Fabi has no permits to shoot anywhere so he films guerilla-style, waking early despite the frigid cold and setting up near dawn. The first morning, we film outside a Chinese restaurant in Pilsen. Karla, Fabi’s wife, is wearing a huge shearling coat and Fabi insists I wear a three-piece plaid brown wool suit that makes me look like a car salesman out of the seventies. Rodney Dangerfield’s lost cameo in Used Cars. And I’m as depressed as Rodney with the same bug-eyes, depressed and nervous about the movie even if it’s a joke, just another of Fabi’s larks. There is no script.
“Script?” Fabi asks, incredulous. “Scripts mean staleness, compagno. Scripts mean contrived. We’re documenting the spontaneity of burgeoning love here, mining in the caves of childhood trauma, not shooting a telenovela.”
Karla is shivering in her shearling coat like a B52 pilot eager to drop her bombs and return to base. Fabi posts up behind his fancy camera and says action. This is my chance to tell Karla how I feel, to work out my feelings for both of them. I can blame any indiscretions or forwardness on my character, on the role of myself I’m playing for the camera.
Karla: I don’t like it here. [staring at her shoes]
Me: In Chicago or Pilsen?
Karla: Being filmed here. Being filmed, period.
Me: Do you miss Connecticut? [leaning against the brick wall]
Karla: Do you miss Seattle?
Me: I missed you. And I miss the Puget Sound, the sea.
Karla: My father was a fisherman.
Me: I know. Fabi told me.
Karla: I hate the sea.
Me: You could still miss it, though.
Karla: Fabi thinks he’s the sea, lapping the world. 70% of the world.
Me: He’s got a lot of character.
Karla: He only fucks me in front of the camera [scratches psoriasis patch above her temple].
Me: Sorry?
Karla: The camera is never running. It’s just there. Set up in the corner. Otherwise, he can’t fuck.
We continue in this vein for what feels like hours, her scratching, exchanging intimacies, intimating painful memories that shaped and shape our jaded selves, revealing our “truths” to each other or performing romantic and cinematic approximations of such reveals, opening up ourselves as possibilities for one another, shots at love and redemption and—
“Cut,” Fabi says. “Can you smell it?”
“What?”
“Sundance, compagno. I can feel it dawning in my nostrils and dancing on my skin.”
“I can’t feel anything,” I say. “I think it’s frostbite.”
Karla smokes a cigarette and says nothing.
“You just lack the soul of a poet,” Fabi says.
“I get no respect.”
*
I’m in love with Karla though I still think of her first and foremost as Fabi’s wife, apostrophe s, as part of that unit because I met Fabi first, fell in love with Fabi first, my friend, my best friend.
Fabi is Italian. A film director. A direttore. An extrovert. Charming, bright, learned. We met almost a decade ago when we were both living in New York, me because I wanted to be a writer, some sort of Hotel Chelsea beatnik, but I arrived fifty or so years too late; he because Tribeca, Scorsese, and well, it’s New York—do you need another reason? But we both hit dead ends there late in our twenties, aging out of bohemian poverty, so we moved out west, me to Seattle, chasing another extinguished scene with a childhood soaked in angsty, tattered-jean grunge music videos. At least this time I had a decent paying job writing copy for a consortium of microbreweries aspiring to merge, like Voltron, into one uber powerful macrobrewery. Meanwhile, Fabi decamped to LA, a rite of passage for anyone interested in filmmaking. In LA he met Karla and together they moved to Chicago. In Seattle I met no one. I still live there.
They visited me a month ago in Seattle, both of them, Fabi singing my praises as his dearest, smartest, kindest friend—though I’m sure he had a platoon of such cherished friends and I didn’t begrudge him this; on the contrary, I was honored to be included in its ranks—and me burning up with desire for Karla, an inexplicable, all-consuming, completely out of character hunger for Karla. For in truth I usually don’t desire much, had even nearly ceased desiring all together, like an inadvertent Buddhist monk, except I wasn’t chasing nirvana so much as embracing my indifference as an anchor meets its fate embracing the cold depths of the sea.
*
On day two of shooting in Chicago, we’re in one of Fabi’s friends’ backyards in Logan Square. Bitterly cold as before but I am warmer now, under Fabi’s direction, in scenes with Karla.
