Paper Lantern: Love Stories (23 page)

The snow-paved Blockbuster parking lot is empty and Ned leaves the car running, wipers swiping, radio broadcasting a movement titled “Catacombae,” which echoes the spectral world beneath the streets of Paris. Ghosts seem to swirl across the deserted streets of Ned’s city, as well. He rushes in and a white kid with rusty dreadlocks shoots him a dirty look from behind the counter, before directing him to the Action section. It only now occurs to Ned that the movie might be checked out and he scans the rack feeling ridiculously frantic. He’s in luck, it’s there between Steven Seagal’s
On Deadly Ground
and
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
.

Open Range
in hand, Ned opens the car door onto a blasting heater and the majesty of the last movement, “The Great Gate of Kiev.” With no more reason to hurry, he silences the heater and sits in the idling car, staring out at a parking lot, watching as his tire tracks left minutes earlier are obliterated by snow gathering as it might in Kiev. The yellow Blockbuster sign subtracts itself from night. Beneath the blurred streetlights, ascending notes and falling flakes create the impression of a gossamer arch spanning Chicago Avenue. Ned slips the Volvo into gear and drives slowly toward the towering gate of snow that retreats before his headlights, impossible to enter, then topples disassembling before the whirling blue of an oncoming squad car. The vision is more imagined than hallucinated, and Ned wonders how long it’s been since he was stoned for real. Not since a vacation when Ceil wanted to see what sex would be like on hashish. Instead of smoking it, they mixed it with honey and spices based on a recipe for a sweetmeat supposedly served by Alice B. Toklas at Gertrude Stein’s soirees. That night ended in an emergency room, with Ceil faint, terrified, hallucinating. She later said she’d had an out-of-body experience and seen herself dead. “Keep talking to her,” the doctor had told Ned. “Don’t let her slip away.” It’s not a scene he wants to recall.

He thinks instead of the first time he heard
Pictures at an Exhibition
. His best friend in high school, Sal Rio, who played Fender bass in the band they’d started, had on an impulse stolen a Lincoln left idling in a valet parking lot. Their plan was to drive to Toronto, where Miles Davis was supposedly playing at a jazz festival. Neither Ned nor Sal had been to Canada. Instead, high, and joyriding after midnight, they cruised onto the Chicago Skyway, the city aglow beneath them. Ned punched on the stereo and when the orchestral version of
Pictures at an Exhibition
blared out they both began conducting wildly—not that either of them knew what was playing. When Sal dumped the car the next morning, he said, “Man, never made it to Miles, but all was not lost—we got to hear that Russian motherfucker.”
All was not lost
, Ned thinks. After that night, it became their go-to phrase and still makes him smile.

Pictures
over, Ned turns off the radio and makes a left into the Dunkin’ Donuts that has lit the end of his block for the three years he’s lived in the neighborhood. He’s never had the urge to stop there before. Maybe it’s where that cop car was racing from. Ceil claimed their coffee was good. If he’s going to do something so peculiar as to stay up late watching a film that more than one critic complained was, at a hundred and thirty-five minutes, too long, a coffee is in order. He doesn’t want to drowse off and miss the answer to Bening’s question about vanishing.

A woman with lapis-lidded, sleepy eyes, a gold-studded nostril, and a caste mark that looks like misapplied nail polish glances up expectantly when he enters. Her face appears disfigured by a mole on her cheek, but as he approaches the counter, Ned realizes that the mole is the microphone of her headset. “The usual?” she asks.

He isn’t sure whether the question is addressed to someone she’s speaking with on the microphone or to him. She smiles, waiting for an answer.

“Depends on what’s usual,” Ned says.

In the hygienically bright lighting, the trays of frosted donuts look like replicas. He notices a surveillance camera and has a tactile sense of being filmed. It’s as if he’s stepped into a scene of infinitely repeated takes.

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” she says. Her singsong accent would be perfectly in character if she were playing an Indian woman who works late nights at a Dunkin’ Donuts. “He always has a small black coffee and a Bavarian Kreme.”

“Good by me,” Ned says. He’s impatient to step back out into the hypnotic night, but the woman takes her time, selecting a donut, artfully creasing the bag, then fitting with inordinate care the lid on the coffee cup that reads
America Runs on Dunkin’.

