On the last day of school, Coffin made arrangements with our French teacher to keep us for three hours in a row so we could watch an entire movie. He hadn’t found Legends of the Fall, he said, and what he brought us didn’t have Brad Pitt in it but Lauren Bacall, but that, in his opinion, was better. I thought he meant to say that it was better because he was a man and Lauren Bacall had been a stunning woman while he had no interest in Brad Pitt physically, but the movie was recent, and Lauren Bacall was an old woman in it. It wasn’t a German movie, it wasn’t even dubbed in German—Coffin could only find it with German subtitles—but in spite of that, he explained, it would teach us something about German culture. The movie was Dogville and no one liked it. The class felt cheated because it didn’t even look like a movie but like filmed theater, which was the worst thing they could think of as far as entertainment went, worse even than live theater.
“There’s no decor, no nothing,” Emilie complained. “The whole time, you’re supposed to buy that those white lines on the floor are walls, or mountains or gardens or whatever…I don’t get it. It’s like there wasn’t any budget for the movie, but then Kidman’s in it, so you know they had bank.
“And it warns you from the beginning that it’s going to be a sad story,” Emilie said. “It tells you there’s going to be nine chapters, and before each chapter it tells you what’s going to happen next. Who wants to watch something when they know how it will end?”
“I thought chapters were only for books anyway,” Victor said.
Coffin let everyone vent for a while. I didn’t say anything because I had actually enjoyed the movie somewhat—I had only fallen asleep a couple of times and had, as a result, found the warnings before each chapter quite handy. Coffin was so still behind his desk, I thought for a minute that he might’ve died of a fussless heart attack, like the father had. People had only noticed he was gone when their board meeting had ended and the father hadn’t gotten up to shake their hands. But Coffin was still alive. He’d just been waiting for the class to run out of disappointed comments to share his own opinions on the film.
“Who among you,” he said, “has any idea why a filmmaker would resort to such a bare setting to tell his story?” Silence. “You all seem to agree that what we just saw was lacking some sort of magic—if you’ll allow me such a word—a magic that you would usually seek in a movie, one that ensues from rich set decoration, nail-biting suspense, et cetera. Why would an artist consciously decide to do without such…magic tricks?”
“To alienate the audience?” Emilie offered.
Some in the back rows laughed, assuming Emilie’s intent had been comical, but Coffin was impressed by her answer.
“Very good,” he said. “Your classmate Emilie has just, without knowing it, I assume, taken her stand in a very long debate about the translation of the word Verfremdungseffekt.”
Victor coughed the second Coffin finished saying Verfremdungseffekt, which is something he thought was funny to do every time he heard a German word more than three syllables long. There were a lot of those.
“See,” Coffin went on, ignoring Victor’s coughing, “specialists of performing arts theory have long wondered how to best translate this term coined by playwright Bertolt Brecht, the Verfremdungseffekt.” (Victor coughed again.) “Some choose to render it as distancing effect, some as estrangement effect, and some even, as your friend Emilie intuited, as alienation effect. Now let’s go a little farther. Why is it you think an artist would want to distance—or estrange, or alienate—his audience?”
Emilie’s whole demeanor had shifted from sniffy to scholarly the moment Coffin had shown interest in her comment. She was thrilled and trying, poorly, to hide exactly how thrilled she was, the way I had been in swimming class after I’d held my breath longer than anybody. She was now assuming a posture of knowledge and tried to give Coffin the answer he wanted.
“Maybe if the artist doesn’t want the audience to get involved?” she said.
“Well, yes, Emilie, sure. But that is just another way to say he would want to distance his audience,” Coffin said. Emilie pinched her lips sideways. I didn’t know if that meant she was looking to elaborate on her answer or if she was just disappointed to have lost her knowledgeable pose. No one said anything for a while, and Coffin had to come up with a new angle.
“It sounds to me,” he said, “hearing your comments on the film, like it has indeed failed to get you involved in it, at least in the way you’re used to getting involved in the movies you would typically watch. It didn’t move you. A certain number of elements were missing in order for you to really relate to the characters. Instead, you found yourself wondering: Why am I being shown this character in this unusual way? How am I supposed to believe that there’s a wall there when it’s obviously just a piece of tape on the floor? What does this all mean about our society? What if the characters could see through the walls the way the audience can? Would the story be different? And, side note: of course it would. All the while, you’re not building an emotional connection with the characters, but an intellectual one with the art piece itself. The movie didn’t move you the way you wanted it to, but it made you think. That is the Verfremdungseffekt, or, as certain people would call it, the V-Effekt.”
The class was not as interested in this as Coffin had hoped. Emilie glanced at her watch.
“But that’s not entertainment, then, if you have to think about it,” Victor said.
Coffin was ready to counter that.
“What Brecht thought,” he said, “was that all the illusions that a traditional narrative encumbered itself with were only building a hypnotic field between the play and the audience, that the hypnotic field only brought passive compliance and let the public fall under its spell, never encouraging them to interpret the work critically.”
“But we have philosophy classes for that,” Emilie said. “And history and civics and all that. Science, even. Art is not there to make us think critically, it is just meant to help us escape our lives and make us feel things.”
