NYC Noir

Waldorf is leaving NY at the end of this month. Among the countless ways that would adversely change my life here, it also means I must get used to going to movies alone. And without anyone to tolerate my pontificating after each screening, that burden will have to fall on you, dear reader.

Short of love and friendship, watching certain films in 35 mm is as close to true happiness as I can get. Which was why Rear Window at Film Forum was an unexpected blessing after a most hideous week.

Lisa: You don't think either one of us could ever change?

Jeff: Right now, it doesn't seem so.

Lisa: I'm in love with you. I don't care what you do for a living. I'd just like to be part of it somehow. It's deflating to find out the only way I can be part of it is to take out a subscription to your magazine...

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Waldorf looking over at me nervously, knowing that these lines have a certain resonance with my own personal struggles. I nearly choked from the onslaught of sorrow and rage—that I could allow it to taint one of my most treasured films is troubling. Very troubling.

What I want is to avoid that trap of inflating ordinary and fundamental daily occurrences into maudlin reminders:

“I took him to this restaurant once… he said it was the best [sobs]… scallops [sobs]… he ever had!… [sob, sob, sob].

“Did you order scotch? That was his drink… [sobs].”

“What is that you have there [gulp] —a guitar? Oh god… [sobs].”

To some extent, grieving in such a way is unavoidable. But, I would not want to force my friends to deal with a melodramatic and self-pitying Chiik. Is there anything more tiresome and unfair? And if I start to behaving like an emotional cripple, I really hope that someone would take a bludgeon to my head.

So enough.

Having seen this newly restored print for the first time, I noticed several new details that really enhance the experience.

On the big screen, you can see what L.B. Jeffries sees. Now I know why he is totally hooked, rear-window ethics be damned. It’s like Flickr. From the smoke from Miss Lonelyhearts’s candles to the crumbs on Miss Torso’s chest. Both ladies are less attractive than I remembered. Knives and saws wrapped in newspaper. You finally understand how Jeffries could possibly know that Lars Thorwald was dialing long distance and see the details of the rings as he holds each one up. And it is much easier to spot the shrinking yellow zinnias.

To date, Thorwald had just been the bad guy—a cheating louse who wanted to throw over his invalid wife for another woman. He's going to run out on her, the coward! But because the conversation fragments are much less audible on my TV than in the theater, I had no way of understanding how awful the Mrs was. She's a total harpy.

“I hope it’s cooked this time.” She flung the rose from the meal tray—the meal which Thorwald so lovingly prepared. Here was Lars Thorwald, a door-to-door costume jewelry salesman, trapped with a bedridden nag who doesn't love him. It inspires pity. I know it isn’t an excuse for adultery and offing his wife, but I am sure this wasn't the life that he wanted.

Worse, Mrs. Thorwald took perverse pleasure in Thorwald's predicament, mocking his proverbial impotence, taunting him: “Ha! Did you tell her you were married?? [holding her belly as if she were cackling]” Before this, I had only seen the gesture without the audio context. Sheesh. And he had a serious five-o’clock-shadow and bloodshot eyes the day after. Poor Lars. He must have been exhausted. And of all the bad luck to have L.B. Jeffries (in a cast) as a neighbor—busybody in possession of bionic hearing, flabby body, and telephoto lenses.

---

Cody sent an email with a single line: "We have to get moving on our sequel." Attached was an article from the Guardian called 'Of all the beachfront restaurants in India, she walks into mine' reporting on a Bollywood remake of Casablanca. This reminded me of something. We were going to start a production company—one that specializes in making unmakeable sequels.

For a start:

Waldorf’s
“Thank you, Lars!”
Synopsis: L.B. Jeffries and Lisa Fremont finally marry and have their honeymoon in the Brazilian rainforest—without raincoats. In their cozy little bungalow, the bickering escalates. Jeffries snaps and uses all the techniques that he observed from Lars Thorwald to dispose of his new wife.

Cody’s
“Return to Rick’s”
Synopsis: The Nazis intercept Victor Laszlo’s plane before it could reach Lisbon. He is killed. Ilsa narrowly escapes and finds Rick and Louis on another island. She would like Rick to help with the cause. Sasha the barman turns on Rick and help the Nazis. Rick's choices are stay where he is, help Ilsa, or return to New York (which he left because of another woman, in flashback sequence).

