There was quite a long line forming at the concessions counter. I was somewhere near the middle, within earshot of an argument happening at the front between a man who felt he’d been cheated and the unfortunately timid theater employee who may have done the cheating. I was inclined to take the side of the employee. Having worked many years in the service industry I knew there was hardly ever a reason for a customer to become so enraged as to publicly shame me, and yet the stories of such explosive encounters are numerous. Others in the line in front of me began speaking up in support of the employee which only made the man chastising him lay into him that much more. There was fresh popcorn popping into the glass case just behind him and he’d given the man a bucket that wasn’t as fresh. Now the man was demanding to speak with a supervisor. He kept putting his left hand on his hip, bracing his torso to shake the pointer finger on his other hand at the employee who simply stared back at him knowing that every moment of piercing vacancy on his face would be crippling to a man who was used to getting what he wanted by shouting at it.
A supervisor rounded the counter and sent the employee to turn on another register so he could take care of the rest of us in line, but the angry man followed him to the next register proving that he did not want justice or fresh popcorn, only domination. The supervisor snapped back at him, informing the man that if he did not cease his tantrum, he’d be forced to ask him to leave. At this, the man threw the stale popcorn in the employee’s face who remained amazingly stoic as kernels and puffs pelted him in the face.
An elderly woman standing just behind the angry man scorned him for his childish tantrum, but he cursed her and turned back to the counter as the supervisor began dialing the police. The angry man was now pressed into the counter on the verge of reaching over it and grabbing the employee by his collar. His spittle was gleaming off the black tile as he snarled insults at the employee about his acne and his slightly sagging chest. He stopped his assault to take a breath, but in that moment, the employee slowly reached his hand over the counter and swiped a handful of the stale popcorn littering the counter. He raised his hand to his lips and stuffed it into his mouth. He crunched on it slowly, cherishing every last chew before uttering, “tastes fine to me.”
The supervisor returned to inform the man that the police were on their way and that he’d better leave if he did not want to be arrested for assault.
The man strutted away murmuring slurs about the employee as he passed me. I always imagined I’d be a person who would jump in to defend someone in a tense situation such as this one, but seeing as there were countless others equally astonished by the man’s behavior, it felt grossly cavalier to be the one to try and beat him at some game of insults.
“I thought he was gonna hit that kid.” I wasn’t certain if I was being spoken to, so I turned around to see a woman facing me, but looking past me, lost in the reeling of her mind.
“Free movie before the movie.” She laughed which snapped her out of her trance.
She asked if I was seeing the Cassavetes film and I told her that, while I loved it, I couldn’t bear to watch Gena Rowlands break down like that ever again, and that I was seeing a new movie from an Israeli director whose name I couldn’t remember at the moment. His name was Nadav Lapid, she said, and that she had seen the film the day before and hadn’t stopped thinking about it since.
I’m not from Hudson, but whenever I went to a new place, I liked to go to their independent movie theater and see a film. I told her this because she mentioned having never seen me before and that she came to see two, sometimes three movies a week. I told her that I was jealous of her that she had so much time to see movies.
“I retired a few years ago when I turned fifty, so I have nothing but time.” She once calculated how many hours she spent commuting into Manhattan and that it was just over four years.
“So I’m actually only forty-eight.”
It was my turn to order snacks, but she insisted that she buy my popcorn to celebrate my first time at the theater.
“Just make sure it’s the fresh stuff.” The employee laughed bashfully at my joke as did the woman, who grabbed my arm and laughed along with him. She was very close to me now and I could smell the faintest scent of smoke on her hair. She took a moment to search for cash in her purse while I plucked a couple of pieces off the top of the popcorn mound and plopped them into my mouth.
I thanked her for treating me and she insisted that it was her pleasure. I asked her if she’d smoke a cigarette with me after her movie finished and she looked a bit embarrassed knowing that I must have smelled it on her at some point, so I made something up about seeing her pack in her purse when she was hunting for cash, but I wondered if that was awkward and quickly asked her name. Jill.
