His door is ajar. He is of course there, drinking, not painting. He is thinking of painting, but the only thing he wants to paint is the girl from the photo. And so he goes to the studio every day and drinks himself into oblivion and either sleeps in his own excess or stumble-fucks his way back home. I don’t know how these people stay alive, but they do. They do. And then they don’t.
How you frame it is all in her hands.
She takes her right hand out of her coat pocket and you move to slow motion again. Her hand then takes up the entire shot, larger than life. Her hand (with blood-red traces) pushes the door open as if she is moving gender itself.
He turns and looks at her, but the camera’s point of view is hers, not his, and so he looks small and puzzled, like a circus midget, at first. Then he looks like a tiny symbol of a man whose prayers have been answered, and he lowers his head, and no I am not kidding, he cries. Huge heaves like a kid. He cries and cries.
You will think there are pages missing, whole scenes.
But there are no pages or scenes missing.
This is the room of art.
Your life rules do not apply here.
Hold still.
I have related this earlier, but I will remind you: the first thing he says, the first words out of his mouth are, I have been painting you.
There is no conversation about this.
There is nothing that. . confuses her or hoodwinks her or overpowers her.
She simply removes her clothes — and how you film this is mostly through color and odd angled blur, a little abstract and almost underwater looking — until she is nude there before him, except that again it is not his point of view, so it is not really before him, and to the audience it looks like some mythic woman god taking up nearly the entire frame except for the almost-cowering man in the lower-right-hand corner.
A miniature man of a man. Twitchy and nervous and simian.
Her body is enormous and milk-blue-aqua.
It almost glows.
You fill the screen with her out-of-focus back and ass and oceans of blond hair. And you take a further risk: you let the camera linger there, with the little monkey of a man frantically painting in the small right-lower corner, for an enormously long time.
It isn’t very dramatic how they come to each other. It’s actually rather simple: His erratic monkey-man gestures finally overtake him and he lunges at her and she absorbs him, like energy disappearing into its opposite.
She laughs, but the sound is loving, not mocking.
For four days, they wrestle-fuck — what is making love — what has it ever been — what is it in this moment — violent “making”—on the floor in the paint and the sweat and the secretions of a male body and a female body. They eat and drink minimally, mostly alcohol and water and pretzels and oranges.
A word about mouths and hands.
You will have to work hard to figure out a way to do credit to this on film. Because the fact is, their devouring mouths and their uncontrollable hands are much more important than their genitals. This has never been filmed before, nor captured in writing, but it is the truth beneath the lie of what usually passes for the “sex scene,” and all I am doing is naming it.
This may not be true for everyone, but it is true for them: that their mouths and their hands are the center. The absolute fulcrum from which all energy emerges. And every other organ or opening is simply an extension or metaphor.
It goes without saying that they both bleed, numerous times.
Biting, scratching, tearing, cutting.
It goes without saying that they paint together with blood.
Four days.
A bloody, messy lovemaking.
That’s it. That’s the scene.
The End. Two
When the girl was walking toward the door of the artist’s warehouse, there was a voyeur.
The photographer.
As random as any image of our lives, she happened to have returned to the States then. She happened to be walking down the street going in the other direction. She was not, in fact, thinking of the American male painter, even as she knew his studio was brushing her right shoulder. Her life path took her past the studio plenty of times, and this time she was thinking of more important things.
But that day she saw the face of a girl-turned-to-woman that made her gasp. The fall air pulled into her lungs, then shot out again.
The prizewinning face, the face that changed her life forever.
Older, yes, much, but still.
Her face burned as it was into her retina, her skull, her heart.
And she is fully aware of what has transpired in the plot of all of their lives. The photographer knows the story. They told her in e-mails and faxes and phone calls. She had never let it enter her mind. At least not fully. She couldn’t. Too much. The image incarnate. Too much.
In fact, though they are not aware of it, she has severed her relationship with this company. She cannot bear the weight of them, and her new life has somehow untethered itself from everything she was connected to before. She hasn’t the heart to tell them; her plan is simply to live without them.
The only one of them she wants to see, was on her way to see, is the writer.
They say she has recovered.
They say she is alive with writing.
They say the girl’s story — and her alive son — and the drive of her husband — brought life back to her. That they pieced her back together from a dead place. Strange made-up family.
She didn’t let it into her and she didn’t let it be true and she didn’t think. She said to herself, Don’t think. Too much.
And so, as she walks briskly to see the writer, whom in truth she wants to devour with a kiss though she is incapable of doing so, she sees the girl from the photo. Her photo. The girl who was lost after the photo.
She sees her enter the warehouse building of the American male painter.
She stands there dully for several minutes.
Still shot.
And then she walks back to her car and sits in it for four days, eating PowerBars, squatting by the sidewalk to pee when no one is looking, walking to a corner café to shit or eat or drink more, unable to leave until she witnessed the girl again.
But the girl does not reappear. She thinks perhaps she missed her in one of her sprints to the café, but somehow she also thinks she did not, that she is inside, with him, that this is how history moves, a man and a woman, violence and desire, time and the moon and nations in fragments and nonsensical bursts.
Her hair looks like hell.
Her pussy and her armpits itch.
How long will she wait for the image of the girl?
When the photographer finally takes the elevator up and opens the door to the loft and walks up the stairs to where she can smell the scent of human, what she sees first is the body of the girl covered in red, which she takes to be blood, splayed out ass-side up on a futon. Then she sees the artist leaning on the ledge of the loft wall, then she sees the gun — a gun — on the floor. She sees the gun and all she can think is, This is the gun. The son of a bitch has kept the gun, all these years, and now his true colors are all over the fucking place — he’s shot another one. He’s shot another woman. Since he is not moving — he looks as if he’s in some kind of trance, or he’s so drunk he can’t stay upright — she moves calmly toward the gun on the floor and picks it up and aims it at him.
“What have you done. What the fuck have you done.”
To which he responds by opening his mouth, closing his eyes, and raising his hands palm-side up. He looks like a middle-aged Jesus, bloated and puffy with drink.
She makes a bad assumption because of. . well, everything. Her past, her present, everything they are and have been and everything she wishes she could have been and everything she has become. She assumes the girl is dead, since she isn’t moving.