David A. Taylor’s short fiction has appeared in Rio Grande Review, Potomac Review, Gargoyle, Barrelhouse, Jabberwock, The MacGuffin and Washington City Paper, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His debut story collection, Success: Stories, received the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize. His nonfiction includes Soul of a People (Wiley) about the 1930s WPA writers, and he’s a producer for the related podcast, The People's Recorder. He received his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University. Find him on Instagram @davidataylor1.
FLIGHT RISK
I tell people, “We had a home until we didn’t. We made it work until we couldn’t.” There is nobody now who does not get that. Our friends and even strangers, my passengers, they nod. I see them in the rearview take a moment to absorb what I’m saying, where I’m headed. Their foreheads tighten and they nod, even when they don’t know why or if anyone sees them. My rideshare family.
The job helps keep a roof over our heads, though it’s just our Golf hatchback roof, while we scheme our next act. We crank the seats back and lay a nappy blue towel over the transmission console and voila. With Hannah’s paisley scarves held tight by the closed windows, we make it cozy as we can. At night across the parking lot, ruby brake lights flicker and make it feel practically like a little neighborhood.
But man, that house! It had three bedrooms, and morning sunlight poured into two of them, bounced off the buttery hardwood floors and made the place glow. Leaving the bed I’d reach the doorway of whichever room the sun was coming into, and I’d be struck still. I’d gape and say a silent Thank you. Then I’d pad into the kitchen, scoop coffee into our old drip coffeemaker and the day would start. Woot.
Caffeinated me would walk to the other room and join the creative economy. That’s what we called it unironically. Back in Oh Seven you could make an okay living talking with people on the phone, typing up the stories they told, ping-ponging the text with your editor to get those articles printed by the thousands. Thousands! Copies arrived in the mail (if you were a subscriber) or in news shops around the city, and I’d grab a copy in a bookshop to see my work in public—even if a print copy had come in the mail! Sometimes I got letters written by people who read those articles. They felt their thoughts and reactions were important enough to write down and mail to me in care of the magazine’s editor, and then the editor forwarded the notes to me, again through the postal service. Handwritten notes sometimes. Looping scrawl was a magical incantation and I treated it like morning toast and dumped the crumbs in the trash.
With Hannah honing her skills as a boom operator, she dropped into loads of film crews that came together for a wide range of documentary projects. At that time, the doc work was steady. Hannah is personable, smart and steady as a rock—exactly who you want on a shoot.
I trace this long bad stretch back to that housing collapse (that caused the whole financial meltdown, the one before this one). It didn’t come as a total shock. One day we were driving somewhere and heard an ad (yes, we listened to radio back then) and she said, “That’s so weird how they’re inviting anyone with a credit card to buy a home. How could that work?”
And I said, “I guess the economy and the banking business is so strong, it doesn’t matter. What an amazing system!” We laughed.
To be honest, that was a difficult season. Confusing. My father was in and out of the hospital with his chronic condition. And my work, my editorial contacts were dropping off. My most reliable gig, strangely, was film and celebrity interviews with Interview and Vanity Fair—my editors accepted nearly every pitch I threw them. And my latest idea, for a piece about the Portuguese director coming to the New York festival for the first time in over a decade, struck a chord. I was just waiting on the details.
So we knew we were solid enough. Until poof, a notice arrived in a bank envelope and I ripped it open and it said they were going under. The bank. That’s when the shock came. I tried calling them but I could never reach a person and we couldn’t track where the mortgage had gone. I might have missed a deadline on one payment but that was it. Suddenly our home was on the auction block with over a hundred others. Within a few days I saw the listing: “140+ foreclosed homes in Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, Spotsylvania and Stafford counties and many more!” The auction was just a week away.
