In the lobby we hugged hello and continued casually, uneventfully, catching up. Speaking online for that many years had, I guess, doused all initial nerves. We talked about movies, basketball, how indiscriminately hot the desert is, and how happy we were for our friend who was getting married. I must have talked about palm trees—I can’t help it when I’m in proximity to them. Palm trees pipe my sense of awe into its purest form. Puppies asleep on their sides, lattice piecrusts, and women in perfectly tailored pantsuits generate a similar response. So does young Al Pacino.
His “sad, lustrous, and doglike eyes,” Lynne Tillman wrote in her 1992 Sight and Sound essay, “Kiss of Death,” describing his performance as “Mikey” Corleone before he transforms into Michael Corleone, when he can still promise Diane Keaton, “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” Those young Pacino eyes capsize me. His battery of protean gestures is absorbing. Young Al Pacino makes me giddy. I sink into my chair. I experience the full-blown, bodily preoccupation of having a crush. Watching him is like discovering a long-lost audition tape, because his delivery, then, was intimate, kept, mild. I cover my face. I even once, not long ago, ducked under my desk while watching a scene from The Panic in Needle Park, before Bobby and Helen—played with disconsolate, plain beauty by Kitty Winn—spiral downward together and before Helen is using, when they’re just getting to know each other, actually. Because in this scene, Bobby is eating lunch with Helen, and he’s smiling between sips from his can of Coke, and, well, who am I to survive that smile? The curl of his bottom lip is uncommonly expressive. The stillness of his voltage seduces. He tells Helen, “Don’t just go around leaving people for no reason.” The first time I saw The Panic was the first time I’d heard that sentiment expressed gently. Young Pacino is perfect as a small-time dealer whose speech is fleecy and whose walk is bright. He bounces like he just landed a backflip, like he might be attempting another one, like he doesn’t know how to backflip at all but gets you thinking he can. Playing stickball and claiming he was once the “Babe Ruth of West Eighty-first Street,” or lifting a TV from a van and impishly trying to pawn it off for more money than it’s worth; or the way cigarettes and lollipops dangle from his mouth the same—all of these gestures, blink-moves, and hijinks reduce me to a ridiculous woman. Watching him in Scarecrow, grinning while he towel dries his hair, listening to Gene Hackman tell a story, I float into a state of feeling like my insides are sinking but my body is pirouetting ever so lightly, like a stray feather in no rush to touch down. The last time we ever see him so young is in the second Godfather when Fredo is ordering a banana daiquiri in Havana. Pacino, in those seconds, lets slip a smile only John Cazale could have drawn from him. I could go on. It wouldn’t be hard. Young Al Pacino unsteadies me. Like young Al Pacino might say, terrifically.
But anyway. Palm trees. Palm Springs. The wedding. My online friend. For whatever reason, at the dinner and then the next day at the ceremony, and then following that, at the reception, I didn’t spend much time with this friend I’d only known, up until now, through our emails. I was distracted. I was reunited with friends from college and dancing in gold sandals I rarely wear, and watching generations of one family dance together. How knees bending at funny angles and sweat mapping the same regions of a shirt are just as heritable as curly hair or a dry sense of humor.
At sunset, the San Jacinto Mountains turned pink-green shades of lithic tourmaline. It caught me off guard. Their likeness to rear-projection was an embarrassing reminder that I’ve limited my sense of panorama to city skylines. A city’s horizon appears more spatial, believable, and substantive than do mountain ranges. I am mountain illiterate even though mountains are—like nature’s narrative-build in general—the most legible telling of the story of time.
As the evening progressed, and as the venue’s sequined strings of twinkle lights began blurring with purple bougainvillea vines, and as I was circuiting between the bar and other guests’ untouched plates of cake, I knew it was soon time for bed. First, the hotel pool and then bed. It was a beautiful night.
A couple weeks after the wedding, the friend who’d shared the cab with us from the hotel to the rehearsal dinner texted me that my online friend had too started emailing with her. He told her it was nice to have finally met me but added, though I can’t understand why, this next bit: he confessed to her that he was surprised by how high-pitched my voice was in person. When she told me what he’d said, I thought, huh. It seemed like the sort of pointless thing one says when trying to make a point without properly making it.
It’s true. My voice is—I’ve been told on numerous occasions—unlikely. Childlike, almost. Not seductive. Informal. My voice is the voice of one’s own voice when recorded. How it makes us cringe when we hear it. The pitch: elevated. Prohibitively hesitant at times—hooking declarative sentences into questions. I sound hasty. Unthinking. Like I have a wide frame of reference, of which I’ve fallen under the influence, but also of which I haven’t considered with more depth, patience, time. I sound like the next-door neighbor in a situation comedy who always drops by uninvited. I sound like I’m wearing a backpack.
The older I get, the more my voice seems to disagree with what people perceive of me. Maybe they imagine a more serious tone. Modulated to reflect control. Or starched and matter-of-fact, like I’m reading aloud the instructions for assembling a bookshelf or slow-cooking beef stew. Or maybe people imagine that my voice would be silvery and pleasant. Maybe because in my own writing, descriptions of fruit, of women, of the changing light indoors play determining parts. As does vague melancholia, and the blow of failing to communicate. Perhaps every writer’s long con is how openly she might write about joy, yet flops when experiencing it openly in her life.
While my voice doesn’t bother me, how its inflection surprises people does. There are worse assumptions to be made, certainly. And yet, this one grates.
Still, I’ve wondered: Should I try to change my pitch? Should I try to sound more staid? I recently asked my father this question as we both stood in the kitchen, loitering in the quiet that follows a meal. He’d overheard me earlier in the day on a work call with one of my editors, during which I too had heard myself. There was, unfortunately, an echo I couldn’t eliminate no matter how many times I tried dialing her again. I heard myself speak the entire call.
As my father and I stood in the kitchen, I asked him, unseriously, “How can I change my voice?”
Wiping the counter with a sponge, he thought for a moment. Then he looked up at me, smiling. “You know how to do it?”
“How?”