Practically an announcement. Not only that. The moment you started talking I knew you were going to say something about him. I realized the shirt meant more than the season is starting to change.”'That's amazing. Because the funny thing is I didn't even know I had the bloody shirt. Frank left three days ago. I found the shirt this morning. I'd totally forgotten the thing existed.”'A mock heirloom as I recall. Those were the days when he wasn't sure what he wanted to look and sound like to others. The young man obsessed by film. What was he doing here? Slow down, I hate this climb.”'He was passing through. What else? He drops in, he passes through. That's the way Volterra operates.”'True enough.”'He'd been in Turkey. He thought he'd drop in. Brought along his current lady. She kept saying, 'People with cancer always want to kiss me on the mouth.' Where does he find them?”'Too bad. I'd like to have seen him. He was coming here, I was going there.”'You're claiming foreknowledge. You knew I was going to say something about him.”'The old psychic motor is still running. When I saw you in the shirt I thought of him right away. Then Tap walked on ahead in his half-downcast all-knowing manner. You started to say something and it hit me: she's heard from Frank. How did he know you were here?”'I wrote once or twice.”'So he knew we'd separated.”'He knew.”'Do you think that's why he dropped in?”'Ass.”'How is he? Does he still sit with his back to the wall in restaurants?”A man and his small sons were mending a net. Kathryn stopped to exchange greetings in the set manner, the simple questions that brought such satisfying replies, the ceremony of well-being. I stepped between the gathers of yellow mesh and with an effort caught up to Tap.
Volterra came out of an old textile town in New England, a place with a dime store, one or two handsome public buildings in decline. A man in trail boots jerked the lever on a cigarette machine in the entranceway of a diner. Women drove station wagons, sometimes just sitting at the wheel, parked, trying to remember something. It was the last generation of station wagons. His father did odd jobs, the movie theater closed. But there were falls, the sound of rushing water. It was a northern sound, it smelled of the north. There was something pure in it.His mother had mental problems. Frank was the youngest of four. She was thirty-seven when he was born and she seemed now to be longing for senility. She wanted to sit in a warm corner and let the past fall slowly over her. Confused recollection was a state she felt was earned. It was a gratifying punishment, a sinking away from the life struggle. Her situation was exemplary. Let the children see how God does these things to people.The dark brick mill ran skeleton shifts, was always on the verge of shutting down. Men wore trail boots, wilderness boots, insulated hunting shoes.In New York he went to a school for private detectives, working in the stock rooms at Macy's during the day. The school, called an academy, was located off the lobby of a hotel full of West Indians. It was a crazy and money-wasting idea, he said, but it marked his freedom, it meant New York. You were a stranger and could do these things. Two months later he enrolled in film school at NYU.He cut news footage for a network affiliate in Providence. After writing a number of unfinished scripts he headed west to do technical films for companies with names like Signetics and Intersil. California was full of technocratic amaze. That's where the visionaries were, developing an argot, playing galactic war games on the display screens in computer research centers. Kathryn and I lived in Palo Alto then, happily on the fringe of things, sanding our secondhand chairs. She worked for Stanford University, the Center for Information Processing, where she helped students and faculty use computers in their research and course work. I was turning out the usual run of low-paying freelance work, most of it for high technology firms in the area.I wrote a script for a film that Volterra directed. He was fast and inventive with an offhand manner toward the work and many ideas about film, the state of film, the meaning of film, the language of film. He spent a lot of time with us. We went to the movies and marched against the war. The two things were connected. The flag-tailored kids were connected, the streets were connected, the music, the marijuana. I stopped smoking grass when the war ran down.He was full of comic sorrows, self-dramatizing impulses, wasted-looking in a way that marked a style more than a set of depressing circumstances, and he seemed most content with himself cursing the chill mist that blew across the hills. He had a narrow face and the feral eyes of a boy absorbed in the task of surviving. The style, the psychological intrigues were elements he played off this deeper thing. When he filled out, later, and grew the second or third of a number of experimental beards, I thought I was still able to detect that early fearfulness of his, the schemer's flexible logic, whatever it takes to get the edge.He started a filmmaking collective in San Francisco. The group shared all tasks, did two documentaries. The first concerned war protests and the police. The second was a story of the love affair, outside marriage, of a middle-aged woman well known in Hillsborough society. The movie became notorious locally for this reason and well-known on a wider basis for a forty-minute segment detailing an afternoon of sex and conversation. For legal reasons the movie had only fitful distribution and eventually none at all, but people talked about it and wrote about it and there were private screenings for months on both coasts. The running time was two hours, the woman's lover was Volterra.Film. This is what there was, to shoot film, cut film, screen it, talk about it.The collective fell apart when a conglomerate bought rights to the second documentary, changed the title, changed the names, hired stars and reshot the whole thing as a feature, using a veteran director and four writers. It was one of those strange transferences in which people conspire to lose sight of a central reality. But what was the reality in this case? There were a dozen questions about ethics, manipulation, the woman's motives. The documentary was edged in politics and hate. Frank was a name in the business.He would go on to features himself, of course, dropping from sight for long periods, insisting on closed sets when he worked. Long before that he was a force in our lives. He made us think about our modest expectations. His drive to make movies was so powerful we couldn't help feeling anxious hopes on his behalf. We were involved with Volterra. We wanted to defend him, explain him, make allowances for his obsessions, believe in his ideas for uncompromising films. He provided an occasion for reckless loyalties.When we told him Kathryn was pregnant he showed an emotion deep enough to confirm our own awe, the remarkableness of what we'd commonly made, this almond curve, detailed and living. We didn't know we were ready for a child until Frank's reaction showed us how beside the point readiness can seem to be.Parenthood eventually deepened our sense of moderation, our not-wanting. It was Frank who left us wondering at this way of life but ultimately confirmed in it. This is one of the balances of a stimulating friendship.There's no denying his effect on Kathryn. He stood outside her measures of a person's worth. He made her laugh, she sparked to him. The sweet mean narrow face, the uncombed hair. He was a genuine talent, a commitment, the one person whose excesses and personas she needed to indulge. It was bracing to have one's principles challenged. It clarified her vision of things, to be able to defend him to herself, this man who would sit with her in a restaurant on a redwood deck and recount in earnest deadpan detail the methods and bents, the
