colin spoelman

At Union Station in Washington, Ed changed trains. He walked around the station, listening to the squeaks of sneakers on polished floors, usually drowned by the rumble of a crowd. He found himself window shopping, looking over merchandise locked in closed stores.

Christmas songs played over the sound system. The perfunctory secular music had been replaced with a selection of Elizabethan carols, played on harpsichord and cello. It seemed fitting in under the cast iron trellises of that old station. One song, “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” drifted sorrowfully through the empty station. He knew it from his distant youth as an advent song, a carol that anticipates the arrival of the infant savior. Ed listened to the song, thinking how mournful it sounded for the circumstances. And yet, its melody seemed finely tuned to the emotion that filled him in the station. He imagined pine boughs and rotting castles, somewhere far away across a dark ocean. The English were good at making an aesthetic of longing. The song changed, and he walked away, down into a dark tunnel. He boarded his train amid the noise of the platform, but in his head, all that played was the haunted melody of an ancient song.

And so Ed found himself on his way to the Midwest, in a bizzare state of mind—and once again transcribing the fantasy of coming home. And while he knew that his family would welcome him, he wondered to himself how he would relate again to the life he once lived. He thought of Anne, the girl of the fantasy. The girl he was going home to for yet another year.

Ed had been going home to Anne for seven years now, three years of boarding school and was now in his fourth of college—this ritual was one of his most religious acts. She was the girl who was content never to escape their small Ohio town, content not to take photographs anymore, living with her parents and waiting for the cathartic event that would take her somewhere else—geographically or otherwise. And to Ed, for better of for worse, this stasis was a certainty and while her reaction to him had changed many times over the course of their history—he still found himself composing events in his mind where he and she were the foreground to a very abstract pattern of darker tones.

Their history was simple enough: she was that girl that outlasted other girls—but never his girl. She and he were close enough to the other’s ideal that they were able to maintain some kind of closeness through the years, sometimes very close, but more often their intimacy was simply superimposed on a history of memories and images. They had always understood each other too well not to be intimate, but he hoped that as he grew older, into different and new sophistications, that old kisses and their pretended meanings would dissolve, giving the illusion of purity.

To him, she remained both simple and obscure. She welcomed his voice, his company, his touch. They spent hours on the beach, or driving in to Toledo to go the jazz clubs. But sometimes Ed couldn’t help but let her know that he wasn’t content just to spend time with her—he was compelled to touch her, to kiss her. As if these things were the essential part of the narrative. And she let him. She welcomed him, but was never eager. And in the cool blueness of the early morning, when he was next to her body in her bed, she was the farthest away, unresponsive, looking out of frame as if to anticipate the next cut, the next juxtaposition.

For his part, Ed was busy redirecting the scene he had just played the lead in. After goodnight and before sleep, he would ignore his tight throat, and imagine the scene from above, manipulating the lighting, changing the script, and refocusing the action.

Given the quiet noise of the train and relative isolation, coupled with his peculiar mood, Ed could not help but compose this new fantasy—although the characters and stage were the same as had ever been. Now he imagined going in to the house, camera panning to follow his walk up the steps of the wrap-around porch, into the double-hung doors, then camera fading to black. Then, an interior medium shot with Anne and her parents, drinking cider. The living room is bright, but the lines are ill-defined, everything is a bit out of focus. Anne wears something charcoal gray, with a turtle neck that covers most of her skin. There is a brief shot of her whole body, her eyes are looking off in the distance. She puts her right hand on her neck and smiles at him.

And then, consumed with nostalgia, Ed redefined his task, editing in the new material with stock footage from the vault of his memory. She’s younger, her hair long again. The living room becomes more clear, and though it is still early evening, the snow becomes a lightning storm, and he and she—consumed with each other and the unusual light of a summer storm on lake Erie--push the living room couches front to front, and crawl together in this new piece of furniture

And then Ed cut to a series of close shots—most of them of Anne’s hands with slender fingers (almost so slender that they are grotesque, but Ed finds that this can be easily forgiven) Her hands move over him, articulate in the growing darkness. His script is well written, for once. There was no more foolish talk of art and dreams. They are both well versed, she with her hands and he with his words. No more physical or verbal fumbling. Together, they understood the importance of composition, of movement in space, of diegetic sound.

But even in his fantasy he could not destroy the fundamental differences: the critic and the artist, the passive and the aggressive, and the woman and the man. And the fantasy shattered into many irreconcilable pieces on the train. He woke up with the daylight, thinking more practically, but no less disturbed by the imperfection of his art.