]:[ Romac ... the film...not the film!!!!]:[

This is confirmed by a daylit shot of her clomping, almost limping along the hall toward her apartment in outsize yellow shoes. So used are we to the rhythm of her walk that this jars on us, as it does on her husband, who stands waiting for her inside. "Where were you?" "I called you." "Where are your shoes?" "I broke a heel. Leela lent me these." "Did you get them repaired? I like those shoes." "I left them at the shop." "Why didn't you wait? It can't take long to fix a heel." She says nothing. "Give me the ticket, I'll pick them up." A pause. "Take those shoes off," he says. She steps out of them. "Undress. Those are my clothes. Take them off. Stay there." She faces him. We see her head and shoulders. Her nakedness is in her lowered eyes. "You're an expensive woman." "I don't mean to be." "You're not qualified to do any work. You could learn to type." "Maybe I'll have to." "Maybe?" "What if you die?" They are in bed, she prone, face to the camera, he above and behind, dominating her. They have perhaps just made love. The room is shaded. They speak in whispers. "I'm sorry I humiliated you. I did it to excite you." Interesting, for a husband. And he adores her. What does she want? But even as she submits to his caress her eyes are vacant, her chips on another number.

Philip is dead. He lies in a coffin while his wife, Michaela and her husband hover, murmuring. Michaela bends to kiss him, a kiss for the dead on the forehead or the cheek but, after the briefest hesitation, she kisses him lightly and lingeringly on the lips. His eyes open. She glances around, panicked lest the others see, and presses his eyes closed. An Athenian cemetery. She walks her deliberate walk alone among graves topped by little gardens with white stone embankments, glass cases with candles. Philip in a suit, barefoot, waits for her by one. "Is this what you want? A spiritual love?" "No. I'm not worthy of you." "It doesn't matter." "I'm trying to salvage a sense of self from all this." "You'll walk away without a backward thought." "No!" She weeps. Sirens go yodeling by.

At a party she and Philip glance at each other. It is a fortunate glance because it tells her--and us--that he is ardent for her. But it is unfortunate because her husband sees it. So strong is it that she turns from it almost in recoil, as from a bout of love-making, and it is this that he takes in. For his part Philip glances guiltily at his wife. Now she knows too. The four of them stand there drawn together by their cumbersome knowledge, unable to speak. Then, with his usual aplomb, her husband does speak. "If God asked me my opinion about creation I'd say the sex drive is up a little high. Once a month is enough to keep the race going, and give us time to think about something else." They shift their weight. "Making love to someone you're used to is like wrestling with a philosophical problem--marshalling arguments, making new cases. Our time has taught us that we don't know whose fault anything is, but it's such a short step from naivety to vulgarity." The guilty ones sag, defeated, wounded by the truth. They can't even look at one another. Philip's wife is almost solicitous; Michaela's husband, aloof, worldly.

Behind the house, beyond the lights of the party, the voices of the guests, the lovers meet in the dark and kiss--heroically, with determination. Hand in hand they hurry to some bushes, kneel and then lie in the grass but have not even wrenched open their clothing when her husband comes walking into the dark towards them. They lie there frozen as he marches up. Will he denounce them publicly? Strike them? Kill them? He comes straight over and suddenly it's clear that he doesn't see them! He unzips and urinates loudly into the bushes. They lie there under the pour, wet, wincing, unable to move. When he's gone they sit up wiping at themselves, the mood shattered.

She is underwater, so far down that it's dark, being helped up a ladder through a narrow passage by two men. One takes his airpiece out and puts it in her mouth--her husband. She breathes. The other does the same--Philip. She breathes. She gives it back. They push her up the passage. She tries to cling to them but they send her up. Daylight. She is climbing the almost sheer face of a cliff, an almost impossible task in any circumstances, let alone in high heels. This time she hasn't taken them off. She is spread out awkwardly, contorted, struggling for footing. When the camera tilts up the summit is so distant we laugh. But here she is, pulling herself up over the rim. Now she crosses a vast barren plateau--rock and wasteland--unsteady in her heels but unstoppable. Dissolves indicate that hours, perhaps days have passed. In the distance, a low building: she trudges toward it; enters it. It is a noisy bar crowded with men. She walks among them, stops. "I need someone to put sun lotion on me," she says, holding up a plastic bottle. Silence. Pan the men. From his place at the bar Philip steps forward. Her back is turned, her straps at her elbows as he oils her shoulders. "I was hoping it would be you," she says.

