Leona and Alan

Halfway through the immense outline I just got sick of the work of writing a boring boring outline, and decided to keep myself excited about the project by going on a dig into whatever meaty slice I really wanted to be working on. I used the first paragraph of a story I had earlier been working on and realized it was exactly the voice of Leona's character—she's judgmental, insecure and narcissistic in that typical Ivy-League way, but at the core she wants to be loved. The challenge in this chapter (and how it fits into the book) is to show how a girl can create divergent fictions around a single incident. This, of course, is how the editors operate based on the footage they have. I don't think we should ever know what Alan thinks, but we should be aware that Leona is deluding herself, and that the boy if in love with anyone, is in love with Celia.

My goal: When Leona, in her bed, imagines Alan, her memories should replay the "dailies" of her "shooting" with him much as Leslie Bennett, in his trailer located LITERALLY in the Alan family drive-way, replays the incidents of the day and decides how to prompt the next day's action to create coherent narratives. I am thinking about changing from my outline of a chapter wholly told through Leona's gaze to break away in a Barthelme-ish last paragraph to Leslie's trailer as he watches snippets of leftover Leona/Alan footage (Leona, who opts to get her head blurred out, cannot be shown in final cuts) and thinks of a sort of pre-TV, pre-lapserian time when he could have just watched this scene without projecting upon it a narrative. It's just two kids, a couch, a TV. A book on a dresser. Leona in her rumpled sheets. It's just people moving through rooms. Etc.

Okay--here's the day's efforts. And by day, I mean 4.30 - 8 spent at Zarah on Gulou Dongdajie.





