Why We Broke Up Page 2

  “Sure, that could mean anything,” Lauren snorted, tossing wet napkins into the bag. “Maybe he works for the phone company.”

  “Stop.”

  “Maybe he’s just obsessed with area codes.”

  “Lauren—”

  “He asked you out. Ed Slaterton.”

  “He’s not going to call,” I said. “It was just a party.”

  “Don’t put yourself down,” Jordan said. “You have all the qualities Ed Slaterton looks for in his millions of girlfriends, come to think of it. You have two legs.”

  “And you’re a carbon-based life-form,” Lauren said.

  “Stop,” I said. “He’s not—he’s just a guy.”

  “Listen to her, just a guy.” Lauren picked up another piece of trash. “Ed Slaterton asked you out. It’s crazy. That’s, like, Eyes on the Roof crazy.”

  “It’s not as crazy as what is, by the way, a great movie, and it’s Eyes on the Ceiling. And, he’s not really going to call.”

  “I just can’t believe it,” Jordan said.

  “There’s nothing to believe,” I said to everybody in the yard, including me. “It was a party and Ed Slaterton was there and it’s over and now we’re cleaning up.”

  “Then come help me,” Al said finally, and held up the dripping punch bowl. I hurried to the kitchen and looked for a towel.

  “Throw those out?”

  “What?”

  He pointed at the bottle caps in my hand.

  “Right, yeah,” I said, but with my back turned they went into my pocket. Al handed me everything, the bowl, the towel to dry it, and looked me over.

  “Ed Slaterton?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to yawn. I was thumping inside.

  “Is he really going to call you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But you—hope so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “He’s not going to call me. He’s Ed Slaterton.”

  “I know who he is, Min. But you—what are you—?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know. How can you not know?”

  I’m good at changing the subject. “Happy birthday, Al.”

  Al just shook his head, probably because I was smiling, I guess. I guess I was smiling, the party over and these bottle caps burning in my pocket. Take them back, Ed. Here they are. Take back the smile and the night, take it all back, I wish I could.

  This is a ticket for the first movie we saw, see how it says right on it: Greta in the Wild, Student Matinee, October 5, a date that’ll rattle me forever. I don’t know if it’s yours or mine, but I know I bought them both and waited outside trying not to pace in the sort-of cold. You were almost late, which turned out to be as usual. I had a feeling. You weren’t going to show, was my feeling, the camera sweeping back and forth down the empty street in the movie of the date, October 5, me alone, gray, and pacing in the lens. So what, I thought. You’re just Ed Slaterton. Show up. Who cares? Show up, show up, where are you? Fuck you, everyone was right about you, prove them wrong, where are you?

  And then from nowhere you were in my life again, tapping me on the shoulder with your hair combed and damp, smiling, maybe nervous. Maybe breathless like me.

  “Hey,” I squeaked.

  “Hey,” you said. “Sorry I’m late if I’m late. I forgot which theater this was. I never go here. I had it confused with the Internationale.”

  “The Internationale?” The Internationale, Ed, is not the Carnelian. The Internationale shows British adaptations of the same three novels by Jane Austen over and over again, and documentaries about pollution. “And who was waiting for you at the Internationale?”

  “Nobody,” you said. “Very lonely. I like it here better.”

  We stood together and I opened the door. “So you’ve never been here?”

  “Once for a field trip in eighth grade, to see something about World War Two. And my dad took me and Joan before that, before he met Kim it must have been, something in black and white.”

  “I’m here, like, every week.”

  “Good to know,” you said. “I’ll always be able to find you.”

  “Um,” I said, savoring that.

  “OK, tell me what we’re seeing, again?”

  “Greta in the Wild. It’s P. F. Mailer’s masterpiece. Hardly anyone gets to see it on the big screen.”

  “Uh-huh,” you said, looking around the sparse lobby. It was only the usual bearded men struggling in alone, another date couple probably from the university, and an old woman in a beautiful hat that made me stare. “I’ll get us tickets.”

  “I got them already,” I said.

  “Oh,” you said. “Well, what can I get? Popcorn?”

  “Definitely. The Carnelian makes the real stuff.”

  “Great. You like butter?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “No,” you said, and touched me, just on the shoulder, I’m sure you don’t remember but it was swoony for me, “whatever you want.”

