“God. I know dogs get stuck,” Storm adds, “but people … I’ve never heard about that before.”
A week has passed since the blessed event took place with my beloved. Ben still hasn’t called and pride has kept me from calling him. The way I see it, it happened to me as much as it happened to him. And yet, I lie awake every night wondering if he is laughing about it, as I sort of hope he is, or if he really does fear me — me, the penis-clamping woman I’m afraid he thinks I am now.
“How the hell did you get out of the lake and into the cottage?” Jenny wants to know.
“What did Mary-Beth call it?” Grace asks. “Can you spell that?” “Did it hurt?” She isn’t holding a pen or paper, but she is making her notes just the same. She can’t help herself. She’s a writer. I oblige and tell her how to spell vaginismus, and that, yes, for a while, it did hurt, and then it went away, or I just got used to it, I’m not sure which.
It is the July meeting of Film Society and Storm has brought Babette’s Feast.
We’ve seen it before.
We’re in a nostalgic phase now.
We’ve gone through the sex phase and the art film phase and the Canadian-films-only phase. Not long ago, we decided that after several years of movie-watching, it was time to revisit a few films, like old friends, even if their initial impact wouldn’t be experienced in the same way again, even if it changed dramatically. It was a risk we were willing to take, and it didn’t always work out, and was sometimes disappointing. Like it was with The Big Chill, which we saw last month, which made us nod in awe and recognition the first time we watched it, years ago, which we had trouble sitting all the way through this last time.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Sally said before the film ended, “what woman is going to let her husband knock up her girlfriend? Tell me. Just because she screwed around on him, we’re supposed to think she’d make this big sacrifice, and they all live fucking happily ever after. Him, because he gets it. Her, because she lets him. And the girlfriend, because she’s pregnant — maybe. Talk about contrived.”
And then there were other films like The Company of Strangers, which seemed more real to us than it did the first time around. Real. And closer to home, now that we could imagine ourselves as old women, facing our own mortality. It didn’t seem so far off anymore. We watched those old women stranded on their bus trip in complete silence. Nobody moved for two hours. Nobody was talking, even when the closing credits rolled.
Tonight, it’s Babette’s Feast, and Jenny has already cried out, “I hate subtitles,” and Sally has followed her lead and proclaimed, “If I wanted to read dialogue, I’d pick up a book,” as I knew she would.
Jenny doesn’t usually care what we watch, as long as there’s lots of wine to drink.
Sally complains but is always the first to lose herself in the flickering images.
Grace likes to point out the great lines, the honest dialogue, and the subtleties she thinks the rest of us have missed.
We put up with her.
It’s only Sally who loses her patience with Grace’s constant commentary, who tells her to shut the hell up and watch the movie. Their distant and roundabout family connection gives her permission. They are cousins by way of someone’s mother’s husband’s cousin’s daughter — enough of a family connection to impose opinion and lay a dismissive hand on the normally acceptable boundaries of friendship, making them feel they ought to know each other better, like each other more, that there is something to their relationship other than proximity, other than the fact they share the same circle of friends.
Grace talks. Sally yells. Storm sometimes closes her eyes and listens to a film.
Lately, everything makes Alex weep.
Delaney, when she’s here, makes us rewind scenes, to see how they were shot. She is the only one missing tonight. She is buried beneath the old photographs of a few dead women, trying to piece together their stories. Normally, she is the clerk at the Sears Catalogue Store on Mill Street. Now, she’s suddenly a documentary filmmaker and she says she can’t come out.
“Have you told Del yet?” Storm asks.
“I wonder if anyone saw you like that,” Sally says. “Christ, can you imagine some old geezer up there getting up to take a piss in the middle of the night and he just happens to look out the window and sees the two of you stuck like dogs?”
“You don’t stick like dogs,” I say.
“How the hell did you get out of the lake?” Jenny still wants to know.
I tell them I found it funny, to be stuck like that.
Can you picture it, I say. There I am, wearing nothing but my Storyteller’s Jacket, lying in bed with my lover stuck inside of me.
I say they wouldn’t believe what it took to get out of that lake and up that slope to the cottage, tangled limbs and the weight of another body fighting the necessary synchronized movement. It was nothing less than an acrobatic achievement, I say. A walk on a tightrope with your dignity falling farther and farther below you, its promise of return as unlikely as you forgetting the exposure, the undignified exposure, revealing you as the awkward, fleshy being you are, at the mercy of your own involuntary reaction. God, help us all.
I say it, and then I let it lie, let the silent space around it finish the story, and watch. Watch as Grace makes her mental notes. Watch as Sally sits in her chair in the corner of my living room and feels the empty crevice between her legs as it tightens and twinges with another reality. Watch as Alex looks down at her feet and thanks God, over and over again, that it happened to me and not to her. Watch as it calls her to attention and back to my words about involuntary contractions, how Mary-Beth said it was rare, but it happens — the clamping, the force, the inevitable prolonged erection.
The sensation of being stuck for good.
This silences them and we start the film, and let the familiar quiet settle in, settle us down, and transport us once again to Babette’s kitchen, to cinematic lovemaking with culinary art, to what we remember when we first saw it, to what we’ve forgotten or see differently now. Only Alex shifts in her seat and sighs repeatedly and throws inquisitive glances my way, worry and sympathy all over her face.
At the end of the night, after everyone else leaves, while she is standing in my doorway, it’s Alex who says, “at least you didn’t have to explain it to anyone else. It’s not such a predicament, Sadie. You’re free to be stuck with whomever you choose.”
Then she disappears into a mid-summer’s night, leaving behind the words free, stuck, and choose, and I cannot separate them from the images of a woman making an exquisite feast she herself will not sit down to eat.
Chapter Four
In twenty-four years of marriage, Anthony Roy never produced a single painting of his wife. It was something that had been on Alex’s mind for some time, although she never brought it up. She let it go by, like everything else, and chose instead to drag it around with her in a suitcase full of self-imposed illusions that never quite worked.
She took it along in her aging blue truck as she drove to the Stirling farmers’ market. It sat next to her the entire morning while she sold her zucchini and tomatoes, and made small talk with women who didn’t seem to recognize her nagging disappointment.
It wasn’t until later in the afternoon that Alex realized how heavy and burdensome the whole thing had become. She saw herself from the rooftop of the Stedman’s department store across the street and allowed one moreillusion — of being in the good care of Anthony’s strong, tanned arms, his palette and his brush giving her their undivided attention. The painting would be Lady at Market, Oil on Canvas. There she’d be, sitting