Free Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

phone calls. I distill the important request from the nuisance or the extraneous and then deliver it to the attention of Jack. But mostly I just have a long-built instinct for what he wants to hear about. I do, however, have to be there without fail, to filter and distill. No spontaneous late lunches for me.
    Jay smiled and nodded. Not that interested in hearing more, which was fine because I wasn’t all that interested, either.
    He came over for dinner that night. It would be a long drive for him. I lived across the Valley and way into the tired desert hills of Santa Clarita. He lived near the Farmers Market, on Ogden Drive. Already we were doomed, we had a commute between us. But he didn’t complain, and arrived on time. He didnot bring me a Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light ™ item that evening. That would be saved for our next date. We ate grilled fish with aioli and drank a steely and unsentimental summer wine. We talked about Nicholas Ray’s hard-to-see film
Bigger Than Life,
in which high school teacher James Mason takes the newfangled cure-all drug cortisone and then becomes sweaty and distorted and psychotic. He loves Nicholas Ray and I love James Mason, so we found common ground in
Bigger Than Life.
Because it hadn’t made it to DVD, it had attained a cult cachet among film fanatics. Jay—no surprise there—was a devoted cineaste, particularly of the highly wrought American films of the 1950s. Jay emerged from his car proudly wielding an old copy of the film on videotape, which I thought was a rather interesting date choice. Though no fanatic, I had seen
Bigger Than Life
at the Nuart years ago. Whatever it was to people in the fifties, or to the film fanatics of the moment, to me it read like a very earnest description of middle-class mortal desperation. It didn’t feel silly or campy, despite how melodramatic I found it. It truly disturbed me. It was a much more discomforting film of addiction than, say,
The Man with the Golden Arm.
It was about the creeping perversity of conventional life; it was, with its increasingly distorted close-ups and subjective angles, its blatant angry reds and hysterical atmospherics, a deeply unsettling film.
    We tapped it into my old VCR. This time I didn’t feel disturbed. Instead I felt as if an old friend had dropped by. I now loved this odd obscure movie.
    “Did you ever think about how men in the movies are rarely shown as high school teachers? How they are always universityprofessors? I think we are supposed to think Mason is a failure because he teaches high school,” Jay said.
    “What about
To Sir with Love
? That was a male high school teacher. He was the hero,” I said.
    “That was a redemption drama—a missionary film. Totally different.”
    He poured out the rest of the wine. Mason was in his bathroom, popping pills with an anguished expression.
    “Don’t look in the mirror! Whatever you do, don’t look in the mirror! Oh, he looked in the mirror,” I said. I was pleased to make Jay laugh. It is nice when you have seen a movie a few times and you have someone you can talk to while you are watching it. The repetition makes the movie lose some of its darker impact, but it gains something else: as it seeps deeper into familiarity, it begins to make a permanent claim on your sensibility, your aesthetic history. It is a lens through which you see the world, and that requires a certain amount of interaction, of movie talk. And I love that. I hate when people say
shhh, shhh,
like you are in church. I want to watch a good movie again and again, and again, and I want to crawl into it with my friends and talk. Jay didn’t
shhh
at me. Not at all.
    “It is hard to buy Mason moonlighting as a cabdriver. It seems so unlikely to me. He does do that seethy humiliation and self-loathing so well, though,” I said.
    “Did you ever notice how in all his movies James Mason always has a scene in a robe? In
Lolita,
in
Five Fingers,
in
A Star Is Born.
And in
The Seventh Veil
.