“How are you so good at pinball?” Henry demands as she racks up points.
Addie isn’t sure. The truth is, she’s never played before, and it’s taken her a few times to get the hang of the game, but now she’s found her stride.
“I’m a fast learner,” she says, just before the ball slips between her paddles.
“HIGH SCORE!” announces the game in a mechanical drone. “Well done,” calls Henry over the noise. “Better own your victory.”
The screen flashes, waiting for her to enter her name. Addie hesitates. “Like this,” he says, showing her how to toggle the red box between the
letters. He steps aside, but when she tries, the cursor doesn’t move. The light just flashes over the letter A, mocking.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, backing away, but Henry steps in.
“New machines, vintage problems.” He bumps it with his hip, and the square goes solid around the A. “There we go.”
He’s about to step aside, but Addie catches his arm. “Enter my name while I grab the next round.”
It’s easier now that the place is full. She swipes a couple of beers from the edge of the counter, weaves back through the crowd before the bartender even turns around. And when she returns, drinks in hand, the first things she sees are the letters, flashing in bright red on the screen.
ADI.
“I didn’t know how to spell your name,” he says.
And it’s wrong, but it doesn’t even matter; nothing matters but those three letters, glowing back at her, almost like a stamp, a signature.
“Swap,” says Henry, hands resting on her hips as he guides her over to his machine. “Let’s see if I can beat that score.”
She holds her breath and hopes that no one ever will.
 |
They play until they run out of quarters and beer, until the place is too crowded for comfort, until they truly can’t hear each other over the ring and clash of the games and the shouts of the other people, and then they spill out of the dark arcade. They go back through the too-bright laundromat, and then out onto the street, still bubbling with energy.
It’s dark out now, the sky overhead a low canopy of dense gray clouds, promising rain, and Henry shoves his hands in his pockets, looks up and down the street. “What now?”
“You want me to choose?”
“This is an equal opportunity date,” he says, rocking from heel to toe. “I provided the first chapter. It’s your turn.”
Addie hums to herself, looking around, summoning a mental picture of the neighborhood.
“Good thing I found my wallet,” she says, patting her pocket. She didn’t, of course, but she did liberate a few twenties from the illustrator’s kitchen drawer before she left that morning. Judging by the recent profile of him in The Times, and the reported size of his latest book deal, Gerald won’t miss it.
“This way.” Addie takes off down the sidewalk.
“How far are we going?” he asks fifteen minutes later, when they’re still walking.
“I thought you were a New Yorker,” she teases.
But his strides are long enough to match her speed, and five minutes later they round the corner, and there it is. The Nitehawk lights up the darkening street, white bulbs tracing patterns on the brick façade, the word CINEMA picked out in red neon light across its front.
Addie has been to every movie theater in Brooklyn, the massive multiplexes with their stadium seats and the indie gems with worn-out sofas, has witnessed every mixture of new releases and nostalgia.
And the Nitehawk is one of her favorites.
She scans the board, buys two tickets to a showing of North by Northwest, since Henry says he’s never seen it, then takes his hand and leads them down the hall into the dark.
There are little tables between each seat with plastic menus and slips of paper to write your order on. She’s never been able to order anything, of course—the pencil marks dissolve, the waiter forgets about her as soon as he is out of sight—so she leans in to watch Henry fill out their card, thrilled by the simple potential of the act.
The previews ramble on as the seats fill up around them, and Henry takes her hand, their fingers lacing together like links in a chain. She glances over at him, painted in the low theater light. Black curls. High cheekbones. The cupid’s bow of his mouth. The flicker of resemblance.
It is hardly the first time she’s seen Luc echoed in a human face. “You’re staring,” whispers Henry under the sound of the previews.
Addie blinks. “Sorry.” She shakes her head. “You look like someone I used to know.”
“Someone you liked, I hope.”
“Not really.” He shoots her a look of mock affront, and Addie almost laughs. “It was more complicated than that.”
“Love, then?”
She shakes her head. “No…” But her delivery is slower, less emphatic. “But he was very nice to look at.”
Henry laughs as the lights dim, and the movie starts.
A different waiter appears, crouching low as he delivers their food, and she plucks fries from the plate one by one, sinking into the comfort of the film. She glances over to see if Henry’s enjoying himself, but he’s not even looking at the screen. His face, all energy and light an hour before, is a rictus of tension. One knee bounces restlessly.
She leans in, whispers. “You don’t like it?”
Henry flashes a hollow smile. “It’s fine,” he says, shifting in his seat. “Just a little slow.”
It’s Hitchcock, she wants to say, but instead she whispers, “It’s worth it, I promise.”
Henry twists toward her, brow folding. “You’ve already seen it?” Of course Addie has seen it.
First, in 1959, at a theater in Los Angeles, and then in the ’70s, a double feature with his last film, Family Plot, and then again, a few years back, right in Greenwich Village, during a retrospective. Hitchcock has a way of being resurrected, fed back into the cinema system at regular intervals.
“Yeah,” she whispers back. “But I don’t mind.”
Henry says nothing, but he clearly does mind. His knee goes back to bouncing, and a few minutes later he’s up and out of the seat, walking out into the lobby.
“Henry,” she calls, confused. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
She catches up with him as he throws open the theater door and steps out onto the curb. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Needed some air.”
But that’s obviously not it. He’s pacing. “Talk to me.”
His steps slow. “I just wish you’d told me.” “Told you what?”
“That you’d already seen it.”
“But you hadn’t,” she says. “And I didn’t mind seeing it again. I like seeing things again.”
“I don’t,” he snaps, and then deflates. “I’m sorry.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. This isn’t your problem.” He runs his hands through his hair. “I just—” He shakes his head, and turns to look at her, green eyes glassy in the dark. “Do you ever feel like you’re running out of time?”
Addie blinks and it is three hundred years ago and she is back on her knees on the forest floor, hands driving down into the mossy earth as the church bells ring behind her.
“I don’t mean in that normal, time flies way,” Henry’s saying. “I mean feeling like its surging by so fast, and you try to reach out and grab it, you try to hold on, but it just keeps rushing away. And every second, there’s a little less time, and a little less air, and sometimes when I’m sitting still, I start to think about it, and when I think about it, I can’t breathe. I have to get up. I have to move.”
He has his arms wrapped around himself, fingers digging into his ribs.
It’s been a long time since Addie felt that kind of urgency, but she remembers it well, remembers the fear, so heavy she thought it might crush her.
Blink and half your life is gone.
I do not want to die as I’ve lived.
Born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.
Addie reaches out and grabs his arm. “Come on,” she says, pulling him down the street. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” he asks, and her hand drops to his, and holds on tight. “To find you something new.”
