Radiance

Do you know what she does first in Self-Portrait? She smiles. She fucking smiles. And then she laughs. A sweet, wry little self-deprecating laugh. Like she’s embarrassed to be taking up so much space in the shot. Like she has stage fright. But she wasn’t. She didn’t. Nothing embarrassed her. Maybe she had stage fright when her ma first put a tit in her mouth, but never a day since. Offstage fright, maybe. She never knew what to do with herself if the camera wasn’t running. But the laugh says she’s embarrassed. The smile tells us she has butterflies. Oh, isn’t it a funny damn racket, to be in the flickies? Who, me? This old thing? I’m so nervous! Who needs a drink?

I haven’t earned anything yet.

Come find me in two years.

Her smile yawns up over me, black and white and enormous—and I knew, as only a man who’s stared at it until he ralphed into his own lap can know—entirely fake. It’s a good one, though. One of my favourites of hers. Full of the feral thrill that surrounded All Things Venus back then. People couldn’t get enough of that shitty little burg—the one world that made all the others possible. But it’s their smile, not hers. Look at her, look at her, don’t you see? She’s going to Venus. She smiles like people smile when they’re obsessed with Venus. It’s a smile like a trailer for the real thing.

But no, it’s too soon for that. I was drunk. I hadn’t slept in three days. When I think of her I see all her movies, all her faces, at the same time. Stacked up into orbit. But you can’t see what I see. I see the Venus smile, but it’s not there yet. This one’s a baby version of that nine-thousand-watt grin. It’s Face #212: Intrepid Girl Reporter. She hadn’t been to Venus yet. Venus always felt so obvious, she told me under the hot, wet stars of Adonis, when she didn’t think I could hear her. In Self-Portrait with Saturn, Venus was four movies and nine years away. Up there, she’s just a kid. Twenty-one. Sleeps like a dragonfly so she never misses a thing. Lovers like a revolving door. Drinks like she’s allergic to water. She’s barely a person yet. The girl in that decrepit print with a cigarette burn in the middle of her forehead like the mark of Cain and film scratches all down her cheeks doesn’t even know that Self-Portrait will be a hit. Better than a hit. It’ll make her name. Her name. Not her old man’s.

These’re things I know about her. These’re things everyone knows about her. It’s not fair that I should know as much as anyone who cares to pick up a magazine. I should know more. I should know it all. But you begin where you begin, and hope—even if hope is a pickpocket with both fists full—to go, somehow, further and higher.

Well, I began with her. And she began on-screen.

I hunt for likenesses between us. For places where, laid over one another, our topographies would match. Capital to capital. River to river. There aren’t many. I try to make more, but she’s done, finished, finite, and I am not.

And what about me? I don’t remember a damn thing before the age of ten. A man is nothing but memory, and by that count I was born on a burnt grass shore with a woman grabbing my wrist so hard she bruised me, a neat line of her four fingers on my skin, over my pulse, over my heart. A flash of light: fiat fucking lux. The smoky, acidic smell of the sea. Hot, pollen-drunk wind. A whirr and a clatter. I’ve been recorded since I was born. So has she. That great black eye got us good. I was born the minute I was noticed.

Before that there’s just a calm pre-credits wipe of darkness, nothing into nothing. There’s footage of my entrance; there’s footage of her exit. We’re each missing the other half. I only know my parents’ names because people who oughta know wrote them down for me. Her father sat astride her life. His name is her name. What luxury.

The fifty-foot woman winks. To no one. To me. To the hatless man and his orally-fixated buddy. To the Astor and Te Deum and the mermaids with their miniature Titans. But really to a solemn goatee’d bellhop in a blue cap who dutifully dropped the needle on an old phonograph so that we could all hear her deep yet somehow nasal voice echo loudly—too loud, too loud—in the theatre.

It hurt our ears. Everyone winced, straightened up. Hatless got his jollies interruptus. We all hated it. We all squirmed.

Nobody makes talkies anymore.

I could stand her face, but her voice did me to pieces. I heard her say the first words of her first movie and her first words to me all at once; and I’ve taken punches, I’ve taken gut stabs, but I couldn’t take that.

I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system.