That scene in "My Dinner With Andre" About a Sexy Picture, and Looking at Pictures of My Wife When She Was Young.
Last week I wrote how my wife was going through a box of her late mother's pictures, and I found myself remarking on how beautiful she looked in a picture someone took of us at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, just before we married, a picture that somehow ended up in my mother's-in-law collection and wasn't in ours.
My wife finally got around to going through her late Mom's photo albums.
A strange feature of the picture is that in it she actually looks younger than she was at the time; she was in her early twenties but looked like a teenager. By contrast, although I had hair and it was dark, and in the picture relatively long and wild in what may have been a wind, I looked older than I actually was; I was in my early thirties. (Because we looked as if the distance in our ages appeared to be larger than it was - my wife got "proofed" in restaurants and bars into her thirties - I used to get some dirty looks from time to time, as if I were an Epsteinish/Trumpish/Gaetzish sort of pervert.)
Well, in any case, I scanned the picture, and I've looked at it a number of times since doing so over the last week, fascinated by it. As I was doing so this morning, it suddenly struck me, looking at that picture of myself, that the man in the picture, me, didn't at that time know very much at all about the world; I was ignorant, even more arrogant than I am now, kind of smug, and although I was merely formally educated, but largely unacquainted with the deeper reality of the things to which my education merely exposed me.
Then I looked at my wife in the picture, and thought about who she was at the time, the Mona Lisa type smile she had on her face concealing the fact that she'd just emerged from a very unhappy upbringing and was possessed of a deep insecurity, and uncertainly - wisely I think - unsure whether it was actually a good idea to be with me, there and then.
In that beautiful movie My Dinner With Andre there's a scene where Andre Gregory discusses a picture of his wife, Mercedes "Chiquita" Gregory. From the script:
Script, My Dinner With Andre
The first time I went away with my (then future) wife, I took her to what was my favorite place in the universe, to Big Sur. We stayed in this beautiful small cabin in a grove of redwoods, a night I have never forgotten, and about which I often muse. I consider it the best night of my somewhat pathetic life up to that point - although in the years of marriage, many similarly beautiful moments would happily entail over and over again.
In the morning after that night in the cabin, we went on a hike up a small mountain in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, and we came upon a grove of pin oaks, and I took pictures of her up there in that grove.
There is one of those pictures in particular that has thrilled me ever since I took it and developed it almost 40 years ago, because in the picture, my wife has exactly the same expression she was wearing the very first time I saw her, the same pose, her legs stretched out, looking down almost shyly at her feet, detached from the outer world, but seemingly deep in an inner world, a kind of impenetrable look of something that could, should perhaps, be recognized as having an aura of buried pain, a resigned sadness strangely contrasting with a sublime physicality. In the Big Sur picture as opposed to my memory of first seeing her, she is sitting on a low branch of a massive oak the Big Sur grove, naked. I must have called that picture up a thousand times, but today, I find myself asking myself if I ever really saw it, I mean, saw it for real.
Of course, when I saw my wife for the first time, I was just another of the many puerile men possessed of less than noble erotic fantasies about her looks; I had no idea who she actually was. Of course, ultimately I did get to know her, and see her divorced from any kind of vanity, somewhat distressed about the somewhat dangerous situations into which her looks had gotten her although she managed to emerge largely unscathed. (Of course early on in our friendship, she could of suspected me of being another dangerous man of the type, but happily she didn't translate those things into suspicions of me or my intentions, although she might well have done so.)
Away from all that, the attentions of puerile men including me, she was always warm, kind, generous, funny and bright, surprisingly accessible and down to Earth, although the deeper things were kept to herself. I could not help falling in love.
But the point is, that in my admiration for these pictures of her youth, like Andre Gregory confessed in his own case, it's not act of seeing, but definitely an act of not seeing anything at all.
We were younger, better looking then, but frankly and honestly, as life winds down, I prefer who we are now. We hadn't lived at all then. We didn't know anything then. We've lived now. We know something, perhaps not a lot, but something now.
Most importantly, something we know now is what it is to have lived at all. That matters.
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