Journal Entry: January 14th, Hudson, NY
Cinema is faulty because images are faulty. Images are faulty because they are deceitful. They’re deceitful because they’re a representation of reality but they are not reality. Anything that is deemed real or authentic in cinema is the most deceitful. Cameras have gotten better at rendering our reality accurately, though I would argue that makes them worse with each progression. Screens and projectors too. Now they want to make VR films. But they want to make the wrong VR films because VR is a medium obsessed with fantasy and world-building and place, but I’m watching Ahed’s Knee and all I can think about is A Woman Under the Influence. When my movie gets very silent, I can hear Peter Falk shouting at Gena Rowlands. I can hear the children screaming back at him to be kind to their mother, and I wonder what it would be like to walk around in their house. I want to put on a VR headset and dance Swan Lake with Gena Rowlands in the back yard. But in that way, VR isn’t cinema because I can choose where to look. I can choose to go upstairs and hide as Peter Falk shouts at Gena Rowlands. I can choose to disobey. The ability to disobey, to choose for oneself, is a determining factor of reality. Cinema is authoritarian in a way that reality is not. I do not have to stay in school. I do not have to reconcile with my mother. I can choose. Children believe cinema is real until they come to understand their own agency, until they realize that Ariel gave up her voice for a prince not because she was naive, but because the writer made her.
I could hear Gena Rowlands shouting at her mother in law through the door to the theater. I opened the door quietly, but as it closed, the draft from the theater to the lobby outside sent it thudding into the frame at a speed far outside my delicate control.
From the light of the screen, I saw Jill’s head whip around, as though she were waiting for me, and it became clear to me in the way she eagerly turned around, that she had turned around every other time someone had entered or exited the theater throughout the course of the previous scenes of the movie, believing that at some point I’d finally show up. She gathered her coat and purse and moved it to the other seat next to her, indicating that she wanted me to come sit beside her. I tiptoed down the aisle trying to remain as silent as possible, knowing how delicate of a spell Cassavete’s conjures in his films.
As I nestled into my seat, Jill put her arm around me, so casually and with such warmth, as though we were old friends. I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was smiling from ear to ear and I sunk deeper into the chair so that her bare arm touched the back of my neck.
I was much happier to view this movie than the one I had intended, but even in my countless viewings of it, I always seem to forget how relentless it is, so when the dinner scene at the end of the movie began to unfold, I decided to sneak off to the bathroom for a breather. I got up silently and weaved my way to the main aisle. I reached the back of the theater and was within arm’s length of the door, but I turned to look at Jill who sat rapt with the film. I watched her watching for a moment. But then, she turned her head and looked back at me, so certain that I was there watching. I still don’t know how she knew.
The lobby was empty now except for the concessions employee who was texting on his phone. He had cleaned the popcorn from the counter and was only waiting for both the movies to end so that he could lock the doors and go home for the night. I asked him what they did with the leftover popcorn at the end of each night and he pointed at a large black garbage bag burgeoning with the stuff. It was then that I remembered that I didn’t really have to go the bathroom, that I was only in the lobby avoiding the crushing ending of the film. He must’ve noticed my pause.
“You smoke?”
The theater was on a long strip of antique and vintage stores that all closed at normal business hours, so the flashing bulbs from the marquee of the theater seemed garish in the silent black night. His name was Luis and he rolled the joint so effortlessly that I almost couldn’t believe it was a hard task.
“I would’a popped him, but I gotta stay outt’a trouble.”
Luis’ parents were living in New York when he was born, but they left him with his uncle and fled to Mexico when he was a child. Being undocumented in New York was risky enough, but the thought of being deported and permanently removed from their child’s life was too great of a risk for them, and it was very easy to visit legally once every few months. I asked him if he was hurt by their decision to leave him behind and he was surprised at my question. Why would he be hurt by such a gift?
Luis’ uncle was a line cook at a restaurant in the East Village and when the owner of that restaurant asked him to be the kitchen manager at a new place he was opening in Hudson, he jumped at the opportunity. Luis did not want to leave the city, but his uncle had raised him and taken care of him and he was not yet old enough to live on his own.
“That was six years ago.”
When they got to Hudson, Luis still had a year left of high school to finish, but the change was not easy to overcome. He was always good at math and science he said, but maybe his school in the city was just easier. I assured him that this could not be the case, but I realized that by trying to make him feel better I was insulting him in a way and I took another long drag of the joint.
Luis knew he didn’t want to go to college and even with his uncle’s new salary and the money his parents brought him every time they came to visit, he didn’t think it was worth the money anyway.
