Driver's Education (16 page)

Now, instead of fleeing from battles, he started them. Instead of dancing with chorus girls, he seduced them.

In the front row of the theater, his father would perch on the edge of his seat. He'd whisper,
Kiss her now, Son. NOW.

Clare and I rarely spoke of our homes. I suppose to a certain degree we considered them blasphemous, these lives we lived outside the Avalon. Or, if not blasphemous, then certainly fictitious—roles that we had to play when the clock wound down and our shifts were over. Often, we stayed at the theater longer than we had to. We'd ask Earl if he needed help counting ticket stubs. If all the craters of overchewed gum had been scraped from beneath the seats.

We became, I think, the last two people on our own empty earth, which is why what transpired next made perfect sense, even if actually it made no sense at all.

•  •  •

On a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of July the air was so thick that it hung in pockets stretched between the trees. I arrived by bike at the Avalon, sweat drenched, to find a CLOSED sign set between the two front doors.

Inside, Clare leaned against an empty concession stand. In her hand:
the last two pages of my script, which she flipped between. Reading one sheet, memorizing, moving on to the next.

“You left this here last night,” she said.

“Who says it's mine?”

She cycled back to the first page. She read, this time mouthing the lines of dialogue, the transitions, the scene headings.

“What's that about?” I pointed toward the sign.

“Earl was supposed to get the reel of
Viva Las Vegas
from MGM today, but someone stole it.”

“What do you mean someone stole it?”

“Someone just—stole it.” She shrugged a single shoulder—Audrey Hepburn, 1961,
Breakfast at Tiffany's
—indicating it was the only answer she planned on giving. Clare hated musicals—she said they interfered with the way things were supposed to be—but more than musicals she hated the Beatles, and so she viewed their entrée into cinema apocalyptically, the convergence of two evils into a single festering point.

“So what are we supposed to do?”

“Nothing. He's closed the theater until MGM can send him a replacement reel.” She stacked the two pages together and then folded them in half, handing them to me. She said, “I'd like to show you something.”

Clare took my hand and I let her; we both assumed, I think, that this is what she was supposed to do. That this was the way it was done. We ascended the lobby's grand staircase, where the red pile carpet now frayed along each step's edge. Past the giant amphora vase, behind which the boy used to hide, a golf-ball-sized chunk missing from one of its two handles.

“Have you been in here before?” she asked me once we'd stopped outside the projector room.

“I don't remember,” I lied. Or, I tried lying.

From her pocket she produced a silver key, and she went to unlock the door, which was unlocked already, and so she ended up locking it, and then having to unlock it again.

“Earl has been training me on the projector,” she said while she fumbled.

“I didn't know that.”

“Well”—she leaned into the door and it jolted open—“now you do.”

The room was smaller than I wanted it to be—half the size of my bedroom at home—and it smelled, very strongly, of plastic and rust. Inside, the temperature was easily ten degrees warmer than the rest of the theater, which, without its fans whirling, still baked red and sticky. I became acutely aware of how much I'd started sweating, the moisture pooling in strange places like the space between my fingers and the undersides of my wrists.

An adjoining doorless closet contained stacks of reels in different sizes: on the floor in limp cardboard boxes, on the steel file cabinet, hanging from racks on the walls. Spilling out of themselves, onto themselves, through themselves. Clare pushed them aside with her foot. Cleared a path for the two of us.

“These are the ones Earl's got to send back to the distributors,” Clare said.

“He sends them back?”

“He's only licensed to show them. What did you think happened to them?” she said. “And they're usually sent back in an awful mess. The films are waxed, you know, so they can play on these projectors. They get scratched terribly, even the first time we play them.”

I squatted next to the first box I came across and I pushed through the reels, all pictures I'd watched in the last two months. I chewed on the dust that snuck into my mouth.

“It's sort of funny, actually,” Clare said. “That playing a film is the thing that destroys it.” She knelt next to me. Picked
Cleopatra
from the box. “Here. Come here.”

