Ash Cinema Read online

  'Good then?'

  'Like nothing I've ever seen before and it was made eighty years ago. I can't believe that, that this guy, Carl Dreyer, could do so much so long ago.'

  You talked about him for days and tracked down all his films, then it was Renoir and Kurosawa, Ozu and Lang, Huston and Welles, and then you ran into France and walked through Truffaut, Malle, Godard, Melville, and others I could never remember.

  We lost track of one another again for the reason we always did. I met someone new and you sunk beneath the horizon writing me letters faster than I could read and then hiding for months refusing to see or speak to me. I think you were the reason so many of my relationships fell apart back then.

  Neither of us knew how to be happy without the other but neither could we be together.

  'The problem is that you're perfect for me but I'll never be even good enough for you.'

  Reading that broke my heart for the hundredth time. I know you didn't mean to because you were so hurt but you could often times be right brutal.

  When we came together I always asked you about films so I could see you smile. Elsewise you were somber and forlorn. I hated to see you like that because a part of me thought it was my fault. Even though you threw all your knife edge words at me for so many months, I always felt that I hurt you and not the other way.

  But you did, Marcel. You hurt me in ways that no one else ever could.

  It was during this time away from me that your journey through time and across the globe truly began. I didn't believe but then I watched it unfold.

  'There's this film by Adolph Sarre,' your words slurred together from the excitement. Unable to even break up syllables long enough to make the words distinct, such was the manic look in your eye and I knew it had been too long since you slept.

  'Who?'

  'Doesn't matter. I'm going to Paris, though.'

  'When's the last time you ate?'

  'What? Who gives a shit. I'm talking about moving.'

  'Let's get something to eat.'

  We walked to that café we breakfasted at sometimes. Your volatile body could only just contain the way your mind raced and I knew you hadn't given this any thought and that you must have only found out about this hours before. I didn't let you talk until you ordered and only a few words until you ate all your eggs.

  'Let's go, I need a cigarette.' Your hands shook and you blinked too often. I feared you were about to combust right there in front of me.

  You lit two and gave me one even though I told you I didn't want one but I smoked it all the same. Red Puffin.

  'You're wrong, Gina, I have thought about it a lot. All day.'

  'Don't call me that.'

  You stopped for the first time, your eyebrows squeezing your eyes down. 'What?'

  'Virginia.'

  'What?'

  'Don't call me Gina. I don't like it.'

  You stared at me for a second as if to say, Who cares, and I knew that's what you thought until a new expression washed over your face like an eclipse and your eyes turned cold and sorrowful. I think I burst you out of the mania you glided through that day. Burst your heart and reminded you that I was lost to you. Oh, you said.

  'You can't move to France.'

  'I am, though.' You spat out your cigarette and shoved your hands deep into your pockets and your gait slowed the way it did when you were about to tell me something I didn't want you to. You watched the pavement beneath our feet the way I always did but I kept glancing up hoping your eyes would meet me in the middle.

  'Why?'

  'I'm moving for the year. Study abroad. I already got the paperwork.'

  'You don't even speak French.'

  'I'm learning.'

  'But why?'

  'For film.' The answers were all short and I lost you again without trying.

  'I'll miss you.'

  'I already do.'

  Stabbed through the stomach is how it felt. The only thing that kept me walking was the heat and the sweat. The smell of cut grass and our shoes staining green beneath our feet. I wanted to scream at you and cry and make you look at me but you never did.

  And he went to France. We made up before then and it became our new tradition. Our friendship bloomed every time he left again to wander other worlds and when he left I had another letter at my door or shoved onto the sill. Another one of those masterpieces of love and apology and accusation. Never was I sure that he would return alive from the way he wrote. He burnt from both ends and from all sides. His death was always on my mind the way I knew it was always on his.

