The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [164]
“Oh, my God, I must look frightful!” she said.
“No, you look fine. Is there anything I can do? I mean I don’t want to get nosy…”
“No, it is fine. Just the normal stupidity of life in which sometimes it is necessary to cry.”
She had the right accent too. In a couple of seconds Bergman or Fass-binder was going to come out of the cockpit and adjust the lighting. What was his next line? He groped for something suitably world weary and existential.
“Or to drink champagne,” he said, raising his glass. “We could drown our sorrows.”
She rewarded this small sally with a smile, which was one of the great smiles he had seen so far in his life, either on-screen or off. “Yes,” she said, “let us have champagne. Thus the sad problems of the rich can be made to dissolve.”
The flight attendant was happy to bring a chilled bottle, and they drank some.
“You are the writer,” she said after the first glass went down, “who discovered this terrible manuscript that has disrupted all our lives. And yet you still write away despite this. In my misery I hear you click-click-clicking. I’m sorry, I have forgotten your name….”
Crosetti supplied this and in return was directed to call her Amalie. “What are you writing?”
“A screenplay.”
“Yes? And what is this screenplay about?”
The champagne made him bold. “I’ll tell you if you tell me why you were crying.”
She gave him a long look, so long that he was starting to think she had taken offense, but then she said, “Do you think that is a fair exchange? Truth for fiction?”
“Fiction is truth. If it’s any good.”
She paused again and then gave a quick nod of the head. “Yes, I see how that could be so. All right. Why do I weep? Because I love my husband and he loves me, but he is afflicted in such a way that he must sleep with other women. And there are many women who would put up with this, would have affairs of their own and keep the marriage as a social arrangement. This is called civilized in some places. Half of Italy and Latin America must do like this. But I cannot. I am a prig. I believe marriage is a sacrament. I wish to be the only one and have him be the only one, and otherwise I cannot live. Tell me, are you a religious person?”
“Well, I was raised Catholic….”
“That is not what I ask.”
“You mean really religious? I’d have to say no. My mother is religious and I can see the difference.”
“But you believe in…in what? Movies?”
“I guess. I believe in art. I think that if there is such a thing as the Holy Spirit it works through great works of art, and yeah, some of them are movies. I believe in love too. I’m probably closer to you than to your husband.”
“I think so. My husband cannot believe in anything. No, that is incorrect. He believes I am a saint and that his father is the very devil. But I am not, and his father is not, but he believes this because it saves him from thinking he is hurting me—she is a saint, so of course she is above such jealousies, yes? And he need not forgive his father for whatever his father has done to him, he has never said what it is. He is a good, kind man, Jake, but he wishes the world to be other than what it is. So this is why I cry. Now, what is your movie?”
Crosetti told her, and not just about the script proper but about its basis in real life, Carolyn and their pathetically brief encounter, and about his own life and where he wanted it to go. She listened attentively, and in near silence, unlike his mother, who was full of lame ideas and not shy about sharing them. When he’d finished, Amalie said, in