All This Heavenly Glory (23 page)

But get this, he also told me that since we last spoke he had seen my movie six times. Six times.
All This Heavenly Glory,
briefly, is on the surface a chick flick (although the title is taken from a line in a Bruce Lee movie where the character
says,
If you gaze too hard at the finger pointing to the moon, you’ll miss all the heavenly glory
). It’s about two lifelong best friends, each with her own profound manifestations of self-hate going on, a single mother
in a difficult relationship and a painter struggling to find the courage to pursue her art, and them struggling with the envy
they have about each other, the artist wishing she were in a difficult relationship as opposed to no relationship and the
one in the relationship wishing she had the courage to not even be in a relationship, and the artist trying to explain that
courage has nothing to do with not being in a relationship, being depressed and inherently unlovable is the reason why she’s
not in a relationship, and in the end neither of the characters has the typical kind of life-changing revelations you see
in major motion pictures, it’s more like the characters have these moments where you see some brief flashes of recognition
on their faces but that still, at the end of the movie you think, Ok, well, maybe they got just a smidgen of insight but the
likelihood is that these people aren’t going to change radically anytime soon. It was my intent to just show people as they
really are. So Matteo told me he loved the movie so much he saw it six times and all I could think to say after
Six times? was I wish you’d seen the movie one time and called me five times, or even one time to tell me this,
considering it had crossed my mind not a few times that he’d seen it and hated it. And he said no, that he loved it so much,
and deeply related to both the characters, he related to the one unable to get out of the difficult relationship and went
on at some length about his tendency to use relationships in this way, explaining that this was the first time in his entire
life he’d been out of a relationship for more than six months, and that virtually every one of the women, no matter how different
they seemed to the naked eye, was in some way elusive to him and that it was his life’s work, more or less literally it would
seem, to get these women to love him by whatever means necessary, and that the pattern was, unsurprisingly, that when they
finally did fall in love with him, he couldn’t bear it, and couldn’t really believe it, and then would do this thing where
he’d get them to break up with him so that he wouldn’t have to be thought of as a bad guy after the fact, all this to illustrate
one more reason he was in no position to be involved with anyone right then. He also said he related just as much to the struggling
artist, because he felt like he had the soul of an artist even if he wasn’t sure what kind, and he even said that he felt
a certain connection to me, watching it, because even though he didn’t assume it was autobiographical, he had the sense that
I understood these women, which of course I do. So that was nice, even if I still was wishing he’d just called.
On the other hand, he said, full disclosure, I felt resentful that you’d made this brilliant film, and I have to tell you
it figures into why I’m not so sure about filmmaking now, because I thought, “She’s so brilliant, why would anyone like that
ever want to be with me?”

And I have to tell you I was floored when he said that, not just because it was the farthest thing from my mind that anyone
would ever think such a thing, that anyone would see my movie and think of me as being better than them somehow, but also
because the whole time I was working on the movie and waiting for it to come out, I’d been thinking this was going to be my
ticket, that they’d be lining up outside my door, guys, that I would have infinite numbers of groupies, twenty-five-year-old,
sexually charged, admiring groupies to choose from, and in that moment I couldn’t really grasp that this was one very depressed
and self-loathing guy saying this, and that he wasn’t necessarily a spokesman for all guys, all I could think was, I’m screwed.
And then it all made perfect sense, considering my whole unlovable persona, I didn’t know how I couldn’t have seen it before,
that there was no level of cinematic brilliance I could reach, no combination of Sundance awards or Palme d’Ors or Oscars
that would remedy my genetic defect. And so there I was, so stunned I wasn’t sure what to say, really, and so what I said
was,
The only difference between you and me is that I wrote down some observations I had and then I put it on film. I’m not brilliant
. I was trying to make him feel better, and there were parts of the statement that were true, it was essentially true, but
it was also true that I was thinking that I was maybe an inch farther down the road, emotionally, if that’s possible, and
I’m not sure I realized it quite yet but it was the beginning of my subtle argument that he should still go out with me. So
Matteo said,
I’m sure Woody Allen doesn’t think he’s brilliant either,
and I said,
No, I’m pretty sure Woody Allen knows he’s brilliant, but it’s an interesting example,
and I’m not sure he got my point but I didn’t feel like explaining. Then Matteo was just back to saying how sorry he was
that he hadn’t told me sooner. Not a few times he said,
I know it sounds so terrible to say it’s not you, and it’s not personal, but it truly isn’t, I’m just not in any position
to get involved.
Which again gets back to my original point, which is that it’s obviously way easier, if absurdly time-consuming, to fabricate
involved excuses or exaggerate the relevance of existing pathologies.

And I should have been sitting there telling myself it was all for the best, and he’s right, he shouldn’t be involved, and
I shouldn’t be involved with him, the sane part of me got this but the bulk of me still wanted to get my hands into his hair
and thought that if I just shook him by the shoulders and told him to get over himself, then we could get on with it, you
know, together.

