Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  Fidei Defensor, Michael

  * * *VIDEO # 3

  TITLE: MORE

  GIRL on bed, legs crossed. Black-and-white, wobble-trembly, handheld.

  MAX (O.S.)

  You just talk about it.

  GIRL puts her finger to her lips. She rubs her nail along the fleshy part of her lower lip, back and forth.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Stop that.

  She looks at him, absent, continuing with her lip rubbing.

  MAX (O.S.)

  With the lip, stop. Get your fingers away from your mouth.

  She stops, pulls her fingers away, and bites her lip in embarrassment, then she shrugs and sheepishly half-smiles.

  MINA

  Are you directing me? That’s exciting. (Pause.) It’s a habit. Do you ever wonder how it is that near-absentminded “nervous” habits offer so much comfort, but the comfort is only realized or thought of or appreciated after someoneorders you to stop? People flat out bark at you to stop as if they were saving you from some horrible mutilation, some regressive slide into nervous adolescence or an inadvertent pronouncement of neurosis. As if they were helping you. But it just gets on people’s nerves. It irks them. It grates.

  MAX (O.S.)

  You’re too self-conscious. Relax.

  MINA

  I can’t relax. I’m too self-conscious.

  Abrupt cut to a close-up of GIRL’s hand. She massages the palm of one of her hands while staring at her thumb, wrinkling her flesh. Then the camera pans slowly up her body back to her face.

  MINA

  Can you really massage yourself? Does the pleasure of it derive from being acted upon by another body? Or is it like masturbation, where the fact that you know exactly what feels good almost makes up for the fact you have to do it yourself?

  MAX (O.S.)

  You don’t have to speak.

  Abruptly stops rubbing.

  MINA

  No, it’s not like masturbation. It really isn’t satisfying to give yourself a massage.

  GIRL just sits there. She yawns.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Mina, tell me. What’s in your head, this second?

  MINA

  Nothing, truly, there is nothing, just embarrassment, and beyond that a wish to please you, and beyond that, some real anger and hostility.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Just stop talking about your feelings, and tell me your thoughts, your random thoughts.

  MINA

  Hostility at you, at your trapping me here like this.

  MAX (O.S.)

  You just say the sentences in your head, the phrases, whatever. You don’t sum, don’t make it analytical.

  MINA

  I would say the hostility is paramount, it’s really the main thing at this point. I mean over thedesire to please and the embarrassment and the anger. If one wanted to construct a sort of hierarchy of emotion.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Mina.

  MINA

  I mean, to think that my vanity would allow me to accept the horrendous terms of being on the wrong end of a camera. To think I might enjoy the attention, your amplified attention. To be literally objectified and directed and exposed. Willingly manipulated only to discover later I really am ugly, really chew my lip like a ward case, really lose my chin when I laugh.

  The camera moves into extreme close-up of her mouth, distorting her face, then abruptly cuts to her hands again, then back to her face. She seems animated, hyped up, excited by the noises coming out of her mouth.

  MINA

  There are a thousand little things one has no idea of, I mean in terms of how we come across. A gaze in the mirror is nothing. A gaze in the mirror is like a glance. A controlled moment of self-regard, a necessarily fixed thing. You only see yourself looking. But to be seen animated, looking down, looking away, talking, moving, is another world. All the thousand details of howyou move through any gesture, the true horror of your own exposed humanness, the thousand ways you give yourself away, off guard. And of the thousand, nine hundred are ugly. At least nine hundred or so are easily unattractive, if not repulsive. And the sad thing—

  MAX (O.S.)

  It’s about letting go of camera awareness. It’s about telling the truth. The truth is interesting.

  MINA

  The sad thing is you realize it has to be sort of petty vanity that got you here in the first place, in this disgusting position. And you can’t resist it. Disgust, hostility still, but mostly disgust.

  The camera wobbles a little. Then it is a static shot from a tripod. She looks off to the left, where the cameraman has moved, still off screen, but apparently away from the camera.

  MAX (O.S.)

  The only thing that doesn’t work, Mina, the only thing that fails on camera is to be uninteresting. Boring people. The easiest way to be interesting is to tell the truth. The harder, deeper, more vicious the truth, the more fascinating. That is it, fascination, that’s what the camera loves.

  GIRL pulls out a cigarette. Max throws her a lighter from off camera.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Abstracted pontificating about the nature of the camera’s gaze is not fascinating. Much, much more difficult to fascinate if you try something fancy. Much easier to bore.

  She shakes her head, smiling.

  MINA

  Hostility, Max, huge mountains of nonabstract anger and hostility.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Hmm. You might shut up. Or you might not. This is the suspense, the narrative drive of this video. Will she ever shut the fuck up?

  MINA

  Max?

  MINA

  The camera still on?

  MAX (O.S.)

  ’Course.

  MINA

  You could turn it off. You could just come over to the bed and see what happens.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Not yet.She sighs.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Mina.

  MINA

  Yeah?

  MAX (O.S.)

  If you don’t want to talk about yourself, if you don’t want to unveil your inner heart, you could just do what you did before and undress.

