In his bewilderment her color spun a towline. No resisting how she reeled him in, this daughter of Mediterranean fisher-folk, but as Matty got his hand on her he could tell this wouldn’t be their first go-round. He could hear it in her luxuriant giggle, and he could see it in his excuse for an erection. Spada should’ve had him solid as a bridge girder. This wasn’t their first time, and the tone of her giggle shifted. At that he groaned with unlikely pleasure, as much aggravation as pleasure, and it made him think about, of all things, the movie. He realized he should bring this sensation, its tone and grimace, into one of his scenes. He’d come back to the work, Matty. It was time to speak up.
Spada, what is this? We’re traveling through time!
Strano, she agreed. Un mistèro, truly.
But she sat up unfazed. The actress went into lotus posture, so at peace about the bizarre itinerary she’d shared with Matty that she struck him as more foreign than ever. She spared him the indignity of a smile, but what could he make of that pout? What, when it wasn’t on the screen or in the centerfold? Whenever a camera set her searching for the best way to inhabit its framing, she went back to some Mama or Nonna Matty couldn’t begin to know. He hugged his knees and became aware of Spada’s perfume. Opium.
The actress, so practiced at the line she spoke it artlessly, suggested they might be confusing their work with their life.
Oh, don’t, he said. Let’s keep it real.
Real—eh. Then perhaps we are falling in love.
When she straightened her back, Matty didn’t notice her breasts so much as her muscle. When he shook his head, it seemed only to get the perfume out of his nose.
Falling in love, she repeated. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
She wiped away something on the air. He ventured that they were both professionals.
Eh. Two professionals who have an affair—what that could do for the movie is hardly a mystery.
He agreed that the brain trust had an eye on the tabloids, when they brought Spada and him together.
Yes, but where do we have our eyes, caro? The windows of the soul?
I’m scared, he said finally.
But perhaps we are only two people falling in love, going to the cinema. Un film noir, then les hippies. We go together, we kiss—
I’m scared. It’s too weird. It’s not what’s best for the movie.
Spada gave it a moment, a beat beyond a moment, then shrugged. Somehow she shrugged and straightened her back at the same time, a combination impossible as her iPod’s club mix in the brightening morning, and with that, to Matty, the two of them appeared terribly fragile. They might’ve been a pair of origami.
But when she noticed him staring, huddling, she had just the thing. She fixed up her gaze, slantwise.
They finished the movie, of course. Went ahead and had the affair, too. A woman like Spada, a man should have her while he’s conscious. While he has his wits about him, and particularly when he’s trying to learn all he can for the work. Couldn’t go on doing loss of innocence forever. Besides, she was a lot more fun once they got to Rome. There the woman really came into her element, shining it on while the press went hysterical. They called him Casanova d’America, the headlines were everywhere, and during Matty and Spada’s first night out together—she insisted on sharing a Vespa—they found themselves blinded by paparazzi. As the cameras went off, it did seem as if Matty and his g.f. were again somersaulted into a different time and place, an epoch of swords and robes and sand. Or it might’ve been an Easter spectacular. He and Spada might’ve been a couple of stock characters, the legionnaire struck down by the angel and the woman who discovers the tomb is empty. Who knows? The strangeness of experience, who knows? Matty figured he could wait till the final edits, and anyway by then he’d spent some hours on his own in the city. Done it incognito, in a Dodgers cap and earbuds (though in fact he had no music; the cord ran to an empty breast pocket). On foot for the aerobics, he’d hiked the Etruscan remains, the Imperial honeycomb, the ghetto from the Dark Ages, the Baroque overkill of the waterworks and the burly quadrangles of the Fascists, also cruising the memorial on Via Veneto for Fellini and La Dolce Vita. After all that, time travel—eh.
A SHRILL SKYPE IN THE NIGHT
Octopuses have been discovered tiptoeing with coconut-shell halves suctioned to their undersides, then reassembling the halves and disappearing inside for protection…
(Text) Have a look & then we troubleshoot.
(Text reply) 2 browsers open.
(Text) Time zone here, Perth, 16 hrs diff. Have a look. See what Im saying.
(Text reply) Search wds, OCTOPUS COCONUT.
—Oww, look. Just look at it, death of a dream.
—He’s got it. I call from the far side of the world, I give his lonesome bed a shake, and he’s got it. Reliable as bebop on the soundtrack in a wine bar.
—Callie. I realize we’re estranged or something.
—No, estranged, that’s married people. You and I just had this project. First a concept, then a meeting, then another meeting…
—A project. We made it that far at least.
—Don’t I know it got weird?
—Mn, a movie project got weird. Adrift in the Dream Factory, I thought it was the Tunnel of Love.
—Isn’t it an occupational hazard? First Mel and Callie hit on a concept, and next thing you know, they’re whispering sweet nothings? Besides, bright side—didn’t our creature turn into a feature? On paper we’re still in development.
—Except, now this. The Multi-Touch display of death.
—You got it, you da man, even when a girl reaches out from the far side of the world…
—Cry havoc, off in the Outback.
—You da man, seeing what a girl’s saying, right there on his screen.
—It’s havoc. Google just those two words and you might as well put them on my tombstone.
—What? Tombstone? Mel, I mean, that’s not the kind of talk I came looking for.
—She utters a shrill cry of warning, but it’s too late. Already he’s under the bulldozers.
—Okay now, lover, this kind of talk?
—Callie, it’s our feature, our project—the movie I’d been trying to make since I left Galveston!
—This kind of apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo? Zombies on the horizon? This is exactly how, when it got weird, you made it weirder.
—Bad enough that my Callie Cuddles had to run off just when we’d gotten the green light.
—Here they come, lurching over the horizon, hungry for living flesh…
—Bad enough that, as soon as the thing becomes something, soon as the project gets to storyboards and mockups, she tells me she needs some space.
—Okay now, what I texted, I’m looking at it. “Troubleshoot,” there it is, not a code word. Now, lover, can we lose this and do that?
—Troubleshoot. What I’m looking at is more like shoot to kill.
—Can we lose this? Can we go back to before it got weird? Used to be, with you and me, what mattered was the dream. We were Team Dream. Can’t we go back? Can’t we just look at what we’re trying to make happen up on the screen?