The Intimacy of Perception

Where did I lose my way? I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway.

—Federico Fellini, 8½

I see things. I see people. I see what they really are. In their smallest gestures, I see what they don’t want me to see—an untruth revealed by a sudden downward glance, the self-doubt behind their swagger, the fear hidden in their composure. I see. I know. So when my wife emerged from the shower one afternoon, I understood—from the way she loosely wore the towel, flitted her eyes, and squeezed my hand on her way to the bedroom—she was telling me something. And when she removed the towel, lay down on the bed, and spread her arms, the conclusion was inescapable: She was upset and needed some time alone.

I’d give her the time, respect her space, but not without first offering comfort. I sat on the edge of the bed. The droplets dotting her gooseflesh skin ran down her ribcage and soaked into the fabric of the duvet.

She placed her palms high on her chest. “Anything you want to do tonight?”

In fact, there was. I’d planned to work on my term paper, an examination of Fellini’s portrayal of female characters as they strive to achieve autonomy within a narcissistic, male-dominated milieu. I was almost done. But the ending was giving me trouble. Over the last week, I’d lost my ability to concentrate. Perhaps it was my wandering imagination, perhaps my general discomfort with endings, perhaps the endless awareness of a quickening societal decay—the war, the disease, the corruption, the unstoppable careening of civilization toward a stoppable oblivion. At any rate, a stubborn, boorish malaise had seated itself in the theater of my mind, crunching popcorn and laughing at unfunny things. And so my work suffered. I was starting to panic a little.

My wife, perhaps sensing my angst, lightly ran a fingertip up my forearm, her question about plans for the night still unanswered.

“I should work on my paper,” I said. My latest stab at the ending was to fully explicate the closing shot of Nights of Cabiria. As the prostitute Cabiria’s tearful eyes meet ours and she smiles, we see a moment of ineffable pathos, a revelation that she, and perhaps each of us, inhabits a universe consisting of both hardship and resolve.

My wife rolled onto her side, facing me, and pressed her forehead to my arm. She kissed the back of my hand. “I’m not really that busy.”

“Want to watch a movie?” I asked. Movie was the right word. I’d been quietly training myself to avoid film in everyday speech.

“Not especially,” she said, moving her palm to my thigh.

A good husband sees the layers of meaning beneath his wife’s trivial actions. Most husbands would miss, for example, that her gesture was a kind of reaching out, a plea for comfort, a sign she needed to lighten a weight that hung on her like a woolen coat sodden with rain. We also hadn’t eaten yet.

“I can make supper,” I said. This would give her the time she needed, and with the distraction of conviviality, she’d open up about her submerged grief.

“You must be tired.” She moved her palm in gentle, lazy circles on my leg.

My heart swelled. She knew, could see, my inner pain! In her selflessness, she was offering to prepare our meal, willing to step into a patriarchy-defined womanly role for the sake of our well-being. This would not do, of course. Assuming our individual pain was, on the whole, effectively equal, I told her I should be the one to make supper.

“There’s stuff for tacos,” I said.

“I’m not super hungry.”

“I can get it started, at least.” Making tacos was not for the faint of heart. It was a complex, multi-stage affair that demanded the coordination of processes as well as a deliberate, thoughtful presentation of individual components—shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, sour cream, and the like. A lot of work. Even with a kit.

I gave her a comforting smile and went down to the kitchen. As I broke up the meat in the frying pan, I reflected on the role that perception played in forming an enduring intimacy. Not all couples knew this closeness, which was made possible by simply paying attention. They lived insular lives that confused proximity with connection. The two of us, though, truly saw each other, nurtured and helped each other. We spoke our own wordless language, giving us strength to endure the unrelenting chaos and strife of existence.

Steam rose from the pan as I stirred the meat. The smell, I imagined, wafted upstairs and reassured her that things were being taken care of. I drained the fat, added water, worked in the spices, let it boil down again. I sliced the tomatoes, chopped the lettuce, put the shells into the oven.

Eventually, she came down and sat at the table, dressed in pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt. Her previous worry, so subtle as to be imperceptible to most men, had now risen to the surface, where it solidified into an expression of quiet anguish. I posed nonthreatening questions to which she responded with monosyllables. Did she want the salsa from the kit or the other stuff? (“Don’t care.”) Could I get her a drink? (“No.”) Anything new at work? (“Nope.”)

I didn’t push it. I held steady.

We sat on opposite sides of the small kitchen table, separated by the multi-bowl taco array. I forked meat into a shell. “Are you tired?”

She shrugged.

