Life went faster after my return. Experience came to resemble endurance cinema, maybe a work of Jacques Rivette or one of Miklós Jancsó films in which the camera keeps moving along with the actors in a series of tracking shots. A reel of film runs from the beginning to the end and everything happens in one go.
One reel ends and another begins. After a certain number of reels, the film ends.
I like these directors because they worked with peaks and valleys of attention. You could go to sleep in the theater and wake up and the film was still going on, still unspooling in the dark. A stream flows from the heights to the valley. Men enter and depart the frame on horseback as women in festive garb snake around green hillocks doing a ritual dance. A character speaks of danger, a time he almost died. As a soldier he fought through icy water, almost drowning and seeing others around him get pulled beneath. He smelled burnt flesh. A flock of birds rises from a tree behind him. The wild grasses shake as he speaks. He speaks of a long-ago war, but the audience knows that one war reverberates with others. In the distance a military helicopter lands.
As an actor I imagine working in this way gives a kind of release. The director isn’t asking for something perfect, rather they ask you to be alive to the moment for a certain period. You have no time for fear. You have to just keep going. There is no more acting, only motion through time, only being present.
*
In that period, I got extra thin by living on caffeine and fruit, melba toast, and vodka spritzes. When I went with Suzanna to parties people said I looked terrific and all that French style suited me. I auditioned for some movies and plays. I found work. I dressed up, I held objects at trade shows, I appeared fleetingly on a TV show where I wore a bikini and got hit in the face with a pie. I got some parts in films. They were of dubious quality, but at least I was working. I kept acting without fulfilling my early promise. I don’t care to remember too much about The Monte Carlo Proposal, Sunday Morning, or The Witchcraft of Salem Village. You can judge for yourself if you can catch them at some midnight showing.
Romantically speaking, I did what I’d done before, slipping into the role of the other woman to older men, only now I was twenty-five and the dynamic felt more brittle than it once had. My needs were supplemented with gifts bought on men’s lines of credit.
I kept myself beautiful with creams and a curling iron, shoplifted nail lacquer, and new calisthenics techniques Suzanna showed me. Whenever I got rejected for something I bought things to compensate. I filled bags with luxury groceries for Suzanna. I gave her a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of perfume as if she was my girlfriend. This is just to thank you for taking me in when I was desperate. She said, you know I love it, doll, but stop throwing your money around like an idiot. Bottles of Arpège don’t grow on trees.
*
One evening at a party downtown I was talking to Bobby, a tall and skinny assistant director whom I liked but didn’t know well, when death showed itself once again.
Bobby said, oh I have some gossip that may interest you. Lev Samara’s wife died. I know you worked with him a few years back and maybe it was different, but from what I’ve heard he is an inveterate womanizer. Supposedly he was even out with an actress when it happened. Was seen at a bar downtown that night. He was in a frenzy then, editing a film called Farewell Performance. I haven’t seen it, but a friend did and he said the rough cut was fantastic. There are questions about who’s going to distribute it.
After that I thought about Lev and Grace for days. I knew how much he had taken her for granted, but also how much he’d relied on her. I wrote him a letter saying how sorry I was. I know what it is to lose like that.
*
Lev’s wife was indeed alone when she collapsed in their bathroom, among the pink towels with satin edgings. Their children were away at their boarding schools. Lev discovered her there when he arrived home drunk at four in the morning.
It was a brain aneurysm. There had been no warning signs except that she sometimes had bad headaches. How could Lev have known? But he should have, he said. He should have insisted she go to a specialist. She was always so blasé about her own well-being, while always worrying over others. He was inconsolable at the hospital they said, useless to his children who were there too. Mary Grace Samaras, née Mixon, died at Manhattan’s Presbyterian Hospital, never having revived after her episode. She was thirty-nine years old and was survived by her husband, their two children, and her loving parents
*
On a May evening, Lev called. He was in Athens. I could hear how drunk and far he was through the crackle in the line. What time is it there? He mumbled, dark. You have a way with details, I said. Don’t be a smart-ass, he said. I don’t need that so much.
I sat on Suzanna’s floor at the end of the telephone’s cord and watched the sun set on New Jersey. The room went all edges and lines as it dimmed, slices of shadow and a black hole for a bedroom doorway. I never got up to turn on the lights. Lev cried about Grace, about his children, but he also cried about other people and things he’d seen with his own eyes like his father dead and lying in a satin-lined casket.