The blood rushed from my head. But soon I had an idea. I thought—it sounds silly—I thought I could save our home if I went to the auction. That I could notch a bold stroke, find a wormhole in the system, bid on our house, and get lucky. I’d heard of second-chance mortgages after foreclosure—and this wasn’t even our fault. Theoretically I could have called the police or a real estate attorney about the listing, but I was hearing from people that this was systemic, and there was no time! Yet somehow I could imagine making the winning bid. Maybe even getting our place back at a fraction of what we’d paid the first time. That would be genius, right? It would confuse the overheated system, or we could at least stir up an outcry and maybe get some support. Everybody’s home was “underwater” and yet a rising tide lifts all boats, right? And if I didn’t go, we didn’t stand a chance.
Okay, I was desperate. Maybe not thinking with great clarity. But that’s when miracles strike, right? Magical thinking? Did Gandhi make sense walking to the sea, railing about a British tax on salt? Who’d expect that to flip India out of the Empire? If I were a contra-imperialist in India, I would not put “Lead walk to beach, pick up fistful of salty sand, cry freedom!” on my To-do list.
Or Joan Didion. Did it make sense when she kept imagining her dead husband would come in the door, day after day? And then she wrote about it expecting others to buy in? And then, whammo! Vanessa Redgrave is standing on a stage on Broadway, declaiming Didion’s words to packed audiences in the Booth Theatre: “That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you.” And we all want in. We want those seats. We believe her.
That’s how I thought about entering the auction, but I was fuzzy on some details. For one thing, I had no idea how sexy the foreclosure business was! You couldn’t tell from the public notice with its list of properties. And I couldn’t bear to go to the open house for our place; I skipped it and went straight to the auction. (Hannah and I figured these things attracted a light showing, like at a pauper’s wake. “Can you imagine?” she said. “Going to scavenge people’s hardest losses?” I managed a grunt and she shook her head.) I decided it would be better to tell her after I went. Maybe nothing would happen anyway.
The morning of the auction I marked myself unavailable on the rideshare app and took the subway into the city. When I walked into the cavernous Convention Center it was like I was tumbling into an abyss, a cave marked off with room dividers and beige acoustic panels and acres of wall-to-wall carpeting in red and mauve. Bold black-and-yellow signs popped up, arrows pointing to House Auction. There were tables with signs for Brokers and Walk-ins, where young attendants with shiny hair asked for your ID, cashier’s check and personal check (you needed both for earnest money).
When I made it through the scrum, a sea of folding chairs opened up in front of me to the auctioneer’s podium. Then the chairs started filling with people. Jumbo screens on either side of the stage. Soon the place was rocking to “Brick House” on the sound system. Believe me when I say I got happy! The vibe was preshow excitement. Signs posted around the walls hawked a “buyer’s premium” on all winning bids. You could not lose in that room!
The beefy auctioneer tested the mic and got started, leaning hard on that idea of no way to lose. The “gentlemen in tuxedos walking the aisle” were “bidders’ assistants,” and they were there to help us win. “It’s important to us that you bid responsibly.” Then things revved up.
He launched the bidding with a house on Lake Barcroft, an exurb I’d driven through a couple times when backups on the arteries were bad. Bids started at $200K. The tuxedo guys were blowing whistles and yelling, pumping and pointing like football refs.
I was feeling the energy. People were shouting out numbers or lifting their ping-pong-sized paddles. After a minute the bids stalled at $1.1 million. I was stunned. Over a million! The music amped up for a little break, Neil Diamond was overjoyed (“Good times never seemed so good!”), everyone was feeling it. Two women in front of me were swaying and grooving.
The tuxedo guys were fist bumping, punching the air—they couldn’t be more excited. They were in their twenties, white and skinny. I guessed every week was a new city for them, following the auction circuit. Maybe in college or just out. Business majors? (“Living in America” piped in now.)
But wait, not everyone was feeling it. The guy across the aisle was head-shaved and dressed in a faux military jacket, track pants, white ear buds. He was utterly immobile, staring at his phone.
The auctioneer gave a goofy laugh. He had our attention again. He was getting ready to start on the next property, but first a pep talk: “excellent opportunity to buy low, sell high down the road.” Quick nod to the past week’s lurching financial woes. “We’ve seen it on the news—a credit crunch.” But here in this room? Credit was uncrunched! Financing was available! Insurable title? “Absolutely yes.” Bidding, he said, “is very easy, very fun.”