Karla: Eli, how many women have you slept with? [lights a cigarette, sits on bar stool with a cracked ivory-colored vinyl cushion]
Me: Why are you calling me Eli?
Karla: Fine, Strother.
Me: Did Fabi tell you to call me that?
Karla: How many women?
Me: Eleven [clears throat]. Actually, three.
Karla: Why did you lie?
Me: I don’t know.
Karla: Do you know how many women Fabi has fucked?
Me: No. Should I?
Karla: 84.
Me: That seems like a lot.
Karla: And counting. He tells me every time the number increases. Which it does. Often. Waves collapsing in the sea.
Me: Does that bother you?
Karla: [standing, stubbing cigarette out on the vinyl cushion] Thy charm be gone.
*
I took them on a tour of my little foggy northwest city while I was burning up with the heat of this newfound yearning. We rode the duck boats across the lake like troops making an amphibious landing to assault the countless cranes raising new tech-funded skyscrapers in South Lake Union. Fabi snapped photos of the houseboats and the cyclists and the meticulously groomed beards and the greenery, going on and on about how this wasn’t America so much as northern Europe, a Scandinavian order and calm, while Karla asked me some generic questions about my work, my life. Yes, I still wrote from time to time. No, I lived alone. Yes, I’d love to visit Chicago. I answered robotically, coolly, to try to cover the need and want and lust sizzling inside me.
Who was this woman? Mid-thirties, white, average height, busty, dirty blonde hair with dirtier looking bangs, skinny legs, narrow hips, long thin fingers with rough, cracked nails at the end of them, lobes full of holes without earrings, a button nose, blue-gray eyes, temples dry and scaly with psoriasis, a deep yet quiet voice—I was listing her features to myself, holding them in isolation in my mind as if they held the key to my uncharacteristic and, given my true and long-standing loyalties to Fabi, ruinous desire.
Later, in Pike Place Market, while Fabi took pictures of mounds of smoked scallops and mussels, Karla said, to herself as much as me, “he tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea.”
And not only did I hear her loud and clear despite her quietness and the roar of the market swelling around her, but I recognized the line from Moby-Dick. I watched Fabi taking pictures, afraid of looking at Karla directly, afraid of what I might do, kiss her, bite her, slit my own throat in front of her just to see her coated in my blood, coated with me. “Moby-Dick” I said.
“I grew up in Connecticut,” she said, “and we’d go to Mystic Seaport and tour the old wooden whaling ship there and listen to readings of Moby-Dick. Listen to the sea.”
Just then the vendor shoved a hunk of smoked sockeye at Karla and she took it, this greasy red fish flesh, and tore it in half, handing me one half and eating the other in one bite.
“Me too,” I said, holding my hunk of salmon in my palm, feeling its omega-rich fat coating my skin, though I hadn’t grown up in Connecticut but Delaware. “I mean, I’ve been there. To that port. That ship. Heard one of those readings.” And I knew we were connected somehow and that connection seemed like destiny and even my eyes felt hot now, burning redly in their sockets as if I were allergic to the world, to the scallops and salmon and Karla and the unveiling of our fate. Because the truth was, I’d felt dead for almost two decades, drowned, submerged, sinking, sunk since that one trip to Mystic long ago, yet suddenly I was kicking again, still underwater but alive, fighting, reaching for the surface. I ate the salmon then looked around for a napkin to wipe my hands free of the fish oil.
“A Khan of the plank,” Karla said, taking my salmonless hand for a second with her fingers, long and thin and cool, and then sucking the oil off each, thumb to pinky. I didn’t know who the Khan was, Ahab or Fabi or Karla or me, or whether that was a good thing, being a conqueror or a ruler or a killer, but I wanted to stay like that forever: Karla holding my hand in her hands, my ring finger in her mouth, under the care of her tongue while the sockeye melted on my tongue like a sacrament. But we both noticed Fabi was no longer taking pictures of the market’s goods. He’d turned his camera on us like we were his stars, the protagonists of his latest film. She let go but not before licking my pinky clean. She went to him as if nothing had happened. I thought: I love you. But who? Fabi? Karla? Both? Then I thought: please save me. But I still didn’t know what form this salvation could or should take and just who I was pleading to.
