She ate another mouthful.
“I suppose we could order in,” David said. She nodded. “Sushi,” he said.
“I’m bored — in a deep, profound, practically hysterical way — with sushi,” Mina said, “and besides, they give you the dregs for to-go orders.”
“They do not. It’s the same sushi.”
“Dregs. Ends. The unlucky pieces. Unwanted, bad luck, cat food pieces.”
“That’s in your head,” David said. Mina made a mental note that David needed to be drunk to go down on her, but he’d eat sushi from three days ago. He’d eat it warm and wilted, he’d eat it from Super Sushi Surprise if he had to.
“It’s yesterday’s. The edges are curled. It’s salmonella and mercury drenched. It’s a petri dish. It’s a penicillin experiment,” she said.
“Oh, stop. You don’t get salmonella from fish.”
“Well, then trichinosis. Or trignomisis. The trich,” she said, “didn’t you hear about the Brentwood housewife who got herpes from a piece of slightly used anago? A piece of previously owned maguro?”
“I heard it was genital warts. From take-out sushi.”
“Right,” she said.
“Pizza, okay.”
“I’ll order it,” Mina said. She pulled open the drawer by the phone. It was full of paper menus.
“Hey, you got some mail today,” David said from the bathroom.
“I did?”
“I almost forgot. A postcard. It’s by the phone,” he shouted. She listened to the shower running. He took showers, she took baths. She noted that, repeating it to herself. Added it to the list compiled for some unknown purpose. He takes showers. Tea. Ignores palm trees. He’s tidy. He drives.
The postcard was a photo of the Andalusian countryside. The card said only one word, “LEFT,” in block capital letters and was unsigned. The postmark was San Francisco.
David appeared, a towel jauntily tied around his hips. Minaadmired his body, damp, tan, and lean, and the hair on his legs and arms and chest in artful wet swirls. The towel tied around the hips. The way the drops of water found all his hollows.
“Who sent the card?” he said.
“Don’t know,” she said.
“It’s got a San Francisco postmark,” David said. David had checked the postmark. He was pondering her mail. She was almost touched, almost excited. She put her finger on his belly. Dragged her finger to his hipbone. The skin was damp and warm. She traced the outline of the hip to where it reached the towel. She could hear him exhale. She thought, I should, I should. She put her hands on his hips and angled them forward, toward her. He did nothing, he was pliant, and she didn’t look at him but bent from the waist to where the hair started to curl and leaned downward. She put her lips there. It felt soft and wet, and when she licked she could feel a trembly sort of movement. His hands were on her shoulders, and he started to pull her shirt up along her back as she bent into him. She grabbed his wrists. He let her. She held his hands out to his sides away from them both. She pushed the towel down with her face. She felt him looking down at her. She pulled her face back a little, closing her eyes, imagining what she looked like, her lips moving on his cock, her hair stranded on her jaw and forehead. She saw them both, her mouth attaining a sort of mesmerized rhythm, and the muscles in his legs and abdomen tightening. She heard his urgent breaths. Then she heard him sigh and some seconds later she felt him shiver. She thought of Max coming, earlier, and then she felt David come. No one should know these things about her. She wouldn’t let herself think about it. David held her for balance and then unwound. She was glad his body felt so heavy, glad being with Max madehim a body again, made him unfamiliar and sexy. He smiled at her, shaking his wet hair. Anyone,anyone, would find him appealing. He leaned to kiss her.
“The pizza will be here soon. Don’t you think we should call the Videorama?” she said, pulling back from the kiss.
They rented a Gary Cooper movie. Movie choices — rental choices, actually, because they never saw movies in the theater anymore, that would have required effort and actually leaving the house and possible contact with strangers — Mina and David often didn’t agree on. Mina had her obsessional way with movies. She liked to see all of a certain actor’s films, or a director’s, or a related batch of films. She would want only postwar melodrama. A William Wyler festival. Or only William Holden. Or postaccident Montgomery Clift. Only British-produced Hitchcock. A Dorothy Malone/Gloria Grahame/“sort of slutty” festival. Films were an organic, coherent whole, with categories and patterns. She saw them connected to the world and to each other. It comforted her to exhaustively track a single career, the rise, the fall. It was the drama outside the drama, and the movies were the artifacts that remained. Her father had filled in obscure production details, quoted lines. He would make jokes, inward metacomments that spoke to their organic movie world, their exclusive and idiosyncratic expertise.
“What’s going on?” her father would say, watchingRed River.“What’s Wayne doing, he’s in a rush because he left all those people on the stagecoach.” Mina would laugh at his joke, because she had seenStagecoach,too. She would say, Well, they better get to Missouri before the army realizes Matt is AWOL. Very good, kid, he would say, and she thought she knew the whole world watching movies with her father. And mostly old, and mostly American. She liked to imagine livingin 1952 and seeing these lady melodramas. She imagined herself housewifed and weeping. Or old war and baseball movies — they made her nostalgic, made her homesick for a time she never even lived through. And she thought she could see what her father was like, at seventeen, watchingFrom Here to Eternity.Imagining him watching those movies for the first time made him seem more like a real person, less like someone’s father. It made her feel a funny kind of sad affection for him. She saw him leaving the theater and she tried to guess what seventeen-year-old Jack felt, whether he thought he was more like Burt Lancaster or more like Frank Sinatra. As she grew older, old films gave her pleasure as the secret heart not just of her father, but of the world, collective pseudomemory of American innocence, Norman Rockwell but more sordid and ironic because the medium wasn’t static — as contexts changed the actual films became ironic and winking. They moved from American to Americana. She knew Gary Cooper spilled his guts to the House Un-American Activities Committee. That was why his brave American heroes were fun to watch. She knew Clift was gay — it made his ambivalent, helpless shrugs all the more resonant. Mina had so many movie reference points in her head, as many as the memories of her own life, it seemed, and they became nearly equally weighted, her memories of her actual life and her memories of the movies she had seen. Was there finally that much difference? She sometimes thought that if someone saw all the movies she had seen, the number of times she had seen them and in the order she had seen them, that person might know exactly who she was. That couldn’t really be true, but it was half true, it felt that crucial, as if her identity were a collection of references.
She watched Cooper’s long eyelashes and baseball swaggeras he rubbed his bad arm and let Barbara Stanwyck talk circles around him. David wanted to see a seventies action film. Mina wanted anything — anything at all — with James Mason. They settled for an easy one. They compromised on a film they had both seen dozens of times.
“Sometimes a film we haven’t seen before seems like so much effort,” Mina said.
“Daunting and risky,” David said. He commented constantly. He had to — they’d seen it too many times to actually be engaged. They now sought the supracritique. The odd detail you missed the first eight times you saw it. The depth of repetition. The continuity gaffes. The way the timing of the dialogue had rhythm. Sometimes Mina thought if you watched one movie enough, it could mean anything. It became a funnel for the entire universe. Besides, it was the most talking they would do all day.