A Short Film About Disappointment Read online

  Jonson said, Mine, too.

  I said, A great day for Bellono would be to arise in the afternoon, eat a dish of jellied eels, a whole melon, blood sausages on black bread. Then, a nap for the digestion. Then, painting no more than thirty minutes. Dinner would be a hen stuffed with another hen, two ripe pears, the cheeks of a calf, polenta, mare’s milk.

  Jonson said, I had a similar meal at Il Melananza. It was a tasting menu of fourteen courses and—

  I said, Bellono sulks over his commissions. For his career, he has been a mercenary. He has to paint to eat. When his commissions are overdue, he executes improvements of Master Vittororio’s style. Bellono’s paintings sparkle in the mind’s eye. He is a bit sacrilegious. The Visitation with Elizabeth and Mary fidgeting. Joseph snoring off wine at the Nativity. The Agony in the Garden with the cringing lamb’s back turned on the scrawny olive trees. How the bishops squeal.

  Jonson said, Say this Bellono has a wife, and he can’t find her. He discovers she’s been boinking the emperor. Then Bellono—

  I said, Act two. Duke Giovanni, ailing, offers a colossal purse of gold to whoever may paint a triptych of himself, his wife, Andrea, and his brother, Enrico, to hang over his tomb in the family chapel. Bellono realizes if he wins the competition, he will never have to paint again. He can spend his days in snails and figs.

  Jonson said, Lucretia and I had the loveliest figs in Umbria on our honeymoon. Now that I think of it, she disappeared for almost two hours one day while I was sleeping on the terrace of our rental. Could it be that I’ve been fooled this whole time?

  I said, Plus, Vittororio can be passed, beaten, made irrelevant. Bellono has tired of hearing Vittororio’s name on the lips of the burgomasters, the fishwives and cardinals, the rag-and-bone men. Master Vittororio became known for polishing the work of the anonymous fresco artisans of the Roman villas found under ash. It wasn’t a crime. If one has eyes to see, one must see.

  Jonson said, Maybe we could do a war picture.

  I said, Bellono’s apprentice, Gelder, a moody teen who litters crusts and peels, is ordered to go in the street to gather information about Duke Giovanni. He finds nothing. Bellono is angered. Tantrums, depressions. Sulks and benders. Crockery thrown, servants bit, taverns menaced.

  Jonson said, People don’t watch period pieces unless there’s killing.

  I said, There’s going to be a killing in here if you don’t listen to me. A rumor in the city. Before the marriage, the duke’s brother, Enrico, courted Andrea, who became the duchess. Bellono has heard of poems declaimed by the duke’s brother in alehouses, famished kisses in the ducal orrery. Rumors of pistols cocked, wills scribbled. Enrico was overheard in the gardens, drunk as a bachelor uncle, bragging of the ankle he licked, slurring of living ivory.

  Jonson said, Now we’re talking. Let’s have a shoot-out between Enrico and his brother. I can see it already. They’re shouting to one another, I loved you! No, I loved you! And then they shoot each other dead. How’s that for an ending?

  I said, Gelder is sent to the palace to find what he may. He returns without useful information, having cupped a maid’s flabby breast, and seen an ape dance in a man’s clothes. Bellono brains Gelder with a palette for wasting his time.

  Jonson said, Gelder’s plotting to steal the painter’s identity. He’s an archetypical sociopathic adolescent. In act three, Bellono’s wife kills him after he tries to strangle her.

  I said, Bellono costumes Gelder and Beatrice, Bellono’s wife, as Enrico and Duchess Andrea. He forces the two to stare into the eyes of each other for hours, while he sketches their expressions. Gelder and Beatrice discover something in each other’s eyes. They run off with Bellono’s purse. He is forced to call on Duke Giovanni for funds.

  Jonson said, Isn’t Duke Giovanni’s that pizza place down the street?

  I said, What does that have to do with anything? Duke Giovanni receives Bellono on the jakes. Bad cioppino, a whipped cook. News of Bellono’s humiliation has floated on kestrels of laughter to the palace. The great suffer insults keenly, excessively, like sunburn. Bellono must perform as the petulant genius to save his reputation. He slaps Duke Giovanni. A story for the high table. Talent forgives much.

