I first went home with Will on an unusually brisk Wednesday evening in October, after we’d met for dinner and drinks at a dark, loungy bar called the Pulpit. This was fifteen years ago, and I’d just turned twenty-four. He worked in marketing, made short films on the side, and spoke in a commanding way that made me want to learn more about whatever he was saying. We’d eaten thin, oval pizzas sprinkled with some sort of red spice and had two beers each, and as we waited for a car to take us to his apartment, he put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. Puffs of our breath disappeared into the icy air. He wore a navy wool coat and smelled like sandalwood, or something else earthy and expensive. As we got in the car, I hoped he would catch the peony whiff of my own perfume.
Ascending the flight of stairs to his front door in the Mission, Will paused. “I have two roommates,” he said. “A couple, but they’re barely ever home.”
The apartment was larger than what I’d thought a twenty-seven-year-old in San Francisco could afford. The living room was lit by a chandelier with a mist-colored sofa underneath, and leafy plants lined the bay window. An orangey-blue abstract print hung over the fireplace. I wanted to know who owned the furnishings and the plants—Will or the other two people who lived in the apartment. I examined a round paper lamp, modern and delicate, as if a single curious poke from my finger might spell the shade’s end.
“Noguchi,” Will said, taking off his coat. “My uncle shipped it to me from Japan.”
“It’s very beautiful.” I adjusted my blouse so it wouldn’t look like a balloon.
In Will’s room I smoothed the back of my skirt and took a perch on his bed. I scanned the pillows for long strands of hair but couldn’t find any.
Will sat down next to me. “I smell like the Pulpit,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower. Do you mind?”
I shook my head and wished I’d washed my hair that morning. He squeezed my knee, stood up, and tugged off his sweater, tossing it onto the chair by his desk.
“See you later,” I said.
He smiled. “I won’t be long.”
While water ran in the bathroom down the hall, I studied my face in my compact. There was an eyelash floating near the bottom of my left eye that I couldn’t retrieve, and my lipstick—a deep red borrowed from my older sister—had been erased by the pizza. I found the tube in my bag and added color to my lips. I combed my eyebrows with the tip of my pinkie and thought of my piano teacher from childhood, a skinny old lady who tapped my fingers with an oily purple pencil and coughed whenever my pinkies did not look arched enough. I no longer played.
Beneath a large, gold-framed mirror was a stack of coffee-table books: Art in China. Interviews with Film Directors. The Americans, by Robert Frank. The wall above Will’s desk was filled with framed movie posters: Stranger than Fiction, Faces, Millennium Mambo.
“Miss me?” Will stood in the doorway in a different T-shirt, his hair damp. I thought he looked handsome.
“Who’s that?” I gestured to the largest poster on the wall, a picture of a woman in a black sweater with full lips and a pile of strawberry-blond hair. DESERTO ROSSO, the bottom read.
“Monica Vitti.” Will settled next to me again on the bed. The movie was Red Desert, an Italian film from the sixties.
“She’s very pretty,” I said.
Monica Vitti looked nothing like me. Her nose was straight like an arrow, her chin an effortless angle, and she remained beautiful while brooding.
“That’s from The Eclipse,” Will said, pointing to a black-and-white handbill next to the Red Desert poster. “Monica Vitti’s in that one too. Both films were directed by the same guy, Antonioni.”
I absorbed the low rumble of Will’s voice, keeping my eyes on his face. His hair was black like mine, but his nose looked a little like Monica Vitti’s: pert and smooth and slim. I could detect a ghost of his scent, whatever hadn’t washed away in the shower. He leaned closer to me, and I felt even more nervous than when I’d been alone in his room.
“So, Flora,” he said, “have you ever seen anything by Antonioni before?” He emphasized the you.
“No,” I replied. “Do you only hook up with girls who have?”
Will laughed, then put one hand against my cheek and kissed me. The kiss felt good and full, and I moved so both my arms were circling his neck. He started to unbutton my shirt. I tugged on my skirt. Everything around us turned soft and inviting. This was how I was supposed to feel, I thought. I could let myself go.
In March I’ll have been married for seven years. I met my husband through mutual friends, and we still live in San Francisco, in a sunnily painted home close to the ocean. Weekdays are hectic, but every so often, on a weekend morning, we’ll go for a stroll along the Great Highway, and I’ll look away from the water, back toward the city. I’ll choose a house, whichever one strikes me, and wonder whether the people living inside it are still asleep, whether they’re a family or alone, whether they’re young or old, what they like to eat and watch and listen to, what they were doing the night before.
