Point Omega - Don Delillo [33]
“Some movies are too visual for their own good.”
“I don’t think this one,” he said. “I think this one is worked out carefully, shot for shot.”
He thought about this. He thought about the shower scene. He thought about watching the shower scene with her. That might be interesting, together. But because it had been shown the day before, and because each day’s screening was discontinued when the museum closed, the shower scene would not be part of today’s viewing. And the curtain rings. Was he completely sure there are six rings spinning on the curtain rod when Janet Leigh in her dying fall pulls the shower curtain down with her? He wanted to watch the scene again, to reaffirm the curtain rings. He’d counted six, he was sure of six, but he needed to reaffirm.
Such second thoughts go on and on and the situation intensified the process, being here, watching and thinking for hours, standing and watching, thinking into the film, into himself. Or was the film thinking into him, spilling through him like some kind of runaway brain fluid?
“Have you been looking at other things in the museum?”
“Came straight here,” she said, and that’s all she said, disappointingly.
He could tell her things about the story and characters but maybe that could wait for later, with luck. He thought of asking what she did. Like two people learning a language. What do you do? I don’t know, what do you do? This was not the kind of conversation they ought to be having here.
He wanted to think of them as two like souls. He imagined them staring at each other for a long moment, here in the dark, a frank and open look, a truthful look, strong and probing, and then they stop staring and turn and watch the film, without a word passing between them.
Janet Leigh’s sister is coming toward the camera. She is running into darkness, a beautiful thing to see, decelerated, the woman running, shedding background light as she comes, face and shoulders faintly shaped, total dark falling in around her. This is what they ought to talk about here, if they talk, when they talk, light and shadow, the image on the screen, the room they’re in, talk about where they are, not what they do.
He tried to believe that the tension in his body alerted her to the drama of the scene. She would sense it, next to him. This is what he thought. Then he thought about combing his hair. He wasn’t carrying a comb. He would have to smooth down his hair with his hands once he got in front of a mirror, wherever and whenever, unnoticeably, or some reflecting surface on a door or pillar.
The French couple changed position, moving across the room to the west wall. They were a positive presence, attentive, and he was sure they would talk about the experience for hours afterward. He imagined the cadence of their voices, the pattern of stress and pause, talking through dinner in a restaurant recommended by friends, an Indian place, a Vietnamese place, Brooklyn, remote, the harder to get to, the better the food. They were outside him, people with lives, it was a question of actuality. This woman, the one next to him, as he regarded her, was a shadow unfolding from the wall.
“You’re sure this isn’t a comedy?” she said. “I mean, just looking at it.”
She was watching the tall spooky house looming over the low motel, the turreted house where Mother sometimes sits by the bedroom window and where Norman Bates assumes the vesture of cross-dressing hell.
He thought about this, about Norman Bates and Mother.
He said, “Can you imagine yourself living another life?”
“That’s too easy. Ask me something else.”
But he couldn’t think of something else to ask. He wanted to dismiss the idea that the film might be a comedy. Was she seeing something he had missed? Did the slow pulse of projection reveal something to one person and conceal it from another? They watched the sister and the lover talk to the sheriff and the wife. He wondered if he could work the conversation around to dinner,