Straight Cut

by Madison Smartt Bell

  There was one section of the film that I remembered well enough to go straight to again when I arrived at QED the following day: close-up of a black man, mouth wide open, screaming. On the film, he screamed with what appeared to be tremendous energy, though of course I couldn’t hear it. But I could see light reflecting off the fillings in his molars, way in back.

  At the beginning of this shot a single frame of film was flashed. It’s a feature of Arriflex cameras, to facilitate sync-up when the crew has been too rushed or too careless to do slates. The Arri flashes one frame of the film and simultaneously sends a tweetering signal, commonly known as the bloop, down the cable to the tape recorder. Match them up, and synchronization is achieved.

  All I had to do was find a scream with a bloop at the beginning, on all those hours of tape, and hope that there weren’t too many cases of that phenomenon. It only took me half a day to find four such instances. During the search I began to make a rough log of all the mag stock I was listening to. Mimmo, sitting to my left, made a matching log in Italian.

  Four chances were enough, I thought, though I hadn’t been through the whole batch. I tried the first segment of tape against the picture, but it didn’t match. The second one, however, did.

  Well, finally. I marked the beginning of the tape with little black crosses, numbered the two strips, and reached for the splicer. Snap. Down came the guillotine blade on the mag stock and the film. I pulled both strips out of the flatbed and hung them in the bin.

  “So you found it,” Mimmo said.

  “Sort of,” I said. “I found thirty seconds out of a lot of hours. But it’s a start.”

  And it was a good start too, if not exactly a fast one. I was oriented now. I could tell which hour of tape was apt to correspond with which five minutes of film. And the needle-in-the-haystack quality of the whole enterprise was greatly diminished thereby.

  We broke for a fast lunch (none of your two-hour extravaganzas with a lengthy nap attached) and then came back to the flatbed. The work began to go a little quicker. I was able to match up six or seven different takes in the vicinity of that useful scream. At four-thirty I quit looking for more and began splicing the synchronized takes together — chop and tape, chop and tape, my hands picking up speed as the disused reflexes returned. Halfway through, I switched chairs with Mimmo and guided him while he finished. Then I showed him how to roll the spliced film onto a core. We put the reel on a separate shelf, to go out for coding later. By then it was five-thirty and it had been a good enough day’s work for me.

  Mimmo caught on to the game so quickly that after a couple of days, for efficiency’s sake, I put him on a swing shift. I arrived daily in the early morning and worked on the sync-up till noon, concentrating on the more difficult segments which required lip reading. Mimmo would show up for lunch and in the afternoon he sat by the flatbed, translating my log into Italian for Dario’s eventual edification and picking up such tips as I could throw his way. At five-thirty or six I would knock off and Mimmo would move over to the flatbed, to work through the evening on the bloop-and-flash segments, which were a little easier to figure out. I don’t know how late he was working, but he always had a decent amount to show for the time by the next day.

  The general atmosphere at QED remained benign. Dario was dropping in occasionally in the afternoons. That worried me a little, since I didn’t require any directorial interference from him at this stage. But Mimmo persuaded him to stay clear of the editing room, at least while I was there, pointing out, I assumed, that the real cutting would not begin before the sync-up was complete.

  The doll-like woman, who went by the name of Carmen, was also there a good part of each day. Mimmo explained to me that she was serving as a sort of general secretary for the project. She was also the liaison between Dario and RAI, the network which would eventually broadcast the film, or so everyone seemed to hope. Fey as she seemed, Mimmo told me, she was well wired into the film circle of Rome, which tended to be, as I knew from previous visits, quite tight and incestuous. When she was present, she handled the phone. When she was gone, it did not seem to ring, which suited me perfectly well.

