Crying at Movies

by John Manderino

  “Done,” I told her. “Leave it.”

  “Not too creepy?”

  “What’s creepy?”

  “The way they’re smiling.”

  “They’re happy. What’s wrong with that?”

  “They look like they’re on medication.”

  “Just leave it, Nan, will ya?” I got up with my empty cereal box and trudged to the door.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I don’t suppose you know anything about pi.”

  “I know I like pie.”

  “What’s your favorite?”

  “Pumpkin.”

  “That’s a good one.”

  “What about you?”

  “I don’t know. Apple, I guess.”

  She nodded.

  I told her goodnight and went to bed. What the hell, it wouldn’t be the first test I ever flunked.

  HAMLET

  My senior year in high school I was depressed a lot and hated everything, everything was sickening, so when I read, with difficulty, Shakespeare’s Hamlet for Miss Giancola’s English class I was pleased to see how depressed and disgusted the main character was, how suicidal even:

  “To be or not to be …”

  Miss Giancola told us Hamlet was “melancholy,” a new word, meaning unhappy in a deep, thoughtful way.

  I started going around thinking of myself as melancholy, thinking of myself as Hamlet: How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world, I would reflect on my way to gym class, or in lunch line with my tray, or staring out the bus window. Fie upon it, fie.

  Miss Giancola said Prince Hamlet was a tormented young man, torn between thought and action.

  I knew that feeling.

  She said he was a tragic hero.

  Exactly.

  Then, over one Thursday and Friday, she set up a screen in front of the room, a projector in the back, and showed us the movie version, starring Laurence Olivier.

  It was old, in black and white, with a lot of large gloomy shadows, and that seemed right, but I didn’t like Laurence Olivier, not at all. He had plenty of melancholy, tons of it, but there was something smug about him, as if being melancholy made him better than everyone. Even when he was calling himself names—a rogue, a drab, an ass, a scullion—it only added to his smugness, for after all, who in the entire castle, who in all of Denmark, would be half so hard on himself? Plus, he dressed like a ballet dancer.

  He was sickening and I hated him.

  The one person in the movie who seemed to be in real pain was the murderous king, especially when he tries to pray for forgiveness, but knows he’s not really sorry. “Oh wretched state, oh bosom black as death!” he cries, without a trace of pleasure.

  “To be,” Laurence Olivier whispers with a lofty look on his smooth face, near the edge of a high cliff, “or not to be.” But even if you haven’t read the play, you know he’s not going to jump.

  At the end of the movie, everyone is dead but Horatio, Miss Giancola turned the lights back on and gave us an assignment for the weekend: two hundred words, Why Hamlet Procrastinates. Then the bell, and we left the room.

  I headed down the loud crowded hallway towards the gym. How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, I began to myself, but then I quit. It wasn’t working. I felt more like Laurence Olivier than Hamlet. And I hated Laurence Olivier. Hated gym class, hated school, hated everything.

  ELVIRA MADIGAN

  The first time I ever had sex was early in my freshman year at college, with an aggressive little freckle-faced girl named Melissa, who helped me out of my clothes in the storage room of the student-center cafeteria where we bussed tables together three evenings a week. “Don’t be nervous,” she told me.

  It was all over in a minute, possibly less. But I fell in love.

  After that one time, though, Melissa wouldn’t have sex with me anymore. I was too much like a rabbit. That was how she put it. “Sorry, you’re too much like a rabbit.” I had never seen rabbits having sex, but I could imagine them: quick and feverish and comical-looking.

  Seeing her at work became very painful, the way she looked—God, so cute—in her starched white coat, the sleeves down around her knuckles, and the way she ignored me:

  Sorry, you’re too much like a rabbit.

  I needed some kind of instruction. But where could I possibly go? I felt so desperate I ended up talking to my roommate one night, deliberately turning in when he did so I could speak across the dark between our beds.

  “Hey, Greg?”

  “What.”

  I hesitated. “Listen …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I went ahead: “How do you have sex with a woman so that she enjoys it too?”

  He said quietly, “Jesus,” turning over the other way.

  I always felt like he considered me a rather creepy guy and now I had surely confirmed it. He had a girlfriend Kathy, a set of buddies, an electric Coors sign on his wall along with a poster of W.C. Fields in a top hat playing cards. I didn’t even have a poster. I had thought about getting one, but I felt a poster ought to say something about yourself, and what could I possibly say?

  Then I saw in the school paper, there was this movie in town at the Egyptian Theater, a love story from Sweden, which might be instructive.

  The Egyptian Theater was very old, with a large heavy curtain in front of the screen, a high ceiling studded with tiny stars, and way up there along the walls these life-sized Egyptian figures, each one lit from its pedestal with a spooky blue light.

  Sitting there waiting for the curtain to open, I felt some deep mystery was about to be revealed.

  Turned out, there wasn’t any actual sex in the movie at all. It was definitely a love story, and Swedish—you had to read what they were saying—but they never even took their clothes off.

  Even so, I was glad I went.

