It Happened One Knife

by JEFFREY COHEN

  I was caught off guard by his question. “No. I mean, yes, but, no. See, I was hoping . . . that is, I wonder if you’d consider . . .”

  “Is that the way you always talk, or do you actually know about sentences?” Lillis asked me. I repeated the question in my mind a few times so I could tell my grandchildren how the brilliant comedian had torn me down.

  “He knows sentences,” my father defended me. “And I don’t mean like ‘seven to ten years for armed robbery,’ either. ”

  Lillis smiled. Dad could establish a genial rapport with a crocodile; it’s why he had been a brilliant salesman for four decades. “It’s nice to see you can keep up, anyway,” Lillis told him. “Was he just an off day for you, or do you think your wife had a thing going with the mailman?”

  If anyone else had said it, Dad would have picked up the table lamp and crowned him with it. But from Lillis, you knew it was the part of his image that he could still control. It must have been a terrific burden to have to insult everyone you meet, and make them enjoy it at the same time.

  “Mom didn’t like the mailman,” I told him. “She said he only brought bills. But I do look a little like the dry cleaner.”

  Dad looked a little shocked, but Lillis laughed. “Welcome to the same conversation, kid,” he said. Then he gave me a very careful look and said, “Okay. You didn’t drive up here today just to appall your father. What is it you came here to ask?”

  4

  “HARRY Lillis is coming to your theatre?” Sharon asked.

  “What did I ask you?” I reminded her.

  We sat in the late September sunshine, in the outdoor section of C’est Moi!, a misnamed restaurant that served burgers and sandwiches (although wraps and salads had recently made their way to the menu) on Edison Avenue, the main drag of Midland Heights. The temperature was in the low seventies, probably the last time we’d see that this year, and Sharon had suggested we take our weekly luncheon al fresco.

  “Not to call it ‘your theatre,’ ” she recited. “But do I have to say Comedy Tonight every time?”

  “No, sometimes you can refer to it as ‘The State’s Only All-Comedy Movie Theatre,’ but only if you say it loudly, and with a couple of exclamation points,” I answered. “I can use all the publicity I can get. And yes, Harry Lillis will be there a week from today.”

  “To get you publicity.” Sharon bit into a turkey club. Mayonnaise would have squirted out on anyone else’s lip, but it knew better than to try that with my ex-wife. She emits a frequency that keeps dirt off her body through sheer intimidation.

  “To celebrate his distinguished career,” I countered. “The poor man almost never leaves the Home anymore. This will show him that people still love his work.” I speared a piece of celery from my garden salad—I’m trying to get back to where my waistline once belonged—and ranch dressing practically leapt off the fork onto my shirt. Had to make it past the hand holding the napkin, too. It was very persistent ranch dressing.

  “And it will get you publicity.”

  I dabbed at the spot on my shirt. “Is that such a crime? The theatre hasn’t exactly turned central New Jersey on its ear with popularity. What’s wrong with drawing a little attention? ” I asked.

  Sharon stared off into space as she droned, “Nothing.” Then she sat and stared some more. I knew that meant something was coming out of left field, and I braced myself for it.

  But then Sharon sighed, and now I knew it was serious. This was the way she’d acted just before she told me that she and Gregory were, let’s say, more than professional acquaintances.

  “We’ve never talked about The Kiss,” she said. The capital letters were implicit in the way she said it.

  I exhaled. “You had me worried for a minute,” I said. “I thought you were going to say you’re moving to Anchorage, Alaska, and couldn’t decide how to tell me.”

  Her eyes narrowed a little. I put down my fork. “Well, we’ve never talked about it,” she reiterated.

  I decided to act casual, and went back to spearing green things that used to be in the earth. “So we haven’t talked about it,” I said. “We kissed in my office, once, four months ago. It hasn’t happened again. What is it you want to say?”

  She glared at me for a time. “You’re being impossible.”

  “I’m not, you know. If I were impossible, by definition you’d be eating alone.”

  When you’ve known someone for ten years, and were married to her for six of them, you get to know her expressions. Sharon’s look repeated her last sentence.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about the kiss.”