  He returned after a year of brief communications. I e-mailed him and he responded within hours but I never could. His life was so different there than it was in America. He wrote me pages and pages and pages but all I returned to him were sentences about a new man and loneliness weeks after his latest tome. In between he wrote letters full of songs and poems he wrote and theories about art he had.

  By the end of that year apart we couldn't recognize one another.

  He told me about The Death of Marat but I don't remember. He talked for days about it but never wrote anything down in his letters to me about it. I could read about it now if he had.

  ***

  Late at night I can't sleep so I sneak out of bed and write down my memories of him and I pretend he hears my pencil scratching through the wall. Often times I page through his many letters. Some of the pages yellowed and others have stains from when I was too young to know how important they were.

  I like it best here when the moon comes round to show her face to me. If not for you always referring to the moon as a she I would likely still believe the moon was a man. She flowers strong tonight before me and I even shut off the lamp to write in her glow. The page lost to my eyes but my hands got good at knowing a page from touch and the pencil runs smooth for now.

  Easiest now to recreate you when I cannot see what it is that I do. Your grey eyes and your crooked nose and the acne scars that only become visible when I'm too close. You were always ashamed of them but never did they look so noticeable or bad as you believed.

  This is the way you returned to me all these years since you left me for eternity. That young man of sixteen or seventeen smoking cigarettes barefoot on his roof in a peacoat too large, silhouetted by the beckoning moon.

  'I believe in the tide and I believe in her,' your crooked finger aimed like a gun to the nightsky.

  My arm pressed into the crook of your arm, we really were perfect then that spring before our first summer and the misfortunes brought on by that fall.

  'I believe in death.'

  A different time near the end of our unforgettable year. Sixteen, in love and perfect, always. When fall hit and the leaves turned so did you and everything fell by the time the trees were bare.

  'He asked me to be his girlfriend.'

  'I know.'

  'How?'

  'I saw it in you months ago.'

  He sought for signs back then. Always taken by his obsessions for his entire life. For so long it was death, especially his own death and mortality. If his life kept any consistent note then that was it. His obsession with his death and it's how he ended it all so many years later.

  Meaning and semantics and theme and reason and threads existed everywhere in his head and he took the slightest of my expressions or the tone of my voice as an indicator of some bad omen or oncoming doom.

  Never did it last because of his inability to be. To simply be and stop thinking.

  'Gina, I want to tell you something.'

  The wind turned cold and that moon was the last we would share like that. I never expected him to turn from me but he did. He drank to die after that and buried his dreams underground. He never recovered from the fact that romance happened to me beyond him and that I did not want his love anymore. Time went by and I waited for him to speak but he didn't. 'Tell me.' I didn't look at him because I feared what I would see there so I stayed in the crook of his arm with my head o
n his shoulder and hand on his ribcage.

  'I won't survive my thirtieth year.'

  'Don't talk like that.'

  'I won't survive my life.'

  'Stop.'

  'I need to tell you.'

  'Don't.'

  'I've seen it a hundred times for a hundred days and maybe it's what drove you away, the fact that I've been so distant and crazy but I can't sleep or think or do anything anymore. All I can think of is you and when it's not you it's the death I know waits for me thirteen years from now. I'm not afraid and I'm ready but there's so much I need to do before then. And when I die I want you to be there. Promise me you'll be there.'

  His voice stayed steady and I knew what it meant but I never believed. The wind howled and an owl made that noise owls make, which I never thought sounded like a hoot or even who but more like a song that forgot all the instruments. His heart beat against my hand but he wasn't nervous or afraid. His hand rubbed my arm from elbow to shoulder with added pressure to keep me from the cold and to remind me of him.

  'Promise me.'

  'I can't,' I whispered and I didn't believe he heard me but I know he did.

  ***

  His year in France did nothing to quell his wanderlust. If anything it only ballooned it to magnificent proportions. He talked his whole life about leaving but I never did believe till he left for France only to return another man who was welcomed by a me that was no longer the one he knew. He lived a lifetime in that year abroad but for the first time I had not aged with him.

