Movie (not like a)
by Adam Berlin
I walk to her, runway-walking, eyes away like I’d walked, looking at her but my eyes not there and making that pressing in my ears that makes me more not there, not really, and when I walk everyone around me has no edges so there’s no one, not really, just thick brush strokes and the feel of new clothes on skin.
I walk away from her.
I stop.
I walk to her, eyes there, looking at her and when I’m close I squint cliché-movie-star but eyes there so she can see it’s not just posing, not just playing.
I sit down.
“I know the difference,” I say.
“Okay.”
“The first was a cover. The second wasn’t. And you saw the difference, so I don’t even have to say it, but I’m saying it.”
“Okay.”
“And I know the difference between sad and Hollywood sad. I know sad doesn’t disappear from one scene to the next. But anyone who says life is more beautiful than it is when they’re high is lying.”
“What about low highs?”
“They’re still highs. You know that or you wouldn’t have asked.”
“Maybe,” she says.
“My low highs are still highs. And my high highs, for me it’s that movie feeling, or it’s driving or drinking or both, but I know anyone who knows anything about living knows, if they’re not lying to themselves, that without the high, life is less. Sometimes I just want to drink and sometimes I just want to drive and sometimes I want to go to the movies.”
We sit there and it’s all noise, people-noise loudest, drinking-volume loud, and behind that cars driving the overpass behind us and behind that but not really bubbles in my beer rising, air through liquid, fortifying the foam on top.
“I’ll take you drinking and driving one day. Or if you don’t want to do that, I’ll take you to one of the movies I like. That’s all they did back then, drinking and smoking and driving smooth roads and everything possible.”
“Tell me some of your favorite movies,” she says.
“They’re not all great movies. Some of them aren’t even good. But they make me feel great, the way they look and even the way they manipulate, even when I see how manipulative they’re being, they still feel great.”
“Tell me some.”
“The Prize with Paul Newman and The Fugitive Kind with Marlon Brando and Bullitt with Steve McQueen and early James Bonds where the villains were characters instead of cartoons and there was more dialogue than special effects and Sean Connery was Bond and not those others that followed, or lesser-known movies with Richard Burton when he was young or George Peppard, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, those movies when color was Technicolor, and a lot of foreign movies, the ones with that old Hollywood feel even if they weren’t shot in Hollywood, movies with Oliver Reed and Jean-Paul Belmondo.”
“I don’t know most of them. I know some of the names, but I didn’t see the movies. I saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
She takes a kernel, bites into it, chews. She’s eating her popcorn kernel by kernel. I could never do that. And she’s taking me in.
“Which one are you?” she says.
“I’m me.”
“I think you want to live a movie.”
“Let’s drink and drive. I’ll show you real.”
“And live a movie.”
“That’s right. Not like a movie.”
“No simile.”
“No likes. A movie isn’t a like. It’s a movie.”
She puts a kernel in her mouth, chews.
“How do you get when you drink heavy?” she says. “When you drink so heavy you can’t drive?”
“Do you love me?”
She smiles and then her mouth closes, only a small space between her lips and the dark there.
Adam Berlin has published four novels, including Belmondo Style (St. Martin’s Press/winner of The Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award) and Both Members of the Club (Texas A&M University Consortium Press/winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize). He teaches writing at John Jay College/CUNY in NYC and co-edits the litmag J Journal.
