Every Day Read Online Free Page B

the movies.”
    I didn’t say a word. I turned off the desk light, grabbed my school sweatshirt and some loose dollars from the bureau, and followed him out.
    •   •   •
    We drove into New York State and saw a double feature of Jules and Jim and The Four Hundred Blows. I tried not to read the subtitles. He sat with his elbows on the armrests and his hands pressed together under his chin as if in prayer. Occasionally he’d turn and whisper, “Watch,” then “See?” as if there was something more of note than the characters’ expressions or gestures could communicate and I’d be privileged to pick up on it. I’d seen both movies before, could have lived without The Four Hundred Blows, but I didn’t mind seeing Jules and Jim again, which has always struck me as the happiest possible portrait of a ménage à trois.
    “Can I ask you why we just did that?” I said when we left the theater
    “You may,” he said. “But first, I think, a hot beverage.”
    We drank coffee at a diner, three cups each. He wasn’t eating anything, so I didn’t push for food. He said, “So?”
    I felt like saying, “Noo?,” which is what my father would have said.
    “What about those movies?”
    “What about them?” Truffaut would have been disgusted.
    “They’re the first movies I ever saw. My mother took me. I was nine.”
    I did the prayer thing with my hands that he’d been doing as we watched the movies. “Are we doing sob stories? Because if we are I’ll have to remember my first movie too, and I’m not sure I can.”
    He laughed. “You’re tough. You’re not used to being up this late, are you?”
    I sprayed coffee all over the table, some on his shirt. “You can’t be serious.”
    “I wasn’t,” he said. “I know you and Tillinghast” (that was Pam’s last name) “never go to bed. Thus the coma when I came in to get you.”
    Pam did have a way of looking terminal when she slept, as if she’d never snap out of it.
    He went on, despite my sarcasm. He said he’d been writing for the movies, between four and six every morning. “I start just about the time you and Tillinghast come oozing up from the lake after the night’s dissipation. You look wonderful at that hour, like some undiscovered species, slow but undeniable.”
    It seemed he never stopped, never let his guard down, always saw and knew everything, was never without his arsenal of commentary and prediction.
    “Why are you telling me this?” I said, trying to sound bored.
    “Because you want to know what I do.”
    “Like fun.” I smiled. I’d given myself away.
    We talked about movies. I told him about seeing The Sound of Music three times in three days, first with my grandmother Liza, who somehow earned the nickname Pussy, then with my mother, then with a friend of Liza’s, Holly Butterfield, who loved taking me places because she had no grandchildren of her own. I told him about leaving the theater after the first time, spellbound, on a late fall afternoon, during theseason he and I were in now. It was cold. Somehow the excitement continued, I said. I tried to describe the clarity of color, of happening, in the movie as I saw it that day, how these seemed extendable to the sharp beauty of an early winter night, how this was a kind of love I hadn’t known before, this love for a movie, for all movies. He watched me. He put money on the table, then stood, and reached for my hand.
    “Where are we going now?” I asked, giving it. My questions had sounded unforgivably childish to me all evening.
    “Driving,” he said. “Continue the excitement.”
    •   •   •
    We drove through towns whose main streets were pitch black, reminders that we were out at the wrong time—had we no shame? We rattled through some covered bridges. He talked about ideas for movies, reasons to make them, what they meant, in terms of livelihood, for him.
    “Some teacher,” I said, too tired to care what I was saying.
    “It’s possible,