  He was alone. His eyes carried his lonesomeness but he spoke nothing of it ever again. Not to me at least.

  His journey continued and he dropped college to search the world for films that no one else had seen or heard of. He found reels of Lang films in South America and Kurosawa in Poland and unheard of Kieslowski in Ukraine. He never even told me how he funded the first trip to Denmark chasing the myth of Dreyer's original reels for The Passion of Joan of Arc but after he discovered a few prints his reputation grew though he never did find Dreyer's original.

  He wrote me letters even then and somehow knew always where I was though I imagine many of his words got lost to the changes my address made in those years.

  For five years he wandered the globe chasing the ghosts of celluloid. I fell in love with Terry during that time and we married before Marcel returned.

  On my wedding day there was an enormous package from him filled with pages and pages and pages but also a congratulations and a hope for my happiness.

  Promise me you will always be happy. One line caught amidst a maelstrom of chaos and I feared again that he died writing to me and that the man who finally found his way home to me would be another yet.

  ***

  Who is Sebastian Falke? It was the first question I had when Marcel rang our doorbell at three in the morning the Christmas Eve of our first nuptial year.

  He shivered horribly and kept stamping his leather shoes to remain warm. A new man with new clothes and even a new peacoat that fit him. More handsome than I remembered and he was dressed well. I had never seen him wear a collar or wear a tie or own clothes that didn't have at least a few holes but there he stood through my bleary eyed gaze in a tailored three piece suit and well cut peacoat. He left a petulant vagabond and returned a foppish dandy but still he bit the end of his cigarette and kept his hands shoved deep in pant pockets.

  I opened the door to his smile and he spat out the cigarette, 'I know what I need to do, what comes next,' but before he could continue my arms swung round him and he held me until I cried and muttered, I missed you so much.

  When he finally brought me inside and we sat the mania filled his eyes and voice again the same way I remember him always being halfmad and fully in love but this time it was only the movies. He spoke too fast and his accent had lost it's place amidst the years he spent away. Vaguely English or Scottish and maybe even bits of German and French invaded his intonation and cadence. He spoke quietly the way he never before had. His lines made no sense and he talked until the sun began to climb over the horizon about a man I never had heard of and even still only know through Marcel. It was an hour before I got a word in and I never got a chance to ask him the questions that mattered like where he had been and what he had seen or who he was now or a hundred different things because all that came out of my mouth was, 'Who is Sebastian Falke?'

  'He's who I've been talking about all night and the man I've been looking for since before I knew I needed to know him. But I know where he is, I think. I heard whispers of him all over Europe and Asia but no one had seen him and only a handful had ever seen what he did but he's why I had to come home.'

  'You came here to tell me about a director?'

  'Yes, but he's not just a director. He's the spirit of cinema and the genius lost in the reels of time. He's the voice of American artistry that everyone turned deaf to and I think it killed him and it may have killed his work because no one knows what happened to it and all that exist are a few reviews here and there that laud him as a genius and ridicule him as a buffoon.' He slowed for the first time and his voice got even quieter when he finally continued. We sat in the halflit morning with only the sound of the house breathing and his soft voice. He lowered his head and stared at the floor between us and then raised his eyes to see though his head still bowed, 'I came here straight from the airport, too, to see you. I came here to tell you my next step as a Christmas present.'

  Terry came down the stairs then and met Marcel for the first and one of the few times. Marcel was visibly agitated by him and never did make eye contact. He was polite, however, and cordial and tried to express enthusiasm and well wishes for us and give Terry a few compliments, though he always referred to him as Terrence, which Terry hated. After moments that felt like hours of awkwardness Marcel smiled, 'I forgot why I came,' and pulled out his phone and had a very short conversation that mostly sounded like he kept repeating Hi. He went to the door a moment later and a tall Asian woman entered holding a stack of papers. I felt embarrassed and crossed my arms because I stood in pyjamas when this beautiful stranger with long black hair and fashionable clothes and high heels strolls in from the cold wearing a long black overcoat.

