. . . I head off to see Capote in the afternoon, the last place it’s still showing on the big screen, way out at the mall in the sticks. I get there a little early and wander around. I buy a present for a friend. I sit and watch the long line of kids waiting to spin an Easter wheel and get a little basket of crap. I go in to the cinema, behind an elderly couple, her barking at him and him limping along slowly. I notice that he’s sensed me behind him, and is trying to step up the pace. So I stop and turn back for a box of candy I don’t want. Then I sit down front, 25% of the way back from the screen, my preferred percentage of distance. I put my feet up, and as always feel a little spark of gratitude at being small, so I can curl up in a thimble if I have to, and at movies my legs can stretch full out and just reach the tops of the seats in front of me, a foot in the notch to either side. Splayed out and comfy, nobody there to bug me and tell me that people aren’t supposed to sit this way. The movie starts up, and it’s one of the most riveting things I’ve seen in eons. I put my legs down, and lean forward, rest my chin on my forearms, concentrating on it. There is one moment in particular, when the camera is on his face, then on the prisoner’s, then back to his, then to a slow-wider shot of the prisoner as he’s walking, then back to his face again as he is watching the whole of the man. There is no dialogue, but what he is seeing is the prisoner’s jeans cuffed on black boots, if you pay attention and watch the angle of the camera through his eyes. On his face, it falls so very slightly, that he thinks (with aching pity) the 1950’s word: “homo”. Then. What follows is a mutual and amorphous seduction, each of the other’s spirit, full of kindnesses and betrayals so slight they melt in the mouth. Just when you think, when Capote himself thinks, that it is clear which one is growing on which, you’re wrong, he’s wrong, and it unsettles and begins again. Not one single look on his face is repeated or wasted. It's fantastic, and devastating.

I walk out into the sunlight focusing on the effort to remember it all, to repeat it in my head and carve it there. I stop and look at a man waiting for a bus at the stop just outside the doors. I’m not really looking at him, I’m thinking and he’s just there. He’s smoking. Everyone in the film chain-smoked, and now suddenly there is the smell of it. He pops the cigarette into his mouth to free his hands, then gets out the pack and taps one out for me, holds it out in the air between us. I take it and say, I don’t smoke. You looked like you needed one. Did I? Yes, he says, not smiling. I ask, Do you know what bereft means? Can’t say as I do, he says.

Nancy Sinatra – Bang Bang