Tess 2

Max Lawton

The glass walls of the sunroom at the back of the house were slightly grimed over, but only on the outside, and Alessia was allergic to the notion of spraying Windex into the ecosystem of her environs. A thumb applied to the hose-nozzle for a forceful spray could only do so much. The majority of the dirt went, but what remained was an intangible turbidness. The inside of the sunroom was filled with orchids and there was a daybed alongside its back wall. Atop silk sheets, Alessia would rest, luxuriate, hoping against hope that the New Jersey winter would once more fail to kill her orchids. Alessia read on her daybed all day long, tossing and turning from right to left flank and from back to tummy so much that the silk sheets soon began to pill. There was a special apparatus one could get online to remove the pills, a little bit like hair clippers or a cheese grater––a circular metal area that one applied to the offending spots. On the other side of the brick wall upon which Alessia sometimes rested her head while reading was a projector screen draped over one plaster wall of the combined living and family room. A little shelf had been attached to the drywall opposite. The screen was around six feet by four: like an arthouse cinema in Lower Manhattan where you could hear the subway go by for the whole duration of the film. During this rainy October, Alessia was reading through all of Thomas Hardy, then, over the course of November, was planning to do Conrad. As she read, her tall frame would contort into ergonomically unfriendly pretzels atop the daybed and her caramel skin would seek out sun to soak up, even as the fog caressed the exterior of her enclosure and left behind fingerprints of sheer condensation––kisses of nothing but penny-smelling air. Alessia didn’t work, nor did she have any family here (North Caldwell). She owned this little house––a rectangle of cream-colored siding out of one face the sunroom had puffed like the world’s most transparent cancer. She read in the sunroom and watched films on the other side of the brick wall. On some days, while reading old Penguin classics editions of 19th-century giants, she would be overtaken by the impression that someone was hidden away in the lip of flowering dogwood and red oak at the edge of her tiny yard––they were watching her through the slightly grimy glass, counting precisely how many pages she got through per hour. At moments like that, her own perceptive apparatus would split into two screens divided by a black line. On the one side would be her reading––a roving POV shot from the perspective of the person stalking her out in her garden. On the other would be herself later in the evening, she’d be watching the footage that’d been taken over the course of the day. One could tell from the ironic rightward curl of her lips that she didn’t much like Return of the Native––this is what she was thinking on the side of the screen that showed her reading. But was there a Alessia who watched the split-screen film of herself reading and, simultaneously, of herself watching herself reading in the room where she always watched films? Right now, I am the one watching it.

In October, Alessia tended to eat about a third of a pumpkin pie every night. For many, pumpkin pie was a sigil of Thanksgiving. Not so for Alessia, for whom it was a Halloween tradition. She purchased her pumpkin pies from a New Jersey chain grocery store with a particularly competent bakery––a dollop of whipped cream on top as she watched horror films. Only, this month, she wasn’t watching filmS, but a single one. As a teenager, I’d come up with the idea of writing a novel that consisted solely of the accounts of how a single film changed over the course of a whole lifetime spent watching it. The film would have to be something shoddy and popular––something that was meant to be consumed a single time, then forgotten. The viewer, most likely imprisoned by an unknown cosmic force, would begin his journey watching the film in a state of agony, but, as time went on, would begin to see sacred things in the film, experience visions, view it as a kind of Bible. This imagined novel would have been a commentary on the fundamentally arbitrary nature of Scripture. This wasn’t an idea that seemed to have retained much, if any, relevance when I actually began writing fiction. It had stuck with me, but as a residue, something scraped out of the head––something that was unworthy of use. Even so, Alessia was stuck in a loop that, while it wasn’t precisely the one I would have described in my story, was kin to it. A few months back, she’d read