What Gayle Knew
I had not seen her in nine years when she walked into the empty theatre with the keys in her hand and the same way of holding her cigarette between the second and third fingers, as if the cigarette were something she had agreed to keep for someone else.
The Astoria was closing. That was the only reason I had come. They were tearing the building down in March to make a row of glass apartments no one I knew would ever live in, and the old projectionist, who had been my friend in the years when I had a great many friends, had written to a small list of us and said, come for the last night, come walk around, the booth is open, the seats are still the velvet ones. I had taken the train down on a Thursday in a coat that was too thin for the weather and a flask of something I did not need and a vague intention to behave myself. The intention had not survived the platform.
She was the manager. I had not known. The projectionist, the old liar, had not told me. He had simply given me the key code for the side door and a time and said, the lobby will be lit, come up the stairs, and I had come up the stairs and there she was at the box-office window, counting something into an envelope, in a black sweater I almost recognized, and when she lifted her head I watched the nine years go through her face in the order they had happened and then collect, quietly, behind her eyes, and stay there.
She said my name. Just the one syllable, the short one, the one only three people on earth had ever used. I said hers. The lobby was the temperature of an old church. The carpet under our feet had been red once and was now the color of a bruise that has been on a body for a week, and the brass of the railings had gone soft and warm with a century of palms.
We did not, at first, touch. I want to be honest about the choreography of the next hour because the choreography was the entire thing. We did not touch in the lobby. We did not touch on the stairs up to the balcony, although we climbed them together and she went first and I watched, against my will and entirely on purpose, the shape of her shoulders move under the black sweater in a way I had not let myself remember in nine years and now remembered all at once, with the shocking clarity of a thing returned intact from a long flood. We did not touch in the balcony either. She showed me her favorite seat, third row from the front, on the aisle, the one with the worn arm where generations of hands had rested through generations of films, and she sat down in it and patted the seat next to her, and I sat down, and our knees, when I crossed my leg, brushed once and did not brush again.
The screen was empty. The house lights were low. Somewhere in the building the projectionist was, I assumed, pretending to be busy. She had brought up a bottle of something amber and two of the small glasses they used to serve at the lobby bar in the years when the Astoria still had a lobby bar, and she poured for both of us with the careful flat wrist of a person who has poured drinks for a living, and we drank the first one fast and the second one slowly and the third one we did not finish.
She asked me what I was doing now. I told her. She told me what she was doing. We had both, in our ways, become quieter people. She had been married, briefly, to a man I had never met and would not, from her telling, have liked. I had moved twice and started a small press that lost money in a dignified way. The facts of nine years took perhaps twenty minutes to exchange, which is the correct ratio, and then there was nothing else to say, and we sat in the velvet dark of the empty balcony and looked at the blank screen as if it might, in its own time, begin.
I had forgotten, or had made myself forget, the specific quality of her silences. She had a way of being quiet that was not absence. It was a kind of forward leaning. It made the air between her and whatever she was looking at feel slightly tilted, as if everything were sliding gently in her direction. I had loved her, twelve years before, in a small apartment with bad windows, badly and well, in the way of people who do not yet know that loving someone is a skill and not a weather. We had ended, the first time, over something so trivial I cannot now reconstruct it, and then properly, later, over the larger things the trivial thing had been standing in for. I had not, in nine years, allowed myself the sentence: I would still.