Sometimes I think of my early years of living in the city, that watery phase of life when you don’t plan beyond the next week, or even the next day, and every new connection is imbued with promise.
In the morning Will made me an espresso, and we agreed to see each other over the weekend. He was different from the other men I’d been with. There was something easy about the way he moved, and he knew what he liked. Every item he owned had been deliberately procured and placed. I admired how carefully he selected his clothes in the morning, yet how natural they looked on him: a solid shirt that fit his shoulders perfectly, sturdy socks whose wool contained more colors than I could count. I picked at a loose thread on my blouse and clawed a hand through my hair.
Later that morning, sandwiched between strangers on the rush-hour bus, I decided that I needed to see Red Desert. I wanted to find out what it was about, perhaps because it would tell me what Will was about. Whatever the reason, the impulse overwhelmed me, and I texted my manager to say that I was sick. I had only a few days before my next date with Will.
Back at my apartment, I threw my coat onto the bed, brewed coffee, drew the curtains as tightly as I could, and signed up for a seven-day trial of the Criterion Channel.
When Giuliana (Monica Vitti) and her little son, Valerio, walked slowly through postwar Ravenna—an industrial town that appeared gray and empty and apocalyptic—I wanted to shut my laptop, because the scene clearly desired to envelop me from a great, theater-size screen, as if I were Giuliana herself. Even so, the strangeness of the atmosphere hit me hard in the stomach. I wanted to reach out and touch the urgent red walls of a shack in one scene, to be embraced by the endless foggy expanse of another. The sight of Giuliana standing by herself amid the gray landscape made me feel exhilarated and lost in turn.
After Red Desert had ended, I put my laptop away and opened the curtains. I could barely remember the last movie I had watched before that one: an action thriller almost three hours long. What had it been about? What emotions had I felt at the end? What was it even called? It seemed to me that every movie I’d seen before Red Desert belonged to a separate world: so perfunctory, so flatly imagined that I didn’t care whether I ever watched any of them again.
That Saturday, before my date with Will, I combed my hair and put on my green coat with the tortoiseshell buttons, because it reminded me of the coat Monica Vitti had worn in the movie. In the car to Will’s place, the driver was playing a vaguely familiar symphonic piece on the radio, and a part of me didn’t want the ride to end. The evening was warmer than I’d expected, and the backs of my knees and neck were damp. Suddenly I felt as if I were balancing on the cusp of everything consequential in life: between being told what to do and forging a path for myself; between having sex and being in love; between having nothing to be passionate about and finding purpose and meaning in something greater than myself.
Will opened the door and gave me a hug, exuding the same resinous scent from the other night. I felt the urge to cinch my arms around him and not let go, but instead I followed him to the kitchen.
“What do you want to eat?” he asked, the sleeves of his bright-white sweater pushed up. We’d agreed to make dinner together, then watch a movie. His roommates, the couple, were out again—a vacation that involved multiple countries in Europe. “I have ingredients for pasta, steak, and some kind of roast chicken, if you like tarragon with lemon and mushrooms.”
The opening scene of Red Desert came to mind: Giuliana, flustered and impulsive, buys and devours a half-eaten sandwich from one of the workers on strike.
“Pasta,” I said, not wanting to reveal that I didn’t know how to make steak or roast chicken.
“Pasta it is.”
I hung my purse and coat on the back of one of the kitchen chairs while he began to remove boxes and jars and bowls from the cupboards. He found a recipe for tomato-and-basil spaghetti on his phone and began slicing tomatoes on the cutting board. I measured out olive oil, golden and generous, into a glass cup, relieved that I wouldn’t have to dice or prod or peel anything.
While Will worked, I read aloud the instructions from his phone: “Heat the olive oil, then add the tomatoes. As the tomatoes reduce, season with a light hand.”
“I know,” Will responded, laughing. “I only pulled up the instructions for you, just in case.”
We toasted bread coated with garlic butter and poured the wine I had brought. The pasta was fresh and spicy and chewy. Dinner passed quickly, and instead of choosing a movie, we moved to Will’s bedroom. I sat down on his bed, Will swept my hair behind my ears with both hands, and we kissed. Something soft and natural had been restored.
My head resting on his collarbone, I told Will what I’d been wanting to say since the start of the evening: “I saw the movie you told me about, Red Desert.” I felt as if I had revealed something colossal about myself, like that I was descended from royalty or had been secretly adopted.
Will looked genuinely pleased, maybe a bit surprised. “So that’s why you wanted to make pasta for dinner.”
“Obviously.”
“What did you think?”
