Note to Self

6

The phone rang while Anna was eating breakfast in front of the computer, but it was only Leslie.

“Where do you go for a bikini wax?” she asked as soon as Anna picked up.

“Lucky Nails on Fifth Ave. at Fifty-Eighth. Out in Sunset Park.”

“Ugh. Don’t you know any place in the city?”

“Nope.”

“Last time I went to my place? They tore my skin off.”

“Ew,” Anna said, opening another tab for Salon.com. She clicked back to Facebook and left a comment on a friend of a friend’s wall, because yes, last night’s episode of Real Housewives of Dallas was total bullshit. That lady’s boobs were for sure fake. Cassandra was right:) Anna typed as she spoke. “Well, Lucky Nails uses this special hard wax. I think it’s from France? Plus they really get in there with the tweezers.”

“At my place, they skip the tweezer part,” said Leslie.

“No way!”

“Way. I think I’m just going to shave. I have to go to one of Josh’s things tonight.”

“Don’t,” Anna said, scrolling through her twitfeed. “It’ll only grow back thicker.”

Waxing, Anna had to admit, was something that had crossed her mind careerwise. Not the inhaling-crotch-musk-all-day part, not the really-getting-in-there-with-the-tweezers part, but the personal part. Anna always ended up telling Wendi, the Chinese lady who groomed her crotch, everything. And without even meaning to, Anna began to wonder how Leslie styled. Wendi once told her that crotch-styling preferences said a lot about a person. So what was it, a Brazilian? A perfect little St. Moritz landing strip? She wouldn’t even put it past Leslie to try vajazzling. And this line of thinking served only to remind Anna that she was getting a little overgrown herself down there. She should give Wendi a call—her pubes were probably hanging down around her knees.

Leslie was still talking about something. Her fertility treatments? But cars were honking in the background and for half a minute a loud siren drowned her out. Anna noticed Gawker had an article about candy cigarettes being banned by a smoking-prevention law.

“—zen person’s pants?”

“Huh?” Anna said, clicking on something.

“—ess than a ten percent chance. That’s what the doctor said. After that it’s pointless. I told Josh we should switch clinics, but can’t decide between Columbia or Cornell.”

“Isn’t Cornell in Ithaca?” Anna said. She forgot what came next after IUI. IVF? Or was IVF first? All the Is confused her. So many Is engaged to create yet another I.

“They have a center in the city, too, but the thing is—I’m sorry this is so loud—”

“Yeah, I can barely hear you,” Anna said, even though she could hear her fine now.

“I’ll call you later,” Leslie shouted.

“Call me later,” Anna shouted, and hung up.

She went to the bathroom, plugged in the flat iron, and turned it to high. Then she got out a tube of SPF 15 Sweet Tea tinted moisturizer and began to put on her face. Today she would call Brandon, Anna decided. She had assumed she would open the AVCCAM box together with Brie after she got back from kickball practice last night, bust out a box of microwave popcorn, and make it a roommate thing. But Brie never showed, so the box remained where it was, by the front door. She’d even sent Brie a text, Yoo-hoo? around 10:30, but never heard back. So now she would have to call Brandon. It’s probably for the best, she thought. Brandon’s better at that sort of thing.

Then again, maybe it would be better to get out of the house first, run a few errands? She hadn’t left the apartment at all yesterday, not even to go downstairs for the mail.

She was halfway down the block when the phone rang again.

“Anna? Taj,” came an unfamiliar man’s voice. “You answered my ad yesterday.”

“Hi,” Anna said, feeling her pulse quicken.

“That was pretty funny.”

“Funny?”

“Mr. 135 blah blah?”

“Oh yeah,” Anna said, nervous. “Ha ha.”

“Is now a good time to talk? I’m scheduling interviews this week, but first I just need to ask you a few questions.”

“OK,” Anna said. She walked by a sports bar with a huge banner outside reading CATCH ALL THE WORLD CUP ACTION HERE! Then she passed another small bar on the corner, with a handwritten sign taped up that said, ABSOLUTELY *NO* WORLD CUP COVERAGE EVER HERE (PHEW!). When she tuned back in, Taj was saying, “Sofia or Francis?”

