REVERSE SHOT — THE BALCONY
as the Doomed Man, bleeding slightly around the throat, lets a smoking pistol wave in his hands, then allows the gun to drop down onto the bodies below him.
Carlo returns with the bill. He puts it cautiously on the table and Jakob closes his notebook, pockets his pen and reaches for his wallet.
“Delicious as always,” Jakob says.
“Can I get you anything else, Mr. K,” Carlo says, “something to go, maybe?”
Jakob smiles and snakes his head as he picks cash from the billfold.
“I’m full to bursting,” he says, getting up. “I couldn’t take another thing.”
19
When Sylvia wakes up, it’s dark in the room. She feels like she’s slept for a week. She lies in bed for a while, takes some deep breaths, stretches her arms and legs and realizes she’s feeling a lot better. She’s still kind of foggy but the aching and nausea have vanished and she’s got some energy back.
She sits up, kicks off the covers. Perry isn’t here. She stands up and goes to the bedroom window and looks out. The streetlights are on and she can see the moon low over the church tower.
She walks out into the kitchen, closes her eyes and turns on the light. She opens the eyes slowly into a squint, goes to the table. There’s no note, no sign that Perry’s been back to the apartment.
She moves into the living room, grabs the remote, which Perry has Scotch-taped together, and turns on the TV. She stares at the weather channel for a minute with the sound off. A young guy with a mustache is in front of a map of the United States. Semitransparent swirling clouds move in a choppy pattern across the screen, left to right, as the weatherman gesticulates, points and sweeps these big hands all over the country. It’s an unsettling image and she shuts it off and goes into the bathroom.
She turns on the light and without thinking, moves to the tub and starts to draw a hot bath. She dumps in several capfuls of essence of rose bath oil, pulls off her T-shirt and tosses it in the hamper, then climbs into the tub and sits down and lets the water fill up around her. It looks like the color of the developer chemical. But it feels wonderful. It never fails that on the rare occasions when Sylvia does take a bath at night, she asks herself why she doesn’t do it every evening, why she doesn’t unwind in a steaming tub while Perry reads briefs or watches a game. She could bring in the radio and turn on a good station, maybe read something, one of those articles she’s got crammed in the desk, something she clipped from the art magazines and forgot about.
The water finally edges up near the top of the tub and she turns it off. The room is filling with steam, getting kind of misty, the mirror getting totally smoked over. She leans her head back and thinks about what Perry said before he left. I don’t know what’s been going on the last few days.
You don’t know the half of it, Perry.
She’s got no explanation for her behavior. The fact is, the things that have happened, the external things, she can accept, write them off the way you’d dismiss a slump, a couple days of bad luck. She’s just had a patch of weirdness, a run of strange hours. The outside events — the camera shop closing down, the riot outside the Skin Palace — don’t really concern her. Everybody’s got some story to tell about the day things went off-kilter. But what she really can’t get a handle on is her reaction to the weirdness. Instead of being repelled, it’s like she’s been sucked in. She’s sought these things out. She followed a strange old man into a pornographic bookstore. She walked into Der Geheime Garten on her own. She accepted Leni’s invitation to lunch at an unlicensed, hit-and-run Peruvian restaurant. She nodded her head yes. She moved her own feet. She was operating under her own influence and control. And now, sitting here in the tub, she’s got no rationale for why she did these things. There’s no precedent for it in her past. She’s never sought out these kinds of experiences before. For the most part, she thinks she’s lived a fairly narrow existence. Maybe more narrow than most. It’s as if for twenty-five years her brain has been functioning in this standard, middle-class, linear way and then one night, maybe while she was asleep, maybe in the middle of a boring and nonsensical dream, some switch just got thrown, some neurons just started firing in a different manner, a different pattern. And she woke up as this other woman, as this stranger, like in one of those late-night cable movies. Like in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
She props her feet up on the faucet and looks at them. These are the feet that brought her into Jack Derry’s Camera Exchange and Brady’s Adult Books and Herzog’s Erotic Palace. The feet look the same as they did a week ago. But something’s changed.
And she wishes she could pin down the cause. Even if she couldn’t reverse it and get back to normal, she wishes she could simply know what’s brought her to this point. She doesn’t know why she thinks this would make things better, or somehow more acceptable.
A week ago, the Snapshot Shack was not only tolerable but actually inviting. It was stable and simple and she loved locking herself up in that booth and running through the boring routine of every shift — counting boxes of film, phoning up customers to say their pictures were ready, handing change through the sliding window/lens like some toll collector on a highway people rarely travel anymore.
Now, she feels like Leni’s right, like the place is a prison and she’ll go crazy if she sits inside it one more time. But she’s got to do something for work and there’s no way she’s going to hire herself out to some studio that’ll have her running after wedding parties every Saturday.
There’s always Hugo’s offer. She could just let the feet bring her down to the Skin Palace every morning and shoot roll after roll of naked people groping each other. Perry would love it. Honey, you know the porn king you’re trying to shut down? Well guess who my new boss is.
She just can’t imagine looking through a viewfinder and focusing in on, say, Leni and one of those actors she saw this afternoon, caressing each other and looking at her while she yells out these inane commands like tilt your head up or could you flex for me a little?
She looks down at her own body sort of shimmering and enlarged through the oily water. She’d like to lose maybe five pounds. She’d like to tone up a little. Maybe get into an aerobics class. Nothing ridiculous, just a couple hours a week. She’s sure she’d feel better. She wishes her breasts were just slightly bigger. It’s not a huge problem, not like she’d go for surgery or anything.
Before Leni, Sylvia never knew a woman who was satisfied with her body. At best, back in college, she knew some who just never complained or joined in when the subject came to body image. But that’s no real indication of satisfaction.
She looks at her body now, rolled out here in front of her, magnified a little by the rose-colored water. She wonders what it will look like in another ten years. And then she thinks suddenly of the pictures down in the darkroom. Propp’s pictures. The Madonna and child in the ruins. How old is the woman in that picture? Sylvia is convinced the Madonna is lacking any body neurosis. And Sylvia knows she’s reading into the photo. She has to be. There’s nothing in those shots to indicate that kind of knowledge. You can’t even see the Mother’s face. Beyond the play of light on her back and shoulder and breast, the rest of her is in silhouette. So how can Sylvia be so sure, more certain the longer she dwells on it, that the Madonna is wholly content with her body?