I said I wished I’d watched it in the theater. Red Desert was breathtakingly beautiful and ugly at the same time, and I’d never seen anything like it.
“The scene I can’t forget,” Will said, “is the girl swimming in the cove. How she sees the mysterious ship in the distance and hears singing even though nobody’s around.”
He was referring to a story that Giuliana tells little Valerio: A young girl in a deep-brown bathing suit, eleven or twelve years old, swims happily alone in pure, shimmering water, surrounded by rocks and animals and stunning pink sand. Then a great ship arrives, and singing voices emerge from the rocks.
“I thought she would be able to swim to the ship,” I said, “but it left before she could reach it.”
“I don’t think she wanted to reach it,” Will said.
In the morning the old church near Will’s apartment rang its bells eleven times, and he made a reference to a movie called Sátántangó—something to do with tolling bells, and how the film was about desolate Hungarian farmers in search of more-fertile land. Also it was over seven hours long.
Now I wanted to watch Sátántangó too. I hadn’t known movies could be seven hours long.
Will looked as if he were gearing up to say something of great import. “If you’re such a fan of Antonioni and you’re free the Sunday after next, some of my friends are helping organize an event at the Pocket Cinema, showing films from the sixties. Red Desert happens to be the Italian selection.”
I’d walked by the recently renovated Pocket a couple of times. They played a lot of international and classic films and ran a membership program called Pocket Monsters, whose fliers I often saw taped to the windows of restaurants.
“I’m going to the whole thing,” Will said, “but you can come just for Red Desert if you want. I don’t remember the last time they screened it in San Francisco.”
Yes, yes, yes. What were the chances?
As I made my way down the steps of Will’s apartment that morning, I felt lightheaded, like I’d been pulled into an alternate orbit. Everything was falling into place: I was going to watch Red Desert on the big screen. I was going to see it with Will. I recalled the young girl in the water, basking in the sounds of singing that emanated from the pillowy, pale rocks.
A few weeks ago my husband and I were in New York City, eating dinner at a tiny, brightly lit restaurant in Chinatown. The owner had taken a liking to us and given us beverages on the house: an acrylic tumbler of barley tea for me, a Coke for my husband. It was New Year’s Eve, and we’d just visited my younger sister in Brooklyn. Overall it had been a bittersweet year. My grandmother had passed away in July. My older sister had adopted twins, a boy and a girl, in August. At work I had finally been promoted to senior project manager, and I’d planned this trip for the two of us to celebrate, beginning in New York and ending in Japan.
The server dropped off a dish of poached chicken, and my husband pushed three-quarters of it onto my plate, even though he’d end up finishing half of my portion.
“Happy New Year.” He lifted his can of complimentary Coke.
I’d folded the chopstick wrapper into a miniature star, and I flicked it playfully in his direction.
After dinner we ambled through the Lower East Side, ducking in and out of stores. While I looked for sparklers, my husband lined up to purchase a jumbo-size cup of peach iced tea. He offered me some, but I wanted wine.
“Let’s look for a wine bar then,” he said, grabbing my hand. “You know, the kind that serves little smelly cheeses and honeycomb on a piece of wood.”
“We’ll have to find one that’s not already packed,” I said.
“One with real marble tables. And antique lamps.”
“One that’ll let you bring in your giant vessel of tea?”
“You know me too well.” He leaned over and kissed me and whispered in my ear, “Challenge accepted.”
To him everything was a game to be won: opening credit cards to take advantage of their welcome benefits, navigating meetings with incompetent executives, finding a wine bar that could squeeze in two more on New Year’s Eve.
We stopped at three or four bars and restaurants, all either too full, or too loud, or not what I was looking for. At the last, the host, a young woman with an elaborate updo and an unusually pink nose, informed us we could have twenty minutes at the bar before we’d need to vacate to make room for a reservation.
My husband looked disgruntled. “Forty minutes,” he countered.
The host sneezed. “What?” She sneezed again.
“Forty minutes,” he repeated, “and I’ll solve your allergies for the night. Potentially for good.”
“Excuse me?” She looked flustered but also intrigued.
“I’ve got these fucking crazy allergy pills from Asia. They’ve never not worked. I’ll give you a tablet—two if we can stay a full hour.”
I tugged on my husband’s arm, but he didn’t turn to look at me.
“I can take care of myself,” the host snapped. “And next time you need somewhere to go on New Year’s, make a reservation.”
I apologized to the host, and we left. Outside, my husband muttered that the woman was probably saving the bar seats for her friends.
“I don’t even have your pills in my bag right now,” I told him.
