Let It Snow Part 6

Holly wishes she could be so sure.

"So, Max, when do you fly back?" Annie asks. It's the first thing she's said since she returned to the table, and it took every ounce of composure she had to speak to him, to utter his name.

But she had to say something. She had to mercifully shut down Eric and Wendy's seemingly endless discussion about city parking. If she continued to allow Eric to control the dinner conversation, everyone would be asleep before dessert. Everyone already seemed mentally disengaged from the table.

"I'm flying to Stacy's parents first thing tomorrow morning."

"Stacy's youra?" Amy asks.

"Oh, sorry. Stacy's my girlfriend."

"And you're flying on Christmas Eve?" Tim asks. "The airports must be terrible."

"Why didn't you just fly back with Stacy?" Eric asks.

"There was some confusion when I bought our tickets. I'm not sure what happened," Max says, though he knows he was supposed to be on that plane with Stacy. But he couldn't come home and not see Annie. Or, rather, he was planning on leaving as scheduled, but when Eric opened up an opportunity for him to see Annie again, he couldn't pa.s.s it up. And, yes, it cost him a small fortune to get another flight out tomorrow morning. And, yes, Stacy was furious with him, confused at his sudden change of heart, and her insecurities blew up as they tend to do when he does something curious, which seems to be his fallback positiona"acting curiousa"in his relations.h.i.+ps.

But he just couldn't pa.s.s up an opportunity to see the woman he's been pining over all these years. He had to see if his obsession for her was something that would endure, or whither away. Now, he knows that it will never whither away. He's only worried now about what he's going to do about the truth of their bond. What can he say to her before he leaves? He'll have to say something.

"How long's your holiday?" Holly asks Max.

"Well, actually, I'm on sabbatical. So, my holiday goes through next summer."

"I didn't know that," Eric says. "How long have you been on sabbatical?"

"Since August. I taught my last cla.s.s over the summer."

"So, you're working on something?" Eric asks.

"Trying to, yeah."

"A book?" Annie asks.

"Yeah."

"What about?" Wendy asks. "Unless you don't want to talk about it?"

"No, it's fine. I'm writing a book on Andrei Tarkovsky."

"Tarkovsky," Annie says, almost reflexively. She's sitting up straight now. He's certainly gotten her attention. If she were trying to suppress her interest in what he was saying minutes before, that's gone now. She looks like she wants to say more, and there are a million questions she wants to ask, but she sinks back into her chair.

"Tarkovsky?" Amy asks. "He's a filmmaker?"

"He's a Russian filmmaker", Eric says. "Well, he was. He's been dead since the eighties."

"Would I be familiar with anything he's done?" Amy asks.

"You might have heard of Solaris," Eric responds. "It was remade here in the states a couple of years ago."

"Well, Soderbergh says that he wasn't remaking Tarkovsky as much as reinterpreting Stanislav Lem's novel," Max says.

Annie smiles at this.

"Well, you're the expert," Eric says.

"I don't recognize any of those names," Amy says. "Do you?" she asks, looking to Tim and Holly. They both shake their heads no.

"I always thought I could've been a bigger film fan had Dad introduced me to it the way he did you," Eric says.

"But you are a film fan," Annie says to Eric.

"Yeah, but not likea" he stops himself, feeling as though he should explain himself to the rest of the table. "When our dad retired from the financial services industrya""

"Semi-retired," Max corrects him.

"Right. When he stopped leaving home for work, he wasa What would you say, Max? Forty-seven, forty-eight years old?"

"I'm not sure. I think I was around ten or eleven. So, some time in the late eighties."

"Yeah. So, I was a teenager by then and didn't have much interest in spending time with my dad. And most of the movies he was watching were old black and white movies, or foreign films that a normal fourteen or fifteen year old wouldn't have much interest in watching. Besides, I hardly knew the man. He was so rarely home when I was growing up that having him around seemed strange to me. But after he retired, or semi-retired, he was catching up on all the movies he'd missed over the years, all the movies he'd wanted to see but didn't have the time to see before. And he was watching movies all the time."

"He saw leaving his day job as an opportunity to educate himself about film," Max says. "He always loved movies but, as you say, he never had the time toa""

"Right. And he got you involved, and you guys started watching movies together."

"Right."

"And what was the first movie you guys watched together? Wasn't it Marienbad?"

"Yeah, Last Year at Marienbad."

"If I'd seen Marienbad at ten years old, I think I might've ended up... I don't know. Having more interest, I guess."

"But you love film. You watch movies with your dad all the time," Annie says again, as if she's trying to rea.s.sure him somehow.

"Right, I do. I just came to it late, I guess. I didn't see Marienbad until I was in college."

"What's Marienbad?" Holly asks.

"It's an early 60's French movie," Michael says. "The screenplay was written by the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet and was considered pretty avant-garde at the time. Still is, really."

Holly is watching him closely as he speaks to her. And he's speaking to her like she's the only one in the room, and, for a moment, she feels that they are the only ones in the room.

"I didn't know you knew anything about film," she says to Michael.

"A little bit, though I don't know a thing about Andrei Tarkovsky."

"It's funny that you're writing about Tarkovsky," Eric says. "There was just a revival of Stalker a couple months ago at the campus theater."

"Did you go?" Max asks.

"No, I would've liked to, but I was so busy witha""

"I was asking Annie."