  'Gina, this is for you.' He handed me the stack of papers and the first one read

  I Wish He Belonged To Me

  a novel

  Marcel Maddox

  'What is it?'

  'It's my next step and it's for you. Merry Christmas.'

  I felt uncomfortable but couldn't place a name on why.

  'Well, we must be going.'

  My head cleared of the noise and anxieties, 'Where?'

  He looked to the Asian woman who nodded and then back to me, 'California.'

  I shook my head before the words came, 'Why?'

  His smile bloomed like a flower across his face the way it did all those years before. Seven years gone by and though we had changed so much and nothing was the same it was also true that nothing had really become different. 'To find Sebastian Falke.'

  Terry shook his hand and they exchanged goodbyes and nice to meet yous but I couldn't yet let go of him after so long and it hurt me and my heartbeat shuddered from being pulled in too many directions too quickly. 'Won't you at least stay for Christmas?'

  He looked to the woman who was his biographer whose name I would discover to be Miho and her face was unreadable to me but he turned to me once more, 'No, we really must be going.'

  The tears clawed at my throat and welled in my eyes and I no longer could meet his gaze. I hugged him and took in the scent hoping it was the same but all I smelt was the cold air.

  An hour later I found the note when it fell out of my ear: I love you even still, forever.

  ***

  It set a precedent, the way he gave me his book to read before it was ready. It wouldn't be published for five years and I think that he did that on purpose. Waited so long. He was right when he said that I didn't read it because I didn't. Terry did an
d he urged me to because he said it was fantastic but I couldn't. Not yet is what I thought. I was punishing him for the way he disappeared only to disappear again chasing more phantoms of film across the world.

  Miho became his sole executor of his work after he left life. He had nine unpublished novels by the time his life ended and only the one to see the light of day and every Christmas for nine consecutive years following his death a manuscript arrived at my door. Each one the next novel to keep him alive and so he lived on not for me only but for the world who only knew him through his writing and Miho's biography. More and more words.

  His biography was titled A Happy Death and it detailed the many moments I would have liked to keep private. I would blame the collapse of Terry and my marriage on that book but it started that Christmas Marcel came to my door in slivers and cracks that rent us apart and we separated three years after his death.

  Between all that we had a baby girl with his chestnut eyes and curly hair. If ever I did something right in that decade it surely was having a hand in her creation. Never did I know a child to smile and laugh so but the decade after was hard what with the divorce. Her mother died with a man she never loved who took both their lives with him and her daddy treated her well but we spoke sparingly and I imagine that was the worst for her. My Genevieve. She's a woman now. An artist and painter with long black hair that rings round her head and dark eyes that melt men's knees but all her life she kept men away and gave herself to solitude.

  So unlike her parents that I fear at times that she belongs to another couple. She smokes Red Puffins and bites the end the way Marcel always did.

  Marcel's novels: I Wish He Belonged to Me, The Death of the Sun, The Birth of the Moon, . . . And then the Rain, The Bird and the Cat, Half-Beaten Heart, Songs of the Living, Take Me With You, Euripides, and Au Revoir, mes Enfants.

  Tales of madness and tales of love always touched with melancholy and magic as if the rules of the world were unstable and inconsistent. The Bird and the Cat was a children's novel dedicated to Genevieve and I let her read it first and I think it was the moment she became a daughter but not mine. His obsessions shined through what with all the talk of death which he always capitalized and then the everpresent love that never could find a way to work out right. Each one, even the happy ones like Songs of the Living were imbued with a deep and troubling sorrow. It was a collection of short stories all interconnected and linked about the life and love of being young and even though the endings all came happily it somehow makes it more sad. Even when he described glee and tenderness it tended to read anguished as if even pleasure was wrought with tragedy.