I nodded patiently and crunched my taco. If she didn’t feel like talking, I’d share something. I told her, as if I’d just learned it, that the working title of Fellini’s 8½ was The Beautiful Confusion. The numeric title referenced the number of films he’d made up to then, including one he codirected. There was more to it, obviously, but I especially liked the original title. Something about it evoked a sense of dreamlike abandon, an ecstasy you might feel if all your lost summers suddenly rushed back and you had to relive them all at once.

“I thought it was interesting,” I said.

She jabbed at her food. She’d piled the fixings onto her plate, including most of the lettuce, to create an ad hoc taco salad.

She puzzled over a forkful of meat. “Is this turkey or hamburger?”

“Yes,” I said.

She glared at me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t paying that close attention.”

“I might go out.” She ate the turkey or the hamburger.

“Go out where?”

“Out of the house.”

An evening alone with Fellini suddenly unfurled in my imagination, and I got a tingling in my tailbone. And yet whatever had seized her before, obvious from the moment she’d stepped from the shower, still had her in its claws. Her plans to vacate were indicative of an unexpressed sorrow, which I couldn’t, in good conscience, ignore. I put my napkin on my plate as if I were signaling to an imaginary server that I was done.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

“About what?”

“This. Whatever this is.” I splayed my fingers and waved my palms at some invisible phantom sitting on or near the table.

“It’s tacos,” she said.

“It’s not just tacos, though, is it?”

“Sometimes, yes, tacos is just tacos.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but it’s time to come clean.”

“Who, you? You want to come clean?”

“Time for you to tell me what’s eating at you.”

She clattered her fork onto her plate and gathered her thoughts. Her eyes darted around the table, as if the right words were hiding somewhere in the tiny city of bowls. But she steadied herself, breathed in, worked the problem in her head, grew calm. A chess player ready to crush her opponent.

Then, unaccountably, she began to cry.

“Sweetie,” I said.

A long time went by.

“I miss you,” she said. She picked up a napkin and blew her nose.

“I’m right here.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What then?”

“You can’t tell?”

So this was the script, then. Woman says man doesn’t understand, man says explain it then, woman says I shouldn’t have to. He’s always an oblivious doofus—a workaholic, a football fanatic, a hyperintellectual. He pretends to understand but wishes they could cut directly to the embracing, the kissing, the peaceful afterward. The crisis eventually passes, but he’s left sitting there just as empty as before.

I could let that scene play out. Go along, listen, apologize. Lower my defenses, let the story pivot. We all live in those decision points, where the singular present branches into disparate, irreversible realities. Rarely do they announce themselves. They lurk in moments of banality—taking a back road instead of the highway, putting off calling your mother to the weekend, vowing to check the battery in the smoke alarm first thing in the morning.

Here, then, was a gift of clarity. A definite moment where our destinies could either stay together or diverge, depending on what I said.

I was about to speak. I was. But then her chin dropped to her chest and she stared at the floor. A small thing. But I saw. I knew. In that moment, whatever had gripped her had released her. I knew I’d never see it, though. She’d never let me see it. It would remain inside, pacing and silent, watching me from the dark but never coming out, not even to pounce. One possible future—I’ll never know which one—had just been annihilated.

And yet seeing her slouched in that one-woman tableau of stillness, I had a revelation. My paper. The ending was all wrong. In trying to breathlessly capture Nights of Cabiria, I’d forgotten the power of simplicity. And in trying to be original, I’d forgotten 8½ altogether. So 8½ then, but I wouldn’t prattle on about the surreal, circus-like atmosphere, the procession of musicians, the men and women holding hands and moving in a great circle. What I needed was a singular, compelling image. I needed Claudia. For a few moments in the final sequence, her face occupies half the frame, with only sand and ocean behind her. She glances down and back up, smiles, and moves on. That’s it. Darkness falls, as it must, but instead of vacancy we see possibility. Instead of an ending we see a beginning, an ascension to a new perceptual plane where silence is speech and absence is hope.

That was the better ending.

First, though, the matter of her question. You can’t tell? It still hung between us, still unanswered, still in the way.

I focused on her hand, just her hand. It was knotted into a fist on the table as she watched the floor. I reached over and put my hand on hers, paper covering rock. She looked up.

I gave her an answer. I decided. I spoke gently and clearly. In the space of a few words, the present became the past, all other futures collapsed, and I became something new. We both did.

She listened as I spoke. She nodded. She knew. Then, without saying anything more, she stood, scraped her chair back, and walked away.

I closed my eyes and saw another world.

A cool sea breeze. A whiff of salt air. A bright infinite sky. A smile rising briefly.