“I am sorry,” he says.
I pull back from his legs and look up at him. His face is barely visible across the landscape of his body.
“What?”
“I have nothing I can give you, no money. I have ex-wives and a wife, actually, and children. And very little I haven’t spent. It is possible you will get a window of attention, and you can do something with that. Believe me, the attention can hurt, so you must make sure you get something out of it.”
I start to cry. He stops talking and places his hand on my head.
“Can you shut up? Please?” I say. He sighs and I help him to his bed.
You can guess the rest. What happened to him was on the news.
The housekeeper comes into my room and wakes me up. Her face is sweaty, and she seems to tremble as she speaks. She tells me she has called 911, and that the ambulance is about to take him away. I scramble out of bed and stop at the doorway, unsure what to do. I watch them take him out on a gurney. He is white and nonresponsive, his massive body already collapsing into itself, looking passed and dead to me. The housekeeper says, “I am calling his family.” And she disappears into his room, closing the door behind her. Soon — within an hour — people will go to the hospital. Then they will descend on this place: a relative, an agent, the press. I pull on my jeans. I had slept in an oversized Mercury Theatre jersey, which I now use as a tunic shirt. I need, it seems to me, to get out of there fast. I pull a suitcase from the closet, the very same one I had brought over after a few days of living with him.
I look around my room. Here is what I take: my clothes, my videotapes, my notebooks, and a few little souvenirs he gave me (some lacquered balls for juggling, a deck of cards, a lobby card for the last of his great films, an annotated copy of King Lear with his small neat notes in the margins along with the King Lear screenplay he wrote but never shot, a long Nubian dress, and a vintage Mark IV viewfinder on a lanyard). I also take the wicker box filled with his love letters. Of course I do. I make the bed. I close the closet door. There is no sign of me in the bedroom or anywhere in the house. I walk to the back door in case someone is arriving. I hesitate as I pass his room. I push open the door. The bed is a mess; as they pulled him onto the gurney they must have dragged all the bedclothes off. I look at his dresser where he left his watch and his pocket notebook. His vest and scarf hang from a chair back, just as he left them last night. I pick up the scarf and hold it to my face. I can smell his hair oil and aftershave. I drape it gently across the dresser. I ought to leave. A tumbler of liquor on the end table by the bed. He couldn’t sleep so he drank and read. Next to the book are some scribbled notes and his sturdy fountain pen. I pick up the pen — it is green resin, fat and substantial in my hand. Just one small thing of his. I put it in my pocket. I slip out the sliding back door to the patio. I open the garage, throw my suitcase into the backseat of my Rabbit, and go.
I drive to Brentwood Village and call my parents on a pay phone. “Everything is fine,” I say. “I just wanted to say hello.” The radio in my car is already reporting that my boyfriend was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center. I stare out the window and listen to the valedictory obituary, something carefully constructed long ago and updated each year until it would finally be read on the air. Nobody had really wanted to see him lumber onto TV sets to talk. They had been waiting to pronounce him dead, to bring to a proper close his long American story.
I head straight to the camera supply store with my father’s wad of cash and pick out some gear. Then onto Route 15 and then 40, by myself, driving to New York. I drive until I reach a motel just over the New Mexico border. It isn’t until I collapse on the motel bed and switch on the TV that I feel it. I watch the special report, and I see him young and beautiful. Close to my age, in fact. And out of that young man comes my boyfriend’s voice. I cry and hold the motel pillow against my face. I see his face as he lay on the gurney, and it is that image that makes me feel how lost he is to me. How much I will miss him. How much I will always love him. I sleep.
In the early-morning light, I sit on the motel bed and examine the equipment I have bought. I read instructions; I put pieces together. I lift the camera and look through the viewfinder.
I will make my trip and I will also make a film diary of my trip called A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents. My first film since high school. I will make film after film that spring and summer. In the fall I will briefly attend the college with the excellent undergraduate film program. My life will begin to take an ordinary shape, as if the past nine months never happened. As if it were a dream, an unfinished film, a lost radio broadcast.
I am a hungry young woman, just like thousands of other young women. But I have some ideas. A directive, of sorts. I will work and I will work. I have said this is a love story, and indeed it begins that way: my love of cinema, as pure as any I have known. Making, watching, thinking cinema. I become a machine of cinema, a monocular creator. It is as though I had been a drawn-back rubber band my whole life, seeming to pull farther and farther away from the life I wanted, until I am released and then I come forward with a huge snap. I am no longer wishing; I am doing. What do I do? I make films that excite and please me, occasionally frustrate me, and for a long while that feels like enough. Later I will find this meager in a number of ways. Later I will see it as self-aggrandizing, problematic, not just useless but hurtful. Later I will quit.
But there is still a bit more of this inaugural story to tell, the end of the story of how I began. A narrative thread that I have left hanging. So here it is: a year after he died, I was working late and began to think about him. There had been a big retrospective of his work, and there was a flurry of articles in the paper. I knew more about him and his work than all of these people. I considered my future and my opportunities. I took the wicker box out. I read the letters. They were beautifully written: some were a little erotic, some were funny. They could be tastefully edited, in any case.
I took them out on the fire escape with me, and read them as I smoked. I could have shown them to an agent, published them, offered them to the highest bidder. That’s what he had suggested — no, urged — me to do. If I approached it all in the right way, the interest in me could lead to a chance to make a film. One little chance to take that attention and use it to my advantage. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it was like a puzzle for me to figure out: here was how I thought the world worked; here was how I thought I fit in it.
I also could burn them, one by one, like a girl in a black-and-white movie. Every last one.
But instead I perched on the steps under a shimmer of deep-night summer stars, and I started once again at the beginning. I read one, folded it, and put it away. I read another, then another, then another. When I got to the end, I put them back in the box, closed the box, and put them away, my secret forever.
I told you this was a love story.
— Meadow Mori, 11/5/2014
Meadow Mori was born in Los Angeles in 1966. She has directed and produced feature-length documentaries, essay films, shorts, and video installations including Kent State: Recovered (1992), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary; Play Truman (1993); Portrait of Deke (1987), which won a BATT Silver Medal and the jury prize at the Seattle Film Festival; Inward Operator (1998), which was a jury prize winner at the Sundance Festival, and Children of the Disappeared (2001). Parts of A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents, the making of which is described in the post above, can be viewed here. Her reconstructions of famous lost films (made in 1984–1985) can be viewed here.