He frowned. “It worked before.”
We kept walking until we saw the marquee of a movie theater. Young men and women in vintage-looking jackets and sleek black boots hung around the entrance. I drew in a breath. “Red Desert,” I said, pointing to the marquee.
“Don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.” My husband balanced his giant cup, finally empty, atop an overflowing bin. “But I’m down. Maybe they’ll have wine.”
It had been many years since I’d watched Red Desert, I told him, and I’d only ever seen it on a laptop. He didn’t seem to notice the quaver in my voice.
“Well, let’s get tickets,” he said.
This is what I planned to tell Will at the Pocket Cinema: I had been completely transfixed by Antonioni, and I’d converted my Criterion Channel trial to a subscription and binged all three films from the director’s black-and-white trilogy: The Adventure, The Night, and The Eclipse. Next I was going to dip my toes into Bergman, Varda, Ozu, and Fellini. I would seek out Sátántangó, following the Hungarian farmers into their promised land. Red Desert had opened up a new world, one that was colossal and lonely and unsettling but that I felt profoundly drawn to. Will and I could watch films together at the Pocket and discuss them afterward over meals at Cindi’s or The Little Bowl across the street. I’d ask what kind of movies he was interested in making. I’d divulge all the pastimes—like the piano and composing stories about my neighbors and my classmates—that I had stopped pursuing after childhood but now planned to start again. Maybe I could help him with whatever project he was working on. I’d never made a movie before, but I wanted to try. A future where one could luxuriate in art and its creation suddenly felt possible.
The screening of Red Desert was slated for seven o’clock. I began getting ready before five, hoping to show up early and find Will during the break between films. I tugged on a black dress with a scalloped hem that I thought was simple enough to appear effortless, and red earrings that were round like cherries. I wondered what Will’s friends were like, if they looked like me or like people who organized film festivals in their spare time. Since the night we’d made spaghetti, Will and I had met twice more at his apartment, but there hadn’t been time to watch any movies together. I hoped I could sound knowledgeable about Antonioni once Will introduced me to his friends.
When I told the Uber driver, a heavyset man with graying hair, that I was going to the Pocket Cinema, he asked what I planned to see.
“It’s called Red Desert. An old Italian film by a director named Michelangelo Antonioni.”
“I don’t know Red Desert,” he said. His accent reminded me of my uncles, and he tapped the long red-and-gold tassel dangling from the rearview mirror so that it swung back and forth. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not good, right?”
“I only learned about it a few weeks ago,” I said.
“Do you speak Italian?”
“Oh, no. Not yet.”
The clock on the dashboard read 6:23—later than I’d planned. I imagined Will leaving the theater before we’d gotten a chance to talk, and I tried to push the troubling thought aside. By the time the driver pulled up across the street from the Pocket, it was 6:36, and I got out and texted Will that I’d arrived. The afternoon screening must have just ended, because a crowd was clustered around the narrow entrance. The attendees were in their twenties or early thirties but appeared exquisitely older. They wore fine sweaters, smoked cigarettes, and looked like people who could converse fluidly about why they enjoyed or loathed what they had just seen, then tell you what you should watch next.
I picked up a flier from a stack outside the entrance so I’d have something other than my phone to hold. In the window was a full-size version of the Red Desert poster, with Monica Vitti brooding in her black sweater. I was certain I could hear voices speaking Italian, maybe even French, among the din. I pushed through the crowd and past the red-painted doors. Going from the lobby into the theater, I caught a glimpse of Will all the way at the front, between the screen and the seats, talking with people he seemed to know well. Distracted, I bumped—hard—into another woman.
“Sorry!” The woman plucked my phone off the ground and handed it to me. She had short, wavy hair and elegant eyebrows that had been expertly shaped. A thin gold necklace with a wine-colored stone flashed against her neck. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“It’s OK.” I straightened my coat. She looked eerily familiar.
“Are you here for Red Desert?”
“I wanted to see it on a real screen,” I said.
“Well, you’re going to love it.” She said this confidently, as if she had somehow played a part in making Antonioni’s movie. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around.”
I had seen her face before, in a photo stuck to Will’s refrigerator. I pointed toward the front. “I’m here with Will Lee. He’s over there.”
“You’re kidding. I live with him.” She smiled wide, her teeth bright and slender. “I’m Nathalie.”
I told her my name, and we shook hands. Until that moment I’d pushed the existence of Will’s roommates to the back of my mind. I waited for Nathalie to ask how I knew Will, but she didn’t, so I found myself asking how often she visited the Pulpit.
