Chapter Eleven
PAUL (adjusting his belt, squinting away): It’s like a, a tunnel or, or more like, something making a tunnel. It’s like something h-h-hollows out a tunnel, through the trouble. Like maybe a tentacle pokes its way through the trouble and at, tat, attack… a tentacle attaches. You can just feel it.
BARBARA (off-screen): A tentacle?
(PAUL laughs, shakes head.)
BARBARA: Just friends talking, Paulie. No judgments, no bad words.
PAUL: You feel a flow, and it’s a wet flow, like this flowing wet that w-w-worms its way through and then at, tack, attaches. That’s where you can get hold of the trouble.
“Check it out,” the editor said, freezing the image before them. “Check it out, the boy just eats the screen.”
Barbara crossed her arms, seeing Paul as a movie star, the computer’s flat screen making more of his lips and eyelashes. She hadn’t known that this was how the editing would work. She hadn’t understood that she would watch it happening, rewinds and cuts and freeze-frames, all handled with a wireless mouse and biomorphic keyboard and taking shape on a screen perhaps a foot from her face. But then, there was nowhere else to sit. The editing room might’ve been a utility closet. The entire “studio headquarters” (according to DiPio, their films had won awards) fit in a single five-room walkup. The only air-conditioning was a unit in one wall of this same cramped space.
The editor himself seemed to prefer things tight. His striped sleeveless t-shirt hugged his torso so closely that it rode up his midsection, exposing a deeply indented waistline. His hip-hugging sailor’s pants, white, looked more snug still. Yet while he sat grinning up at Paul’s image, he appeared hardly older than Barbara’s middle child.
“That stutter is right on, too,” the editor added. “Total authenticity.”
PAUL (looking left of camera): You feel, you feel so much when it at, attaches, like so much a-all at once. I, I mean whatever the trouble is, a-all at wuh-wuh-wuh…all at once you know you can fix it.
BARBARA (off-screen): Do you hear anything? Voices or anything?
PAUL (frowning): Mo-om. (hesitates, fingers to cheek) It’s not, it’s never in words. There m-might be n-n-noises. There might like a single n-noise c-coming on, like a r-rising, a r-rumbling rising that’s a-also lots of, of noises a-at once.
BARBARA: Like traffic noise? Traffic and street noise?
PAUL: Whatever. A-anyway it’s never w-words. Words, you know, they a-add up, they, they line up a-and go somewhere. This, it just comes on, buh-buh, behemoth, you know? It’s shapeless and, and e-everywhere at once. That’s also, it’s a-also how I know this, it can’t, it can’t — this won’t last.
BARBARA (sharply): What? This won’t last?
PAUL: It’s, it isn’t, the h-healing, it won’t go on forever.
BARBARA: Are you saying, these episodes—
PAUL: It comes on so aw, aw, awesome, w-with the rumble a-and the flow through the trouble. It’s, it’s such a force when it at, attaches. You just feel it. And, and that’s got to mean, there’s o-only going to be so many. There can only b-be so many.
BARBARA: The episodes are a temporary condition? You won’t always…
(PAUL plucks at pants-legs, pinching the crease).
BARBARA: Sorry, Paul. You tell it. Your story.
PAUL: Well, come on. This can’t keep, keep h-happening the rest of my life. Even when it, when it d-does happen, you can feel the thing has like, it’s licked out its, its one and o-only tunnel. One soul, solo tunnel, one ten, tentacle. Then it’s done.
(BARBARA moves onscreen, beside the boy. Focus widens around them: a balcony over a piazza. He’s in a chair and she squats beside him, against railing.)
DR. DIPIO (off-screen): Si. Phenomenon is situational.
PAUL (hands clasped but fingers extended, Italian): You know what i-it feels like when, when something can’t last.
(BARBARA nods slowly.)
“Look at him,” the sailor-boy said, “like the camera isn’t even there. Do it do it do it. Superstar authenticity.”
Spare me, Hollywood. The editor was Neapolitan, born and raised not far from Barbara’s upscale palazzo, but he’d gotten a film degree from NYU and he’d asked the mother to call him Whitman. If you asked her, the way he darted between mouse and keyboard called to mind a dancer rather than a poet. A ballet dancer, nothing but muscle and bone. And every time he made a pirouette, the video became more interesting. Whitman created emphasis; he made Paul’s gesturing hands fill the screen.
As for the young man’s gayness, flaming, l’Americana couldn’t say she was surprised. Naples was famous for its queers, a sailors’ town. Even her father had told her a story about the local demi-monde — or part of a story. Dad had managed only a halting effort at sharing such stuff with his Barbie, sweet but halting. He’d done what he could to increase his daughter’s sophistication while, at the same time, striving to comprehend his own failed foray into love. But she hadn’t needed her Babo’s help. The drag queens of Naples actually rated mention in the guidebooks. An American could find a photo or two, since a number of the male hookers found the pictures good for business. The poses made Barbara think of her mother-in-law, her man-catching sashay.
Silky Kahlberg of course had known all about such creatures of the shadow. Once when he and Barbara had been away from the children, he’d pointed out a couple of the more flagrant cross-dressers. As if the mother could’ve missed them in the first place. Dr. DiPio however, forever needing the consolation of his Mr. Christopher, had surprised her. She would never have expected the old medico would know someone like Whitman. Nor would Barbara have thought that an editor of this young man’s rank and accomplishment would bother with her material, the roughest kind of point-&-shoot. In the States only someone on the fringes of the business, say a student strapped for cash, would’ve accepted such an assignment. The keyboard Baryshnikov beside her, on the other hand, boasted openly about a short he’d just completed. It had been picked up for an anthology of “the Naples new wave,” he announced, and what’s more, his first full-length feature would be rebroadcast next week on cable-access. You could buy that earlier movie off the web too, Whitman told her. A five-minute trailer was available without subscription. Just watching the man sent Barbara into another dizzying carom between believing she had a handle on this city and thinking she knew nothing.
Whitman also insisted they speak English. “I need the practice,” he said.
The man worked Christopher Street into the conversation, “Christopher east,” as if the distinction mattered. What Barbara was finding significant, however, was something close by — the man’s hair. Above his nipple-notched top, Whitman affected the look of a young King David, with luxuriant black curls that hung to his shoulders. As he sat working the computer, in that shifting and indirect light, he called to mind the late Lieutenant-Major. Barbara couldn’t help noticing: Silky had worn his the same length. He’d tossed it back with the same vanity, the same flair, and with an almost identical twist of the neck. Now what did that mean?