While the room was smaller than I expected, the projector was larger. Or, potentially larger. I had, until that point, imagined the projector in a sort of ambiguous space in which the size of something didn't actually exist.

“Watch.” Clare stood on the opposite side of the projector. She placed the reel on the machine's front arm and then, as she reminded herself of the steps, she let the film's loose end fall slack until it—the film and the reel to which it was attached—looked like the number 9.

“Okay,” she said, and she wiped the wetness from her hands against her wool slacks. Slowly, almost surgically, she unwound the slack part of the film, the celluloid that was devoid of any shot frames, pictures. I stood back and licked sweat from my lips as she circled around to the projector's lens, where she unclipped two sets of hinges and sprockets.

“You just . . . feed it through.” She fitted the film's guide holes into the sprockets. When it slipped from the projector, she cursed and started over again. Finally, once the guides were hooked snugly into the sprockets she shut the hinges. Two small loops of celluloid formed near each one.

“This, the looseness,” Clare said, pointing to each loop, “lets the film flow easier. It shouldn't be tight.” She fed the slack film into an empty reel set at the back of the projector. “And that's where it goes when it's done.”

When she turned it on, there was a sound that was mechanical and regimented: gears eating one another and a small box opening. I closed my eyes.

“You can look,” she said.

“I don't know,” I told her. “Ha. It's sort of bright.”

•  •  •

I don't recall how many times I'd seen
Cleopatra
by that afternoon, but I'd wager that Clare had seen it twice as many. Still, though, after Clare had loaded the film, we crept into the empty theater and took our two seats at the front of the balcony. We shifted in our seats, bringing our feet to rest on the balcony's rail. Accidentally kicking the journal that lay beneath the seats.

“Were you here the day the Avalon opened?” Clare asked me. They were crowning a new queen of Egypt.

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the boy who snuck in? When all the people were waiting outside?”

“Yes.”

“I've always thought you looked like him.”

Neither of us spoke for another hour. Approximately every twenty
minutes, we'd hear Earl in the projection room—tinkering, adjusting, fixing. And also on occasion, Clare would see something new and add entries, squinting in the dark: C—CONQUERING A KINGDOM. 3 WAYS. For the most part, though, we were silent; when our arms accidently brushed, we leaned away. When we crossed our legs and our feet touched, we mouthed noiseless apologies.

When Cleopatra held the dying Antony in her arms, she looked toward the palace's gilded roof and said, “Has there ever been such a silence?”

Clare spoke. “Do you know how to tell if an actress wasn't actually able to cry and the director had to use fake tears?”

“I don't.”

“Real tears stream. You can just see them streaming down her face. In these little rivers. Fake tears roll. They don't flow, they just roll. Like marbles. At least, that's what I've noticed.”

I don't remember saying anything in response.

“There are three hundred and nineteen ways for a person to cry, but none of them are equal to Elizabeth Taylor. It's so subtle, isn't it? I don't care what critics say about the film. After they kiss, and he dies, the scene is only twenty-three seconds before the cut. Still—it's the way we actually cry. Lips don't ever really quiver, you know. We make them quiver because we think they're supposed to—but on their own, they don't. I don't know. There's a sort of wretched shudder, but it's a whole-body thing. Still, though. So subtle.

“You know she could cry whenever she wanted, right? That's why her tears never roll.”

“I didn't know that.”

“She had this awful domineering mother as a child. This woman named Sara who forced her to practice crying on cue.”

I watched as Clare stared forward. As she conjured up a million different emotions that she'd seen played out across the faces onscreen. As she bit her lip to prevent it from quivering, as her eyes welled up with tears—not out of sadness, but out of dryness.

“I haven't cried in four years. I don't know how she does it.” She
added, “Please don't be upset with me, Colin,” and I leaned over and kissed her. She shrank her head back at first, as if she was expecting to not to expect it, but then she pressed into me: the taste of popcorn and flat soda.

