Free Stories in an Almost Classical Mode by Harold Brodkey

Liselotte’s forehead, then of her breasts, then the obelisk, the street, and the leaves.
    How much did Nanna see? Sukie and Robin were secretive about their affair. Marcus never discussed his sexual adventures with Nanna.But Nanna was old, shrewd; surely she guessed. She clung tightly to his arm when they walked on the bluff. She said, “You have become an interesting-looking young man.” She did not go to Florida that winter until after Christmas, but stayed in Scantuate, giving as her reason that she felt like enjoying the cold weather; but Marcus was sure it was to be near and help him. He was starting college and might get into trouble. Nanna asked him about Sukie. “She likes someone else,” Marcus said evasively. “She and I are still friends.” “I’m glad,” Nanna said. “Gamma Foster hasn’t been well. You never do your imitations anymore.” He saw Sukie at college from time to time. The people he knew said of her she was a very stupid girl, a snob, shallow, affected. One of Marcus’s cousins (she also told him Nanna was cold and hadn’t loved her husband and children: “She was crazy about her father and nursed him, and you know that kind of thing. He was one of those citizenship-mad Jews, very anxious to win awards”) mentioned that Sukie had always had a reputation in Scantuate: “Definitely loose.”
    Work commences on the shot that will introduce the figures of Oskar and Liselotte when the film is edited. Marcus, Alliat, and the camera are ensconced on the boom. Marcus signals, and the boom rises into the air. High above Rome, Marcus and Alliat confer in whispers. Far up the street, Oskar and Liselotte begin to walk. Oskar slightly in advance—that is, Oskar walks and Liselotte is pulled. Marcus leans forward. Liselotte teeters on the vanity of her high heels. The camera sights down through the frozen surf of leaves toward Oskar and Liselotte among the pedestrians, speckled like the street with leaf shadows and bits of light, adrift, like the leaf shadows, details of the day, and as transitory. When they come to a place where the shadow is thick and unbroken beneath the trees, Marcus shouts,
“Halt!”
and Oskar, Liselotte, and the extras pause, as still as death, while the camera whirs. Marcus shouts, “March!” and Oskar and Liselotte emerge from the shadow. Oskar points from time to time, and Liselotte nods; on the sound track, Liselotte’s voice, from a distance, will say,
“Ja, ist schön.
” When they pass the chalk marks of the shot before, Marcus shouts,
“Bon!
Stop!
Halt!”
and calls a retake for safety.
    On autumn Saturday afternoons, Nanna walked with her cane in the garden. Nanna had a cyst on her leg. Marcus came down in the convertible she had bought him. On the road between college and Scantuate, he left behind the life he led at college—the moods, the self-disgust, the talk, the alcohol, the girls and women, pursued without imagination orfervor but with indignation; they ought to give in. “Everything’s fine, as usual,” he told Nanna. That meant he was glad to see her. When Sukie and Robin were in Scantuate at Gamma Foster’s, they always came to see Nanna. Nanna had become a member of their group. Nanna, who had never been demonstrative, now kissed Marcus—not frequently: when he arrived and when he left—and she held his arm when they walked in the garden. “I may fall,” she said. There is no old woman among the extras, Marcus realizes, no old Roman women, only an old man in a straw hat.
    Oskar tells Marcus through Whitehart’s headset telephone that Liselotte is terrible, and he asks if in the next shot he should play his part as if he is acting according to a conscious plan.
    Marcus thinks and says, “No. You plan, you don’t plan. It doesn’t matter. You do what you do anyway. I’ll tell you what it’s like. Excuse me, but it’s like a dog. The expression in the dog’s eyes when he is going to disobey a command. Is he thinking? It is his body.