Annie looks at him. A nervous laugh falls from her mouth, but she goes silent when she sees Max's stare. She'd forgotten how unapologetically straightforward he could be, even if it sometimes comes off as aggressive. His clear-eyed intensity was always one of the things she loved about him.

"I did go. Yes."

"Do you remember when wea"?"

"I don't think anyone wants to talk about old Russian movies, Max. Why don't we talk abouta"?"

"But you do," Max says "I do what?"

"You'd like to talk about old Russian movies, or, at least, you used to," Max says.

"I still love movies of all kinds," she says, almost defensively. "I just think we should talk about something that everyone cana""

"Stalker was the first movie that Annie and I ever saw together," Max says as if he's talking to the table, though he's still looking only at Annie. "We were juniors in high school. Do you remember?"

"Of course I remember."

"Of course you do."

"What's it about? The movie?" Amy asks.

"It's about a Stalker, a guide contracted to safely guide people through this abandoned, and supposedly dangerous area."

"In the movie, the place is called the zone," Annie says.

"Right, and in what ways the zone is dangerous, or how it came to be abandoned, we're never explicitly told. There are old, rusty tanks there, and a few dead bodies, but Tarkovsky makes the choice to never come out and say what happened."

"And the Stalker is supposed to get them through the zone to a room," Annie says.

"And this is apparently no easy task since the zone has been cordoned off by the military because the whole area, and specifically this one room, has taken on such a mythical, almost religious quality," Max says. "It seems that after the military event, or environmental catastrophe, or whatever it was that happened in the zone, people began to hear stories about this special room, and they began to attempt this dangerous pilgrimage. And, for some reasona"again, deliberately obscured in the moviea"the government decided to put an end to these pilgrimages. And, so, hiring a Stalker became necessary because it had become so dangerous to even enter the zone, to get beyond the military presence that guarded the place," Max says.

"But what's in the room?" Amy asks.

"It's not about what's physically in the room, or what you see in the room necessarily. It's more about what the room sees in you."

"What's that mean?" Wendy asks.

"It's where your deepest wish comes true," Annie says.

"Yes," Max says. "But it's not a wish you make, the room makes it for you."

"What do you mean the room makes it for you?" Holly asks.

"I mean, you don't enter the room and make a verbal wish. The room looks within you and finds your deepest desire. So, in some ways, what the room sees as your wish ends up showing you your true self."

"That's interesting," Michael says. "So, if you enter this room intending to wish that a sick loved one be healed, but the room sees that your true desire is to win the lotterya"

"Then you win the lottery and your sick loved one stays sick," Max says. "In fact, in the movie, our Stalker tells the story of another Stalker, his mentora"

"And Stalkers aren't supposed to enter the room themselves. Their goal is to only help others get to the room." Annie says.

"Right, but this other Stalker, our Stalker's mentor, did enter the room, and, when he got home from the zone, he started to become very wealthy. And to know that his deepest desire was to be rich was so utterly depressing that he took his own life."

"Okay, let's talk about something else," Annie says, looking over at Holly. This was all she needed now was for people to start talking about suicide. That would really pick up the party.

Michael looks at Holly. Tim has reached out and squeezed her hand. Something deeper and more complicated than anger shoots through Michael at the sight of Tim's hand on hers. Holly sees Michael's reaction to Tim clutching her, and slowly moves her hand away from him. She looks back to Max, trying to pretend that she didn't see the hurt on Michael's face. But she won't forget it. It hurts her more than she expected to know that he's hurt.

And Michael can't pretend that his jealous reaction didn't scare him. He can't say that he's never known jealousy, but never like that. It's another emotion, of many emotions, that Holly has opened up in him, but not one he particularly enjoyed discovering.

"It is an interesting thought experiment, though," Max says. "What if a room like that really existed? What would it give you?"

"I'd like to believe that most people are good enough, and strong enough in character, that their deepest wishes wouldn't be so base or selfish," Eric says.

"I'd like to think that too, brother. But I don't."

"I don't see any reason to presume that people are so predictably superficial. That seems too simplistic, too cynical."

"Maybe so. But life teaches us hard lessons," Max says.

"I agree," Tim says. "I think people would hope to show their best selves with their wish. But our true selves aren't always our best selves, even if we hope they are. There's always going to be a divide between our idealistic self and our realistic self, our public self and our private self."

"Yeah, and I don't remember who said it exactly. It may've been Kerouac, but someone wrote that writers should strive to give voice to their unspeakable visions," Max says. "Maybe this idea applies to everyone, and we all have these unspeakable visions that we bury within ourselves."

"But you're operating on the presumption that these unspeakable visions are something that we feel shame about," Eric says.

"That's why their unspeakable."

"Why conclude that? Maybe we just can't articulate them yet? Unspeakable doesn't necessarily mean shameful."

"And isn't it also about context," Annie says. "It's not that the things we feel, or can't articulate, are selfish or dangerous or shameful, but that maybe they might simply be thoughts we keep to ourselves because they would do no good to share, might only be hurtful to those we share them with."

"Still, saying something could be hurtful presumes negativity," Eric says.

"But not objectively negative," Annie says. "Only in the context of a particular subject."

"So you're talking about keeping secrets?" Eric asks Annie.

"I suppose."

"But aren't secrets just an acceptable way of being dishonest about how you present yourself to the world?" Eric asks.

"How is that?" Annie asks. "Dishonesty through omission? Just because you keep your thoughts or feelings private, doesn't make them any less real. Someone, at least, even if only yourself, knows the truth, and no one is being lied to necessarily."