(Bike Race – 2010) Hilde: Eddy and I, we lived together in Belgium for five years and then we moved to Minneapolis for a job. And then we met you. Lance: I, Lance, was living here with my girlfriend, and the three of us started hanging out in bars together. We drank a beer or two or three together. Hilde: For Eddy, you were his best friend, as well. That’s dialogue from my 2010 animated film “Bike Race,” which tells the story of both a playful bicycle race between me and Cis Bierinckx and of my courtship with Hilde de Roover during the late summer of 2002. I waited for seven years after these events to begin making the film. At the time, Hilde had captured audio on the locations of the races with a field recorder. I am Lance, as in Armstrong, in the film and Cis is called Eddy, as in Merckx, the famous Flemish racer from the 1970’s. My girlfriend that I mention was Jenny, whom I’d met at the Arts High School where we were then both teaching. Cis had been hired as the curator of film and video at the Walker Art Center in 2000 and I had met Cis and Hilde shortly after they arrived in Minneapolis because of our shared enthusiasm for hanging out in bars and obsessing over cinema. (Bike Race – 2010) Lance: And Eddy and I started to have a repetitive argument about the best bicyclist in the world. Hilde: Lance Armstrong or Eddy Merckx. Lance: ‘Cause Lance Armstrong equaled the record of the famous Belgian from the 70’s, Eddy Merckx. Hilde: In number, not in heart and bone. Lance: So we adopted their names and Eddy and I were out for a casual bike ride and he started riding faster and I started riding faster and then pretty soon, without knowing it, we were racing. And I said, “Okay, let’s just have a race to decide actually who’s the champion, Eddy or Lance, and we’ll set up routes that are mapped in advance.

In addition to his job as curator of film and video at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Cis programmed for the Rotterdam Film Festival. An animated short of mine had been accepted in the 2002 festival, so Cis, Hilde and I travelled together to the Netherlands that year in late January. We arrived at the main festival building, De Doelen, where Cis was well known, and we were invited immediately to the bar. We drank a De Koninck beer or two and, just as I was excusing myself to go to my hotel room to have a nap, Cis said, “Oh, “The Fast Runner” is showing in ten minutes. This is a beautiful film, my friend.” A few minutes later in a large theater the festival director introduced the movie, the auditorium darkened, and a three-hour story in the Inuit language with Dutch subtitles began. The one phrase that I understood in Dutch at this time was something Hilde had taught me on the plane, “Ik heb een kater” (I have a hangover). (Bike Race – 2010) Hilde: It’s the first race of the Tour de Force. How are you feeling? Lance: The wind is strong and I’m a little concerned about the first leg of the race being directly into the wind, but all in all I feel confident. Hilde: Okay, Eddy? Eddy: You know, the first race is always touching and feeling, as they say. So we touch and feel and I’m sure he will see more my back than my front. Hilde: Okay, the wind in the back. Good luck.

Toward the end of the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival, Hilde and I spent a day alone together while Cis attended to his world cinema program. We both needed a break from watching three films a day and decided to walk through the city. We stopped in what remained of the old town center after the German bombing during World War II, and sat in a café to eat pumpkin soup. Hilde and I had been born a month apart in 1963 and our lives had travelled on remarkably parallel paths. We’d both fallen in love in our early twenties with people who had abandoned us in our early thirties. Hilde had recovered from her disillusionment in Seville, Spain; I described my trip to the Greek Islands and the recovery of my confidence at the peak of Tinos in the second episode of these stories. We admitted that the relationships of our thirties, in reaction to the disappointments of our twenties, were exalted friendships with admirable, smart people, whom we didn’t love romantically. It began to rain and we paused to watch through the window as a dozen umbrellas unfurled simultaneously . . . as in the opening credits of Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”

Through all the choices that didn't get made After everything I thought and did not say Through all the lost and passing, temporary days I ended up sitting at this table with you The usual miracle, this common transformation As we acknowledge the smallness of the afternoon I eat another spoonful of this simple pumpkin soup And watch through the window as the rain begins to fall (refrain) And I go to the point of communication That I have with my heart at the end of the scar I got from reaching for the too-perfect apple And I ask it again what promises have been made I watch your left sock, fallen down around your ankle I take a sip of Leffe and hold it still behind my teeth I feel the sadness, desperation, gentleness and longing Of everyone walking with umbrellas in the street I want to complicate our secret childhood handshake I want to walk outside and feel the unfamiliarity I want to watch the fading light fall across your face As the cloudy sky begins to part above the trees (refrain) And I go to the point of communication That I have with my heart at the end of the scar I got from reaching for the too-perfect apple And I ask it again what promises have been made

