David, the technician, the analyst, said, “You can’t get away with dialogue like that anymore. Too much talking.”
“But it’s good still.”
“Yeah. It is. You can’t, though.”
Mina nodded, not turning from the eyelashes. The black and white and gray luminous movie eyes. She knew Cooper’s eyes were cerulean blue, translucent and denim-flecked and cold, an impossible manly American Blue, the way she knew Rita Hayworth’s Gilda nails in black-and-white had to be a platonic perfect sex-sinister Red.
“Now you have to have less dialogue. It has to be careful and tricky, though. It can’t be too obvious. The lovers fight, then say, ‘I can’t live without you.’ Or they’re making love, and she sighs and says, ‘You bastard.’ It has to go like that,” he said, looking at the TV.
Mina, eyes on Cooper, said, “Yeah. I think that’s called irony, David.” And it came out more sarcastic and mean than she intended. Cooper was shrugging, in that “It seems to me but what do I know” kind of common, noble way. Cooper was starting to irritate her.
“You’re a snob,” David said quietly, looking at the screen.
It’s funny that she often forgave things in other people that irritated her in David. She fingered the Andalusian “LEFT” postcard folded in her pocket. Left of what? Why Andalusia? She’d have to call the hospital tomorrow. She felt moody and impatient.
“We should have rentedOnly Angels Have Wings.Rita Hayworth. Cary Grant. And that actress with the oddly pitched voice.”
“Who?” David said.
“She’s wearing slacks. These great slacks.”
“Jean Peters.”
LEFT. Of course. It was leftfrom,notof.
David cracked a beer open triumphantly. “Oh, I have to have lunch with my agent tomorrow.”
“On Saturday?”
David shrugged.
“Well, I have to work tomorrow night at the club, so I guess I won’t see you.”
David nodded. He took another sip of beer and watched the screen.
“Jean Arthur. Not Jean Peters, for Christ’s sake.”
“I love Gary Cooper,” David said.
“Jean Arthur, David.”
Mina took a long, hot bubble bath. She stared at the parts of her body that poked out from the bubbles. She extended aleg to wash seductively. A commercial, it reminded her of. Her leg looked great, all bubble-dripping against the tile. She tried to forget pencil tests. She wrapped a towel turban-style around her head. She emptied the tub. She stopped on the way to the bedroom at the door to David’s office. He was at his computer again. The room was completely dark except for the sickly green-blue aura of the screen.
Mina stood watching David. David watched the screen, which contained a small screen within the screen that watched some other guy’s computer, unattended and unmoving. Free-streaming live-feed video. Sometimes you could watch him at his computer. Sometimes he left and you could just watch his computer.
“I can watch him for minutes at a time,” David said.
“I do other things. I eat my lunch, I talk on the phone,” Mina said.
“He stares at his screen. Does nothing. Occasionally he works the keyboard, but mostly he watches,” David said, eyes fixed.
“I walk around. I see people. I smell things. I take baths, David.”
“I like to watch real life, a stranger’s life, in real time. There is unlimited space, so the most atomic details are available. The most micro moments get play. Everything is attended.”
“You know what I pray for?” Mina said.
“It’s just different things that engage you, not that things engage you less.”
“I pray for the day I pick up the paper and they discover that the Internet is a big failure and everyone is wrong and nobody wants to use it anymore.”
“It’s not that you get more information shoved at you. It’sjust different. And you have to figure out what you want. You have to be more accurate in your desires.”
“They would say, ‘Oh, boy, remember the Internet? What a fad that was.’ And people who hated it would be congratulated. ‘Boy, you guys were smart not to bother with that, how did ya know?’ ”
“Infinitesimal things can have as much pull as massive things. Things are not privileged in the same way. Eccentricity is encouraged.”
“I hate the fucking Internet.”
“You can bet on that making no difference at all. You can bet everything on that.”
“Oh look, he’s moving. What — look, I think he just — did you see that, David?”
“That’s nothing. Let’s go to live-streaming accidents.”
“How can they be live? How do they know an accident will happen?”
“There are certain street corners, one in L.A., one in New York, and of course, the best one is in Athens, where accidents happen up to three or four times a day. These live cams just surveil those corners. See?”
“But there is no accident.”
“But it’s all an accident. This is guaranteed preaccident footage.”
“Have you ever actually seen a live accident on this site?”
“Actual live, at the actual occurrence, or replayed highlight, postlive?”
“Actual-live live.”
“Actually, no.”
Saturday His-and-Her Perversities
The week before it was the “trashy” lingerie superstore on a famously dilapidated boulevard. Today it was Mitterrand’s Mistress, an exclusive European hosiery-only boutique. Mina bought cashmere tights, guaranteed to let you wear skirts through the most frigid days of winter. They were the most expensive hose in the store, even more than the hand-stitched lace-topped stay-up thigh-highs in sheerest Noir. She had to admit the Viennese 70 denier strumpfhose in Pearled Cracked Cement, part of the Urban Disaster collection, tempted her, as well as the Semi-Sheer Velvet Finish Tights in Bruise and Blood Ultra Ultra Red (although any red, and especially a brown-purple red, is particularly unflattering in any-denier sheer, and she decided to wait until they restocked the sold-out opaque version of the tights). But these couldn’t match the feel — the promise, really — of the Cashmere Pure-Luxury, woven with the tiniest bit of nylon and Lycra (to make the cashmere cling and not bunch, barely detectable, a soft breath, a whisper on skin). When she spotted the last pair in medium, in the sort of oatmeal cream that would make her feel October and Ivy League, coed and coquettish, or at least like a sort of wrapped Christmas treat, all warm and inviting to touch, she said yes, knowing, in a sinking way, it was obscene. She just wouldn’t think about it — not even attempt the usual relativism of what was three hundred dollars here or there: Two couples out for dinner? A plane ticket to Seattle and back? One month’s health insurance? An evening’s worth of cocaine? — and, actually, not thinking about certain things had become soeasy lately, so much a newfound capacity of her conscious will. And by Friday the Winter-Spring Collection, such as Luscious Lent in Satin-Finish Ash, and even Ramadan Rayon Rose, in a more modest 170 denier, would be in, for preview, to the most special and loyal customers. A group with whom Mina surely belonged.
She had large, full thighs. David moved Gwen on the bed, her body the anchor of their afternoons; he could move against it and it would both resist and respond to him. Braque. No, something softer, undulative and layered. Bellini-folded intricacies, a labyrinth of other flesh. It almost upset him, repulsed him, but it did not. So close to disgust it was bracingly erotic, a giving over to all things unlooked at, unexplored. Here was exuberance in flesh. His larger and older lover, Gwen. Long married and with a grown child, Gwen.