  MINA

  You want me to take off my clothes?

  MAX (O.S.)

  Yeah.

  MINA

  Max, I think I might just do that. I think it might be easier.

  Mina starts to unbutton her dress.

  TITLE: END

  * * *Mina arrived at the Gentleman’s Club to meet Lorene a miraculous hour early. She hadn’t slept well. She spoke to David on the phone. She ordered a “drink.” She did not think about Scott. She bused a few tables through the lunch rush. Her floor rhythm was off. She dropped things. She was annoying the wait staff. She almost called Max. She spent ten minutes changing the arrangement of salt and pepper shakers, moving them to the other side of the tiny vintage vases (several tea roses in each). She examined the tables. She returned the salt shakers to their original positions. She thought she might cry if spoken to.

  She ate a dinner-sized lunch: a whole red snapper, so she could filet the fish, the odd and solid satisfaction of cutting off the head, then making the incision through the skin to the bone. A delicate touch is required, and the fish must be properly cooked. But it was something she knew how to do flawlessly. It felt very satisfying to put her fork along and under the sides of the incision, flicking back the halves of the fish intact and then, with the fork and knife, pulling up the spine from the end and removing it unbroken, in one deft gesture. It calmed her to do this one delicate thing.

  When Lorene finally arrived, she had two men with her: a slender and beatific man Mina hadn’t seen before and the high-voiced, thin-limbed Mariott, Lorene’s restaurant designer. Mina watched as Lorene led the beatific man around the restaurant. He gestured at corners and windows. Mariott took notes, nodding and smiling. Mina approached them.

  “Feng shui is all about placement of objects in a room for maximum peace and productivity,” the man said.


  “Lovely Mina, I want you to meet Beryl.” Lorene winked at Mina.

  “The energy flows would make this table the worst table.”

  “See, Mina? I told you nobody likes table twenty-three. I hate table twenty-three.”

  “What is this?” Mina said, gesturing to a chart in Lorene’s hand. It was vibrantly colored and quite mathematical-looking.

  Lorene handed it to her.

  “It’s a new astrological chart for the restaurant. Chinese and Indian astrology combined in one chart.”

  “A Chin-In horoscope.”

  “And this part is the feng shui analysis of the seating. It’s going to help us with priority table placements.”

  “You want me to redo the seating according to this?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  Mina rolled her eyes.

  “I used to work in an Italian restaurant, and when it was slow the owner made us go outside the front of the restaurant and toss salt. To get rid of evil spirits.”

  “Did it work?” Mina asked.

  “Well, it gave us something to do other than stand there wondering why we were slow.”

  “A reason and a cure.”

  “Magical thinking and conjuring can be a great comfort, Mina. You shouldn’t be so cynical about it.”

  Mina sat at the bar and took a sip of her soda. “Baby, somebody has to be around here. Or we are all liable to float into space. And then who would run the restaurant.”

  Lorene took a sip out of Mina’s glass. “We’ll finish this discussion later. Jake wants to meet with us now.”

  Mina sipped club soda and listened to Jake, the new floor manager of the Gentleman’s Club, pitch bar concepts to Lorene. Lorene wore gold-rimmed oval glasses. The lens colorwas smoky amber. She wore a white Chinese heavy silk dress so tight that she had to lean rather than sit on the barstool.

  “I don’t know, tell Mina. Mina, listen to Jake. Ray, give me — what is Mina drinking?” she said.

  “A Jeanne Crain Colada,” Ray said, filling a glass with club soda.

  “Ugh. Really? Fine, give me a Linda Darnell Daiquiri. Jake, talk.”

  Jake wore a sharkskin zoot suit, silver and cut as conservatively as a suit could be cut and still be called a zoot suit. He hadL-O-V-Etattooed on his left knuckles,L–I-K-Etattooed on his right knuckles. After she hired him, Lorene speculated he hadI-N-D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-C-Etattooed on his cock. Mina liked the fact that Lorene said the wordcockfrom time to time, and never said dick or penis or, even worse, made vague southbound hand gestures accompanied by a giggle.

  “I have a couple of concepts which I know Lorene has heard and dismissed for various reasons before, but you, Mina, must convince her.” Mina nodded, looked around the room, already bored.

  “Cyber and Silk, a high-end Internet bar and restaurant. Everyone sees the success of cyber cafes; well, this would be a three-star-level cyber establishment.” Jake was making room for himself as he launched into the pitch. Lorene removed her glasses. She held up a finger.

  “No, and I’ll tell you why,” Lorene said, her lips matte auburn in the gold-tinged light. The lighting in all of Lorene’s establishments was designed by the most respected Hollywood glamour technicians, and advertised as such. The back of the bar menu had credits to match any film, and her places got voted Most Flattering Lighting by theL.A. Readerthree yearsin a row. That fact alone gave her enormous advantage over her competitors.

  “But cyber places,” Jake said. “Someone has to take it to the next step.”

  “Oh, cyber anything is so passé. Especially that wordcyber.Totally over,” Mina said.

