The Book of Air and Shadows

delivered another glass of icy champagne and dropped a menu on his table. Apparently you could have a filet mignon cordon bleu or cold Scottish salmon or a chili dog. Crosetti went for the filet and was typing again when he became aware of a peculiar sound, like a small dog barking, no, coughing-a kind of suppressed high-pitched squeak. At first he thought it was sound leakage from one of the kids’ machines, but when he looked over at Mrs. Mishkin, he observed that the sounds were coordinated with the spasmodic jerking of her shoulder and head. She was weeping.
    He said, “Excuse me, are you all right?”
    She made a hand gesture that could have been “give me a moment” or “mind your own business” and then blew her nose, a surprisingly hearty honk, into a wad of tissues. She turned to face him, and his first thought was “foreigner”; Crosetti had always thought there was something vague about American faces compared with those he saw in the films of other lands, and this was an example of the difference. Mishkin’s wife had the sort of interestingly constructed northern European face that seemed designed to glow in black-and-white cinematography. The tip of her nose and her eye rims were red, which rather spoiled the effect, but he could not help an entranced stare. It was one more indication that he had departed his real life and was now in a shooting script. She caught his stare and her hand flew to her face and hair in the eternal gesture of the woman caught out of toilette.
    “Oh, my God, I must look frightful!” she said.
    “No, you look fine. Is there anything I can do? I mean I don’t want to get nosy…”
    “No, it is fine. Just the normal stupidity of life in which sometimes it is necessary to cry.”
    She had the right accent too. In a couple of seconds Bergman or Fass-binder was going to come out of the cockpit and adjust the lighting. What was his next line? He groped for something suitably world weary and existential.
    “Or to drink champagne,” he said, raising his glass. “We could drown our sorrows.”
    She rewarded this small sally with a smile, which was one of the great smiles he had seen so far in his life, either on-screen or off. “Yes,” she said, “let us have champagne. Thus the sad problems of the rich can be made to dissolve.”
    The flight attendant was happy to bring a chilled bottle, and they drank some.
    “You are the writer,” she said after the first glass went down, “who discovered this terrible manuscript that has disrupted all our lives. And yet you still write away despite this. In my misery I hear you click-click-clicking. I’m sorry, I have forgotten your name…”
    Crosetti supplied this and in return was directed to call her Amalie. “What are you writing?”
    “A screenplay.”
    “Yes? And what is this screenplay about?”
    The champagne made him bold. “I’ll tell you if you tell me why you were crying.”
    She gave him a long look, so long that he was starting to think she had taken offense, but then she said, “Do you think that is a fair exchange? Truth for fiction?”
    “Fiction
is
truth. If it’s any good.”
    She paused again and then gave a quick nod of the head. “Yes, I see how that could be so. All right. Why do I weep? Because I love my husband and he loves me, but he is afflicted in such a way that he must sleep with other women. And there are many women who would put up with this, would have affairs of their own and keep the marriage as a social arrangement. This is called civilized in some places. Half of Italy and Latin America must do like this. But I cannot. I am a prig. I believe marriage is a sacrament. I wish to be the only one and have him be the only one, and otherwise I cannot live. Tell me, are you a religious person?”
    “Well, I was raised Catholic…”
    “That is not what I ask.”
    “You mean
really
religious? I’d have to say no. My
mother
is religious and I can see the difference.”
    “But you believe in…in what? Movies?”
    “I guess. I believe in art. I think that if there is such a thing as the Holy Spirit it works through great works of art, and yeah, some of them are movies. I believe in love too. I’m probably closer to you than to your husband.”
    “I think so. My husband cannot believe in anything. No, that is incorrect. He believes I am a saint and that his father is the very devil. But I am not, and his father is not, but he believes this because it saves him from thinking he is