Lev said his daughter didn’t shed a tear on the day of her mother’s funeral. That’s not normal, he said. But he could also understand. She has a coldness in her. I remembered my mother’s memorial flowers, those purple spears of gladiolas. I said, it will be okay for her someday. Not now, but after a long while. All you can offer her is love. That’s it. I have it, but I don’t know if she’ll want the battered kind of love I have. Her mother was the one who could be kind.
Are you sleeping enough? Are you drinking water, Lev? He said he couldn’t sleep at all. I wish I could hold you. I know it’s all fucked but that time in the village was quite special to me. I believed in the art we were making. I started crying myself.
After a sharp inhale Lev asked, why don’t you come here? I’ll buy you a ticket. What the hell, darling. Just come here and be with me and we can make each other happy for a while.
*
People usually did what Lev asked them to and I was a person so I went. He wired me money. I went to a travel agency and the lady booked me on a TWA 707 from JFK to Athens with stopovers in Paris and Rome. As I was packing Suzanna said, he must want you a lot to bring you all that way.
The navy-gray Atlantic rippled in gaps between the clouds. I had a coffee and croissant in Orly before going up again above the northern weather. I washed my armpits and sprayed perfume all over in the plane toilet. The air stewardess announced our descent into Athens.
Women were waving handkerchiefs from the observation deck overlooking where the planes landed. The airport was a modern city gate where banners flapped and tears were shed. Αναχώρηση said the signs. The sky was blue, the clouds white, and the air dry like the high desert. I walked down the stairs into the foreign heat feeling famous, like the Rolling Stones on tour. Sunglasses on and a scarf tied over my mess of hair.
When I was spit out into the crowd on the other side of customs, I spotted Lev right away. International and at home. Here his features made sense, he belonged among these people. I was happy but I could tell right away he was annoyed. He pulled me toward the throng of jockeying taxis.
During the long cab ride, he was cool. He regretted everything and it had only just begun. I’m not angry with you but at myself. I’ve been on a binge. Drinking too much. Working too much, he sighed.
You invited me here, I said. Can’t we make the best of it? I stroked his hand and reassured him. We could pretend, like you said. I’ll leave soon enough. Let me take care of you for a bit. I was so very tired.
The city grew older the deeper into the center we went. On the narrow street of dirty marble, men were gathered outside a café within billows of smoke. Their round tables were painted vivid green. The cab squeezed by, practically grazing the chairs, but no one paid it any mind. Orange and pink bougainvillea grew out of pots. These have become my favorite plants over time, with their flower petal paper leaves.
*
Lev’s place had a few pieces of elegant antique furniture but he had no bed, just an unmade mattress covered with mismatched blankets and pillows. His sheets smelled of sweat. His skin smelled of tobacco and herbal cologne, his neck soap clean under the white collar of his shirt. I’d crossed seas to bury my face there. He pushed into me roughly. Oh God. A car honked its way through the alley street. I reached my hand back and caressed the sun-faded velvet of a curtain. Music and talk floated up from below. After we were through, he broke into stifled sobs with his head jammed into a pillow. I petted. I stroked. I pulled Lev into kissing. Baby. It’s okay, baby. Anything to bring him back to the moment.
*
Part of acting is creating conditions that you yourself can believe in. It’s convincing yourself the situation is real enough. We were survivors left to act out living, so that’s what we did. The shame made things more technicolor. Lev’s suffering made the honey so sweet.
I invented a character and based her on my grandmother. I had only seen my grandmother a handful of times but had heard her described many times in repeating fragments.
She immigrated to the United States from Germany because she’d been ruined by a young man named Lukas. In New York, unwed, she gave birth to my mother. I feel like they don’t call girls bastards the way they do boys.
After a few years of uncertainty, my grandmother married a man who delivered beer. But after not too long he was killed while working. Something spooked the Clydesdale horses, and in their fear they pushed his wagon backward. Someone shrieked. Her husband’s cracked chest seeped his whole shirt red.
My grandmother carried on, she moved west with a friend, dragging my little girl mother behind. She married again to a veteran of the first war who had problems, old ones and ones he created for himself. It was with him that my grandmother’s real troubles began.
Despite her all-too-common tribulations, my grandmother was always well turned out. She applied makeup expertly, powdered her rosy décolleté, buffed her nails. She learned shorthand to be a secretary and knew all the popular dances. She was beautiful and a real charmer.
She had arrived by ship with her name written on the side of a leather suitcase. Her life could fit into that case and she was strong enough to lift it. She knew the sound of lapping against a ship’s side, the look of rust-colored oil swirling at the surface of the water around a dock.