  “Yes, and especially not for Pleasure Model Enterprises. You see, this cyber crap is a fad. Fine. But it’s not even social. The whole point of the Internet is not to be seen but to be comfortably agoraphobic, to travel without moving, to interact without contact — precisely the opposite of my philosophy of contemporary social enterprise. I create social clubs — for company. Not techno-pseudo company, but actual human company. Dietary fetish — fine. I want to create environments for people to indulge safely, not regress to cubicles of self-involvement. And, God, the idea of computers, possibly the ugliest design objects on earth, in one of my restaurants, and that horrible green-tinged light they give off, right on people’s faces — oh, God.” Lorene put her glasses back on.

  “But it goes with your contradiction theory — social but antisocial at the same time,” Mina said.

  “Yes, but some things are not appropriate for public space. Masturbation is fun, but the point of it is its privacy. I wouldn’t have masturbation bars. Next idea, Jake. What have you been up to, Mina, you’re flushed.”

  “OK. Incense and Peppermints, a surreal retro sixties club. Sort of Dada—Clockwork Orange.White plastic. Call the food ‘strawberry steak shortcake,’ that sort of thing. Or munchies drug food, Oreos and peanut butter sandwiches. Potato chips and ice cream. Saltines and ketchup. Furry teacups, that sort of thing.”

  Lorene shook her head. Mina shuddered.

  “Nice stockings, Mina,” Lorene said. Mina extended one oatmeal-colored cashmere leg against Lorene’s silk-covered thigh. Lorene put one manicured hand on Mina’s knee.

  “Oh, my. Yes. Cashmere. Wow. Cashmere cable knit, no less. Very sort of Ali MacGraw-ish, I think.”

  “That’s what I was going for.”

  “OK, one more idea,” Jake said, and the women turned to him. He took one of Lorene’s cigarettes and Mina lit it for him.

  “We call it Blow Up. A sort of Antonioni-inspired milieu where model-perfect indifferent women are draped about in various throes of ennui and the food takes a really long time to come to your table.”

  “Maybe it never comes,” Mina said, and all three of them started to smirk.

  “OK, OK, I’ll work on other ideas.” Jake shook his head, laughing.

  “Really, you’re getting closer, Jake. Just remember, it actually has to be pleasurable as well as high-concept. Pleasure.”

  “Are there really throes of ennui?” Mina said, touching her stocking.

  Lorene shook her head. “He’s too awful. Completely tragic.” They watched Jake shrug away and retreat to the floor, where the one o’clock rush was suddenly upon him.

  “I got a postcard from Michael,” Lorene said. Mina drained her glass.

  “Yeah, I know, I know. Jesus. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You want another drink?” Ray asked them.

  “Yes,” Mina said. “Something red.”

  “An NC-17, straight up.”

  “I forgot, does that get fruit?” Ray asked, lining up the glasses.

  “Natch.”

  Lorene and Michael. Mina met Lorene through Michael. Only after Michael was gone from L.A. did they become friends, years after they had met for three seconds, it seemed to Mina, at a party her suddenly grown-up brother had thrown for her at their father’s house in L.A. After the first school year they had spent apart, Mina at boarding school, Michael in L.A. at an art school for gifted youth.

  Mina had spent most of that night sitting on the stairs, feeling lumpen and fourteen, examining the crowd. A party, she thought. This is one of those strange parties like you see in movies from the seventies; there was something plastic and explosive and inevitable about it, with the odd L.A. retro lightweight irony that went as far as how you dressed — flapper dresses with clear plastic go-go boots. Nineteen seventy-nine punk bondage pants with a pink tube top. Sixties op-art minidresses with combat boots. S&M stilettos with dyke hiphop jeans and Twiggy-lined kohl eyes. It was six decades of fashion mistakes all juxtaposed, recontextualized, “deconstructed” by people who really believed fashion was the heart of subversion. Not the badge, not the consequence, but subversion itself was found in a Bakelite bracelet on a tattooed wrist. She felt both superior to this and deathly envious, the way she felt about fashion in general, longing for days of Catholic-schoolgirl uniforms, blue-skirted and neutral. She wanted uniforms, fascism of some kin
d, to take away the tinkling, enticing fashion distraction. Brown shirts and sackcloths. Then we’ll see what you have to do to be subversive. Not piercing and tattooing, I tell you. She was nearly mumbling to herself about this when Michael interrupted with a squeeze on her arm.

  “I remember when I first started seventh grade. It was theheight of punk. British class war hit suburban L.A. and transformed into a beautiful mall-driven, middle-class American nihilism. Everyone said shave your head, pierce your nose, mutilate yourself to prove you’re not just a weekend rebel. Make yourself unhirable, undesirable. But now it is desirable, and practically required for hire. It is absorbed and digested, thrown in your face to mock you. It makes me feel old.” Michael smiled, seventeen and handsome, a closed-mouth and sheepish grin. He had the disturbing habit of nearly reading her mind. She put her face on his shoulder.

  “You have such cool parties, Michael,” she said.

  “It’s your party. You could actually, you know, sort of walk around, talk to people. I threw it for you.”