This is the first deep pleasure I remember having “after” the pandemic—the pandemic was still very much ongoing, but I was vaccinated, out of my house, sitting outdoors at a cafe, and my daughter was with a nanny, a luxury we had not had for 10 months. Prior to this I was with our 2 year old every day, all day, with the exception of a few hours in the afternoon when my husband would take her, and 2-3 minutes each time I had to pee. “After the pandemic” really means so many things, at so many times; I’ve had many afters. This was roughly June 2021.
The couple are two filmmakers, and also not a couple—an English man and an American woman, divorced many years now, amicable in their separation if not at first then certainly now as they sit and talk as old friends, laughing at each other’s jokes, telling the news of the weeks past and forecasting the ones to come. He brings her a coffee, she removes a dusting of lint from his too-small athletic jacket. He is energetic while also staid, subtle in his mannerisms; she is full and gregarious, all warmth and strength, an athlete’s physique hard-earned in the wake of birthing their two now-grown children.
The divorcées are aged but not old; sun has sprinkled freckles onto her chest and shoulders; weight has accumulated gently at his middle. A third person sits at the patio table with them on this half-rainy, half-cloudy Los Angeles morning. He is also a filmmaker, also English, though his head is obscured and I can see little of his body—never mind, he is mostly accompaniment to this couple who have awakened in me a long-dead pleasure: eavesdropping. The conversation is about making movies, mostly, yet everything seems contained within it, their whole careers, their marriage, the state of the union and the state of their children.
Him: I’m not sure cancel culture is such a bad thing.
Other him: Cancel them all, I say!
Her: What is being cancelled, anyway?
Him: And if you get a few wrong, well. Haven’t we got it wrong putting people in prison?
Other him: Killing people in prison, even.
Her: The proverbial chopping block! Which, if the rebound of their careers tells us anything, doesn’t seem to chop much.
Him: Hm. I remember when I got bad press a few years ago—
Other him: —oh yes, when that reporter from the Times did that retrospective! Ha, ha! And didn’t realize you had made [mentions famous thriller from the ‘90s]
Her: Because he couldn’t imagine you’d done [famous thriller from the ‘90s].
Him: Well, he thought I couldn’t possibly be that old! That no one could be that old and be making new films.
Her: But you are that old.
Him: Older!
Her: Do you remember when we drove to Florida to meet that one reporter?
Him: And had Christmas in Kentucky.
Her: We drove a million hours that trip.
Other him: America is endless.
Him: The kids hated going.
Her: They did hate it. But we loved it.
Other him: Almost impossible to do that, isn’t it, love something your kids hate?
Her: Yes but this one time…
Him: We managed. We loved in spite of them. Ha ha!
Her: Except the badlands.
Other him: What are they?
Him: In New Mexico. These soft sort of buttes. The kids still talk about them.
Her: How they were actually…blue.
Him: Like alien land.
Her: We all just stood staring at them in some sort of reverence. We all loved the badlands.
Other him: I drive cross-country next week. Then I’ll see the American dentist.
Him: It’s the place to see dentists, really.
Her: We must draw you a map.
Their accents made me long for England, a place I’d lived and a literature I loved; alongside them I travelled across the United States and back and could see in my mind the land, wide-open sky, my effortlessly free and uncertain self of a decade ago; I learned what it means, in a glancing way, to sustain a long artistic career; I admired, from the depths of my own stay-at-home marriage, a divorced couple's clear and humane friendship; and remembered amongst it all, my own, well-spent 20s—mostly spent watching the sun go down from a fire escape on Miracle Mile with my cat, British friend / beau who smoked Benson & Hedges and laughed at the same time, at the same things that I did, like school children. What does eavesdropping offer the unsettled and lonely? Whole lives, and a great, big world.
Listening to strangers after such a long while expanded my sense of what was possible, what existed beyond the perimeters of myself, and brought me loop-round back to myself, too. Often we declare the world "such a small place" but I'm here to protest that the world is magically, unbelievably an enormous place, full of ideas, ponderances, joys, utterances, delusions, and pains which we only know in pieces—which we can ever only know partially, anyway, no matter how close we sit to another person or how much they speak to us about their life's particulars.
But we get to at least try.
You can read Part II of Eavesdropping here
I so badly want to know what the redacted movies are.
Love.