B008J4PNHE EBOK (25 page)

“The president seems cool.” Obama struck Sam as the kind of person who—if there was a dinner party and one of the invitees got dumped the day before and had to come stag—could be counted on to make an effort. He’d tease the newly single buddy about his shirt, demand that he defend the new Radiohead album with a straight face, make an insinuation about the guy’s sexual prowess, just basically talk him up so the dumped guy couldn’t brood. Whether he was a good leader or not, Sam not only had no opinion, he couldn’t even imagine having an opinion.

“Obama’s okay. I’ve been a little disappointed,” said Tess. “But it’s, like, I’ve had it up to my ears with old white people who wear cell phones on belt clips. Like they’re so damn important, they have to be able to quick-draw their cell phone like freaking Wyatt Earp. Tea Baggers, you watch a report on one of their protests sometime, you’ll see, the most homogenous thing about them isn’t even that they’re old and white, it’s that they all have cell-phone belt clips.”

Sam groaned. Here was something he did have an opinion on. “Oh, those fucking cell-phone belt clips! I hate those, too.”

They exchanged a fist pound.

“I do think the president has turned out to be kind of like the Segway, though. Remember before the Segway came out, all the rumors about what it was?” She raised an eyebrow. Her eyebrows were very black, very thin, and very sharp. “Like it was going to be a space car or a teleportation machine, some amazing leap forward? And it was just this scooter thing. When I voted for Obama, I thought he was going to be a space car, and he’s turned out to be a Segway.”

“Wait a sec. I don’t know if you’re being fair to the Segway.” Sam didn’t usually notice eyebrows, but he liked hers. Tess’s eyebrows weren’t messing around. “It’s incredibly responsive, right? With special gyroscopes and everything?”

“Special gyroscopes are meaningless if they don’t come in a space car.” She sipped her drink, again sucking on an ice cube before letting it drop back in the tumbler. It could have seemed like some kind of cheesy come-on, but he sensed that it was involuntary, which made it sexy. “John Cazale, though. They don’t make them like that anymore, do they? What’s the closest thing? Rick Savini?”

Sam shrugged in a way that was meant to indicate he was noncommittal. The parallel was there—the two actors had a great deal in common—but a discussion of Rick Savini was something that Sam very definitely wanted no part of. He was enjoying talking to her, and that was a sure way to spoil it. “I wouldn’t want to compare Cazale to anyone else. There’s that part in
Dog Day Afternoon
where Pacino asks him what country he wants to escape to, and Cazale, he says, ‘Wyoming.’ I can’t imagine anyone else carrying that line off. It kills me every time.”

Tess closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Oh, I remember that! I know what you mean. It’s sort of funny, but it’s also like—you know, this guy has some serious problems. He doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing. ‘Wyoming.’ ”

“ ‘Wyoming.’ Yeah. Exactly.” Sam was impressed. That was how he saw it, too, and it was exciting to agree.

“You’d never know that the scene was improvised,” she said.

“I’m sure it wasn’t improvised.” He was being polite; it couldn’t have
been improvised. The scene was too good, too precise. Lumet had directed it.

“I’m pretty sure I read that it was.”

“Nah,” said Sam. “I’m positive Lumet had the scene nailed down when he shot it.”

“I’m really pretty sure I read that it was.”

He shook his head. “No.”

Tess scrutinized him. The keenness of her look made Sam feel, not unappealingly, like a shabby piece of quartz under a gemcutter’s microscope—like he was about to get sawed up. “I guess shooting weddings is sort of like directing, isn’t it? You’re like, what, a wedding auteur?”

Despite the youthful plating—the dress, the ponytails, the nose ring—Sam put Tess in her thirties, a few years older than he. A few frayed threads around the eyes gave her away. From these features, he extrapolated that she was someone experienced enough with disappointment to appreciate the underrated pleasure of settling for a man who was useless but friendly and not crazy—someone like him, for instance.

Except under circumstances of extreme horniness, he preferred not to tangle with optimistic people. Optimistic people required enthusiasm. To Sam, this was anathema. If you thought of sex as poker, then fervor was what the high rollers bet. He was strictly a low-stakes player, and he knew it; Sam’s markers were agreeability and low-key bravado, both as worthless as Monopoly money. They just looked like big bucks when you threw them up in the air.

