Free Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta Page A

Mason, it appears, was required to wear a robe in every movie he did,” Jay said.
    “Not in every one. Not in
The Desert Fox.
”
    “Yes in
The Desert Fox.
”
    “He didn’t wear a robe in
The Desert Fox,
did he? A Nazi smoking jacket?”
    “I’m afraid he did. A rather smart dressing gown, with a matching monogrammed handkerchief pressed to his mouth from time to time. Don’t you remember how they have to drag him from his convalescent bed because he is the only one who really understands the desert?”
    “I never actually saw it,” I said. “But you’re on to something here, he has these robe scenes, doesn’t he? A very neatly tied robe. Or perhaps a smoking jacket. Maybe it is because women want to imagine him in these intimate circumstances, but they also want to imagine he is stern and elegant all the time. Robert Mitchum or Burt Lancaster, they could be sloppily bare-chested. But if we saw James Mason in careless naked abandon, it would be like the end of civilization.”
    “Except
Age of Consent.
I recall a growling Mason rolling around naked with Helen Mirren in
Age of Consent,
” Jay said. “Of course, that was the sixties—”
    “Oh my,” I said. “That’s just—”
    “Yes,” Jay said.
    After the movie, we had a gentle, tentative kiss. I took his hand and led him to my bedroom. We undressed in the forgiving twilight. He was slight, with mottled middle-aged skin, standing naked by my bed. A little like James Mason, I thought, with his accent and all.
    The next time we met, he brought a copy of
The Seventh Veil.
I hadn’t seen this film before. It not only starred a young and severe James Mason with a mysterious Byronesque limp, butit also featured a woman with a memory problem pulling back the “veils” to recover her troubled, fragmented past. It was hard not to like a guy who had an instinct for indulging my eccentric longings.
    Jay and I began to meet once every couple of weeks. It was an affair without urgency or agenda, it seemed. We’d see a movie—he continued to bring me hard-to-see films—we would have dinner, and we would sleep together. In the morning we would say goodbye. But we were not in love. We didn’t have those exhausting conversations that in-love people have. We didn’t talk about our failed marriages, although I did discover, eventually, that he was once married to an American woman. We didn’t do the life-story stuff. I knew only what pertained to the present—that, for example, he would be gone for two weeks around the holidays so he could visit his family in England.
    After he gave me my birthday present, we watched
Odd Man Out.
I didn’t tell Jay any of my birthday anxieties. Not because I wanted to withhold something. I just didn’t feel them when I was with him. I didn’t want to talk about myself; I wanted to talk about movies. Somehow, in the time between being young and where I was, the life-story recital grew too long, both dull and complicated. When I was eighteen, I wanted to tell my lovers every inch of every moment that led to this miraculous moment. I thought that would make them understand me, and then they would have to love me. But now that I was older, and actually had a life story, I didn’t feel like telling it or hearing it. I just wanted him to press against me as we slowly figured our bodies out. I understood our real stories lived there anyway.

FEBRUARY 14–15
     
    Ada came to visit. My favorite thing is spending the occasional weekend with Ada. When she still lived in LA, she would come over for dinner every week or so. But now that she lived in New York, I would get these wonderful weekends with her. I would take a plane to the city. I would stay with her in her studio apartment in Greenpoint. She would introduce me to her latest boyfriend. We would go have a glass of wine at her new favorite bar. We would sit up late talking. Even after we went to bed (in her double bed, under her pale pink satin duvet with the large, pale pink