear fanatic. Loves ears.

  Millings said, Brilliant. I insist the four of you must attend my party, two weeks from today, to celebrate forty-five years of Millings Kiosk. It will be boring without my friends.

  Jonson’s wife said, Of course.

  Millings said, Ladies. Jonson.

  Limp handshakes.

  Millings took his leave. The women shared a private smile. Jonson and I pretended not to notice.

  A half hour more and we left. Promises to return. Arrangements, polite thanks. The relief of surviving another couple.

  Dr. Lisa said, How long have they been married?

  I said, Six years or seven.

  Dr. Lisa said, After that long couples are tired of each other or at least resigned. The saddest are those calculating if it will get better or change, if they should hang on another season, or another year. But they were making it work. They hadn’t reached the end of what they had to say to each other. Better than that, actually. It gives me hope.

  I said, You think you can evaluate a relationship based on what you see?

  She said, Of course you can.

  I said, I would submit you can’t at all, because what you observe does not account for what neuroses are driving the persons within.

  She said, If you can’t tell the difference between a happy and an unhappy relationship, maybe you aren’t as smart as you think you are.

  I said, An event like tonight is a performance of happiness. We come to their stage. They have prepared themselves. We take seats.

  She said, Aren’t they your friends?

  I said, I am fond of Jonson for preserving his innocence.

  She said, My theory is, you don’t like her much, because she is like you, and you don’t like to be reminded you’re not unique.

  I said, I suppose you might be right. It’s not healthy to reflect too much on the self.

  She said, Why don’t you like Rolf?

  I said, We had a disagreement over the film Don’t Bother. It got very heated and Jonson made me leave his apartment.

  She said, I thought he was charming. I like good manners.

  Walking.

  She said, Of course, you could never have a conversation with such a man. It would be all surface, and you’d talk more and more, hoping something of significance would arise, but it never would. That man is afraid of his opinions.

  I said, What use are opinions?

  She said, Put your arm around me.

  She said, No, like this. Yeah. Like we’re going to a dance and you’re possessive. Have you ever been dancing?

  I said, No.

  She said, Then we’ll go now.

  49.

  NOTABLE CELIBATES

  DIR. JUAN COGUMELO

  13 MINUTES

  Newton. Kierkegaard tried to stop the wandering hands of his girlfriend by giving her a New Testament. Pythagoras. Paul. Marcus Batterham, the actor who died last year on the set of Mysterious Circumstances under mysterious circumstances. Jerome said a man who desired his wife was an adulterer. These men found women to idealize, like a nice triangle or a favored oak. Aristotle, Spinoza. Farboksky. Poor Sidis. Tesla with his hatred of roundness. Ruskin, who feared pubic hair. Gaudí. Beethoven. John the Baptist. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. Hamlet. Augustine, after he’d gotten his ya-yas out. Nietzsche. A few of the aforementioned were mad. Afraid of certain numbers, birds overhead.

  50.

  THE WOMAN IN 702

  DIR. ROMAN HARLEN

  88 MINUTES

  When Osvald and I lived together, our prevailing opinion was that he needed to get laid. He loaded a dating module onto his Pinger. Osvald was not skilled at interpreting when women were interested, and he feared rejection. Exchanging messages allowed him to reveal, in anonymous comfort, the deliberate nature of his thought, his ability to entertain, and the chummy accessibility of his humor. On the Pinger, his personality showed up well.

  Osvald was a superlative punctuator of his flabby and legalese sentences. He allowed himself the indulgence of a semicolon. He took as long as was necessary to ensure his views were clear. It would no
t be wrong for a woman to read his comments and surmise intelligence.

  Although we pried, begged, tried reverse psychology, he was vague on what transpired with the women he took to the Ornery Hog. Isabel and I, vicarious fiends, could not get from him a single titillating detail. Osvald refused to dangle a black stocking, a soggy kiss, a leaden line.

  He was looking less sallow, shaving, wearing jaunty windbreakers, joining Isabel and I for a drink, buying vegetables to die in his crisper, jogging, wearing laced-up neon sneakers. His Pinger bleeped and he thumbed the message with affected cool. Less than once per month did Osvald smile, but now he was practically beaming.

