Ten Days in the Hills Read Free Page A

drama right there. Just the sight of Luise Rainer all dressed up in that gown and made up and helped out onto the stage. Shocking! We thought she was dead! This one was surely dead, but no! So Frank had a lot to work with, and he did a wonderful job moving it along, and millions of people watched it, so why wouldn’t they watch a minute of your arm, or, you know, Frances McDormand’s arm, while the voice-over makes remarks about things?”
    Elena said, “You want to have penetration?”
    “Well, that would be the promise. I don’t see, if it’s
My Lovemaking with Elena,
how you could avoid penetration.”
    “You would never get it on the screen. It would be pornography.”
    “Just because of a little penetration? A little penetration embedded in a long conversation? I don’t know about that. Anyway, if the conversation were interesting enough, and the audience got inured to seeing them, us, on the screen, fifty and fifty-eight, who cares? If penetration has a context, then it isn’t pornography, it’s a story. The mere sight of penetration doesn’t arouse, isn’t meant to arouse. It’s
their
penetration, not an abstract penetration taken out of context. It would be much easier to simply observe and consider a penetration if it were surrounded by other things, especially voice-over. In some sense, the movie would sort of bore the viewer until he was beyond caring about the penetration as penetration. And anyway, in porn movies, they don’t do much with the penetration, because they always want the ejaculation to be on the screen. Our ejaculation would be normal—entirely invisible.”
    “I don’t know that people would see it like that. Don’t you think the penetration would be the news, and that everyone would go to the movie to see the penetration and more or less ignore the other stuff?” Max rolled onto his back and put his hands behind his head. Now the sunlight was stronger. She said, “Are you ready for a cup of coffee?”
    “But having no penetration would be just avoiding the issue. Everyone knows that when you make love you have a penetration and all the various sensations that go with it. How would this movie be different from
My Dinner with Andre
if there were no penetration?”
    “But here’s another thing. Who would be seeing the penetration? We don’t see the penetration, except from various odd angles.”
    “I see it. I see it in the mirror, and you don’t because you aren’t looking. I also see it from better angles than you do, just because of anatomy.”
    “So would the actor playing you wear one of those little cameras around his head like they do in sports events?”
    “That’s an idea. I’ll have to think about that idea. I actually haven’t seen one of those, so I don’t know how you would fit it onto a regular head, you know, without a helmet or something like that. Also, I would have the penetration in the first act of the movie, not the third. The penetration is not the climax.”
    “What is the climax, then?”
    “Well, think about every Hollywood movie you’ve ever seen. What’s the climax?”
    “A warehouse explosion?”
    “No. The kiss.”
    “They, we, would be making love but not kissing for ninety minutes?”
    “Well, eighty-five. The kiss itself would be quite lengthy, but it would take a while to get to it.”
    “How could they make love for eighty-five minutes without kissing? I don’t think that’s very realistic, especially for us. We kiss all the time.”
    He kissed her. Elena closed her eyes, which shut out the brightness of the room and relocated her back inside her sense of touch. The sensation of his lips on hers flowered along her cranial nerves, which she imagined fanning outward from her lips over and around her head like a spiderweb, and within that web was a darkness whose life she could better sense when her eyes were closed. When her eyes were open, she was all surface, facing the world. When her eyes were closed, she was all hollow,