  Dario’s fuzzy-headed cameraman, Grushko by name or alias, did not turn up again. Mimmo was even more relieved at that than I. Mimmo did not get along with Grushko personally, and he was doubtful of his technical competence (a suspicion which was borne out by some but not all of the footage). Grushko could be difficult to work with, Mimmo said. He was highly temperamental and spoke neither Italian nor English. But he was not likely to trouble us any time soon. His Italian visa had apparently run out, and Mimmo thought that he had probably returned to Bulgaria, his native land.

  The ownership of the QED apartment remained unclear to me. Both Carmen and Dario sometimes spent the night. Mimmo, I think, also crashed there from time to time. There was a regular flow of other guests who passed through for a day or two. It made no difference to me so long as they all stayed out of the cutting room, which they seemed to do. Sometimes, as I left in the evening, a sort of dinner party would be under way. On Carmen’s invitation, I hung around for one of these, but the effort to speak and understand soon gave me a headache, and the old man who ran the trattoria near my place was a better cook than Carmen. Carmen’s acquaintances seemed to belong to some sub-glitter set of Rome, and they didn’t interest me very much. Several of them might be taking something, I suspected, like Carmen often seemed to be, but none of them showed any tracks, and there was no trace of works in the bathroom I could see.

  I was busy enough that I didn’t require any social life anyway. I liked the relative solitude of the editing room, dark except for the light behind the screen and a small bulb over the plates and the splicer. Everything within that small orb of light was completely under my control. The flatbed was ultimately reliable; I knew that it would only put out what I put into it. The rhythm of the work sustained me, and at the end of each day I was calm.

  The evenings were still cool and crisp, though the days were getting hotter, and I began to look forward to the slow walk across the river. Each night I’d stop into the trattoria for a meal or at least a glass of grappa. The owner, Signor Strozzi, knew me now, since I was turning up most days for breakfast and dinner too. I liked the regularity of it, and Strozzi was nearly as reliable as a machine himself. After a very few days I felt completely enwombed in my new habits. Nightly, I’d find Strozzi at the same position behind his counter, a white apron covering his street clothes, gray hair feathering around his head. I’d drink or eat something, whichever, and we’d exchange some phrase book courtesies about the weather or the food. Back home (it did begin to seem like home), no thought distracted me from sleeping. I’d lie on my back in the narrow bed, and let the day repeat itself within its ordered limits: the regular snapping of the splicer, the hiss of film over the sprockets, the frames gliding smoothly across the screen, one image evenly succeeded by the next.

  Thanks to Mimmo’s working nights, we finished the sync-up by the afternoon of the twelfth day. It had gone a bit quicker than I’d thought likely, and I was pleased with that. We’d worked straight through one weekend, and I noticed for the first time that there were black rings around Mimmo’s eyes. He’d been working a little beyond himself probably, and not telling me. I decided it was time to take a couple of days off before we started trying to put a rough cut together. The last few rolls still had to be coded anyway.

  I packed Mimmo off for home or wherever he wanted to go, and spent an hour cleaning up the cutting room. It was still dreadfully early when I left QED, however, and on the walk home I began to feel slight prickles of anxiety, began to wonder if the free time I’d awarded myself would throw me back on the ropes again. I was a little nervous of shutting myself into the apartment right away. So I stopped off at the trattoria for a premature drink.

  As it happened, I was the only one in the place at that early hour. I sat at the counter and ordered my usual tumbler of grappa. Setting the glass before me,
Strozzi remarked that I was in earlier than usual.

  “È vero,” I said. I resorted to the phrase book for a crude approximation of “The work finished early today. “

  Strozzi said something I didn’t catch. I shrugged, as I usually did when that happened, and drank off half my grappa, feeling the warmth of it spread through my trunk. Then Strozzi’s line finally registered in my brain.

  “La sua sposa è ritornata.”

  “La mia sposa?” I said. I was slightly taken aback, though I assumed that I’d probably just misunderstood.

  “Si, si,” Strozzi said, smiling. I must have looked bemused, for he began to pantomime. He jerked his thumb in the direction of my apartment, made a motion with his thumb and forefinger as if turning a key, and nodded vigorously several times.