“And Brecht would argue that there is a form of involvement other than emotional empathy, one that requires the audience to go into a play, or a movie, with an investigating eye instead of a passive one.”
“Germans are so fucked up,” Victor said, not loud enough for Coffin to hear. “Can’t just let people enjoy themselves.”
The bell to the last class of the year was about to ring and I knew the rest of the class would hate me for having us stay even one minute overtime because of the stupid question I wanted to ask, but I asked it anyway.
“Isn’t there a way to have it—” The bell rang there and I let it ring before resuming with my question, indicating I meant to resume by not packing my bag the way everyone else around me was. “Isn’t there a way to have it all?” I said. “To be, at the same time, intellectually and emotionally involved in a movie or a play?”
I thought this would get Coffin thinking for a second but his answer was immediate and foursquare.
“Impossible,” he said. “You cannot have both the critical interpretation and…the magic at the same time.”
I wanted to ask him if he thought the same went for life in general, if one had to make a choice between overthinking and truly living it, but Coffin seemed so satisfied that the words he’d just spoken should be the last of his teaching year that I let him have it.
“You all have a wonderful summer now,” he said, and half the class was lined up at the door before he’d finished his sentence. Coffin himself looked eager to get away from us.
“Great job requesting we watch a movie in class,” Victor said as he passed my table. “I think we all would’ve preferred an actual German class to this shit.”
I said I was sorry, even though I didn’t believe Victor’s feelings on the movie were my responsibility at all. I knew my apology would destabilize him and send him on his way to bother other people. It did. As I packed my bag, careful not to break the frame with Juliette
’s picture under the weight of my German textbook, I wondered if Leonard knew about the Verfremdungseffekt. Deprived of magic. I wondered if that was how he saw us, how he had to see us in order to write his PhD dissertation.
“Well I thought it was interesting,” I heard Emilie say on her way out. She’d waited to be the last person in the room to tell me this, so I would be the only one to hear, and she’d only said it in passing, maybe just to be kind, but I clung to her remark as if we were friends.
“You don’t think Coffin is wrong though?” I asked her. “About art either being an intellectual or an emotional experience?”
Emilie stopped and turned around to look at me but she didn’t come closer, staying on the threshold of the classroom.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “He’s the teacher. He has to know, right?”
I thought about this, apparently a bit too long for her taste.
“Anyway,” she said, “enjoy your summer, Isidore. I hope Denise gets better.”
I wanted to thank her but I could only wave before she was out of my sight.
When I came home, my mother was waiting for me on the sidewalk in front of our door. She was sitting on our couch, reading the paper.
“What’s the couch doing on the sidewalk?” I said.
“Well, it’s waiting for the trash truck, obviously.”
“Did you get a new one?”
“No, not yet. I thought we could go pick one together one of these days.”
“Where are we going to sit in the meantime?”
“What’s with all the questions, Dory? I thought you’d be happy about this.”
I sat on the couch next to her and said nothing.
“It was about time we changed it, don’t you think?”
Berenice moved to Chicago in July. Denise was still in a coma, and I kept setting deadlines to maintain hope. She’ll wake up before the new couch comes in, I’d told myself. Then when they’d delivered the couch, I’d thought, She’ll wake up before Berenice leaves. I had to come up with new deadlines all the time.
I was trying to decide when Denise would wake up when Aurore came into my bedroom to see if Simone had borrowed her old edition of Tommaso Garzoni. Simone was in the shower.
“I don’t think she would’ve told me about it,” I said to Aurore. “But you’re welcome to look around.”
I knew Aurore had waited for Simone to be in the shower on purpose. My siblings always borrowed books from one another without warning the rightful owner. That way, they hoped, they would get to keep the books. If the rightful owner realized a book was missing, they’d retrieve it without a word to the borrower. They couldn’t officially complain—they all did the same thing. It wasn’t stealing but hopeful borrowing, Simone had explained to me. I guess it worked and the borrowers got to keep the books sometimes, or else they wouldn’t have kept doing it.
Aurore started scanning Simone’s bookshelves, and as she spotted what she was looking for, or something else she could hopeful-borrow, she extended her whole body to grab it and her loose pajama top lifted and I saw that she was pregnant. Just a little, I thought, but then there was no such thing as being just a little pregnant. She didn’t catch me looking, acted unaware, even, that anyone might notice, and I wondered if she herself knew what was going on.
“How have you been?” I said.
“What do you mean how have I been?” Aurore said. “I live in the bedroom across the hall from you, have you noticed? You talk like you haven’t seen me in ages.”
“Well you’ve been out with Ber a lot lately. We haven’t seen much of you.”
“You never see much of me,” Aurore said.
She grabbed another book, flipped through it, and said something about Simone’s horrible reading habits (dog-earing, underlining, correcting typos).
“Are you thinking about getting a second PhD too?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said. “Employment prospects for a history PhD in France are just dismal.”
“I didn’t realize you’d been looking for a job.”
Aurore looked like she was going to respond to that but then she changed her mind and put the second book back on the shelves and I saw her round stomach again. Could it just be that she’d been drinking more than usual and what she had was what people called beer belly?
