Stone Arabia

by Spiotta, Dana

  I am drawn to obsessives. I’m not one myself, so I can only guess about this stuff—okay, maybe I have obsessions, but mine are useless, neurotic obsessions. I am talking about aesthetic-driven, artistic obsessives. I sure am surrounded by them: Jay, Nik, even Ada in her way.

  Jay slept over, which he did now once every week or so. It had become a regular thing, not increasing or decreasing in intensity or frequency. It held. We had slow, easy sex that had a low-volume erotic tone. We weren’t in love—even the idea of that made us both skittish and nervous—but the physical pleasure was real and steady and welcome.

  Knowing I would see Jay once a week also helped me keep some minimum level of grooming: I shaved my legs, I did my nails, and nearly regularly did my pilates DVD. I first met him at the Farmers Market on Fairfax, which is near where I work as a secretary for Greer Properties. I mean office manager. I mean personal assistant.

  It was at Du-par’s, an old coffee shop where I eat lunch a couple of times a week. I used to occasionally see Jay there, reading. One day, on my way out, he asked if he could have lunch with me the following day. Jay wasn’t a good-looking guy. He was in his mid-fifties, balding, and he wore sweaters that were too big for him and created an off-putting, almost creepy diminutive effect. Nevertheless, he did have a faded British accent. I said yes.

  We agreed to meet at the same place. As soon as I sat down with him, I regretted it. The whole thing felt so awkward, and now this coffee shop would be forever poisoned with failure. I’d have to eat somewhere else. We ordered and then sat in forced smiles and silence. I became very conscious of how often I seemed to blink. I drank too much coffee and then I began to talk, and talk, filling the empty air.

  “Have you been following the severe acute respiratory syndrome global pandemic? You know, SARS? Well, you remember how at the beginning of the year it was constantly in the news? Every time you turned on the news they were talking about it. All winter long we heard about where it was and what could be causing it. We saw people in hospital beds on respirators next to photos of them healthy and smiling at a barbecue. Interviews with family members and CDC officials. Remember? Well, then SARS just stopped for no reason. Do you know there were over seven thousand cases?” I said, leaning in.

  Jay nodded politely. I believe I mentioned “corona virus” and “etology” and “case-fatality ratios” and I didn’t stop. I hadn’t been out with a guy in a long time, but even I knew talking about infectious diseases was not appealing first-date conversation. I finally took a breath and he looked uncomfortable.

  “What do you do?” I asked, my whole person collapsing in weary resignation as I asked this ridiculously boring question. This was exactly why I stopped dating. This was why I wanted to stay with my husband long after I realized he was unhappy. So I wouldn’t have to ask and answer these sorts of questions.

  “I’m a teacher,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s great. What do you teach?” I said. To me, asking and answering these questions implied a false promise about the future. Telling your life history meant you were throwing it out for someone’s perusal, and how optimistic could you feel? How could anyone “get” me at this point? I made no sense, especially in light recitation.

  “I teach art history. And sometimes film. At Wake School. Do you know it?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a private high school for rich industry kids. Mostly. They do give some financial-need scholarships to gifted kids.”

  It was my turn, and I found myself speedily talking about Ada and her life in New York. And I knew I now sounded like a woman who lived through her daughter, but I guessed that was better than the woman I was a minute earlier who loved to talk about SARS. I was just about to launch into describing my dying mother and her approaching dementia and my own fears of age-related memory impairment when I stopped. I just stopped myself. I took a sip of water, a deep breath, and I let the silence hang there. I even stopped smiling.

