The Silent Movie in the Sky
an excerpt

Lisa Malouf was the diminutive maid who took my picture with Anna Ross on the balcony overlooking the ocean. She was born in 1928 in Los Angeles. She was tiny then, too, and she got picked on and made fun of in school because of it. She had to develop a thick skin and a fierce demeanor to survive, and soon she found herself dishing out the majority of the insults in her class. Lisa was a pangifted teenager, adept at clarinet, enamored of books and writing, fluent in French, and a wonderful cook. She knew herself to be destined for success, at some unique job tailored to perfectly fit her abilities and interests like a glove: maybe as a caretaker and chef for an ailing French playwright, or a concert clarinetist in Quebec with a noveling profession on the side. Having grown up the smartest and most gifted in her class, Lisa’s assumption was that one of these situations would naturally form itself around her, in recognition of the praise heaped upon her by her teachers in seventh grade. The harsh reality of the world was like a slap in the face for Lisa, and she refused to acknowledge much of it. She regarded her maid work as a gateway job, a way to get close to the sort of people that she wanted to be¬– the kind of people, that is, who had maids, who could afford them and who wanted them. Lisa herself would never have a maid. She would never have any kind of servant, and she would never write a novel or play the clarinet for anything other than her own enjoyment. She would cook, though, every day, for forty-three years and two months. But her husband, George Wilder, only liked pork chops and steak. She made some French food once, and he froze in his tracks when he entered the dining room as if there’d been a Bengal tiger crouched on the table.
“Hello, dear. What’s this?” he said.
“It’s something new,” said Lisa Wilder, which was her name now. “It’s French.”
George sat down and tried some. He did not grimace.
“What do you think?” she said. She knew, and it pained her, but she had to hear it.
“It’s pretty buttery,” he said. “I’m sorry, it looks very professional, but it’s pretty buttery. It really looks great, though. Just like a cookbook.”
“It’s French,” she said, “from France”
“Well, you know me, Lisa,” he said, “I love you, but I’m a pretty American guy.”
Lisa took a bite of her food. It was delicious.
To George’s credit, he finished everything on his plate, and went for seconds. He felt bad, and he was afraid that he had hurt Lisa’s feelings. Do not misunderstand George Wilder. He was not an inconsiderate man. He was just a boring man, with boring tastes, who loved his wife and hated his job and wanted nothing more at the end of the day but to eat a dinner of steak or pork chops with his tiny beautiful Lisa and then crawl into bed with her and sleep.
Lisa knew this, and she loved George too, despite his clumsy ways. But she never made French food again. She never really gave up thinking that greatness, somehow, would steal into the house at night and surround her like a mantle, for all of her accomplishments and for all that she had suffered. For her high marks in grade school, for her fluency in French, for her impeccable service to Anna Ross, and for her undying loyalty to her dim and well-meaning husband for forty-three years. The world would have to reward her someday, and say, “Congratulations, Lisa, for you have been a good student and a good wife, and we reveal to you now that the world has appreciated and loved you from the very start. We have always been on your side”.
I talked with her in 1958 in the house that she moved into when she married George. George had lived there since he was a child. She spoke to me about her favorite books, and she spoke to me in French, and she played the clarinet for me. She is a wonderful clarinet player. And at one point in our interview she said this to me: “I read every night, Spencer, and my head is so full of ideas that I need to discuss them with somebody. So at night I have imaginary debates in my head, and I make up characters with opposing arguments. I can do it for hours. It’s how I get to sleep.”
Lisa Malouf Wilder is, in my opinion, the finest person in this story, and it is to her that I dedicate it.