She strolls in the city, lingers to savor the breath of a flower shop in the acrid street. Philip's two-seater stops at the curb and he leans toward her, opens the door for her. Here is their chance. She looks around nervously: should she get in? They are in the car together, moving through traffic. It starts to rain. He turns off the main thoroughfare and parks amid the usual jumble of cars nosed onto the sidewalk. The rain has driven everyone inside. The windows are fogged. Perfect. "Let's get this over with," he smiles, and our hearts sink. Over with? Is he worthy of her? Is he willing to engage on anything like her terms? Can he see what she's going through? Is she a fool? Of course she's a fool, but is she the kind of fool we want her to be?--that we want to be? "Do you love her?" He thinks about it. "The other night we were watching a late movie on TV. No commercials. We couldn't tear ourselves away to go to the bathroom so we pissed in a water bottle. It wasn't easy." She looks at him, not as amused as he'd hoped. "It must have been harder for her." "You're lonely." "When I'm alone I'm with others. Often when I'm with others I'm alone. So it works out." But the moment of doubt has passed. The steady rain. They are closer, savoring a sweet inevitability. Then thunder crashes so loudly they jump. The burglar sirens go off in all the cars on the street. A policeman knocks at the window.

Night. A roof-garden restaurant high over the city. She and her husband are at a table with business associates, and he is holding forth. "The difference between America and Europe is the difference between maniacs and crooks. Advertisers, athletes, fundamentalists, corporations, the New Age, the paramilitary, feminists--American maniacs. Even the waiters have a glow in the eyes. The psychopath is a hero there. If a politician embezzles money or sleeps with a stewardess he's impeached by moral maniacs. Here he becomes prime minister." All laugh but Michaela, who's heard this before. "Of course crooks are politer." As the dinner proceeds behind her she strolls in the dark, her mobile phone at her ear. Across the city a tall office building shows only a few lights. "I can see you," she says. "Are you third from the top?" "I wish I didn't have to work," says Philip's voice. "Is that what you tell your wife?" "Yes." "What are you doing with her?" "My best." "I hope you never say that about me." "Come over. I'm alone." "I can't. It's business." "Is he making a deal with my competitors?" "I'm sure he likes you best." "Did he say so?" The office tower is still inconveniently in her line of vision when she is back at the table, smiling insincerely but not unwarmly at the men who talk to her. Their words are as indistinct to us as they must be to her. After a while she gives her husband a little shrug that says she has a headache and stands. "Gentlemen, there's an emergency at home. Do you mind?" A swell of voices profusely excuses her and she hurries away.

In the elevator she tries the phone, which of course doesn't work. In the street she paces for a reception, dials awkwardly as she flags a cab. She is still punching numbers in the back seat but they are stalled in a canyon of buildings, in a traffic jam that extends to the vanishing point. What must be an hour later she emerges from the taxi and high-heel runs across the concrete apron before the glass wall of the office tower, but the closers of doors have preceded her. Each of them--she tries the whole long row--is locked. She taps numbers on the phone, listens to the ring--at last a clear reception. No answer. Now we watch a transformation for which we will remember this actress: her beaten, hot, almost slouching demeanor becomes crisp, aloof, self-possessed without even acknowledging a former state. She doesn't glance at her reflection in the dark glass, she doesn't shrug or sigh or drop the phone into her purse with a that's-that sarcasm; she turns, walks to the curb and without addressing the driver gets into the back seat of a cab standing in gridlock traffic. Nor does he turn and look at her. All is calm acceptance. Some time must have passed for other passengers have gotten in, as is the pattern in Athens--someone up front with the driver and Michaela behind him by the window, cramped against it by two people conspicuously less refined, but perfectly neutral in her cocktail dress. She has never seemed so attractive.