“I like sellin’.” Luis started working in the kitchen at the restaurant the summer after he graduated from high school. While he was working, he met Derrick who sold as his main source of income. Luis liked smoking and liked the idea of doing something he loved as a career, so he started pushing small amounts to help Derrick grow his business, and after a year, Luis was making more money selling than he was working full time in the kitchen.
“These white people smoke a lott’a weed.” Hudson was a place where wealthier white folks from Manhattan retired to once the daily life of city living became too hectic. It was charming and Earthy but close enough to Manhattan to extract all the culture and excitement they wanted. At first, Luis had a hard time making the types of connections necessary to be a successful dealer in the town. Working in a kitchen wasn’t helping.
“People who like those type’a movies like smokin’ weed.” I chuckled at this observation and asked him why he felt the need to work at the theater rather than just go to see the movies, yielding him even more potential customers and less work in the process.
“Taxable income. And those movies are weird.”
A man and his wife walked out of the lobby. I turned to see which theater they were coming out of, realizing I had been missing for nearly half an hour. Luis stood and held the door as the few people in the screening of Ahed’s Knee trickled out of the lobby and down the empty Main Street that stretched through downtown Hudson.
I thought I might go back for the last few minutes of the Cassavetes movie, but based on how long I had been missing, if I returned now, it might indicate to Jill that I was pooping, and I didn’t want that to be on her mind as the film ground into an intense, melancholic sadness.
Luis went to check the condition of the theater as I smoked the joint down to nothing. When he returned he told me that his parents were coming to visit in the next few days and that he had been saving his money from dealing and working at the theater in preparation to surprise them with an immigration lawyer.
“Dudes like that piss me the fuck off.” I knew he was referring to the man from earlier, but suddenly I understood Luis’ stoic response to him and his outburst all the more. There are people with so much money, he said, so much they they don’t even have use for most of it. Luis had been saving for over three years and it was barely enough to pay for a year of services. His watch cost more than I have saved, Luis said. And if you’re making that much money, you’re cheating somebody somewhere, so whenever Luis felt bad about dealing which he often did, wondering what his parents would think, he was reminded that all money is bloody, and the more you had of one, the more you had of the other. I asked him how he thought working at an independent cinema bloodied his money.
“‘Cause I gotta tell people that bad movies is good.”
Our laughter crackled off the old brick of the antique shops along the street. Luis’ breath scattered through the air as I heard voices coming from the lobby.
Before Luis went to clean the theater, I told him that I’d want to buy some weed from him. Probably not tonight, but tomorrow. He told me he’d be working all day and to swing by whenever. He passed Jill on his way in as she was the last person to leave the theater. She wiped tears from her eyes as she walked toward me, almost instinctually, and wrapped her arms around me.
Outside, I lit a cigarette and placed it on her lips and I thought of the way Gena Rowlands held her’s at the very tips of her fingers puffing thick clouds of smoke every time she dragged.
We walked. Nowhere. I don’t remember walking. A violent chill would rattle her body and she’d squeeze my arm as tightly as she could to stop herself from convulsing from the cold. She squeezed four times. I picked her up and carried her over a patch of ice and she rubbed her cheek against my ear which burned a little because my ear was so cold and her cheek was so warm and the friction was immense. She put her hand in my back pocket and patted. She ran her hand up my back, accidentally lifting my jacket and touching my bare skin with her icy hand. It irritated me, but then she sang and I liked the feeling of her nails.
She drove us to her house which was a short distance from the theater, she said. It was on a hillside surrounded by trees where she liked to watch the deer each morning from her window. The atmosphere inside the car was like a lightbulb inside the freezer. Every sound amplified by the tightening of the late winter air. It was silent for most of the ride. I started asking about the movie, but she told me to shut up which I’m thankful for. She wanted to be quiet with me. To hear my cheeks pull away from my teeth if I smiled. To hear the leather of my jacket tug against my body. I lifted my arm to place it on the console. To make her a sound. She wanted sounds and objects. I thought to say her name but I didn’t want to hurt her so I made the name with my mouth and I made it many times until my tongue was dry and I could feel the hinge of my jaw.