*
The third morning is colder still. Below zero with a polar wind ripping iron-gray off the lake. Karla is wearing the same shearling coat but with a Russian fur hat too, looking like a sickly version of Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago. Fabi has me wearing a peacoat and a wool watch cap from his endless supply of outfits. My half-covered ears burn from the cold.
Me: I’m not sure if I love you or the aura Fabi’s given you or if I’m just a narcissist responding to myself reflected in you, to a self I was once or could have been, a better self.
Karla: So?
Me: You don’t think it matters?
Karla: [Fabi signals something to her] Do you want to fuck me or Fabi or yourself?
Me: I don’t know. I don’t know if fucking is the word for what I want to do or have done.
Karla: Fabi knows. Leave it to him.
Me: How does he know when I don’t know?
Karla: He’s the director.
*
Other than the moment in the market in Seattle—that confusing, erotic, miraculous moment—their three-day visit passed uneventfully, though my fever continued unabated. They stayed on the pull-out couch in my living room and in the darkest hours of the night I stood in the hallway staring at them, waiting for Karla to give me a sign, to acknowledge me, to say with word or glance or gesture that she understood this desire, that it was reciprocal. But what would I have done with such an understanding? Betray Fabi? Dive into bed with the both of them? Hang myself? I didn’t know and didn’t find out for she never moved. Never. She lay unnaturally still each night every time I checked on her. While I witnessed Fabi roll over countless times, twisting, turning, farting, and snoring, Karla remained frozen. I took this immobility as a rejection because she must have known that the slightest shift or tremor, even the whisper of a yawn, would have felt portentous to me, and I would have responded somehow, rashly, wildly, and Karla, wanting to spare both my feelings and Fabi’s, must have known all this, foreseen it, and thus remained still.
Aside from the hug hello we exchanged when I picked them up at the airport and the finger sucking in the market, Karla and I didn’t touch until their departure. I dropped them off at Sea-Tac. Fabi gave me six wet kisses, three on each cheek, with his typical winning effusiveness, showering praise again on me and Seattle and America, and insisting I visit them in Chicago, presto. Karla gave me—bestowed is a better word—one dry kiss on my left cheek that I felt in my chest, my guts, my spine, metastasizing throughout my body and my life, consuming me, until I felt the only possible treatment was a confession of my love, if that’s what I was feeling, face-to-face. I booked a ticket to Chicago three weeks later, presto indeed, molto presto, and arrived in that cold Midwest metropolis still feverish, jumpy and afraid, burning with reckless and delirious desire on the one hand and a clear sense of my wretchedness, my failure as a friend, on the other. Fabi picked me up in his bright yellow Fiat, waving and smiling like what he was—my only friend in the world.
I noticed he was alone and asked after Karla with an acceptable amount of solicitousness though when I saw she wasn’t in the car I felt like throwing up right there, filling his tiny Italian car with my disgust, shame, and half-digested airline pretzels.
*
The fourth scene is a dinner scene. We’re filming in Fabi’s dining room. He’s made a huge mound of arancini from some leftover risotto. The house smells like frying. Karla is wearing a thin gray tube top though it’s still chilly inside. Her shoulders are tiny. Fabi has me wearing a blue button-down shirt and a narrow preppy tie covered in anchors.
Me: [holding up a golden fried rice ball] These are good.
Karla: What if Fabi loves not you, but himself as reflected in you, the successful, charming director you see him as?
Me: Who says I love him?
Karla: Me. And you.
Me: Who says he loves me?
Karla: Him. And me. [lights a cigarette] Do you want to fuck Fabi?
Me: What?
Karla: Do you want to fuck me?
Me: I think you’re beautiful.
Karla: No, you don’t.
Me: I think you have beautiful breasts.
Karla: I do. But you don’t think that.
Me: How do you know? [crushing another rice ball in my hand]
Karla: You’re toiling, not pleasuring.
Me: [in a whisper the microphone just barely picks up] And you?
Karla: You know I’m toiling too.
*
“We’re working on a project,” Fabi said as he drove me from O’Hare to his home in North Lawndale, “a film, a new film, a documentary—”
“About?”
“Love and the body and the sea, the ocean as a metaphor for longing and love and the unconscious, sottocorrente, a mockumentary and an exploration and a rom-com and tragedy all in one.” He swerved into the flow of traffic like someone who relished the challenge of urban navigation though he did everything with that zeal, that savor.
“I didn’t know Karla acted.” I took off my jacket and my sweater and undid three buttons on my shirt.