somewhere that Tarantino’s second favorite film of the decade was Doctor Sleep and immediately programmed it as the first movie of her October marathon. She approached her first viewing––on the first of the month––with excitement, the projector-fan’s warm-up whirr stirring forth a tingle of anticipation inside her that was hardly bereft of eros. But it was no good-–the film was no good. The fedoras during the child-murder scenes, the CGI netherworld of the ending, the cheap references to The Shining, Mike Flanagan’s endless copping of King’s highly “human” style, all in a mode that felt even more like made-for-TV movies than King already did. And the whole thing smelled so… cheap! She couldn’t even really sleep afterwards, running through the whole film in her head, asking herself: ‘What’s meant to be good about this at all?’ It wasn’t just the disappointment that one necessarily felt after watching a bad film. It was that Alessia felt she’d come across something the contours of which wouldn’t fit inside her head. As such, in the weeks to come, her days were spent reading Hardy and her evenings watching Doctor Sleep––again and again and again. After each subsequent viewing, she was just as troubled as during the first. She would sit in her glass room and watch blackest night fade into the ash-saturated milk of morning––as still as a corpse stitched into a shroud of onion skin. During these long nights, the daybed’s endless pills began to bother her and she was constantly shearing them free, the buzzing metal circle reducing the silk sheet’s thickness until it too came to approximate onion skin. Before this, well before dawn, the handheld POV-shot camera would emerge from the brambles of flowering dogwood and come right up close to the glass, attempting to record Alessia’s highly personal aesthetic crisis. The grime was something of an impediment to this mission, but, eventually, her face would be sure to rise up in the frame, a single tear moving down one cheek as she put her soft auburn hair into a bun: so as to be able to better conceive of what her failure to appreciate the film might mean. Doctor Sleep simply did not get better. In fact, many elements of it got worse. Especially the fedoras, the child-murder scenes, and the callbacks to the previous film. Though her house was located in a secluded spot in the neighborhood, it was only a 15-minute walk to get groceries from her preferred New Jersey chain. It was better to walk than burn fuel and Alessia barely drove her Subaru. Other people from the community looked worried when they saw her out and about: leggings, flip-flops (even though this caused her toes to nip and go numb with cold), a holey sweater, and a waxed raincoat. Her hair also began to resemble a great conundrum of harsh convolutions, her auburn locks shedding their former softness. Already a tower of panettone gazing upon her from the corner of the shop. The paper boxes, so glossy on the outside, accumulating the collective grease of 10,000 Italian subs over the months they spent standing sentinel there. Then Alessia would hightail it home carrying two bags of groceries none too heavy, the smell of hot hoagies stuck to her hair like burs or small branches. After she’d watched Doctor Sleep ten times and eaten 10 pumpkin-pie thirds––so three and ⅓ pies––she sought external assistance and began to research what people both liked and did not about Doctor Sleep. Most seemed to agree with her. Even when they liked it, it was apologetically––with a tacit admission that it could have been better. Those who were unapologetic about their affection tended to reference the high quality of the director’s cut and, though the director’s cut wasn’t the version that Tarantino recommended, this discovery almost caused Alessia to shout “hallelujah” into the fog that was pressing right up to the four walls of her rectangular home. Dead of night: black fog. Thus did she plan to watch the director’s cut of Doctor Sleep the following night. Her bed awaited her in its tiny chamber, the only room in the house apart from the glass one, the main one, the kitchen (which was more or less part of the main one), and two bathrooms. It was nice that, once you got out of big cities, apartment-sized domiciles could be their own self-contained homes––with little backyards too. Her bed smelled of the snow in the hedge maze at the end of The Shining and of Doctor Sleep too. It was because of the fog. She kept the bedroom window cracked, which allowed vapor to seep in. What was it about both fog and snow that smelled electric? Her depressed contours awaiting her atop the memory foam.

