11pm Sunday night, off a plane from DC and we’re being driven through the quiet, genteel streets of Toronto to see Lisa. Haven’t seen her since her diagnosis. We’ve seen her interviews, seen the pictures on her blog, but Hanan is still worried I will crack. ‘Don’t stare at her, if she doesn’t look the same,’ she tells me and I smile.
I don’t know how to do anything else. I have spent most of two whole years staring at Lisa. Checking the light against her cheekbones through the viewfinder of a Panavision movie camera. Watching her in rehearsal, getting used to evaluating her on set, learning her mannerisms, noting the way her eyes reflect a genuine emotion found and rendered to make Miriam real in The World Unseen. Understanding which moments are fall backs because she’s tired, or because she temporarily has lost my view of the ephemeral essence of the scene after 12 hours of shooting and the 6th take. Gazing at the features she shares with Tala on a fifteen foot high studio screen, checking colours with clean, clinical concentration. Learning how to communicate with her to refine a performance, explaining without too many words – because, for someone who writes so well, she doesn’t like too many words. The poet in her realised a while ago that words are a poor substitute for what we all yearn and love and desire, but that our humanity always makes us try and shuffle those words into patterns that evoke meaning. And feeling.
So we hug her and kiss her, and lie on the bed and touch hands, arms, whatever, all of us. It’s a visceral need, to feel she is there and solid and with us when we were scared out of our wits by the word ‘cancer’, because there’s a word that can evoke meaning for you, all of it layered with fear and sorrow. And I look at her, closely, for these two days, see the way the steroids have rounded her face, made her blowfish cheeks burn hot like she’s holding coals in her mouth. And her eyes, liquid green and glowing. I watch her laugh and speak, dropping philosophy that stills us from her chapped lips with no effort, and I watch Hanan, my practical, beautiful doer and fixer, who cries silently as she holds Lisa because she can’t fix her. Hanan, who always conceals the flayed, raw emotions of her heart under lists and bluster, but the cover is blown now, and that is hard to watch.
It’s a lot to observe, a lot to absorb, and we spend every minute together, explaining, comparing, deciding but mostly laughing very hard. I cook, desperate to nourish her, marinating chicken, steaming rice, toasting pine nuts, crisping garlic, so much garlic, because garlic cleans the blood, doesn’t it, it’s better than a stem cell transfusion, better than chemo, better than anything else I can do.
So. How was it with Lisa? I can’t tell you more than I’ve told you here – and it was a lot more fun than this blog. It was being with family, and the best kind of family. And I am sorry I did not make you laugh today, my lovely fans. I am sorry I did not make you drop your phone, or snort coffee through your nose, or wake your sleeping girlfriend with your giggles, or make you not care that your bike got stolen. You see, I remember the things you tell me, and I am glad for them. We’ll laugh again in a couple of days, but in the meantime when you ask me how Lisa was, I can tell you that she was rightly once voted on of the most beautiful women of the millennium, and that it had very little to do with how she looks.
Back
Newsletter Signup
