It Chooses You (10 page)

Pam: I think they have very, very good life. Nice, happy life, actually, if you living that long.

Miranda: Yeah, they’re pretty old in some of these.

Pam: Yeah, is very, very old, and is nice not only that they go, but it is nice to see them be happy with each other. Look at him, and he is just smiling, and it’s nice. I always feel so good to see somebody really happy.

Miranda: Do you think they died pretty old?

Pam: Yeah, I think the lady is like ninety-five and the guy ninety, yeah.

Miranda: I’m surprised their kids wouldn’t have taken these. Wouldn’t you think —

Pam: They don’t have kids, yeah. They don’t have kids.

Miranda: So when did you move from Greece? How old were you?

Pam: I was seventeen. I got married and I come here, and then after I had three kids.

Miranda: Right away?

Pam: Yeah, after a year.

Miranda: So you were eighteen. And what did you do?

Pam: We work in restaurants, fixing food.

Miranda: So you had a restaurant?

Pam: Yeah. Twenty years one, and thirteen years another one.

Miranda: Wow — so twenty-three years.

Pam: Yeah, thirty-three years.

Pam: Right, thirty-three. What would you do in the restaurant? What was your job?

Pam: My job was waitress, service, cashier — talk to the people, you know.

Miranda: Do you have a computer?

Pam: No. I don’t know computer. I wish to know it, but I don’t know.

Pam opened another album, and as we looked at pictures of the rich, white strangers on a boat, I had the queasy feeling that I was Pam, in reverse. She’d invented all kinds of happiness for these people who seemed boring to me, while her immigrant story struck me as inherently poignant and profound. And probably neither of us was entirely wrong; it’s just that we were, more than anything, sick of our own problems.

Miranda: Have you ever run another ad in the
PennySaver
?

Pam: No.

Miranda: And why do you think you decided to do this now?

Pam: Because you know what, I need the room.

Miranda
:
And has anyone called about the albums to buy them?

Pam
:
Yeah, a lot of people, but —

Miranda
:
But they don’t buy them.

Pam: Yeah. But I can’t throw them out. I used to have one customer in the restaurant, she was like ninety-five years old. Her name was Meg. She was so sweet. She come in every day at eleven o’clock and she eat. And this lady, she’s doing a job kind of like your job, she goes to people and takes pictures and talks to somebody. And then after she’s like sixty-five years old, you know what she does? She takes pictures of herself every day. And she goes home, and she puts them in the scrap album. She was so careful — three rooms like this high, thick, thick with albums. And then one day she passed away. And the son-in-law, he take all the albums and put everything in the dumpster. It’s so sad. That’s why I took these albums, so they wouldn’t get thrown in a dumpster, you know? That’s sad to me.

At age sixty-five, an age so far past young as to be almost unfeminine, a woman had decided to photograph herself every single day. It was immediately one of my favorite works of art, all the more significant because she wasn’t Sophie Calle or Tracey Emin. She knew no one would clamor for the three rooms’ worth of albums; their value was entirely self-defined. And though of course I wished I had somehow saved the albums, the performance had to end with her dying and the collection being thrown into the dumpster. It was the ending that really made you think.

I bought a few of Pam’s albums, and when I got home I forced myself to look at the pictures of the couple posing at alumni functions and tourist attractions. The moral of these people was clear to me: if you spend your life endlessly cruising around the world, never stopping to plant children on dry land, then when you die some Greek woman you don’t even know will become the steward of your legacy. And when she wants more room in her house, she sells your legacy in the
PennySaver
. And no one wants it.

I’d been waiting for the perfect movie title, but finally I decided to just name it. It had to be short, a very familiar, short word. I looked up the most commonly used nouns. The number one most common noun was
time
. Which made me feel less alone; everyone else was thinking about it too. Number two was
person
. Number three was
year
. Number 320 was
future
.
The Future.

I didn’t set out planning to write a script about time, but the longer I took to write it and get it made, the more time became a protagonist in my life. At first my boyfriend and I thought we’d get married after our movies were made, but after about six months of trying to get the films financed we thought better of this plan and set a date, come what may. Nothing came, we got married. And then, right around the time I started blindly meeting
PennySaver
sellers, it began to dawn on me that not only was I now old enough to have a baby, I was almost old enough to be too old to have a baby. Five years left. Which is not very long if an independent movie takes at least one year to finance, one year to make, and throw in a year or two for unforeseen disasters. (And I couldn’t make the movie while pregnant, even if I wanted to, because I was in it.)

So all my time was spent measuring time. While I listened to strangers and tried to patiently have faith in the unknown, I was also wondering how long this would take, and if any of it really mattered compared to having a baby. Word on the street was that it did not. Nothing mattered compared to having a baby.

And now that I had vowed to hang out with this man until I died, I also thought a lot about dying. It seemed I had not only married him but also married my eventual death. Before the vows, I might have lived alone, but forever; now I would definitely not be alone and I would definitely die. I had agreed to die, in front of all my family and friends. Brigitte had taken a picture of the very moment: I was smiling and, understandably, crying. The only thing between me and death was this child. If I delayed having the child, then I could also delay death, sort of. So I was in a hurry to step across the void so I could make the movie so I could have a child before it was too late — and I was also, secretly, not in a hurry.

I had shortened my life in another way too, by marrying a man who was eight years older than me, meaning he would die exactly eight years before me, rendering the last eight years of my life useless. I would just spend it crying.

—

—

—

Around this time it was kindly suggested to me that what I really needed was not a two-hundredth draft of
The Future
, but a movie star in a lead role to reassure potential investors. This was troubling because I already had people in mind for Jason and for Marshall, the man my character has an affair with. They were incredible actors who had had small parts in big movies and big parts in movies no one had seen. I tried to point out that I hadn’t cast stars in my first movie either, and that had worked out fine. But it didn’t matter, because that was 2005. You wouldn’t be able to make your first movie now, they said ominously. Which made me feel like the recession might be able to go back in time and take apart
Me and You and Everyone We Know
, un-finance it, un-shoot it, un-edit it.

I began trying to think of middle-aged TV and movie stars to play Marshall. I felt most comfortable with the thought of a “comeback,” so I tried to remember who the leading men were when I was a child, and then I looked them up to see where they were now. Generally speaking, it was a motley demographic. These men had swelled up; often they had abused their wives or drugs, many had mug shots, and very few of them seemed like they would “get me.” Which was appealing, because it was what the role called for — someone unlikely, almost unthinkable. And meanwhile I continued calling
PennySaver
sellers; in fact, I became more resolute about my interviews, more rebelliously determined to continue them now that I had “real” meetings, with actors.

Ron tried to convince me to interview him over the phone; he said he had his reasons for not wanting me to come over. But then he suddenly changed his mind and gave me his address. As I knocked on the door I braced myself for facelessness, or no head, or a head but no body, a head on wheels. But Ron had a body with a head and even a baseball hat. He was the most average person I’d ever seen. In preparation for our meeting, he had laid out items all over the bed and floor, brand-new books and DVDs and a sixty-seven-piece art set. They were mostly for children —
Mrs. Doubtfire
was in attendance, as was
Hop on Pop
— and they all seemed vaguely ill-gotten. The apartment was small, and he sauntered around setting up chairs for us.