NINE

We are already over-budget and off script. I plan ahead and do a couple shots of espresso, invite a friend, wear wool socks. I gather they heat this place with nothing but a few tea candles and Oscar buzz.

Madeleine snorts with derision when Kidman tells Day-Lewis he doesn’t know how to love. I wonder in what way his is like and unlike Alvin’s problem, who is an artist, too, though—I’ll just say it—a compromised one. Day-Lewis dangles his long blackstockinged feet from the cuffs of his skinny suit; Cecil Vyse is banished completely now, with his shoes in dejection slowly tied. Madeleine maintains director Rob Marshall prefers, in choreography and camerawork, “the hinders” to tits. Maybe so, but skinny Cotillard, more frozen than Kidman, more bland than Hudson, more haughty than Cruz, is paradoxically the only one whose musical number, a striptease in memory of her debasement, provides the sole instrument by which a single cock in the seat of any theater in Christendom might be prevailed upon to grow by a scarce quarter-inch. I see I must cross a desert to write the feminist text this must of necessity be.

And Italy—gone for good, though it held on, like the whole twentieth century, for an extra ten years. As 1910 bid the true farewell to ornament and the lie of dynamism, so 2010 gives the slip at last to close reading, museums, and the “march of centuries” itself. In one motion a career barman lifts the scummed espresso cup on its saucer as already his other hand swipes a damp towelette across the surface of the marble bar. For an instant you believe you still see the ring. No, it is the light-writ ceiling fan looking up at you from the stone.