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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsThat scene in "My Dinner With Andre" About a Sexy Picture, and Looking at Pictures of My Wife When She Was Young.
Last week I wrote how my wife was going through a box of her late mother's pictures, and I found myself remarking on how beautiful she looked in a picture someone took of us at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, just before we married, a picture that somehow ended up in my mother's-in-law collection and wasn't in ours.
My wife finally got around to going through her late Mom's photo albums.
A strange feature of the picture is that in it she actually looks younger than she was at the time; she was in her early twenties but looked like a teenager. By contrast, although I had hair and it was dark, and in the picture relatively long and wild in what may have been a wind, I looked older than I actually was; I was in my early thirties. (Because we looked as if the distance in our ages appeared to be larger than it was - my wife got "proofed" in restaurants and bars into her thirties - I used to get some dirty looks from time to time, as if I were an Epsteinish/Trumpish/Gaetzish sort of pervert.)
Well, in any case, I scanned the picture, and I've looked at it a number of times since doing so over the last week, fascinated by it. As I was doing so this morning, it suddenly struck me, looking at that picture of myself, that the man in the picture, me, didn't at that time know very much at all about the world; I was ignorant, even more arrogant than I am now, kind of smug, and although I was merely formally educated, but largely unacquainted with the deeper reality of the things to which my education merely exposed me.
Then I looked at my wife in the picture, and thought about who she was at the time, the Mona Lisa type smile she had on her face concealing the fact that she'd just emerged from a very unhappy upbringing and was possessed of a deep insecurity, and uncertainly - wisely I think - unsure whether it was actually a good idea to be with me, there and then.
In that beautiful movie My Dinner With Andre there's a scene where Andre Gregory discusses a picture of his wife, Mercedes "Chiquita" Gregory. From the script:
Script, My Dinner With Andre
The first time I went away with my (then future) wife, I took her to what was my favorite place in the universe, to Big Sur. We stayed in this beautiful small cabin in a grove of redwoods, a night I have never forgotten, and about which I often muse. I consider it the best night of my somewhat pathetic life up to that point - although in the years of marriage, many similarly beautiful moments would happily entail over and over again.
In the morning after that night in the cabin, we went on a hike up a small mountain in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, and we came upon a grove of pin oaks, and I took pictures of her up there in that grove.
There is one of those pictures in particular that has thrilled me ever since I took it and developed it almost 40 years ago, because in the picture, my wife has exactly the same expression she was wearing the very first time I saw her, the same pose, her legs stretched out, looking down almost shyly at her feet, detached from the outer world, but seemingly deep in an inner world, a kind of impenetrable look of something that could, should perhaps, be recognized as having an aura of buried pain, a resigned sadness strangely contrasting with a sublime physicality. In the Big Sur picture as opposed to my memory of first seeing her, she is sitting on a low branch of a massive oak the Big Sur grove, naked. I must have called that picture up a thousand times, but today, I find myself asking myself if I ever really saw it, I mean, saw it for real.
Of course, when I saw my wife for the first time, I was just another of the many puerile men possessed of less than noble erotic fantasies about her looks; I had no idea who she actually was. Of course, ultimately I did get to know her, and see her divorced from any kind of vanity, somewhat distressed about the somewhat dangerous situations into which her looks had gotten her although she managed to emerge largely unscathed. (Of course early on in our friendship, she could of suspected me of being another dangerous man of the type, but happily she didn't translate those things into suspicions of me or my intentions, although she might well have done so.)
Away from all that, the attentions of puerile men including me, she was always warm, kind, generous, funny and bright, surprisingly accessible and down to Earth, although the deeper things were kept to herself. I could not help falling in love.
But the point is, that in my admiration for these pictures of her youth, like Andre Gregory confessed in his own case, it's not act of seeing, but definitely an act of not seeing anything at all.
We were younger, better looking then, but frankly and honestly, as life winds down, I prefer who we are now. We hadn't lived at all then. We didn't know anything then. We've lived now. We know something, perhaps not a lot, but something now.
Most importantly, something we know now is what it is to have lived at all. That matters.
S/V Loner
(9,000 posts)I still see my wife just as the woman I married.
Of course my eyesight isn't as good but...
Deuxcents
(16,330 posts)Something very telling about you, the author, being in love with your wife thru the years and I think its that youre more than just in love. These years youve spent with each other seems to have made the bond you committed to more passionate and meaningful. Very few are so fortunate to be able to experience a happiness that you so eloquently share.
NNadir
(33,544 posts)I do realize that my good fortune is rare, but wish it were more commonly realized. I'm not entirely sure I deserve this good fortune, but I gratefully accept it.
