Here I was maybe forty minutes ago, sort of claustrophobed in the gap between the kickass movie world where Lila dumps the guy with the smarmy mustache and the obvious one where it just keeps getting later. It was the last show and were I to guess it was just the moment where the stripper woman is forcing the hired-sunglasses dude to tell her who sent him to mess up all the chrome in her apartment where she sits in a towel and stares at a picture of her brother who was killed in a motorcycle accident, when Lila and I see this guy with his hands behind his back walking very slowly across the Sovereign carpet staring straight down like the chivalrous code of the wisdom of the ancients was encoded in stray kernels of popcorn that it was my turn to suck up before closing.
“At this point,” says the woman who I’m beginning to remember was in the air force but was thrown out for insubordination, “we are departing for regions unknown.”
This guy was not from Mercer Island. He was older than me. He was the age where chivalry has rewarded you, I hope I hope I hope, and he was carrying a jacket. When he reached the two escalators, he stopped looking at the carpet and looked at both of us, and then he did what I would have done, which is go over to Lila.
“Hey,” he said, “has anybody turned in a pair of keys? Two keys, on a ring?”
“Turned in?” Lila said, chewing her beautiful gum. “I don’t think so.”
The guy frowned and then looked at me and I made a face to the guy like I don’t have your keys either. “Is there—could I check the lost and found or something?”
“We don’t really have like a lost and found,” Lila said. “We have a box with some sweaters in it, behind popcorn. But nobody turned in anything tonight. Did you lose them tonight?”
“Yeah,” the guy said. “I don’t know when, but tonight. Two keys on a ring. I can’t find them. I’ve been looking all over the parking lot and I went back to the restaurant where we ate so, um, I thought I’d try here.”
“Sorry,” Lila said. She looked at this guy and shrugged just a little little bit. It was sort of a gorgeous sneak preview of the “Sorry” shrug supercombo that I would get some day if I actually bought the flowers and laid them at her gorgeous hardcore rap-star sneakers, and maybe that’s why I spoke up. Or maybe, probably, it was the jacket. Maybe it was the pretty dream of a time when my fireproof vest would be nowhere and if someone asked me, like at a party where everything is poured into real glasses, did you ever work at the Sovereign Cinemaplex, I would call across my chrome Manhattan place to my wife and say, “Lila? Remember like a hundred years ago when we used to rip tickets in half? This guy in the jacket wants to know about it,” and we’d all shout the healthy, excited laugh of people with ice in their drinks who can stay out as late as they want, a time in my life when sorry wouldn’t be good enough when I’ve lost my keys and I’m looking for them on the filthy floor and hoping against hope against hope for a chivalrous squire to say “What movie were you in?”
“What movie were you in?” I asked. Yeah.
The guy sighed. “That one with all of those skinny women kicking things,” he said. “You know, Kickass.”
“The Movie,” I said, and I said it perfect. I know because the guy gave me a little smile like he and I knew the same perfect code of: this world is suckier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys. The kickass rookie women smile at the famous guy the same way after the three of them break up a fight at the biker bar where they go to get to know each other over a product-placement beer by pounding this bandanna asshole against a heavy metal jukebox playing a song that was popular a million years ago when my parents roamed the earth free and loose. “Let’s get to work,” the famous guy says, and the women nod, like yeah I know, I know so well that you didn’t need to say it but you’re not at all geeky and overtalkative for saying it anyway. I walked over to Lila’s escalator and reached down to the flashlight they make us wear, clipped to my belt, bouncing along my thigh like a bonus helping of embarrassing. I held it up for the guy. “Let’s get to work, check it out. We can go in there and see if it’s on the floor. See if you dropped it.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiled again, my chivalrous compadre. “Thanks.”
Lila was looking at me with some gorgeous indecisive loveliness, like she couldn’t decide if I was cool because I could talk to this guy, like we were two cool guys standing near her, or if I’d just dragged him down and we were two lame guys who weren’t Keith and that was all we had to offer. “There’s people in there,” she said. “The movie is playing.”
“We won’t bother them,” I said. “We won’t bother the movie patrons.” I said a bullshit word like patrons so the guy would know that I didn’t think those people would stop us for a second. “This guy lost his keys,” I said. “It’s more important than a movie. We’ll be quiet.”
“Thanks,” the guy said, nodding at me.
“Okay?” I said to Lila, and I watched her consult. She consulted the same imagination that bought that lipstick, and made her face a sexy promise for anyone who happened to have at least one working eye in their yearning little head. What principles from the life of Sir Gawain do you see practiced in your own life? asks Ms. Wylie’s essay question which is due on Monday, and I watched Lila consult her imagination. I might be the guy practicing chivalry, I hope I hope she was thinking. “Okay?” I said. “Okay?”
