The couple ordered their food and ordered their drinks, and I was about to say something else but I didn’t see the point. It was obvious, to them and to me, that I was superfluous. By becoming Steve and then becoming not-Steve, I’d become a nonentity. So I stepped away from the counter, past the condiment area, and because of the architecture of the place, I found myself walking down the gauntlet of tables and sitting on a bench at one of them. I was sitting there, facing the men’s room door, thinking I ought to just pee in a paper cup, when the door suddenly opened. A man with a reflective vest walked out, and before the door could shut, I walked in.
I would have hoped for a cleaner bathroom, but since it was free I couldn’t complain. I urinated in the urinal and washed my hands in the sink, watching my hands sliding around each other in the soap and then the water, and then the automatic hand dryer. And it’s strange because if there’s a mirror around, it’s hard not to look. And I did look. And what I saw, literally, was the glass of the mirror. Not the image in the mirror, but the mirror itself. I knew I was there, in my peripheral vision, but I wasn’t focusing on my image, I was focusing on the actual glass. Partly, it was an eye muscle exercise, a perceptual recoordination, and partly I preferred to see only the glass. If I saw myself then I would exist, and I preferred a world without me, and without all the lumbering disappointment I seemed to carry. And for a while I was able to do this. I could control my vision, for a while, but eventually my eye muscles got tired, or my brain got tired, and when they did I focused, naturally, not on the glass, but on the image in the glass.
I remember thinking that if this was a movie, I would look into the mirror, and with all the significance of mirrors, I would suddenly see what I was and accept myself. With swelling music on the soundtrack, or maybe the ambient sound of traffic, I would go out into the world a new man, a changed person, full of understanding and love, and yes, I did walk out of the bathroom, into the world, but I could only wish I was in a movie. I could only wish that an actual change had taken place, that I would look up and be something different. I could only wish that the man at the ordering counter would look up and smile at me. I could only wish that Jane would suddenly appear, and unable to read the menu, she would turn to me. “Where have you been?” she would say. Or I would say it.
The book I’d been reading contained the script of Galileo, as well as an account of how Brecht and Laughton worked together, translating the text of the play. Because Laughton spoke almost no German, and Brecht very little English, their primary mode of communication was gesture. And because the language of gesture is largely unconscious, they could act out their father-son relationship without ever being aware of it. Because it was a satisfying relationship, trust was developed, and trust bred more trust, and that’s how it started, the collaboration and friendship between the self-confident Brecht and the insecure Laughton.
Mostly they worked in Laughton’s house, on the edge of a cliff in Pacific Palisades. It had a view and a garden, and Laughton, who was a large man, was an avid gardener. He would putter from the rosebushes to the lemons to the flowers in his terra-cotta pots. For him, a garden was a paradise, and Brecht seemed to understand that the puttering and the pacing and the piles of unread books were a part of a process that made the acting possible. Although Laughton was married, he was probably homosexual, and although Brecht derided homosexuality, if love is to some extent the acceptance of an incomprehensible point of view, Brecht had a soft spot for Laughton’s eccentricities. You can almost hear the acceptance in his journal entry: “Often L. would come and meet me in the garden, running barefoot in shirt and trousers over the damp grass. .”
One afternoon, after a long period of heavy rain, they were sitting around Laughton’s fireplace. The rain had stopped, and in the middle of reading some lines of the text, in the middle of a momentary silence, they heard a noise, a rumbling, like the earth moving, and they felt it move. When they stepped outside to check the hillside behind Laughton’s house, they saw that part of the hillside had fallen away. The ground had seemingly opened up, and part of the cliff, and the garden that sat on the cliff, was gone.
I don’t know what happened exactly, but I imagine Brecht standing by the patio doors, watching Laughton walk across the wet grass, his hands holding the sides of his head. If he went crazy over a misplaced prop, now, seeing his paradise ruined, what would he do? Brecht knew Laughton would be devastated, and of course he was, and in the face of that devastation he had a number of options. He could fall to the ground sobbing; he could look to the sky and berate the heavens; or, instead of lamenting the loss of what used to be or what might have been, he could walk out to the edge of what remained of his garden and kneel on the wet grass. Near the edge of the cliff some pots had fallen over, and I imagine him going to these pots, and the ones he could reach, he set them to rights. Brecht watched him as he kneeled on the grass, one hand on the grass and the other hand reaching out into the mud. Laughton’s hands were his tools, and they were wet, and with them he reached out to the still-living roots. He scooped up what soil he could salvage, and he replanted the roots in the pots that were still unbroken. This was the situation that had presented itself, and he wasn’t manic and he wasn’t methodical. And it wasn’t a role he was playing. His utopia had been destroyed, and this was his form of protest.
At that moment, Jane is visiting her friend Christine. Christine lives with her kids off Mulholland Drive, in a house with a redwood deck that overlooks the San Fernando Valley. Christine has been invited to a party, and because Jane is feeling a numbness in her mind, and because that numbness is spreading to her body, and because she wants to feel something other than numbness, she agrees to go. She eats leftover birthday cake with Christine and Lucca and Isabel, and when the babysitter arrives, Jane drives with Christine, through the rain, down the winding road into Hollywood. Christine goes to a lot of clubs, and this particular club is meant to look like a Transylvanian castle, with stone blocks made of painted plywood. The music is loud and the crowd is vibrating, and everyone seems to glow with the glow of a tanning bed or a skin treatment, or the glow of sexual desire. The women, with their bronze skin, all seem to be perfect, their perfect breasts like pieces of jewelry attached to their chests. Although Jane is feeling removed from the bodies and the people inhabiting them, in their seeming happiness it’s as if they’ve seen the light, or some light, some light Jane hasn’t seen, and as she makes her way around the club she’s aware that men want to talk to her. And it’s nice to be noticed, to feel another person’s desire directed at her, but her desire, which normally might respond to another person’s desire, is somewhere else.
She joins Christine at a small table presided over by a Ghanaian diplomat. People come to the table because of the bottles of vodka, and Jane can’t tell who’s supposed to be pouring, but when she reaches over, someone fills her glass. She notices a tall bodyguard standing in the corner watching the table. Then a man, who seems to have barely begun shaving, walks up to her and asks her if she wants to dance. She answers honestly, that she does, and when he invites her onto the dance floor she follows him. The music plays, and her body begins moving to the music, and although the man is watching her and smiling at her, instead of alleviating the numbness, his attention just seems to exacerbate it. And when the dance is over she thanks the man and walks back to the Ghanaian party. The bodyguard is still there, watchful and quiet, and although he’s beneficent enough, as she sits under the sphere of his security, she wants to get away from that security. So she wanders to an outdoor alcove protected from the drizzle.