Innocents and Others (11 page)

Again Oz turned the phone receiver away from his ear and Jelly heard a roar of voices. Oz laughed at the chaos—the babble—on the line, and then he gently placed the phone on the cradle, disconnecting.

“I can't believe you did that,” Jelly said. In a few minutes the phone rang. Oz let the rings vibrate into the room. He didn't pick
up. He let it ring until it stopped. Then it started up again. Jelly went to bed and put the pillow over her head. On-and-off rings into the night. Although lately Jelly fell asleep before Oz went to bed, tonight she was still awake when he came in. She heard him moving around the room, undressing, and she slowed her breathing and pretended to be asleep. In the middle of the night, half-asleep, they sometimes fucked. But whether he thought her asleep or not, Oz didn't reach for her, and soon Jelly heard the sounds of sleep breathing from Oz's side of the bed. She rolled over on her back. She was fully awake. To her surprise, she felt tears dripping into the corners of her eyes. And once she felt the tears, she let more come, the saltiness in the corners of her mouth, the clutch at the back of her throat. She stayed quiet and she cried.

It took a few days, but eventually the FBI came and questioned Oz. He was charged with malicious mischief and had to spend the night in jail. Jelly was not charged, but she gave up her blue box and swore never to phreak again, which she didn't. The incident was reported widely in the press, and in interviews Oz stated that he just wanted to get a job with the phone company. That was why he did it. Jelly figured that the phone company was not keen on rejecting a blind youth in such a public way, because indeed they did hire Oz to help with line security and system weaknesses, something he understood better than anyone. Two months later, Oz moved out of their apartment and she let him go without an argument.

Jelly knew that she had lost Oz long before the phreak debacle. In the painful last weeks of living together, deep into the limp nights of being in the same bed without having sex or touching at all, she sometimes thought about it, traced the tendrils of misery all the way back to the first hints of problems. But in the morning, when she would be momentarily happy before she remembered the state of
things, Jelly blamed everything on that phone incident, the way we like to pinpoint things in one moment, one increment of time, the way it happens in certain movies or stories. But some part of her knew that wasn't the truth. One day, years later, she would even remember that she had been doing her own secret thing elsewhere for months, so how could she blame Oz?

JELLY AND JACK

The phone rang very early one morning. Jelly woke in her bed, the room dark. She had fallen asleep talking to Jack, and the phone was on its cradle on the nightstand. She reached out from under the covers and picked up the phone. She held it to her ear and half asleep she whispered, “Hello?”

“Nico,” Jack said in a low voice.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and her voice sounded girlish and sleepy.

“Yes,” he said. “Are you asleep?” Jelly pulled the covers over her head and held the phone to her ear as she closed her eyes.

“A little,” she said, and she made a long exhale into the mattress by the receiver.

Years ago when Jelly was in college, she had rented her first apartment, just off campus. She was excited about having her own space and her own phone. One night the phone woke her. She was still partially asleep when a man's voice said, “Hi,” as if he knew her.

“Hi,” she said.

“It's me,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” she said.

“You sound sleepy.”

“I am a little sleepy,” she said.

“It's good,” he said. And then she heard something in his voice. “So good,” he whispered. “And you like it, don't you?”

“Who is this?” she said, now awake and angry. And he moaned a little into the phone. She heard it, paused for just a moment and slammed the phone onto the cradle. Who was it? But it wasn't anyone she knew. He just randomly called her, a crank call. He called women in the phone book, probably, and got them to talk to him by acting intimate, by whispering to them while they were disoriented from being woken in the middle of the night. What upset Jelly the most was how he sounded, gentle and easy. She replayed the voice in her head, and it wasn't a deviant voice. It was sexy. He never called again, although she almost wished he had. It was the first time she realized the phone could be like that, a weapon of intimacy.

Jelly closed her eyes and said his name into the receiver, “Jack.” She lay on her stomach with the phone next to her. “I'm in bed.” And she listened to him breathe.

