“Mother, please…”
“… oh, dear God, calling me Grandma…”
Sophie covered her face with her hands.
“But you see,” Elise said.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Sophie said, as though her daughter were explaining it to her and not to Matthew and Bloom.
“If what we’d done then was to have any meaning now…”
“Yes,” Sophie said, exhaling the word.
“If protecting the house had been important back then…”
“It was even more important now.”
“How could we acknowledge her?”
“A bastard child?”
Sophie shook her head.
“I asked her to leave. I told her she had no mother here, no grandmother, either. I told her never to come here again. She said she had proof. I knew there was no proof. I sent her on her way.”
The clock on the mantel was ticking.
Above the mantel, Jacob Brechtmann glared down from his portrait.
“And then Hurley called,” Elise said.
“And told us he knew all about the pictures.”
“Which is why I went to see Jonathan…”
Jonathan…
Jonathan…
It is not yet dawn on the morning of January thirtieth…
Elise does not yet know how she will handle this confrontation; it has been so many years, too many years. She is dressed for the rain: black slacks and black jersey top, a black raincoat and a black slouch hat that makes her look like Garbo. And because there is a chill accompanying the rain, she is also wearing black leather gloves.
She parks her car at Pelican Reef and begins walking up the beach toward his house. As she walks, she rehearses what she will say to him. She does not like having to go to him this way, begging a favor of him, especially after the way he treated her the last time, when all she was trying to do was protect him.
Because…
Because back then, even though Jonathan was what he was, there were still times when she succumbed to the dream of what might have been. If only. If only he weren’t homosexual — but he was. If only he hadn’t told her their relationship was hopeless — but he had. And then the self-pity: If only I’d never met him, if only I’d never gone to bed with him…
The rain encourages memories.
The whispering rush of the ocean against the shore prompts total recall.
Time has no meaning in the movie of her mind. When she can flip the switch either to fast forward or reverse, what possible meaning can time have? Choose any scene, choose any snippet, edit them in order or in reckless disarray. Seize each memory but only for a moment; most of the memories are painful. For Elise, time is meaningless except as it defines pain.
The movie is titled My Life with Jonathan.
A cheap little film.
Fade in on a luxurious Florida beach house.
Title over: NOVEMBER, 1968.
It is a gloriously balmy night. Japanese lanterns on the terrace, a band playing Beatles tunes. Elise is sixteen years old and attending the birthday party of her friend Marcia Nathanson, who has just turned seventeen.
The boy who comes walking out onto the terrace is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life. Long blond hair and flashing blue eyes. A dancer’s body, a dancer’s moves. Barefooted. Wearing blue jeans and a white sweatshirt. The other boys at the party are wearing ties and jackets; Jonathan Parrish has dropped in from another planet.
Self-absorbed at sixteen, the curse of adolescence, Elise immediately thinks of him as an adjunct to herself, the perfect partner, the ideal mate, blond and blonde, pale and paler, together they will dazzle! She will capture this gorgeous alien male and keep him in a cage. She will tame this wild and splendid starman and make him her own. Confident of her own good looks, emboldened by her budding sexuality, she fastens herself like a succubus to this twenty-year-old stranger w ho has come not from another galaxy, as it turns out, but only from Indiana.
By the end of the night, she is lying in his arms on the beach.
He insists that she use only her mouth.
But she suspects nothing.
Two weeks later, in the house he is renting on Fatback Key, she persuades him to enter her, and surrenders her virginity to him.
Still suspecting nothing.
In the night, she whispers, “I love you.”
And does not for a moment realize how these words trouble him.
My Life with Jonathan
A film by Elise Brechtmann
Starring, in order of appearance:
*ELISE BRECHTMANN*
*JONATHAN PARRISH*
And, in the role of Charles Abbott:
*CHARLES ABBOTT*
She goes to Abbott for the first time late in December. Deliberately seeks him out in his room over the garage. Goes to him in anger and in tears. Goes to him to get even. Because not an hour earlier, Jonathan Parrish has told her he is homosexual, he is gay, he is as queer as a turnip, he want nothing further to do with her. This entire episode with her — he calls it an episode, he calls what they shared together an episode — this entire episode was merely an experiment, something he still owed himself, something he still had to prove to himself. Prove? But prove what? Why, that girls… women… females cannot satisfy him.
So she is here in this room over the garage…
Title over: DECEMBER, 1968…
… to make love to a stranger. In retribution for Jonathan’s abrupt dismissal of her. Here in tears, here in anger and in shame, here to make love — no, not love. Certainly not love. Never again will sixteen-year-old Elise Brechtmann, star of this tedious little low-budget film, make love to any man. She is here to fuck and to be fucked. By the chauffeur. A man in her father’s employ. A menial. She weeps into his shoulder as he claims her.
Fast forward.
Skip the boring months of her pregnancy and the frightening, painful delivery, cut to the goddamn chase. She has grown used to pain ever since Jonathan closed the door on their dream, the dream that still seeps unbidden into her mind, awake or asleep, these two beautiful people moving gracefully through life together, the dream that can never be, he can never be satisfied by a girl, a woman, a female, dig?
So she is understandably surprised (the camera moves in for a close shot of her utterly astonished face) when a few days after she gives birth, who should show up at the hospital but the Indiana Kid himself! Fresh from the recent festivities at Woodstock, he is sporting long blond hair and a long blond beard and feathers and beads, oh, how her girlish heart flutters!
He says he wants to take pictures of her and the baby.
He has taken at least a dozen of them when the nurse comes in and asks him to stop.
He kisses Elise on the cheek when he leaves an hour later.
A brotherly kiss.
He promises to send her prints of the pictures.
And is gone.
She is crying again. The pain, the pain.
He never sends the pictures.
She does not see him again until…
Title over: OCTOBER, 1981.
Twelve years later. Twelve long years, kiddies!
A montage of shots.
In the foreground, Jonathan Parrish on the Whisper Key beach. In the background, the house his brother has bought for him to live in. Jonathan Parrish is back in town, and up to his old tricks, moving into Calusa’s growing gay community, discreetly to be sure, but not so discreetly as to hide his escapades from the all-seeing, all-knowing Elise Brechtmann, the writer, director, and star of this shabby little R-rated flick. Elise still nurtures the dream, you see, she still lives in the land of Might Have Been. It seems to her sometimes that her life is defined by loss. The loss of Jonathan, the loss of the baby, the loss of her father. Loss and pain, this is a three-handkerchief movie, folks.