  “No. It’s obvious you don’t want to.” There were reasons we got divorced that had nothing to do with Gregory. Well, very little to do with Gregory.

  “Come on,” I said, now begging to participate in a conversation I’d rather have avoided. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

  Clearly, she had been rehearsing in her mind, because she dove right in: “I think the kiss meant something. I think we’ve both been trying to deny that it did, but the fact that we haven’t talked about it for all these months means it was significant. If it were casual, one of us would have mentioned it in passing. I know us; I think we need to talk about why we did that.”

  “Okay. We were in a small office, standing very close to each other, and I still find you very attractive,” I said. “We’ve been apart for almost two years. Longer, if you count the time we were still married but not talking to each other. So I slipped for a moment.”

  Sharon’s face said, “Oh, please,” while her voice said, “Come on, Elliot. It’s obvious. Both of us are trying to deflect our emotions and not dealing with the possibility that we might still have feelings for each other. We’re in classic avoidance mode.”

  I looked at her for a moment. “You and Gregory are in couples therapy, aren’t you?” I asked.

  She actually avoided my eyes. “Yes,” she said.

  “How’s that going?”

  “I’m not seeing a lot of effort on Gregory’s part to deal with his . . . jealousy.” Sharon’s second husband had behaved badly—okay, very badly—after he’d inadvertently witnessed The Kiss. He had, in fact, tried to commit violence on my person.

  “He’s blaming you,” I guessed.

  “And it’s so unfair,” Sharon nodded. “Okay, so maybe I reacted to some friction in our marriage by coming back to you for a minute, but come on! If he’d done the same thing, I wouldn’t have tried to kill the woman he’d kissed.”

  “I would have vaccinated her and given her a Purple Heart,” I said. That was probably a miscalculation.

  Sharon gave me a curdling stare. “You know, our marriage wasn’t exactly a Disneyland attraction, either.”

  “I don’t know. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride?”

  She laughed, in spite of herself. “Peter Pan’s Flight, I think.”

  “Star Tours.”

  Sharon laughed again, her giggle picking up speed now. It took her a moment or two to croak out, “Haunted Mansion.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot!”

  Sharon inexplicably dissolved into hysterics, and to be honest, I laughed for a while, too. Nothing either of us had said had been that funny, but it was one of those moments between couples. Ex-couples. People who used to be couples. You know.

  When she had recovered, Sharon put her hand over mine. “This is what I mean. We’re still good together.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I never said we weren’t. You know, the divorce wasn’t my idea.”

  “You filed the papers,” she reminded me.

  “I was convinced you’d be happier . . . elsewhere. Was I wrong?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” Sharon said, and suddenly, I didn’t know, either.

  I headed back to the theatre to get ready for the night’s showings, and to interview a kid about joining our cockeyed team of optimists at Comedy Tonight. I’d been meaning to hire an extra person for some time, and with the reopening, this se
emed like the logical moment. I had run a help wanted ad in the Press-Tribune, and got one call from a kid named Jonathan Goodwin.

  Sophie and Anthony were fine at what they did, but by definition, there were only two of them. Anthony was already in college; he’d be around a couple more years at most, and Sophie, now a high school senior, would be going off to college next September, most likely an all-female one, in the mood she was currently exhibiting. And unless she followed Anthony to Rutgers, it would probably prohibit commuting to work at Comedy Tonight. As if her education were more important than her part-time job.

  As it stood, both Sophie and Anthony worked five nights a week, including weekends. That meant I had three days (Friday to Sunday) with both of them in the theatre, and four days when the “staff” consisted of myself and one other person. Even in an operation as small as Comedy Tonight, that was too small a crew. I needed a swing person, and if the interview worked out, that would be Jonathan Goodwin.

  Jonathan, a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Midland Heights High School, had sounded so breathless on the phone (after I’d seen his e-mail application) that I worried for his level of excitement at the interview. He showed up a half hour early, a tall, skinny kid with a neck like a giraffe, dressed in a Monty Python shirt and a pair of shorts that hung down almost to his ankles, making me wonder if they still qualified as shorts. He also wore a pair of flip-flops normally associated with the area we Jerseyans call “down the shore.”