What struck me was how he summed up the housing market right then: “It truly is the perfect storm for investment buyers.”
I scanned the list, down to where our address popped up like a lost friend.
A Cape Cod home in Stafford went up onscreen, and the tuxedo near me—close-cropped black hair and an athletic bounce on the balls of his feet—started howling “Do it! 275, yes! Owwww!”
The woman with a ponytail in front of me clinched the winning bid at 260. She gave a shout and hugged both tuxedos near us.
I can do this, I told myself. Snippets from movies flashed through my head—the scene in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray is goaded to the stage and auctioned off. The winning bid comes from Andie MacDowell. Or Cary Grant sauntering into the auction house in North By Northwest. Thornhill, in disguise, gains total control of the room. I channeled his cool, his hair, his suit.
But I stewed in collar sweat as the auctioneer sold off another place in Stafford, 4br, 2.5 baths. Bidding started at a fraction of its value. The guy across the aisle was checking his phone. I was stunned that the house, valued at $355K, went for a third of that in cash. Then the auctioneer took a beat. When he spoke next, his voice was lower.
“Where are my investors in the crowd today?” Soon enough, a couple to my right nabbed that one and followed a tuxedo to the finance table. A couple of these homes started at $1,000.
The paddles were waving again. A Black man with graying beard in front of me raised his at $380, half the listed value. Like a third-base coach, the bidder’s assistant stretched a hand out flat, letting the guy know he was still in. Safe. He got it for 395! “Yeww!” the tuxedo guy shouted to the ceiling, fist raised. “Yesssss! You scared ‘em off. Owwooo!” Another one off to the finance table.
My eyes itched and my head itched but I was careful not to scratch. Then we got to our house, #253 on the block. “Some mold on the property. Please make a note.”
Mold? Bullshit.
The auctioneer slowed the pace. Then he started the bidding, at twenty thousand. The number landed with a knot in my gut.
I raised my paddle when he called a new number. But I was also holding back, patient. I got my Cary Grant groove down: subtle, but enough that the tuxedo near me clued in. He was loving it. Soon I had the leading bid at $40K. Bids bubbled up higher, some fierce staccato jumps, paddle-raising, the auctioneer pivoting left-right, making the back-and-forth physical, a dance. What a ham.
I couldn’t see who I was bidding against. Somewhere across the room. Didn’t matter—I was totally focused, channeling Cary. Keeping the twitch of my right leg under control. My tuxedo guy was into this faceoff with my invisible counterbidder. After another five-second pause I raised my paddle casually. Got to slow this down. In my mind I saw Hannah, her palms together. Standing at our front door.
No pause from the other side of the room. Soon we were up in the thin air of $90K. That was the red line my spreadsheet had dictated the night before. The auctioneer said, “Ninety-five thousand five hundred, do I hear ninety-six? Ninety-six thousand? Looking at the—the seasoned man in the fedora. Ninety-six?” I breathed in, counted to four. “Going once, twice—”
My paddle went up.
“Ninety-six thousand! Folks, this is a rare find, a gem among the lawns of...” The tinny buzz in my ears drowned out his voice but I started to breathe again. The tuxedo near me had both fists clenched at his shoulders, ready to clean and jerk the ceiling. “Going once—”
We went two more rounds, the total reaching ninety-eight. Finally, I got it. Tuxedo pumped his fists high. “We did it!”
Less than half of what Hannah and I had paid a decade ago, when we rejoiced that our offer was accepted and scraped together our down payment. But more than we could afford now.
Black specks hovered at the edge of my vision like sparrows wheeling in the room. I made my way toward the finance table. My cheeks were burning—a woman in a baseball cap shot me a thumbs up. Soon I was at the table, filling out forms. I still wasn’t sure we’d get through the procedure without a uniformed officer strolling over, but up to that weekend we still had a home-equity line of credit, and that’s what I listed.