  What I wanted is what I got. We sat in the sixth row where I always like it. The fading mural, the sticky floor. The bearded men identical and separated in faraway seats, like the corners of a rectangle. The profile of the old woman standing in the back taking off her hat and putting it next to her. And you, Ed, your arm a thrill around me, sitting in the dark as the lights went down.

  Greta in the Wild opens, brilliantly, gorgeously, with the curtain opening. Lottie Carson is a chorus girl in a chorus line, with the dimple that made her America’s Cinematic Lovely and P. F. Mailer’s mistress in all those beautiful parties in the photographs in When the Lights Go Down: A Short Illustrated History of Film, with his arms draped all over her. She’s only a little older than I am now, with a lacy fan and a tiny hat and a song called “You’re the Pip for Me, Chéri” all flourishy with an orchestra and a glittery cardboard apple that lowers on strings from the rafters. Miles De La Raz can’t take his eyes off her, in his skinny waxed mustache and the box seat where he’s flanked by scowly bodyguards, and you held my hand with both of your hands, warm and electric with the popcorn abandoned.

  Backstage he’s an asshole, as if we didn’t know from the mustache. “Greta, I told you a million times never to talk to that lousy bum of a trombone player,” “Aw Joe, he’s just a friend, that’s all,” etc. More dialogue, another song I think, but—

  —you were kissing me. It was sudden, I guess, though it’s not sudden to kiss someone on a date, especially if you’re Ed Slaterton, and also, if I’m going to write the truth, if you’re Min Green. It was a good first one, gentle and jolty, I can feel it now in Al’s dad’s truck on my neck like light and flutter. What will you do, I asked myself, and then with a rat-tat-tat of machine guns laying a curve of bullets into the instrument case in the alley while Lottie Carson screams in her mink, I kissed you back.

  Lottie Carson has to leave town, but we stayed right where we were. Miles De La Raz’s right-hand man, the bald guy who’s also in Dinner at Midnight with glasses and a head cold, puts her on the train and she throws her mink in his sputtering face in a pouty huff, but you probably don’t remember that scene because by then it was French with your mouth wet and just the slight mint of toothbrushing. Al and I watched it sophomore year, double-featured with Catch That Gun, at his house with pizza and iced coffee that made me babbly but Al just trembly nervous with his knee twitching and nowhere to put his hands. So I know the scene. Boy does she regret that gesture with the fur, because the train goes north, way north in a montage I just love, even better on the big screen with the edges of the picture all cloudy, announcing “Buffalo! Next stop Buffalo!” and then the funnier and funnier towns, “Worchester! Badwood! Chokypond! Ducksbreath!” until she’s in the goddamn Yukon with Will Ringer all bundled up on a dogsled ready to take her the rest of the way to where she’s hiding out, your hand on my neck and me not knowing if you’ll slide it down to feel me over my second-favorite top
with the weird pearly buttons that mean you have to hand wash it, or just move to hold me at the waist before making your way up underneath, and if I’ll stop you, if I want to, if you’ll tell anyone, your hands on me and we’re only twenty minutes into the first movie of the first date. So I stop the kiss and Lottie Carson sleeps in the igloo alone and Will Ringer, frost on the beard he’ll shave off for her, because she asks him to, because he loves her—he sleeps with the dogs. We sat still for the rest, in the dark, merely holding hands until the ending and the big, big kiss, and then we were blinking in the lobby and I asked you what you thought.

  “Um,” you said, shrugged, looked at me, shrugged again, and shook your hand in a so-so seesaw, and I wanted to grab your wrist and hold your palm right where I’d stopped you from putting it before. My heart, Ed, thump-thump-thumped for it to happen, right then, October 5, at the Carnelian Theater.

  “Well, I liked it,” I said, hoping I wasn’t flushed with thinking it. “Thanks for seeing it with me.”

  “Yeah,” you said, and then, “I mean, you’re welcome.”

  “You’re welcome?”

  “You know what I mean,” you said. “Sorry.”

  “You meant sorry?”

  “No,” you said. “I mean, what do we do now?”

  “Um,” I said, and you looked at me like you didn’t know your lines. What could I do with you? I’d been hoping you’d have an idea, the movie was mine. “Are you hungry?”

  You smiled gently. “I play basketball,” you answered, “so the answer’s always yes.”