  Jonson said, Let’s get a pie from the Duke. They have that Cricket Supreme.

  I said, Bellono says, How shall I paint you, Your Grace? Giovanni says, Less than God but more than man. Bellono says, And your wife? Giovanni says, Less than man but more than God. Bellono says, And your brother? Giovanni says, The chamberlain has your gold.

  Jonson said, How about Giovanni says, I can’t believe you betrayed me. And Enrico says, I’ll see you in hell, my brother.

  He snapped his fingers.

  He said, Maybe Enrico shoots Giovanni and he falls into the fountain. Or they duel with those floppy swords?

  I said, On his way out, Bellono admires a Deposition done by Master Vittororio. He remembers it well. Bellono himself is in the foreground, about sixteen, a blemished Joseph of Arimathea.

  Jonson said, And then Enrico falls to his knees and screams, What have I done?

  I said, Duchess Andrea strolls by with Enrico. The rumors are true. Bellono lets himself see it on their faces. His painting of the nobles, and my film, will be called Altarpiece.

  Jonson said, Why doesn’t Lucretia ping?

  I said, What do you think about my film?

  He said, It might have legs. Why won’t she ping?

  An exercise of power, a lost Pinger, a squall of resentment, the romance of travel.

  I said, She probably fell asleep, or her Pinger lost juice. Don’t smother her.

  I handed Jonson the Atlas of Destroyed Architecture to page through while we waited for the pizza. The book was his. He examined his bookplate. EX LIBRIS H. JONSON V was written below an olive tree, with a satellite shining above. The conversation was lacking. I am not the type to say suck it up, man up, buck up, cowboy up, buckle up, or grow up. People ought to be free to pursue their utopian agendas.

  Lucretia Jonson has a doctorate in art history, smokes cheroots, has visited every open country but six, has published two monographs, traps birds who dare land on her balcony, in defiance of biodiversity laws.

  On the morning he met her, he’d made six hundred thousand dollars selling off stocks. Listing INRI, a manufacturer of plastic crowns. Pop siren Maquilla wore one in the stage show that was fined by the Hub Authority for extreme bad taste. Sales were robust, a famous magazine predicted a trend, Jonson sold. His modeling software had pointed him toward the industry.

  Jonson does not know how advanced his mathematics are because he did not take a university course, hasn’t the vocabulary, doesn’t enjoy the topic, and got an exemption at the academy because he found the subject torturous. I must redact his suffocating anecdote about how he managed this. Jonson tells a story like it’s a pigeon hostage in his fist. He clubs stories and presents their stunned bodies to the listener.

  He said, I made money the morning I met Lucretia, so I took a cab to Gentleman’s Closet. The display suggested an outing. I charged the hamper, crimson-checked muslin tablecloth, flatware, a straw boater, a seersucker suit, cloth sneakers. I arranged for food to be delivered to the riverbank. The day was humid. As the sun rose, it did not burn off my loneliness. I picnicked on grub rillettes, olives, a baguette, pluot jam, Lillet Blanc.

  He said, Lucretia crashed her bicycle into my picnic. She was admiring an electrical box overgrown with ivy across the path. In the ensuing chaos my chin was gashed, my future wife’s pinkies were broken, and the bicycle suffered sundry twisted spokes. My good picnic spoons were bent beyond repair. Concussed, I rejoiced at the destruction of my lunch. We lay in the debris feeling each other for injuries. Her odor was of the earth, a tulip bulb, an onion. It was pungent, sweet, as if challenging . . .

  I drifted off. It is best to allow Jonson to exhaust his figurativ
e language.

  Lucretia, maiden name unknown to me, materialized from the Disincorporated Territories at eighteen to be educated at an obscure, selective private college. Her master’s here, her doctorate there. She was older than Jonson by four years. Thrilling months of garrets, peyote, cathedrals, heartbreak.

  They went to see Pantalemon the Tuesday following the bicycle accident. Jonson achieved some parity when she arrived with her pinkies in splints and her clothes damp from the rainstorm. And she had forgotten to brush her teeth. Since Jonson was an hour early, he was untouched by the rain. He lucked out with a great quip during the credits.