Here we go, I thought. I was smiles with the finance rep. The words I’d rehearsed under my breath on the subway that morning? Now they came out of my mouth.
I left the finance table clutching a two-inch-thick block of paper. I had gotten our house back. And I didn’t piss myself or pass out as I walked back to the subway entrance.
Hannah was stunned, understandably, but that quickly turned to joy. And later the same week the magazine approved my pitch, saying they’d send me to Portugal for the interview with the auteur.
My father, ensconced in the hospital bed and draped in a blue-dappled cotton gown that set off his eyes, asked during my next visit what article I was working on. I was momentarily stumped, then let loose an elaborate tale of the profile of the filmmaker. I talked about Jorge, the director from Portugal I had interviewed a few weeks before. How he left Lisbon as a boy; his path with his parents to the fishing community on Cape Cod; growing up there, selling fish and chips to tourists. Jorge clawed his way to film school, then surprisingly turned back across the ocean. My father listened, eyeing me, his fingertip glowing orange with the oximeter clipped there, the numbers of his oxygen and heart rate trilling on a screen behind him. He’d been in the hospital so many times, these beeps and equipment were as familiar as my TV remote.
“What about his parents?” he asked. Honestly I hadn’t expected my father to track my meandering tale. He’d been hazy about time for two days, since returning to the hospital in an ambulance. I hadn’t gotten to the part of the story where Hannah and I would be tagging along with the movie director during his next shoot.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “I’ll ask him.” My father looked down, apparently satisfied. The trip hung in the silence over his bed.
“I’ll be curious to hear what he says,” he said.
We were at the end of my visit. I squeezed his hand and stepped back as the nurse pulled the curtain for privacy while he peed.
“His lungs just aren’t getting the oxygen to his brain,” my mother told me after, in the hallway.
I sensed a change in the nurses’ and my mother’s behavior. I was trying to read them but couldn’t. Back in the car, I requested books from our library, like Preparing for a Better End. My mother called the next day: she had just visited my father and he sounded like his old self! She was so happy.
I didn’t trust myself to join in her good feeling. It would pass. “That’s great,” I said. “Can’t wait to get him home.” She heard the flatness in my voice.
“Such a relief,” she said. “It’s all I have wanted.”
As I pressed the end-call button, I remained skeptical that he’d really go home that day. And where would I be when my father did get released? Hannah and I might be in Lisbon by then, throwing back flights of port. Tawny tints of shame at the thought.
Hannah reminded me that my father would never want me to cancel travel because of him.
That weekend I drove to the hospital once again. An old CD of George Shearing was playing on the car stereo, the piano mashup of Satie’s “Gymnopédies” and “It Never Entered My Mind.” At a stoplight on Route 1, I felt a flood of sadness in my chest. My father had driven me up this broken-down retail highway many times, me a kid in the passenger seat barely able to see over the door. Back when he was a godlike engineer. How many more trips up and down this gloomy pavement did he have? I teared up, with a swelling fullness, Shearing’s piano arpeggios shimmering up the keys.
I made it to the parking lot. The spaces unfilled in the midafternoon, the Jack and Jill ice cream factory beyond where trucks were lined up, their refrigerated holds plugged into posts. I sat getting my breath back, gulping three big lungfuls before exiting the car. I walked through the ER’s automatic sliding doors.
That night was my last visit before we’d leave, and my father struggled to focus. It was hard for him to talk against the ventilator’s pulsing sighs. He managed to ask me about the flight to Portugal. What route were we taking? Where were the connections? How long would the trip take? He loved travel.
The nurse, who’d mentioned her family in Ethiopia, said she didn’t think he was lucid. His voice was hard to understand over the burr of the vent. She asked him where he was, and he tried twice to answer with hardly any sound. He finally pushed out “Mount Vernon.” She and I exchanged relieved glances.