  “You always get this dressed up for business situations?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Jonathan said, head down. “This is my first job interview.”

  Oh, geez. Now the kid’s whole life of employment expectations was riding on my reaction. I’d have to be nice to him, something that usually makes me break out in a rash. “So, you’ve never had a job before?”

  He looked up with some anxiety, and shook his head. “Raking leaves for my mom,” he said. “Mowing the lawn.”

  “Guess that doesn’t really count, huh?”

  Jonathan hung his head again. “I guess not.”

  “You really need the money?” Maybe the kid’s mom was pushing him to get a job and he really didn’t want to, so he was acting like someone who’d rather be in front of his PlayStation.

  “No,” he said.

  A heck of a conversationalist, too.

  Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Why do you want the job, Jonathan?” I asked.

  He didn’t hesitate. “I love comedy,” he said without inflection.

  My eyes narrowed. “You mean like Old School? Knocked Up? Stuff like that?”

  Jonathan looked startled. “Well, yeah, I guess,” he said. “But really I like the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Jerry Lewis.” He pointed to his shirt. “Monty Python.”

  Uh-oh. “Do you know who Ernst Lubitsch was?” I asked Jonathan.

  He nodded enthusiastically. “He directed Ninotchka,” he said. “The Shop Around the Corner. To Be or Not to Be.”

  Damn! “Preston Sturges?”

  “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero, The Lady Eve.”

  I threw out a name he couldn’t possibly know. “Frank Tashlin?” I asked.

  “Son of Paleface, The Girl Can’t Help It, Cinderfella. He was also uncredited on The Lemon-Drop Kid, and did a lot of Warner Brothers cartoons.”

  I was defeated. “When can you start, Jonathan?” I asked, and he actually looked me in the eye. He grinned.

  We filled out the necessary paperwork, agreed he’d start the next night, and the minute Jonathan was out the door, Vic Testalone walked in. He wore the same expression Edgar Kennedy, famed “slow-burn” artist in Hal Roach comedies, had whenever someone would drop a piano on his foot or hit him in the face with a dead fish. That Hal Roach was a subtle guy.

  “Someone run over your pet ferret, Vic?” I asked.

  He looked around, as he always did, for a second seat in my office. As always, there wasn’t one. I barely had room for the one I was sitting on. “Yeah, you,” he said. “It wasn’t enough you tried to appeal to my good nature—despite the fact that I don’t have one—about the kid’s movie. You didn’t trust me to do the right thing . . .”

  “Should I have?”

  “Of course not,” he answered. “But it’s the lack of trust that hurts. Then you go and steal the kid’s movie so I can’t even tell him about Monitor Films and how they may be interested. What’s the point, if there’s no movie to show them?”

  Another nut job. “I didn’t steal the movie, Vic,” I told him.

  “Sure you didn’t. I suppose it was the work of the Sprocket Hole in the Wall Gang, riding willy-nilly around the country pilfering movies that could make some money for struggling distributor reps. Who else would have taken it, Elliot, seriously?”

  “Willy-nilly?”

  “I was under pressure,” Vic said.

  “How come I’m guilty until proven innocent? How come everybody comes in here assuming I stole the movie, and then dares me to prove I didn’t?”

  “Everybody?”

  “Anthony thinks I took it, too,” I told him. “What kind of insane do-gooder would I have to be to commit a felony in the name of saving Anthony from himself? What am I, his fairy godfather?”

  Vic leaned against my desk. “I don’t know. Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “Yes. I’m looking for another distribution company.”

  He guffawed. No, really. “Another one with a thirty-five-millimeter copy of Cracked Ice?” Vic asked.

  Okay, so he had me. “Where is it?” I asked, my pulse racing just a little.

  “Where’s Killin’ Time?” Vic asked.

  “How the hell would I know?”

  "Well then,” he said, “I guess I don’t know where Cracked Ice is, either.”