“Um, Sofia?” Anna said.

“Dogme 95 or French New Wave?”

“Both?” Anna said, not knowing much about either.

“Black and white or color?”

“That depends—”

“Dolly or handheld?”

“Handheld.”

“Pinhole or digital?”

“Are you being serious?”

“Semiserious.”

She actually knew what a pinhole was because Brie had brought home one of those Build-Your-Own-Pinhole-Camera kits from Urban Outfitters one day.

“I guess, pinhole?” This is supposed to be art, she thought. In which case, the weirder the better, right?

“Bolex or Pixelvision?”

“What?”

“Bolex camera or Pixelvision?”

“Um …”

“That’s OK,” said Taj. “I was thinking of changing that one anyway. Bolex or Flip?”

“Flip.” At least she knew what a Flip was. There was a longish pause. “Hello?” Anna said, pressing the phone closer to her ear.

“I’ve heard nothing but wrong answers,” said Taj.

Well, that’s that, Anna thought, automatically binding the familiar wound with a tourniquet of indifference. She was standing right outside the pharmacy now. She had something to do. After getting off the phone, she would fill her prescription. And then? Then she would go to Earthy Basket and get one of those fancy, superhealthy deli salads and have lunch, maybe grab a few things to go, for later. When she got home, she would call Brandon and they’d make a date to open the AVCCAM box. In the meantime, she could get back on craigslist, send some follow-up messages. Keep busy. Why hadn’t she heard from anyone else yet?

“So, BING! You win,” Taj continued. There was a smile in his voice. “I’m intrigued. Where do you want to meet?”

She felt her heart contract.

“Have you ever been to Café Gowanus?” There was another long pause and Anna thought maybe the line had gone dead, just now, at the crucial moment. “Hello?”

“They may as well call that place Café Schadenfreude,” Taj said. “Let’s keep it real. We’ll meet at Halal Wireless Café on Thirty-Third and Fourth in Brooklyn. Can you do tomorrow at three-thirty?”

“Yes,” Anna said.

“I’ll text you the address so you’ll have it.”

“OK.”

“Bring a sweater. It gets cold in there with the air-conditioning,” Taj said, and he hung up.

Anna walked into Health Aid, a little dazed. She needed time to think, so she walked around the aisles, looking at different things. Vitamins making sketchy claims. Shark cartilage pills. She would wear her blue dress tomorrow. The soy-based cotton one that she’d gotten on Etsy last spring. And instead of calling Brandon to open the box, she would watch a bunch of movies on Hulu tonight to prepare. Anna inspected the toothpastes, forgetting whether they were running low. It was only eleven o’clock. What should she do? Go to Earthy Basket for lunch and then home to watch movies? Or she could check the listings for Film Forum and IFC, see what was playing. She hadn’t gone out to see a movie in forever. She pulled out her cell—an iPhone rip-off that came free with her shitty Verizon plan—to see whether there was anything good at Film Forum tonight. Before she knew it, a half hour had passed, she was still standing in the aisle, and the clerk was coughing softly into her fist.

Anna went up to the counter and handed over her thyroid prescription. Then, feeling in a celebratory mood, threw down a box of the shark cartilage tablets as well. That’s what she’d do, go to the movies. Maybe Brie would want to come. Or Brandon. She would skip the popcorn this time, hide some wheat thins in her purse instead. It felt like a plan.

7

It was a neighborhood of fix-a-flats and squat storefronts begging to install neon lights underneath your truck or wrap your large vehicle in four-color advertising. Everything else—the kebab shops, the mosques, the all-girls Muslim school—came off as mere footnotes in the larger story of down-market goods and depressed real estate. Anna barely noticed them. She had taken a southbound R train to Thirty-Sixth Street, emerged onto Fourth Avenue, then walked three blocks, breathing in the halitosis of open-air garages and the burning sugar tar of the candy-nut vendors. Halal Wireless Café was an unassuming cinder-block square painted queasy yellow. It sat between a shuttered Off-Track Betting place and a bakery whose window was a tableau vivant of artificial food coloring. If she hadn’t been looking for it, she would have walked right by.