*
I have had so much. My grandmother could not fathom the luxury I’ve frittered away.
For my whole life I would take anything I could get. I know it’s easy to judge me then for sleeping with a newly dead woman’s husband, for having him too when she was alive. I was selfish and grotesque. I know. I have always been ashamed of what I wanted, ashamed of all the wants I had.
When Lev and I regarded one another, we had the dead between and within us. They recognized one another. It had been true from the start and was even more true when we met in Athens. I could feel these wives and ancestors, prisoners and bomb victims inside looking out.
There she goes, they murmured, shopping for groceries for another woman’s husband. There he is, making coffee in a foreign home. What right have they to live their lives so? They spill and mope and flounder. They don’t listen to us when we speak.
It was only my mother who didn’t chatter. In silence, she watched the movies I was making. I could feel her eyes on me in the dark auditorium of Lev’s borrowed apartment but I could not hear her voice.
*
In the mornings I went out as my character to acquire whatever was needed for the day, tomatoes and cucumbers, figs and cheese. For bigger shopping trips Lev relied on a local woman. I just played around. The vegetables there were the best I’d ever had. I wanted for the first time ever to actually eat. The food tasted vital and clean.
I picked up Sante cigarettes in their pleasing red packs. I got a heap of news from the stand that stocked international papers. The New York Times said Lincoln Center was getting artworks by Calder and Moore. The Hollies’ “I’m Alive” was number one on the British charts. An Italian had won the Tour de France. The women of Paris Vogue looked out at me with pleased half smiles.
I spent my time and Lev’s liras browsing for esoteric trifles. I bought a sheer embroidered nightgown and ordered a pair of sandals to be made custom for me by an old man who caressed my foot when he traced it.
In the afternoons I read while Lev worked. He laughed on long calls behind his closed door. It was always a producer or an investor on the other end. Lev flattered and exclaimed in an effort to get whatever it was he wanted to win, an invitation, a job, a chunk of change. That’s a fantastic idea, Lev said. I love it. I knew he didn’t because he’d told me beforehand it was garbage.
We’d eat and drink. I’d pull my skirt up and sit on his lap and we’d kiss and kiss. I’d fall asleep then half wake to feel him getting out of bed in the dark heat. He worked all hours. These overheated days never put a dent in his energy whereas I lay groggy and tangled in the sheet until late each morning.
I’d pull myself up eventually and start the ritual play again. I skimmed the leftover news with my first coffee. Lev would be returning from a stroll with layered pastries filled with a barely sweet cheese. He said a great painter had died yesterday and people were sad about it. Imagine being such an artist you’re mourned at the bakery.
I found enough energy to repair the apartment’s disorder. I aired out the bedroom as I smoked my first cigarette. I was a sophisticate and smelled like I slept in sprays of Fracas because I did.
*
Lev’s friend Peter was arriving from Rome. We were having a dinner party in his honor. I draped a tablecloth and arranged a bouquet. As Lev bathed, I poured Campari into glasses and put potato chips and olives into separate bowls. I thought, sun-stroked, about the kaleidoscope possibility of films. Eyes shot up close, reflections of people caught over the shoulder. How shooting someone in a mirror enables the viewer to see front and back in a single image.
I admired things as they were. It made me happy to look. The white flowers with their black centers bowed in their brown vase atop the shrouded table in the middle of the room. The table stood beside a black-edged window that was open to a faded blue sky that stretched above a complex blocky jumble of rooftops. Singing was coming from the record player. I tested the density of a green olive between my teeth and the salt brightened all my senses. The yellow potato chips were translucent with oil. A crystal of ice was melting into the red transparency in my glass. The tiles beneath my feet were rust colored, the walls chalk white. The hills of the city were going dark blue. Each substance was itself. Things were present in my attention without them needing me. But I was there to see the light change and it moved me, giving a physical, total pleasure.
This is why we need film, because it would never be just like this again.
*
When Peter burst through the door he and Lev caught one another in a bear hug. They swayed and laughed and embraced and it made me emotional seeing such manly joy. Peter brought with him a whole party.
The men talked about bombing campaigns and riots, Visconti and Powell while the women listened. Women I hadn’t ever met flickered in eggshell blue and mimosa, pure red and onyx, and silver. Not because we didn’t have opinions on bigger things, but because it was easier, we complimented one another’s hair and perfumes.