A thunderstorm the following day. Watering the orchids with a spray bottle first thing in the morning. A cup of ginger tea. Alessia was enjoying Tess of the D’Urbervilles quite a bit more than Return of the Native. As she got deeper and deeper into it, the rumbles of thunder outside enhancing the desolation of her reading experience, she sought out the luxurious ease that typically characterized her time spent reading––the feeling that her blood had grown sleepy in her veins. Ever since she’d begun watching Doctor Sleep, that feeling had fled from her––as if her blood pressure had shot up and what had previously been warm, grounded immersion in the language of centuries past had become a stressful compulsion… as if, along with the cameraman out in the dogwood, she too were counting how many pages she could get through per hour, determined to mow down a preordained quota or face the consequences. Tess made her hungry. She wanted to eat something British. A Ploughman’s. Or poached eggs on buttered toast. She settled for the latter, holding the Signet paperback with its spine furrowing inwards as she stirred the poaching eggs, continuing to read for as long as she was able. She was slightly worried about the power going out as regarded watching the director’s cut of Doctor Sleep that night. The thunder felt like it was getting closer with its every rumble, the lightning illuminating the yolk dripping down from the ledge of her toast, imbuing it with a sea-sick green. She shuddered to think of touching her book after eating these eggs. It was so difficult to get yolk residue off of one’s hand; it made everything one touched begin to smell of iron and rot. Paperback books were particularly effective at preserving grease on their pages and exterior surfaces. One further humiliation for Hardy’s unfortunate protagonist: eternal reek. After washing the dishes, Alessia scrubbed her hands with dish soap, feeling all natural oils leaving them along with the yolk residue. But, much like the grime on the sunroom windows, a constituent part of the yolk would never leave, especially around the fingernails, and Alessia sniffed at it compulsively for the rest of the day.

The director’s cut of the film was no better. In fact, if anything, it was worse. The only remotely positive thing she could say was that the baseball boy’s death scene had become more frightful––the spurts of blood shooting up onto the murdered child’s face, the screams of joy from the fedora-cult as they did the deed… But the extended backstories were execrable and the director had been wrong to have another actor fill in for young Jack Nicholson. Alessia was practically in tears after watching it. She sat down on the daybed, well on its way to becoming a nightbed, and rested her round cheeks upon her upturned palms. Sighed from so deep within that it felt halfway like an orgasm. The camera came right up to the glass. Alessia hadn’t turned off the Roku or the projector, so the jeweled light of the device’s aquarium-screensaver was making its way out of the house’s main room and into the glass-walled area in which she now found herself. Why did Alessia weep? She was so distraught, she’d even neglected to eat her pumpkin pie. The camera became a mere recorder of the glass’s filthiness. A split screen on one side of which was unwashed window, whereas, on the other, a different story began to play out. Alessia’s despair cut too deep and the director––a pudgy dude in a hoodie and a windbreaker nestled away in the dogwood outside––felt the sudden need to tell another story. Something sexy and forlorn. A metaphysical New Jersey porno. “The problem with your idea,” he told me, scratching away at the beard that extended too far down his neck, “is that nobody other than a schizophrenic would actually have that reaction to watching some dumbass film whatever number of times. Sure, being imprisoned by a cosmic power and being forced to watch The Break-Up until the end of time might well, y’know, end up giving you schizophrenia, but you wouldn’t find more to love in it, wouldn’t see anything else in it, unless you absolutely lost your fucking marbles. That’s not how art works. Only the good stuff reveals itself more over subsequent viewings, right? So, for the next shot, I want you to go into the house, which we’ll have on the right side of the split screen, the left side still being reserved for that real high-brow shot of the grime on the window––if that’s cool with you. Just go in there! Improvise! Y’do know that the presence of the camera outside the window means she’s up for whatever, right?” I hesitated to do as he asked. How could I console Alessia about the fact that the film was a piece of shit? Why did it matter to her so much? Did she put that much stock in Tarantino’s rankings? I took a deep breath and sought to rid myself of my apprehension. It had been pouring out here all day––not that the director minded. Misery simply reinforces directors in their megalomania. Alessia