Chiik’s
“The Sneaky Russian”
Synopsis: Gutman and Joel Cairo break Brigid O’Shaughnessy out of prison. They recruit a reluctant Sam Spade for a little game of revenge. Spanning across three continents, the gang tracks down Kemidov and beats the tar out of him. But this time, it’s Wilmer that gets the last laugh.

Insomnia

I can deal with the drama. It's the absence that's hard.



Go ahead. Ask me what I'm doing at these early hours of the morning. I'm sure you couldn't guess. Here I am, standing by the kitchen counter, face swollen from the constant tears, reeking from cigarettes, fingers shoving moist chunks of barbecue brisket into my mouth.

I'm going to be sick.

I've deleted his messages from my phone. Every one. As far back as October. When you really add up all the days and hours, it probably didn't amount to any more than two or three months. He had such a presence in my mind, though, for this past year that is it difficult to make that disappear. I don't know that I want to.

I miss him.

I was right...

... it is worse than anticipated.

I have nothing new or profound to contribute to all the awful blogging on breakups. I'm unwell, which is to be expected. But rest assured, dear reader, I am in no danger of plunging myself into Crazy Valley. Thus far, I've used my brain to the utmost, in order to anesthetize myself for it. But it is difficult to sustain detachment from one's emotions and as with all opiates, that numbing effect has worn off.

Here are a few things that I am thinking:

1. My favorite translation of the ideogram 愛 (ai) is Burton Watson's: "cannot bear to part with" because it better captures the agony than the abstract and more commonly translated term "love." I'm having a difficult time with the idea that I will probably never see him again.
2. As Trey says: Why can't people just act right? It is startlingly simple, but this is a pervasive concern. More specific to this situation, an aversion to hurt him competes with that interest of making myself intelligible to him, seeing him answerable for his conduct. If he could experience even a modicum of my pain, would he be able to justify it?
3. I regret not having absconded with one of his t-shirts from the hamper. I'm sure that the idea is repugnant/unhygienic to you, dear reader. And I'm sure that the last thing I need at this point is to be curled up in bed sobbing my eyes out into a raggedy wad of cotton. But, he really is the best-smelling guy I've known.

Apostasy

“Lucretius anticipated David Hume in saying that the prospect of future annihilation was no worse than the contemplation of the nothingness from which one came.” As you might have guessed, dear reader, I’ve been flipping through Christopher Hitchens’s latest book. It isn’t a startling argument that most people are possessed of a religious impulse to worship in order to allay that fear of nonexistence, to survive death and achieve immortality—that they, however brilliant, will choose to eschew reason for the illusion that “there exists a god who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

So here I am, appropriating Hitchens’s appropriation of Lucretius (or Hume) and presenting it to you, dear reader, third- or fourth-hand. My purpose is not to discuss religion, but faith of a different sort. A realization. I never considered myself “prone to that solipsism…which imagines that the universe is preoccupied with one’s own faith.” In spite of this, I surprise myself in the past year by the willingness to which I ceded over my confidence and faith to just this fallacy: my dependence on love from some external source, without which my happiness would be incomplete. Nothing but my own willingness to examine all of the evidence will have me understand that I have been alone all along, it seems.

Once loneliness holds no terror, it is easy to see: (1) the love that I imagined may not and likely does not exist except in abstract. To borrow and vulgarize Kant’s ontological argument (as stated by Betrand Russell), the Darcy that I merely imagine have all the same predicates as a real Darcy. (2) what’s more, I don’t need him.

This is not to say that ending this will be painless. In fact, it will probably be worse than I can now anticipate. All I can do is remind myself that I haven’t gained or lost a thing. It’s all been a dream…

Winky and "the Brain"

“Yeah? If you’re so smart, what’s a half divided by a third?”

I stared at him in disbelief. When I tell people what I do for a living, that isn’t usually their response.

The correct answer is not 1.5, dear reader. Unbeknownst to me, I had found myself in an interview for a position I had little desire to attain. The intended goal of the question was not to ascertain but to demean my accomplishments. Any attempt to respond would be an acknowledgement of this idiot question—that it was an adequate and appropriate measure of ability.

I wish I could say that were he not DH’s twin brother, I would scarcely allow him to speak to me in such a manner without a stinging riposte. But the truth is, I’m a softy. My disposition is not nasty, nor brutish, nor short—ill equipped to survive in a state of “warre of every man against every man.”