  5

  FRIDAY

  Cracked Ice (1956)

  A Very Special Attraction

  STANDING in front of the glass doors to my theatre in a rented tuxedo, I was mostly wishing the butterflies in my stomach would be captured by a tiny net wielded, perhaps, by the half of a turkey sandwich I’d had for lunch. We were waiting for Harry Lillis to arrive, and everyone who works at Comedy Tonight was excited (except Sophie, who wouldn’t work up any genuine enthusiasm unless Betty Friedan was bringing Gertrude Stein by to watch Diary of a Mad Housewife and An Unmarried Woman on a double bill. Maybe when her birthday came around, I’d book 9 to 5 for her, but I knew she wouldn’t appreciate the gesture).

  I was not, however, worried about our feature film arriving. Vic had caved in quickly about my booking a copy of Cracked Ice when I noted that I could easily call his boss and mention that a representative of Klassic Komedy Distributors was refusing to rent a film to the firm’s best customer. And who was Vic kidding, anyway: he wanted to see that movie on the big screen as much as I did.

  I’d held an inspection of the troops as soon as everyone was in the house, and found them attentive, impressed with their mission, and none wearing clothing that compared with that of the boss (that’s me): a tux that Fred Astaire himself would look upon with envy.

  Sophie had shown up in a power suit with lapels sharp enough to cause deep wounds if touched. Anthony—well, Anthony was upstairs in the projection booth, though he was wearing Dockers and a T-shirt with the poster from Amarcord on it, but our newest employee, Jonathan Goodwin . . . let’s just say that Jonathan was not exactly reflecting the elegance of the evening in his chosen attire.

  One of the reasons I’d hired Jonathan was because he’d worn a Monty Python T-shirt to the interview, and that had to count for something. The problem right now was that he was wearing the same T-shirt again; in fact, he’d been wearing it almost every day since he started a week ago, and I wasn’t sure it had been washed since I’d hired him. It created a contrast to my tuxedo that I felt was not optimal for the paying customers.

  The other problem was that Harry Lillis hadn’t shown up yet, and ther
efore the tuxedo would soon begin to show sweat stains.

  “I thought I made it clear that tonight was special,” I told Jonathan, who seemed uncomfortable and was avoiding eye contact.

  “You did,” he said, bewildered. “Why?”

  There was no point in arguing it: I don’t make my staff wear uniforms, mostly because I don’t want to pay for uniforms (and okay, because I think uniforms are dumb), and it wasn’t as if Jonathan had spare clothing at the theatre. Anyway, it would have taken me an hour to explain to him why his attire was less than appropriate for an occasion of this magnitude.

  Besides, when I’d told Jonathan (on his first day of work) that we’d be expecting Harry Lillis less than a week later, he had almost wet himself. Turned out he was at least as big a Lillis and Townes fan as I was, so Jonathan was probably more nervous tonight than I was, and that was saying something.

  I decided to go up to the projection booth, even though I knew Anthony was perhaps a tad distracted by another issue. Another issue we’d discussed at least twice a day for a good number of days, now.

  “Why did you steal my film?”

  “I’m tired of saying it, Anthony: I didn’t steal your movie. I only told you it was missing. Don’t shoot the messenger.”

  “You were against my starting my career now, weren’t you, Mr. Freed?”

  “Anthony. I’m only the guy who gave you a job. I like you, but I’m not so caught up in your life that I’d perform a felony because I thought you needed a life lesson. You’re aware I don’t have any children. It’s by design.”

  “You got divorced.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Why did you steal my film?”

  “I’m going to tell you this one more time: I have no idea where your movie is. I never saw the reels of film after you carried them up to the projection booth. I walked in after the showing, and they were gone. I didn’t steal your movie, Anthony.”

  “You didn’t like Killin’ Time, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. I didn’t care much for Hostel, either. But I didn’t drive from theatre to theatre, pilfering prints. I’m not a thief, Anthony, and I’m starting to get just a little insulted by your constant insinuations that I am. I think you’re a nice kid. I’m glad you got to make your movie. I was happy to screen it here in the theatre for you. I have absolutely no motivation to take it away from you, and if I knew where it was, I would gladly go get it and deliver it safely into your hands. If you want to quit your education and plunge headlong into a business that offers a .000001 percent chance of success, I would disagree, but I wouldn’t stand in your way. Listen carefully, Anthony: I didn’t steal your movie.”