was also oblivious to the storm’s continuous thrum––to the rain’s occult convolutions down the glass of the sunroom. Both the director and Alessia were locked into their monomaniacal obsessions centered around cinema. In Alessia’s case, it was an impotence with regard to enjoyment that had become a torture. In the director’s case, it was an overestimation of his own virility. Both were equally paralyzing. The mud had begun to overtake the neat strands of grass coming up through it. Each tread of my New Balance sneakers only contributed more to this overflow. Alessia must have been looking out the windows as she sat alongside the orchids shivering with each crash of thunder. There was no way she wouldn’t see me coming. A blurry photo of a paunchy man constructing the house in the 1960’s. Time had been so unkind to it that the man resembled nothing so much as a ragged blur. The photo hung there, scotch-taped to the wall just to the left of Alessia’s head. Eventually, both the man in the photo and Alessia caught sight of my approach. Alessia didn’t leap up and search for a weapon, didn’t scream, and the other half of the split screen stayed focused on the window grime. Had she been expecting me? She simply watched me walk up to the enclosure and tap on the glass. There was no door here and I would have to walk around to the front of the house––she motioned this by shaping a hoop in the air with her left hand. I understood immediately, plus had no desire to break the glass. It had, in large measure, been the room that had drawn me to her. As I trudged through the grass, so wet my sneakers tore it up by way of stride alone, I thought about why Alessia was so unafraid to see me (and the director, if she’d noticed him) hidden away amongst the flowering dogwood at the edge of her backyard. Did she want a buddy to watch Doctor Sleep with? Someone to commiserate with about its lack of quality? Or was she hoping that I was one of the film’s devotees? That I could show her the nooks and crannies within it that she’d missed? When she opened the wooden front door, heavier than the semi-synthetic siding of the house might suggest, all that her countenance expressed was pity for my suede jacket––it was a little small at the shoulders to begin with, but now, because of the rain, it would never be the same. The vestibule of the house was a pinched passage and, though various sweet aromas were perceptible, there was also an underlying staleness redolent of unrefurbished homes from the late middle of the 20th century. Floor lamps stood sentry down the hallway leading into the main room and the jeweled light of the Roku screensaver played over Alessia’s highly Italian features as she gazed through the open door and into the thunderstruck night. “What do you want?” she asked and, my back illuminated by a triplicate flash of lightning, I must have looked dumbfounded because she took a beat, then came back with the much more gentle, “I mean, how can I help you?” Then she took another step backwards, as if to invite me in, but didn’t. “I’m sorry, it’s been a weird few days. I… who sent you?” I kept my silence, imagining the camera zooming in over my left shoulder from down the long driveway, where another cameraman was presumably hidden away. “Has the script been changed?” she asked and, though this made me uncomfortable, I nodded very slightly. It had. She exhaled, some measure of the tension leaking out of her features, then invited me in. “I can guess where this is going then… I, um, had my doubts about the movie idea. Like, no offense.” “None taken,” I said as I peeled off the wet canvas of my sneakers, attempting not to spatter it onto what felt like the fake wood of the flooring. “We’re both just, y’know, goin’ with the flow.” “Can I hang this up for you? I think it’s probably fucked, but maybe we can give it a fighting chance…” She was pressing her palm semi-rhythmically against my sodden back. “Sure… That’d be great,” and I was also peeling off my socks––not like the convolutions of a snake’s shed skin, but something much heavier. “All I can really offer you is ginger tea and pumpkin pie. I could make you, like, those triangled English sandwiches too––I’ve been reading lots of Thomas Hardy, which, weirdly enough, makes me hungry for cheese sandwiches––but it might be too late for that,” she glanced at the digital figures of her Casio watch––10:30pm––then helped my jacket off and disappeared into what must have been the laundry room just off of the vestibule. Unlike the entryway, there were no floor lamps in there and the flickering fluorescence was formidable. While I waited for Alessia to return, I tried to sniff out whether there was any asbestos beneath the wood paneling––a highly lacquered shade of yellow. How the hell was I supposed to know? Alessia came out of the laundry room, shut the door meticulously behind her, then led the way into the kitchen. Still wearing tights, holey sweater, and no apparent bra, her body expressed an