Michael asked today if Henry & June makes a good date movie. I replied it’s too filthy for a first date, and then silently wished very much that I had someone to watch it with. It’s been a long time.
Ten or eleven years old, I had put my little brothers to bed hours ago, reading them a story of two round, identical looking policemen afflicted with green bubbles. I am in the living room – the lights are off except for the flickering TV, a window open to another world, earlier in the century, where writers flirt like fires blazing and Anias Nin is the brightest star I’ve ever seen. She’s lucent, intense, everything I suddenly want to kiss – an entirely new jet set idea. She’s sitting by a bed where two whores curl like perfect notes on sheets as white as a score and my imagination’s on a rocket-trip from rags to riches, inspired by the sly incipient grace of her character and the sweetheart face of Maria de Medeiros. Abruptly, I have a type, another map for the future desires embedded in my fingers. I want to read everything Anias has ever written, I want to fall out of the sky into the arms of a woman who looks just like her.
And, a few years later, I did.
One of these days, I have to watch that movie again.