They inch in a broad sea of cars, likewise small, likewise inching. On her left in the next taxi, almost as close as the fat woman on her right, Philip. They see each other, lean eagerly toward each other. He tries to open his door, bumping it on hers--both drivers become anxious--but the taxis are too close together. Philip is otherwise alone in his and she is anyway smaller so she squeezes out through the window and partway in through his. Her driver begins a sustained stream of shouting and in a lower tone she keeps fearless pace with him, explaining her motives even as she continues her struggle through the opening, her upper third already with Philip who, obstetrician-like, assists her as best he can. Her fellow passengers add their voices to the chorus, some supportive, some discouraging, and now the cars are rolling. There is no resisting this. When traffic moves it all moves, whether by moral force of horns and shouts or the actual coercion of

bumpers, and as it accelerates the taxis separate slightly, stretching Michaela between them so that she grips Philip's window, he holding her forearms more reassuringly than effectively--what can he do?--shouting at his driver in unacknowledged English, and the fat woman anxiously holding Michaela's ankles, Michaela herself, intimidated by the growing speed, unsure which way she should or can go. Philip tries rather daringly, gripping her wrist with one hand, to open his door so as to pull her in but the dangerous awkwardness of it and a chorus of shouted protest discourage him and besides, a motorcycle is passing between the two taxis. It is the privilege of these that they are not restrained by traffic jams and this one refuses to be so now. The motorcyclist ducks and nudges under her as she inch-worm-style raises her midriff to accommodate first him and then another motorcyclist, likewise adamant. But now they are approaching a division in the road about which decisions have been made kilometers back; there is no question of anyone's changing position. She must act, she must clamber forward and cling as best she can and she does, she actually takes leave of her former taxi just as the pointed median is coming up but the feet she pulls to her are bare, she has left her shoes in the hands of the over-maternal fat lady whose face shows an awe as deep as our own. In a moment of irrational panic conditioned by we know what guilts and hardships she screams "My shoes! My shoes!" and we have now the spectacle of Michaela changing direction, replanting the grip of one hand on the former window, bracing a knee under it, transferring her center of gravity across the now widening situation and entrusting it to the hands reaching out to pull her in. The taxis veer apart, her protruding lower half clamped to the car with a life of its own.

She walks, almost limps along a dark street, disheveled, breathless but still somehow keeping pace with destiny, still sustained by her determination, which has not even become boisterous. Her weariness ennobles her. She stops by a tree, her hand on it, perhaps resting. But no, she embraces it; kisses it. Extreme close-up on her lips: she kisses it tenderly; lasciviously; madly; presses her cheek to it in some access of release; then sinks down sitting by it, still holding it. She weeps freely and at length. We watch her. The camera advances a little, commiserative, respectful.

Sunny day. She enters an open-air cafe under a broad brown canopy, golden light inside, and goes to a table where her husband, Philip's wife and Philip are waiting for her. She sits. Around them all is relaxation and warm-weather voices. A young woman puts her hand behind her head as she chats, stretching open her underarm and roofing her elbow. But at this table, silence. "We'll have to make another arrangement," her husband says. "Another arrangement?" It seems so easy. He indicates Philip's wife. "We'll stand aside." There is a pause. She looks at the other couple. "I think I owe you an apology." "You have to let love happen, as you do death," says her husband, a little too urbane. "How do you feel?" says Philip's wife. "I've got too much on my mind to know how I feel," says Michaela. "No, I'll tell you how I feel--like a child who's been singled out for punishment. Like it's happening to someone else while I look on." "Our marriage is over," says the other wife. "So is Philip's deal with your husband. We've lost everything we came here for." "Deal?" she says. She has been stupid. "Are you saying that you're calling everything off because you think there's something between us? There is nothing between us! Philip, tell them." He hesitates. "Have we ever slept together?" she says, interrogating him. "No," he shrugs. He looks at the others. "We haven't." "No," she says immediately, "we haven't." She stares at them. They are outfaced. "We are two people drawn to one another! I've never heard of anything so provincial!" She looks at her husband. "Do you enjoy being humored?" What can they say?

Early evening. She stands at a public phone. "Are you staying?" "Of course. We have to." "I don't know why I'm doing this." He says nothing. "Why don't you get a younger woman?" "I'm afraid of what they're going to turn into. You're a finished product." "We all turn into something." "If they see us we'll lose it all." "Then let's not." A pause. "Someplace secret," he says. She looks up at one of the mountains that ring the city. He stands on a crest overlooking the city, looking around, at his watch, waiting for her. She walks along a paved path through the woods. It ends at a cliff. She turns back, finds another. It takes her to a busy thoroughfare. She turns away, follows another. We no longer care that the affair be consummated; we care only that she persists. She is ridiculous, and no doubt on the wrong path, but even in the throes of obsession she has a compelling dignity and the sound of her walk is a triumph.

My Husband Suspects Part 1

My Husband Suspects Part 2