amplitude that fabric could not prevent the expression of. Once we’d reached the kitchen, she cut us both a third of a pumpkin pie, whipped homemade cream from a little jug without, I was glad to see, much crust at its mouth, added a pinch of powdered sugar, whipped a little more, then dolloped it onto the pie. She could have put the kettle on before serving the pie and preparing the cream, but she had not, so we waited, making amiable small talk, as the kettle got going. We soon discovered that both of our lives were characterized by nothing so much as a solitude that had been sought out in order to facilitate our communion with literature. There was something frightful about this solitude and, in fact, it brought to mind the apartment of an older novelist I’d become acquainted with in the last few years. He lived on the UWS, in a doorman building, but he’d likely bought the place back when the 90s to the east of Central Park were still quite dangerous. The apartment was cluttered, unkempt, but that wasn’t the crux of the issue. No… The novelist’s domicile was simply too small for all the cultural artifacts within it: the books, CDs, and Native American folk art. It was a storage space for all the texts he’d ever interacted with, all the CDs he’d ever listened to, and he himself had become something of an unwelcome appendage to that ensemble. He was imprisoned in a cell made up of dreams of what it meant to be an artist. And, as he aged out of life, the objects he left behind would become increasingly useless and incomprehensible. When he was gone, they would be mere junk: fodder for rummage sales. Is that what it meant to be an artist? Alessia expressed pretty much the same sentiment to me: “The fact is that I set up my life to write, bought this funny little house, didn’t touch what little remained of my trust fund, but still… When I got settled in and sat down, the words wouldn’t come. It was like moving to a foreign country for a lover only to discover that they’d also moved back where you’d come from. What does it mean to wish to create art? Does aspiration play any role in the process? I mean, if we can speak frankly?” I nodded. “Well, that’s the part of the endlessly-watching-one-movie idea that I like. Any piece of art you create takes on that sickening sameness. It’s like walking through a Halloween haunted house twenty times in a row. Thirty. Forty. Fuckin’ endless times in a row. Every work of art that’s brought into the world is a prison for its creator. And that’s a fact. You know what I mean?” I nodded again as she was pouring the tea and I couldn’t resist having a bite of pumpkin pie before the tea was ready, expressing my satisfaction with a guttural “mmm.” The tea would be too hot to drink for a couple of minutes. We sat down atop squashed couch-cushions, the Roku fish swimming with a total sense of contentment before us. “It’s like in The World, your whatever-it-is… a collection of short stories, I guess… You may not be seeking to express this, but what it ends up being about is how trapped you are in your own head. With your own ideas. And, like, wasn’t that the fundamental tragedy of Leo Tolstoy’s work? The only physically viable portraits in it are of himself, but pasted onto others. Into others. Are you afraid of that also being the case with you?” I nodded, but was also a little too absorbed by the tastiness of the pumpkin pie. Alessia was right about the chain-grocery-store bakery’s quality. “I think that I can’t write because I don’t want to enter the prison that anything one creates necessarily ends up being. Also because I can’t really inhabit anyone else’s mind… My own consciousness is too, like, all-encompassing.” “Shouldn’t stop you from trying,” I mumbled through pie crumbs, some of which I accidentally spoke out onto the couch. “That’s right––it hasn’t stopped you,” Alessia smirked, by which point we were done with the pie, so she took away the plates and put them into the sink. The pruning on my feet had only just begun to diminish, the nylon carpeting like a balm to them. When she got back, she sat down a little closer and I felt the dampness of my All Saints T-shirt clinging to my pecs and belly. I must have looked nervous or, now that the pie was gone, was spending too much time looking at the fish in the screensaver, because she laid her hand down onto my thigh. I wondered if the other camera was still shooting the dirty glass. “Shall we watch something else?” I asked hesitantly. “I assume this whole monologue means you’re done with the Doctor Sleep experiment?” “Yeah. I’m done.” I cleared my throat. I really would have preferred to go watch the storm alongside the orchids in the sunroom, but this would have created an unbearable sense of expectation. I hadn’t, after all, read the new version of the script and didn’t know what we were meant to be doing. “Where’s the Roku remote?” I asked, then, once it was handed to me, began to flip through recommended films on Amazon Prime. Alessia had