  “OK,” I said, thinking I could have tea. And watch you eat? Was this the afternoon, the whole October 5? With Greta still dazzling in my brain, I wanted us to do something, I don’t know—

  And then I gasped, I really did. I had to show you, because it wasn’t something you could see right away, a route to take to a place to go, an opening of the story that could make October 5 a movie as lovely as the one we’d just seen. It was more than the old woman walking past us, more than anything you could glance at in the normal light of the puddly afternoon. It was a dream of a curtain opening, and I took your hand so I could lead you through it to someplace more than a junior and a senior making out in a theater, somewhere better than tea for the girl and a meal for the athlete like every other afternoon for everyone, something magic on a big screen, something else, something—

  —extraordinary.

  I gasped and pointed the way. I gave you an adventure, Ed, right in front of you but you never saw it until I showed you, and that’s why we broke up.

  It breaks my heart to give this back to you, but you’re already heartbroken, so we’re even, I guess. Anyway, I can’t look at Lottie Carson ever again, for obvious reasons, so if I didn’t give this back it would waste away somewhere in a trash heap instead of staring up at you when you open the box and making you cry with her grin, her beautiful grin, the famous grin of Lottie Carson.

  “What?” you said, and watched the old woman go down the block.

  “Lottie Carson,” I said.

  “Who’s she?”

  “From the movie.”

  “Yeah, I saw her in the back row. With the hat.”

  “No, that’s Lottie Carson,” I said. “At least I think. Who was in the movie. Greta.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No,” I said, “of course I’m not sure. But it could be.”

  We went outside and you squinted and frowned. “She doesn’t look a thing like in the movie.”

  “That was years and years ago,” I said. “You have to use your imagination. If it’s her, it means she snuck into the Carnelian to watch herself in the wild, and we’re the only people who know.”

  “If it’s her,” you repeated. “But how can you be sure?”

  “There’s no way we can be sure,” I said. “Not now. But, you know, I had a feeling in there. During the big kiss at the end.”

  You smiled, and I knew what kiss you were thinking of. “You had a feeling.”

  “Not that kiss,” I said, feeling it again, both of your hands holding my hair so dearly out of our faces. “The kiss in the movie.”

  “Wait a minute,” you said, and you went back into the theater. The door swung shut and I watched you through the smudgy glass like a film out of focus, an unrestored print. You stepped quick to the wall and leaned over, and then hurry hurry hurry, you were back out the door and grabbing my arm and we jaywalked across Tenth to the dry cleaner’s. I saw the time on the clock on the wall above the rack of clothes that they move around when they’re looking for yours. I saw that the movie was short, that I had plenty of time before I told my mom I’d be home and told Al I’d call him with all the details. The clothes moved like they were in a fire drill, filing in an orderly fashion round and round in plastic, and then stopped and an ugly dress reunited with a customer in a crinkly embrace. But you moved my cheek, your hand so warm on me, and I saw what you wanted me to see. Lobby cards, they call them, I know from When the Lights Go Down: A Short Illustrated History of Film, you’d snitched the lobby card from the Carnelian. It’s a real one, vintage, you can see from the tinting, dimpled and happy in your hand. Lottie Carson with the blizzard in the background, cute as a button in her fur, America’s Cinematic Lovely.

  “This girl,” you said, “this actress and the lady down the street. You’re saying they’re the same.”

  “Look at her,” I said, and I held the other corner. It took my breath away to touch it. I was holding one corner and you one corner and then one corner had the logo for Bixby Brothers Pictures and one corner is gone, see, ripped and left hanging on a thumbtack in the lobby when you stole it so we could look at Lottie Carson together and see.

  “If it’s her, then she probably lives here,” I realized. She was a little away by now, in the coat, with the hat, halfway to halfway down the block. “Nearby, I mean. Someplace. That would be—”

  “If it’s her,” you said again.

  “The eyes look the same,” I said. “The chin. Look at the dimple.”

  You looked down the block and then at me and then at the photo. “Well,” you said, “this is definitely her. But the lady down the block, that might not be.”

  I stopped looking at her and looked, my God it was beautiful, at you. I kissed you. I can feel it, my mouth on you, I have a feeling now of the feeling I had then, even though I don’t have it anymore. “Even if it isn’t,” I murmured against your neck when it was through—the dry-cleaning customer ahemed us out of her way with her ugly dress exhausted over her elbow, and I pulled away from you—“we should follow her.”