  Of course, I didn’t believe it. Probably what had happened was that the rightful owner of the apartment had reappeared, or that Dario or Carmen might have seen fit to furnish me with a roommate.

  But the possibility, however faint, however ludicrous, was interesting. It was almost a physical sensation, tingling in my chest. I finished the grappa, but stayed there on my stool. For some reason I didn’t want to think in English. I repeated Strozzi’s words to myself, la sua sposa, then switched to French, which I understood a little better: mon épouse, ma femme, mon amour. I swung on my stool toward the open door and looked at the sunlight on the cobbles there, tasting the foreign words as they formed in my mouth, remembering love with its language.

  9

  THERE WAS A BURNING smell when I opened the door of the apartment, and that frightened me unreasonably, beyond the merits of the situation. I felt as though the building were on fire, but it turned out only to be a pan on the hotplate. Evidently someone had started to cook and then forgotten or abandoned the project. I turned the heat off and opened a window to let the smoke out. The scorched pot contained what had perhaps been meant for a tomato sauce. From habit I scraped up the burn from the bottom and stirred it into the mixture.

  A curl of smoke hovered along the ceiling and twisted down to pass through the door of the outer room. I followed it. There were two bags near the door which I had not noticed when I first came in; the door swung forward to cover them. One was a medium-sized fabric suitcase with leather trim and the other was a silver Halliburton attaché case of the sort that well-to-do film people sometimes carry equipment in. The Halliburton had combination locks, I observed. Neither bag carried any personal identification. There was a TWA tag on the suitcase, which did not tell me much.

  The door to the courtyard was open. Outside on the terrace, my arboretum of weeds, it was shady and cool. Sunlight drifted down through the tangles of vine, tinted green by the leaves, and when the breeze rose the light rippled over the rusted furniture and the cracked cobbles of the yard. I walked back and forth along the far wall of the terrace, smoking, with tendrils of vine brushing my shoulders now and then. There were birds singing regularly somewhere up above the trellis, and otherwise all I could hear was the even breathing of the woman who had fallen asleep in one of the iron chairs.

  Another case of jet lag, I imagined. She would have just come off the plane; I could see a corner of her passport edging out of the open purse that rested against her shoe; Her legs were crossed and she slumped a little in the old chair, chin propped on one hand, her long white neck curved a little to one side. She was dressed for fair-weather travel: tan slacks, a cotton shirt, a linen jacket folded across her knees. Her hair had grown a little longer than I remembered it. A thick coil of it hung forward over her shoulder and across the open neck of her blouse, its reddish highlights shimmering in the leaf-filtered sun. I meant to move softly, to leave her undisturbed, but in spite of myself I began to laugh. Lauren had always been a little careless in the kitchen. It was like her to let a boiling saucepan slip her mind.

  My laughter was sudden in the quiet of the courtyard; it sounded harsh even to me, and it was enough to rouse Lauren. She shifted in her chair and stretched like a cat. Her long fingers groped for the purse and failed to find it. Her eyes opened, clearing, and she looked at me.

  “Will you give me a cigarette?”

  “What about ‘hello’?” I said. “What about ‘I’m sorry I started a fire on the stove’?”

  “Did I?” Lauren yawned so widely that her eyes closed altogether. “It’s a bloody long trip, you know.”

  I walked over and set a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. My hand was an inch from her cheek and I could have touched it if I had wanted to. I struck a match.

  “Thanks,” Lauren said, centering the cigarette’s tip on the flame. “I knew I could count on you.”

  “You stopped in for a cigarette, did you?” I said. “Where were you coming from?”

  “New York. You know I never can sleep on the plane. And I never feel like eating anything until afterwards. “

  “I know.”

  Lauren was somewhat frightened of flying, though she had done enough of it, and the long transatlantic hauls could tie her stomach up in knots.

  “I was going to make some pasta,” she said. “It seems to be what you’ve got.”

