Holly didn’t love Kit anymore, and the movie shows us that through Holly’s fantasizing about her future husband, obviously not Kit. It shows us how dreamy and self-centered she is, and it shows us the flatness of her moral imagination. Part of it is in Holly’s monotoned-but-childish recitation, and part of it is in the cheerful drum-churn of the soundtrack.
And this:
While I understood the art of Malick’s construction, I felt — like a revelation — that I was Holly, unrealized, my future uncertain, all possibility and no accomplishment. I had only dreams and the childishness of yet, yet, yet. My dreams not of future husbands, but of making a film like this one, a film that implicated the viewer even as it delighted her. I blinked and tears blurred my view despite the fact that the filmmaker had gone to great lengths not to create a feeling of emotional sympathy with Holly and Kit. I blinked but I did not wipe my eyes; my boyfriend didn’t need to know I was crying. What a mystery the way things act on us, like secret messages just to you as you sit in the dark. We watched the film together, but my feelings were private, unshared and unspoken.
We saw films together only a handful of times. Much more often I would see a movie on my own after he fell asleep. Sometimes I watched a video or I would watch what was on the Z Channel. But just as often I would get stoned and look at reruns of Rod Serling’s creepy ’70s TV show Night Gallery. One night, when very stoned, I watched a plant-loving Elsa Lanchester grow out of the ground after she refuses a developer’s insistence that she move. He kills her, and her revenge is to come back as one of her plants. It terrified me and I had to sneak into his room. I startled him as he slept. My plan was to sleep near him, not wake him. But his breath caught and he sputtered awake.
“What’s wrong?” he said in a stern rasp.
“Nothing, I’m sorry.”
“It’s the middle of the night, Meadow.” He sighed.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You can’t do this to me. I’ll be up for hours.” He hoisted himself up on his pillows and rubbed his eyes.
“I was scared,” I said, and I detested my own words as if someone else had spoken them. Then I stood there and waited for him to soften or explain. Instead he pulled the chain on his fringed reading lamp and picked up a book from his bed table. He opened it and began to read. I waited for him to look up or speak but he did not. Finally I went to my own room. That was the only time I remember him getting angry with me. Or that is the angriest he ever got, as far as I was concerned.
I’m not complaining, though. He was a great companion. He recited Shakespeare. He spoke it so beautifully in his deep, resonant voice. Words seemed to linger in the air after he stopped speaking. He had a precise, actor-trained memory — nothing I said to him was ever forgotten. He wove every moment into the last moment, never stopped connecting things. I think I will never get over what it was like to be with someone who remembered everything. He could make a fork disappear into the air with a wave of a napkin and the lift of an eyebrow. He talked as he worked his magic and he revealed his trickery, which only makes the trick work better. He never bored me.
One of the best things about him was his letters. He wrote love letters to me. I found them in my books. He would leave for the day, and I would read about my lips, my laugh, my gentle touch. My long legs in shorts and loose socks. Yes, mostly they were about my body, but a body is part of you, there is no getting around it even if you want to. Besides, I liked the attention to my body details. Strange as it seems, I hadn’t had that before. All my life I had felt like a brain with two incidental arms and two useful legs growing out of it. For whatever reason, boys my age never approached me.
He wrote me letters nearly every day. Sometimes I wrote back. I reported on what I had read or seen or thought about that day. What I liked and why. I saved his letters in a small wicker box under my bed. I have no idea what he did with my letters.
We did this for nine months, the watching and the books and the tricks and the letters. I swam in the pool. I didn’t rush into the future.
Once a week I took a deep breath and called my parents, spinning a story of a cross-country trip leading to the factory in Gloversville where I spent my summer and then winter making films. No, thank you, I didn’t need more money, I had told them in late August, but I did need to defer college for a year so I could finish making these films. They protested feebly about delaying school but then insisted on sending money. (This is the type of parents they were.) Instead of making films, I lived with my enormous boyfriend. I inhaled filmmaking in the air I breathed. I ingested it; I took it inside me. I spent my days imagining films that I wanted to make while at night I loved my boyfriend.
Sometimes I wanted to go out into the world with him. To dinner or to a party. I was reckless like that. But he didn’t let me. He did not want anyone to know about us, because he felt it would be misunderstood. He knew how people can be, and how much it can cost a person. “You have no idea what it feels like,” he said, “I want to spare you that,” and I believed it.
“I’m stronger than you think,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. I tried out the idea as I spoke it. Maybe I really was.
Mostly we were happy, in the way you can be happy when you know something won’t last forever. The way you can clutch the moment deeply and without holding back. “I love you,” I whispered to him. “And I love you, darling,” he said. “That is what this is, love,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.
Then the last day came — ready or not — but of course I didn’t know it was the last day at the time.
* * *
We have lunch by the pool. The sunlight sparkles on the water. He looks pale, and somehow almost frail. He hardly eats or drinks, and lately his face has become gaunt, as though his full cheeks were hanging down from his bones. I should have guessed what was coming, for he surely does.
“Wonderful news,” he says.
“What?”
“My picture will be financed. Things are falling into place. I just have to stay alive long enough to make the damn thing.”
“Stop that — you’ll be able to do it. You are ready.”
“Yes, I am. I feel as if I can make my greatest film. I know exactly how I want to do it. I’ve been dreaming of it for years. And at last, I get a chance.”
I see him momentarily perk up, excited at the thought.
“After all this time, I am finally making another film,” he says. But as he exhales, I can see something else, some trickery below the surface.
He never made the movie. We all know that now. But about that very last day, the very last night:
He is going on The Merv Griffin Show. He will talk about the new project, get things heated up. He has some backing, but he still needs more. They use him, the wonderfully witty and entertaining old has-been, and he will use them back, sneak in his agitprop on his own behalf. “That,” he says, “is how this town works, and I have always understood how this fucking town works.”
I watch him on TV. He is eloquent and generous. I watch him and feel lucky.
It doesn’t go the way he expected. He comes home from the studio, white-faced and damp. He shambles in on his cane, falls back onto the couch with a moan.
“How did it go?” I ask.
“A disaster. I went in to do my song and dance, but instead I was a dignified old man, elegiac and stinking of the grave.”
“Nonsense,” I say. “I thought you were magnificent.” I sit down on the floor at his feet. I undo his shoes. His heavy wide feet are white and swollen. I take one foot in my hand: I feel tender toward this heavy small thing, the weight of a lifetime always pushing down on it. I press it with my palm for a minute, one and then the other. His feet are oddly soft and uncallused, but they also seem useless, abandoned somehow. I wrap my arm across his legs and push my face against his knees.