  “What? Follow her?”

  “Let’s,” I said. “We can see if it’s her. And, well—”

  “Better than watching me eat,” you said, reading my mind.

  “Well, we could have lunch,” I said, “instead. Or, if you have to, I don’t know. Get home, or something?”

  “No,” you said.

  “No, you don’t want to, or no, you don’t have to go home?”

  “No, I mean yes, OK, if you want to.”

  You started to cross back to her side of the street, but I took your arm. “No, stay here,” I said. “We should follow at a discreet distance.” I’d gotten that from Morocco Midnight.

  “What?”

  “It’ll be easy,” I said. “She walks slow.”

  “She’s old,” you agreed.

  “She’d have to be,” I said. “She’d be something like, I don’t know, she was young in Greta in the Wild and that was in, let’s see.” I turned the card over and blinked at a true fact.

  “If it’s her,” you said.

  “If it’s her,” I said, and you took my hand. And even if it isn’t, I wanted to murmur to your neck again, smelling of your shave and your sweat. Let’s go, is what I thought, the movie leaving its vapor trail across my mind. Let’s see where this leads us, this adventure with the thrum of the music and the bl
izzard of stagy snow, Lottie Carson stalking out of the igloo and Will Ringer grumbling and stamping before, of course, he rouses the dogs and mush!-mush!-mush!es to find her so Greta will choose the right man, no matter how humble his igloo, her happy tears freezing to diamonds on her dimple in that light only Mailer could get. Let’s go, let’s go, hurry toward the happy ending with the fur coat of her dreams, pure white polar bear fur Will Ringer tanned himself, wrapped around her so happy and beaming and snug with the engagement ring a surprise in the pocket just as THE END flutters on-screen enormous and triumphant, the big, big kiss. That was the pip for me, chéri. I had a feeling of where it would lead that day, October 5, a feeling fanned by the back of this card, the promotional printing of Lottie Carson, a time line with the dates of her life and work. Her birthday was coming up—she was almost eighty-nine. That’s what I thought, moving unaware down the street. December 5 is what I saw as we walked together on October 5, let’s go, let’s go together toward something extraordinary and I started making plans, thinking we would get that far.

  If you open this you’ll see it’s empty, and you’ll wonder for a sec if it was empty when you gave it to me—I can see it—another empty gesture you slipped into my hand like a bad bribe. But the truth, and I’m telling you the truth, is that it was full, twenty-four matches lined up cozy inside. It’s empty now because they’re gone.

  I don’t smoke, although it looks fantastic in films. But I light matches on those thinking blank nights when I crawl my route out onto the roof of the garage and the sky while my parents sleep innocent and the lonely cars move sparse on the faraway streets, when the pillow won’t stay cool and the blankets bother my body no matter how I move or lie still. I just sit with my legs dangling and light matches and watch them flicker away.

  This box lasted just three nights, not in a row, before they were all gone and the box held the nothing you see now. The first night was the night of the day you gave it to me, when my mom had finally door-slammed her way to bed and I’d hung up with Al. I was too jitterbuggy happy to sleep, and the whole day kept playing in my brain’s little screening room. There’s a picture in When the Lights Go Down: A Short Illustrated History of Film of Alec Matto smoking in a chair in a room with a slice of light blaring over his head toward a screen we can’t see. “Alec Matto reviewing dailies for Where Has Julia Gone? (1947) in his private screening room.” Joan had to tell me what dailies are, it’s when the director takes some time in the evening, while smoking, to see all the footage that was filmed that day, maybe just one scene, a man opening a door over and over, a woman pointing out the window, pointing out the window, pointing out the window. That’s dailies, and it took seven or eight matches on the roof over the garage for me to go over our breathless dailies that night, the nervous wait with the tickets in my hand, Lottie Carson heading north on all those trains, kissing you, kissing you, the strange conversation in A-Post Novelties that had me all nerve-wracky after I talked to Al about it, even though he said he had no opinion. The matches were a little he loves me, he loves me not, but then I saw right on the box that I had twenty-four, which would end the game at not, so I just let the small handful sparkle and puff for a bit, each one a thrill, a tiny delicious jolt for each part I remembered, until I burned my finger and went back in still thinking of all we did together.