“That's how Humphrey Bogart kissed Ingrid Bergman, except we're in Westchester instead of Morocco, and Roosevelt stopped the Nazis,” she said once she pulled her head away for a moment. She wiped bits of me from her mouth.

By the time Cleopatra's servants had presented her with the basket filled with a dozen figs and one asp, we had kissed again, and this time she told me it was how Steve McQueen kissed Natalie Wood in
Love with the Proper Stranger
.

“Confident, but also, from a different angle, a little scared.”

And then, when the credits were rolling, another kiss. Clark Gable and Sophia Loren in
It Started in Naples.
Coy—but also a little cocky.

And then another, and another, and another.

She had been leaning toward me, her stomach pinched against the armrest between the seats, but she suddenly pulled away.

“I don't love you, you know,” she said.

“All right.”

“That's one of the six ways you can do this. You can love somebody. But I'm telling you now that I don't.”

“Your elbow's hurting my hand.”

“What?”

“Your elbow—it's crushing my hand on the armrest.”

She shifted.

“Do you love me?”

“I haven't given it much thought.”

“I don't think you should.”

“All right, then,” I said. “I won't.”

Finn

Mrs. Dalloway doesn't like Ohio. Fucking hates it, actually, though neither Randal nor I can figure out why.

“Maybe she's a Michigan fan,” I say.

Or: “Maybe she blames it for Bush's second term.”

Randal pinches the bridge of his nose, squeezing the thin bone till the skin surrounding it grows white. He says, “Mrs. Dalloway is definitely a Republican.”

She was silent as we left Pennsylvania, when the interstate sloped downward and the trees in West Virginia formed impenetrable walls on either side of us. So silent we figured she was dead again. But as we trekked across the shallow hills of the Allegheny Plateau, which makes up Ohio's eastern chunk, the whining started. A strangled, muffled squawk—a seagull in a blender, we said when it started—that seeped out from Randal's backpack.

She keeps at it as we make our way down the Allegheny escarpment and as we stare at the white cotton faces of the clouds that swim above the Till Plains, the Columbus Lowlands.

“Maybe we should let her out?” I ask him. “Maybe that's the problem.”

When we do, though, when we get the zipper opened enough for her to sneak out into the open, Mrs. Dalloway becomes a cat possessed. She freezes on the dash and takes in the stark ruralness of the road. She flings herself against Lucy's windows like she's some abhorrent three-legged beanbag. She jumps over seats with a nimbleness that, for a cat of
fifty, is pretty fucking impressive; she bats at the windshield, moving her paw in tight circles, wax on, wax off.

“Grab her!” I yell. “Jesus Christ, Randal, grab her!”

He does, finally, as she's trying to rip the knobs off the radio with her four remaining teeth. Randal's bleeding from somewhere, his elbow or his forehead. His lips are curled, and I'm pretty positive he's going to hurl Mrs. Dalloway into the grille of the next passing sixteen-wheeler, but instead what he does is, after he gets her back into the bag, he opens the zipper again, but this time only half an inch. He sticks a finger's tip into it, up to the first knuckle. Wiggles it timidly. “Shh,” he tells her.

We are passing through New Concord, and then across the Muskingum River in Zanesville. Everything is extremely pretty in a very unpretty way: interesting because there's a phenomenal lack of interest.

“
Shh
, Mrs. Dalloway.”

But of course she doesn't
shh
. Not even when we arrive in Columbus, which is so clean, bleached to a frightening level of urban purity. We drive through an area of town called German Village, which boasts proud red-brick homes with intricate wrought-iron fences laced across their chests; stone streets, shaded with lines of trees.

There are other ones, other villages. There's an Italian Village, a Victorian Village, an Ohio Village—though we never make it there. We never make it to the Ohio Village.

Across the Olentangy River on East Broad Street we pass the Ohio courthouse, and then the statehouse. We turn south on South Third Street and slow to a roll near the capitol building, stopping long enough to examine its white limestone pillars, its blue roof, which is the same color as the flat midwestern sky.