“It isn’t an act with her. It’s real. That’s why I’m with her. That’s why I’ve cast her in the role of being with me, capito? And she’s the daughter of a fisherman. Of generations of fishermans. A real bitter pescatrice!”
I cracked the window, breathed in the cold car-exhaust air of this landlocked state and by God it smelled like the sea. “Cast her?”
“You on the other hand, you’re more of a character actor than a leading man. Like Strother Martin. Or Eli Wallach. But you have a glorious nose. Trintignant’s patata nose.”
“You think I look like the Ugly?”
He laughed at this and I wasn’t offended, not really. All three actors were talented and the fact that Fabi had given me some thought, had shined the spotlight of his attention on me, even if some of his comparisons could be considered unflattering, pleased me. I felt more alive, more real, under his scrutiny. I wondered if Karla felt the same. If perhaps that shared feeling could lead us to sharing more of ourselves and I steeled myself for my confession and its aftermath whatever that might be.
Karla was waiting on their stoop when we pulled up, smoking a cigarette, cupping it like a soldier in a trench, and surveying their tiny snow-covered front yard.
We parked in the street and Fabi yelled something in Italian, some exuberant greeting more at home on the bustling streets of Naples than Chicago. Karla waved weakly in reply and through their ornate fence of rusting iron she looked both forbidden and trapped.
Fabi carried my bag and greeted her with a chaste peck on the cheek, then took her cigarette, pulled a long drag, and handed it to me. I took a drag too though I don’t smoke, then handed the cigarette back to her as if it were a ritual. She examined it then flicked it into the street. I undid another two buttons of my shirt, feeling my hot skin sear the cold air as Fabi struggled with the second door inside the vestibule.
“So?” I said, offering Karla an opening.
“So?” she replied, not taking it.
It was going to be a long weekend.
*
Fabi and Karla wake me up in the guestroom at two in the morning. “Now,” he says. “Action.”
Me: Are you a pornographer now, Fabi?
Fabi: [in a loud, bland voice-over voice, an old-time radio voice, with only a trace of his Italian accent] Our heroes find themselves confronting their nudity, confronting themselves.
Karla: You don’t have to do this if you want to.
Me: Don’t you mean, don’t want to?
Karla: No.
Me: What if I want to?
Karla: What if?
*
After Karla went to bed that first night in Chicago, Fabi probed me with questions. Was I lonely? Did I find Karla attractive? Did I love her? What did I think love was? Did I still dream of being a tugboat captain? Had I seen Jules et Jim? Was I still sad over my mother’s dying? Still angry about my father’s death? Why did I think I couldn’t get it up anymore?
I tried to answer him honestly. I owed him that. So, I told him about my conflicted feelings for Karla. About my previous inability to feel and how Karla could be a change in that. I retold him my Mystic Seaport story. It was my twenty-second birthday and the last time my parents had been together, the last time we three had been together. We had listened to the guide there tell us all about the rich history of the whaling industry in America, the chase for blubber, the Nantucket sleigh rides, the harpoons digging into flesh, and that night we went to a reading of Moby-Dick on the wooden whaling ship. A clear summer night. Stars reflecting, little lights trembling on the surface of the dark black sea. The deck packed with Melville fanatics. The booming voice of the old man reading. My father slipping away unnoticed and driving back to our motel to shoot himself in the shower with a Beretta we didn’t know he owned. Later, the flashing lights. The questions followed by silence. The grief. The sea.
*
I’m naked and I have an erection. Karla is naked next to me, nipples erect. Fabi is, as usual, behind his camera. We’re facing him and it.
Karla: Are we going to fuck?
Me: I don’t know.
Karla: [holding my cock] It seems like you do know.
Me: I don’t though.
Karla: [lightly squeezing my cock] Is it true your father killed himself in Mystic?
Me: [nodding]
Karla: I tried to kill myself in Mystic.
Me: Why?
Karla: I don’t know.
Me: The fire hissed in the waves.
Karla: [crying] The ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made [releasing my cock].
Me: [wraps arm around Karla] Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
We’re naked. The camera is rolling. Out there, in here, everywhere—the dark black sea.
*
Jon Doughboy is a hobbyist scribbler tossing stories and poems into the lead-colored waters of the literary sea @doughboywrites.
New Critique 