The band members, a jazz quintet, were plugging their instruments back in. The dancing portion of the evening would begin soon.

Sam told her he had to go back to work, but he’d like to talk to her later.

“Okay.” Tess picked up his iPhone from where he’d set it on top of his camera bag. “Are you sure Mina is your sister?” She started to enter her own contact information.

“Caught me. She’s a prostitute. But not the one who gave me gonorrhea.”

“Okay.” Tess handed him his phone.

“Thanks. No, Mina really is my sister. What are you doing tonight, after? Why don’t we get a drink?”

Tess reached out and brushed a crumb from his jacket. “I can do that. No more panic attacks, though, right?”

“Sure thing.”

“Good, because honestly, Sam, I’m not great at the shoulder-to-lean-on thing. I’m not that nice a person.”

He was bent, hoisting his camera, which was why she didn’t see his face fall.

Only nice people said they weren’t nice, and it was hard to be nice unless you harbored some expectations, still kept a secret to-do list, still imagined what it might feel like to check all the boxes. The subject of politics should have been a warning: she gave a shit. Tess may have looked the part, and she knew her lines, but it was acting, and Sam was not—now, later, evermore—about to suspend his disbelief. No good came of that.

“Uh-huh. I’ll see you later.” The weddingographer was already moving away, camera poised to document the clothes and the pomp, the laughter and the hugs, the entire joyous celebration.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Tess proved difficult to shake.

During the first slow dance, she was there in the far corner of the floor, gaze plainly fixed on him while everyone else was watching the newlyweds turn in circles. Sam tightened on the bride and groom to make Tess disappear.

At the cake cutting, everyone in the band took up a horn and, as the bride and groom lowered the knife into the bottom tier, let blast a heraldic charge.

A hand touched Sam’s left elbow, the side of his free eye. “You want something to drink, Cazale?” asked Tess. He told her he was fine, and she said, “Righto. Carry on.”

While he filmed the chair dance, Sam glimpsed her face among the pitching hands and the flipping hem of the bride’s gown. This time he surrendered to an impulse to go close on her, pushing the focus past the chair, past hands and shoulders, until her face was near, captured at a three-quarter angle. With her bare neck and the tendril of black hair dangling past her ear, she was pretty, yet also sad, despite a small smile. It might have been the tilt of her head, or the way the lens separated her from the cheering crowd, but as Sam studied her, he thought of the little portraits in big museums: how you saw a fabulous painting of a beautiful sixteenth-century countess in a monograph, and then it turned out
to be the size of a birthday card, tucked into a corner of a quiet vaulted room. The exacting miniaturization of those real people—dust now—caused him to feel a pang. You knew that they had been so much bigger.

Sam thought, it’s too bad I don’t make movies anymore. The shot asked interesting questions. Why this girl? What about her is turned, ever so slightly, away from the audience’s view?

Then he thought, What in the hell are you doing? And jerked the camera to the left.

The weddingographer spent the next hour shooting good-luck messages from various guests, got a few atmospheric clips—the band, the waiters, the open bar, the tiny lights strung along the balcony—and at last, the bride and groom dashing to their limousine in a hail of rice. The party would continue for an indefinite period, but Sam’s work was nearly done.

 ■ ■ ■ 

On the balcony again, he sat in a chair and filmed the Brooklyn Bridge for five continuous minutes. While as a metaphor, it sucked, it was relaxing, watching the cars pour over the bridge.

“Thought experiment: what do you do if you see someone getting ready to jump off?” Tess had come up behind him.

“Keep rolling,” said Sam. He didn’t shift from the viewfinder.

“Huh,” she said. A few seconds passed, and he heard her heels click away.

 ■ ■ ■ 

If a bride and groom granted a little space for self-promotion, Sam liked to leave his laptop out on a banquet table in the vicinity of the coat/bag check. He programmed it to run an infinite loop of the different wedding videos that he’d filmed. When Sam came down from the balcony, Tess was waiting at the table, transfixed by his wedding reel, an amber-colored drink in her hand.

