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When Lucky was presumed dead, a devastated Laura broke down in her son's room.
Later, Luke arrived, and, in the frustration of grief, threw Lucky's things out
of the window, insisting that he would take them to the dump. Laura protested,
holding on to one cherished item, and posters on the newsgroup protested, saying
that Luke was cold, cruel, or, at the very least, making no sense. The reaction
made sense to us, born as it was out of sorrow and anger, but we also agreed that
it indicated a distinct difference between Luke and Laura regarding the ways they
related to mementos--to stuff. We've written on Laura's photographs, on her house
both before and after the redecoration; we've waxed philosophical on Luke's traveling
light v. Laura's settling down. And we were right, for the most part: Luke and
Laura have different relationships to souvenirs of the past. But if we ever argued
that Luke didn't keep "stuff," that he moved on while Laura held on,
we were wrong. Something about our argument didn't completely gel for me when
we made it, but only recently have I figured out what was bothering me. It's not
that Laura keeps things and Luke does not, but that they keep different things,
in different ways.
We have always known that Laura keeps memories of her family out in the open,
primarily in the form of photographs. Though the redesigned Spencer house has
fewer photos, they're still there to be seen, and have figured in several moving
and important Spencer scenes over the years. Laura's mementoes are on display,
their meaning clear to anybody who walks into the room. She can't throw away her
wedding ring; she puts it in a drawer. She doesn't want to dispose of all of her
presumably dead son's worldly goods, she wants them where she can touch them,
see them, know they are nearby when Lucky is not. And because she has been the
one to keep the Spencer household, as long as Luke lived there he had these same
things around. There was the sense, perhaps, that they were Laura's things, even
though they were shared, or that he wouldn't have had the same things around him
were she not there. But until Luke moved out on his own into the apartment above
the club, we had not seen him live by himself since the early 80s, a time dominated
by rat hole apartments and very few worldly possessions.
Luke's office should have been enough of a clue that Luke keeps things. His
desk, walls, shelves, filing cabinets are filled with all manner of stuff. But
as much time as I have spent pondering that office, I fell neatly into the trap
Luke has set. The stuff with which he surrounds himself there seems alternately
silly, useless, and insanely practical. The things Luke keeps versus the things
Laura keeps seem, at first, to say that Luke doesn't keep things for sentimental
reasons, only for use in his next convoluted plan. The photos on the desk are
the exception in his wacky world of kitsch and clutter.
Luke's new apartment, however, holds the Rosetta stone--if one can find it
amidst the strands of Christmas lights, the mountains of albums, and the archaeological
dig he calls his coffee table. The albums themselves are sentimental, as we have
seen in scenes with Felicia, but in a sequence in mid-June, we witnessed Luke
sorting through the mess to bring out pieces of junk that are not junk at all,
but mementoes never destined to be part of any homey décor. A key chain
from an Irish pub, photos (not framed or neatly stored in an album, but loose
in a drawer) of past business ventures, an arrowhead from Texas--all things that
Luke has kept over the years, all things that hold special meaning for him and
for Laura.
And there's the difference. It's not that Laura keeps things and Luke doesn't.
It's that Luke keeps things that make sense only to him--and to Laura. It's that
Luke keeps things stuffed in desk drawers and tossed on cluttered shelves. He
convinces you that there is no system, that the piles of stuff you see around
you are worthless, a sign of a man who has never claimed to be domestic in any
way, who has neither the time or the energy to clean, who believes that everything
will come in handy somewhere down the road. It is his way, as always, to put people
off, to keep them at a distance, and even when they get close to offer them an
appearance that belies the reality beneath. Even Laura was surprised that he had
kept all of these things. I suppose that's testament enough to Luke's skill at
deflection, and excuse enough that it took us this long to figure out what he
was up to.
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