IN THE MARGINS OF THE BOOK HE HAD LENT HER, THE BOY HAD WRITTEN, "Man v. Nature." It made Leona flinch: how soppy, how obvious and poorly seen, she thought. But…at the same time…She noted his crabbed handwriting, the care with which he had set down the phrase. It was cute to imagine Alan using a regular old pencil, like a child sitting at a desk doing homework after-hours, the lamp casting its spot of peach light on the page, a single circle in a dark room, and within the circle—Man v. Nature.It was cute to imagine him sharpening the pencil—pausing to open the desk drawer and, finding no sharpeners there, splitting at the graphite with the edge of a razor blade. It was nice, she guessed, to just imagine him in a little room alone, reading.
And these ruminations set her to loving him again, without reason, with only heartache. It was difficult to be a girl in love, she thought, tossing on the rumpled duvet, thinking of how the moonlight might look against her body in just this position. She lay sprawled open like a starfish, her limp hands dangling off the bed’s edges like the sculpted, heavy useless things of a Michaelangelo. It was as if she were watching herself in a movie. Like watching herself as she would watch a sort of character with whom she empathized, to whom she felt good things should be coming. It was difficult.
A part of her knew that Alan loved her and a part of her could never know. If he did not love her, the knowledge would be too hard to bear. It was not only the rejection that must be reckoned with—another hatchmark in a long line—it was the sheer waste expended in the years she had spent loving him—two years, nearly. And it was only just this week that they had reached some sort of crest.
Crest—she liked that word. It was a wave, but it also recalled the intimacy of toothpaste. Crest. She imagined a tube of his toothpaste in a dirty glass cup, kept on the lip of a porcelain sink. She could really love him.
So yes, it started with the book. And it kept going.
The book was a childish collection of Victorian lyric poems. Everyone knew by now that the Victorians hadn’t been any good at poetry but Leona still paged through the thing—scanning for the poem that would be clearly, succinctly addressed from him to her. She read an awful one about finches—a drowned bird found and raised to sing “sweetly”—and then she put the thing down. Maybe he was gay.
That was what it was. She thought of the way he dressed—tight, pressed trousers, worn European-looking sneakers, shirts always with collars (and the collars rumpled as if someone had just been kissing him at the neck). At the house, when he had ostensibly come over to lend her the book and to borrow Weekend at Bernie’s, he had not left right away. He had come in through the backdoor—the sliding glass doors that led from the pool to the den, where Celia had been watching television, and had repaired to the kitchen when she had got a call.
Project Runway was on—Celia had left it loudly running—and the two of them stood for a minute, watching it without sitting down. He had asked what the show was; she had explained and said, “It’s actually good”; and they had sat down—he, sitting back easily with his arm stretched around the back of the couch, she sitting with her arms crossed across her stomach, one leg crossed over the other, and her loose foot jittering. When she noticed its quaking she tried to stop it and every few minutes she would forget, and see it going again. The still-warm dimple on the couch between them—where Celia had sat before she had risen—seemed to nearly hum; Leona could feel its weight as if the absence were a body whose weight was greater than his own. Unmovable space. Dense emptiness, like spots of air between knitted webs of lace.
They could hear, over in the kitchen, Celia talking on her cell, yelling at one point with breathless, teenage urgency, “Ugh—kill me with a hatchet?” At that, Alan had snickered and looked over at Leona. Leona had wanted her look—slimly rolled eyes—to say, I would never act that way toward you, but afterward she realized how the gesture did nothing except show how truly judgmental she could be—of her own sister, no less. It was hard to win with Alan. And she knew, somewhere, in the hot buried place beneath her folded hands, that that was what she wanted, more than love—she wanted him to just like her. And then they had had a fight.
[Greg, Cameraman 7, whom she rather liked (he was prone to taking his lunches silently, alone, at the glass table on the veranda, doing a crossword while the rest of the crew ate out by the vans) was filming in there. Dane, the soundman holding the boom, stood in the threshold between the kitchen and the den, and looked over at the two of them—Alan and Leona—as though deciding which show was more interesting. She gave him a glare—a direct, pushy stare—and he looked back to Celia. A sidelong glance at Alan showed him to be all innocence—looking completely at the TV, as if she were not even there.]
Onscreen, the primly dressed gray-haired host wore a pink oxford open at the collar and moved around the workroom, touching the failed dreams of various designers. He had paused over a green dress whose maker sat on a nearby stool, crying into her hands, and said, looking from the weepy dress to the weepy girl, “Oh, this is too much.”
Alan, who hadn’t said anything so far, had said: “I sort of like it.”
The dress—with its saucy, frilly cuffs that poured out from two thin sleeves—was one of those unapologetically feminine things, made to rhumba in—complicated beyond measure. How these people sewed these things was insane to her—incomprehensible—not only in the physics of puffing those two-dimensional, silken sheets, whose movements operated by laws not known to her, but more so in the designers’ mental processes while doing it. How could a person, a human, who knew what beauty was, convince themselves that a puff could improve something, could improve anything.
About the dress, she said: “I mean, I guess?”
“You hate it,” he said, looking over at her with a smirk. “You hate everything I like.”
“That’s completely untrue,” she had said, accenting it with a little shocked guffaw. “I like Weekend at Bernie’s.”
“Ironically,” he said. “You like things through a haze of distance.” He held the word haze long, uses his fingers like a trill.
“I like like Weekend at Bernie’s,” she said. “Sans irony.”
“Right. A test then.” He lifted his right arm, pointed toward the screen. “What do you think of the other dresses?”
Her eyes washed over them. They were all dresses, intended for other women, for the fey, lean silhouettes of women who needed nothing, who consumed no food, who lounged on hard, white chaises in the windswept modern homes of Mediterranean beachtowns. She’d look awful in any of the dresses. But it wasn’t about her, she knew. She liked the simple one—black, cut with a diagonal seam down the front. She liked it for the buttons: little squares, sewn one-inch apart up the seam, made to be sexily, slowly unhinged. It had been designed by a girl who was now grasping her shears, holding them jokingly above the neck of a fellow competitor who sat in the breakroom, eating the last snickers bar that had been available in the vending machine. It was now 3 am in their studio and the girl was desperate.
“I like Rachel’s,” she had said, of the black dress.
“Hate it,” Alan had said. “Hate it hate it.” And then he had said, quickly—it was still part of the same sentence. “We’re incompatible.”
When he had said that, he had turned away from the screen, where the dresses were, and he had looked at her.


