John at once said, Your film is random, you speak, a woman comes, a hand opens, the rain might be raining or not, though within that accident you might film it or not—
Oh shut up, said Len, and took his plate out into the kitchen leaving the door open, but there was no window from where I stood. I turned to the window behind us here in the dining room with its rounded corners and its discussion and its cast all so awkward you felt it was perfectly spontaneous except it seemed rigged — and under the striped umbrella stood two children and Herma’s English boy watching the moon tour so I couldn’t see the screen. I remarked that this was the first trail of the lunar rover. Dagger pivoted the turret to 50 mm. for a shot of the kitchen through the open door. Len stopped on the way back from the kitchen, asked Elizabeth’s boyfriend why he didn’t turn around and look at the camera and seemed testy about something as he moved around the table to his chair, and Dagger moved with him. He said he was going to turn off those seasounds upstairs, but at the hall door blocked by Gene’s wife he turned to Dagger who was still with him, and said What the fuck is the point of this?
There was a little physical business at the door with Gene’s wife but Len didn’t want to play and he pointed his index finger toward her chest as if to touch her but then pushed past and then his steps were on the hall stairs.
John said what were we up to, then quickly called out to Len not to be so bloody restless; and Dagger, who was back on 25 and was filming Chad with the pink gentleman in the portrait behind, said we’d know when we saw it all together.
And where have you been? said John, who seemed unaware that Herma was wandering behind the duumvirate hoping to be filmed.
I said we had borrowed a zoom in Corsica but they were very expensive to rent and we figured the three standard lenses we had would—
Turret mount? said John.
The sea sound continued.
Dagger was filming Gene’s wife, who looked more and more like a model. It even made her smile for a second, and John and I went on talking, and when I said we’d been in Corsica filming and he asked what and didn’t let me speak but quoted a long Corsican song about a dead dog that ended with a proudly irrelevant chorus about Napoléon Napoléon Napoléon, I knew he had his facts off, though all he’d done was put two truths into one instance.
I asked for the camera. I pivoted it on the tripod ball and focused through the window. The patio was deserted, the TV screen snowy, then clear; the landscape beyond Hadley Rille Canyon disappeared and there was a man in street clothes standing by a lunar rover, the child in the olive green mac chugged by and this green against the rain-flattened color of the field was a subtle moment of life. John was asking about Corsica, had we been to Calvi, Bastia, Filitosa. Dagger was saying we’d gotten good footage of a naval battle but we weren’t sure what political context to put it in, and John narrowed his puffy eyes instead of smiling uncertainly.
We needed more film. Dagger unscrewed the camera and tried to put it in my hands, but I said I’d go for the spools in the hall and Dagger indecisively said maybe we should reload out there, there was less light.
Gene’s wife had disappeared. I heard her talking to Len upstairs, it didn’t sound good, her even sound sort of combing through his rising falling intensity. I thought, We’ve been unlucky, Dagger muffed it.
I wanted people we could know, but this complaint found no place in the diary pages I gave Jenny to type.
Eighteenth-century choral music came on upstairs.
Elizabeth was engaged in a discussion of ends justifying means. John knew one of her dons. John was himself a technological consultant. He spent half the year in America and owned a house near Portland, Maine.
Chad was on camera saying he had more to offer us as a ballplayer. The six scars, the paler palms opening and closing, the modest American demeanor cloaking muscle, and behind him someone’s pink ancestor in the walclass="underline" a series full of energy, though whose energy? And had one of the portrait eyes now blinked back its two-hundred-year-old pigment in favor of the human pupil of someone on the other side, the ghost of some grandmother somnambulist: and for us — energy of others — look out! — a chance of some experimental revelation on film which the commercial sector would get hold of and shrink to a neat train of erring or psychotic behaviors — and where was Sherman! Maybe just sitting, taking a bath, reading, all of these, or solemnly removing every item in his pack, his other jeans (not mentioned), his Minox (mentioned by Dagger), a photograph? (not mentioned), not the portable butane-cartridge mini-stove because he had given that away to a poor Scots couple after a bed and some porridge and not much sleep listening to them most of the night fight out their poverty and unemployment at the kitchen table rather than in bed.
The English boyfriend of Elizabeth had moved to the hall doorway and was talking to Gene’s wife about the effect of this room’s shape; by rounding the corners you enlarged the space.
Herma and Chad were discussing radical diets friends had gone on, and Chad wrapped one tube of buckwheat spaghetti around the tines of his fork and leaned over and put it in her mouth.
The choral music stopped in the middle of a big note upstairs.
John seemed redder and fatter, I looked forward to seeing him on Anscochrome. He rose in the middle of Elizabeth’s latest sentence saying thank God he wasn’t an undergraduate any more, looked at me, weighed my worth, and said, What were you after in Corsica? You went to Filitosa of course, I once met the lady who discovered the significance of the menhirs there, she had a lot to say about a face sculpted by superimposed V’s; you know all about that I suppose.
I said going to Corsica had been Dagger’s idea and the only pure plunge of the whole plan, and Dagger had got expenses from a New York contact, and there was an ecology conference there with Americans, and Dagger’s wife Alba was French, and there are drugs up in Bastia and there was a little Franco-Italian contretemps we got onto film which takes you back to the wartime occupation and a little rumble involving French and American students which was too complicated to tell just with film, but nothing exactly political.
But I didn’t ask about that, said John, I didn’t say anything about that.
No one was talking and we heard steps coming down.
John called out, Going somewhere, Len?
I said I didn’t care if he’d asked or not, and I had almost a thing to say inspired by his dense dark hair almost as dark as Chad’s that made John’s mottled puss and the stiff one-piece movement of his corpulent torso seem prematurely old by contrast, but the thing just missed the circuit of articulation and he was saying You can go to hell, why would anyone pay your expenses to go make a film in Corsica, and spare me your — or were you in the war? Why I could tell you about real things do you hear, real forces and Corsica too while you’re at it.
Christ, John, said Gene’s wife, but Len was in the doorway beside her raising a long-barreled pistol at John and saying OK what about a game of darts John, but Dagger’s quick pan to Len bumped into my shoulder as I moved slightly and Len fired twice into the dart board. Chad, John, Herma, Elizabeth, and the English boy dropped to the floor, I smelled the after-sound. Gene’s wife said, Christ, Len, who replied, Come on I want to talk to you.
And that was pretty well that.
I guess you could say that in professional parlance we got a few reaction shots.