She spoke fantastically fast, words and key phrases expertly compressed into coded format, the accidents, road repairs, bridges and tunnels, the delays measured in geologic time. The BQE, the FDR, always the biblical Cross Bronx, ten thousand drivers with deadened eyes waiting for the gates to open, the seas to part.
He watched her approach now, slantwise, her body language of determined inquiry, head flopped left, eyes advancing through levels of scrutiny. She stopped at a distance of five feet.
“Did you get a haircut?”
He sat thinking, then reached back to run his thumb over the back of his neck. A haircut was a hurried few moments in a well-scheduled day, submitted to in order to be forgotten.
“I think so, absolutely.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Maybe three days ago.”
She took a step to the side, approaching once again.
“What’s wrong with me? I’m just now noticing,” she said. “What did he do to you?”
“Who?”
“The barber.”
“I don’t know. What did he do to me?”
“He emasculated your sideburns,” she said.
She touched the side of his head, honoring the memory, it seemed, of what had been there, her hand still wet from the cereal bowl. Then she danced away, into a jacket and out the door. This is what they did, they came and went. She had to hurry to the studio, in midtown, and he had a movie to get to, ten-forty a.m., walking distance from here, and then another movie somewhere else, and somewhere else after that, and then one more time before his day was done.
It was a dense white summer day and there were men in orange vests jackhammering along the middle of the broad street, with concrete barriers rimming the raw crevice and every moving thing on either side taking defensive measures, taxis in stop-and-start pattern and pedestrians sprinting across the street in stages, in tactical bursts, cell phones welded to their heads.
He walked west, beginning to feel the flesh in his step, the width of chest and hips. He’d always been big, slow and strong and he was bigger and slower now, all those fistfuls of saturated fat that he pushed into his face, irresistibly, sitting slumped over the counter in diners or standing alongside food carts. He didn’t eat meals, he grabbed meals, he grabbed a bite and paid and fled, and the aftertaste of whatever he absorbed lingered for hours somewhere in the lower tracts.
This was his father eating, the aging son assuming the father’s spacious frame, if nothing else.
He turned north on Sixth Avenue, knowing that the theater would be near empty, three or four solitary souls. Moviegoers were souls when there were only a few of them. This was almost always the case late morning or early afternoon. They would remain solitary even as they left the theater, not exchanging a word or glance, unlike souls in the course of other kinds of witness, a remote accident or threat of nature.
He paid at the booth, got his ticket, gave it to the man in the lobby and went directly to the catacomb toilets. A few minutes later he took his seat in the small theater and waited for the feature to begin. Wait now, hurry later, these were the rules of the day. Days were all the same, movies were not.
His name was Leo Zhelezniak. It took half a lifetime before he began to fit into the name. Did he think there was a resonance in the name, or a foreignness, a history, that he could never earn? Other people lived in their names. He used to wonder whether the name itself made any difference. Maybe he would feel this separation no matter what name he carried on the plastic cards in his wallet.
He had the row to himself, seated dead center as the house went dark. Whatever moons of disquiet and melancholy hovered over his experience, recent or distant, this was the place where it might all evaporate.
Flory had ideas about his vocation. In those early years, between acting jobs, voice-overs, sales fairs and dogwalking, she occasionally joined him, three movies some days, even four, the novelty of it, the sort of inspired lunacy. A film can be undermined by the person you’re seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot. They both knew this. They also knew that she would do nothing to compromise the integrity of his endeavor — no whispers, nudges, bags of popcorn. But she did not overplay her sense of careful forethought. She was not a trite person. She understood that he was not turning a routine diversion into some hellish obsession.
What, then, was he doing?
She advanced theories. He was an ascetic, she said. This was one theory. She found something saintly and crazed in his undertaking, an element of self-denial, an element of penance. Sit in the dark, revere the images. Were his parents Catholic? Did his grandparents go to mass every day, before first light, in some village in the Carpathian Mountains, repeating the words of a priest with a long white beard and golden cloak? Where were the Carpathian Mountains? She spoke late at night, usually in bed, bodies at rest, and he liked listening to these ideas. They were impeccable fictions, with no attempt on her part to get his rendering of what might be the case. Maybe she knew it would have to be dredged out of his pores, a fever in the skin rather than a product of conscious mind.
Or he was a man escaping his past. He needed to dream away a grim memory of childhood, some misadventure of adolescence. Movies are waking dreams — daydreams, she said, protection against the recoil of that early curse, that bane. She seemed to be speaking lines from the misbegotten revival of a once-loved play. The tender sound of her voice, the make-believe she was able to unfurl, sometimes distracted Leo, who’d feel an erection beginning to hum beneath the sheets.
Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?
He thought about this.
He could stay home and watch TV, movie after movie, on cable, three hundred channels, she said, deep into the night. He wouldn’t have to get from theater to theater, subways, buses, worry, rush, and he’d be far more comfortable, he’d save himself money, he’d eat half-decent meals.
He thought about this. It was obvious, wasn’t it, that there were simpler alternatives. Every alternative was simpler. A job was simpler. Dying was simpler. But he understood that her question was philosophical, not practical. She was probing his deeper recesses. Being at the movies to be at the movies. He thought about this. He owed her the gesture.
The woman entered as the feature began. He hadn’t seen her in a while and was surprised to realize, only now, that he’d noted her absence. She was a recent enlistee — is that the word? He wasn’t sure when she’d started showing up. She seemed awkward, slightly angular, and she was far younger than the others. There were others, the floating group of four or five people who made the circuit every day, each keeping to his or her rigid schedule, crisscrossing the city, theater to theater, mornings, nights, weekends, years.
Leo did not count himself part of the group. He did not speak to the others, ever, not a word, not a look directed their way. He saw them nonetheless, now and then, here and there, one or the other. They were vague shapes with pasty faces, planted among the lobby posters in their weary clothing, restless bearing, their postoperative posture.
He tried not to care that there were others. But how could it fail to disturb him? The sightings were unavoidable, one person at the Quad, another the next day at the Sunshine, two of them at Empire 25 in the vast rotunda or on the long steep narrow escalator that seems to lead to some high-rise form of hell.