bet she would.
We’d have to cancel buying the Vermont place.
Yeah. And build us a big brick colonial manse overlooking the James.
You’d have to let that Goddard College job go. I mean, you never actually signed a contract, right? It was all just a verbal agreement between you and the dean, wasn’t it?
Fife doesn’t answer. In the nearly dark room he can make out the shape of her body and the outline of her face, but he can’t read her expression. He thinks, he hopes, she’s joking. Teasing him a little. She’s an actress—trained as an actress—and he sometimes can’t tell whether she is herself or is playing a role to entertain herself. He’s not sure there’s a difference.
He says, You’re kidding, right?
Yes. Yes, of course, I’m kidding. But you’ve got to admit, Leo, it’s a stunner! And isn’t it just a teenie-weenie bit tempting, Leo?
Jesus, no! Not even a teenie-weenie bit tempting, he declares. He’d end up a drunk or dead by his own hand or both before he hit his mid-thirties. He’d be miserable, and then he’d make her miserable, and the kids, and everyone who came near him.
Not if you were still able to do your writing. And not if all the while your family was happy. You could continue to write, you know. Daddy spends barely four or five hours a day at Doctor Todd’s, and the rest of the time plays golf or hunts birds. The company practically runs itself, Leo.
You want me to accept their offer. Don’t you?
Of course not! I mean, I don’t want you not to accept it, either. It’s your decision, honey, not mine. She just wants him to do whatever will make him happy and avoid doing whatever will make him sad. And no one except he himself knows which is which.
There’s nothing that can make me happy. I’ve never been interested in happy, he says. You know that.
She knows he doesn’t like being a college professor. Even part-time. But it does give him the time to do his writing. And Vermont is beautiful, and they both love that little old house and the hills and the small New England college-town environment for raising a family, where it doesn’t matter if you’re white or Black, like it does here. Alicia rattles on, listing good reasons for rejecting her father’s and uncle’s offer.
Then she switches abruptly back to good reasons why Fife might want to accept their offer. Family support with raising their children and enough money to hire domestic help and to send the soon-to-be-two children to private schools and to build the house of their dreams, just as her parents built theirs thirty years ago, and to travel, and to keep the Vermont house and use it as a summer place. And it would sure make her parents happy in their old age if their grandchildren were close by. In a way, she says, whether he takes their offer or not, that they offered it means he’s finally found his family.
Yes, but I have a family, Alicia. I wasn’t looking for one. They weren’t lost.
For a moment, both are silent.
Then Fife says, I don’t get it.
Hmmm? Get what?
Everything has turned really weird, he says.
She was supposed to join him in his surprise and the pleasure of his redemption. And she was supposed to share his delight in the absurdity of the idea of his running Doctor Todd’s and their living her parents’ life here in Richmond. But it’s clear to him that, while she is probably as surprised by the offer as he and feels a certain relief for his redemption herself, she does not think it would be absurd, ridiculous, possibly suicidal, for him to accept the offer. He doesn’t say any of this. Only that everything has turned really weird.
Yes, weird. God, yes. How did you leave it with Daddy and Uncle Jackson?
That I’d have to talk to you. That I would get back with an answer when I return from Vermont. That I need to think about it. A huge decision, et cetera. Mostly bullshit.
Yes, she says. She reaches out and touches his cheek with her fingertips. It is a huge decision, she says softly. Now c’mon to bed, sweetie. It’s late, and you’ve got a long flight and drive ahead of you tomorrow.
Yeah. Long flight, Richmond to Washington to Boston. Then a long drive. Boston to Vermont.
5
Emma’s smoky voice swirls out of the dark from somewhere near the hallway door. She says sorry to interrupt but she has to step out, she has a text on her phone that just came in and has to answer it right away. I’ll keep track and catch up later, she says. Sorry, she repeats. You go on talking, Leo, I shouldn’t’ve interrupted. Really, most of this stuff, some of it anyhow, I already know. Or versions thereof.
No, you don’t! You don’t know any of it. And you managed to fuck up Malcolm’s shot! The continuity got busted when Vincent was swinging the camera around to my right. Didn’t you notice Vincent on the dolly moving from a straight-on headshot to a profile? When he cuts your interruption, it’ll end up a jump cut and the fucking thing will look edited. Suspension of disbelief, Emma! Remember? You want it to flow like time, not memory. You want …
Please, Leo. I’m not one of your students.
No, really, Emma. I need you here listening to all this. Because you don’t already know most of this other stuff. Because I never told you most of it. Or told anyone. Some of it not even to myself. And if you’re going to interrupt or make noise going in and out of the room, then please do it when the camera’s locked, not when it’s moving. This goes for you, too, Renée.
Comment?
You know what I’m saying, Renée. Your English is as good as my French!
Calm down, Leo, Emma says. Jesus. She reminds him that he’s been talking for nearly an hour, he should take a break. He’s not used to putting out this much energy for this long a time. There’s no need for him to push himself. Malcolm can come back tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, if need be. You have to save your strength, she says. You probably shouldn’t be doing this interview at all.
Malcolm says Emma’s right. They can spread the interview over three or four or more sessions. But making the interview is a good thing, he says. It gives Leo a chance to get his own story told his own way. He’s spent a lifetime telling other people’s stories, letting them use him and his camera to document their lives. He should finally have the chance to tell his own story and use Malcolm’s camera to document it. Vincent’s camera, he corrects himself.
Yeah, Vincent’s camera, and Malcolm’s and Diana’s heavy-handed edit, Fife points out. Using that, too. Whose fucking story will it be then? he wants to know. Whose story will it be when Malcolm and Diana have sliced and diced and stitched and hitched his words and images of his face and body back into a hundred-and-twenty-minute narrative? Whose story will it be when the CBC suits tell them they have to reduce the interview to ninety minutes? Or even less. Maybe forty minutes, he says. My story? I don’t think so.
Sloan says, That is so interesting, Leo. I never thought of it that way, like a doc is no different than a fictional film. When it comes to the truth, I mean.
Diana says, Theory of cinema one-oh-one, Sloan, dear.
Excuse me?
Never