  Then, a charcoal mood. Osvald was silent. His tongue lay flat at the bottom of his mouth like a manta ray. Closing doors or leaving the wrong doors open. Isabel’s barbs ricocheted off his skin. Osvald’s method for getting Isabel’s attention was to claim she wasn’t his type. The transparency of his feigned indifference did not occur to Isabel. I did not mind. It is no sin to have a crush. One is free to play in the fields of the self.

  Halloween. There were no children in our neighborhood, but adults were in costume. We had a lot to drink. Tired of sitting in the dusk of his living room, feet up on his cement-and-plywood coffee table, I asked him to please tell me what was wrong. He declined. I speculated.

  I said, Maybe a bout of ejaculatio praecox. Warts. A banning from the makerspace for untidiness. The handywoman in the woodshop sneered at your pocket-hole joinery.

  After thirty questions, he gave in. Osvald’s confessions involved a gradual circumnavigation of the dangerous topic. He had to be seduced into telling, but he wanted to tell. He huffed, pinched the bridge of his nose, fixed his hair, and blurted out his misfortunes.

  On the Ping site he’d met Katrina. She was a sculptor of male nudes employed as an actuary. Osvald was temping in the IT office of a school district, removing malware from the administrators’ Pingers. In his free time, he made birdhouses instead of films. They went on a date.

  Eliding Osvald’s analysis of the outfit he wore, his choice of cocktail bar, and his lines of questioning, the date went well. He went home expecting to be sculpted the next week. Did some push-ups. Here is where Osvald usually stumbled, pinging before he should or getting spooked and pinging the woman too late. The successful animal relies on instinct. This time, he waited the textbook three hours plus one for style.

  Katrina chose The Woman in 702, soap-opera bondage given legitimacy by a lighting budget. Osvald’s conversational subterfuge was to state his peccadilloes without shame. Women respected his candor. The pair fidgeted through the whipping, gagging, and code words. Osvald suggested a walk by the riverfront.

  He pointed his feet west, but Katrina said they should walk east, toward her place. Gulping his gin, recrossing his legs, Osvald admitted to us that he began to sweat. When they reached a pair of peachleaf willows where Jonson met his wife, their catkins fattened with pollen, she suggested they use a cannabinoid inhaler. Osvald was nauseous with fear, so he smoked much more than usual, hoping to eradicate his self-consciousness. She kissed him and he did not embarrass himself. Osvald experienced what felt like the disintegration of his soul. He was too high.

  A few more blocks, then they would be inside. Here it was. An old building with wood floors that would be too hot in summer and too hot in winter. No privacy, so when he used the bathroom in the middle of the night, she would hear everything, as she tossed with the uneasiness that comes with a new person in one’s bed. The thrill of seeing her fridge for the first time, her books, her pictures. The stone steps.

  He said, Do you understand? I walked behind her to look at her ass but another department of my consciousness was preparing for imminent destruction by extraterrestrial debris.

  She unlocked the door. Two jealous cats, printed Monet haystacks. She dragged him to her bedroom, popping a collar button. On the way out, he could not find it, which heartened him, because maybe it meant she would ping him when she found it.

  Isabel was hypnotized. She spilled her drink in her lap. When she flinched in surprise, her fingernails dug into my neck, where she liked to rest her palm.

  Maybe this was actually told to us in my and Isabel’s apartment. It doesn’t matter. It is brighter, there is music. The glasses are clean. Our cat sleeps behind the blinds. Clumps of her soft gray fur poke between the slits.

  He tells us, due to his anxiety, because he is infatuated, because he has imagined her body for the last two weeks, because he has been rigorously abusing himself for as long as his memory allows, he can’t get a storm trooper, although his date tries her best. He tells us, in dirty parlance, what he does for her. Isabel snickers. I am sympathetic.

  Afterward, Katrina asked him to leave.

  She said, It is hard for me to sleep when I am not alone, and I have to work tomorrow, so.

  Isabel and I agreed it was poor form of her to kick him out of her bed. Katrina ignored his ping. He hadn’t the courage to send another. Isabel and I called him Dope Dick, hoping our teasing might raise his spirits, but he retreated into the sticky welter, into the heap of magazines and the tattered boxer briefs, the stale odor of semen, the desiccated plants, the empties, the battered model airplanes, of his bedroom.