I'm a lucky guy.
betsuni
(25,614 posts)malthaussen
(17,216 posts)... but I have a negative reaction to the Andre character. He's relatively articulate, but obviously (to me) almost wholly self-indulgent, and if he shows flashes of suddenly discovering empathy, he's well behind the curve for a man of his age.
But hey, everyone is a different data-point on the bell curve of life, and to make matters more interesting, the position is constantly changing. One fellow's insight is another one's statement of the obvious, and a third one's blasphemy. Again, it keeps things interesting.
-- Mal
NNadir
(33,544 posts)...the life of an artist - he is one - and, of course, as stated in the OP, I was personally responding to what I was missing when looking freshly pictures of my wife that I hadn't seen before, pictures of when she was young and the object of so much attention that was all about being sexy in the eyes of men, myself included.
In particular, when I looked at the picture taken at the Grand Canyon, of all places, I was in it as well, and as an old man I have a perspective on who I was then. I'm hardly proud of who I was then; and after 40 years of being my wife's friend and lover I do realize who she was then, not that I really saw it at the time.
It was interesting to watch the movie again; it's probably been a decade or more since last we saw it.
My wife had pretty much the same reaction as you did; she thought the movie reflected a lot of bourgeois cluelessness on the part of both protagonists.
In the last 43 years things unimaginable then are now realities, but in a way, from my perspective, despite this, I think overall the movie aged well.
Last my son saw it, he was an art student, and he was young and filled with admiration of the film. I recall him talking about it at the time quite a bit, and I remember mocking Wally's voice, which I can mimic quite well when he was trying to discuss the film seriously. Now, in some minor sense, although he works far harder than Wally seemed to do as portrayed in the film, he is definitely in Wally world where the issue is art and money, a peripheral but real part of the movie.
As it happens, my son has one degree of separation from Andre; one of his professors was a close friend of Andre Gregory and spent a lot of time with him.
This time, seeing the film, my son remarked on why Andre carries on so much about Nazis, interpreting it as being because of his father's record of collaboration during those times. I think though that we all have increased sensitivity to issues in fascism now, and probably many Americans are fans of the collaborationists of the present day, at least half of the Republicans now in our Congress. Possibly in this country the choice between collaboration and decency might rise again. We're no longer in "it can't happen here."
My wife remarked on how bourgeois New York art scene was (and may still be), and definitely had a negative take on Andre; but let's face it the world is far more dire than it was in 1981; then it was possible to be naive and self absorbed without as much ethical consequence as there is now. She was offended by the remarks about secretaries, even as Wally was expressing horror at how people saw Debbie in that role in the smug upper East Side world of that time, as my wife had been a secretary herself.
As for me, I was passively amused on the "artsy" criticism of science, typical of art intellectuals of that time (and perhaps still), criticism by people who don't know anything at all about what science is.
Andre is self absorbed throughout, but at least he knows it, and calls himself out, albeit from a perch of material comfort to which few of us can even aspire.
For me though, I'd forgotten a lot of the movie, but Andre's self critical comments on how he had never really seen who his wife was at the time she, like my wife, was young and beautiful, still rang true; it's why I watched the movie again. They popped into my head as soon as I measured the wan smile of my wife in the photograph at the Grand Canyon. Now, at last, I know who she was then.
Those remarks of Andre's are almost at the end of the film. They're spot on, been there, done that. They definitely came to mind when I looked a photograph in which I was a younger, slightly better looking, fool, and where my wife was a very beautiful young woman of whose secret pain I was more or less unaware at the time; it wasn't even on my mind. To me she was all about a kind of perfection, but perfection I now understand as extremely shallow, almost the point of obscenity.
She stuck with me, but I regret that I wasn't a better man then, that I took so much and gave back far less than she deserved. I wish I'd been more aware of who she really was beyond the romance, the love making, and my silly admiration, bordering on obsession, of what proved to be the least important thing about her, her looks.
That part still strikes home.
My wife was struck by Andre's final remarks, as we have grown old and lived to see our sons become men:
She repeated that, "Where's that son?"
My son was in the room, of course, but he'll be on the other side of the planet all summer, studying Asian art, and he's now in love with a woman from Mexico, and it's possible that the question - already applied to my younger son - "Where's that son?" will be crossing our lips all too soon.
As any characters in any good film would and should be, they are flawed. Still, after all these years, it's a lovely film.
malthaussen
(17,216 posts)I love that song. Especially the (maybe unconscious) juxtaposition of the lines "And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it seems it would be easier sometimes to change the past," followed immediately by "I'm just one or two years and a couple of changes behind you."
-- Mal