“Two eighty-two,” she says, and, when Ned digs into his jeans pocket, she adds, “He always gives me a fiver. Tells me, ‘Keep the change, donut girl.’”

“Maybe that handsome guy you thought was me will come by later,” Ned says, handing her a five.

“No,” she says, “no cabs tonight.”

“He takes a cab here?”

“
Drives
a cab. He’s never come in, just goes through drive-through. He always jokes I’m the most beautiful woman in the donut shop.”

“Keep it,” Ned says, and she stuffs the change into a Styrofoam tip cup on the counter. He doesn’t call her donut girl. Their conversation feels scripted enough already. It was a mistake to stop here. Not only has the spell of what had come to seem like a quest been broken, but a night that seemed spontaneous now seems manufactured.
The snow is real
, Ned thinks,
and the music
.
All is not lost
.

“I told him it was my last night working here,” she says. “I just wanted to say goodbye.”

*   *   *

Ceil was right about the coffee—strong with a hint of licorice—but whoever his cab-driving doppelgänger is doesn’t have the same taste in donuts. Ned crushes the bag with the half-eaten Bavarian Kreme inside and lobs it into a wastebasket. He moves his laptop from the bedroom that serves as an office to an end table in the living room, inserts the DVD, and turns off the only lamp burning in his apartment. He tries to imagine Ceil alone in a dark movie theater years earlier, gazing at a panoramic screen that properly conveyed the big-sky landscape. Or maybe she saw it on a little seat-back screen, during a flight from London or Brussels. Back then, if she wasn’t traveling for her work with a human rights organization, they’d spend every weekend together. It surprises him that he never asked her where she’d seen the movie. He’s watching it now to see it through her eyes.

From its early scenes on,
Open Range
is a love story between cowboys, a
Brokeback Mountain
without kisses. Driving longhorns before him, a grizzled Robert Duvall gallops across the iconic landscape and one of the cowpokes remarks, “Old Boss sure can cowboy, can’t he?” Costner answers, “Yeah, broke the mold after him.”

Earlier, Ned had skimmed an interview online in which Costner said that “
Open Range
starts with language.” The movie’s dialogue is, as the reviews noted, a rehash of other westerns. Usually Ned avoids reading reviews beforehand, so as not to ruin any surprises, but there aren’t any surprises in
Open Range
, unless its degree of sentimentality qualifies. Costner’s Charley Waite has a cute mutt that follows him on the trail. Ned knows from the reviews that the dog is marked for death; he’d have guessed it anyway. It brings to mind
Hondo
, which Ned saw as a child, in which Apaches kill John Wayne’s dog
,
Sam—Ned still remembers the name. Despite all the people slaughtered in
Hondo
, the only loss Ned really felt was the dog’s. He wonders if a young Costner felt the same for Sam and never forgot the effect, both the loss and the justification of violence that went with it—clearly such savage dog-killers deserve extermination. Costner has already used the cruelty-to-canines ploy in
Dances with Wolves. Open Range
ups the ante. As if one murdered dog isn’t enough to establish that Charley Waite—no matter how many men he’s gunned down—has a gentle heart, there’s a scene where he risks his life to save a puppy from a flash flood.

Annette Bening doesn’t appear until partway through. When she does, Ned is suddenly, nervously alert. He listens for the question about vanishing to be posed in Bening’s voice rather than in Ceil’s. It’s not a question for the early stages of a relationship, but Ned knows that the film has reached the point when that question, and its answer, must be coming.

In the online interview, Costner said he thought Bening was “very heroic” for playing a woman her own age without wearing makeup. It gives her a mature, sympathetic look that’s fitting for the nurse she plays. Ned imagines that it’s a look Ceil could identify with, as she, too, was heroic about makeup. But then Ceil’s face was still unlined, except for a worry wrinkle across her forehead, visible when she wore her amber hair tied back. The corners of her eyes crinkled as if she were squinting against the wind when she smiled. Ned can visualize her pale blue, windblown eyes, but not her face. Ceil traveled regularly for work, and early in their relationship, when they didn’t see each other for a couple of weeks, he’d tell her that he was in danger of forgetting what she looked like. She’d pretend to be exasperated that he could forget so easily. He was kidding but only in part; after each absence the beauty of her face struck him anew. That was true of her nakedness as well. To remove her clothes was to release light. He’d watch her dressing or undressing in the mirror as if not daring to look directly into brightness. He wonders now what else he didn’t look at, what else he didn’t see.