“Whatever,” she said. “Be careful out there.”
By this time the threesome had cornered the main suspect, but it was so early in the movie you knew he couldn’t be the right guy, even if you didn’t actually see that the real mastermind had created a false digital trail by utilizing the satellite time he exchanged for rubies in the shadowy scene they filmed in a hurry. “Your training is over,” the famous guy tells the slightly hotter of the two women after she kicks in the door before he can, and we opened the swinging doors at the back of the theater and cast a fine yellow slice of light, all laid out as a triangle on the carpet like a big piece of pie. Some heads swiveled and swiveled back to the sputtering wrong suspect, who they made a sissy for comic relief.
“Where were you?” I said. “Where was your seat?”
“She wanted to be toward the back,” he said and his jacket shrugged in the closing light of the door. “She said it was going to be loud.”
He led the way. “But there are like fifteen speakers all over the walls,” I said. “You can’t escape a movie loud like this.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said grimly.
“Shut up,” said someone who got himself an aisle seat so as to show the world, Hey, I got boots. The guy glared and for a minute I thought that Kickass might start playing on one more screen, if you know what I mean. Wicked boot man didn’t want any real-life audio to interfere with the famous guy saying, “Of course! It’s a false digital trail,” but my guy was all set with the chivalry secret weapon.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” and in the light of the next morning in front of police headquarters I was so fucking proud of him. Chivalrous chivalrous with the “I’m very sorry” and the “sir,” and without a sword being drawn my man Gawain made the guy embarrassed and wearing boots. “I heard about your shenanigans last night,” the Chief said all grumpy on the screen, but I knew my guy was shenanigan-free.
He stopped in the aisle. “Here I think,” he said, and it was pretty empty. He moved my flashlight slightly and we saw some couple making out and a few bored alone men. “Or a row up or down, or two rows, I don’t know.”
“We’ll find it,” I said. “We’ll look.”
“I hope so,” the guy said. “I got a girl outside and she’s not that happy at me about it.”
“Outside?” I said. It was cold outside, what else is new in this part of the world.
“Smoking,” he said. “She’s a smoker. A smoker, and she’s a dream, and I think she might vanish if I don’t find those goddamn keys on a ring if you know what I mean.”
I knew what he meant and felt for him, to ge
t a girl and then not be able to bring her indoors. My pal Garth blew it almost the same way after a girl he met at camp invited him down to San Francisco for a weekend. He has the kind of parents who always said no, so he saved the money himself and took the bus down, listening to a mix I made him over and over, while I stood by the phone to vouch that he was in the shower if they called. My man Garth slapped on aftershave in the station rest room so the smell of his sweat would be invisible. Picture it like a movie. Play it like a movie in your head, the montage of his Saturday, of a brunch with her parents and a walk alone across that beautiful bridge, kissing with tongue in the exact middle of it, like a love song playing for the lovely parts of the movie, some obvious love song previously unreleased by the original artist and now a theme for Garth’s motion-picture weekend with Kate, with the lyrics all hooked up to them so if it was “Everything I Do, I Do It for You,” it would be “Everything Garth Does, He Does It for Kate.”
But then he lost the fifty bucks. He took her to the movies for some French thing she wanted and had already called down on his parents’ phone to the French restaurant to reserve a dinner afterwards and was prepared to catch hell for it when the phone bill came. But the hell of losing one of his hard-saved fifty-dollar bills and to scour the floor as the audience poured out, willing himself not to cry as he brushed the spilled kernels of someone else’s date to look for it in the nothing and gum spread out before him, while Kate stood embarrassed with her purse and finally stammer to admit the dinner couldn’t happen? Who can fucking dare to tell me that love is intangible when it’s so obvious that it’s not? The people who say intangible have places of their own. It’s not intangible. Garth felt it. He felt it with the lost fifty dollars on the floor. I felt it. Garth and Kate did not have sex that weekend and never wrote again in their embarrassment. “Get down!” the hero says as the windows explode, and everyone ducks so the shatter won’t rip them up. I got down on the ground all fierce with fucking chivalrous determination to find this guy Gawain’s keys, because the good guys have to be teammates or the masterminds like Dr. Drecko will make life permanently harsh, Esmeralda!
I’ve seen this movie so many times.
Gawain ducked down one row ahead of me near the make-outs, and I scanned the ugly floor with my flashlight with an imaginary rap song fired up in my head about motherfuckers finding motherfucking keys boy, as the water rose in the basement chamber with the girls all chained together and their costumes getting wet and sexy, and I found them right as the handcuffs broke.