I had assumed that most adults interested in measuring my abilities would simply engage me in conversation. By conversation I do not mean verbal exchanges within an adversarial framework, which outcome must yield a definite winner and a definite loser. By conversation, I do not mean:

“Anyone can talk… got any money on you? Want to bet on it? How much?” And, yes, I consider it appalling to bully a near stranger into staking a humiliating wager. It compounds the insult.

To be fair and to put this all in context, it was a difficult time for the family. Only the heartless would deny compassion for DH and his brothers, who must watch both parents undergo rapid deterioration of mental and physical health. And if this is the cause of one’s rudeness, then so be it. But, I cannot pretend, dear reader, that I am immune to the petty indignities endured that weekend. Even if a portion was the workings of my hypersensitive imagination, the remainder were undeserved slights—at least, undeserved by me.

I understand all of the reasons why DH brought me down there that weekend. And, I also understand why his brother would resent my intrusion. It was painfully clear that he regarded me as an opportunist whose purpose is to insinuate into the family. And if his demeanor toward me was chilly, his wife, Winky, achieved what scientists believed only theoretical—bringing temperatures down to Absolute Zero Kelvin (–273.15 °C). In Boca, no less.

Before the trip, DH predicted that she and I would get on well. We are so alike, he said. I'll totally love her. Now that I've met her, I can't say that I appreciate the comparison. Then again, men are less attuned to female territoriality. And it is difficult to cozy up with any woman who behaves as one's mere existence was a personal affront.

“It wouldn’t have mattered who you are,” said Toby, the eldest brother. “They would have hated you anyway because of the situation. It isn’t personal.”

I like Toby and appreciate his efforts to welcome me (if somewhat prematurely) into the family. But, his assessment is also off the mark. Their animus may have been non-specific, but it is entirely personal. How could it be otherwise? In their eyes, I am an empty object, the most visible manifestation of what they believe to be DH's midlife crisis, abhorrent to his twin brother but even more so to his brother’s wife.

Overheard (Day 2): “I am secure! I am secure in my place as a woman...as a loving wife...as a mother of two...in my career. I am not at all threatened.” Winky’s protestations belie her argument, methinks—in the same way that her persistent references to her accomplishments have me believe that such confidence is for my benefit. Either that, or she thinks the family requires constant reminder to that effect, which would be bizarre, lame or both. The compulsion to qualify statements needlessly with non-sequiturs as “As a medical doctor…” makes those insecurities transparent as to be cringe-inducing. What is that idiom: pena ajena? As a woman, her embarrassment is mine. And the anxiety of compensating for youth by those who no longer possess it engenders pathos, but not so much that it forgives the wrong of causing injury to others through quiet condescension.

She has difficulty addressing me except in the third person, communicating with me only through other people in the room. She does give a grudging direct answer when I ask her a direct question. But even in such situations, her eyes are fixed on some point on the floor or the wall, as if she’s talking to the furniture. Because she has no reason to address me as a peer, an adult. To countervail the perceived threat of a significantly younger woman, Winky sought to reduce me (ostensibly, the significantly younger woman) to the diminished status and mental capacity of a child.

Else, how can we account for her gasp of horror when she overheard me confess to Toby that I do not read Bukowski? "OH MY GOD! I LOVE Bukowski! Toby, don't you love Bukowski? DH, Bukowski is your favorite, right?”¹ Indeed. I might just be an illiterate yokel, but Bukowski isn't exactly the voice of my generation, man.

Or consider this comment to her 15-year-old son while his father, DH, and I sat around, each drinking beer, contemplating the division of 1/2 by 1/3: “Son, I would have given you a beer, but Chiik drank the last one.” Had I known it was the last one, I would have certainly reserved it for the enjoyment of her underage son. But it wasn’t DH or DH’s brother, but I who took her son’s beer, because we are in the same age group? Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that as a medical doctor, she possesses a level of sophisticated power-play that goes beyond “Chiik is a jerk for drinking the last beer.”

I can accept that members of DH's family may simply not like me. I have been disliked by far worthier people, who have had cause. Dear reader, why can't people just act right? It's not just the fractional arithmetic, or the wagering, or Bukowski, or internal beverage politicking. It's just exhausting having to mind the tedious or the small-minded, who look only to inflict damage by scores of psychological papercuts.