Afterward I walked back out the ICU’s swinging doors to the elevators, the persistent tremor in my leg, momentarily unsure of the decision to go on this trip. But this Interview feature was, weirdly, the only chance I had to earn the five thousand dollars that would make the house deal work, at least on paper.
Hannah sat across from me in DCA’s departure lounge. We both were checking our phones with a half hour before boarding started. Portugal. Excited.
“Penny?” she said.
“Oh, just a bunch of things.” I mentally scrolled down the reasons not to be here: political demonstrations in the streets of Lisbon, my father’s return yesterday to the ICU, my assignment editor for this feature equivocating again on the phone yesterday. He was caustic about the filmmaker’s meager box office numbers. I had a creeping fraudulent feeling.
“Me too,” Hannah said.
Still, it felt great to be on an international flight again. So good. Not that I liked the boarding process, or the odd sealed geometry of the departure lounge with its rows of plastic seats facing nowhere and competing, amplified announcements of flights boarding and final boarding overlapping in a din of misdirection.
But I had missed the affirmation of travel. There was a flying chair with my name on it, which somehow confirmed my existence. That my passport and boarding pass, also bearing my name, brought me nods of validation from people in uniforms: the gate attendant, the flight crew, customs officials. They saw me standing there before them, and my name and my image on those documents lined up. There was a dinner tray with my vegetarian entrée. A unique form of privilege.
It had been a while since my life had borne signs of that belonging, of being worthy of hospitality. I was a little stunned to realize that a letter-sized boarding pass in my hand might hold my self esteem. But it choked me up, reminding me I had once been a rising star. Of course I had visions of following Godard! His clacky typewriter for Cahiers du Cinema opened doors to a life in film; they marked off his vision, sentence by sentence, and made a place for him in the hearts of Hitchcock and other luminaries. Or okay, maybe that poseur, Peter Bogdanovich. That could be my path. For years I’d forgotten even to dream.
Now on the plane, a part of me dreamt again. Two stirred months before, during my brief interview with Jorge at the festival, I’d felt surprised and moved by how encouraging he was. I had pitched a film review, a short piece, hoping I could get enough from it to swing into a pitch with my editor for one more feature at Interview. Jorge had enjoyed a flurry of buzz in North America after the award in Venice, so I expected he’d be tired of another conversation about his life. And frankly, the convention hall meeting room was no place to inspire human connection. It was in the Marriott’s conference suite, with rows of tacky tables and bunting and cardboard effigies of stars, and as I stepped into the room I had a moment of ick. But Jorge was ebullient, a warm exchange from the start. He made me feel I belonged there.
So I relaxed and gushed about his first film (which almost nobody had seen) and how I viewed it as a new direction for filmmaking. That film, black and white and grainy, opened up with the filmmaker’s question to a young woman in a pickup truck, her head down and deep in her own grief. As if oblivious to her pain, the director’s voice behind the cameras asked, “Can you tell me a story? Any story.” Seeing it the first time, I recoiled. It felt callous. Unnerving. The woman wiped her nose with her shawl, took a breath, containing her irritation and pain.
“What can I tell you, true or not true?” she said, almost under her breath. Then she started to tell a tale, a fantastic tale that animation would follow and embody, unspooling through the whole film. That moment, I said to Jorge, showed the depth of human imagination in a way I’d never seen.
His face lit up boyishly as he took in what I said. From there, our conversation flowed. We discussed his new film, bopped across stories of his film school days, his return to Portugal, his youth and everything that brought up. I felt a connection. When we parted, I genuinely wished him well.
When my little review was published, I emailed it to Jorge. In reply, he texted “the next time you’re in Portugal let me know.” Of course, an invitation like that is easily tossed off, but I sensed he was genuine. When I emailed him saying I had plans that would take me to Lisbon, he replied within a day, repeating his offer. And that was enough to get me the assignment from Interview plus travel authorization to Lisbon. Bingo. Sometimes you have to break a few eggs.