  “Well, you’ve made a nice botch of it so far,” I said. “I don’t think your cooking’s improved, anyway.”

  “Is that a nice thing to say?” Lauren pulled hard on her cigarette. “And it’s months since I’ve seen you, too.” She wasn’t being arch, she really did seem a little miffed. It came as a surprise to me to find that I still had the least capacity to injure her, however slightly. It was not what I had intended at the moment.

  “You must be hungry,” I said. “Wait a minute and I’ll get something together. “I left her on the terrace and walked into the kitchen. The sauce she’d begun was not salvageable, I decided. I threw it out and scraped the pot and put it in the sink. The smoke had cleared from the room, at least. I began to peel an onion and sank the knife into the ball of my thumb. My hands were shaking badly; they went on shaking as I held them under cold water to stop the bleeding. I knew that she would return this way, without any hint or warning, if she returned at all. I would be lying if I said I had not wished for that very thing. But I was not prepared for it.

  “Oh, you’ve cut yourself,” Lauren said. I had not heard her coming up behind me over the running water.

  “Nothing much,” I said. In fact the bleeding had stopped. “I’m getting clumsy in my old age, I suppose.” I turned off the water and walked in a wide circle around Lauren, out of the room. In the open door of the courtyard I stopped and lit a cigarette. The cut on my thumb was seeping a little and I licked it.

  “Let me see,” Lauren said, and took my hand without waiting for an answer.

  “It’s only a flesh wound,” I said. That didn’t sound particularly amusing once I had said it. Lauren folded my hand into hers and brought it up under her chin. She bowed her head and rested it on my collarbone.

  “You’ll get yourself all bloody,” I said. “That nice outfit.” I flicked my cigarette so hard that the head came off, and I dropped the dead butt over the doorsill.

  “You’re shaking,” Lauren said.

  “I know.”

  “Should I have stayed away?”

  I looked down at the part in the center of her hair. Yes, I might have said, with a fair degree of truth. You should have stayed away. My mind was at ease, and now it is not.

  “No,” I said. Though I knew that with Lauren any return was most often only a prelude to another departure. “Of course I’m glad you came.” Saying the words, I became so desperately delighted I could scarcely bear it. I raised my free hand and let the fingers of it sink down into her hair.

  The bedspread lay crumpled across the sill of the open courtyard door and I found myself looking up across it onto the terrace, again and again. The birds had become bolder; they picked their way among the fallen leaves on the cobbles, coming closer to the door. Our movement on the bed did not seem to disturb them. My body was bending, close to its
limit, and each time I felt it near the breaking point I would glance over at the birds and they would spare me for a moment more. From lack of interest as much as lack of opportunity, I had been celibate since Lauren had left me months before, and at first I worried that I might have become awkward or hasty. Not so. At this level, in this act, we had never understood each other so well.

  The invisible sun was dropping down behind the rooftops, and fingers of light stroked across the wall beside us, crossing her face, then leaving it in shadow. Outside, a sparrow had reached the sill, and stood at the edge of the bedspread with its head cocked to one side. The bird and I exchanged a glance, which gave me one more instant of detachment. If I was in love again, I was angry too, whether at myself or her I was unsure. It had become a struggle of sorts and I was determined to win it somehow. My hands moved of their own volition, knowing every inch of her flesh and bone as intimately as they knew themselves. I found a grip on the points of her shoulder blades and raised her a little, lighter than air.

  “Tell me that you love me,” I said. Her face rose up and up toward mine, weightless as a kite.

  “I love you,” Lauren said, and her eyes closed.

  I might have slept a little, I don’t know. Lauren was sound asleep when I sat up in bed, and it was almost dark. I dressed quietly and left the apartment, locking the door behind me. My body felt papery, almost transparent, and I even had some difficulty walking. There was not a trace of a thought in my head. I walked for some distance before I found an open market, where I bought bread and cheese, a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of wine. When I came back the bed was empty and Lauren was gone.