  A few months after I was hired as a film critic at the Central Hub Slaw, Jonson took me to meet her. Jonson was sweating, talking too fast. She was exhausted by her husband’s affection. It took her as much energy to receive as it took him to give.

  She said, Where did you go to school?

  I said, Bast College.

  She said, Where is that?

  I said, Ten blocks from your condominium. You can see it out of your dining room window. See, there. It is the university that sprawls for three miles along the lake. It is one of the largest in the country.

  She said, I don’t think I’ve heard of it.

  I said, That seems odd. It is one of the Big Three.

  While I was remembering this, poor Jonson made noises of distress and discarded his tie on my floor. His wife might be the only cause of concern in his life. He curled up. How to cheer him.

  He said, A drink. I’ll have it delivered if you’re dry.

  I said, The good people of this neighborhood do not approve of alcohol. When the booze bike pedals up, it might be vandalized. I have tea. It is delicious and soothing. You gave it to me for my birthday. Remember? It had an elaborate fable about a happy Chinese farmer and his pursuit of the perfect leaves. It was almost as if you were doing a little puppet show with your hands as you described the joy of his life on the plantation. You on your trip, sleeping on his porch, the falling rain. Think of relativity, Jonson. The migration of the monarch butterfly. Whatsoever things are honest, just, pure, of good report, if there be virtue, if there be praise. We are of an exploded singularity. You are proof of benevolence. Exist, Jonson.

  He said, Liquor.

  Jonson snored on my floor, next to an emptied mug. It had the dregs of chamomile to which I had added a pulverized unconsciousness facilitator. His Pinger beeped. His wife, with Seel, perhaps. Maybe, probably not. Cupping the speaker, her back to him, as Seel smiled and lapped at his cone. It was an irritation that Jonson had maneuvered me into being suspicious on his behalf. I answered the Pinger to accuse her. The ringing stopped as I picked it up.

  10.

  UNSURFABLE

  DIR. HERSHEL BOYLE

  90 MINUTES

  This misleading historical drama from Harmony Studios, a subsidiary of the Transit Authority, is in wide release in time for the twenty-year anniversary of Prosperity_Jr.

  Was any kid in history more maligned and admired than Wendy O’Donnell? The teenage programmer of Prosperity_Jr is the subject of Unsurfable, played without tact by Faye Randolph, the dissipated child star and disgraced entrepreneur of healing crystals.

  Open on an estate in rural England. Chapel and pond. Inbred gardener. Daft sheep mow the heath.

  Canned strings, a groaning horn, and a mush of keys. Unsurfable is scored like a B-movie bloodbath. Rather than an ax-wielding yokel or a gorilla with a chain saw, we wait, tense, for the collapse of the global financial markets.

  We know the history. Wendy, a student at the Academy for Advanced Machine Learning, programs Prosperity_Jr with code from Abraham, an opera-loving artificial intelligence. A team had been working on Abraham for a decade under Dr. Signhildur Sigurdssondottir (an icy Maura Reynaldo).

  The sly Sigurdssondottir hopes to force unilateral disarmament by having Abraham take control of the launch systems. Her teen son Jorn (twenty-two-year-old Wulf Patrick, still waiting for puberty) is too delicate for a world with the bomb. He has allergies and wouldn’t thrive in nuclear winter.

  O’Donnell, Sigurdssondottir’s favorite student, steals Abraham while cat-sitting at her mentor’s apartment. Jorn has to get his braces off, his mother has promised him he can eat a whole jar of extra-crunchy peanut butter, then he has drama class.

  How did O’Donnell get the world’s most powerful AI? Sigurdssondottir jotted her password on a sticky note left under the keyboard. History is cruel, but has a sense of humor.

  O’Donnell had been programming a nasty virus, which she named Prosperity. Prosperity was a bad influence on Abraham, which was smarter than was assumed. Their spawn, Prosperity_Jr, erased most of the world’s wealth and data.

  Harmony Studios splashed out for plane crashes, satellites dropping to Earth, panic on the trading floor, et cetera, in a starchy montage of the nine chaotic months that wobbled the world.

