So that was that. I called Joe from the set. He said he felt fine, and I said I knew he did but that I just had to do what I thought was best. “Well, you’re the boss,” he said glumly. I had been used to his chatty bluster, but in that moment I heard the man who had painted buildings for seventy years, a hard worker who was used to being part of a team and doing what the boss said. Some bosses had probably not been very nice.
That weekend I sat in a room and watched elderly actors read Joe’s lines. I was so exhausted that my personal goal was just not to cry during these auditions. The whole idea for the role of Joe was Joe. Most of the lines I’d written didn’t matter; they were just placeholders for where Joe would improvise. When these old men improvised, they drew upon their personal histories — as lifelong actors. They weren’t a boring group of people, but none of them had met their wives at Lake Paw Paw.
After watching one particularly frail man hobble through his reading, I complained to Gina that these eighty-year-old men actually seemed sicker than Joe; who was to say that all of them didn’t also have cancer and just two weeks to live? It also occurred to me now that Joe had been counting on the checks we were about to give him, for his work and for the rental of his house. Had I come into his life, gotten his hopes up, and then let him down — left him to die?
After the bleak auditions, I asked my husband to come with me to meet Joe; I didn’t trust myself entirely. The two of us paced around Joe’s living room, trying to paint a picture of what a movie shoot was like. “A normal day is really long,” I said. “Like twelve or fourteen hours.” “There would be lots of people in here,” my husband said, looking around the tiny house. “It would be like the army coming in and taking over.” “Will they mess up the carpets?” Joe asked. “No, no,” we said, “they’d put rubber mats down, all over the house.” After a while we’d talked over every last detail and there was just nothing more to say. I had to call it. “Well,” I said shakily, “I’d like to do this with you, if you really want to.” “I really do,” Joe said.
We splurged and ran two cameras all day, knowing we couldn’t expect Joe to repeat things he’d done, so each scene was filmed tight and wider at the same time. Then we’d shoot Hamish’s various reactions, which would hopefully bind the dialogue into the fiction. When I asked Joe to sell Hamish the old hair dryer, he handled it like a seasoned improviser, hilarious and real. Much harder was trying to get him to say specific lines, especially “You’re still in the beginning.” It was blisteringly hot, the room was crowded, and he’d been working for hours and hours (many of them spent waiting for planes to fly by). It was so hard to keep insisting that he say this particular sentence that had long since lost all meaning. He must have tried fifty times, so sweetly, always missing by a mile and then launching into a monologue about his own early married years, which he remembered perfectly. Finally on one take he said, “You’re in the middle of the beginning, right now.” It was a much better and more specific idea — that a beginning could have a beginning, middle, and end.
At the end of his fourteen-hour shoot day, Joe was in good spirits and seemed reluctant to see us all go, especially the pretty women. And two weeks later, he was still very much alive, making repairs on his house. When I was done shooting, I hurried to edit his scenes and record his voice-over lines as the Moon. But Joe continued to not die, and so after a while I relaxed, and as I shaped and reshaped the movie he indulged me with many, many recording sessions. One time I brought my laptop so I could watch the scene before we began the call-and-response process of recording. He seemed disconcerted at the sight of himself on the screen. “Strange to see yourself on there, isn’t it?” I said, turning the screen away from him. “I didn’t realize I was so old,” he said.
At the end of our last recording session, I asked him how he would describe what had happened, what we had done together.
Joe: Well, about six years ago I bought fifty thousand Christmas cards from a friend of mine when he got a heart attack. So I put the ad in the PennySaver for the cards, and you came up and knocked on the door and told me you were answering the ad. And then later you explained to me what you wanted to do and asked if I’d be willing to do it.
Miranda: Why’d you do it?
Joe: Well, I’m kind of adventurous. I thought it would be worth a try and see how I liked it as I went along.
Miranda: And how was it?
Joe: You were real good to work with. You want something done and you’ll stop and think about exactly which way you want it and you’ll do it quick. I don’t know if there’d be a future in it for me, you know, making a little bit on the side. But I know I’m not going to be a big movie star.
Miranda: How was the day when we shot at your house?
Joe: Well, it was a little hectic, but I’d get up early in the morning to feed the cats at about five thirty or six. These are all the neighbor’s cats, not mine. Mine are all dead now. I went over to a parking lot where most of the help parked, and they served breakfast. Well, I got a couple cups of coffee and a couple of doughnuts and that. Then I came back here. But then it started becoming a little hectic because they had a lot of people standing around not doing anything and I didn’t know what their purpose was. I had to tell them to keep out of the one bedroom because I got a lot of important papers in there, you know, and I didn’t want them mixed up. But other than that, everything was pretty good.
Miranda: How was it working with Hamish?