Ned doesn’t have a photo of her. On the few occasions when they took pictures, it was Ceil who snapped them. He recalls her fiddling with a new digital camera as they walked out onto a wave-sloshed pier under a bleaching summer sky. Ceil stopped before a small fish that looked as if a wave had flipped it onto a pier. Ned thought she was going to photograph it, but she gently slipped the fish back into the water. They’d gone only a step when an Asian man fishing from the pier turned and yelped, “Miss, you throw away my bait!” Ceil was annoyed when Ned laughed, but by the time they reached the end of the pier, where gulls swirled around a man cleaning salmon, they were both laughing. Ceil asked the man’s daughter to take a picture of them. They didn’t know then, smiling for the camera, that later that night, stoned on hashish, they’d end up in the emergency room. Ned asked for a copy of the picture taken on the pier, as he’d also asked for a picture of her for his birthday present. Ceil gave him instead an antique letter opener that she said would accrue in value. Ceil collected letter openers, pens, and paperweights, which she traded on eBay.

It was that night, after Ned had talked Ceil through her near-death experience in the ER, that she told him about a long-distance affair she’d had before they met, with a man named Dom, who until then she’d only vaguely mentioned. He was a paleontologist who lived in Princeton and ran an online business selling fossils to museums and gift shops. She told Ned the story of how she regarded love at first sight as a cheesy cliché until it happened to her. Their affair had lasted for years and Ceil had subsequently sold or given away the fossils, geodes, gemstones, and meteorites he’d given her. She’d kept only a single rare fossil from the Cretaceous age, of mating dragonflies trapped in amber. Dom had photographed her naked so that during phone sex he could summon what she called “nonvanilla” poses—Dom had a thing for women and bottles. Ceil said posing for him was one of the most erotic experiences of her life. She described their nearly immediate rapport as “speaking the same language”; it was as if she’d met a male twin to a secret self she’d always felt was dirty. Dom, she said, had made it clean. Their sexual likeness had overridden their difference, including his right-wing politics. After she and Dom broke up, Ceil had asked more than once if she could come for a last visit, to watch while he deleted the intimate show he had directed, but he refused, claiming that it would be too painful for him to see her again. He promised to erase the photos. Still, Ceil worried that they were somewhere in cyberspace, posted on one or another of the websites Dom frequented.

Listening to her, Ned understood how profoundly in love she’d been with the paleontologist and the authority the relationship still had in her life. It brought to mind an earlier night with Ceil, in bed, when she’d called him what he thought was “mister” in a little girl’s voice he hadn’t heard before and then apologized. Had she said “master”? Ned wishes he’d thought then to ask: That “same language” that you spoke, what language was it? He’d wondered, but didn’t ask, what it had taken for her to break that long relationship off.

Tonight, he wonders if perhaps Ceil had been sleeping with them both. It would have been easy, given her frequent travel. He wonders if she could have been that devious, if in fact he’d been the catalyst she needed to end things with Dom, if he’d been a player in a love-triangle drama she was directing, a love triangle he hadn’t known he had a part in. He had felt uncomfortable having to press her for what was, in her word—or was it Dom’s?—a simple “vanilla” photo.

It’s nearly three a.m. Costner and Bening have grown closer despite the lack of chemistry between them. As one reviewer remarked, “If the two of them were any more upstanding, they’d be trees.” Though Bening still hasn’t asked the question, she has revealed to Costner that she “always hoped somebody gentle and caring might come along.” The nurse she plays has up to this point abhorred violence, but when Costner replies, “Men are gonna get killed here today, Sue, and I’m gonna kill them, you understand that?” she submissively answers, “Yes.” After the climactic shoot-’em-up, modeled on the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in which the bad guys are wasted, Costner asks her again, “Those killings, they don’t give you pause?”

“I’m not afraid of you, Charley,” she answers. It’s the moment in the film that reviews found least credible, given Bening’s character. But Ned thinks that the film has finally got something right. Afraid? No, she’s turned on, thrilled, ready to brag about her gunslinger. Peace be damned, she just wants to get laid.