Four days later, she was thinking of that moment. She had measured the incident as an example of him loving her: he had thought of them as a couple, between whom compatibility could be measured. But now she saw it for what it was—they had been talking about dresses, and he had loved the frilly one, hated the one with its pleasant simplicity, its bosom-grazing dropline neck. It was not that he hated the things she loved, that they had a sparring comeraderie similar to oh… she didn’t know… it seemed too cheesy to admit she plainly thought of him as her Knightley. It was that they had talked about dresses. And boys who liked to talk about dresses were gay. And the book beside her on the nightstand now—the Victorian poems:
Man v. Nature.
Holding yourself back. So he could be gay. But then there was his arm. It had rested on the back of the couch, inches from her neck. He had not moved it. And she was sure that after twenty minutes, the human arm loses blood, the human arm must be moved, but he kept it there. He kept it there. Kept it there until Celia came back into the room, trailing two cameramen and Dane, that sound guy, whose eyes wandered all over Celia with a hateful glaze, Alan jumped up. He moved his arm. He said, “I better go” even though they had not yet decided the final dress (she had looked it up later that night on YouTube—it had been Angela) and then he said, “Oh, nearly forgot.”
Out of his bag he had pulled the book. And it had started with the book, this crest.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Alan’s father—in Palm Springs, car wreck, cousin, Leona being his date at the funeral, the frilly dress she chooses to please him, his disappointment, the poem read at the funeral, his recitation, hiding behind the garage of Alan’s house (next to their old house), showing him the place she knows—where the painters could not reach. Seeing Anabelle there. Knew her from camp as a child. Recollection of the incident (India, Sybelle) on the day where they had run out of lanyard string, and it had seemed an omen, because later that night the bear had come. Anabelle is beautiful. What is it to film a dead face? Why can they not show the dead on television? Leona wonders this, she looks at Alan. People are incomprehensible to her. She loves Alan because of the same way other people love characters on television. She knows nothing other than her own literary projections.


“Why are you doing this?” he said. She looked over the railing, and could see him stopped on the stairs, one flight down, peering up between the xxxxx bars.
“You’re doing this for all of the wrong reasons.”
What could she say to that. She said, “I’m sorry.”
He said not don’t be but “Don’t bother being.” And left.




If it were another girl it was probably Annabelle, who was certainly thinner than herself but was also a lot duller intellectually. Not to mention Anabelle’s duller pallor, given her smoking. She hated him for liking Annabelle—it seemed so, I don’t know, she thought, wrong for him to like blondes. It wasn’t just that it was conventional, Leona wasn’t being purposefully unconventional to not like Annabelle, but the girl was the sort of blonde the stereotype had been created for, or, if not created for, she was the sort of blonde the stereotype later came to swallow. She wore hats cocked at an angle, for god sakes. She owned capris, and read serious hardcover books and kept the covers intact. Leona had seen her through the window of Buck’s the other day, hunched over one of those sort of carved-out bread bowls of soup and an untouched stack of three bad Saul Bellow novels, their spines facing out to the street. If only some people could learn how to try instead of just to try. She probably didn’t even eat the soup. She was probably anorexic.
The other day at Buck’s, Leona had looked up over to the counter and seen him speaking with her. Anabelle must have just bought something because they were talking over a bag she held. He leaned down closer to her, breathing in her airspace. It was the type of lean that, when he’d done it to her, she’d interpreted as love.
How awful. She couldn’t bear to think of it now. Not with the covers rumpled and the moonlight streaming. Now it was better to think of other things, of the times when he had loved her or he could have loved her.