I knew it looked sketchy. But Bogdanovich! He’d do it, gambler that he was. And I was leveraging the fee to get our house back. So I booked our flights. Yes, I was dreading the call, the tumbling cards, but remember—in those days databases didn’t speak to each other as much as they do now, and in those months financial systems were still scrambled after the fall of Lehman Brothers.
There we were, Hannah and I, sitting in our seats heading over the ocean for conversations with the international auteur. When I’d contacted him about scheduling the trip, he had sounded uncertain, probably trying to remember me. But now I had his cell phone number to punch in once we got settled in our flat perched in Pena district overlooking Lisbon’s Rossio Square.
Sitting in that plane I gazed up at the overhead button where I could manage the air vent. I felt unbelievably lucky. We and everyone on that flight were escaping a disaster. We had set the wrecks on fire and boarded the last ship out, as America descended into night.
A few minutes before midnight, the pilot came on and welcomed us aboard. The plane backed away from the terminal. I was too pumped to sleep. The flight attendants came around and I took a gin and tonic and nodded off, my cheek on Hannah’s shoulder. In my mind, hospital trays with unidentifiable food drifted to and fro.
Next thing, we’re in the Lisbon airport, standing in a long line snaking to passport control. After we reach that counter I ask a woman in a red vest where our luggage has stalled, and she points me to another line six people deep at Lost Luggage.
When we finally get to the counter, the woman at the ancient computer asks if we have a luggage receipt. No. She enters my contact information just before the computer freezes. So she has to shout my name and contact details to the person at the next computer, letter by letter. I feel a simmering rage by the time a taxi pulls up and deposits us in front of the industrial building where our rental is. Inside, just before we collapse with dizzying, time-bending exhaustion, I get the phone to work and text Jorge, confirming that we’ve arrived. A few hours later I wake to see he has replied: we’re to meet him in Porto in two days. They’re shooting at a winery near a factory south of the river.
Another city. Okay, I buy the tickets for the next morning and put them on our card. What’s another three hundred bucks? By the time we get the bill, I’ll be paid by the magazine. Same with the international phone bill.
When we reach Porto the next afternoon, we’re ahead of our luggage. Meanwhile Jorge has nixed my earlier request that Hannah come along and handle the audio recording. So now I’ll have to rely on my phone. That rattles me, both of us. The following dawn it’s still dark when I kiss Hannah and leave the flat (a notch below our Lisbon place, but hey, short notice) and walk to get my rental car for the day. Porto’s streets look gray and haunted at dawn. I feel haunted. The traffic leaving the city is crawling, but on the bridge high over the Douro river, I gaze on a slice of the waterfront below. Wild, rolling countryside beyond olive trees, low grape arbors. Dream big to seem big.
After ten minutes on the highway my directions fail, the GPS dies. I have no map.
I stop at a café that’s not yet open, standing on an empty tile floor. A guy in a police uniform enters (another customer?) and after I babble my dilemma, he draws me a penciled pictograph. It works. I reach the office complex twenty minutes late, amped up. I rush up the steps and tell the person at the desk I’m there to interview Jorge.
An assistant offers me an espresso (in flawless English), leads me to an empty conference room, and directs me to a seat. Left alone, I wonder if the director leases this space or does he own? Then through the door bursts Jorge, trailed by a young pale man who looks like a close-cropped Peter Sarsgaard, the flack who, Jorge explains, will chaperone me through the set after our interview.
Up close, I’m again struck by Jorge’s charisma. He’s the center of attention, yet his magnetism is warm. Sarsgaard smiles too, in on a joke, and moves lightly on his feet like he’s on a sports team, ready to take the baton for his coach. Early in life, Jorge lived on the Lower East Side, banging out corporate safety videos during the day, choreographing his gemlike Super 8 films at night. Here in Lisbon he has gathered a team that will follow him anywhere. Today they’re following him to a bottling factory.
