At her desk, Saskia tinkers for a while with her Mélanie material, makes it worse, restores the dispiriting crap she already had. Gets up to brew more tea, stares out the window at fascinating India Street, flips through the most interesting Crate&Barrel catalog she’s seen in years. Eventually sits back at her desk and ruminates on those scenes in movies where the writer-hero clickety-clacks and ding-zzzzziiiiings through the night, while a montage shows the ashtray filling with cigarette butts, and suddenly it’s morning and our man rips the last page from the platen, squares the pile, and bounds off to the post.
Taking time to think.
Maybe it’s this sentence that worries Saskia the most. Mette has always had all the time in the world to think. And she’s exceptionally straightforward. This sentence sounds like bullshit, or anyway, strategically vague. Taking time to think about what? What decision is so momentous that she has to run away in order to contemplate it, when she could stay in her room for days on end, undisturbed by Saskia or anyone else?
More tea!
Another pee!
Anthropologie’s winter catalog, yessirree!
Back in chair . . .
She’d been tinkering and writing notes about the play for more than a year before it occurred to her that her conception of Joan owed a lot to Mette. What clued her in was something Eileen Atkins said about playing Shaw’s Joan: “I am very attracted to parts that are very direct, and say what they think. Joan is saying what she means.” And there was also something Régine Pernoud wrote about Joan: “We can sense that her prophetic character came from her belief that she transmitted the message of her voices without adding or deleting. Throughout her trial, she indicates that she feared above all to exceed what her voices had dictated, to be an insufficiently faithful instrument.”
Once Saskia made the connection, it helped her notice patterns in Joan’s thinking, for example, the way her piety maybe came out of a need for regularity. The church warden at Domrémy said, “When I did not ring the bells punctually for Compline, Joan would catch me and scold me, saying that I had not done well.” It made Saskia wonder if Joan’s flouting of social conventions was so easy for her because she had never noticed them in the first place. And her literal-mindedness—she never wavered from an untenably simple idea, one that equated labels with logic: France is for French people. Or something she said at her trial: “I had a great will and desire that my king have his kingdom.” Yes, kings rule kingdoms, Q. E. D. A place for everything, and everything in its place.
Must, then, the question be asked? Is Saskia writing Joan, Maid in part because she longs to better understand her daughter? She finds it easy to envision Mette alone and spotlit on a stage, wide-eyed and blank-faced, holding her right hand up to signal, “Hear me,” or adopting an unearthly pose as though to say, “This is my inner nature.” In Saskia’s imagination, the theater audience is dead quiet. Or maybe the theater is empty. Mette holds her pose. This image frightens Saskia.
She gets up again, moves in agitation around the room. It’s 3:25 p.m. The fifth day. Maybe she should call Mark, see if he has heard anything new. There’s no point, he’s good about letting her know as soon as he knows. Still, she grabs her phone. She hesitates, staring into space. Then she realizes that what she’s really doing is looking at the closed door to Mette’s room. It is unquestionably respectful of Mette’s wishes that she has not searched her room for clues. But is it also negligent?
The phone vibrates in her hand.
She looks at the screen. Her agent. Shit. Usually she’d care, indulge a hope—there are such things as retroactive Oscars, who knew?—but not now. “Marisa, what’s up?”
“Hi Saskia, I just heard a strange message on my voicemail left about an hour ago from a guy who said he’s your father? But why would he be calling me? He said your daughter was with him and you’d better come as soon as you can, any idea what that’s about?”
Sunday, February 21, 2016
He can pick Saskia out easily as he comes down the concourse toward the gate, the small head lower in the chair than all the other heads, the tangled mist of weightless hair, the large nose. When alone and unobserved, she’s always looking down, it seems, reading or writing, her mouth tensed on one side as though frozen mid-chew. She can block out the whole world. He last saw her almost a year ago, when he came to the city to take Mette to lunch for her twentieth birthday. He walks up to her, close enough that his shoes are in her line of sight, and waits a few seconds during which she continues reading, then says, “Hello.”
She glances up. “Hey.” Takes her knapsack off the chair next to her, slips the large book inside.
He sits down. “Thanks for letting me come along.”
She seems to interpret that as an aggressive comment. “I’m not the gatekeeper.”
He didn’t mean it that way, he’s grateful. That she’s willing to let this be a joint venture.
Seven hours ago, he was working at his computer at home when she called. “She’s with my father in Denmark. I just heard.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to fly out there, I’m checking flights right now.”
“What did she say?”
“It wasn’t her who called. My father left a message with my agent.”
“Can’t you call your father back?”
“He doesn’t have a phone. Or email, either. And apparently he doesn’t know my number, he must have looked up my professional contact info. He told my agent I’d better come, so I’m going. There’s a flight at 11:00 p.m. out of JFK, nonstop to Copenhagen, Norwegian Air.”
Mark began typing on his own