  At last he said, “You have the loveliest hands,” and he put his hand, or just the fingers of his hand, very gently on top of the fingers of my hand. I could feel my cheeks getting warm. I stared stupidly at our hands on the table. At last I looked up, and he was looking right back at me. I made myself hold his gaze for a second, and I could feel an unmistakable wave of desire move through my hand and across my body. I had to shift a bit in my seat, even, and I was amazed at how a man who didn’t seem sexy at all could suddenly become starkly erotic just by plainly admitting his desire. Was it always like that? I didn’t think so. I think it had a lot to do with the many pointless bad dates I had after my second husband, Will, left me (I refer to him as my second husband, but I never actually married Ada’s father, Chris, so Will is in fact my one and only husband, or he was before he left me). I went through setups and contrived dinner parties and even an online dating service. How difficult and humiliating it was to discover a man wasn’t really attracted to you. There was a time when a man’s attraction was a given, and that time had passed. I stopped trying to date after barely a year. It had, I’m afraid, been a long time. Sitting there, with his hand on mine, staring me into desiring him, felt good—quietly, dizzily good.

  I would have liked to do something then, but. “I have to go back to work,” I said. I gently pulled my hand back toward me. He let go.

  “What work do you do?”

  “I’m a personal secretary. Or assistant. An office manager for Greer Properties. A sort of personal assistant to Jack Greer.” The Greer family had real estate holdings all over Los Angeles. They owned land from pre-Hollywood time, orange-grove time. They were even related to Henry Gaylord Wilshire on his mother’s side. Wilshire used to own property from West Hollywood down to what would become Wilshire Boulevard, which he planned to develop from a barren field into a grand street named after himself. He donated the property to the city in the 1890s. Henry Gaylord Wilshire frequently ran for office as a socialist and eventually lost everything; Jack’s money came from his father’s unsocialist grandfather, Lymon Greer.

  I have been working for Jack Greer for fifteen years. I do everything for him, from making lunch dates to getting his dry cleaning. I answer letters and return phone calls. I distill the important request from the nuisance or the extraneous and then deliver it to the attention of Jack. But mostly I just have a long-built instinct for what he wants to hear about. I do, however, have to be there without fail, to filter and distill. No spontaneous late lunches for me.

  Jay smiled and nodded. Not that interested in hearing more, which was fine because I wasn’t all that interested, either.

  He came over for dinner that night. It would be a long drive for him. I lived across the Valley and way into the tired desert hills of Santa Clarita. He lived near the Farmers Market, on Ogden Drive. Already we were doomed, we had a commute between us. But he didn’t complain, and arrived on time. He did not bring me a Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ item that evening. That would be saved for our next date. We ate grilled fish with aioli and drank a steely and unsentimental summer wine. We talked about Nicholas Ray’s hard-to-see film Bigger Than Life, in which high school teacher James Mason takes the newfangled cure-all drug cortisone and then becomes sweaty and distorted and psychotic. He loves Nicholas Ray and I love James Mason, so we found common ground in Bigger Than Life. Because it hadn’t made it to DVD, it had attained a cult cachet among film fanatics. Jay—no surprise there—was a devoted cineaste, particularly of the highly wrought American films of the 1950s. Jay emerged from his car proudly wielding an old copy of the film on videotape, which I thought was a rather interesting date choice. Though no fanatic, I had seen Bigger Than Life at the Nuart years ago. Whatever it was to people in the fifties, or to the film fanatics of the moment, to me it read like a very earnest description of middle-class mortal desperation. It didn’t feel silly or campy, despite how melodramatic I found it. It truly disturbed me. It was a much more discomforting film of addiction than, say, The Man with the Golden Arm. It
was about the creeping perversity of conventional life; it was, with its increasingly distorted close-ups and subjective angles, its blatant angry reds and hysterical atmospherics, a deeply unsettling film.

  We tapped it into my old VCR. This time I didn’t feel disturbed. Instead I felt as if an old friend had dropped by. I now loved this odd obscure movie.

  “Did you ever think about how men in the movies are rarely shown as high school teachers? How they are always university professors? I think we are supposed to think Mason is a failure because he teaches high school,” Jay said.

  “What about To Sir with Love? That was a male high school teacher. He was the hero,” I said.

  “That was a redemption drama—a missionary film. Totally different.”

  He poured out the rest of the wine. Mason was in his bathroom, popping pills with an anguished expression.