SOLAX STUDIOS

Meadow had moved back upstate full-time after an aborted attempt at attending NYU in the fall. Carrie wasn't able to make frequent excursions to Gloversville to visit Meadow. It was Carrie's sophomore year, and school kept her very busy. She had also met someone, Will, and Meadow gathered that she needed to spend a lot of time cooking and playing house with him. By June, Meadow had a full agenda of projects she wanted to execute. Carrie couldn't stay the whole summer, but she did come up for most of June and July as promised.

First they made reenactments of silent films lost or destroyed. They focused on the lost Alice Guy-Blaché films because she was a woman and didn't get enough credit as one of film's early greats. Meadow didn't have to talk Carrie into it; she was up for whatever Meadow had in mind. They shot black-and-white silent film, and Meadow felt such relief in not having to think about sound for a while. The silent, colorless world: at least two variables eliminated, some constraints. They used a vintage wind-up Bell & Howell 16 mm Filmo camera, “just like the one Jean Rouch used to make
Moi, un noir.
” The camera shot for twenty seconds and then needed to be cranked again. They would make black-and-white silent vignettes, like pieces of a dream.

For inspiration Meadow insisted they watch
Barry Lyndon
, Kubrick's film about eighteenth-century Europe. It is a film of poses and artifice, each scene composed as clearly as a painting, each actor stiff and unmoving in giant wig and elaborate costume. Meadow remembered how Carrie and she hated the film when they saw it on video at Meadow's house the summer of eleventh grade, a long Kubrick summer where they watched his films in a binge and then watched their favorites over and over (
Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space ­Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove
).
Barry Lyndon
had seemed a laughable misfire for the first fifteen minutes and then turgid and boring after that.

But recently Meadow read that the disdained
Barry Lyndon
was playing for a short run with a new 70 mm print. She took the four-and-a-half-hour bus ride and snuck into the city, not telling anyone. She went straight to the beautiful Paris Theatre on West Fifty-eighth Street and made it just in time for the 3:30 show. Again the resistance in the first fifteen minutes, but already she felt herself change in relation to it. The baroque music, the minimal dialogue: it worked like a silent film. And it was almost a film of no movement from the actors or settings, a film about stillness. All the movement was from the camera, which languidly tracked in or out of the heavily sumptuous tableaux. Meadow felt it most in the remarkable scene in which Barry first kisses his future wife, Lady Lyndon. The music: the second movement of Schubert's Piano Trio in E-flat Major, with pulsing piano that gets complicated and intensified by a violin melody and then switches so the violins are pulsing and rhythmic and the piano plays the melody. The actors: Lady Lyndon walking in her huge silk dress to the edge of the terrace and turning to the moonlight. She stares at the sky, her face covered in powder, beautiful and unmoving. Barry moves slowly in the background until he is at the door to the terrace. Kubrick shows them in a medium-distance shot. Slowly—so
slowly, wind-up-toy slowly—Barry walks toward her. They are separate but pulling toward each other, as in the music we hear, as if one is the piano and the other is the strings. And as the watcher of the film waits, the length of time—the duration, the time endured—works on you and changes you. It could take an hour and you would watch. It mesmerizes you. The music resolves as the characters finally kiss—the uncanny slowness lets him make a minuet of a kiss, as stylized as the wigs and the clothes. What an arresting, striking thing. Next Meadow watched the cold pale thighs of Lady Lyndon seated in a bath, catatonic with sadness, her white face like Ophelia in that Rossetti painting. The actress barely moves as the camera pulls farther and farther away. Meadow felt pinned to her chair, every part of her body alive to this film. She stayed for the second showing, almost seven total hours of sad, immobile faces burdened by beauty and decoration and decadence, trapped by their own lack of expression. Meadow felt the tears stream down her face and she didn't wipe them away. How could she have missed the beauty of this film? She despised her younger, callow self and worried about what else she had missed or misunderstood.