  51.

  EQUIPMENT TEST I

  DIR. NOAH BODY

  3 MINUTES

  Cameras arrived with lights and accessories we are not sure about.

  Yesterday’s equipment test was a categorical disaster, it disheartens to recall. To choose the worst mistake is not possible. Candidates: the difficulty of renting the hospital wing, the protests of the doctors, the destruction of the hyperbaric chamber, the small, hardly visible fire, the stress of concealing the endeavor from Jonson’s wife, the bored actress, the shy actor, the whistling technician, the camera obliterated by the collapsing shed, the realization we’d forgotten to buy insurance, the threatened lawsuit, the second fire, the cold nurse, the dropped lens, the missing drive, the open fly, the sun-shower when the exteriors were blocked, the despair of Jonson, the absent props, the harassment of the grip by the gaffer. The miscues, retakes, touch-ups, cover-ups, coveralls, continuity errors. The rancid synth-meat between sponges of bread disinterred for lunch.

  Jonson said, The rushes were not encouraging. They looked like porn. Were you using a light meter?

  I said, I dropped it in the urinal.

  He said, Maybe this is a bad idea.

  I said, We’ve had this equipment for two days. Calm down.

  He said, Are we directors?

  I said, I would think you would be more worried about if this film is commercially viable.

  He said, Are we?

  I said, Maybe you are and maybe I am, but so far, we are not.

  He said, That’s what I’m afraid of.

  I said, Jonson, if you wanted to make money, you would have done anything else. Why don’t you sow a handful of chaos in your heart? Isn’t that why we’re in this construction trailer? So you can learn to accommodate chaos?

  He said, When we started, I had different expectations. Maybe we should get a consulting director, to show us how to organize our day, deal with the unions, and use the cameras.

  I said, Never. We’ll learn by doing. Otherwise, Altarpiece will look like everything else. We are fatigued by everything else.

  Our ideas are like poplars, like algae. They flourish and spread despite the conditions.

  52.

  A NIGHT IN FOXTOWN

  DIR. ROXANNE GORDON

  94 MINUTES

  Isabel was fond of her therapy module, which was recommended by her aunt Gloria. Gloria managed to remain unhinged after three decades of therapy. It might have been a world record. We all have passing thoughts of leaving our partner or hurling ourselves off a bridge. The lunch hour on Thursdays was when Gloria teased the effervescence of depression into crises. So it became
with Isabel. Charlie, the name of the voice issuing from Isabel’s Pinger, constructed a narrative with myself in the role of the vampire siphoning Isabel’s energy. She suggested to Isabel that I sit in with her to be interrogated.

  Charlie ordered me to address my frustrations. If I was angry because Isabel had come home, torn off her clothes, and strewn them wherever, instead of telling her, I was to tell the clothes how frustrated they had made me by being in the sink instead of the hamper.

  I said, Toilet, why aren’t you flushed? Flush yourself.

  Mood boards, shared meditation. A candle of wishes burned on the dresser.

  Over our last summer, I became disinterested in having sex with Isabel. After Transit Day, her vagina became a source of ongoing low-level anxiety. My morning resolution was: Tonight I’m going to really fuck her. Until her eyes roll back. Maybe Tuesday. Thursday, I won’t be so tired. For all of the noncontiguous years of our relationship we’d gone at it pretty much every night. I was satisfied with our practices. Ambition is poisonous to sensuality.

  We met past the age when sex was a revelation. After separations, we did it from a combination of longing, loneliness, and nostalgia. One gruesome autumn we passed the clap back and forth. Our physical relationship was sound, buttressed by jealousy, although Isabel was reluctant to vocalize what she wanted or needed.

  She would get walleyed drunk and I would manage to extract her preferences in sin, as if I were enticing a painted bunting to fly into my cage, before she had too much wine and smashed a lamp, or threatened to geld me with her bang shears. When the occasion called for it, I’d tie her up, switch her, throw her down, whisper filthy things on her Pinger, lick her anus. The design of these exercises was more satisfying than their execution, like camping. It is difficult to bicker with whom you’ve fucked in a bush. For Isabel, it was important my desire designated her as its locus in novel ways. We complain of being objectified, but to be someone’s specific object, their piece of meat, is better than the opposite.