  “Don’t look in the mirror! Whatever you do, don’t look in the mirror! Oh, he looked in the mirror,” I said. I was pleased to make Jay laugh. It is nice when you have seen a movie a few times and you have someone you can talk to while you are watching it. The repetition makes the movie lose some of its darker impact, but it gains something else: as it seeps deeper into familiarity, it begins to make a permanent claim on your sensibility, your aesthetic history. It is a lens through which you see the world, and that requires a certain amount of interaction, of movie talk. And I love that. I hate when people say shhh, shhh, like you are in church. I want to watch a good movie again and again, and again, and I want to crawl into it with my friends and talk. Jay didn’t shhh at me. Not at all.

  “It is hard to buy Mason moonlighting as a cabdriver. It seems so unlikely to me. He does do that seethy humiliation and self-loathing so well, though,” I said.

  “Did you ever notice how in all his movies James Mason always has a scene in a robe? In Lolita, in Five Fingers, in A Star Is Born. And in The Seventh Veil. Mason, it appears, was required to wear a robe in every movie he did,” Jay said.

  “Not in every one. Not in The Desert Fox.”

  “Yes in The Desert Fox.”

  “He didn’t wear a robe in The Desert Fox, did he? A Nazi smoking jacket?”

  “I’m afraid he did. A rather smart dressing gown, with a matching monogrammed handkerchief pressed to his mouth from time to time. Don’t you remember how they have to drag him from his convalescent bed because he is the only one who really understands the desert?”

  “I never actually saw it,” I said. “But you’re on to something here, he has these robe scenes, doesn’t he? A very neatly tied robe. Or perhaps a smoking jacket. Maybe it is because women want to imagine him in these intimate circumstances, but they also want to imagine he is stern and elegant all the time. Robert Mitchum or Burt Lancaster, they could be sloppily bare-chested. But if we saw James Mason in careless naked abandon, it would be like the end of civilization.”

  “Except Age of Consent. I recall a growling Mason rolling around naked with Helen Mirren in Age of Consent,” Jay said. “Of course, that was the sixties—”

  “Oh my,” I said. “That’s just—”

  “Yes,” Jay said.

  After the movie, we had a gentle, tentative kiss. I took his hand and led him to my bedroom. We undressed in the forgiving twilight. He was slight, with mottled middle-aged skin, standing naked by my bed. A little like James Mason, I thought, with his accent and all.

  The next time we met, he brought a copy of The Seventh Veil. I hadn’t seen this film before. It not only starred a young and severe James Mason with a mysterious Byronesque limp, but it also featured a woman with a memory problem pulling back the “veils” to recover her troubled, fragmented past. It was hard not to like a guy who had an instinct for indulging my eccentric longings.

  Jay and I began to meet once every couple of weeks. It was an affair without urgency or agenda, it seemed. We’d see a movie—he continued to bring me hard-to-see films—we would have dinner, and we would sleep together. In the morning we would say goodbye. But we were not in love. We didn’t have those exhausting conversations that in-love people have. We didn’t talk about our failed marriages, although I did discover, eventually, that he was once married to an American woman. We didn’t do the life-story stuff. I knew only what pertained to the present—that, for example, he would be gone for two weeks around the holidays so he could visit his family in England.

  After he gave me my birthday present, we watched Odd Man Out. I didn’t tell Jay any of my birthday anxieties. Not because I wanted to withhold something. I just didn’t feel them when I was with him. I didn’t want to talk about myself; I wanted to talk about movies. Somehow, in the time between being young and where I was, the life-story recital grew too long, both dull and complicated. When I was eighteen, I wanted to tell my lovers every inch of every moment that led to this miraculous moment. I thought that would make them understand me, and then they would have to love me. But now that I was older, and actually had a life story, I didn’t feel like telling it or hearing it. I just wanted him to press against me as we slowly figured our bodies out. I understood our real stories lived there anyway.

