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“I Don’t Know.”
Smile
’s drama was real, not a fabrication. Heard over and over, those chants and ostinatos came to mimic the obsessive ruminations of a confused, broken man. It was music worth obsessing about: “Heroes and Villains,” “Surf ’s Up,” “Child Is Father of the Man.” The most beautiful music ever.
    To Allison, it sounded like noise. “Something else, please,” she called across the room.
    Heath turned off the music. “What do you want to hear?”
    Focused on her task, she spooned three dark heaps of ground coffee into the basket filter of Heath’s never-before-washed coffeemaker. “Actually, nothing right now. I’m still thinking about that movie.” Starting the coffee, she pulled up a stool and sat down. Her feet were dirty from picking up dust and bits of uncooked rice from the floor. “I wonder why they don’t make movies like that anymore. I mean, it’s just
porn.
What’s the big deal?”
    â€œIt’s not porn, Allison.” He moved in on her; this was a subject that he took
very
seriously, and his unshaven face—which Allison had once likened to a banana, an image she hadn’t been able to shake since—regarded her with pity and concern. “Porn is its own thing. I’m not interested in porn. I’m interested in transgressive cinema.”
    She smiled at him. “No, I know you are, honey.” Her eyes went dreamy as she appraised his body; his long, dyed-blond hair, black at the roots; the impressive musculature he’d built up from years of lugging camera equipment around and that now seemed wrong for his personality. She’d never dated a boy like Heath before. Two, maybe three nights a week, she stayed with him in East Providence, their dates consisting mostly of takeout pizza, one or two rounds of lovemaking (at twenty-one, Allison’s sexual proclivities were still rooted in adolescence: candlewax and flavored condoms) interspersed with late-night screenings of
Zabriskie Point, I Am Curious (Yellow), I Am Curious (Blue), Salon Kitty, The Naked Ape, Last House on Dead End
Street, Guyana: Cult of the Damned,
any number of Umberto Lenzi films,
Jungle Holocaust, Farewell Uncle Tom,
the uncut
Lolita,
the uncut
Caligula,
the European-only version of
Salo or
the 120 Days of Sodom,
all preselected from his ever-growing library of rare and imported videos, DVDs, and even 16mm, which he showed against a baby-blue bedspread hung over the wall. For her part, Allison did her best not to draw any conclusions about her boyfriend’s sanity based on his cinematic preferences: banned films, films involving rape and torture and child molestation, films at the very least rated NC-17 but generally not rated all. She was beyond drawing conclusions about anything. Besides, she didn’t want to look like a wimp.
    Ever since college—as expected, she’d graduated with honors in Comparative Literature, with a minor in Postfeminist Theory—she’d been crafting a new persona for herself. Though she still kept in touch with her former housemates, she now considered almost everything about the Ivy League experience distasteful. During those four years at Harvard, she’d gotten laid exactly once and not since her first semester. The drugs were good on campus, and easy to find, but the only place she liked to get high was the aquarium—
check out the fishes, whoa
—and the only clubs in town usually played too much eighties retro for her taste. Freed from the bonds of academia, she wanted to explore life a little, maybe get arrested, try heroin once, have a “lesbian experience,” read James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, wear slinky black dresses instead of sweaters and jeans, high-heeled sandals instead of shapeless brown loafers, Poison instead of patchouli.
    When she’d first met Heath back in June—the Wild Colonial wasn’t his usual hangout,