After the second showing, Meadow thought about it but didn't call Carrie, didn't want to talk to anyone. She took the midnight bus back upstate, in and out of sleep on the way. Now she wanted to share
Barry Lyndon
with Carrie, had been waiting to share it, and had rented a print for them to watch. She wanted their silent films to use music the way this film did, to entrance the audience. And their films wouldn't have the usual typical silent-film look of flickering light and too few frames per second speeding up the action. They would have a
Barry Lyndon
–like devotion to slow, slow time, a languid moving into a painting-like scene, but in twenty-second pieces. So they set up scenes as almost unmoving compositions: a girl at a table with a
young man. A boy feeding a kitten. A girl in bed waking. Everything long and slow, but with odd jump cuts every twenty seconds that returned you to the exact same scene. A jump cut out of technical necessity, the camera's limits, but somehow that worked and made all the difference. It was odd: kinetic and static at the same time. Carrie played pieces of music as they worked (just as Sergio Leone used to so that his shoot-outs felt like ballets), the actors expressing the music in odd ways in their bodies. Carrie used only music of the lost-films era or earlier: she found a gramophone and a stack of 78s at a local antiques store. So they invented films out of titles and technical restraints and found records. Made one, made another, then another. All of them acting and operating the camera, taking turns. They double-­exposed the film and made slow-moving ghosts of themselves. They used a filter to render everything a pale lavender. There was a feeling that something good could be happening, a sense of deep possibility among them. This was happiness.

Later, when editing these pieces together alone late at night and adding Carrie's music, Meadow could feel how good they were becoming, how she made something good into something truly special, and this also was real happiness.

In the last two weeks of Carrie's visit, Meadow insisted on working on other reenactments, not of lost silent films but of iconic classic films. They would pick a scene from a famous American Western, and they would redo it as precisely as they could with Meadow or Carrie playing the hero. John Wayne's part or Alan Ladd's or Gary Cooper's. All they needed was some Western gear, then they watched the scenes Meadow had decided on, over and over. It was fun: as Meadow redid the scenes, she figured out how they worked. As she acted, she felt the power of the men in her. The mysterious male of the West. It was so simple, and, well, so easy. She also suspected it was more
interesting in idea than execution, like many of her ideas. Meadow knew she had a weakness for perfect geometries of concepts, theories, and images. She could feel how it lacked the happenstance magic of the silent films they made, the way the limits of the form had inspired them to do unexpected things.

By the time Carrie left in August, Meadow had raw footage and months of editing ahead of her.

“This is my favorite part,” she said. Carrie hugged her.

“I can't wait to see how they look,” Carrie said.

“You can stay and help me, you know,” Meadow said.

“School, I have school,” she said. “And Will.”

“Yeah, I know.”

* * *

In the end, the Alice Guy-Blaché reenactments were indeed wonderful: beautiful, old in feeling rather than in cliché representations of “old.” The films had some relationship to Guy-Blaché's titles, but they also had evidence of Meadow and Carrie's noticing everywhere. Kubrick and the found music and a summer in Gloversville. Reimaginings rather than reenactments, they had found a way to collaborate with the history of cinema.

The Western reenactments, however, were as bad as Meadow feared: silly, obvious, and smug. The idea never went anywhere unexpected. Meadow had hoped that you would move to a different place once you got the initial joke. But it didn't happen. She couldn't make it interesting in editing, because the concept was to replicate the editing of the original films. Formally it felt too schematic and dull, and she couldn't think of it as anything but an exercise. Meadow grew frustrated with all of it. She quit doing anything movie-related for three weeks. She slept late and then lay on the couch and read the
paper. So bored was Meadow that she had sex with Deke three times a day.

“What's wrong?” Deke asked. She shrugged him off. At the end of the three weeks, she woke up and went for a long run. She ran through Gloversville until the main street suddenly gave way to farmland. She could see the long view of the horizon where the peaks of the Adirondacks were visible. She could breathe, and she could shake off all the sitting in the dark looking at shadows. Stupid, boring shadows. She ran faster until she had to stop, breathless. She bent over and waited to catch her breath. A wave started in her stomach. Her mouth moistened and she felt that she might vomit.

It sickened her. Some of her ideas would fail no matter how hard she worked. She couldn't always figure it out ahead of time. She could fail.