Inside, the ceiling fan moved the air in slack circles and a television blared from a wall mount. Of the four people in the room, three sat together, crowded around a laptop. The man who was sitting at a table by himself near the window was brown-skinned. He was some indeterminate age between thirty and forty and wore dark slacks, a beige-collared shirt, and chunky black eyeglasses. There was a Moleskine open on the table next to a plate of half-eaten food, a basket of pita, and a coffee mug. With one hand, he waved Anna over. With the other, he pressed a cell phone to his ear.

“You graduated oh-eight?” Anna heard him say into the phone. He paused to write something down. “Tisch? Is there any chance you knew Chi-Wei? Production and Critical Studies? Ha! So Crick is still teaching that …?”

Isn’t it kind of rude, Anna thought, to conduct another interview, knowing I’d arrive any minute? She set her bag down on the chair opposite Taj and went over to the counter, where pretzel dogs were rotating sadly under a heat lamp. The menu was a bizarre mash-up of Middle Eastern and American food, casting doubt on the authenticity of either. Anna ordered a poached egg and coffee from a lady in a hairnet, then lingered by the toilet door, pretending to watch Wolf Blitzer on CNN until Taj was off the phone.

“Hey, Anna,” Taj said, reading her name from a list in his Moleskine. “Did you find this place OK?” His face, Anna noticed, was lopsided, but in kind of a sexy way. His eyes were a dark liquid brown that reminded her of West Elm furniture. “I know it’s kind of out of the way.”

Anna nodded and took a sip of her coffee, which tasted like someone had done their laundry in it. She actually looked down into the cup to see if there might be a cigarette butt floating there, if some sort of mistake had been made.

“All right. So where were we?” Taj flipped open the Moleskine on the table. “I have in my notes that you’re a big Lars von Trier fan.”

Having never heard this name, Anna could only assume he’d confused her with somebody else.

“Actually, lately I’ve been getting really into Romanian New Wave,” Anna chirped. “Lately” being since last night, when she had gone up to Lincoln Center to see a Cristian Mungiu double feature with Brandon.

“Oh, come on …,” Taj said, a half-bemused smile playing on his lips.

“What?”

“What what? Is that what you think I want to hear?”

“No!”

“You didn’t think the first half hour of 12:08 East of Bucharest could have been about half an hour shorter?”

“It maybe could’ve used some editing—” Anna began.

“And The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, how long was that movie? Maybe five hours? Weren’t you like, ‘Please die already, Lazarescu, I could use a fucking bathroom break’?”

Anna wasn’t sure where to go with this whole line of inquiry, but felt like now she had to follow through. Go on the defensive.

“It won Cannes,” she said with less certainty.

“Yeah, where they have a special jury prize for slowest film.” He stirred his coffee boldly with one finger. “Seriously, don’t you feel a little like the whole Romanian thing, it’s almost like rewarding low expectations?”

“You’re being reductive,” Anna said and immediately regretted it. This happened sometimes; a bit of logorrhea left over from grad school would shoot out of her mouth before she could stop it. But Taj only smiled.

“Those movies, it’s like they’re almost designed to win Cannes,” he said. “I think they have a secret Cannes-winning lab in Romania.”

Anna giggled despite herself. “That lab should be in Transylvania.”

“Doesn’t it feel almost opportunistic?” He said this in a conspiratorial whisper, leaning in toward her.

“Like an infection?” She giggled again.

“Like an infection.”

Taj held up a finger and wrote something down in his Moleskine. While he wrote, Anna studied his face: a very good nose, and his skin was more olive than brown up close. One eye, she noticed, was a little higher up than the other. Maybe that’s where the sexiness came from? It made sense. She’d always had a weird thing for guys with amblyopia.

Realizing that Taj actually enjoyed sparring with her, Anna let herself relax a little. She stabbed her egg, letting the yolk spill across the plate. Taj generously pushed his pita basket toward her. She couldn’t believe how well things were going.

