Meeting Nicole Kidman

He will meet her in the reception line. There will have been earlier opportunities but he’ll have missed them. There especially would have been an opportunity for a quick introduction before the film began had he been available but with lingering weakness from the recent flu, and the special honor this year of having the festival named after him, so that he too is a star of the occasion (in his own less glamorous way, as befits a professor emeritus), he will have his wife drive him to the university auditorium only moments before the film starts, letting him join the audience anonymously as people are taking their seats and saving his own dramatic introduction for later in the evening during the awards ceremony. Sandwiched between the film and the dinner, at the insistence of the student group that has done most of the festival’s grunt work, there will be a reception line at which Miss Kidman can be greeted and touched by her many adoring student fans, and it is then when he finally will meet her.

Of course, he will wait at the end of the line, the last to approach her, which suits both his position and his age. He will look her straight in the eye, eyes (he has been told) that can thrust directly to a person’s soul, eyes that have been his most attractive physical asset for as long as he can remember, as long as women have told him about such things, yes, he will look into the eyes of Miss Kidman and tell her in a voice low enough to be private:


“Miss Kidman, without question you are the most accomplished actor of your generation. The nuances of character you find in your many and varied roles continue to amaze and impress me, and for ever more I cannot think of Virginia Woolf without seeing your very face, false nose and all, as the icon of her genius. You are a great treasure not only for film lovers but for the entire world.”

As he speaks he will have taken her hand, his right grasping her right, a gentle handshake, but then his left hand will reach forward as he turns her hand horizontally so his own can spread over her small hand like a blanket, and he will have enclosed her hand in both of his, handshake becoming embrace, and he will release her only after he has finished praising her, all the while looking deeply into her eyes, locked on her very soul. It will be a moment he will remember for the rest of his life.

And that will be about it.

But wait. There appears to be more.

After the reception line everyone walks across campus to the dining hall for a sit-down dinner, after which the various awards are made that always highlight the annual student film festival, and this year there is the special achievement award to Nicole Kidman and also a special honor to the professor emeritus, which includes renaming the festival after him for all its future incarnations. And this is when Nicole Kidman will take notice of him.

Clearly she is unable to get him out of her mind, those powerful eyes of his having done their work, and she will go out of her way to corner him at the reception that ends the evening to congratulate him on his honor and ask about his work, though of course he is too modest to say much of anything about his professional life, which seems so long ago at any rate, and Miss Kidman will look into his eyes with an intensity just short of his own, and he will feel the shiver of a special bonding taking place between them, which will cut his breath short, and it will be all he can do to find his wife in the noisy, mingling crowd, she the social butterfly of the family, and he will beg her to get him out of there and home before he passes out from the sheer wonder of the evening and causes a scene.

Then, finally alone in bed while his wife stays up to see the weather report on the late night news (the third time she has watched the weather report today), he will slip into slumber while thinking of Miss Kidman. And this at last will be the end of it. Or should be.

But a miracle happens.

Not quite a year later, Miss Kidman is on location less than a hundred miles away and during a free day she gets a chauffeur to drive her to campus. She is looking for him. What an extraordinary development! Miss Kidman hasn’t forgotten him. It must be his eyes. She has come to campus to ask him to lunch and to invite him to watch her work on location tomorrow.

Of course, he seldom uses his office on campus any more, even though the university retains it for him. She is given directions to his home on the hill behind campus, a location that permits the professor emeritus to look down from his deck upon the terrain of his former pedagogical and intellectual fame.

She climbs the steps to the front porch alone, her chauffeur waiting with the vehicle at the curb. She rings the doorbell. She knocks.

As it happens, he is alone in the house. His wife, in fact, is out of town, burying her mother, who did not last in the nursing home till her hundredth birthday after all. He is alone and hears the bell and ignores it, figuring someone wants to sell him something. But the gentle knock suggests someone with a different motive. He begins a slow cross over hardwood floors to the entrance.

He opens the door. Miss Kidman is astonishingly shy and astonishingly beautiful. Also astonishingly attracted to him. Such attraction is new to her, so much sexual energy directed at a man old enough to be her father. Or even her grandfather.

He, of course, is astounded to see her. But he immediately regards her in a context even more charged than their first meeting, regarding her more personally, more intimately, because it is obvious she is there only to see him, no other motive for her appearance on his front porch making sense, which means she cannot keep herself away from him, a conclusion reinforced by the thin film of tears forming over her eyes. And his own welling eyes lock with hers with enough intensity to tilt the galaxy.

No words get exchanged between them. The moment is too radiant with sexual energy for words. He hasn’t felt anything like this for longer than he can remember. He feels half a century younger. If he had the strength and stamina of his younger self, he would lift her in his arms at this very moment and carry her off like a bride to the guest bedroom. As it turns out, he suddenly feels light-headed, and it’s all he can do to stumble to his walking cane, which leans like a shotgun in the corner behind the door, all he can do to grasp it to steady himself before he faints.

Miss Kidman understands the situation completely. She quickly takes control. She lets him lean against her, bearing his weight with her incredible body, and her breath is warm and wet when she whispers in his ear, asking directions to the bedroom. As she guides him down the hallway, he feels stirrings in parts of his anatomy long dismissed, long in slumber, and he leans comfortably against Miss Kidman knowing the situation now is entirely in her capable hands, which is a good thing, she could be the nurse who more than anyone knows what he needs, what is ailing him, what medicine will cure the ailment. Miss Kidman plays this role with all the nuances of character she has brought to every theatrical challenge of her career, the most accomplished actor of her generation, who clearly must be in love with the professor emeritus and who is leading him to intimate places that will be profoundly wondrous to them both, into experiences that will redefine what it means to be human, nothing less than this, certainly nothing less.

A large dark silhouette appears on the shower curtain. Is it Miss Kidman whose voice he hears, “I have never met a man who really gets me, who can see straight through me to the very essence of my soul, the way you can. Even Tom couldn’t.”

But no, the voice is too dissonant for Miss Kidman’s, too hoarse, too weathered, sounding too much like a distant fog horn belching over the waves in an effort to save lost ships from crashing against rocks that wait like mines under the raging sea. It is, in fact, the voice of his wife.

“Are you all right in there? You’re going to shrivel up into a prune. You don’t want to be late, Henry, not tonight of all nights. This is your special moment, dear. And to think we get to meet Nicole Kidman!”

Charles Deemer, 2004