A dark-haired bride swings in the arms of her groom, laughing and whirling in slow motion as mariachi music fills the sound track, completely out of time. In the next moment, there’s a jump cut flashing back to the bride’s dressing room. She’s in her underwear and freaking out: “I’m so fat!” The mariachi sound track shifts to the next gear; voices whoop over a spray of guitar figures. An older woman reaches for the bride’s forearm in an attempt to calm her. The bride belts the older
woman with a dainty white teddy bear: “Don’t touch me!” Then she’s dancing again, swinging in slow motion. This is followed by another jump cut, and now the little white teddy bear is floating snout-down in a crystal bowl of cherry-red punch. An hors d’oeuvre spear protrudes from his back. A title card emerges in blinking, buzzing green neon:

MARRIAGE IS A GRINDHOUSE

The image froze, faded, and another section of the video loop began.

“These are impressive. I mean, I’m not saying I’d want one. But they’re impressive.”

“Thanks.” Sam reached over her shoulder to close the lid of the laptop, picked up the computer, and stowed it in his shoulder bag.

Besides providing the de rigueur weddingography service, which promised a chronicle of all the highlights of the ceremony and reception, Sam offered a deluxe Director’s Cut package. At the cost of an extra seven hundred dollars—plus a few minor expenses—he produced a short alternate wedding video designed according to the principles of one of three different styles. The choices were: Grindhouse Wedding, Nouvelle Vague Wedding, and Citizen Wedding.

The Director’s Cut videos were primarily exercises in editing and sound-tracking and, in the case of the Citizen Wedding, the use of extra light to create a simulacrum of deep-focus photography. In each case, it was necessary to shoot a certain amount of staged material, although less than people expected.

The Grindhouse Wedding clip was typical. The bride actually had gone berserk on her mother-in-law with the little teddy bear. It was the sort of occurrence that took place all the time at weddings. A minute afterward, of course, everyone in the bride’s dressing room was laughing, but Sam instantly recognized the dramatic caché.

For the Grindhouse cut, he trimmed out the laughter, spliced it with some of the dancing footage, slowed the latter way down for maximum strangeness, added a clashing mariachi sound track, and as a topper, filmed the murdered teddy in the punch bowl on a separate day. Patched together, the different parts supplied the hallmarks of the genre: violence adjacent to happiness, slow-motion interludes, and an ironic sound track.

The other cuts were conceived according to similar formulas. With the Nouvelle Vague Wedding, Sam took time out to follow the different principals, stalking them from area to area as opposed to filming from static locations or using a tripod. This provided a rough facsimile of that style’s characteristic tracking shots. When he edited the footage, he spliced in clips from a library that he had built over the years by surreptitiously filming episodes in public places that he deemed Gallic: cool-looking women in trench coats, unshaved men unabashedly staring at asses and tits, people drinking from tiny cups at sidewalk tables, face-to-face meetings between small dogs and large dogs, etc. Tack on a Charles Aznavour tune, and voilà.

The Citizen Wedding was probably the simplest. Sam rented a shitload of stationary lighting, planted it around, and hired an extra camera-person to come and shoot additional footage upward from the floor. In the editing, he flipped the heavily shadowed floor footage to black and white to achieve Wellesian deep focus, stripped the sound, and replaced it with a scratchy vinyl recording of Boris Karloff reading “Kubla Khan.”

Tess was impressed. Well, that made one of them.

The Director’s Cuts were exercises in the cheesiest sort of mimesis. People liked them the way they liked the Caesar salad at chain restaurants, without anchovies, and without being aware that anything was missing. The cuts were no less clichéd than the fade-out of the Brooklyn Bridge. Sam didn’t begrudge people for enjoying them—he hated anchovies, too—but he knew what they were: bullshit.

Tess followed him out to his car, a red compact that he had rented for the job, and stood by while he stowed his gear in the trunk. It was a warm, clammy evening. Pieces of wet trash plastered the pavement. Two steps outside, beyond the envelope of the air-conditioning, Sam was sweating.

“Seriously, those are pretty good,” she said.

“Thanks.” He slammed the trunk shut. Okay, maybe he begrudged them a little.

“Not just the music and the slo-mo and all that showy stuff. You had a lot of different perspectives mixed in, and it’s so steady, you’d think you had multiple cameras all over the place. You ever thought about going pro?”

They walked back toward the restaurant. “What do you mean?”

Tess held open the door, and Sam stepped through. “Pro. Make real movies. Television, whatever.”