There were more men than women and the words poured mostly from the men’s mouths. I didn’t mind. It was relaxing to hear the history of the present tumble out in arguments and off-color jokes. They talked about uprising and box office numbers, fascists who’d gotten away with everything and were still in control. They talked about women they thought were especially beautiful, islands they wanted us all to visit, and sex they wanted us all to have. This was surely the collapse of something the men agreed.
The local woman often cooked for Lev, when he had people over. She always kept me out of the kitchen during her preparations. But she was old and went home to cook for her husband before the parties began.
Peter’s girlfriend Olivia and I took turns choosing records. She’d even brought some new things with her. I made vodka tonics. I doused the salad with lemon and oil. Then we had lamb and rice that people barely ate. There was wine and we drank it all. We served the limoncello someone brought from duty-free. The custard pie no one wanted but we had it on hand to be good hosts. I poured coffee into thin china cups glazed red, then offered more alcohol.
Girls, forget the cleaning, Lev said. But we couldn’t. None of us liked leaving things a mess. Olivia helped me and we laughed about nothings and danced around as we did dishes.
Come outside and look at the view. Look at the Acropolis under the full moon. We are so lucky to be here in this beautiful world. Play another record, they asked, and we chose. Finally, when it was so late it had circled back to early, the guests said they had to go. And then Lev said come to bed and I did.
*
I had grown up drinking milk or water out of glasses I was careful not to break. I was a careful child and cool neutral drinks were the only thing that touched my throat and inner body. My father drank water, weak coffee in the morning, maybe a token bottle of beer on Friday night, or a symbolic whiskey when it was some meaningful day like the end of the war. He was controlled and did not care for the heavy stuff he said. In my family alcohol was the spirit that possessed others, so it was exotic for me to make my way into the fray of clubs and nightcaps and tying one on. Lev had a drink for any time of day and every season, and yet he drank a style that was the opposite of vulgar. Burning liquors made of exotic herbs and pristine grains went down throats. Out of them came endearments and shouts and wild ideas. Lev and Peter and all the men they liked so much said sweetheart and darling. They said, my angel can you get us another, and it relaxed me, hearing that.
My father never had this rhythm. Women and wine, they simply had not occurred to my father as issues, as pleasures or pursuits. Flattery and endearment were not logical to him. He could not treat women with anything beyond cordial disinterest, and that extended even to my mother. So, this warmth Lev expressed could tint even the most mundane interaction with an erotic hue. Blue afternoons under an arbor. Nights by the sea under a yellow light.
If you haven’t grown up with them, men who drink and laugh and sing and love their friends, you find them the most irresistible kind in the whole world. At least that’s how it has been for me.
I love being called honey because it feels plush like a hotel robe. I couldn’t feel guilty for giving in to the pleasures of sexual suggestion because it felt nourishing, rehydrating after an early life of austerity.
I called Lev daddy in bed. Is it too magazine-psychotherapy, easy to conjure fathers and directors when analyzing a woman’s proclivities? Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. I wanted what my father wasn’t. I wanted what my mother didn’t choose. I wanted someone to tell me what to do. I had to restart my heart somewhere. One needs allies to get by. Lev always said that. You can’t survive in this world without a rabbi. It’s common sense, he said. Who would you be without friends and lovers?
*
I was supposed to leave. Lev was supposed to go in a different direction. That was supposed to be the end of it. I was a foreigner passing through my lover’s ancient land. He said let’s go to the beach one more time. My head is pounding and salt water is medicinal.
Grab your suit, he said.
The car he’d borrowed crept down the street to a barrage of honks. Hands waved out rolled-down windows. Go around for Christ’s sake. The weather was still summer but it was turning.
At the beach we settled next to a gaggle of seagulls. These birds had a great careless way of standing like they had nowhere to be, but were also waiting for something vital. They were waiting to steal our potato chips, Lev scoffed.
We went out into the green waves. I kept jumping and floating with the swells, doing my best to avoid getting smacked to the face. I tried not to be afraid in the water, but I always was a little. Maybe it was a consequence of growing up in the mountains. Lev swam out far and then right back in a short athletic burst. Out of breath he said he needed a cigarette and strode back to shore.
We were lounging on our beach towels, propped up on our elbows and facing the sea when Lev asked out of the blue, what the hell, do you want to get married? Let’s go back to New York and be done with it. I laughed. But I don’t have the right dress. So, buy something, dummy. It’s not so complicated.
__________________________________
From Barbara by Joni Murphy. Used with permission of the publisher, Astra House. Copyright © 2025 by Joni Murphy.