  It was about this young cavalry officer who deserts the army to run off with a beautiful circus tightrope-walker, and they’re so in love it’s like they’re in another world, running around a sunny field in slow-motion, chasing little white butterflies, for example, laughing like they can hardly believe how happy they are, this beautiful dreamy Mozart music meanwhile playing.

  “I barely recognize myself,” he says to her at one point.

  “Now I know who I am,” she says to him.

  But meanwhile the real world is still out there, brutal and stupid, and closing in.

  So they kill themselves.

  They go on a picnic and in their basket bring hardboiled eggs, bread, wine, cheese and a pistol. He tries to shoot her while they’re hugging under a tree but he can’t do it, so she gets up and goes wandering around the field. We see him aiming the pistol. Then we see her about to cup a butterfly in her palms. There’s a gunshot and the frame freezes. She still has a tiny smile on her face. There’s another gunshot and the screen goes black.

  I sat there, letting everyone leave. Then I got up slowly.

  I went wandering around, up and down side streets. It was a warm October night, with a moon, and as I walked I thought about the soldier and the circus girl, about Melissa, about love, oh love …

  I ended up at the lagoon, under a tree. There was no one around, just some ducks muttering in the weeds on the other side. I sat there, that dreamy theme music still playing in my head. Now and then the silhouette of a duck would come gliding, stately, through the wiggling line of moonlight on the water.

  God, I thought. If only Melissa were here right now. I would not be like a rabbit. I would kiss her eyelids, carefully, one and then the other, cupping her face in my hands.

  THE GRADUATE

  As soon as we stepped from the theater into the lobby, Marcia said she had to use the ladies room and walked off. I waited, leaning against the wall, smoking a Salem.

  “Enjoy your popcorn?” a guy asked me, walking by, and his girlfriend threw back her head and lau
ghed.

  I didn’t understand.

  Then I noticed the front of my sweater. It was covered with popcorn—it was made of popcorn. There were whole kernels, fragments, even some seeds in there. I began frantically brushing and picking and pulling them off, finishing just in time.

  “Go for some coffee?” I asked Marcia, leaning against the wall once again, smoking a Salem.

  Marcia was my roommate Eric’s girlfriend’s roommate. I’d only met her once, just for a minute, but the next day she actually called me up and asked me out, which bewildered me because she was tall, a senior, an English major, on the pretty side, and I was short, a sophomore, Undecided, on the homely side. But I told her, “Yeah. Sure. You bet.”

  The movie was her idea.

  Afterwards we went for coffee at the student center, sitting across from each other in a booth, sharing an ashtray. Turned out, this was her third time seeing the movie. I thought parts of it were funny and it was pretty exciting towards the end, but Marcia loved the movie—her word— especially Dustin Hoffman.

  “You mean … as an actor?”

  “I mean Ben,” she said. “Benjamin.”

  That was the guy Dustin Hoffman played.

  “You love Benjamin?”

  She sipped her coffee.

  She loved Benjamin.

  Once again I was bewildered. First of all, Benjamin was short and looked like a rodent. Plus, he was this very depressed, very depressing guy. I considered it a major flaw in the movie to have someone as beautiful as Elaine be interested in a guy like Benjamin. It just didn’t seem believable. I could see her with Steve McQueen, someone like that. But Dustin Hoffman. Even his voice was wimpy. Whiny, in fact.

  I asked Marcia, right up front, what she found so attractive about Dustin Hoffman—or Benjamin—either one.

  “He’s very sad, very sensitive, very sweet,” she said, just like that.

  I told her I thought he was very annoying.

  “Annoying?” she said, her hackles up.

  “Moping around, staring at his goldfish …”

  She sat there shaking her head, just sat there looking at me and shaking her head.

  “What,” I said.

  She tried to explain why Benjamin was so unhappy. It was because he was spiritually unfulfilled. He had all these achievements and material things, everything society says is supposed to make you happy, but he felt totally empty inside. She said that was such a great moment in the movie when his expensive little sports car runs out of gas, the symbolism of it.

  I said, “You can tell you’re an English major.”

  She lifted her chin. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. I’m just saying.”

  She sighed, like it was hopeless even talking to me, and sipped her coffee.

  I sipped mine.

  This wasn’t working out.

  She didn’t like me very much, that was the problem. And I didn’t like her a hell of a lot either, come to that. But she was definitely on the pretty side and she wasn’t even wearing any make-up. I wanted her to like me so we could go out again and possibly eventually have sex together and then our different tastes in movies wouldn’t matter so much.

  “Marcia?”

  “What.”

  “Would you like a muffin?”

  “You know what’s so ironic?” she said, giving a little ironic laugh. “I wanted to go out with you because you look like Dustin Hoffman and I thought maybe—”

  “Wait a minute, hold it.”

  “What.”

  “You think I look like Dustin Hoffman?”

  “Well, you’re short, and you have a big nose, and you’re kind of sad-looking, and I thought maybe you’d be like Benjamin.” She shook her head and said, “Boy,” meaning boy was she ever wrong about that.

  We sat there.

  I told her I could get pretty sad sometimes. “Damn sad, as a matter of fact.”

  “Right,” she said, looking off, smoking.