purchased the director’s cut of Doctor Sleep only a few hours before, expecting to watch it again and again and again. But this wasn’t to materialize, so she would have been better off renting it. I clicked through the movies and, also having noticed Tess of the D’Urbervilles on the daybed when I was hidden away with the director amongst the flowering dogwood, I stopped clicking through once I’d reached Polanski’s Tess. Would its verdant celluloid be enough to draw us forth from our prison? I hit play without waiting for Alessia’s assent. But she didn’t grumble, didn’t complain, and, soon enough, we were in a split screen, one side of which was us watching Tess, the other Tess itself. “I hope this won’t spoil the book for you,” I said, seeking to be affable. “Plot doesn’t matter nearly as much as style,” she replied. And I agreed. Still, it was strange to watch a film about a woman so unfortunate made by a man who had seemed to revel so much in female misery. Did Polanski sympathize more with Tess, the true D’Urberville, or the usurper––the dandily dressed merchant who took her virginity and destroyed her life? The film was ambiguous, but the facts were not. As we got deeper into the film––now well past midnight––I began to have the uncanny feeling that the split screen had shifted and I was unsure of the contours of either side thereof. On the one hand, I could still see the residue of filth on glass—it overlaid everything––but, on the other, sensed something like the pills of the daybed’s silk sheets beneath my buttocks. Yes, the film was paused and the Roku screen saver had returned. Once more spangled with deep-purple light, Alessia was riding me atop the daybed, our cries shivering the orchid-petals even more than the thunder. The rhythm of her hips was dictated by the storm’s proximity to North Caldwell. I’d never before made love to someone whose caramel skin was being lit up by stormlight. The lightning changed the entire phrasing of her body––as if the presence of flesh were transmuted into shadow’s absence. As if I were making love to a shade or succubus. But the other side of the split screen no longer showed us watching the film: we’d entered into the digitized celluloid for the final act. I was Angel and Alessia was Tess and all of this coming to pass simultaneously: Alessia taking possession of my body atop the daybed in the sunroom and Angela and Tess finding themselves at the center of Stonehenge after only just consummating their marriage. In Hardy’s novel, it wasn’t immediately clear that Tess and Angel had actually stumbled upon Stonehenge. When they reached it, they were as befuddled as if they’d found themselves before an awful sci-fi edifice: “a vast architrave.” And there seemed to have been a departure taken from the source material in the film we were now a part of––a departure that didn’t exist in Polanski’s version. Instead of Stonehenge, Tess and I had found ourselves atop a giant steel platform over which loomed vast spider-legs of metal and stone––a true architrave. The entire edifice was taking off from Merry Olde England and transporting us up into the cosmos. We lay there entombed in its evil rusty odor, having only just become man and wife in the eyes of God––though we’d been man and wife in the eyes of the law for many months. The platform was already so far away from the verdant green of Albion––of New Jersey too. Tess would not die in this film––the film we were in. This film no longer had anything to do with Polanski’s version. Here, she was redeemed: taken to outer space. And I (Angel) would not be marrying her little sister. Was this a sci-fi sequel? Tess 2? The ecstasy of our flight was such that I could not say. The lightning was so continuous that the enshadowed aspect of Alessia’s body was no longer at play, her curves against the background of grimy glass an ineffably blued presence. I brought my head upwards as if to sniff at her electricity. She smelled of the black fog that so adored caressing the outside of her home. After our congress was complete, both of us lay panting on the daybed, the indentations from the pills forming a message on my ass and thighs, though I would never comprehend its significance. Tess and Angel were beyond our solar system. Beyond the grasp of our systems of knowledge. Alessia and I exchanged a long kiss––with tongues––that tasted of ginger tea and pumpkin pie. Alessia placed her right hand onto my right cheek, then whispered into my left ear: “In prison no longer.” The orchids shivered in post-coital bliss.

Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. In addition to more than ten of Sorokin’s books, forthcoming from NYRB Classics and Dalkey Archive Press, he is currently working on translations of works by Michael Lentz, Antonio Moresco, Eduard Limonov, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His novel Progress is forthcoming. He lives in Los Angeles, where he also plays noise music and heavy metal in a variety of ensembles.