“I was afraid you’d be like the other guy who was just here,” Taj said. “He brought me his semiotics thesis. Check this out.” Taj picked up the first page from the stack of paper on the table. “‘Process Identification and The Shawshank Redemption—A Microanalysis,’” he read. “Who even knows what that means? I’m like, don’t give me the words man, give me the feelings, you know?”

“I know what you mean.” Anna smiled. “I’m all about the feelings.” In fact, maybe now was as good a time as any to come clean. “Actually, that’s sort of the reason I answered your ad. Have you heard of Paul Gilman?”

“Gilman?” Taj repeated.

“He did Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop and 87 Love Street with—”

“Is this some lame attempt at irony?” Taj interrupted.

“N-no—”

“I know Paul,” Taj said.

“Oh! So you know—”

“What I don’t know, exactly, is how the fuck you people keep finding me.” His voice was soft now, almost feral. “I never name-check Paul or even Simone, but Jesus, every time it’s the same thing with you people. It’s incredible, you know?” He leaned in closer. “Just explain to me how it works, OK? Do you really, really have nothing better to do than hang out all day on the Internet? It’s like this piece of fucking shit I can’t get off my shoe.”

Anna felt her face get hot, stunned at the violence of this turnaround. “I swear, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was still chewing on Taj’s pita, for God’s sake. Hardly the body of Christ, but they’d shared a moment of communion, hadn’t they? She wondered how soon she could leave, because now things were definitely superawkward, especially with the counterwoman in the hairnet wiping the table next to them. She would wait it out for five more minutes, she thought, trying to be like China.

“Yes, you do,” said Taj.

“No,” she said. “I don’t. I watched Age of Consent the other night and it made me, I don’t know, think of things a whole other way. That’s when I found your ad. After that, I mean.”

“I bet you watched it and thought, I can do that!” he said with a smirk.

Anna said nothing though it was true that those exact words had occurred to her.

“You really don’t know who I am?”

“You’re a guy who put an ad on craigslist?” Anna said, not knowing what else to say.

He searched her face for a long moment, then finally seemed to uncoil a bit.

“OK, you want to know about Paul?” He opened a creamer even though his coffee was gone.

“No, that’s really OK—”

“Of course you do,” Taj said, matter-of-factly. “So, first of all, Paul comes from money. And I know those movies ‘didn’t cost anything.’ But movies that don’t ‘cost anything’? They all cost, minimum, twenty grand. So forget about the brutal honesty of ‘exurban realism’ or whatever it is he calls it. It was all family money.”

Anna didn’t really see what that had to do with anything, but she let Taj talk.

“And with Paul, the thing is … it’s an aesthetic, OK, and I’ll admit he’s made it work, for himself at least, but where do you go from there? He’s got his little game, ‘Is it documentary or fiction, is it real or fake?’ How interesting is that? This stupid manufactured intrigue. With me, I like to think it’s really clear-cut. It’s either totally, obviously real, or really, obviously fake, you get what I mean?”

Anna nodded, understanding nothing. She had googled Taj, but oddly her search hadn’t yielded any results.

“Age of Consent, OK? It’s a trick. Paul uses all his gimmicks, his faux realism, keeping everything so very, you know, grim? And what you think you’re getting is honesty. But you know what you’re really getting? Think for a minute about what you’re getting. Do you know what it is?”

Anna shook her head mutely, feeling the way she had back at Columbia when trying to master impossible inflections, the complex morphology of Slavic declensions.

“You’re getting sex,” said Taj. “You’re getting sex packaged as art, so you can go to a theater and sit there nicely with your friends feeling smart, and afterward you can go somewhere and talk about fucking without feeling like you’re exploiting anyone, because it’s art. But guess what? All those movies, Calista and the rest of them, they’re nothing but porn. It’s all one kind of porn or another. And don’t even get me started on Simone,” Taj said, though getting starting on Simone was something he clearly relished. “If there’s one thing her story proves, it’s there’s no faster way to fame in today’s attention economy than to show someone your pink parts.”

“So what if it’s titillating?” Anna said, surprised to find herself arguing. “At least it makes you feel something. If that guy in Age of Consent was obsessed with, I don’t know, plumbing, and was reading from a bunch of plumbing magazines about pipes and things with a bag on his head, it wouldn’t be the same. People wouldn’t care. It’s because he’s sharing something private—”

“You’re right,” Taj said.