  I told her the popcorn-on-my-sweater story, how that girl had thrown back her head and laughed at me standing there all sad and covered with popcorn.

  It didn’t move her at all. She wanted to know how I could have gotten that much popcorn on my sweater—did I have trouble finding my mouth in the dark?

  We finished our coffee and I walked her home.

  I said goodnight outside the front door of her building and didn’t even bother asking for another date. I just turned and walked off, with my head hung, hands deep in my pockets, dragging my feet …

  “Wait,” Marcia said.

  I almost burst out laughing. I almost blew it.

  LA DOLCE VITA

  I agreed with Marcia about Fellini using water as a unifying metaphor, especially in the fountain scene. “The Fountain of Life, right?”

  “Very good,” she said, lying naked beside me, sharing a Salem.

  “He’s there with her,” I went on, “in the fountain, water falling all around …”

  “So baptismal,” she observed.

  “Very much so,” I agreed. “Yes.”

  We belonged to the University Foreign Film Society, which featured a discussion each week after the movie, but we never stayed for it, preferring to return to her apartment for sex, afterwards discussing the movie ourselves. So far we’d seen Bergman’s Seventh Seal, which we both considered completely brilliant; Truffaut’s Breathless, which I thought was completely brilliant, but Marcia regarded as somewhat flawed; Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, which we agreed was excellent, but not quite brilliant; and tonight’s La Dolce Vita, which we hadn’t decided on yet.

  “But then, what happens next?” she said. “Remember?”

  “I’m trying to think …”

  “Suddenly … ?”

  “He kisses her?”

  “The water, what happens to the water.”

  “Right, it’s turned off. The fountain goes dry. They’re just standing there.”

  “Modern man,” she said, “in a spiritual drought.”

  “Bingo.”

  She lit another cigarette.

  I said something about Anita Ekberg having remarkably large breasts.

  “That’s real insightful.”

  “No, I’m saying, they were probably, you know …”

  “Fake?”

  “Symbolic.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know … the milk of human kindness?”

  She laughed, getting up. “I gotta pee.”

  I lay there smoking, staring up at a complicated network of cracks in the ceiling. During the movie I felt sure they would eventually show Anita Ekberg’s entire tits, this being an Italian movie, but they never did. Marcia’s tits were tiny but I liked them and in fact I liked her entire long scrawny body quite a lot. Sometimes during sex I felt like we must be in love, or very nearly, the heated way we carried on and the things we said, looking each other dead in the eye, like lovers in a European movie—film, I mean. She was always correcting me about that: America made movies, Europe made films.

  When she came back from the bathroom we talked some more about La Dolce Vita and the various ways Fellini showed modern man in a spiritual drought, and decided the film was completely brilliant, and had some more sex.

  Afterwards she lit another cigarette. I waited for her to pass it to me but she didn’t. She lay there staring up at the ceiling and told me she wished to be alone.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What’d I do?”

  “Please just go.”

  “Tell me. What’d I do?”

  “Please? Just go?”

  I didn’t understand. I thought I’d performed pretty well, sexually and conversationally. But this was her apartment, so I got up and started pulling on my clothes.

  “What are you doing?” she said, sitting up.

  “You told me to go. So I’m going.”

  “Just like that?”

  I shrugged. “It’s your a
partment.”

  “You could at least pretend to be hurt.”

  “I am hurt. I don’t have to pretend.”

  “Well? So?”

  I looked at her.

  She seemed to be waiting.

  I told her, “I don’t understand. What do you want me to do?”

  “Something, for God sakes.”

  It occurred to me what she wanted. She wanted a scene. I did my best. Turning up my palms I said to her, “I mean, you just tell me to go? Like I’m some kind of a …”

  “Go ahead. Say it,” she told me, stabbing out her cigarette in the ash tray. “You’ve been wanting to. Let’s hear it. Let’s have it allll out.”

  “Like I’m some kind of a …” I needed a script. “Some kind of a …”

  “Oh, forget it,” she said, and lay back down.

  “Fine,” I told her, “gladly,” and resumed getting dressed.

  She sat up again. “Wait, John. Please don’t go? I’m so afraid.” She really looked it too.

  “Afraid of what,” I asked her.

  She lay back again, staring at the ceiling. “Of Nothing,” she said. “The great … vast … endless … absolute … Nothing.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “Yes,” I said to her, deepening my voice a little. “I know what you mean.”

  “Hold me, John? Please hold me?”

  I reached down and pulled her bony body up into my arms.

  “Oh, God,” she said, “life is so devoid of meaning.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s like we’re in some kind of a … I don’t know, some kind of spiritual drought.”

  She started shaking and I held her tight and said her name because I thought she was crying, but she wasn’t, she was laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said, unable to stop.

  I let go of her, got up and once again resumed getting dressed. “I don’t need this bullshit, Marcia,” I told her, buttoning my shirt. “You know? I really and truly don’t need this.”

  “Oh, is that right,” she said, sitting up again. “So what do you need, John? Can you tell me? Do you even know? I’m serious. Do you?”

  “Well … I guess that pretty much depends on what you mean by ‘need.’ On the one hand—”