There was something about her house that felt like the end of living. I think it was the view of a creek. Like we were in a coffin floating down. But walking up her stairs was like applause in a large crowd. And my fingers running on the railing was the dirtiest I’ve done. We passed the bedroom, and good. Something in between us would implode if we had sex, like we’d fuck it away. I’m glad she understood this too because I didn’t want to, couldn’t tell her no. In the bathroom, she folded into the tub. I ended up in too with my head on her chest, leg laced legs. Sometimes she would plow her heels along the meat of my thighs like she was breaking ground for a bank and I would bury my nose in her soaking hair. She had a bit of blood under her nails from my chest but it had to stop there because I was so full of her name.
We were on a palette in front of her fire place when she spoke for the first time in two hours.
“Why are you in Hudson?”
I don’t like the way I think to answer questions. Some believe it a gift, but articulation is only a curse, saying what I mean. It’s another way to be drastically misunderstood only with much higher stakes, and there’s something about using words to convey meaning that makes the very act of communication perverse, so when Jill ruptured our silent void, I couldn’t help but wish she’d been a newborn, crying and shrieking. I would have been certain of what she wanted then.
I told her of my friend, Laura, who was dying. How we were gathering with our friends from college at a cabin in the Catskills for the week, maybe the last time we’d all be together. I was careful not to divulge too much because I didn’t want to make Jill sad, but that editing alone made me wonder if I was already beginning to harden myself to her, so instead, I told her a story about Laura from school, how she tripped and hurt her head on the sidewalk and had to be taken to the emergency room. I was there when she fell, and I watched blood pool around her head as she lay silently for a moment or two. At the hospital, Laura told me it was the first time she ever feared death, and in the months since her cancer diagnosis, I’ve often thought of this story and wondered what level of fear she must be operating on now, if at all.
Jill’s silence confused me, as though my reasoning for turning up in her town wasn’t to her liking. She rolled away from me to face the fire, leaving me only the memory of when her body was touching mine, two bodies that had been inseparable since the cigarette. When she rolled away, her creamy cable-knit tangled beneath her and tugged away from her shoulder. She had chills in the crook of her neck, teased by the warm crackle of the fire. I wanted to blow on them.
“I am scared to die.” She spoke to the logs in the fire. “I don’t want people to feel they’ve lost something.”
The fire illuminated the strands of orange hair around the crown of her head. There was a bit of bark laying just to the right of it, perfectly in my line of sight from behind her. The flames swarmed the logs beside it, but the bit of bark remained, wisps of smoke flitting from the crevices that ran along it as the embers beneath burned low and gentle. It looked like the skin of a branch. Until it didn’t. It moved like water as it crumbled and sank into a pile of ash. It was a sheet of trunk, held together by years of nutrients.
Jill pulled her sweater over her head, threading her hair through it and tossed it into the vast, dark room. I was admittedly entranced by the bare curve of her waist and I did not notice her tears immediately.
“She reminded me of my mother.” I did not want to ask who, but I assumed she was finally referring to the Cassavetes film.
Her mother married her father when she was sixteen and he was thirty-three. They did not have language for such a thing back then, but her mother was always talking to herself. Her father just assumed she was off.
“That’s what he’d say. Off.”
One time, when Jill was in college, her father telephoned to tell her that her mother was in the hospital but not to worry because it wasn’t life-threatening. When she pressed her father about her mother’s diagnosis, he became angry and a bit embarrassed. Jill did not particularly care for school, so she drove home without notifying her professors so that she could be by her mother’s side, but when she arrived at the hospital back home, the nurses informed her that her mother wasn’t allowed visitors. What kind of illness forbids you from receiving visitors, she thought, and as she was waiting for more answers she overheard another nurse mention in passing that her mother had been admitted to the psychiatric ward after threatening to harm herself.
Jill rushed to her childhood home to be with her father, but when she arrived, she found the house picked over. The front door was unlocked and her father’s car was gone, the phone hanging off the hook.
“It was strange to realize my father was a coward.” Her father had always been charming and friendly in her memory. They were not well off, but he’d always managed to give her mother and her not just the necessities but a bit of luxury as well. He was afraid of what people would say, she thought. Or that, given his wife’s condition, it was only a matter of time before something else, something worse, happened. It wasn’t pancreatitis or a bad kidney, but a potentially life-long, phantom pain that would wreak havoc on his peace. He probably just didn’t believe it was real.
