“The play’s the thing.”
“Yeah. Hah. Want to see the stats?”
“Later.”
“I wanted to ask you about an idea for kiddies’ matinees on Saturday mornings and school holidays. I hate a dark theater.”
“Later, Lockwire. It’s show time. I’m going to look around.”
“You want to see a picture? I’ve got some calls to make. You want to see a picture? The Longest Yard. Terrific. The Gambler, good but too sophisticated, you know? I was a little disappointed. I thought it would do better than it has. I bought it for two weeks with a third-week option, but I don’t think I’ll pick it up. But if you want to see a picture—”
“I just want to look around.”
“The place is clean as a whistle, Ben. This crew is terrific. Your shoes don’t stick to the floor. We Scotchgard the seats once a month. They’re as good as the day we opened. Farts bounce off them. The image is bright, the sound is excellent.”
“Who am I, the Inspector General? I’m a mingler, I mingle. Make your calls. I just wanted to look at the auditorium. I’m absolutely all business. I want to get a sense. I think in the dark.”
“In the dark?”
“You didn’t know that? Oh yes. Go, go to your office. I’ll think in the dark and get a sense and be back to you in half an hour.”
Who thinks in the dark? The blind? I enter my movie’s auditorium.
The houselights are still up. I take a seat, change it, change a third time. The crowd is a good one, but no sellout. Here and there the seats are empty, the auditorium like an incomplete crossword, the vacant seats like dark squares on a puzzle, five down and three across like a roomful of L’s of the absent. There is music, sourceless, anonymous, background, standards flattened to international Palm Court arrangements, the ticky ticky of the snares and cymbals vaguely Latin, all percussion’s cushioned bumpy paradiddle, the roof-garden strings urban alfresco, the hotel horns of high-society bands, debs coming out, thousands to charity. I like it. It is the music in elevators and department stores and doctors’ waiting rooms. It is the music of all shopping-centered air-conditioned space, an anthem of the universal. In Norway it’s in people’s ears like wax. Hip hip hurrah for the brotherhood of man. They’re playing our song, Finsberg’s brassy showstoppers tamed, declined to lame fox-trot, the threatless noise of motivational research like the soothing pasteurized pastels of walls in women’s prisons. (My movie’s walls are colorless. I mean, I do not know their color. They are neutral, I’d guess, as primed canvas behind a landscape. Right now concealed spots blue the auditorium like east twilight, golden the curtains like a glass of beer.) All about me I hear a snug delicious chatter like peppertalk around an infield. I cannot quite catch what’s being said, but I know that it is optimistic, spoofing, vaguely — they’ve come in pairs, in pairs of pairs, the engaged, the double dating, the married — flirtatious, mock aggressive. It’s the sound of prosperous good humor. (The prime interest rate is through the roof and counting, rising like tropical fever into the treacherous red end of the dial face, but here, in my movie, the talk is manic, the will chipper, bright as the checks and plaids of their styles. Why is it I think the men are dressed in Bermuda shorts? They aren’t, yet they have about them this Miami and island aura, a heraldry of the golf course and day trip, this cruise nimbus.)
“What do you like, chocolate-covered cherries? I’ll bring chocolate-covered cherries. I’ll bring caramels and lollipops. I’ll bring licorice and jujubes. I’m the tooth-decay fairy and what I say goes.”
“I won’t eat it.”
“Take it home to the kids in a doggy bag, Ginny. A souvenir from Uncle Pete like saltwater taffy from the boardwalk. Anybody else? Last orders. Time, gentlemen. Anybody else? All right, that’s it then.” People up and down the row are laughing.
“He’s very nice,” I tell Ginny.
“Pete’s sweet,” she says.
“Pete’s a sweet tooth,” her husband says.
“No,” I say, “he’s a good man in a good mood.”
Pete’s wife and his two friends look at me. I am an intruder, but an older man, well-dressed, clean. Alone on the aisle, perhaps someone recently widowed. They let me in under their mood as if it were an umbrella.
“The best,” Ginny’s husband says.
“What business are you folks in?” (Where do I get my nerve? From my remission.) It is a strange question, but what can I do to them, a clean, older, well-dressed, wifeless man? They will answer, but before they can I reach into the pocket of my suitcoat and take out four passes. (My fingers can do this. Blind they can find the flap of the pocket, lift it, go in with all five fingers extended, no pinky unconsciously snagged on the lip of the pocket, discriminate between my car keys and the paper passes, count out four from the dozen I have taken from Lockwire, and bring them out.) “Here,” I say, “I happen to have the franchise for this theater. I’d like you to take these passes and use them at your convenience.”
“Say,” Pete’s wife says, “are they really passes?”
“Sure,” I say. I give them to her. “Pass them on. Pass on the passes.”
She looks at them. “They’re real.”
“What did you think, counterfeit? You’ll see they’re not good on Friday or Saturday nights, but otherwise there are no restrictions.”
“Well thanks.”
“I’m a good man in a good mood.”
“Well thanks.”
“What business? What line of work?”
“I’m a supervisor with Southwestern Bell,” Pete’s friend says.
“Name’s Eckerd.” He looks down at the passes. “Mr. Lockwire?”
“Oh no. No no. Mr. Lockwire’s my manager. I’m Benjamin Flesh. I’m not normally in the Oklahoma City area. I’m here on business about the theater. I’m here on show business.”
“Oh,” Eckerd says. “I didn’t think you sounded like an Okie. Got an Eastern accent, sort of.”
“We’re all Americans.”
“Well, that’s so,” Eckerd says. “This is my wife Ginny, and that’s Angie Solberto. Pete, Angie’s husband, has Solberto’s Pharmacy in the Draper Lake Mall.”
“That so? Solberto’s? I parked nearby. That’s very nice.” We shake hands. (Hands!) “Yes,” I say, “all Americans. There are over fifty thousand people throughout our land who will see this picture tonight. Who are going to watch Burt Reynolds as he whips his team of convicts into shape. In New York, a different time zone, they’re already seeing it. The game’s already started. In California they’re still picking up their babysitters, but fifty thousand of us and tomorrow another fifty thousand. And over the course of the week say another seventy-five thousand, and in a month maybe close to a million people. That’s what holds us together, you know.” Pete had come back and we were formally introduced. He’d heard of me. Owning Solberto’s, he knew Lockwire and he’d heard of me.
The music stopped in the middle of a phrase and an image came on the screen while the lights were still up. I rose. “Enjoy the picture, folks. It was nice talking to you. Mr. and Mrs. Eckerd, Mr. and Mrs. Solberto.”
“Aren’t you going to—”
“Oh dear me, no, I’ve seen it. Wonderful meeting you. You seem very nice. Like you know what you’re doing.”
“Hey, shh,” someone said behind me.
“Yes, sorry. Yes of course. Quite right. Enjoy the picture. I’m sorry, sir. It’s just the trailers, only the coming attractions. A lot of late-model cars being destroyed. I saw that one, too. Well, again — it’s been a genuine pleasure. We’re all Americans. We all love Burt. He reaches something in each of us, and though he’s the star, we needn’t take a backseat. Not for a minute. How competent people are! How their authority bespeaks some grounding in natural law itself, God’s glorious injunction to be. My godfather was wrong, I think. Life not only is not flashy, a kick in the head of the rules of probability, it’s normal, fixed as thermostat.”