Mon amie américaine Read Online Free Page A

can’t imagine not having you beside me.
    I’m probably going to get to know that young assistant you just hired. (“Hallelujah! He’s an ace backgammon player!” you’d said.)
    Don’t worry, I’m going to help him, enough so that he can stand in for you, but not too much, so that he won’t imagine he could take your place.
    While waiting to leave for London again, I ended up being taken along on a side trip for people from the film world to Saint Petersburg, a place I’d never been. You often went to the Moscow Film Festival, which takes place every year in July, but you didn’t tell me anything about it,except that year when you’d fallen in love with an actor who you said was young enough to be your son, which made you hold back.
    I’m very uncomfortable here, despite the beauty of the city, and I think you would have felt the same. The younger jet set sends even more shivers down my spine in this country than it does elsewhere. The women have a heady beauty, but there’s nothing relaxed about it. It seems to be a very concrete form of currency. What the men are thinking is written on their faces. Face and neck are squashed into a single severe mass, and there’s a restrained violence that their tailored suits don’t soften. Molly, don’t be shocked, but at the point we’ve reached, I figure that it’s time to have all religions start contributing. I managed to give the group the slip this morning, enough time to go and light a candle for you in a tiny, freezing cold, jam-packed Orthodox church.
    The congregation was composed of old women whose religious fervor blew me away. The beauty of the chants, the intensity of the faces; it wasn’t that different from Tarkovsky’s films. Since you’ve been in that elsewhere I find inexplicable, I’ve thought more about Bergman, Fellini, Lynch,Wenders, Huston, Visconti, and Truffaut than about more contemporary directors. Just as in literature, the classics are a better refuge, because of their crystal-clear lucidity and amused humanity.
    A half hour went by, and I couldn’t leave that church. I lingered on the steps by the entrance, caught by the beauty of the chants, intoxicated by the incense, bewitched by the sound of a bell hanging from a chain that a priest shook.
    I’ve never gone with you to pray. Even to a synagogue. You’ve explained to me a hundred times that you’re not a believer. That you don’t succumb, as I do, to the beauty of the liturgical chants. But you turned on the waterworks when Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind” at Lady Di’s funeral.
    We were at the Toronto Film Festival that day, or rather that night. Because of the time difference, it was three in the morning when the broadcast began. A giant screen had been set up in the largest stadium in the city to show the ceremony, and you’d insisted on going. The crowd was unbelievable. Young people, old people, children in strollers, kids on their bikes. You’d brought sandwichesand a thermos of coffee. It was like a kind of mourning festival. All the smells you’d associate with celebration: food, beer, people lying down and smoking grass. But the faces looked transfixed, frozen with grief. In the stadium, the sobbing spilled out in sheets, like a giant wave of tears. Your comments jumped from one subject to another, from the dignity of the two boys, so tiny behind their mother’s casket, to the beauty of Nicole Kidman on the arm of Tom Cruise; from the noticeable absence of Stanley Kubrick, who’d been filming with them in the greatest secrecy for the last year, to the surprising appearance of Steven Spielberg, who’d made the trip. Only Elton John succeeded in interrupting your chatter. On the way back, you pointed out the windows that were still lit up. “You see, nobody is sleeping, everyone watched. It reminds me of when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.