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Excerpt from the Book
I.
February 4, Bodega Bay.
Notes for film:
Title - “Looking At Me.”
Frontal shot, standing up. In the nude. No - naked. That’s how I would feel facing the camera, as if I had been stripped. No props, no background. A bare floor and wall. Recalling a lineup. As if my life were some kind of crime for which I was being tracked down. My face from a passport photo. I have always been in transit. Never belonging. Never of one place.
“Looking At Me.” Looking at my teeth becoming discolored. Looking at the traces life has left in my body. Looking at the loose gray skin of my face. Not in the dark, like Mami did, but in the daylight. Looking at my facial hair. Looking at my soft belly. Looking at my thighs. My skinny thighs. The stretch marks. The cellulite. Looking at my ass. I want to say “rear.” Still. Each step both a triumph and a defeat. My ass is like jelly.
Looking at my crotch, with its long hair, some of it still black. Looking at my breasts. My pride in the fact that they are so small they never sagged – until now. Each looking is hard won. I come upon markers of another life.
My body is a frightening terrain. People used to say I was beautiful. I can still see my thirty-year-old face through the layers of time. The slight fullness of my lips.
“Looking At Me.” The thin hair receding at the forehead. When did it stop being gray and become white? The precision of the seasons. In my garden I chart the blossomings of plum and magnolia and the turning leaves of apple and liquidambar; I watch the last iris under evergreens with petals still uncurled.
Will I ever do this film? It’s hard enough to accept these images of myself much less thinking of exposing them to others. Last night the ceiling light was unkind as I stood in the bath looking at my naked body in the mirror. I had not been able to do this for a long time. Years perhaps. Since I first started noticing the rippling of my thighs. A place of secrecy. At the moment before some irreversible and public change.
Seeing was my joy, but it has become
a curse. Could I blot my face with a black strip, like in
documentaries of children who have been used for porno videos?
No, what no longer can be hidden has to be exposed. I want
to document a history of lies. Truth writes itself.
* * *
I stopped reading my grandmother’s journal to look at the rectangle of sea and sky trapped in the doorframe. Who is this woman? I asked myself. I felt disconnected, floating, beyond gravitation, as images of Meli rushed into my mind. I dwelled on the architecture of the door, the deck, a patch of sunlight on the hardwood floor. Simple and angular. I wanted to become continuous with the house, to anchor myself and find a sense of place. Without thinking, I reached out to touch the wall.
I invoked memories of childhood: Meli tending her flowers, walking on the beach looking for smooth rocks, making home movies of me, her Lila, or in her study, with paintbrushes, toys, sketchbooks we shared, magazines, shells, and boxes of papers. I recalled memories of the past year. But the images from the journal forced me into an unexpected relationship with her: of voyeur.
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