While I was setting up the microphone she made two cups of tea. She brought them into the room on a wooden tray, and because the beanbag chair was in the corner of the room, she had to reach over me to set the tea on the table. Partly it was the lavender scent she was wearing, and partly it was the fact that I’d just seen the movie Notorious, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. In the lobby of my hotel they’d set up a television that played old movies, and it wasn’t that I was comparing her with Ingrid Bergman, but when she sat down, cross-legged on a pillow, I noticed a kind of Ingrid Bergman beauty in her cheekbones. In the movie, Ingrid Bergman played a kind of prostitute, and I was going to ask Jane about her experience with prostitution in the neighborhood when she started explaining to me about the young-adult fiction she was writing. She said it was aspirational, meaning that her readers were aspiring to be different. She was sitting on the pillow, with the microphone on the beanbag naugahyde between us, and as she talked I was looking at her face, which was thoughtful yet playful, and I felt attraction. Her looks and her manner were easy and natural, and I liked her. And it’s natural, when you like someone, to want the feeling reciprocated. And to facilitate that reciprocation, I sat up in the beanbag, pressing my shoulder blades deeper into my back, hoping a change in my posture would effect a reaction in her. But she didn’t seem to notice. She was concentrating on the microphone, trying to be interesting and articulate for the readers of the magazine I was supposedly writing for.
“Their personalities,” she said, “are like the bones of babies,” and when she gestured, she looked at me, and she asked me, “Do you have any children?” I told her I didn’t, and she nodded — she paused first, then nodded — and as I watched her talking I was thinking that yes, she was an author now, but she hadn’t always been an author. I thought I was seeing through the role of author, through her interest and expressiveness, to who she really was. I thought I was being perceptive until I realized there was something about the way she was sitting on her pillow, with the sunlight hitting the side of her face, her hands waving in the air, and the fact that she was honestly answering my questions. Although I thought I was seeing her role, in actual fact, she wasn’t playing any role.
And it’s easy to say to someone, Be yourself, and I could have said it to her, but because she was being herself, I began thinking about who I was. I was feeling a tightness in my chest, which is usually an indication that I’m about to do something or say something to spoil an otherwise enjoyable experience. And what I did, in response to that, was think of someone who would do something different. I thought about Steve Martin, but I didn’t know many Steve Martin movies, and since I’d just seen a Cary Grant movie, and because Cary Grant, in the history of leading men, was someone I didn’t mind emulating, I tried to act like him. I didn’t talk like Cary Grant or do a Cary Grant imitation, but I tried to relax. And in that relaxation I became a little more honest. I told her what I was doing. I admitted that I wasn’t really writing a magazine story about her neighborhood. And that’s when Jane suggested we take a walk.
“You can leave the microphone,” she said, and she put Rex on a leash and we set off, up through the eucalyptus trees behind her house. She lived near Elysian Park, and we were walking Rex up the trails, traversing the hillside, and Rex, old as he was, seemed to love to be outside, smelling the world. He was running ahead, off his leash now, happy to be sniffing the various stumps and bushes and clumps of leaves. She told me the main reason she chose the house was so Rex could have the park. “Rex is quite a dog,” I said, and she said that he was indeed quite a dog.
“He’s old,” she said, “but he’s photogenic,” and she brought out her phone and showed me what seemed to be a collection of photos. There was Rex with his paw in the air, and Rex eating his food, and Rex sleeping, and then there was a photo of what appeared to be a naked woman’s body, in a bathtub. And then she closed her phone.
“Who was that?” I said. “That wasn’t Rex.”
“I don’t know how that got on there.”
She turned toward Rex so that I couldn’t see her face, but I assumed the photo was a photo of her, and as I watched her running after Rex, in my mind I began combining the two images, her in her sweat pants and T-shirt, and the naked body lying in the tub.
Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach, in England. He left school early, joined a troupe of acrobats, began acting, and then he changed his name. It was to a young Cary Grant that Mae West said her famous line, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” In those first films, although he’d taken the name of Cary Grant, he was still developing a character different than the character of Archibald Leach. With time, however, the Cary Grant he named himself became the Cary Grant he was, and I wanted to be like that. Not changing my name, but changing what I was. I wanted to be what he was, and since partly what he was was an acrobat, I started climbing onto the rocks. There were some large boulders next to the trail and I started walking on those. Rex, who was panting at this point, stayed on the trail watching me, and Jane was also watching, and I was glad she was watching.
“You’re being careful, I hope.”
I was standing on a steep part of a round boulder. I told her my shoes were very sticky.
“It looks precarious.”
And I wanted it to look precarious. She was athletic, and I seemed to be impressing her with my athleticism. So I continued doing what seemed to be working. I ran ahead, feeling good, not quite like Cary Grant, but acrobatic like him, and jumping like him, and in the physical activity of hopping from rock to rock, whatever thoughts I had, about who I was other than Cary Grant, disappeared.
Apparently, in the field of memory acquisition, one school of research claims that very young children actually have no memory, that because their experience of the world is so new, when they see a tree, they can’t compare it with other trees because they haven’t seen enough trees to make the comparison. What would normally be processed as memory gets sent to a part of the brain in charge of pure experience. And it was pure experience for me, scampering along the rock ledge, running along, watching the rock where my foot would land, and then, before it landed, looking for the next rock, trusting my foot to land on the rock I’d seen a half second earlier.
I wasn’t being a complete Cary Grant, but because I was letting Cary Grant take over the jumping, it got to the point where I felt light, like air, and as I glided over the rocks, part of me was thinking about weightlessness and part of me was thinking about the end of Notorious. That’s when Cary Grant, who until that time had been judgmental and disdainful toward Ingrid Bergman, was able to see her, not as a spy or a slut or an alcoholic brat, but as a woman whose love he could possibly return.
And that’s when I fell.
I thought I was pretty good at telling which rocks were stable, and I thought this particular jump was an easy jump. But the rock I was jumping on, which had seemed solid and stable, moved, and my ankle, which was already weak, twisted. And when I fell I could tell I was hurt, not seriously, but enough to know I should probably put some ice on it. Or at least go back to my hotel.