  FEBRUARY 14–15

  Ada came to visit. My favorite thing is spending the occasional weekend with Ada. When she still lived in LA, she would come over for dinner every week or so. But now that she lived in New York, I would get these wonderful weekends with her. I would take a plane to the city. I would stay with her in her studio apartment in Greenpoint. She would introduce me to her latest boyfriend. We would go have a glass of wine at her new favorite bar. We would sit up late talking. Even after we went to bed (in her double bed, under her pale pink satin duvet with the large, pale pink Art Deco swirls of stitching and cording), we would continue talking. What did we talk about? She told me everything. And I listened. We were like college girlfriends.

  This time she was coming to LA for two nights. She had a documentary film project she was trying to raise money for. Her production partner, Lisa, had set up some meetings at the cable channels that supported beginning filmmakers. We sat on the patio and ate cheese and drank her favorite rosé champagne. Her early years of waitering in nice restaurants had left her with expensive tastes in food and wine. I delighted in pleasing her and strove to spoil her for the few weekends I had with her.

  “I drove over to Nik’s today,” she said.

  “I invited him to come by tonight, but he didn’t feel like it.” “He is so funny—he showed me his latest Chronicle entries and played the corresponding music for me.”

  “I’m sure he loved doing that.”

  Ada took a sip of her pink wine. She took a drag off her cigarette. I know this is an awful thing to say about your kid, but she looked good with a cigarette. I thought this, even knowing how my brother fell into long hawking fits every morning. And coughing fits throughout the day. Bronchitis every winter. But when a young person smokes, it is different. It just underlines their excess life. It looks appealing and reminds you they feel as if they have life to spare. They have such luxury of time that they can flirt with lethal addictions. They have plenty of time to heal and repair later. A young woman like Ada would eventually discard these things. When you are old, like Nik, when it is a very old habit, smoking looks mostly like a reckless delusion. But for Ada it was an abundance, a kind of fun, a kick off of a shoe, a sip of pink champagne.

  By any standard, reasonable light, I appeared to be a crappy mother. I had an inappropriately casual relationship with my daughter. Of course her father, Chris, saw it that way. Even Nik—Nik, for God’s sake, the least judgmental person on earth—thought I was too easy on Ada. It is all true. But Ada, somehow, still managed to become this wonderful, thoughtful young woman.

  “I think I want to make a movie about Nik,” she said. “You know, he really is like a folk-art genius. Not just his music but the whole deal, the whole constructed lifelong thingy. He would totally be a great subject. Don’t you think?”

  I thought about it. Nik might be a g
ood subject. He was so eccentric, so hardworking, so unapologetic. But I didn’t think enough about it, or about what making a movie would do to the delicate balance of a secret life. I forgot, maybe because it was Ada, that I needed to look out for Nik.

  “He would be a great subject, and he would love it. But then again, he might not be totally receptive. Nik, he seems like he’s hungry for attention, but I’m not sure he is. Not anymore. Besides, he is used to controlling the whole story.”

  Ada glanced at me and nodded. She had short, shiny black bangs and long, straight black hair. Her eyes were heavily lined and the penciled-in arches of her brows precise. Her eyes looked enormous, even as (or because) her lids appeared halfway closed when she looked straight at you, sleepy kewpie-doll eyes.

  I poured myself more champagne. “We might have to talk him into it. Nik has his world, and I don’t think he even sees himself …Let’s put it this way: I think his whole life is a private joke that he doesn’t want to explain to anyone.” I took a sip of champagne and felt the bubbles fizz on the sides of my tongue as I swallowed. “And I think part of his pleasure, or at least his freedom, is he doesn’t think anyone will see it or judge it.”

  Ada nibbled at a cracker with a delicate sliver of cheddar on it. She had the eating habits of the relentlessly waifish.

  “I don’t know. Of course, it’s up to him—he will know if he wants to do it.”

  Ada nodded.

  “But what if people think the music isn’t any good?” I said, something I never considered before because it just didn’t apply. I listened, I paid attention, I enjoyed.