Back in Minneapolis after the Rotterdam Festival, Hilde and I began to meet more regularly. Cis often travelled for his work at the Walker Art Center and, when he was out of town, we would call each other to have a drink or see a movie. We watched Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge” together at the Heights Theater in Northeast Minneapolis. The Heights was built in the 1920’s and in the early 2000’s had undergone a restoration of its Beaux Arts interior. An organist played Tin Pan Alley repertoire before the movies and then descended by means of a hydraulic lift into the floor. During this period in the early summer of 2002 an old friend asked me bluntly, “Are you and Hilde having an affair?” Genuinely surprised, I responded, “Are you crazy? She lives with Cis. I live with Jenny. It’s as simple as that. We’re friends and we have fun together.” But his question did suggest a dangerous thought to me, “If I have this much fun with Hilde as a friend, what would it feel like to be involved in a more intimate relationship with her?” (Bike Race – 2010) Lance: Between the third stage and the final stage of the Tour de Force there was a party and, in a way that was typical for Eddy, he encouraged the two of us to dance together. Hilde: We danced and danced and then the two of us were on the floor on our belly, the top of our fingers almost touching each other. Lance: And between our hands was a crack in the concrete, like a barrier. And then your pinky came creeping across the line and touched my pinky. Hilde: With energy and electricity and warmth for me. Lance: Our hands began to get closer and closer to each other and start to touch each other. Hilde: Just the fingertips . . . Lance: Just the fingertips at first and then eventually a whole hand was in a hand and you had an enormous smile on your face. And I just looked in your eyes and I said, “This is actually happening.”

It was on September 27, 2002 that we crossed this line and acknowledged that we were in love with each other. During the final stage of the bike race a few weeks later, ironically in the small town of Ghent, Minnesota, Hilde and I confessed to our partners what had happened and we rode away together in the backseat of a car. (Bike Race – 2010) Lance: We were driving away from Ghent, Minnesota and I was being jostled about in the backseat feeling kind of sick, but I was holding your hand. Hilde: And I looked up at you and I said, “Well, I hope we like each other.” When I was editing the sound for the film “Bike Race” the tone of Hilde’s circumspect, final statement reminded me of the bus scene at the end of “The Graduate.” Dustin Hoffman’s character has willfully disrupted the wedding and fled with the woman he loves: the grand wish-fulfillment fantasy of many movies that had shaped my idea of romantic love as a young man. The two lovers sit in the rear of a bus and the camera dwells on them for longer than is comfortable. Both the characters and the audience are given time to consider “Now what?” Reputedly, Mike Nichols didn’t rehearse the actors for that shot. He started the take and simply didn’t call ‘cut.’ The discomfort that Nichols elicited from Hoffman and Katherine Ross is authentic. The uncertainty of the future emerges, the knowledge that after every action, no matter how thrilling, a mundane ordinariness inevitably ensues.

Woke up this morning With a weight upon my arm Realized with surprise that it was you Sometimes I am alive I am a lucky one You are a lucky one too (refrain) I will fail to live up to your expectations I will take the time to disappoint you I will be reduced to something merely human I will walk around this boring life with you Houses are shuttered against last night's rain Against paper hats that are shifting on cobblestone Dust leaf and brick, train station timetables These shuttered houses have passed from our story (refrain) I will fail to live up to your expectations I will take the time to disappoint you I will be reduced to something merely human I will walk around this boring life with you (bridge) Perhaps this is a world to grow wise in As I had once believed that it would be

(Bike Race -2010) Lance: We are feeling . . . Hilde: . . . very much in love and because we couldn’t see each other, like, every day Lance: You found a tree . . . Hilde: . . . which was hollow and we could leave little notes in that tree. The fundamental level of acting and storytelling in an animated film occurs for me with a pencil, drawing in response to an edited audio track. When I started blocking out the character performances with gesture drawings, it was surprisingly easy to conceive of my own life as a movie. The thematic relationships in “Bike Race” felt as if they followed a premeditated literary structure: the mock-nationalistic arguments in bars about Eddy Merckx and Lance Armstrong evolving into a low-stakes, male, playground competitiveness, which in turn reflects upon the developing “Jules and Jim” love triangle. It was as if the life that was the basis of the documentary film had itself been written. In self-consciously performing the theatrical melodrama of the race, Cis, Hilde and I were unconsciously playing out our fatalistic destinies. (Bike Race -2010) Eddy: When we turned, I think, we looked both to each other. We were both so surprised because it was just a wall of wind that hit us. In the first episode of this story, I described Sayer writing the script for the end of our marriage; that was clearly an act of semi-conscious will, of creative work as wish fulfillment. After playing my role as actor in Sayer’s script, I had apparently learned the lesson that it’s better to be the author of one’s own story. In 2019, Sayer’s script now appears to me to be the first act of the documentary film which Hilde and I have been continuing to make over the last 17 years. I presently maintain the belief that my partnership with Hilde was always fated to be, that we arrived at the crossroads toward which our individual paths and histories had been inevitably leading us. But is my awareness of an underlying order in these events entirely an imposition of my own desire for meaning, seeing images in the shifting clouds that help me rationalize my behavior after the fact? This trilogy of film-obsessed love stories is now complete and fixed, a reflection pulled from the flow of time; at least until I revise the storytelling again in some other form twenty-five years in the future.

This little room how well I know it Now they’ve rented it and the one next door The whole building has been swallowed up by offices How familiar it is, this little room (Refrain) Somewhere all this old furniture Must still be knocking around Once here, by the door, stood a sofa And before it, a little rug exactly here There’s the table where I always used to sit and draw How many years, by the window in the sun? (Bridge) And now I learn the language of the place Where as a girl of two you wore your sunday dress Against the North Sea, standing with your brother And a bucket in your small right hand In the corner we had a small bed In the afternoon the sun would climb upon it We parted, four o’clock, just for a week On such an afternoon, who would have thought That seven days could last forever (Refrain) Somewhere all this old furniture Must still be knocking around