Ten Days in the Hills Read Free Page B

facing inward. And what shape was she? Not precisely human, not precisely bipedal, but more amorphous. She opened her eyes. His face was right there—she could see the bridge of his nose, the orbit of his right eye, and the lid slightly wrinkled across it. Three creases in the corner. The plane of his cheek. She said, “But in some ways, watching people kiss is the most pornographic of all, because, from their point of view, the kiss is in darkness. It’s felt in the body, and there’s no way to get that on film, or even to get that weird view you have of the other person while you’re kissing, just his eye and his hair and the far wall. As soon as they start kissing, no matter what point-of-view shots you’ve had before, you’re out of their consciousness, and you couldn’t have voice-over, either, because they’re kissing. So you’re stuck with watching the two people kiss. I don’t think you—”
    He kissed her again. This time her sense of herself was located between her lips and her hands and arms, because between kisses, more or less as an involuntary response to kissing, they had repositioned themselves in order to address the kiss more fully. Now their heads were tilted at more of an angle, their arms were fully around one another, and they were pressed together all down her breastbone, and belly. It was a satisfying kiss, a whole-body kiss, definitely a kiss of the nerves and the epidermis, not a kiss of the mind. They parted, kissed again for a second. He said, “Of course you could have some cut-away shots that represent the kissing. That’s a technique. It can be kind of cheesy, of course, if you cut away to trees blowing in the wind or surf crashing on the shore. But what if you cut away to something simple and abstract, like mere blackness with some indefinable shadows or light patterns? Just for a second. I mean, at this point, artists have been visually representing the inner life by means of abstract color and shape for more than a hundred years. Why hasn’t this made it into film? That’s a question in itself. It’s a challenge. That’s why this whole thing is a good idea.”
    Elena said, “What if you cut away as soon as their lips touched to that
Scream
painting? I would like to see that. It would make the whole movie not quite so domestic.”
    But even after two quite superior kisses, he didn’t have an erection. And she was stiff from lying in bed. She was fifty, after all. If she remained too long in one position, muscles contracted, that was just the way it was. She rolled away from him, got up, walked across the room, and picked up the velvet dress. He lay there with his hands clasped behind his head, happy with his idea.
    She picked up the velvet dress and smoothed it. The velvet dress added up to, in every sense, a private triumph for her. As far as she knew, no one at the Oscars or at the Governors Ball had noticed the velvet dress. She had not detected a single lingering glance or turn of the head. Whether this was owing to her own obscurity or to the apparent unimportance of the velvet dress she did not know, but the velvet dress was true silk velvet, of a rich, deep gold color, and it had a lineage—it had belonged to Gene Tierney, and been worn by her, though certainly not to the Oscars. Maybe she had worn it as a young woman. When the dress was new, in 1927, Gene Tierney was only seven years old, so perhaps she had inherited it from her own mother. At any rate, the dress had gotten from Gene Tierney to her niece, and when Elena had told the niece, whom she knew from a cooking class, that she was going to the Oscars, the niece had handed her the dress in a brown paper bag and said, “It’s in terrible shape, practically unwearable.” The niece, whom Elena did not know well, seemed to be the sort of woman who had transcended material considerations, and so no longer valued the dress except as a mildly arresting artifact. Elena, having nothing else to wear and not wanting