Jill dropped out of her classes so she could be there for her mother when she finished her treatment. Her professors couldn’t believe she would sacrifice such a coveted spot at an Ivy League, and that they’d offered it to a woman was that much more of a slight to their generosity, but Jill never once felt a moment of regret.
The day her mother arrived home, Jill invited her mother’s best friend and a few of her friends from high school that her mother particularly favored to greet her, and just before her mother arrived in the taxi, Jill felt a moment of intense panic that it was a grave mistake to welcome her home in this way knowing what she’d have to reveal about her father, but before Jill could decide what to do, the doorbell rang. The ladies sat anxiously waiting, in some way only interested in seeing a real psychopath in the flesh, but when she opened the door and Jill’s mother stepped over the threshold, Jill was overcome with emotion. She had not yet mourned her father’s selfish flight, only capable of anger on behalf of her mother that when she saw her standing next to the coat rack, her father’s coat left behind, she fell to her knees and wept that her father had not only abandoned her mother in such a fragile state, but he’d left her too.
Her mother picked her up and took her to the couch. She comforted her the way she always did. Her mother seemed perfectly even-spirited. All the things she’d read or heard of psychiatric patients seemed like utter fables as she held onto her mother. Through tears, she told her of her father’s decision to leave. How she came home to support him and he wasn’t even kind enough to lock the door on his way out. Her mother was unfazed, certain that her recent stint in the hospital and her husband’s abandonment were one in the same mode of help. She thought it was what she needed, Jill said.
Jill’s return home was pleasant for a while. She got a job as a seamstress which gave her the chance to work with clothes and steal copies of Vogue from the women who frequented the shop. But around her mother’s birthday, she started noticing cracks. Jill would walk to the bathroom in the early hours of morning to find her mother standing at the top of the steps, haunting the hallway in chilly silence. She’d usher her mother back to bed only for her mother to never remember a single one of these haunting episodes. Her mother began shouting at people in public for the most menial offenses. Once a teenage boy crossed in front of her at the grocery store to reach for a candy bar and her mother screamed at him so viciously that the owner of the store banned her from ever stepping foot inside again. After that, they had to drive over twenty minutes to reach the next nearest grocery store.
Jill rolled over to face me again. We were both naked, save for her socks, but there was a strange amount of distance between us, at least two feet or so, wanting more to observe one another than to be held. I could tell she was finished recounting the story of her mother, afraid to admit whatever she inevitably had to do with her.
I traced my finger along her waist, gripped her thigh. She kissed my stomach. I tangled my fingers in the roots of her hair at the base of her skull. She slowed everything down. I bent her. She covered me. She ran from room to room, begging me to chase her. Nowhere to hide, as ever. Her figure in the sheet interrupts my thinking, slinking towards a window framing ashen white trees beyond it and the creek that would give way to freezing before sunrise. She asked me what my name was.
Jill’s house was a five minute drive from the theater so I estimated a thirty minute walk taking into consideration the potentially icy road conditions and that I’d be traversing a route not meant for pedestrians. If I had to, I could ask some passerby for a ride.
Sure enough, there were deer in the yard when I stepped on the front porch. They went about their business foraging for bits amidst the crisply frozen earth. I lumbered down the stone steps and made my way along the winding driveway to the main road.
Kieran would be getting to town soon and we agreed to meet at the cabin to see the condition of the place before everybody else arrived. I called him, but it went to voicemail. I never leave voicemails, but for some reason, I felt an all-consuming urge to let him know about my evening with Jill. Immediately after ending the call, I knew I’d come to regret bragging about it. He’d want to know why I’d spent an entire evening naked with a woman without having sex with her.
It was longer than thirty minutes, but the air was sharp and clear so I didn’t mind. Some of the stores on the strip were opening their doors by the time I got into town. It took a while for my windows to defrost so I smoked a cigarette while the car heated up. One of the store owners was struggling to maneuver a large armoire through the front door of his store. It was on a small, square dolly, but the wheels were catching on the lip of the metal doorway and he almost tipped it over once or twice before finally squeezing it through. Once it was clear of the entryway, safely inside and surrounded by various other nicknacks and objects, the man turned to see if anyone had seen his accomplishment, but there was just me whom he didn’t notice. He smiled for himself.
yes good