“I mean, maybe it’s less arty, or more shallow or whatever,” Anna went on, emboldened, “but I wouldn’t want to watch it either if it was about plumbing. I guess I don’t mind that Gilman uses sex to draw you in.”

“No one’s denying you your right to titillation, OK? I get it. Titillation is important, necessary even. But it can’t be everything. You have to have titillation plus something else. If you’re going to show me your nut sack, make it the Michelangelo of nut sacks. Blow me away with your craft, your insight, your something—shit—” Taj grabbed his pen and scrawled something down. “That’s kind of a great idea: Titillation Plus. What if we call it that?”

“Call what what?” Anna said.

“A new framework for art criticism,” Taj said, still writing. “Something’s either just titillating or titillating plus.”

“Or it’s just not titillating,” Anna added.

“T, NT, or TP, then?”

“I guess.”

Taj paused to spoon some ful mudammas into his mouth with a pita triangle.

“I’ll tell you a story about Paul,” Taj said, “but it’s probably not the kind of thing he wants to get around.”

“I promise,” Anna said, trying to hide her excitement. It really only hit her now: she was sitting with a guy who knows Gilman! This put things on an entirely different level, didn’t it? But then Anna realized something else. She wasn’t just excited because Taj knew Gilman; she was excited because things were about to get fucked up. Already—and without getting drunk or high—they had stumbled into the zone of inappropriate intimacy. She could tell Taj things. And Taj could tell her things. Not everything, maybe, but a lot of things. Things they might not tell anyone else, because they either knew them too well or not well enough. Why was it that she never felt this way with other women? Brandon was the closest thing. But she and Brandon had something in common. They had been cubicle serfs at Pinter, Chinski and Harms together. A “loser bond” they called it. Because theirs weren’t the kinds of jobs anyone aspired to but the kind you simply ended up at, sucked in by promises of health benefits and discounted Metrocards. You made excuses for being there until the excuses became the reasons themselves. So she and Brandon had Chinski and Harms, but what did she and Taj have?

“—had signed up for this special six-week seminar with Herzog out in LA,” Taj was saying. “It was called Ephemeral Cinema or Cinema of the Ephemeral or something, and every week everyone in the class was supposed to make a three-minute movie and bring it in for crit. Paul was starting to get a name for himself in certain circles, but hadn’t hit on the magic bullet yet. At the time he was in a Mario Giacomelli phase, shooting these supercontrasty, eight-millimeter films at night. Basically in the dark. Grain big as golf balls.” Taj was tearing open a Sweet’n Low packet as he spoke, pouring its contents onto the table. “I think I still have some of those in a box somewhere.”

Anna had no idea what Taj was talking about, but it was all interesting. She ate her egg.

“So Paul was showing his boring movies in crit every week and no one liked them. Then he comes home one day and his roommate is fucking some guy. He had found this cheap studio to sublet but it was a share, so he and this other guy basically lived in one big room together.”

“I had a roommate like that once,” Anna began. “In college we—”

“Yeah,” Taj went on, ignoring her. “I forget all the details, but I think the guy was like, some kind of Puerto Rican queen. Or Vietnamese queen?”

“An ethnic queen?” Anna supplied helpfully.

“Something. And maybe he was fucking this other guy for money? I don’t know. I remember Paul telling me there was something weird about it. Maybe they were dressed up like Pilgrims or, like, finger-painting with their balls—whatever it was, it wasn’t exactly normal. Plus, of course, they’re both totally jacked up on something. Paul had crit the next day and he hadn’t made his movie yet, so he thinks, What the hell? And grabs his Nizo. He sets the camera down on something and hits record. He shoots them for three minutes, all one take. They probably didn’t even notice, or didn’t care, if they did.”

“That’s so messed up—”

“Yeah, not exactly what you’d call a triumph of the human spirit.” Taj paused to pour the contents of another Sweet’n Low on the table and began to draw a spiral in the sugar with his finger, a sort of Spiral Jetty