“No, I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “Or maybe I did. I don’t know.”
“You have that creepy doorman, right?” she asked.
“He’s okay,” I said. “Except when it comes to you. Then he gets creepy.”
She looked confused.
“I’ve heard him talking to you,” I said. “I’ve been watching you for months.”
“Okay,” she said. “So you’re the creepy one.”
She rolled her chair back.
“You’re not a stalker, are you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m a night watchman.”
She didn’t say anything. She studied me, looking for signs of real danger, I suppose. I knew I wasn’t dangerous. And I think she knew it, too.
“Okay,” she said. “You can pay the receptionist. Tips are happily accepted.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t come back. And I’ll stop watching you.”
She just nodded her head.
I wanted to say something profound to her — give a name to our separate loneliness, a metaphor that described the abysses that can grow between people in love. But I had only my most basic desire.
“If I could only sleep,” I said.
“Yeah,” Saundra said. “I know.”
I paid for my manicure and walked back toward my building. As I noticed that my doorman was absent, I also realized that I’d forgotten my keys in the apartment. I’d have to wake my girlfriend. And she’d be angry that I’d gone missing and jealous that I’d been talking to another woman. My girlfriend wouldn’t fuck me but she didn’t want anybody else fucking me, either. After the inevitable argument, she and I would lie in the dark, with her worried that she’d be too tired to teach well later that day and me too terrified to reach across the bed and touch her.
I wanted none of that to happen. I didn’t want anything to happen. So I stopped in the middle of the street. Amazing how quiet eight million people can be. I wondered if I should just walk over to that twenty-four-hour deli on Canal and wait for sunrise. But then I looked up toward my apartment and saw my girlfriend standing on our little terrace. I could see her through the dark. I wondered how long she’d been watching me. I wondered if she wanted me to walk toward her or to walk away.
BREAKING AND ENTERING
Back in college, when I was first learning how to edit film — how to construct a scene — my professor, Mr. Baron, said to me, “You don’t have to show people using a door to walk into a room. If people are already in the room, the audience will understand that they didn’t crawl through a window or drop from the ceiling or just materialize. The audience understands that a door has been used — the eyes and mind will make the connection — so you can just skip the door.”
Mr. Baron, a full-time visual aid, skipped as he said, “Skip the door.” And I laughed, not knowing that I would always remember his bit of teaching, though of course, when I tell the story now, I turn my emotive professor into the scene-eating lead of a Broadway musical.
“Skip the door, young man!” Mr. Baron sings in my stories — my lies and exaggerations — skipping across the stage with a top hat in one hand and a cane in the other. “Skip the door, old friend! And you will be set free!”
“Skip the door” is a good piece of advice — a maxim, if you will — that I’ve applied to my entire editorial career, if not my entire life. To state it in less poetic terms, one would say, “An editor must omit all unnecessary information.” So in telling you this story — with words, not film or video stock — in constructing its scenes, I will attempt to omit all unnecessary information. But oddly enough, in order to skip the door in telling this story, I am forced to begin with a door: the front door of my home on Twenty-seventh Avenue in the Central District neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.
One year ago, there was a knock on that door. I heard it, but I did not rise from my chair to answer. As a freelance editor, I work at home, and I had been struggling with a scene from a locally made film, an independent. Written, directed, and shot by amateurs, the footage was both incomplete and voluminous. Simply stated, there was far too much of nothing. Moreover, it was a love scene — a graphic sex scene, in fact — and the director and the producer had somehow convinced a naive and ambitious local actress to shoot the scene full frontal, graphically so. This was not supposed to be a pornographic movie; this was to be a tender coming-of-age work of art. But it wasn’t artistic, or not the kind of art it pretended to be. This young woman had been exploited — with her permission, of course — but I was still going to do my best to protect her.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a prude — I’ve edited and enjoyed sexual and violent films that were far more graphic — but I’d spotted honest transformative vulnerability in that young actress’s performance. Though the director and the producer thought she’d just been acting — had created her fear and shame through technical skill — I knew better. And so, by editing out the more gratuitous nudity and focusing on faces and small pieces of dialogue — and by paying more attention to fingertips than to what those fingertips were touching — I was hoping to turn a sleazy gymnastic sex scene into an exchange that resembled how two people in new love might actually touch each other.
Was I being paternalistic, condescending, and hypocritical? Sure. After all, I was being paid to work with exploiters, so didn’t that mean I was also being exploited as I helped exploit the woman? And what about the young man, the actor, in the scene? Was he dumb and vulnerable as well? Though he was allowed — was legally bound — to keep his penis hidden, wasn’t he more exploited than exploiter? These things are hard to define. Still, even in the most compromised of situations, one must find a moral center.
But how could I find any center with that knocking on the door? It had become an evangelical pounding: Bang, bang, bang, bang! It had to be the four/four beat of a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon. Bang, cha, bang, cha! It had to be the iambic pentameter of a Sierra Club shill or a magazine sales kid.
Trust me, nobody interesting or vital has ever knocked on a front door at three in the afternoon, so I ignored the knocking and kept at my good work. And, sure enough, my potential guest stopped the noise and went away. I could hear feet pounding down the stairs and there was only silence — or, rather, the relative silence of my urban neighborhood.
But then, a few moments later, I heard a window shatter in my basement. Is shatter too strong a verb? I heard my window break. But break seems too weak a verb. As I visualize the moment — as I edit in my mind — I add the sound track, or rather I completely silence the sound track. I cut the sounds of the city — the planes overhead, the cars on the streets, the boats on the lake, the televisions and the voices and the music and the wind through the trees — until one can hear only shards of glass dropping onto a hardwood floor.
And then one hears — feels — the epic thump of two feet landing on that same floor.
Somebody — the same person who had knocked on my front door to ascertain if anybody was home, had just broken and entered my life.
Now please forgive me if my tenses — my past, present, and future — blend, but one must understand that I happen to be one editor who is not afraid of jump cuts — of rapid flashbacks and flash-forwards. In order to be terrified, one must lose all sense of time and place. When I heard those feet hit the floor, I traveled back in time — I de-evolved, I suppose — and became a primitive version of myself. I had been a complex organism — but I’d turned into a two-hundred-and-two pound one-celled amoeba. And that amoeba knew only fear.