But then I just, okay, I lost it a little bit, because up to that point I’d been leaning back in my chair, with my whole,
Hey, look how evolved and insouciant I am demeanor, sitting here talking about this, no big deal, and then I went back to
my old self, and I said,
I’d bet money that you’ll he in a relationship before a year is up,
guessing that this was an amount of time in which he was not going to have his career and self-hate all sewn up, and he said,
I couldn’t say,
and I said,
I just think that if you were knocked out by someone none of this would make any difference,
and he said,
If I were knocked out by someone I’d run screaming in the other direction,
and since I was obviously not
someone
in this hypothetical scenario given that he didn’t get up and run screaming in the other direction, and since I was increasingly
having the sense that we were entering into some bizarre and hostile negotiation (which admittedly, I started), here’s the
worst of it, I said,
By that logic I should be exactly the kind of person you should go out with,
and he laughed and said,
Maybe, but it would have to be slow,
and I said,
I have no objection to that,
and he said,
Very slow,
and even though I had really only been trying to make a point, I wasn’t exactly sure what to think at that point, but I did
feel like things needed to be lightened up so I said,
Well then I think you’re making progress already,
and I said,
Who knows, by our year anniversary we could have gone out three, maybe four times.

I had someplace else to be, and by then I felt I had gotten some useful information, even if I wasn’t sure what I was going
to do with it. We hugged goodbye, which is a whole other weird thing because it didn’t seem any less meaningful than the first
time, even if I had to admit it might be a different meaning. He was still talking as he walked away, so I’m not l00 percent
sure what he said, but I’m almost positive the end of the sentence was
Next time.

C
HARLOTTE ANNE BYERS, age nineteen, has learned a few things about love, mostly regarding what not to do. After a late start her senior year of
high school with the hopelessly smitten Eddie Greenfield, and accounting for

1)  a fraction of one regret roughly equaling .4, for not giving nice-guy Greenfield more of a chance

(and which)

resulted in a slight delay of another year in between dates due to an uncertainty about whether dating was anything she had
a continuing interest in, Charlotte Anne developed an all-consuming crush on junior Billy Glassmeyer (inspired entirely by
his heavy-lidded green eyes and Afro of soft dark curls) in the fall of her freshman year of college. Said crush, which gained
her an A in Beginning Fiction for a story that was basically copied right out of her diary at the last minute (certain names
changed to “Carrie Anne Boyer” and “Benjy Grossmeyer”) after a semester of being unable to satisfy her professor’s desire
for writing “that gave off the stench of a bleak, ugly truth” with anything genuinely fictional, also figured in significantly
to an increasingly bad drinking problem. Back in New York for the summer, Charlotte Anne makes an attempt at drying out (somewhat
easier when one is living with one’s parents and not out of state in a dorm next to a bar that serves mixed drinks for a dollar),
taking a job as a busgirl at the Take One Restaurant on 56th and l0th, not coincidentally a hangout of sorts for her stepfather,
who works nearby. Charlotte Anne quickly adopts as her overall life mentor her twenty-year-old coworker, African American
waitress Evangeline Powers. Evangeline, a dual citizen raised in Ghana who majored in drama at the High School for Performing
Arts, seems much more than only one year older than Charlotte Anne, not because she is in any way old looking (she is, in
fact, startlingly beautiful, with dark skin, mile-wide cheekbones, and a weirdly royal type of air about her) but because
of her obviously advanced sophistication. Charlotte Anne likes to think she has a certain sophistication herself but which
thinking may in fact be directly offsetting whatever small advancement of sophistication she might have over any other teenager
who went to prep school and saw a ballet. It is evident early on from Evangeline’s fantastic posture, not to mention her habit
of ending pretty much every sentence with an unseen but unmistakable exclamation point (any sentence that doesn’t end this
way is spoken entirely in italics; even if she pulls Charlotte Anne aside to tell her
the kitchen just ran out of clam sauce,
there’s always an urgency that makes C.A. feel like she’s just been let in on a vital secret), that Evangeline is worth watching.
Evangeline, currently starring as Cordelia in
King Lear
at the Holy Redeemer Church in Brooklyn, has
principles,
often in the form of quotes and among them:

a) never sell out

b) to thine own self be true

c) those who dare, truly live.

Charlotte Anne is just trying to get through her shift. So compelling is Evangeline Powers that Charlotte Anne devotes long
passages in her diary to possible ways of modeling herself after Evangeline, included among them dropping out of college to
become an actress, which hadn’t previously been of any interest but seems very exciting the way Evangeline describes it. (
I got three lines in a Scorsese film.…He phoned me himself and said, “It’s
Marty.”
Marty!
) It seems as good an idea at this point as struggling to fit in and get good grades at what Charlotte Anne knew by the end
of her first semester was the wrong college and accounting for

2) one full regret; of the two schools Charlotte Anne was accepted into, University of Vermont and Mason College, C.A. easily
decided upon Mason on the basis of its not being in the middle of nowhere; because she couldn’t picture herself wearing Docksiders
and drinking beer, she ended up wearing designer clothes she couldn’t afford and drinking anything with sour mix