She then set off in a resolute direction, compelling him along. “We’re having dinner, yes? Let’s skip the bar, though I hear it’s in some chapel straight from Il Gattopardo. If I cannot drink, and alas I cannot, I’ll take pasta, pronto. Pasta with some of that lobster imported to these waters as part of the Marshall Plan. Did you know that this is the only part of the world where the lobsters are as good as you’d get in Maine?” She raised her eyebrows; Nick managed to shake his head. “Sicilian food is unique. You get couscous. North African fishes. And the best of the white wines—if you have doctor’s permission—are molto fabuloso. As for me, no vino means I get to order dessert. Give me tiramisu or semifreddo. The least pretentious sweet they offer at this pop stand.” Her soliloquy flowed seamlessly along as she led him among the tables on a stone terrace, its walls enrobed in pink bougainvillea, its vista one of sun-blazed blue water stretching toward…was it Libya or Greece? Nick had looked at maps before leaving home, but in the compass-tilting glare of Deirdre’s presence—and in her opulently perfumed wake—he hadn’t the faintest notion of his place on any map.
“We are unfashionably early,” she said—obvious from the empty tables, all set but still awaiting diners, “or, if we prefer, we simply don’t give a high hoot what customs everybody else observes.”
He was twelve all over again: weak-kneed, swollen-hearted, speechless in the grip of a confused veneration. This wasn’t the same quietly coiled actress he had met in front of that camera on the opposite side of the world.
Thank God the ma?tre d’ (who finally caught up with them) pointed out a table set for five. Once in their chairs, Deirdre spread her napkin in her lap, leaned over, and said, “One thing. No matter what you hear from these other jokers, do not call me Deedee. I can’t stand it, but the name sticks to me like Bazooka to a shoe. Call me by my proper name and you will not be punished.” Up went her artfully shaped brows; crikey, what did she mean by that?
Before he had time to wonder further, they were joined by two producers and Sam Schull, the director. Nick said very little, concentrating on the food, the view, and the incredulity of his being here, on the terrace of this ancient monastery tastefully tarted out for the rich, in thrall to a bona fide American movie star (her radiance only burnished by her resilience in the wake of bad behavior). He found himself listening reverently as she talked about another town in Sicily, high on a small steep mountain, the site of an ancient temple to Aphrodite.
“The priestesses spent their days doing priestessy things: ablutions, devotions, sacrifices, prayers. But at night they gave shelter to beached sailors from all points around the Mediterranean. And fucked them, of course. But nobly, in service to the ideals of the love-and-beauty goddess. The women who live there today are the most gorgeous women in the world. Part Greek, part Moroccan…Spanish, Egyptian, Mes-o-po-tamian. You’re laughing? Go and see, my friends. No, no, don’t be pigs and look it up on your phones.” She rolled her eyes, and then, to Nick, she said, “You and I should take a little side trip. Seriously. If these slave drivers give us a day off.”
Listening, marveling, eating his swordfish (which tasted intensely of orange and an unexpected spice; cinnamon?), drinking his effervescent wine, he understood that he was there: where all aspiring actors long to arrive. He might have been one of those sailors, having disembarked safely from a rough voyage and climbed that peak to the temple. So here he stood, at the threshold. Deirdre might have been the high priestess herself. Nick could easily see her playing Catherine the Great or Cleopatra. In fact, the more he gazed at her—you could tell she was used to being gazed at, comfortable as the object of attention—the more he saw in her a middle-aged Elizabeth Taylor, seducing with her insolence as much as her beauty. The patina of her aging allure, her very nature, reminded Nick (well, metaphorically!) of oxidizing copper.
When his agent had come to him with the script, Nick had been suspicious that it was little more than art-house melodrama—though when he heard Deirdre’s name, he knew he’d be an idiot to turn it down….Or would he? Perhaps actors with far shinier names than his had said no for the very same reason. (Might she implode again, as everyone knew she had, five years before, on the set of Never, Ever Stop?) In her twenties and thirties, however, she had been aflame with talent, every camera she faced besotted with her hybrid appearance: delicately freckled skin, thick dark hair, and otter-brown eyes. In her prime, a critic had called her “the love child of Max von Sydow and Maria Callas.” Nick’s complexion, if nothing else, made their on-screen kinship plausible.
“Listen,” said Nick’s agent, “think of it as Tennessee Williams hijacking Lost in Translation, with an assist from Bertolucci and a sideways glance from Hitchcock. You’re lucky they’d take a chance on you. But they liked you in that Lonergan play and know you can do spot-on Yank. Just spend an afternoon in some grotty pub with Schull. That’s the way he makes up his mind. Has to know you’re not a wanker or a New Age hippie ascetic. Do not so much as whisper the words yoga or vegan or mindful.”
Nick’s character was Francis Wren, a successful American architect who lives in San Francisco with Conrad, the man he plans to marry; together, they hope to have children, settle in a house with a garden, live a conventionally responsible life—the opposite of the life Francis knew as a boy, raised mostly by nannies at the fiery fringe of his wealthy parents’ marital hell. But this was all backstory, emerging mostly through minimal flashbacks, concise bits of dialogue. The film opens with a journey: Francis setting forth, on three successive flights, to arrive at last in Sicily, the place his mother chose to exile herself after her bitter divorce from his father—the homeland of her parents, where people speak the language into which she was born.
The only present dialogue in the first ten minutes of the film is a series of brief, routine exchanges between Francis and various airline personnel. But each time he glances through an airplane porthole, over the panoply of surrounding clouds or down toward the fugitive landscape, a memory emerges, each a small home movie: of hearing from his younger mother her plans to move abroad, of making love to Conrad for the very first time…of learning, when he tried to ring her on her latest birthday, that his mother’s Italian phone was disconnected.
A son’s quest for his mother, hardly offbeat. But the story line accelerates when, in Taormina, he discovers that she’s been seduced by a much younger man—younger even than Francis—and has sold her small house to live with the handsome scoundrel in a baroque hotel suite, where he keeps her virtually captive while spending her money to live a louche life out on the town. Yet she seems content, benumbed by the easy, coddling life in a grand hotel…possibly even drugged.