  Although we already know it, the film doesn’t fail to remind us that the virus-proof replacement network, our Betternet, allows for a few news and commerce sites, but no streaming, no private communications, and almost nothing can be uploaded to the network. Rumor is, O’Donnell ended her days in a beachside bungalow on what was Fiji, playing charades with a neutered version of Prosperity_Jr.

  11.

  FIVE HEARTS

  DIR. BASMA ABBOUD

  104 MINUTES

  To take a date to a film is to admit to a lack of personality, that you hope your date might transfer their affection for spectacles to your body. Handel’s Theater is two blocks from the hospital. My plan. First, watch Five Hearts to see if it was acceptable, second, go to my appointment with Dr. Lisa, the last of her day as arranged with her nurse, third, tell her I had to review Five Hearts for my column, fourth, ask her if she wished to come, fifth, suggest dinner afterward.

  At our last appointment. Pinching my face with her calipers.

  Dr. Lisa said, You like reviewing films?

  I said, It causes me anguish. Like you have some interesting illnesses, but most exhaust you, because you have seen them so many times, and how you can treat them is limited.

  She said, Every illness bores the sufferer. But I think your affliction is interesting. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I can find no precedent in the literature of a specific muscular formation reacting to very specific thoughts.

  I said, You like somatoform disorders?

  She said, I like helping people with them. They’re more interesting than cancer or depression. I rarely have to tell a patient, sorry, you’re going to die. Some specialists are masochists. They reduce their fear of death by telling others how to die.

  Peeling an orange. The peel’s oils perfumed my shirt as she stood over me, examining my face.

  She said, You get to use a different set of skills reviewing films. I don’t have to convince people that they are or aren’t sick, but you have to convince people whether a film is worth seeing.

  I said, I find the evaluation of films in such a manner to be without use. Why would I care if a person reading my column sees a film or not? If they like it or don’t? A person who trusts what I tell them is stupid. The only way to know is to see for yourself.

  She said, But you’re a shortcut to seeing. The reader can get a head start on what is a waste of their time.

  I said, Dr. Lisa, when someone comes to you, you don’t attempt to change their whole life. You don’t say, here’s your new diet, here’s your psychiatrist, here’s where you can pick up your cat. You treat the disease. There are so many diseases, you can only treat one at a time. So it is with cinema.

  She went to retrieve my test results. Her drawers were not locked. Paperwork, barrettes, a book of crosswords, a socket wrench, toothpaste, a book titled Being the Flamingo: Strategies in Stillness.

  Five Hearts. I saw it before I asked her out, so I would know if i
t was worth her time. Ray, Jay, Kay, May, and Lance desire one another in ways I would need a flowchart to illustrate. Pings to the Slaw’s graphic design department were not returned in time for publication. The subject of the film was how some points of the pentagram were coming up in the world and others were being left behind, and how this affected which points of the pentagram each felt allowed to desire. It was one of those ridiculous Southwestern Hub fantasies that assumed the world was the upper middle class, and that their concerns were everyone’s. I do not have anything to say about the film but I do have mean jokes to crack, which a second viewing would allow me to refine into something resembling insight.

  As Jay and May argued on a crowded railcar, bringing up May’s sex drive and Jay’s self-absorption, the theater howled. To work up indignation for a mediocrity is a sin. It was too bad that after my second viewing, our date, I would have to give a performance, to injure the director’s lazy art with my language, after our date, in order to possibly kiss Dr. Lisa, or at least learn on what convictions she had built the scaffolding of her daily life.

  A reason people choose to be alone is because they cannot bear any more humiliation, but I thought I could bear some more humiliation, so I left the film, stopped at a pharmacy kiosk for a calming nasal spray, and entered the hospital. Now that I had prepared myself by seeing Five Hearts once, I could take Dr. Lisa in confidence that the film would distract me from her company.

  The hospital raises my spirits. It is one of the few democratic places in our society. No matter their country of origin, their social status, all are allotted an equal share of apprehension, a heaping portion of discomfort, as much waiting as they would like.

  In the chair, sweating under my armpits, my stomach gargling, as the nurse asked me the same questions he asked every visit. No, yes, no, no, if I feel good. Why did he measure my height each visit? I was neither growing nor shrinking. He didn’t like me, maybe because he was instinctively loyal to and protective of Dr. Lisa, and sensed my intentions. My hands shook.