“Hey,” I said, and swallowed my Gawain and offered a gratitude prayer someplace that I hadn’t said it out loud. “Hey, I found your keys.”
The make-out couple stopped with the tongue to shush me and it was a miracle like the ignition keys being in the helicopter when they finally reach the roof without a second to lose. It was Keith and some other chick. She had a scarf draped around her and he was all guilty with the lipstick and he stared, knowing me, seesawing between humble and angry. He made the wrong choice.
“Shut up, Joe,” he said. “And stop shining that light or I’ll kick your ass. Go sell popcorn or whatever. You’re the usher.”
“And you’re Lila’s boyfriend,” I said.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the girl, and then it popped into her head to play with Keith’s hair.
“Lila and I have an arrangement,” Keith said.
“Then you won’t mind me mentioning that,” I said, “when I return to the escalator, sir.” I made good with my posture. “Lila is a lady,” I said, “kind and true. The most beautiful here is Lila, flashing her gray eye. No one has ever seen anyone lovelier in his day. The first I gazed upon her face I knew. It was in sixth grade and that girl Allison was crying about something in the stairwell, and Lila was hugging her so tight and nicely. She was hugging her out of kindness. She even said ssh, a person who has the kindness to say ssh when someone is brokenhearted. I watched her kind small head tucked on top of Allison’s shoulder and noticed for the first time the lovely story of her, and how gorgeous it would be to stay on this island with her throughout high school, quietly loving her all this time. It’s obvious she’s a person to love and obviously I love her. Love is this clear thing of revering her, lending your chivalry to her pretty pants and the way she tosses her hair up behind her on rare sunny days and those gray eyes, the luscious gray of them like when the clouds are beautiful even if you’re not buzzed, and so how fucking dare you, Keith. How dare you with the insults to her character by saying there’s an arrangement. Lila has honor, Keith, so how dare you, and with this girl I think I recognize from the winter musical!”
By now people were shushing us and plus I didn’t really say all that, especially the parts I stole from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. “You don’t have to say it,” the stripper spy says at the end of the movie and ruffles the famous guy’s hair all shiny in the spinning red light of the sirens. It wasn’t the end yet but I knew what was coming. Keith stood up and sort of punched me like pizza dough at my old job, right on WELCOME TO THE BIG SHOW!
“If you fucking tell Lila anything—” he said.
“What’s up?” my guy said, standing up with a handful of something. “Hey,” he said, because Keith was still grabbing my vest. The guy reached out quietly and Keith put his hand down.
“This is personal,” Keith said, suddenly all whiny.
“He was bothering us,” said the temptress.
“This guy’s here because of me.” My man Gawain stepped into the aisle right beside me as if almost for color guard. “He’s helping me. Just chill. The villain gets his ass defeated, if you’re worried.”
“I’m not worried,” Keith said, and sat down.
“Then sit down,” Gawain said.
“I found your keys so let’s go,” I said to him. We paused anyway and looked down at the couple writhing in the light of the big boom as the truck went off the bridge. It looked dangerous but the hero whooped like a rodeo. “Enjoy the show,” I said calmly, “sir.”
We strode the aisle like we were medals of honor, or at least deserved them. We stopped underneath the EXIT sign to share the spoils, the light emerald on our faces like the whole night was green. It was a pretty green night.
“Do you really have my keys?” Gawain said.
I held them out to see and then tossed them into the air for him to catch with confidence and he did. “Thanks,” he said, “and I found something for you.”
He held a hand in front of my eyes like he’d caught a frog down by the old-time creek, and then unfurled his fingers for me. Inside was a thing of beauty. It was a chain, of some dark metal, tiny thick links all wrung together so it looked like an elegant kind of tough that’s hard to find outside of certain album covers. The chain was all curled around itself like something sleeping in a lair, but at rest in the center was the beautiful pendant. Shiny with special curlicues and all ornate like a palace, it was caught mid-prance for the world to see: a unicorn, man, mighty and lovely, with some kind of tiny semiprecious stones, one on the eye, one on the tip of the horn, and a three-stone glitter of a neck harness. Fucking wow.
“I thought you could give it to the girl,” he said. “You know, by the other escalator. Looks like something that might win her heart.”
“You could tell I like her?” I asked him.
He closed his hand and then held it over mine and dribbled the necklace into my sweaty palm. “It’s obvious,” he said, and then nodded back to Screen Four. “And now maybe you have a chance, huh? With that guy Keith blowing it.”
“You heard?” I said. “You heard me?”
“I thought you did well,” he said, reshouldering his jacket. “I only stepped in when it seemed like you needed backup.”
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