Jorge sits across from me on the black plush couch and launches into the hectic schedule he has today—three setups, three locations. The new project is a return his neo-film noir stories. He’s wearing a slightly frayed blue denim shirt like a farmworker, which highlights the bronzed skin of his forearms and face, aglow from the sun. The high-low contrast as he riffs about Godard and French New Wave, and giggles like a teenager about Dashiell Hammett’s origins as a private investigator—it’s captivating. It erases the usual borders. We’ve reentered the zone of our earlier conversation. I breathe again.
Then one moment as I’m recording his monologue on my phone, racing to follow his mercurial flow with a question before he zooms off for the day’s shoot, I start to panic, realizing the question I need to ask—just one—requires him to take a breath.
And we don’t get to it. He’s waterfalling about Portugal’s violent history and how his characters navigate the phantom borderland. “How did they?” he asks with imploring eyes. Without a beat for me to enter, he arrives where I was about to go: the Depression’s effect on his parents, “robbing them of their home, their livelihood—they had to flee.”
Those words funnel me into a memory of my own shame. I see Hannah packing up the boxes in our empty house. Her face drawn to focus, determined to get things right. To exit properly and get to safety. Now, I hope, she is ordering an espresso.
The next moment Jorge is turning to wave goodbye. My one-on-one is done. From now on, my visit is contingent: a hanger-on. I catch up as Jorge reaches the elevator. In my jog, my hysteria, I note the cast of morning light, the sun over a vineyard. “One last question,” I say as if we’ve had a conversation. “If I may.”
“Tell him,” the director says, pointing to Sarsgaard. “We’ll get back to you. Sorry, I’ve kept a whole team waiting.”
“But your parents,” I blurt. He steps across the gated metal elevator threshold.
He gazes ahead silently as the metal doors close on his face of confused sorrow.
“We can definitely get you his answer,” Sarsgaard says blandly.
I follow Sarsgaard the rest of that morning past empty setups that won’t be filmed until the “golden hour,” through warehouses where he describes the film’s entire plot so I’ll understand why we’re in a warehouse. I nod and ask a few questions, but it’s just going through motions—I’m despairing. I still clutch at the idea there’s some way I can turn this into a feature story. But no inside chats, no reveals of the filmmaker’s thinking. The sad eyes caught in the elevator. Could that be enough?
Later that question dogs me as I sit in the car, preparing to drive back to Porto. Empty-handed. I hesitate, then text to see about a call. No response.
Hannah doesn’t have a working phone in this country. I drive back, unsure what I’ll find. My phone buzzes in the passenger seat while I’m navigating highway signs in a language I don’t understand. When I glance at the screen later, it’s a reply from Jorge! We’re off to the border tomorrow. Stay in touch.
That night, Hannah and I walk to dinner at a nice place. Why not splurge? We’re heading home. Hannah wears the outfit that she’d packed carefully in the suitcase that has just caught up with us. She looks like a million. The restaurant has an “old country” vibe with dark beams and hearty food. Between courses, I show her the text from Jorge. Later, back in the rental, I make one last attempt. I need more from him. I take a breath, hold it for five, then press the green handset icon and silently urge him to pick up. He does.
“I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time,” I say.
“No, I’m okay,” he yawns. I ask his impression of the day’s shoot. He says he captured what he’d hoped for, so. A good day. Even the extras. “I’m so impressed by the teens of Êvora,” he says. Then he gracefully gets me off the phone. “Keep in touch.”
I wish him luck, say I can’t wait to see the film. I will end the call, I realize, not with a bang but a whimper of politeness. As I press the red icon, a sharp ache hits my stomach—not for having gambled my way here, but for having held back. I didn’t fully commit to his schedule! If I hadn’t hedged this as an overdue vacation, I could’ve followed Jorge’s crew to the border and seen the light in the trees at the edge where smugglers crossed. I was not all in. Turning my head a second too late, a failure of imagination. Not like at the auction. Where was that me?
We ride to the airport in silence. With extra time, I dawdle in the fluorescent duty-free area in front of bright displays of chocolates and alcohol. On my phone a string of texts from my brother rise up. There’s also an email from the bank. I look up and scan the Departures screen for a name.