Alligator - Lisa Moore [46]
I will not be a slave to the facts — Guy spat the word out as if it were poison. Who knows what the nineteenth century looked like? he’d said. I’ll tell them what it looked like.
Madeleine lets him rant. He had come through for her on the winter shoot. Blizzards, sleet, ice; he had come through. He’s the best in Canada, the best she’s ever seen. What he could do with natural light made him worth his staggering fee. He might be shouting and spitting now, but on the set he was energetic and wise. He spoke to the actors with respect. He was unobtrusive and bold. They all wanted to do a good job for him, live up to his expectations. Not every cinematographer could deliver like Guy — what he had made of the Southern Shore in winter — it was a Gothic, vicious landscape, a curse, a new kind of beauty.
She knew he suspected she was thinking budget. The whole notion of a budget offended him deeply. He didn’t care about cost, it wasn’t his job. He cared about light. That was his job: to care immensely about light.
She’s supposed to be working out the cost of skylights but for some reason she’s thinking of the train station in Paris; why is the train station barrelling through her with such force? The glass rooftop of a train station: sheaves of light, clank of the rails beneath, chopping every memory up, twenty-four per second. Holding Marty’s hand. She was gripping his hand and the straps of her knapsack dug into her shoulders. At some point they gave up holding hands; they became self-conscious about touching in public. A staid sense of coupledom settled over them. But in the cold station they watched pigeons flap against the skylights and he squeezed her hand so hard it hurt. Their shoes echoed and they promised each other they’d find the most expensive restaurant in France.
Let’s blow our wad in Paris, Marty had said. But by evening they’d forgotten about eating. They had walked all day, every cobbled street they could find. They hadn’t gone to see the Eiffel Tower and Madeleine found she was crying because she just was. She just was, okay?
She smiled at Marty and her eyes looked a rusty brown, through a glaze of tears, and he thought she looked insane.
There might be a strain of insanity in her family she had not mentioned.
If she had driven her Swiss Army knife into his forehead up to the hilt at that moment it would not have seemed incongruous to him. That’s what he’d said at the time. But, he’d said, she was simultaneously dazzling and he thought whatever errant emotion had caused her to well up had also made her beautiful and he would let her plunge a knife through his skull if that was what she wanted. Whatever she wanted from now on, she could have.
Guy is whispering with full-blown fury: Don’t speak to me about expense.
She’s touching the tip of her pencil against this figure and that figure but what she wants is the afternoon alone. They all imagine she can carry the great weight of this film by herself. She feels her chest constrict and she pauses to draw a deep breath but she can’t fill her lungs. Why does she always have to be fighting someone? Why is there always a battle? In Rothenburg they’d eaten putrid, green-veined cheese smeared on a baguette, then wandered through a torture museum. Marty had thrust handcuffs at her and wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and she hadn’t found it very funny. She remembers exactly the smell of algae from whatever river it was that