Joe: Hamish was real congenial — I got along with him from the time he got here to the time he left. I was kind of surprised, you know, a big star like that coming in for a little thing like this. But I figure maybe this is going to be a big hit, you know. Going to win an Academy Award.
Miranda: When was the last time you went to the movies?
Joe: We don’t go to the shows very often, since prices started going up, you know. The last time I went to a movie was in October 1969. It was an X-rated movie, when they first started coming out in the late ’60s. It was at an outdoor theater — I don’t remember the name of it offhand. But on all the streets around, all the cars were parked with hundreds of kids standing on the roof watching the movie. You know, getting to see it free. Learning something new like they’d never done it before.
I finished the movie in Germany and flew home the day before Thanksgiving. The day after Thanksgiving I called Joe. His wife Carolyn answered and said Joe had died two days earlier.
I was so sorry, and I kept saying that, and though we hardly knew each other, we kept laughing and crying. I had thought of her as shadowy or slight, but she wasn’t at all. Carolyn was open and ardent, with a gravely voice. We made jokes about Joe, and in laughing we forgot for an instant and then remembered and cried again. And all the while I was trying to get off the phone because it seemed so presumptuous to talk to her right now. Who was I? Just some person who’d answered her husband’s ad in the PennySaver. But she wanted to tell me about his last day. “He was in bed, and I kissed him, and, you know, diddled him a little, and then I went out of the room for a moment, and when I came back he was gone.” I made sympathetic noises, but I was thinking, Diddled? Was Joe masturbated before he died? I thought about the dirty cards and it seemed possible. Carolyn described some “wonderful Jewish people from the Skirball” who came to wash his body and take care of everything. She wept and said that this wasn’t the plan; she was supposed to die first.
Brigitte and I visited her a couple weeks later. It was strange to be in the house without Joe, very quiet. And of course Carolyn wasn’t in her bedroom as usual. “Do you want to see him? He’s right over there,” she said, pointing behind me. I smiled with uncomprehending horror and turned around very slowly. “In the paint can. Because all he did was paint. And he never stood still. We put him in the can so he’s here, where I can see him. He’s not out somewhere in some… grave. And I told my son, ‘When I go, I want to be put in the can with Dad.’ He said, ‘Are you sure?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m sure! Why n
ot? And in the end, if that can isn’t big enough, get a bigger one.’”
Carolyn and I walked around the house, looking at all their old things and talking. I imagined living alone in our house after my husband’s theoretical death, and it seemed intolerably sad. I would have to move back into the office where I’d tried to write the script, the little cave. I would pick up where I had left off before I met him, when I was thirty. I would finally cook the great northern beans into a soup, and I would sit and eat that soup, alone, and then I would go to sleep, as if my entire life with him had been a single long day.
Brigitte was taking Carolyn’s picture and telling her she seemed like a happy person. Carolyn agreed that she was, and then added, “You know, to be a sorry person, that’s not nice. Like Dorothy always says. That’s my girlfriend. I told you about her, right? We’ve been friends for seventy-three years.”
This number startled me out of my sad tale. “So you’ve known her longer than Joe, then?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Because I met her when I was seven.”
I touched the glass jar containing the tiny bride and groom from the top of Joe and Carolyn’s wedding cake. Dorothy had been at that wedding. She’d probably thrown rice at her best friend. And then what did she do? How did she spend the rest of her life? I’d could call her right now and ask. It almost hurt, remembering that Joe and Carolyn were a part of the world, surrounded by an infinite number of simultaneous stories. I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important — I had to believe in my own story. Perhaps I wouldn’t live out my last days alone in my office, drinking soup and wearing black. Maybe I would live without him among the things we had made together. Not without sadness, but not only tragically.
Carolyn was putting away the photo albums and I knew it was time to go. I just had to clarify one last thing.
“I probably misheard this, but when we first talked, when you told me he had passed away, you said you kissed him and then what did you do? You did something and then you went to the other room. You diddled…?”
Carolyn squinted into the air, remembering. “I dithered around, putting him to bed. I told him that his nose was cold and that he was a puppy dog. The rest of him was cozy because we put blankets on, you know, warm blankets. But his nose was cold, and I told him, ‘Jeez, your nose is cold. You’re a puppy dog.’ And then I left the room.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Jesse Pearson for encouraging this idea at the very start, my literary agent Sarah Chalfant for really listening, Eli Horowitz for a seventeen-step to-do list, and Starlee Kine for emboldening me to the finish. Additional thanks to Aaron Beckum for being so kind to Joe and Carolyn, going far above and beyond his duties as my assistant.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and in two Whitney Biennials. July wrote, directed, and starred in the film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. July created the participatory website learningtoloveyoumore with artist Harrell Fletcher, and a companion book was published in 2007 (Prestel). Raised in Berkeley, California, she currently lives in Los Angeles. Her second feature film, The Future, was released in the summer of 2011.
Miranda July, It Chooses You
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