Sunset Park - By Paul Auster Page 0,41
than just a warm smile, a maternal smile somehow, not the way Ellen’s mother smiles at her, perhaps, but the kind of smile all mothers should give their children, a smile that is not a greeting so much as an offering, a benediction. She thinks: Alice will make a terrific mother when the time comes…a superior mother, she says to herself, and then, because of the juxtaposition of those two words, she transforms Alice into a Mother Superior, suddenly seeing her in a nun’s habit, and because of this momentary digression she loses her train of thought and doesn’t have time to ask Alice if she would be willing to pose for her before Alice is asking a question of her own:
Have you ever seen The Best Years of Our Lives?
Of course, Ellen says. Everyone knows that film.
Do you like it?
Very much. It’s one of my favorite Hollywood movies.
Why do you like it?
I don’t know. It touches me. I always cry when I see it.
You don’t find it a little too pat?
Of course it’s pat. It’s a Hollywood movie, isn’t it? All Hollywood movies are a bit contrived, don’t you think?
Good point. But this one is a little less contrived than most—is that what you’re saying?
Think of the scene when the father helps prepare his son for bed.
Harold Russell, the soldier who lost his hands in the war.
The boy can’t take off the hooks by himself, he can’t button up his own pajamas, he can’t put out his cigarette. His father has to do everything for him. As I remember it, there’s no music in that scene, hardly a word of dialogue, but it’s a great moment in the film. Completely honest. Incredibly moving.
Does everyone live happily ever after?
Maybe yes, maybe no. Dana Andrews tells the girl—
Teresa Wright—
He tells Teresa Wright that they’re going to get kicked around a lot. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. And the Fredric March character is a drunk, a serious, nonstop, raving alcoholic, so his life isn’t going to be much fun a few years down the road.
What about Harold Russell?
He marries his sweetheart at the end, but what kind of marriage is it going to be? He’s a simple, good-hearted boy, but so damned inarticulate, so bottled up emotionally, I don’t see how he’s going to make his wife very happy.
I hadn’t realized you knew the film so well.
My grandmother was crazy about it. She was about sixteen when the war broke out, and she always said The Best Years of Our Lives was her movie. We must have watched it together five or six times.
They go on talking about the film for a few more minutes, and then she finally remembers to ask Alice the question that prompted her to knock on the door in the first place. Alice is busy now, but she will be glad to break for an hour after lunch and pose for her then. What Alice doesn’t understand is that Ellen isn’t interested in doing a portrait of her face, she wants to make a drawing of her whole body, and not that body hidden by clothes but a full nude sketch, perhaps several sketches, similar to the ones she did in her life classes at art school. It is therefore an awkward moment for both of them when they go upstairs to Ellen’s room after lunch and Ellen asks Alice to take off her clothes. Alice has never worked as a model, she is not accustomed to having her naked body scrutinized by anyone, and although she and Ellen occasionally catch glimpses of each other going in and out of the bathroom, that has nothing to do with the torture of having to sit stock-still for an hour as your closest friend looks you over from top to bottom, especially now, when she is feeling so miserable about her weight, and even though Ellen tells Alice that she is beautiful, that she has nothing to worry about, it is merely an art exercise, artists are used to looking at other people’s bodies, Alice is too embarrassed to give in to her friend’s request, she is sorry, terribly sorry, but she can’t go through with it and must say no. Ellen is stung by Alice’s refusal to do this simple thing for her, which is in fact the first step in reinventing herself as an artist, which is no less than reinventing herself as a woman, a human being, and while she understands that Alice has no