“I love that place.” Nathalie rubbed the stone of her necklace. She and her boyfriend, Miles, traveled frequently, she said, but they’d just gotten back in town. “I’m glad you’re here. Will and the rest of our friends are always putting on events and trying to get the community together.”
I pictured Nathalie reading in pajamas on the mist-colored sofa, watering the plants by the bay window, watching a movie in their living room with Will and Miles. I didn’t know what Miles looked like, so I gave him the face of one of the men I’d seen smoking outside the Pocket. I looked over at Will, chatting with his friends and sipping a beer. He saw me and waved. I waved back. I wanted him to leave the people he was talking to and come over to me, but neither of us moved.
“Has Will told you about the project we’re working on?” Nathalie asked.
I shook my head.
“Really!” She seemed amused. “You haven’t heard him go on and on about our screenplay?”
She explained that they—Nathalie, Miles, and Will—had been working on the screenplay for a short film for months. They planned to start shooting next year. The opening scene would take place at the Pulpit, in fact. The film would be based on an experience Nathalie had once had with a date at a bar, and she’d play the lead.
“Think My Dinner with Andre, but with a young woman at the center and a lot of influence from Tsai Ming-liang,” Nathalie explained. “Do you like Tsai Ming-liang?”
I admitted I hadn’t heard of Tsai Ming-liang, nor was I familiar with My Dinner with Andre. But I had been to the Pulpit.
She laughed loudly. Tsai Ming-liang was a Taiwanese director, and their project was just a small, silly thing, she said. Probably a waste of time.
“I’m sure it’s not.”
“Come on.” Nathalie grabbed my wrist. “We should find seats. The movie’s going to start soon.”
I didn’t like the way her smile had shifted, as if I’d failed at steering our conversation in the right direction. I looked at Will, still at the front of the theater. Again he caught my eye but didn’t budge, and my cheeks burned with shame. “You go on ahead,” I said. “I think I forgot something in my car.”
Outside, I held my purse tightly. I looked back once, but this time I didn’t see Nathalie or Will, only Monica Vitti’s anguished face in the window, all too aware of what would happen next. The crowd was beginning to move inside, and I could feel their blurred mass of coats brush past me. I crossed the street and called for a ride home.
Inside the refurbished Lower East Side theater, my husband and I settled into the plush red seats. He sprinkled small packets of salt from the concession bar into his bag of popcorn. Back in San Francisco we rarely went to see movies at the theater, and I ran my fingers up and down the upholstered arm of my seat while my husband commented on how fresh the popcorn tasted.
He had never heard the story about Will or the Pocket Cinema, but I wanted to whisper it to him then: How Will didn’t text or call me that evening after I left the screening of Red Desert. When he texted several days later, nothing came of it; perhaps he didn’t care enough about what was transpiring between us to pursue it any further, and I was convinced that if he didn’t care, there wasn’t any point in trying to get together again. I avoided the Pocket Cinema after that. Looking back, I wondered: Had I loathed myself enough to deny what I desired?
I took a sip of wine, laid my head on my husband’s shoulder, and asked him to chew more quietly as the lights dimmed. As I watched Red Desert for the second time, on New Year’s Eve in New York, everyone and everything on-screen still appeared beautiful, but the striking colors came across as more artificial than I remembered, the dialogue stiffer, the story simpler yet also frustratingly opaque. Monica Vitti’s gloomy stares and whimpers began to feel gratuitous, and her love interest was obviously a shallow, washed-out man who’d never stood a chance of saving Giuliana from her suffocating desolation. Who was the tanned young girl in the bathing suit supposed to be? How could the mysterious ship from Giuliana’s fanciful tale have no one aboard? Yet I found tears slipping down my cheeks, and I wiped them quickly so my husband would not see.
At the end of the film, Giuliana’s son, Valerio, points to yellow smoke blowing from an industrial plant in the distance and asks if the smoke kills the birds that fly too close. Giuliana, her eyes subdued, assures him that the birds know not to fly there anymore. The final image of her staring off into the distance reminded me how Will and those people who knew all about the movies had briefly meant everything to me. Or maybe they had meant nothing at all.
We filed out of the theater and into the lobby, trailing a dozen or so other moviegoers who had New Year’s parties to hurry to. My husband tipped the popcorn bag up and shook the last granules into his mouth; to him, it was a sin to waste anything.
“I didn’t get it,” he said. “Did you?”
“It was made for a different time,” I explained, taking the oily bag from his fingers and dropping it into the trash.
But the first time I’d seen it, I’d imagined a new life.