“Maybe Berenice left with my Garzoni,” Aurore said, like we were both involved in solving a mystery.
I looked at her breasts, to see if they’d gotten any bigger. I thought I was being stealthy, only glancing for a second, and only on my way to pretend-look at the clock on Simone’s shelf, but girls have an extra sense when it comes to people checking out their breasts. Aurore felt I’d been looking and held the first book she’d taken from Simone’s shelf tight against her chest.
“I guess I’ll just borrow this one then,” she said.
“Sure.”
“No need to tell Simone.”
“Of course not.”
She left the room and closed the door behind her, which was something I often complained no one ever did. Maybe she assumed, because she’d caught me looking at her breasts, that I needed some privacy. I was embarrassed by that. Mostly though, I was excited that I was going to be an uncle. I had no idea how far along Aurore was, but I started making plans for when the baby would arrive. I guessed he would sleep in Aurore’s bedroom at first, but that she would get tired of his screaming fast, and then he’d end up with me, since Simone would’ve moved out by then. I tried to picture a crib where Simone’s bed was. I wanted to picture other things but I didn’t know much about babies. I pictured myself teaching him things—what, exactly, I would determine later. I pictured myself taking him out for strolls, introducing him to people, when people were interested. I pictured him smiling at Denise in a way that would show her that life was not all bad. Denise would be awake by the time the baby was born, I’d decided.
Denise awoke before Aurore’s body really had time to show any more signs of pregnancy. Her mother gave me a call and said I could come visit Denise at the hospital whenever I wanted before eight p.m. I subtly tried to figure out a time when I could go without having to see her parents (“I don’t want to be in your way,” I said), and Denise’s mother said that around five thirty, she and her husband would go home to take showers and watch Questions pour un Champion before they would return to the hospital to kiss their daughter good night. I said it sounded great, that if I went while they watched their show, Denise wouldn’t have to be alone at any point. Except when I knocked on Denise’s door, her room was empty and I was told a nurse was taking her through the hospital for various tests. A male nurse who walked around with what looked like Ziplocs full of blood showed me a place to sit and said I might wait awhile.
“Can’t I just go meet her wherever she is right now?” I asked, but the nurse told me there was no way to know where Denise was exactly at this moment. I thought he just didn’t want to take the time to help me, but then as I sat and waited, I heard people ask where their doctors were and saw doctors come by wondering where their patients were, and the nurses couldn’t tell them anything either, and doctors and patients seemed to find that perfectly normal, like a hospital was by definition a place where no one knew where anyone else was.
On the wall between the waiting room and the nurses’ station, someone had pinned a little piece of paper that read something like evryethnig one nedeed in odrer to undresatnd a mesasge was for the frist and last letrtes of its wodrs to be wehre tehy had to and the rset of the lettres colud be all fcuked aournd wtih it did not matetr becuase the barin rergonaized the lettres autaomitcally.
It didn’t say that exactly, but that was the idea. I wondered if Simone knew about that.
I waited and waited until visiting hours were over, surprised and also relieved Denise’s parents hadn’t shown up. I’d read on the Internet that in some cases of depression, doctors opted for isolating the patient from anyone she knew, friend or family, in order for her to
recover. I thought maybe that’s what they were doing with Denise, except they’d warned her parents and not me. I waited another half hour and finally, a nurse I’d never seen before but who seemed to know who I was came to me and told me that Denise had died an hour ago, inside the MRI machine. She told me her parents were with the body, and she gave me instructions on how to go see the body myself. She kept saying body. I had no desire to see the body. I started to translate, in my head, all the words the nurse had spoken into German. Body. She is dead. Der Leib/der Körper. Sie ist tot/Sie ist gestorben. They had less power that way.
I asked if I could go inside Denise’s bedroom instead of the morgue, and the nurse repeated that Denise had died and that it meant no one would bring her back to her room. No one—niemand; room—das Zimmer; her room—ihre Zimmer.
“I understand,” I said. “I would still like to go in.”
She considered my request.
“All right,” she said. “You can go. But the cleaning team will be here any minute.”
I went in and she followed me. “We had some cases of theft on this floor,” she explained.
Theft…how did one say that…Stahl?
I looked around the room and saw nothing worthy of being stolen, and the nurse must have shared my opinion because she sighed and said, “I’ll give you some privacy now,” and left. The room looked like the cleaning team had been there already. I took Juliette’s picture out of my bag and set it on the nightstand, since there was one, and sat on Denise’s hospital bed. I didn’t think I was accomplishing any kind of meaningful act of mourning there. I just never wanted to see the picture again.
Denise hadn’t left any kind of note, which I’d found okay as long as she hadn’t died from her suicide attempt—I thought it meant she hadn’t really meant to die, and therefore that she wouldn’t—but once she did, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. “Most suicides don’t leave notes, actually,” Simone told me, as if blending the specificities of Denise’s case into a standard pattern would somehow make the whole thing more acceptable. When I asked Simone how she knew about the notes, she just said that she did.
How to Behave in a Crowd Page 24